Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Then, in early April, came the rains. They destroyed twenty miles of the road east of Grand Island and damaged far more. Reed to Durant, April 9: “Flood whole length of line immense damage to road. Track at Loup fork repaired track washed away near Fremont, North Bend, Shell Creek, Lone Tree, Grand Island, Wood River and Willow Island.”2 General Jack Casement put his crews to work repairing track that he had already counted on. “We are all in a heap, generally,” he wrote.3

  How big a heap was Arthur Ferguson’s concern. The young surveyor reported to work on April 15, 1867. The railroad was not running and he was stuck in Omaha. A week later, he was still there. “Water in the river still rising,” he wrote in his diary. “Track in places entirely out of sight—a good prospect of the depot grounds being drowned out.” A day later, “Water has risen four inches since last night. The bottom now presents a vast sea of rushing waters.” On April 24, he finally got out of town but was delayed at the Elkhorn River, where there was damage to the bridge. He and his party had to be ferried across the river, to a new engine that was waiting for them. “Road at places in very bad condition.”

  The train was pulling baled hay in its cars. The morning of April 25, one of them caught fire from a spark from the engine. “It was a grand sight to see an engine rushing madly across the plains, followed by a car wrapped in flames and streaming sparks and fire in its path.” Then two other cars caught fire, “and we had to run with these burning cars some ten or twelve miles. Arrived at North Platte about 1 p.m.” On April 26, Ferguson got to the end of track on the “first through train from Omaha.”

  The previous day, Reed had written his wife that no grading or track laying had yet been done. “Before the break, there was a prospect of rushing ahead more rapidly than last year. It gives me to blues to think that our road, which was in such good shape, should be at this season of the year so badly cut up.”

  On May 1, Ferguson finally set off in a wagon to do his job, but “until nearly dark we were stuck in mud holes and had to unload and reload.” Finally, he got so badly stuck that he sent his man back to fetch more livestock to help pull him out. “I felt very lonesome. Alone with a loaded wagon, which was deeply imbedded in the mud—the dark and gloomy shades of night fast gathering and with the vast expanse of prairie, I felt truly desolated. There is an indescribable something, a feeling unspeakable, an utter desolation which creeps over a man on these vast plains.”

  There was more. In a couple of days he got started on his work, mainly running levels for the graders. Among his diary entries for May are May 15: “About half-past one it commenced snowing and continued to snow hard for several hours. News was brought to camp this evening that the Indians made a descent on the ranches east of us yesterday and ran off with the stock.” May 17: “The weather is quite cold. I put on my greatcoat, draw my feet up to the fire, and read ‘Pickwick.’ About 2 p.m. the party returned, the weather being too inclement. While I now write, Clark is sitting by the stove with his greatcoat on. It has commenced to drizzle. The wind blows very hard and very cold, though we are very comfortable in our tent, with the exception of a few places where it leaks.”

  May 22: “The Indians have killed four men. When the men go to work, even if they are in full sight of the camp, they go well armed. I counted ten guns, most of them breech-loading. Something like the times of 1776.” May 23: “Last night were startled by the howling of wolves…. There is reported to be a camp of 700 Sioux lodges on the North Platte. Indians are reported to have been seen in the bluffs today.” May 25: “A party of Indians dashed into the camp below us and ran off three head of stock, and then they came charging towards our tents but turned off into the bluffs in plain view of camp. The Indians were pursued and the stock retaken, with one head in addition, which was captured from the savages.”4

  E. C. Lockwood was a lad in his teens working as a paymaster for the Casement brothers out on the line. One day he saw seventeen Sioux Indians under the leadership of Spotted Tail ride up to the tracks. Jack Casement received them cordially and showed them the process of track laying. At one point he took them through one of the cars with U.S. Army rifles stacked horizontally on one of the walls. Lockwood found it “interesting to see the expressions on their faces.” But then the impression turned; Casement had Lockwood put up a shovel sixty feet or so away, then challenged the Indians to show what they could do with their bows and arrows. Lockwood later wrote, “Sixteen of the Indians put their arrows through the hole in the handle, while the seventeenth hit the handle at the hole, knocking the shovel over. He felt quite disgraced.”

  Next came a race between the Indians on their ponies and the locomotive. Spotted Tail got into the cab of the engine along with Casement and Lockwood, while the warriors lined up four abreast for the word to go. “Away they went. At first the Indians outdistanced the locomotive, which so pleased them that they gave their Indian war whoop. But presently the engine gathered speed, then overhauled them. The engineer as he passed opened his whistle, which so startled them that all, as if by word of command, swung to the offside of their ponies. Of course this ended the race.”5

  DESPITE the weather and the Indians, Dodge had big plans for the railroad in 1867. So did Durant. In April, from Omaha, he telegraphed to Nebraska Senator John Thayer, “I will pledge myself to complete two miles a day for the first one hundred working days after the frost is out of the ground.” By April 20, the Casements were at work preparing for and laying new track. Their workforce was as big as and more complex than that of the CP.6

  Dodge expected to push the end of track as far as Fort Sanders, Dakota Territory,* on the Laramie River, between the Black Hills and the Medicine Bows, west of the mountains and 288 miles beyond the North Platte River. The track would surmount the summit of the Black Hills at an altitude of 8,242 feet (the CP’s highest point was twelve hundred feet or so lower). Then down the mountains’ western slope, across Dale Creek, and a descent to the Laramie Plains.

  When Dodge outlined his plan to Sherman, the general expressed wonderment: “It is almost a miracle to grasp your purpose to finish to Fort Sanders this year, but you have done so much that I mistrust my own judgment and accept yours.” He also told Dodge that, after the railroad had gotten across Nebraska and into Wyoming, Indians such as the Sioux and Cheyennes “must die or submit to our dictation.”7

  “I hope you will have troops to give us ample protection,” Dodge wrote back. “We are going to be short of labor, and any lack of military protection, when Indians are at war, would render it almost impossible to keep men on the line.” Dodge knew the problems Grant and Sherman had, what with demobilization and reconstruction in the South and demands from all over the Western United States for protection, but “what you and I know is going to be hard to make a lot of Irishmen believe. They want to see occasionally a soldier to give them confidence.” Sherman wrote back, “I give you all that I possibly can.”8

  One of Sherman’s handicaps was the slackness in enlistment. He had a demand for soldiers everywhere, but few were signing up. The army tried to get the newly freed slaves to join, but Sherman said they were slow to do so, which “limits our ability to respond.” Still, he signed off, “So far as interest in your section is concerned, you may rest easy that both Grant and I feel deeply concerned in the safety of your great national enterprise.”9

  IN mid-April, the Casements had started their armies west. The numbers—from 3,500 graders working as far as 200 miles in advance of the end of track, to 450 track men, 350 men of the train force, 100 surveyors, several thousand tie cutters and lumberjacks, and as many as 1,000 shop men—approached 10,000. In addition, L. B. Boomer, owner of the Chicago Howe Truss Bridge Company, with well over 1,000 working for him, was supplying the UP with prefabricated sections for bridges. These were made of 12-inch-by-12-inch-by-16-foot lumber, sent out from Chicago, according to specifications sent to the bridge company by the UP engineers.10

  Durant arrived in late April, to do an inspection. With hi
m were the UP’s Acting President Oliver Ames and Director John Duff, and a government director. Reed, who picked them up on the east bank of the Missouri, wrote his wife, “I do not feel any trembling in my boots. Let what will, come. I have a clear conscience.”11

  Dodge joined them and took them out on the line, and Durant said he and the others were “well pleased” with the road. Still, Oliver Ames was appalled to discover what Nebraska looked like west of Fort Kearney. He thought it a miserable waste, and said that if it were up to him he wouldn’t take all the land along the railroad as a gift.

  The directors told Dodge to begin selling lots belonging to the railroad, and he did, with some success, matching the government’s price of $2.50 per acre. His best argument was that rain followed the tracks. Dodge thought that the rain belt moved westward at the rate of eight miles per year behind the tracks. Twenty-five years after the UP went through Nebraska, he declared that it now rained as much in the Plains as it did east of the Mississippi, and to such an extent that farmers in Colorado or Nebraska could raise fine crops without irrigation, “right up to the foot of the mountains.” This had been predicted, he claimed, by a “Prof. Agassis in 1867,” who said it would come by “the disturbance of the electrical currents, caused by the building of the Pacific railroad.”12

  Durant and Ames were in the midst of a gigantic struggle. Durant believed that the road would never make any money, that the only chance for a profit in return for all their work and investment was in construction—i.e., with the Crédit Mobilier. Ames thought the opposite. Durant wanted to cheapen the construction as much as the UP could get away with, and lengthen the mileage. Ames wanted to make money from the road itself. Durant called him a “damn fool.”

  On May 6, Reed told his wife that Durant and the other men had “broken up in a row and no one knows what will be the end.”13

  The Casements and their men, meanwhile, continued to lay track, quickly making more than a mile per day. “That slender line of iron,” reported the Chicago Tribune, “goes constantly onward.”14 One mile per day, sometimes one and a half, even two miles a day. They were going across western Nebraska, toward Julesburg, just a couple of miles into northernmost Colorado, where they would break away from the Platte River and follow its tributary, Lodgepole Creek, into present-day Wyoming.

  The crew chiefs lived as did their men. A Chicago Tribune reporter wrote: “The chiefs intend to have their men do a fair day’s work—that is business. But they also intend to make them as comfortable as possible. If a man is sick, they take care of him. If he dies, they bury him. He is as well fed as those who employ him, and is as well housed. He undergoes no more risks than they do.”15

  The Casements and their men never let up, except on the day of rest. The construction train and wagons were twenty miles long. At the end of track, the cry of “Down!” rang out every thirty seconds. The wagons, when empty, were tipped over, and a teamster barked out his orders and his horse jerked forward, hauling the next load forward. Behind the men pulling off the rails and putting them into place came the gaugers, then the spikers and bolters, who all swarmed to the rail in rapid succession, measuring and squaring and pounding it into place. The drumbeat was the sledgehammers on the spikes. It was always there, monotonous but thrilling. The railroad was being built.

  Alongside the various crews the foremen paced restlessly, spitting out orders, exhorting, pleading, cursing. Up ahead—sometimes far ahead, as much as a hundred miles—the grading parties worked, linked to the others only by the thin tentacles of telegraph wire, also far in advance of the work. Ahead of the graders, the surveyors were laying out the final line.

  Arthur Ferguson was one of them. He recorded in his diary the way he and the others operated. July 24: “This morning, our party proceeded to change a portion of the line, opposite our present camp, for the purpose of avoiding some exceedingly rough and expensive work. After completing this we went to the end of our division for the purpose of changing the line which we completed this afternoon.” July 25: “Worked hard all the morning at staking out and running levels.” July 28: “After breakfast we staked out several hundred feet on the curve on the change of line opposite camp. We then recommenced work on our estimate of the 1st Div., 5th 100 mile and finished all with the exception of figuring out the cubic yards over a portion of it. We are now located in a wild and beautiful region. I finished reading the New Testament through this morning. Mr. Shannon sits by my side reading one of Sir Walter Scott’s works.”16

  “What unites them all,” Maury Klein wrote, “is a fierce determination not to let down those coming on behind.” They were like an army in so many ways, but most of all in this epitome of friendship: they all knew and accepted that every man was dependent on every other man. “Every party is bent on holding up its end. The men will not be outstripped by those pushing on ahead or chasing from behind.” Like sergeants or junior officers, the crew chiefs knew their men’s determination and took full advantage of it. In Klein’s words, “No one will know the names of those thousands who provided the brawn, but the greatest accomplishment of all will be theirs: they built the railroad.”17

  • • •

  THE weather slowed the railroad down, and even stopped it for some time. The Indians threatened to put it out of existence. What the construction crews had, the Indians wanted. Livestock, rifles, ammunition, hats, jackets, food in cans. Much of it could be easily captured by a raiding party. Then there were scalps. Most of all there was the land, which the Indians regarded as theirs. One quick dash on the Casements’, working gangs, one pile of rails or ties set over a completed track, would bring riches such as never before known on the Great Plains. There for the taking. The soldiers seldom if ever could detect, prevent, or defeat an Indian raiding party.

  On May 1, 1867, the Cheyennes eliminated a four-man mail party just west of Laramie. That was just a start. On May 18, Ferguson saw an Indian war party sweep by as it “pulled up one mile of Railroad stakes in sight of the party,” stakes he had helped place. The Indians cantered away without loss.18

  Two days later, Dodge wrote to Sherman pleading for more protection. The Sioux had “cleaned out two of our subcontractors of everything they had and scared the workmen out of their boots, so they abandoned the work and we can not get them back.” The Sioux had also raided tie men cutting trees in the Black Hills, killing several, and hit a survey team, killing a soldier and a surveyor. After other complaints, Dodge told Sherman, “I have smothered all the recent attacks and kept them out of the press.”19

  But Dodge was not so successful as he wished in keeping the Indian raids out of the newspapers. It became a major story, played up in all the papers, especially the New York, Chicago, and other big-city dailies. The scalps taken, the wounds inflicted, the savages’ practice of firing arrows into dead bodies or mutilating them in other ways, and many more atrocities were widely reported, with full details, some of them made up by the reporters. In a pretelevision era, the reports took the place of smoke, burning buildings, weeping victims, stabbing or shooting wounds, and other outrages that grab and hold the American viewing public in the twenty-first century.

  As the weather improved, the raids increased. On May 25, 26, and 27, the Sioux and Cheyennes struck the line at various points, derailing a work train near the end of track, killing four UP workers, taking UP livestock. At another place a war party killed four graders and at yet another a six-man section gang. Dodge was traveling to the end of track with three government commissioners that spring when about a hundred Indians swept down on a grading party. Dodge’s standing orders to “every surveying corps, grading, bridging, and tie outfit was never to run when attacked.” The graders had their arms stacked on the cut where they were working. They rushed to them to begin shooting, but the Indians managed to run off some stock first. After that experience, according to Dodge, the commissioners “on returning to the East dwelt earnestly on the necessity of our being protected.”

  Sherman did w
hat he could to help. He visited the work site several times each year. Dodge wrote to him once a month or more. Dodge also wrote the commander-in-chief, General Grant, who “had given full and positive instructions that every support should be given to me.”20

  Given the army’s size, that support often meant little or nothing. Or, as one trooper said, “It’s awkward as hell for one soldier to surround three Indians.” Indeed. On June 2, Ferguson recorded: “This morning, shortly after sunrise the camp was aroused by the cry of here they come! Here they come boys!” He and his tent mates grabbed their rifles and rushed out, “and there we saw the Indians charging down upon us from the northern bluffs.” The white men fired and the Indians pulled back, then retreated. “One of the engineers captured from the Indians a white woman’s scalp, which was quite green having been killed but a few days.”21

  A few days later, Sherman was in Nebraska examining the line and pondering the Indian raids. He wrote to Grant. The Indian country was large, he said, as large as the whole settled United States. It posed enormous problems. But the railroad, when completed, would settle many of them. Supplies could then be hauled west in sufficient quantity to mount a real offensive action against the Indians. Military posts would be unnecessary, because the train could move the troops around.

  The Indian guerrilla war continued. Two of Dodge’s surveyors, L. L. Hills in the mountains and Percy Browne west of the Rockies, were killed. They had been caught unaware. They should have been looking out for themselves, but there was something in the nature of these surveyors that made them careless of danger. Both men and their parties were entranced by the country around them. In June, it was in full bloom. Thick grass flowed in the wind, delicate white lilies sprouted through the grass. Even the cacti were covered with red and golden blossoms.