On June 18, Hills wandered away from his party and was caught by a band of Arapahos. He was riddled with arrows. One of his young helpers, nineteen-year-old axman J. M. Eddy, rallied the men and drove off the Indians. When Dodge learned that Eddy had served under him during the war, after enlisting at the age of sixteen, he promoted him and put him to work directly under himself. Eddy stayed with the UP until it was constructed, and continued to rise; eventually he became a general manager of the railroad, a position he held for the rest of his life.22 Hills had evidently ignored, or forgotten, Dodge’s orders, which were that “the chief of the party must absolutely command it, and at all times be ready to fight.” Another was “the importance of never slacking their vigilance no matter where they were, never being off their guard.” According to Dodge, those who followed his orders “generally took their parties through.”23
A month after Hills’s death, Browne was looking for the Continental Divide, west of Nebraska, but he found that he was in a great basin five hundred feet lower than the surrounding country. He and his party set off across it in search of water flowing west. The Sioux caught them. A long skirmish followed. Browne was hit by a ball in the abdomen. He staggered a few hundred feet before falling.
He begged his assistant to “Shoot me first,” before riding off. But his men would not abandon him. They let the horses go, hoping the Sioux would follow. They did, and Browne’s men improvised a litter by lashing their carbines together. They trudged down a ridge. Browne never groaned or complained. A half-hour after reaching a stage station, he died.24
Dodge could not afford to lose his best surveyors.
FIRES were another hazard. Engineer Robert Miller Galbraith ran a UP train from Sidney, Nebraska, west. He was burning a combination of cedarwood and Iowa coal, and pulling among other things two carloads of baled hay, uncovered. After a short run, he discovered that sparks from the fuel to run the boiler had set the hay on fire. He tried to ditch the burning cars by cutting them loose from the remainder of the train, but one of them fell onto the track. He ran the locomotive to the next station, where with a cold chisel and a hammer he cleaned out the grates on the engine, throwing the clinkers out onto the deck, which set it afire. Meanwhile, his brakeman took a pine tie out from under the track and cut it up for kindling wood. That enabled Galbraith to get up steam.
He set off, and had come to a little trestle bridge when a car loaded with mules jumped the track and tipped over. Galbraith ditched the car and went on to the end of track. After sleeping on the ground, he woke up and “found I had a fine herd of cooties.” He was called back to North Platte to pick up Dr. Durant and bring him west. And so it went for the early engineers. Galbraith would not have taken any other job.25
AS the end of track moved on west, it was accompanied by a scene that greatly pleased the workingmen and would later excite Hollywood and the book writers who made epics out of the Union Pacific, led by Cecil B. DeMille. Hell on Wheels—the man who came up with the phrase, which was universally adopted, is unknown—began at North Platte. The village had grown from almost nothing to five thousand inhabitants since the track stopped there for the winter of 1866-67. Most of the residents were workers waiting for warm weather. The village bulged with gambling dens, houses of prostitution, taverns, music halls, hotels, and an occasional restaurant. These establishments were run by sharks, from Chicago mainly, who had put up a small investment—canvas for a tent or for some split lumber, a bar full of liquor, some money for dancers and dealers, a little more here and there.
The sharks took in large amounts. Their customers consisted of young men with whatever they had saved from their wages, whether last year’s or last week’s, with nothing to do, far from home and family constraints. Their chief entertainment came from getting drunk, getting laid, and losing all their money to the gamblers. What the hell, there was nothing else to spend money on, and anyway they had a place to sleep and eat, and during the working season they would make more money the next morning.
Many of them, perhaps most, were young Irishmen. Stephen Vincent Benét wrote about them in his 1935 fable “O’Halloran’s Luck.” He opened, “They were strong men built the Big Road and it was the Irish did it.” The grandfather of the protagonist was “a young man then, and wild. He could swing a pick all day and dance all night, if there was a fiddler handy.” He and his buddies “had left famine and England’s rule behind.” He “liked the strength and the wildness of it—he’d drink with the thirstiest and fight with the wildest—and that he knew how to do. It was all meat and drink to him—the bare tracks pushing ahead across the bare prairie and the fussy cough of the wood-burning locomotives and the cold blind eyes of a murdered man.”26
They had served in the Union Army, for the most part, and were accustomed to the life. Whether many of them, or only a few, or none suffered from shell shock or other forms of postcombat trauma is not known, but for certain they were accustomed to pistols and rifles and artillery going off, to losing everything on one roll of the dice, to wounds and death.
Henry Stanley wrote of North Platte when it was at the end of track: “Every gambler in the Union seems to have steered his course here, where every known game under the sun is played. Every house is a saloon and every saloon is a gambling den. Revolvers are in great requisition. Beardless youths … try their hands at the ‘Mexican monte,’ ‘high-low’ ‘chuck-a-luck,’ and lose their all.”27
Sometimes they protested about being cheated. When they did, they were shot. One a day, or more. Hell on Wheels moved as the end of track moved. It could be taken down and set up again in a day. Its population numbered two thousand or so. By June, Hell on Wheels was in Julesburg, a town that, according to Samuel Reed, “continues to grow with magic rapidity. Vice and crime stalk unblushingly in the mid-day sun.”28 It had grown from forty men and one woman to four thousand.
Stanley visited the place and was amazed at what he saw: “I walked on to a dance-house. Gorgeously decorated and brilliantly lighted. I was almost blinded by the glare and stunned by the clatter. The ground floor was as crowded as it could well be…. Mostly every one seemed bent on debauchery and dissipation. The women were the most reckless, … expensive. They come in for a large share of the money wasted…. Soldiers, herdsmen, teamsters, women, railroad men, are dancing, singing or gambling. There are men here who would murder a fellow-creature for five dollars. Nay, there are men who have already done it. Not a day passes but a dead body is found somewhere in the vicinity with pockets rifled of their contents.”29
These places were built of the “most perishable materials,” Samuel Bowles wrote. They consisted of “canvas tents, plain board shanties, and turf-hovels.” The population was scum. “One to two thousand men, and a dozen or two women were encamped on the alkali plain…. Not a tree, not a shrub, not a blade of grass was visible; the dust ankle deep as we walked through it, and so fine it irritated every sense and poisoned half of them.” Hell on Wheels was “a village of a few variety stores and shops, and many grog-shops; by day disgusting, by night dangerous; almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of lowest vice; averaging a murder a day; gambling and drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce the chief business and pastime of the hours.”
Where these people came from, where they went to later, “were both puzzles too intricate for me,” Bowles confessed. “Hell would appear to have been raked to furnish them; and to it they must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its highest seats and most diabolical service.”30
The so-called “Big Tent” was a hundred feet long and forty feet wide, covered with canvas but with a wood floor for dancing. The right side was lined by a splendid bar with every variety of liquors and cigars, with cut-glass goblets, ice pitchers, splendid mirrors and pictures. A full band played, apparently day and night. Gambling tables surrounded the dance floor. Fair women, in light and airy garments, mingled with the throng. Men paid 50 cents for a drink for their gir
l, 50 cents for themselves, with a dance thrown in. The whiskey for the men was watered, and it was tea for the girls, but no matter. Down it went.
One reporter noted that in such places “Madam Rumor has full sway. It reminds one of Washington during the war. There are as many reports as then. Every stage driver, every passenger, every ranchman, every railroad employee, has his little legend to tell.”
The UP officials tried to hold things down, however they could. Occasionally they would send out a Columbus priest named Father Ryan, who would put up a tent and ties for the congregation to sit on. According to the reporter who witnessed the scene, they listened devoutly to the sermon and shared in Communion, and sang a hymn or two. Then Father Ryan “talked to them about their profanity, their drunkenness, and their general waste of money. He urged them to be true to their faith, and to their employers, and to take a pride in their work on the great railroad.”31
Julesburg got so bad that Grenville Dodge, who had seen a lot of young Americans downing a lot of drinks during the Civil War, stepped in. He heard that gamblers had taken over and refused to obey the local UP officials. What bothered Dodge the most was that they had taken up lands he had set aside as belonging to the UP and refused to pay for them. He called Julesburg “a much harder place than North Platte.” Dodge told Jack Casement to take his train force into town and clean the place up.
Casement, who was a teetotaler, was ready. He marched into town that night with two hundred men. They met with the gamblers, who spat contempt at him and refused to pay up. With a quiet voice, Casement ordered his men to open fire, “not caring whom they hit.” When Dodge came to town and asked what had happened, Casement led him to a nearby hill full of fresh graves. “General,” he told Dodge, “they all died, but bought peace. Julesburg has been quiet since.”32 Among those with Dodge were engineers Evans and Reed, and General John A. Rawlins. Grant had asked Dodge to take Rawlins, who served as his aide and was one of Grant’s closest friends, along with him, in the hope that the pure mountain air would cure Rawlins of his consumption. Others included a geologist who was hoping to find coal on the lands given the UP by the government. Sherman provided two companies of cavalry and two of infantry for protection. Jack Casement joined the party.
One of Dodge’s first tasks was to get a surveying party to work. He discovered that the men who had been working for L. L. Hills were waiting for a leader. Dodge placed Evans in charge and put him to work on the land west of the summit of the mountains. Then he began to look over the ground around his camp. He had the authority to lay out town sites and take lots for the company’s use as depots, repair shops, sidings, and so forth. On this one, he came immediately to the conclusion that the railroad’s main shops should be precisely where his tent stood. So he laid out a town, claiming 320 acres for the railroad’s use. He honored the dominant tribe in the region by calling the town Cheyenne.33
On July 4, Rawlins gave a well-received speech. The next day, a band of Indians sprang on a grading crew and killed three men. Rawlins was astonished to see the Indians attack when there were four companies of U.S. troops camped in the area. Dodge had the dead men buried on the site of his new town, and Cheyenne had its first cemetery.
The city of Cheyenne is where the mountains meet the plains, on the southeastern edge of Wyoming, at an elevation of 6,062 feet. It is a natural crossing place. From Cheyenne today, one train track leads west across the state and on to California, another north to Montana and south to Denver; so too the interstate, with 1-80 going east-west and 1-25 north-south.
The Union Pacific is the main corporate employer in town. To the uncountable number of train buffs in the United States, and indeed around the world, Cheyenne is a Mecca. There the last steam engines purchased by the UP are housed. They were made during World War II and used well into the 1950s, and today they haul passenger trains to special events. The old depot has been turned into a railroad museum. Dodge’s tent site has a marker on it. Everyone with any connection to the UP or to trains knows the simple fact that Dodge picked well, and that Cheyenne remains, as it has been for nearly a century and a half, one of the premier railroad towns in the world.
DODGE stayed in Cheyenne for three weeks, long enough to see another Hell on Wheels roll into it. The army established a post just north of town, called Fort A. D. Russell. Dodge rode over the summit and on to Dale Creek, on the edge of the Laramie Plains. While his men went trout fishing, he studied the creek. It was a tiny stream that in July just barely trickled through a gorge that was 130 feet deep and 713 feet wide. It would take a trestle bridge 125 feet high and 1,400 feet long to cross it, plus some cuts before the bridge could be reached. Dodge studied it for several days and could find no other way to get across. It was a mighty puny creek to require such a terribly large bridge, but that could not be helped.
Dodge went on to Fort Sanders, where he stayed long enough to lay out another town, to be called Laramie (and eventually to be the site of the University of Wyoming). It was here at Fort Sanders that Dodge learned for the first time that Browne had been killed by Indians. Now he needed a new surveyor to mark out the region to the west.
He was tired, overworked, shorthanded, sick, and he had just lost two of his best engineers and surveyors. On the trip west he had suffered “everything but death from my rides—how long I can stand it God only knows.” But he had to continue, in order to do Browne’s work and lay out a line west of the Rockies. “I must push West,” he wired the company. “The Indians hold the country from here to Green River [in today’s western Wyoming] and unless I get out there, we will fail in all our plans for 1868.”34
That would not do. The railroad had captured the public, to the point where it dominated the news. Horace Greeley’s paper, the New York Tribune, declared that Casement’s men “are working upon a scale never before approached in railway history.”35 Harper’s Weekly pronounced, “No road of its length and magnitude was ever before contemplated, much less attempted…. The work is now one of such national importance that the people insist upon its vigorous prosecution as positively as they insisted on the prosecution of the late war.”36
The railroad to the Pacific may have been of the greatest importance, but riding on an 1867 train imposed a terrible price on passengers. Back east, and not infrequently in the West as well, at least according to Harper’s Weekly, the railroads used “abominable old-fashioned, low-roofed cars and there are still passengers who ignominiously submit to this and to every other kind of railroad tyranny.” The cars were subject to a constant “jerking and thumping.” Sometimes during this ordeal, “a brakeman thrusts his head into the car, shouts something, slams the door, and leaves the excited passenger to the wildest conjecture.” In addition there was the “misery of summer railway travel, including the heat, the glare, the dust, the cinders and the rattle, plus the flies.”37
Through the summer, the Indians continued to dispute the road. Ferguson noted on July 8, “In the past 48 hours, they have made dashes on both sides of us. Everything indicates lively times on the Lodge Pole line as regards Indians.” July 9: “Last night about midnight, three Indians rode up within gunshot of our tent.” August 5: “I have cleaned my carbine out today and got my ammunition, 74 rounds, in readiness.” A climax came on August 11: “The report has reached us that the Indians have thrown a train of cars off the track and after killed all on board except the conductor, piled ties around the engine and cars and destroyed them by fire. It is also reported that the Indians have carried off two white women.”38
That wasn’t rumor. On August 7, a party of forty or so Cheyennes led by Chief Pawnee Killer went after the railroad. Operating near Plum Creek, in central Nebraska, they cut the telegraph, then removed the spikes and bent the rails and waited for the next train to derail itself—just as the Confederates and Yankees had done to each other’s trains during the war. When the train hit the damaged rail, over the engine went. The engineer, fireman, two brakemen, and three telegraph repairers were kill
ed. Behind that train came another freight train. It crashed into the wreck and was overturned. The conductor ran back down the track and stopped a third train, which backed up to the Plum Creek station. The Cheyennes meanwhile burned the trains and cars; they killed and scalped seven or eight people and threw their bodies into the flames.39
A relief train carrying workers armed with carbines went back to the scene before dawn. As the train approached, the engineer and others saw that the Indians had found some barrels of whiskey, got drunk, and set the wreck on fire. A Chicago Tribune reporter noted that the fire “lit the prairie for a considerable distance around. The dark forms of the savages were plainly seen dancing triumphantly around the scene of their atrocious work, while their fierce yells were borne savagely back to the train.” It was horrifying. The Tribune wrote: “The railroad men in Omaha, fresh from Cheyenne, filled with alarming rumors … have an infallible remedy for the Indian troubles. That remedy is extermination. These men, most of them tender and gentle with the weak of their own race, speak with indifference of the ‘wiping out’ of thousands of papooses and squaws.”40
It wasn’t just the ordinary railroad workers who felt that way. So did their leaders. “We’ve got to clean the damn Indians out,” Dodge declared, “or give up building the Union Pacific Railroad. The government may take its choice.” For his part, Sherman wrote at this time, “The more we can kill this year the less will have to be killed the next year, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.”41
AFTER going over the pass (called Sherman Pass by Dodge, a name it retains), examining Dale Creek, and laying out Laramie, Dodge and his group pushed on west, looking for water flowing toward the Pacific as a sign that they had passed the Continental Divide. After crossing the North Platte River (which flows out of the Medicine Bow Mountains nearly straight north as far as today’s Casper before it turns east), they set out to the west, “endeavoring to find running water.”
Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Page 26
