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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Another break for the teams came when the blasted rock at the base had to be removed. At a signal from the foreman, the remainder of the gang—thirty or so men—moved in with their shovels and wheelbarrows. They would load up the rock, wheel it out of the tunnel to a windowlike opening in the snow, and dump it down the mountain.

  More than a dozen tunnels were cut this way through the granite mountains. Most were in curves, laid out by Lewis Clement. When the faces met, they were never more than an inch off line, showing the re-markable accuracy of his calculations and instrument work under the most difficult of circumstances. Van Nostrand’s Engineering Magazine said in 1870 that the undertaking was preposterous, but Clement did it.2 The Summit Tunnel was sixteen feet wide at the bottom, eleven feet high at the top of the spring line, which was nineteen feet high to the top of the arch, a semicircle sixteen feet in diameter.3

  Tea was brought to the workers by young Chinese employees, carried on a yoke over their shoulders, one keg on each end of the yoke. They used kegs that had originally been filled with black powder and were washed clean before the tea went in. In California it was known as “powder tea.” The men ate before and after their shift, excellent Chinese food, expertly prepared. The remainder of their time off was spent, besides sleeping on mats in the snow tunnel quarters, in washing themselves and their clothes, gambling, talking, reading. They seldom saw the light of day or a blue sky: they walked to and from work inside the snow tunnels, and there they endured their long, grueling shifts in a dim, dank world of smoky lights, ear-ringing explosions, and choking dust.

  IN the High Sierra in the winter of 1866-67, there were forty-four storms. Some were squalls, others much bigger. The one everyone recalled began at 2 P.M. on February 18 and didn’t let up until 10 P.M. on February 22. It added six feet of new snow to that already on the ground. The wind raged on for five more days, building huge drifts.

  The wind was so strong men and animals could not face it. Engineer John R. Gilliss, who worked on the tunnels, recounted the time when three of his men were walking with the storm at their backs in order to get to their shack. “Two got in safely. After waiting a while, just as we were starting to look for the third, he came in exhausted. In a short, straight path between two walls of rock, he had lost his way and thought his last hour had come.”4

  A storm would begin with a fall in the barometer and a strong wind from the southwest The thermometer was rarely below twenty degrees at the beginning, and usually rose to thirty-two degrees before its close. That meant the last snowfall was damp and heavy. Then the wind shifted, which scattered the clouds, raised the barometer, and dropped the temperature all at once. The lowest temperature of the winter was five degrees above zero.5

  On February 27, the snow began falling again, and it continued until March 2. This storm added four more feet of new snow. At the eastern approach to the Summit Tunnel, the Chinese had to lengthen their snow tunnel fifty feet in order to get to their quarters and on to work. One of the engineers said that whenever he returned to his shack he had to shovel it out before he could enter. Twenty Chinese were killed in one snowslide. Individual workers simply disappeared. Often enough their frozen bodies were found in the spring, sometimes upright in the melting snow, with shovels or picks still gripped in their hands.6

  In early March 1867, the Sacramento Union reported that nineteen Chinamen had been killed by a snowslide on the east side of the summit, but that wasn’t so bad—a much larger number had been reported lost, and in any event the road from Emigrant Gap to Virginia City was open for stages drawn by horses. It was believed this road would stay open.7

  COMMUNICATION over the mountain was kept up via the Dutch Flat and Donner Lake Wagon Road, five or six hundred feet below the grade and the tunnels. The rocky sides of Donner Peak quickly became and remained smooth slopes of snow and ice. Even the tops of the telegraph poles were buried by drifts. Up to one-half the CP’s labor force was kept busy shoveling. Sometimes after storms the entire labor force was engaged in removing snow.8

  Engineer Gilliss found the scene from the Dutch Flat road to be “strangely beautiful at night.” He was drawn by the sight of “tall firs, which though drooping under their heavy burdens pointed to the mountains that overhung them. The fires that lit seven tunnels shone like stars on their snowy sides. The only sound that came down to break the stillness of the winter night was the sharp ring of hammer on steel, or the heavy reports of the blasts.”9

  To those who were struggling to get more blasting powder, drills, food, and other supplies to the men working in the tunnels, the sight was much more daunting than inspirational. The teamsters and their oxen had to make their way through new snow that was soft, powdery, and up to their waists or higher, even to their shoulders. The falling snow or the drifts would cover their tracks. Into this the oxen would flounder. Often they would lie down, worn out, to be roused by teamsters twisting their tails. Bellowing with pain, they scrambled to their feet and went on. Gilliss saw one team so fortunate as to have had their tails twisted clear off and thus to have been spared further agony.

  The teamsters at first used Canadian snowshoes, but soon learned to abandon them for Norwegian skis. These strips of light wood—ten to twelve feet long, four inches wide, and tapered in thickness from the center to the ends—were turned up in front and grooved on the bottom. They had a strap in the middle, and the men carried poles in each hand in order to steady, push, and brake. A good man could cover as much as forty miles a day on them—that is, with no oxen to urge on.10

  The storms cost the CP time and money, and which was more expensive cannot be said. In January, one snowstorm caused drastic damage to a trestle a hundred feet high about two miles below the end of track, at Cisco. A small lake above the trestle, with a dam at the downslope end, was put under great strain by the snow piling up on it. One warm day started a melt which caused the dam to give way. A thunderous surge of water rushed down the ravine and carried away the center section of the trestle.

  The bridge had to be repaired. It was difficult to get to it because of the fifteen feet and more of snow in the woods around it. Loggers and oxen went to work. Swarms of workers cut down huge trees, then whipsawed them into shape for the carpenters, who rebuilt the trestle. In less than a month, by February 4, trains were crossing the trestle once again, bringing on rails and hardware for the three thousand track builders forty miles away on the Truckee River and supplies for the Chinese.11

  AT this time, the directors made a costly but necessary decision. One day, over lunch with Crocker, Stanford took out his pencil and began estimating the cost of covering the track with snowsheds in its most vulnerable parts. That meant putting a roof over the track that led through the snow belt. Arthur Brown, superintendent of the bridges, thought the cost to be “almost appalling, and unprecedented in railroad construction.” Yet he confessed that “there seemed to be no alternative.” Huntington was also appalled. “It costs a fearful amount of money to pay all the bills,” he protested to Hopkins, and added, “I sometimes think I would change my place for any other in this world.”12 But it had to be done.

  Brown later said, “although every known appliance was used to keep the road clear from snow that winter of 1866-67, including the largest and best snow plows then known, it was found impossible to keep it open over half the time and that mostly by means of men and shovels, which required an army of men on hand all the time at great expense.”13

  Lewis Clement designed the snowsheds, which ended up covering almost fifty miles. One of them extended for twenty-eight miles without a break. About five miles were covered in 1867, the rest mostly in 1868.

  GUNPOWDER and Chinamen were the only weapons of combat the road builders had with which to fight the earth and stone through which they had to pass, laid in their path centuries ago by the Creator,” according to one of the engineers.14 But the black powder was too slow for Crocker and Strobridge. On January 7, 1867, Crocker wrote to Huntington, “We are only aver
aging about one foot per day on each face—and Stro and I have come to the conclusion that something must be done to hasten it. We are proposing to use nitroglycerine.” They had read about it in a recent article in the Scientific American.15

  As we saw, they had tried nitroglycerin once in 1866, but put it away as too dangerous. It was greatly feared by the workers, except by the Chinese, who had become skillful in using it. Crocker and Strobridge thought it was not proper for general use, and anyway the black powder had certain advantages on rock other than granite. But on the Summit Tunnel, and the next two to the east, nitroglycerin was necessary. Among other things, the nitroglycerin required smaller holes; it was costing the CP $1.19 per Chinese worker for each eight hours, and it took three men an hour to drill one foot. “We are bound to use it,” wrote Crocker, “if we find it will expedite the Summit Tunnel.”

  Crocker had it brought up the mountains in its separate ingredients—glycerin and nitric and sulfuric acids. He hired James Howden, a Scottish chemist, to mix them where the nitro would be used. Howden’s brew was a yellow liquid, light and oily, which he made up each day at a cost of only 75 cents per pound. As the Chinese became more accustomed to handling the brew, they grew careless. Consequently, one of the engineers wrote, “many an honest John went to China feet first.” But John Gilliss calmly observed that the accidents “would have happened with powder.”16

  Gilliss estimated that nitroglycerin was eight times as powerful as the same weight of powder. And the tunnel cleared of smoke faster than when powder was exploded in it. At the facings, inward progress increased by 54 percent, from 1.18 feet per day with powder to 1.82 feet per day with nitroglycerin. At the bottom of the tunnel shaft, where the workers had their backs to each other as they moved outward, the average daily progress jumped from 2.51 feet with powder to 438 feet with nitroglycerin, a 74 percent increase.

  Mark Hopkins told Huntington, “Charles [Crocker] has just come from the tunnel and he thinks some of them are making three feet per day. Hurrah! For nitroglycerine.”17 E. B. Crocker wrote that as of early May there was “only 681 feet left between the headings. Last week they made 60 feet—more than three feet per day. Nitroglycerine tells.”18

  Crocker also wanted to use the power of the engine he had transported to the top of the mountain, the Sacramento, to run drills. “We are all alive to the need to get through the Summit Tunnel,” he wrote in January. They had been at it since the fall of 1866 and had so far made only 290 feet, with 1,367 feet of drilling and exploding and carrying out the blasted rock to go. “We have got Strobridge, who lives right up there, roused up. He has talked with the foreman and they are ready to give a steam drill a trial.”19

  On February 12, E. B. Crocker told Huntington, “We’ve tried nitroglycerine and it works well.” Drilling smaller holes saved time. “We are beginning to use an electric battery to fire off charges,” he wrote, “and that too at once effects a great savings in time.” And the company was replacing chairs with fish joints to tie rails together. “The section men are delighted with the fish joint.”

  Not all the newfangled devices worked. Strobridge had to abandon the electric battery. He also refused to allow steam to be taken from the Sacramento’s boiler to run the drilling machine. His reason was that he didn’t want to stop the engine to make the necessary connections for the drilling machines. Told that it would only take two hours, he replied that he didn’t have two hours to give. E. B. Crocker told Hopkins, “The truth is things have got to such a pass that there can’t be a thing done unless it suits Strobridge.”

  A part of the trouble was with Charles Crocker. E.B. said of his brother, “Whenever a man gets Charles’ confidence, he swears by him and all he says or does is right.” Stanford wrote Hopkins, “I fear the drilling machines will prove useless. There does not appear a will that they should succeed, and usually where there is no will there is no way.”20

  “Charley says to wait until we reach the Summit before we haul iron over to the Truckee,” Stanford wrote to Hopkins on February 5, 1867. There were about eight thousand Chinese working on the tunnels, but there was also a crew of about three thousand Chinese east of the summit, and they could be laying track. Crocker, however, wanted them to grade, then to lay rail when good weather made it possible to get the rail over the summit.

  Construction worker A. P. Partridge spent much of the winter on the Truckee, building grade. He recalled the coming of the Chinese, who took up the old buildings and sheds in the area. One heavy snowfall collapsed an old barn and killed four. Further, “a good many of them were frozen to death.” Once he went up to Donner Lake for a dance at a hotel. When the sleigh returned to Truckee in the morning, “we saw something under a tree. We stopped and found a frozen Chinese. We threw him in the sleigh and took him into town and laid him out by the side of a shed and covered him with a rice mat, the most appropriate thing for the laying out of a Celestial.”21

  Through February and March, Partridge worked on putting up bridges over the Truckee River. He and his crew put up two 204-foot spans and one two-span bridge of 150 feet per span. The Chinese, meanwhile, were moved east to get the heavy grading done well in advance of the main force. Some three thousand men with four hundred horses and carts were sent out, a distance of three hundred miles in advance of the track. Hay, grain, and food for the Chinese, plus all the supplies they needed, were hauled by teams of horses over the desert. Water for men and animals was hauled forty miles.22

  THE surveyors for the CP were way out in front of the graders, all the way to the east of the Salt Lake, working their way up Weber Canyon, then through Echo Canyon, across the Wasatch Range and on to Fort Bridger, on the eastern slope of the range. By the spring of 1867, they were setting up their flags and stakes right beside those of the UP surveyors. The CP intended to get to Fort Bridger, whereas the UP boasted that it would meet the CP at the California-Nevada border.

  E. B. Crocker wished the two lines could work together, but it wasn’t to be. “Our surveys run to Weber,” he wrote, “so we’re confident that well reach Ft. Bridger before they do. It can be done in spite of Durant’s frantic efforts and boasts.”23

  The CP was trying to get government approval of its proposed route from the California-Nevada state line to Humboldt Wells in northeastern Nevada, but President Johnson’s secretary of the interior, Orville Hickman Browning, refused to issue the permit. The Crocker brothers wanted it done as soon as possible, and immediately after Browning had approved, they were ready to present him with a route from Humboldt Wells to the Salt Lake, and then with another route from the Salt Lake eastward into Wyoming. “That will be so much gained,” E. B. Crocker commented dryly.24

  There was big money at stake. As Stanford wrote to Huntington, “Our real profits lie in the road beyond the Sierra Nevadas and to secure the line to Salt Lake if necessary we can afford to make great sacrifices in getting over the mountains.”25 Salt Lake City was the only settled establishment between the two ends of track, the only place that needed to import goods that could be carried on trains, and the only one that had products to export. Then there was the government loan of bonds for every mile constructed to go to the railroad company that built it. And the government gift of alternative parts of land (which in truth wasn’t worth much if anything in the desert, where most of it was never sold) would increase as more track was laid.

  Perhaps most of all, there was the prestige to be considered. Bragging rights were to be had by one or the other of the railroads. That was the way the Congress had set it up. Congress had reserved to itself the right to pick the spot where the roads would meet, but it had not yet done so and showed no inclination to do so. It wanted the roads built as fast and as far as possible. The spot would be chosen after the grading crews had passed each other, and as the rails at the end of track approached each other. Where that would be, no one knew. So the surveyors kept surveying, the graders kept grading, the rail layers kept laying.

  • • •

&n
bsp; BOTH companies were trying, with some success (the full extent of which is not known in any detail), to place moles, or spies, in the other railroad’s camp. The UP sent two engineers to Colfax to snoop around and see what they could pick up. The Crocker brothers knew about this effort and showed them around, filling their heads full of nonsense. The UP engineers “were quite inquisitive” and took in whatever they were told. What they were told was that the tunnels were terribly long and progress was disappointingly slow and it would take a long time to blast through the granite. They went back to Omaha to report to Durant that there was nothing to worry about, that the CP would be blasting away for years. They convinced Durant that it would take at least two more years to get through the Summit Tunnel. E. B. Crocker told Huntington, “While the engineers were here we led them to think that it would take us a long time to get over the mountains. We thought that Durant, while laboring under that idea, would not be apt to be in so great a hurry.”26

  Then one of the UP spies told Durant that the CP wasn’t going to wait for the Summit Tunnel to be finished, but was going to haul tracks over the mountains and begin working east from the Truckee. “This news was probably a small bombshell in Durant’s camp,” E. B. Crocker wrote to Huntington. “He saw that if we dodged around the summit in this way that his hopes were dashed.” On the spur of the moment, Durant wrote his spy and told him that he, Durant, would slap an injunction on the CP to prevent any such dodging of the summit. But Crocker commented, “This is ridiculous.”27

  The CP, meanwhile, was planting its own spies on the UP. “I have a way,” boasted Huntington, “of finding out what is done in the Union Company’s office.”28 In April 1867, E. B. Crocker heard that “the Union Pacific has had a good deal of trouble with snow this winter—full as much if not more than we have had. The fact is that after this year while they are building between the Black Hills & Salt Lake, they will only be able to work on construction during the summer months. They will be such a high latitude that the snow will fall early and stay late and from now on they will find themselves in the fix we are now in.”29