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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  On August 3, Ferguson himself was almost caught by flying bullets. He commented, “It is owing to the carelessness of individuals in our vicinity whose reckless disregard of life and limb in their promiscuous shooting is perfectly outrageous and alarming.”34

  Life came cheap on the Union Pacific Railroad, as Ferguson knew as well as any. Nevertheless, he directed his emotions not at the workers who shot their fellows and who were more dangerous than the Native Americans, but at the Indian boys who sometimes killed and often stole from the whites. In fact, the Indian outrages were exclusively committed by teenage boys. The threat of war parties, so severe in 1867, had gone away. This was thanks to the resolution of the veterans who were working for the UP, and to the five thousand troops stationed along the line of the UP between Omaha and the Salt Lake.

  Another factor was the quality of the rifles. The Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho were using muzzle loaders, with loose powder, balls, and percussion caps. The U.S. Army soldiers were not much if any better off until 1867, when the Springfield rifle was first issued to the infantry on the Great Plains. It was a breechloader, made from the old Springfield musket, sighted for a thousand yards maximum range. On two occasions in the fall of 1867, the Sioux lost some of their best warriors to the quickness and range of the Springfield, which was a splendid weapon.

  Further, the Pawnees protecting some of the graders and others were getting better at their task. In truth, they were living what they regarded as a joyous life. The army furnished them with arms and ammunition, food, clothes, and pay, all this to do what they wanted above all other things to be doing, fighting their enemies. And if their enemies proved to be too strong for them, they could always retreat to the nearest white troops for protection. In addition, they were now much farther west than they had ever been or would have dared to go by themselves.

  David Lemon was an engineer for the UP. Fifty-six years after the event, he wrote a reminiscence of one of his experiences on the railroad. During the first week of October 1868, at night, he was in the cab of a locomotive on the line, with two boxcars of oats and corn followed by twenty-three cars of railroad iron. Sioux Indians had removed bolts and fishplates from the rail joint and torn down telegraph poles to pry apart the rails.

  Lemon crashed. “You can well imagine the ugly wreck.” Not until daylight did a relief crew arrive to assist him. Pawnee troops gave chase to the Sioux. When they returned, they had seven scalps. They said the scalps were all from Sioux, “although one of them had long red hair, which was probably that of an escaped white convict who had taken refuge with the Sioux tribe.” That night the Pawnees had a grand scalp dance.35

  IN the eyes of the men of the UP, the Indians deserved extreme punishment and even more. President Oliver Ames came west and raged, “I see nothing but extermination to the Indians as the result of their thieving disposition, and we shall probably have to come to this before we can run the road safely.”36

  General Sherman hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but he was ready if it did. British reporter Henry Stanley had been at North Platte, Nebraska, in the fall of 1867, for a peace council. He heard Sherman say to the Indians: “We built iron roads, and you cannot stop the locomotive any more than you can stop the sun or moon, and you must submit, and do the best you can…. If our people in the east make up their minds to fight you they will come out as thick as a herd of buffalo, and if you continue fighting you will all be killed. We advise you for the best. We now offer you this, choose your own homes, and live like white men, and we will help you all you want.”37

  Ferguson was more rabid. “I have no sympathy with the red devils,” he wrote in his diary on August 17, “notwithstanding the halo of romance by which they are surrounded by the people of the East, who, secure in their happy and peaceful homes, know naught of the wild and awful horrors of the West.” He added that, for his part, having been “surrounded by too many perils, and knowing too much of the savage details of Indian warfare,” he wanted them eliminated. “Let the savage strength of the demoniac Indian be broken,” he wrote. “May their dwelling places and habitations be destroyed. May the greedy crow hover over their silent corpses. May the coyote feast upon their stiff and festering carcases, and the sooner the better.”38

  As bloodthirsty as that was, Ferguson had the same kind of mixed emotions as most of his fellow surveyors and engineers. To a man, they loved the wild life, the scenery, the game, the swift and clear-flowing streams, the untouched prairie and forest, the flowers and trees, the birds, the opportunity to ride across an unfenced country. And they also loved Indians, as long as the Indians stayed out of the white man’s way.

  But they were also aware that, as the first white men other than the mountain men ever to come into this paradise, this Eden, this unspoiled country, they had the job of wiping it out by bringing to it the very thing that had brought them into the wilderness, the railroad. Much as they loved the wild country, they were going to tame it. Thus Ferguson observed, “The time is coming and fast too, when in the sense it is now understood, THERE WILL BE NO WEST.”39

  That was partly right. The West was not going to be eliminated from the maps or from American territory or from people’s imaginations. But it surely would be changed. One such change was in fact already evident. In the summer of 1868, a herd of eight hundred Texas cattle was trailed into the vicinity of North Platte. The first Nebraska cow town was born. In the next year, seventeen hundred head arrived and were put out to graze on the prairie. By 1870, the total cattle herd was up to seven thousand, with a smaller number of sheep. And this was just the beginning.40 The cattle and sheep were displacing the buffalo even as Ferguson was helping build the UP.

  The tame was replacing the wild. As Ferguson understood, there had to be a price. One that he recorded but apparently did not understand was accidents. To UP workers they were just a part of the job, bound to happen. Moving all those iron rails, throwing down fishplates and spikes also made of iron, swinging sledgehammers all day long, and all the other movement of goods and supplies, meant accidents. How many could not be said. Nor is there an accounting of how many men lost a limb or their lives.

  Accidents involving locomotives were another matter. First of all, they cost money—even by the standards of the UP or the CP, big money. Second, it was thought that locomotives would last, if not forever, at least through a man’s lifetime. That a locomotive accident could cost lives was taken for granted, but the trouble was that they often cost valuable or even irreplaceable lives—namely, the engineers running the trains.

  That there would be accidents with locomotives was inevitable. They were the biggest moving things ever built by man, and they moved faster than anything ever built. Even the fastest animal—say a cheetah—could outrun them for only a short distance. They could go farther pulling a heavier load than anything else.

  Morris Mills, an early employee of the UP, noted in 1926 that more radical change in operating practice for the railroads came in the 1870s than in any other decade before or since. This included advancing from hand to air brakes, from a coupling hook to automatic couplers, from iron to steel rails, from eight-wheel locomotives to ten-wheelers, from ten-ton capacity for freight cars to forty-or even sixty-ton capacity, from snow-plows of the wedge type to the rotary plow, and more. But none of those and other improvements had been made before 1870. Indeed, as Mills pointed out, “Railroading in the days of hand brakes, soil ballast, light power, and mountain grades, entailed hardships that produced a type of employee that were a veritable survival of the fittest.”41

  Accidents were so common they hardly got reported. The Chicago Tribune gave one paragraph to an incident in which a construction train in eastern Nebraska, near Fremont, ran over a cow. The accident threw several cars off the track. Five men were killed, twelve wounded (and two of them died the following day). “Several ladies were badly mangled.”

  Another report, dated July 15, 1868, dateline Laramie City, said that a westbound freight train that had
just passed over the Dale Creek Bridge ran into a car carrying gravel. The car had become detached from an eastbound train and ran down the grade toward Laramie “at such fearful velocity that it demolished the rear car of the freight train, which contained a number of persons.” One man was killed, another seriously injured, and others were cut or bruised.42

  After the track got up to and beyond the second crossing of the North Platte, a boiler malfunction, sometimes even an explosion, became commonplace. This was because, throughout the Wyoming desert, from Rawlins to Green River, the water was an alkaline concoction that destroyed the boilers faster than they could be replaced. It looked like water but, according to Morris Mills, when heat was applied to it “it became a law unto it-self and defying the ingenuity of man it would shoot out through the smoke stack like a miniature geyser.” Engines headed east rolled into Cheyenne looking as if they had been whitewashed. Eventually the UP learned how to apply a chemical process to the water to make it behave.43

  THE region west of Rawlins was an “awful place,” according to Jack Casement. It consisted of “alkali dust knee deep and certainly the meanest place I have ever been in.” Surveyor James Evans said, “It is not a country where people are disposed to linger.”44 But the railroad, and those who worked on it and those who worked on them, had to get across it.

  On June 21, 1868, Arthur Ferguson recorded in his diary, “Large numbers of wagon teams, men and women, the latter principally prostitutes, are now crossing the [North Platte] river, bound as far west as Green River, which they say is quite a town.”45

  The sharpers, the cooks, the bartenders, the musicians, the girls, and the women were leaving Benton for the next end of track to boast a city, or at least a railroad establishment. Leaving Benton was no problem. A Cheyenne, Wyoming, reporter described the place as reminding him of “the camps of the Bedouin Arabs, [because it] is of tents, and of almost a transitory nature as the elements of a soap bubble.” Novelist J. H. Beadle was there in the summer of 1868 and, tramping through the alkali in his black suit, he said he came to resemble “a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel.” He found “not a green tree, shrub or patch of grass. The red hills were scorched as bare as if blasted by lightning.”

  Samuel Bowles, the travel writer from Massachusetts, described Benton as “by day disgusting, by night dangerous, almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of lowest vice; averaging a murder a day; gambling, drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce.” He thought the inhabitants a “congregation of scum.”46

  A month or so later, they were all gone. There was not a single house or tent, only the rubble of a few chimneys and the sole surviving institution, the cemetery. This was because, as Ferguson noted, Hell on Wheels was on the move. Like the UP Railroad, Green River was the next stop.

  • • •

  THERE was money to be made out of the railroad. Among the many who knew that basic fact were Doc Durant and his fellow stockholders in the Crédit Mobilier. Dodge might want to build a first-class railroad, one that would last. Durant was for that, in his own way, but meanwhile he wanted to make money, not from any dividends the UP might pay from profits earned down the line, but from the construction phase. So he and his fellow trustees began handing out the Crédit Mobilier profits to none other than themselves, as UP stock-and bondholders. On January 4, 1868, the dividend was 80 percent of their CM stock, paid in UP first-mortgage bonds, and 100 percent in UP stock. Then, in June, they made three distributions to CM stockholders who also held UP shares. The first distribution amounted to 40 percent in stock of the UP, amounting to $1.5 million in face value or $450,000 at the current price of $30 per share, plus 60 percent in cash, or $2.25 million. The second was 75 percent in UP bonds, worth $2,812,500. The third was a cash allotment of 30 percent, or $1,125,000.

  A man holding a hundred shares of Crédit Mobilier stock, which had cost him $10,000, received in 1868 alone $9,000 in cash, $7,500 in UP bonds then selling at par, and forty shares of UP stock worth about $1,600 in cash, or a total of $18,100. Added to the earlier dividend, he received $28,200 for his $10,000 investment, or 280 percent in one year.47

  No one could accuse Doc of thinking small. Indeed he was thinking of much more than money. Though money was nice to have, and his lever for power, he also wanted every American to know his name and his accomplishments. At forty-eight years of age, he had time to make that happen, but he knew that just making money would never get him there. He wanted a place in history. Not from politics: he was contemptuous of politicians, a feeling common to the men of the Gilded Age. Durant wanted what such contemporaries as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt had, or something like what Collis Huntington or Leland Stanford would have. Doc wanted, above all else, to be remembered as the Man Who Built the Union Pacific Railroad.

  Doc’s competition for that title was Grenville Dodge. Durant knew that Dodge had a sizable lead on him, one that perhaps could not be overcome. Dodge was the one who told Lincoln where the railroad should run, the one who had pushed Lincoln on the 1862 Pacific Railroad Bill and the 1864 revision, the one who had brought Grant and Sherman into play. Durant knew—better than anyone else, since he was the person who had insisted on bringing Dodge into the company as chief engineer—that Dodge had been indispensable. He knew in addition that Dodge was the one who had found the route out of Omaha, the route up Lodgepole Creek to Cheyenne, the route to Sherman Summit and beyond to Laramie, and then to Green River and beyond. Plus which, all the employees, from the Casement brothers, Evans, Reed, and so on down to the lowliest Irish laborer, reported to Dodge. Back in New York, or even in Boston, people might think of it as Durant’s railroad, but not west of the Mississippi.

  Yet, even if Doc couldn’t compete with Dodge on the ground, he could send in the “interfering engineer,” Silas Seymour, to fight for him. From the beginning, that had been Seymour’s role, to work for Durant by second-guessing Dodge. From Omaha westward, Seymour had questioned Dodge’s route and often tried to change it, primarily to add more miles, so that the UP would collect more government bonds and land grants. In most cases, Dodge was able to overrule Seymour.

  On April 23, 1868, Dodge met with Doc and the UP’s Dillon and Seymour at Cheyenne. They had what Dodge called “a very plain talk.” Doc assured Dodge that “he had no desire to interfere with the work or delay it, but only wanted to help.” For his part, Dodge vowed that “nobody could go over his work superficially and change it.”

  Less than two weeks later, Durant, from Fort Sanders, issued his “General Order No. 1” (a nice way for Doc, who had never been in the military, to steal a military phrase from one of the heroes of the Civil War). He took advantage of the multitude of duties that descended on Dodge, who was not only a member of Congress but also chief engineer, surveyor, the man in charge of selling the land grants, and more, duties that involved him in much travel. So Durant declared, “In order to prevent unnecessary delay in the work during the absence of the Chief Engineer from the line of the road, the consulting engineer [Seymour] is hereby invested with full power to perform all the duties pertaining to the office of acting Chief engineer and his [Seymour’s] orders will be obeyed accordingly by everyone connected with the engineer department. Any orders heretofore given by the chief engineer conflicting with orders that may be given by the consulting engineer are hereby rescinded.”48

  Seymour had told Durant that Dodge’s line from Green River to the Salt Lake was all wrong, that he had laid out a new one and it was much better, and longer. That was one of the causes of General Order No. 1. But more important was Durant’s desire to be the man who built the railroad.

  This, and other disputes between the vice-president and the chief engineer, came to a head. On July 26, the Republican nominee for the presidency, General Ulysses S. Grant, along with Generals Sherman and Sheridan and others, including Durant, was going to be in Fort Sanders. Dodge had been in Salt Lake City when he received wo
rd that he too was expected. He took a chartered stagecoach to the UP’s end of track, then a train to Laramie, arriving on July 25. Grant was there as part of a campaign tour whose purpose was to shake the hands of as many Union veterans as possible. Sherman, who was with him, wrote his brother the senator, “Of course Grant will be elected. I have just traveled with him for two weeks, and the curiosity to see him exhausted his and my patience.”49

  Dodge took Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and the other generals to the end of track, then at Benton, 124 miles beyond Fort Sanders and Laramie. In his own words, he “took great pains on this trip to post them thoroughly about everything connected with the Union Pacific.” What an opportunity for a reporter! Or, come to that, for a tape recorder! But neither was there. Still, one can imagine General Dodge, the top railroad man in the Union Army, the man on whom Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, not to mention Lincoln had relied to keep the trains running or to lay new track for them, telling his confederates about the progress and prospects for the longest railroad in the world. And one can imagine how hard the generals listened, the questions they asked, and how impressed they were.

  At one point Dodge declared that he was ready to quit his job if Durant, Seymour, or anyone else changed his final location. Grant heard him, thought for a moment, then exacted a personal promise from Dodge that he would not resign until the railroad was finished.50

  The men rode the train back to Fort Sanders. July 26 was a baking-hot day. At the Officers’ Club at the fort, a big log bungalow, the generals met with Durant and Seymour. Durant took the floor. He was bold enough to attack Dodge, telling Grant and the others that Dodge had selected extravagant routes, wasted precious time and money on useless surveys, ignored the sound judgment of Silas Seymour, was about to bypass Salt Lake City, had neglected his congressional duties, and more.