A different sort of fight was taking place in Washington. Congress debated the railroads. Senator William M. Stewart from Nevada, a staunch friend of the CP, described with gusto and in detail the sins of the UP. He was supported by Senator James Nye, also of Nevada. Picking up on Charles Francis Adams’s article on the Crédit Mobilier, Stewart declared, “Leading members of Congress, members of the committee on the Pacific Railroad in the House, were not only in the Union Pacific but in this identical Crédit Mobilier, and were the recipients of enormous dividends.” That was surely ominous for the congressmen who held Crédit Mobilier stock, but also for the Big Four and their Contract and Finance Company, if only because the UP had its defenders, including General Sherman’s brother, and they might well broaden any investigation.53
So, on April 9, Dodge met with Huntington in Washington. Both companies had reason to compromise, at once. Huntington made the initial move. The CP would buy the UP track between Promontory Summit and Ogden for its own use. “I offered them $4 million,” he later asserted. Huntington coupled the offer with a threat: if the UP refused, the CP would build its own track into Ogden. Dodge argued but eventually gave in.
The two men agreed that the roads would meet in or near Ogden. That evening, in a night session, the Congress that had created the race to begin with, finally voted to end it. A joint resolution said, “The common terminus of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads shall be at or near Ogden, and the Union Pacific Railroad Company shall build, and the Central Pacific Railroad Company shall pay for and own, the railroad from the terminus aforesaid to Promontory Summit, at which the rails shall meet and connect and form one continuous line.”54
The race was over. Who could say who won? Generally, the men involved breathed a sigh of relief Charlie Crocker spoke for most of them. He had been suffering from insomnia for months, and he later said, “When Huntington telegraphed me that he had fixed matters with the Union Pacific, and that we were to meet on the summit of Promontory, I was out at the front, and went to bed that night and slept like a child.”55
Of all the people to speak for the UP, Silas Seymour, the interfering engineer, was the least likely. But, wandering out to the end of track west of Corinne a week later, he paused to contemplate how much had been accomplished. Exactly a year earlier, he had watched Durant pound in the last spike at Sherman Summit, in the Black Hills in eastern Wyoming. Since then the UP had advanced 519 miles through desert and mountains. Seymour marveled, “Nothing like it in the world.”56
When Lewis Clement, who had so much to do with it, heard the news, he wrote his friend and CP surveyor Butler Ives, and signed off with a wonderfully perfect line: he said he was glad to contemplate “the bond of iron which is to hold our glorious country in one eternal union.”57
* Mormon crews were also grading, for both companies, but the author has seen no account of their going after each other, or of Chinese or Irish going after them.
* In Europe in World War II, American GIs used their hand grenades, or dynamite charges, to blast frozen earth apart so that they could dig foxholes.
Chapter Sixteen
TO THE SUMMIT April 11 - May 7, 1869
OGDEN would be the terminus for the Central Pacific coming from Sacramento and the Union Pacific coming from Omaha, but the initial meeting point for the two lines would be the basin at Promontory Summit. To signify that the graders and track layers had accepted what their bosses in Washington (meaning Dodge and Huntington, the U.S. Congress, and the President and his Cabinet) had decided, on April 10 the UP stopped grading west of Promontory, and on April 15 the CP stopped grading east of the summit. The companies pulled back their men, their tents, their cooking facilities, their equipment, their wagons, horses and mules, everything.
The workers and their superintendents felt that a diktat had been forced on them. It wasn’t their choice, it wasn’t their decision. It hurt, it stung, it mattered, but it had to be done, even though it meant abandoning the field of battle. It was a retreat. That was something all the Confederate and most of the Yankee veterans in the two companies had experienced more than once during the war, but they hated it as much now as they had then.
Still, losing the battle wasn’t the same as losing the war. The rivalry between the two railroad lines continued.* The competition had become a habit. At the end of April 1869, even though the race had been over for nearly three weeks, that competition captured the attention of the people of the United States plus the directors of the two companies. Most of all, for every employee from superintendent down to dishwasher, the climax to the competition, even if meaningless in financial terms, was mesmerizing. There had never been anything like it before and never would be again.
For the UP directors and employees, one of the things that stung the most was that their railroad had become, in effect, no different from Brigham Young’s grading crews, a contractor for the CP. The UP grading and track-laying gangs were working not for their own company but for the other guy’s, and they knew it. Everything they did on the line between Ogden and Promontory Summit would be turned over to the CP. And the UP’s treasury was, as always, empty. Dodge warned Oliver Ames, “Men will work no longer without pay & a stoppage now is fatal to us.” Jack Casement added his own warning: the banks and merchants from Omaha to Ogden were “loaded with UPRR paper and if the company don’t send some money here soon they will bust up the whole country.” Seymour added in his own telegram, “We are being ruined for want of track material.”1
Despite Jim Fisk’s legal maneuvers, the UP directors had managed to get the headquarters out of Nassau Street in New York and up to Boston. But when the officers were let go and the sign was taken down in New York, who else but Doc Durant promptly rented the rooms and took possession of their contents. He didn’t get much, because the Ames brothers and their friends had acted first in emptying the vaults, file cabinets, and the rest. “When we can get our Books away from NY and cleaned out from that sink of corruption,” Oliver Ames declared while doing the deed, “we shall feel safe and not until then.”
By April 22, they were safe. The directors held their long-postponed stockholders’ meeting in Boston. The highlight came after a series of speeches, when a telegraph from Dodge in Utah was read: “CENTRAL PACIFIC RAILROAD, EIGHTEEN MILES FROM PROMONTORY SUMMIT. WE ARE TWELVE MILES FROM SUMMIT.” There were cheers all around, and the meeting was adjourned.2
The troubles were not over. Lewis Dent let the board know that he and his partner expected to be retained as counsel for the UP at $10,000 a year. Each. He had connections. He was Grant’s brother-in-law, and his own brother, General Frederick Dent, had served with Grant through the war and was now the President’s military secretary. Further, General Rawlins, Grant’s closest adviser, had promised Dent he would receive a “very liberal proposition” from the UP.
Dodge said to give him $500 a year. Dent dismissed that offer as an insult. General Dent then told another director that his brother had been treated badly. That director then warned Oliver Ames, “It is not in the interest of our Co. to make enemies in that direction.” The UP gave in and put Dent and his partner on the payroll.3
Worse followed. The corruption all along the line, so often pointed out by Webster Snyder, was now apparent to all. Cries went up. There were mutters of “Off with their heads” and screams of outrage. But nothing happened, because everyone was too busy with his own concerns. Early in April, Snyder wrote Dodge, “I am heartily sick of this outfit that talks so much about cleaning out thieves & yet weakens when in presence of the thieves & will let thousands be stolen under their own eyes.”
There was more. Reports came to Dodge of defective masonry on many of the UP’s bridges. Three spans collapsed when the masonry failed. The arches on two culverts at Lodgepole Creek also crashed because of inferior workmanship. Dodge did a quick inspection and declared the masonry at Bear River “worthless.” He said, “The backing is dirt and free stone set on edge.” He wrote Oliver Ames,
“We cannot trust masons who have had the reputation of being No. 1 and honest unless we employ an engineer to every structure to stand right over them.”4
Shortly thereafter, a telegram came in from Utah: “WE MUST HAVE FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS TO PAY CONTRACTORS MEN IMMEDIATELY OR ROAD CANNOT RUN.” And at a time when most American newspapers were recording the march to the summit in minute detail for their readers, the New York Herald ran a sour editorial: “In congress we see the Union Pacific Railroad ring triumphant and its directors and hangers-on flaunt their corruption and their ill-acquired means in the face of all decency and legislative morality.”5
To the directors it must have seemed that this was a hell of a way to run a railroad. Just as their company was on the verge of completing the job, it appeared to be nearing the brink of collapse. The triumphal procession they had anticipated threatened to become a funeral cortege.
• • •
THE CP was moving ahead briskly. Indeed, almost without worries. On April 9, it was 690 miles east of Sacramento and that day laid 4.2 miles of track. The next day, it set down 3.1 miles, and the day after that, 4.6. By April 17, it had reached Monument Point, a quarter-mile north of the lakeshore. There the CP had established three sprawling grading camps. The first had a hundred tents, the second another hundred, and the third seventy-five. “Hustle” and “bustle” were the words that came to people’s lips when they saw this hive of activity. As one example, on April 18 a train came from Sacramento. It was thirty-two cars in length. While the Chinese unloaded each car of its rails and ties, others were putting intermediate ties under the rails, which were already spiked into place, and still others were putting in additional ballast and tamping it down.
Monument Point was a spot Durant and Dodge had once thought of as a meeting place, after they had given up on the Nevada-California state line or Humboldt Wells. Now none of that was to be. On April 23, the Alta California reported that the distance separating the two lines was less than fifty miles. “The CP is laying about four miles of track a day; the UP some days have laid the same, on others only one or two miles, from lack of material—principally ties.”6
Although the tracks had not yet joined, increasingly emigrants were moving west by rail rather than wagon trains. On April 26, the newspaper reported that immigrants who had traveled from Omaha to beyond Ogden on the UP hired stagecoaches at the terminus and took them to Monument Point, got on a CP train, and were in California only a little over a week after leaving Omaha.7 There were constant reminders of the change the transcontinental railroad had already wrought. Freight wagons carrying supplies to the end of track from Sacramento and Omaha were constantly rolling past the construction crews. Wells Fargo stagecoaches, which had once spanned the continent, now provided service between railheads. Their run became shorter with each passing day.
The road that was about to be completed had been built, in part, because General Sherman and his army wanted it. So did the politicians, and of course those who settled in the West. Everyone would save time and benefit from its completion, but none more directly than the army. In its task of protecting the frontier and the Far West, the army had sent its units on exhausting marches of sometimes as much as several months just to get to a new post. The expense was terrific, the pain considerable.
But in mid-April 1869, the Twelfth Infantry Regiment, with orders to proceed to the Presidio of San Francisco, took the UP to Corinne, detrained, marched two easy days to the CP railhead, and got on the CP for the trip west.8 It took a week from Omaha to Sacramento, and for both speed and comfort it was a dream. No American army unit had ever before moved so fast or so far for less money or at such ease.
On April 27, the Alta’s reporter was at the end of the CP’s track, 678 miles from Sacramento. The railroad was fourteen miles short of Promontory Summit, and the UP was within eight miles and was laying a mile per day. The UP was coming on even though it still had to finish the Big Trestle and do some difficult rock-cutting. “They may hurry up,” the reporter wrote, “or they may decide to turn to the abandoned grade of the Central Pacific, which is within a few feet of where they are working.” That abandoned grade included the CP’s Big Fill.9
IN 1868, Jack Casement’s men had laid down four and a half miles of track in a single day. “They bragged of it,” Crocker later said, “and it was heralded all over the country as being the biggest day’s track-laying that was ever known.” Crocker told Strobridge that the CP must beat the UP. They got together the material, talked to the men, and did it, spiking down six miles and a few feet in a single day.
Casement had come back at them, starting at 3 A.M., working by the light of lanterns until dawn, and keeping at the task until midnight. At the end of the day, the UP had advanced the end of track eight miles and a fraction.
“Now,” Crocker said to Stro, “we must take off our coats, but we must not beat them until we get so close together that there is not enough room for them to turn around and outdo us.” Ten miles ought to do it, he figured.
“Mr. Crocker,” Strobridge said, “we cannot get men enough onto the track to lay ten miles.” Crocker said it had to be done.
“How are we going to do it?” Stro asked. “The men will all be in each other’s way.”
Organize, Crocker replied. “I’ve been thinking over this for two weeks, and I have got it all planned out.”10
Crocker’s plan was to have the men and the horses ready at first light. He wanted ironcars with rails, spikes, and fishplates, all ready to go. The night before, he wanted five supply trains lined up, the first at the railhead. Each of the five locomotives would pull sixteen cars, which contained enough supplies for two miles of track. When the sun rose, the Chinese would leap onto the cars of the first train, up at the end of track, and begin throwing down kegs of bolts and spikes, bundles of fishplates, and the iron rails. That train would then back up to a siding, and while the first two miles were laid another would come forward. As the first train moved back, six-man gangs of Chinese would lift the small open flatcars onto the track and begin loading each one with sixteen rails plus kegs of bolts, spikes, and fishplates. The flatcars had rollers along their outer edges to make it easier to slide the rails forward and off. Two horses, in single file, each with a rider on its back, would be hitched to the car by a long rope. The horses would then race down the side of the grade kept clear for them.
As this operation was being mounted, three men with shovels, called “pioneers,” would move out along the grade, aligning the ties that had been placed on the grade the night before. When the loaded cart got to the end of track, right after the pioneers, a team of Irish workers, one on each side, would grab the rails with their tongs, two men in front, two at the rear, race them forward to their proper position, and drop them in their proper place when the foreman called out “Down!”
Ahead of the track layers would be two men to handle the portable track-gauge, a wooden measuring device that was four feet eight and a half inches long. They would stay just ahead of the track layers all day long, making sure the rails laid down were just as far apart as Abraham Lincoln had decreed they should be. The spikes, placed by the Chinese workers atop the rails, would dribble onto the grade as the rails were removed. The bolts and fishplates were carried in hand buckets to where they were needed. When the cart was empty, it would be tipped off the grade and the next one brought on. Then the first would be turned around and the horses would be rehitched, to race back for another load.
Next would come the men placing and pounding in spikes. Crocker told Stro, “Have the first man drive one particular spike and not stop for another; he walks right past that rail and drives the same spike in the next rail; another man follows him and drives the next spike in the same rail; and another follows him and so on.” He admonished Stro to have enough spikes on hand so that “no man stops and no man passes another.”
After the spikes were driven in place, five to a rail, would come the straighteners. “One man sees
a defective place and he gives it a shove and passes on,” Crocker instructed. “Another comes right behind him and they get the track straight; none of them stop—they are walking forward all the time.” Next would be the crew to ballast the rails. One would raise the track with his shovel placed under a tie. Another would cast a shovelful of dirt under the tie. Then the fillers, one man after another throwing in a shovelful of earth. Crocker told Stro to “have enough of them so that when they are all through you have it all filled and no man stops nor allows another man to pass him.”
Finally, the tampers. There were four hundred of them. “Each one gives two tamps and he goes right along and gives two more to the next and does not stop on one rail, so that he will not be in the way of the next man.”
The crew placing the telegraph poles and fixing the wire would keep pace with the others. And as the rail layers emptied a car, it would be tipped off the track and another one brought on. The empty car would be replaced and taken back to the pile of rails by the horses at a gallop. When a loaded car was approaching down the track, the crew on the empty one would jump off and lift their car from the rails, then put it back after the loaded car went past with unslackened speed. When all the rails had been laid, another train pulling sixteen cars would come up to the end of track. The Chinese would swarm over it and throw off the rails, spikes, bolts, and fishplates and the process would be repeated.
Strobridge heard everything Crocker had to say, considered it, and finally said, “We can beat them, but it will cost something.” For example, he insisted on having a fresh team of horses for each car hauling rail, the fresh horses to take over after every two and a half miles.
Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Page 41
