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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Just a few minutes before noon, Stanford and Durant settled the controversy.

  Strobridge and Reed came forward, from the CP train, bearing the laurel tie. Alongside them was a squad of Chinese, wearing clean blue frocks and carrying one rail, and an Irish squad with the other rail. The Jupiter and the No. 119 were facing each other, a couple of rail lengths apart. The engineers, Booth and Bradford, pulled on their whistles to send up a shriek. Cheers broke out. One veteran said, “We all yelled like to bust.”

  The crowd pressed forward. On the telegraph, W. N. Shilling, a telegrapher from Western Union’s Ogden office, beat a tattoo of messages to impatient inquiries from various offices: “TO EVERYBODY. KEEP QUIET. WHEN THE LAST SPIKE IS DRIVEN AT PROMONTORY POINT, WE WILL SAY ‘DONE!’ DON’T BREAK THE CIRCUIT, BUT WATCH FOR THE SIGNALS OF THE BLOWS OF THE HAMMER.”

  The preacher was introduced, and he offered a prayer. Shilling clicked again: “ALMOST READY. HATS OFF; PRAYER IS BEING OFFERED.”

  The spikes were brought forward. Shilling clicked, “WE HAVE GOT DONE PRAYING. THE SPIKE IS ABOUT TO BE PRESENTED.” Stanford gave a brief, uninspired speech. Dodge spoke up for the UP. He mentioned Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Christopher Columbus. Shilling again: “ALL READY NOW; THE SPIKE WILL SOON BE DRIVEN. THE SIGNAL WILL BE THREE DOTS FOR THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE BLOWS.”

  Strobridge and Reed put the last tie, the laurel tie, in place. Durant drove in his spike—or, rather, tapped it in, for it was partially seated in the predrilled hole already. Then Stanford. When he tapped the Golden Spike in, he would signal the waiting country. Reporters compared what was coming to the first shot fired at Lexington. One said the blow would be heard “the fartherest of any by mortal man.”

  Stanford swung and missed, striking only the rail. It made no difference. The telegraph operator closed the circuit and the wire went out, “done!”16

  Across the nation, bells pealed. Even the venerable Liberty Bell in Philadelphia was rung. Then came the boom of cannons, 220 of them in San Francisco at Fort Point, a hundred in Washington D.C., countless fired off elsewhere. It was said that more cannons were fired in celebration than ever took part in the Battle of Gettysburg. Everywhere there was the shriek of fire whistles, firecrackers and fireworks, singing and prayers in churches. The Tabernacle in Salt Lake City was packed to capacity, with an astonishing seven thousand people. In New Orleans, Richmond, Atlanta, and throughout the old Confederacy, there were celebrations. Chicago had a parade that was its biggest of the century—seven miles long, with tens of thousands of people participating, cheering, watching.

  A correspondent in Chicago caught exactly the spirit that had brought the whole country together. The festivity, he wrote in the Tribune, “was free from the atmosphere of warlike energy and the suggestions of suffering, danger, and death which threw their oppressive shadow over the celebrations of our victories during the war for the Union.”17

  In Promontory, the Jupiter and the UP’s No. 119 were unhooked from their trains. Then they moved forward ever so slowly, until their pilots touched. Russell urged the crews to form a wedge radiating out from the point of contact. Men clinging to each engine held bottles of champagne aloft. On the track, Dodge and Montague clasped hands, framing the last tie beneath them. Russell captured the moment for posterity. When he told his subjects they were free to move, the whistles shrieked and a roar exploded from the crowd. Champagne bottles were smashed against each engine.

  Jupiter and No. 119 backed up and hooked onto their trains. Jupiter backed up a bit more, and No. 119 then came forward until it had crossed the junction of the tracks, halted for an instant, then majestically backed away. Jupiter came forward, crossed the junction, and backed up. The transcontinental railroad was a reality.

  The Golden Spike was snatched up and safely deposited in Stanford’s car. Souvenir hunters quickly whittled the last tie to splinters. In all, six ties were cut to pieces before the end of the day.

  Stanford invited the UP officials to his car for a celebratory lunch, with plenty of California fruit and wine to mark the occasion. There were speeches, including an awful one by Stanford, who argued that the government subsidy had been more a detriment than a boost to the companies, because of all the conditions attached to the bonds. People were stunned—that is, everyone except Dan Casement, who had been imbibing the champagne in heroic quantities. He hoisted himself up on Jack’s shoulders and brayed, “Mr. President of the Central Pacific: If this subsidy has been such a detriment to the building of these roads, I move you say that it be returned to the United States Government with our compliments.” There were cheers and laughter, except from Stanford, who glowered.18

  Telegrams went out and came in. To President Grant: “Sir: We have the honor to report that the last rail is laid, the last spike is driven, the Pacific Railroad is finished.” Signed by Stanford and Durant. Another from Dodge to Grant. One to Vice-President Schuyler Colfax, signed by Dodge, Duff, Dillon, and Durant, but not by Stanford, who had named a town after Colfax. One from Dodge to Secretary of War Rawlins, with a nice touch: “The great work, commenced during the Administration of Lincoln, in the middle of a great rebellion, is completed under that of Grant, who conquered the peace.” And another from Dodge to Sherman, saying in part, “Your continuous active aid, with that of the Army, has made you a part of us and enabled us to complete our work in so short a time.”

  Sherman’s reply: “In common with millions I sat and heard the mystic taps of the telegraphic battery and heard the nailing of the last spike in the great Pacific road. Indeed, am I its friend? Yes … As early as 1854 I was vice president of the effort begun in San Francisco.” He promised Dodge he would ride the rails from the East to the West Coast as soon as possible, and make the passage in a much shorter time than his journey by water before the Mexican War. “All honor to you, to Durant, to Jack and Dan Casement, to Reed, and thousands of brave fellows who have fought this glorious national problem in spite of deserts, storms, Indians, and the doubts of the incredulous.”19

  Sherman later told Dodge that the transcontinental railroad “advanced our country one hundred years.”20

  There was one telegram never sent. It was to a person none ever thought to invite to the ceremony: Anna Ferona Judah. She stayed alone in her home in Greenfield, Massachusetts. “I refused myself to everyone that day,” she later wrote. “I could not talk of the common events of daily living.” Naturally she thought of Theodore. She would have anyway, because by coincidence May 10 was their wedding anniversary.

  “It seemed as though the spirit of my brave husband descended upon me,” she wrote, “and together we were there unseen, unheard of men.”21

  IN Salt Lake City, where there were many speeches, there was one by a man named John Taylor that put the achievement in perspective. It was, he said, “so stupendous that we can scarcely find words to express our sentiments or give vent to our admiration.” Then he did what he said he could scarcely do. He was a Mormon from England, and old enough that “I can very well remember the time when there was no such thing as a railroad in existence.” Impressive enough, but what came next was almost beyond contemplation to the members of his audience in 1869: “I rode on the first train that was ever made, soon after its completion; that was between Manchester and Liverpool, England.”

  Mr. Taylor could recall other changes in his life, such as the time when there was no telegraph in operation, “when the idea of conveying thought from one city to another, and from one continent to another by the aid of electricity, instantly, would have been considered magic, superhuman, and beyond the reach of human intellect, enterprise and ingenuity.” But nothing could match the experience of having ridden on the first train ever in operation, then being in Salt Lake City to celebrate the completion of the railroad that linked together the North American continent.22

  * The spike today is at Stanford University.

  * Sweet was twenty years old. He lived through World War II and died on May 30, 1948.
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  EPILOGUE

  OF all the things done by the first transcontinental railroad, nothing exceeded the cuts in time and cost it made for people traveling across the continent. Before the Mexican War, during the Gold Rush that started in 1848, through the 1850s, and until after the Civil War ended in 1865, it took a person months and might cost more than $1,000 to go from New York to San Francisco.

  But less than a week after the pounding of the Golden Spike, a man or woman could go from New York to San Francisco in seven days. That included stops. So fast, they used to say, “that you don’t even have time to take a bath.” And the cost to go from New York to San Francisco, as listed in the summer of 1869, was $150 for first class, $70 for emigrant. By June 1870, that was down to $136 for first class, $110 for second class, and $65 for third, or emigrant, class. First class meant a Pullman sleeping car. Emigrants sat on a bench.

  Freight rates by train were incredibly less than for ox-or horse-drawn wagons, or for sailboats or steamers. Mail that once cost dollars per ounce and took forever now cost pennies and got from Chicago to California in a few days. The telegraph, meanwhile, could move ideas, thoughts, statistics, any words or numbers that could be put on paper, from one place to another, from Europe or England or New York to San Francisco or anywhere else that had a telegraph station, all but instantly.

  The Pullman Company published a weekly newspaper called the Trans-Continental for the passengers. On May 30, 1870, the paper had this item: “It was a cheering incident in our smoking car last evening when one of our party who had telegraphed to Boston to learn if his wife was well, received, after we had run forty-seven miles farther west, the answer: ‘All well at home,’ which fact was announced, and loud applause followed from all in the car.”1

  Together, the transcontinental railroad and the telegraph made modern America possible. Things that could not be imagined before the Civil War now became common. A nationwide stock market, for example. A continent-wide economy in which people, agricultural products, coal, and minerals moved wherever someone wanted to send them, and did so cheaply and quickly. A continent-wide culture in which mail and popular magazines and books that used to cost dollars per ounce and had taken forever to get from the East to the West Coast, now cost pennies and got there in a few days. Entertainers could move from one city to another in a matter of hours.

  DODGE had concluded his short speech on May 10 with the words “This is the way to India.” Whitman had called his poem “Passage to India.” Throughout the building of the road, its proponents had predicted that the China-Japan-India trade with the East Coast of America and with Europe would pass through San Francisco and then over the transcontinental railroad to points east, or to be shipped to Europe via New York. The first through-car on the transcontinental line carried a shipment of India tea, forerunner of the future.

  But the trade with Asia didn’t happen, certainly not to the extent people had hoped. This was primarily because, in the same year the rails were connected, 1869, the Suez Canal opened, providing the shortest eastward sea route from Europe. But what did happen was beyond imagination when the 1862 Pacific Railroad Bill was passed. Sidney Dillon, a director of the UP, in an 1892 article in Scribner’s Magazine called “Historic Moments: Driving the Last Spike of the Union Pacific,” spoke to the point.

  The relatively few people who saw the ceremony at Promontory Point, he wrote, “were strongly impressed with the conviction that the event was of historic importance; but, as I remember it now, we connected it rather with the notion of transcontinental communication and trade with China and Japan than with internal development, or what railroad men call local traffic.” Dillon added that no one was disappointed “in the stupendous results attained,” but admitted that “they are different from those we looked for, and of vastly greater consequence for the country.” Expectations of trade with Asia “have fallen far short of fulfilment.” But “the enormous development of local business has surpassed anything we could have ever dreamed of.” The Asian trade yielded only 5 percent of the UP’s business in 1891, while 95 percent was local.2

  Putnam’s Magazine, in its October 1868 issue, pointed out why the American people, “standing in the fore-front of the civilized world, have reaped the most signal advantages from this new servant,” the locomotive. In the year 1868, there were forty thousand miles of track in the United States, “or four-tenths of all the railroads in the world.” Without the railroads, Putnam’s asserted, the Mississippi Valley would have fewer than four million inhabitants instead of the twelve million already there, with more coming. In the past fifteen years, Putnam’s said, the population of the United States had increased 90 percent, while production had jumped 230 percent.

  The conclusion in Putnam’s was that the railroads, especially the transcontinental railroad, had “lightened human toil, made men richer in blessings and in leisure, increased their activity, shielded them from tempest and famine, enlarged the area available for man’s residence and subsistence, enabled him to do more in the same period of time and spread knowledge and virtue over all this earth.”3

  MISTAKES were made all along the line, caused both by errors of judgment and a certain cynicism, encouraged by Congress, and cheered on by the populace at large. There was an emphasis on speed rather than quality, on laying as much track and making as much grade as possible rather than doing it right.

  One glaring reminder of the waste was the two grades running east and west from Promontory Summit, parallel to each other. Eventually, under dictate from Congress, in November 1869, the UP sold its line from near Ogden to the summit to the CP for $2,852,970 ($58,824 per mile). But just as the CP had to abandon grade it had made from the summit to Ogden (but it did use the Big Fill, ignored by the UP), so did the UP have to abandon everything west of Ogden, all the way to Humboldt Wells, 222 miles from Ogden. That cost the UP over $200,000. The CP abandoned parallel grades that cost it $752,000. Congress had watched as more than two hundred miles of the overlapping grade-work was being done. Not until April 10, 1869, did it step in to halt this.4

  PROMONTORY Summit remained the terminus point for the railroads until the CP had paid for the tracks from there to Ogden. For a few months it was the last Hell on Wheels. Boxcars on a siding provided living quarters for railroad employees. A row of tents faced the railroad across a single dirt street. The tents served as hotels, lunch counters, saloons, gambling dens, a few shops, and as nests for the “soiled doves.” There was plenty of whiskey, but precious little water. The railroads had to haul it on their cars, in barrels, from springs thirty to fifty miles distant.

  A number of “hard cases” arrived in Promontory. A reporter for the Sacramento Bee wrote of “Behind-the-Rock Johnny, hero of at least five murders and unnumbered robberies.” In the gambling tents the games included three-card monte, ten-die, strap game, chuck-a-luck, faro, and keno. A gang of gamblers and confidence men called the “Promontory Boys” set up headquarters there and were “thicker than hypocrites at a camp meeting of frogs after a shower.” J. H. Beadle wrote that Promontory Summit “certainly was, for its size, morally nearest to the infernal regions of any town on the road.” In January 1870, when the terminus was transferred to Ogden, Hell on Wheels moved out of Promontory.5

  THE rails were joined but the UP’s financial problems continued to grow. Aside from resources Durant had siphoned off, contractors had stolen much material that the UP had paid for, or at least signed for. And among many other creditors, there was Brigham Young, who bombarded the company headquarters in Boston with demands for payment in full. The UP had no money, but it did have equipment left over and Young was desperate to have a branch line, to be owned and controlled by the Mormons, running from Ogden to Salt Lake City. Finally, in September 1869, a deal was struck. The UP gave the Mormons four thousand tons of iron rail ($480,000), 144 tons of spikes ($20,000), thirty-two tons of bolts ($5,600), four first-class passenger cars ($5,000 each), second-class cars, mail cars, flatcars, and boxcars. The
total value that Young signed for was $599,460. The Mormons got started on their railroad immediately and had it in service in a few months.6

  WHILE building the road, the UP had relied on steamboats and ferries or, in the colder winters, on temporary tracks laid across the frozen Missouri River, to bring into Omaha supplies of all kinds from the east. What was needed was a permanent bridge, which was started in 1870 and opened in March 1872. It had eleven spans, each 250 feet in length and sixty feet above the water. It cost about $2.9 million to build.

  With the completion of that bridge, there was a continuous line of track from New York to Sacramento. In Sacramento, the Big Four were putting their first pioneering line into the San Francisco Bay Area and through the broad, fertile, and largely unpopulated San Joaquin Valley. They were taking control of other railroads and had even bigger plans.

  ON September 4, 1872, the New York Sun had a bold headline:

  THE KING OF FRAUDS

  How the Credit Mobilier Bought

  Its Way Through Congress

  COLOSSAL BRIBERY

  Congressmen who Have Robbed the People, and who now Support

  The National Robber

  HOW SOME MEN GET FORTUNES7

  The newspaper had launched what became the biggest scandal of the nineteenth century. That scandal would scar the UP through the remainder of that century, and indeed to the end of the twentieth century. The House of Representatives had a series of hearings to inquire into the workings of the Crédit Mobilier, the UP, and the CR Every official from the companies was required to testify. In virtually every case the testimony was twisted and given the worst possible interpretation. The hearings went on for a full six months, featuring for the most part acrimony and sensationalism, although most charges were true and would be proven.

  A chief but by no means only target was Oakes Ames (“Hoax Ames,” one newspaper called him), because as a congressman he had distributed Crédit Mobilier stock to some of his colleagues. Representative James G. Blaine was one of them. Representative James Garfield was another, Representative James Brooks another, and the list included Vice-President Schuyler Colfax. Ames had written (in a letter published by an inquiring reporter) that he wanted to place the stock “where it would do the most good.”