Which Way to the Wild West?

by Steve Sheinkin

  “We fired two or three shots,” Thompson said, “and then, as the Indians pressed on us, we ran away.”

  Thompson hadn’t gotten far when he felt a bullet rip through his right arm. He kept running. A Cheyenne warrior chased him down and clubbed him with a rifle. “He then took out his knife,” Thompson said, “stabbed me in the neck, and making a twirl round his fingers with my hair, he commenced sawing and hacking away at my scalp.”

  William Thompson was one of the few people to be scalped and live to tell about it. “I can’t describe it to you,” he later told a newspaper writer. “It just felt as if the whole head was taken right off.”

  Somehow Thompson managed to stay silent, convincing his attacker he was already dead. “The Indian then mounted and galloped away,” Thompson said, “but as he went he dropped my scalp within a few feet of me.”

  Thompson grabbed back his scalp and hid in the weeds. He watched the Cheyenne warriors lay more wood across the tracks. He heard a train coming and wanted desperately to jump up to signal a warning, but he was too scared. The train was knocked off the tracks and skidded sideways onto the grass. The Cheyenne shot the men driving the train, then robbed and burned the train cars.

  When the Indians rode away Thompson was finally able to get up and look for help. Two days later a reporter named Henry Stanley met him in Omaha. “In a pail of water by his side, was his scalp,” Stanley wrote, “about nine inches in length and four in width, somewhat resembling a drowned rat.”

  Doctors in town told Thompson they could sew the scalp back to his head. They couldn’t. After a painful failure of an operation, Thompson donated his scalp to the Omaha Public Library (where it was put on display in the children’s section).

  The Plum Creek attack became famous thanks to Thompson’s incredible survival story. But it was just one of a growing number of Indian raids on railroad workers. “We have had a very anxious day of it,” a UP worker named Arthur Ferguson wrote in his diary. “On the lookout from morning until night, not knowing but what we might be attacked at every turn of the road.”

  The men running the Union Pacific demanded action from the government. “We’ve got to clean the damn Indians out, or give up building the Union Pacific,” grumbled Grenville Dodge, the railroad’s chief engineer. “The government may make its choice.”

  No Interruptions Allowed

  It was an easy choice to make. The government considered the railroad far too important to allow anything, or anyone, to stand in its way. General William Tecumseh Sherman summed up the government’s tough stand:

  “No interruption to the work upon the line of the Union Pacific will be tolerated. Both the Sioux1 and Cheyenne must die, or submit.”

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  While helping lead the Union army to victory in the Civil War, Sherman had gained a reputation for his merciless fighting style. “War is cruelty,” he was famous for saying. “The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” In other words: War sucks, so you might as well get it over with. Don’t just attack enemy armies—burn their homes, destroy their farms, break their will, force them to give up.

  Sherman’s strategy had worked against the South. It would work on the Great Plains too. “You should not allow the troops to settle down on the defensive,” he told his generals, “but carry the war to the Indian camps, where the women and children are.” Soldiers attacked villages in winter, burning food supplies and driving survivors out into the snow. The Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and other groups living in the path of railroad had no choice—they agreed to move onto reservations further to the south.

  Red Cloud Wins One

  Then the United States turned its attention to ending Red Cloud’s

  War, which was still dragging on north of the railroad route. Here the government did something surprising: it admitted defeat. Soldiers abandoned forts along the Bozeman Trail. The road was closed.

  Lakota chiefs then agreed to make peace, signing the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. “The government of the United States desires peace, and its honor is hereby pledged to keep it,” declared the treaty. “The Indians desire peace, and they now pledge their honor to maintain it.”

  The Fort Laramie Treaty created what was called the Great Sioux Reservation. This was a massive chunk (about eighteen million acres) of traditional Lakota land that was forever off-limits to American travelers and settlers. At least, it was supposed to be.

  For the first time in American history Native American tribes had beaten the United States in a war. Government officials didn’t seem too upset, though. For them, the real key was protecting the transcontinental railroad. Sherman’s soldiers started guarding the railroad workers as they laid tracks across the Plains.

  But would this railroad ever actually be completed?

  California Update

  No, judging by the progress of the Central Pacific in California. We haven’t checked in on them in a while. We haven’t missed much—the CP still needed thousands of workers.

  Here’s where the Chinese immigrants come back into the story. By the early 1860s nearly 50,000 Chinese immigrants had arrived in California, almost all of them young men. Chased off the good gold mining spots and forced to pay bogus taxes, they had little chance of making money as miners. They were eager for work—any work.

  Charles Crocker (another of the Big Four; weight: 265 pounds) thought it made sense to hire some of these men.

  “I will not boss Chinese!” shouted James Strobridge, boss of the CP’s construction crews.

  “But who said laborers have to be white to build railroads?” asked Crocker.

  “I was very much prejudiced against Chinese labor,” Strobridge later admitted.

  Crocker convinced Strobridge to try just fifty Chinese workers. “They did so well that he took fifty more,” Crocker reported, “and he got more and more until finally we got all we could use, until at one time I think we had ten or twelve thousand.”

  By 1866, Chinese workers (ranging in age from thirteen to sixty) made up about 80 percent of the Central Pacific’s entire workforce. True, they had some habits that white workers found weird. They bathed a lot, for example. They sent to San Francisco for seaweed, dried fish, and vegetables, and they drank only tea. Turns out they knew what they were doing. Boiling water for tea killed germs. And the varied diet of fresh food kept them much healthier than other workers, who ate plate after plate of meat and potatoes, sloshed down with muddy water scooped from the nearest stream.

  So the Central Pacific had itself a good workforce. But as the men built their way east, they ran smack into the question that had faced Theodore Judah: Was it even possible to build a railroad over the rugged peaks of the Sierra Nevada?

  Blasting Through the Mountains

  Actually, no. But, with enough courage and patience, it might be possible to build tracks through the mountains—literally through them. Teams of Chinese workers got the job of carving tunnels through mountains of solid granite. Workers would stand at the top of a cliff and lower other men over the edge on long ropes. Using hand drills, these guys would slowly drill small holes into the side of the mountain. They filled the holes with gunpowder, lit fuses, then jerked on the ropes—the signal for the men on top to pull them up as quickly as possible.

  Historians haven’t been able to find any letters or journals written by Chinese workers on the Central Pacific. But a worker named Wong Hau-hon, who helped build railroads in Canada in the 1880s, described the process of blasting through solid rock. “The work was very dangerous,” he said. The men were under constant pressure to work very quickly, which made the job even riskier. While blasting one tunnel, workers were sent back in before all the gunpowder had exploded.

  “Just at that moment the remaining two charges suddenly exploded,” said Wong Hau-hon. “Chinese bodies flew from the cave as if shot from a cannon. Blood and flesh were mixed in a horrible mess.” At least ten men died that day, he reported. We know that accidents like this took the lives
of Central Pacific workers as well.

  Even with the men taking these terrible risks, progress was painfully slow. “We are only averaging about one foot per day,” complained Charles Crocker.

  Then came the snowstorms—workers counted more than forty of them during the winter of 1866–67. At first the men shoveled the snow off the tracks, dumping it into empty train cars. When cars overflowing with snow rolled into Sacramento (where it hardly ever snows), cheering children raced to the train and started a massive snowball fight.

  Up in the mountains the snow kept falling, drifting into piles more than sixty feet high. Rather than quit for the winter, workers dug tunnels down to the tracks and continued working under the snow. The tunnels had stairs and rooms and even blacksmith shops. But the bitter cold and the constant threat of avalanches made them deadly places to work. Central Pacific records include reports that say things such as:

  “Snow slides carried away our camps and we lost a good many men.”

  “Some fifteen or twenty Chinese were killed by a [snow] slide about this time.”

  “A good many were frozen to death.”

  As you can tell from these reports, the Central Pacific never bothered to count the exact number of Chinese workers killed on the job. It was certainly somewhere in the hundreds, maybe even the thousands.

  “We Are Now Sailing”

  The Union Pacific was having a better time. Possibly too good, thought Frances Casement. Like Americans everywhere, she was following the railroad race in her daily newspaper. The more she read, the more she worried. She wrote to her husband, Jack, who was in charge of construction crews for the Union Pacific, saying: “Dear Jack, Do get home as soon as possible—and darling, be careful of your health—and for the sake of our little boy more than for your own sake, beware of the tempter in the form of strong drink.”

  Frances had been reading stories about the wild towns springing up along the railroad tracks. As soon as railroad workers arrived in a new spot, other folks rushed in to set up bars and gambling houses. Some came simply to steal. “There are men here who would murder a fellow creature for five dollars,” reported one journalist in a Nebraska town. “Nay,” he added, “there are men who have already done it.” A newspaper in another town along the tracks actually ran a daily column called “Last Night’s Shootings.” (They weren’t all shootings: in Paint Rock, Nebraska, two girls killed their sleeping stepmother by pouring melted lead into her ear.)

  All of this helped sell newspapers, but none of it slowed down the speeding Union Pacific. Jack Casement worked his men hard all day, then lit bonfires along the tracks and had other crews work all night. “We are now sailing,” he reported, “and mean to lay over three miles every day.”

  General Sherman was working hard to protect workers from Indian attacks—and the Union Pacific was working hard to keep Sherman happy. A UP official named Herbert Hoxie told Sherman that the railroad had decided to name a water station in his honor. (Trains stopped at these stations to fill up on water, which was needed to run the steam engines.) This conversation followed:

  Sherman: Where is it?

  Hoxie: [pointing to a map] Down here in Nebraska.

  Sherman: Oh, I don’t want a water station named after me. Why, nobody will live there. Where is the highest point on the road?

  Hoxie: Altamont.

  Sherman: Just scratch out that name, and put down mine.

  And that’s how Sherman, Wyoming—the station at the highest elevation along the Union Pacific—got its name. (Sherman might be sad to know it’s a ghost town today.)

  The CP Starts Sailing Too

  In 1868 the Central Pacific workers finally finished what many had said was impossible—they busted through the mountains of California. Suddenly the CP started to pick up speed as it built tracks across the flat Nevada desert.

  In need of extra hands to keep the work cruising along, the railroad hired Paiute and Shoshone workers. This actually caused a brief delay when some of the Indians told Chinese workers that out in the desert ahead slithered enormous snakes that swallowed men whole. It was meant as a joke, of course. But these Chinese crews had seen enough danger for ten lifetimes, and a few hundred of the men decided it was time to head back to San Francisco. Other Central Pacific workers had to ride after them and plead with them to come back to work.

  To the Central Pacific’s Big Four, speed was everything now. They were determined to build as quickly as possible and collect as much money as possible—even if it meant building tracks that would soon fall apart. “The line we construct now is the one we can build the soonest, even if we rebuild immediately,” said one CP engineer.

  Didn’t this present a problem when government inspectors came to look at the quality of the track? Not really, said a San Francisco Chronicle reporter named W. H. Rhodes, who watched one of these government inspections in Nevada. Rhodes noticed that whenever the train stopped for water, the CP’s Charles Crocker handed out another round of whiskey to the government inspectors. “In truth we became hilarious,” reported Rhodes (hilarious was nineteenthcentury slang for “really drunk”).

  One of the inspectors soon fell asleep face-down on the floor of the train. Crocker insisted that the man could continue his inspection that way: “If the passengers could sleep, the track must be level, easy, and all right; whereas, if too rough to sleep, something must be wrong with the work.” The inspector was able to stay asleep. When he woke up, he gave his official approval to the tracks, and the government money continued rolling in.

  Sprint to the Finish Line

  The Union Pacific was doing the same thing—building crummy track as quickly as possible. To keep the tracks moving during winter, UP workers even built tracks on top of ice!

  Work crews for both companies started speeding through Utah in 1869. In fact, they sped right past each other. Eager to build as many miles of track as possible, the two companies went right past the meeting point and starting building railroads right next to each other in opposite directions.

  Realizing that the race was getting ridiculous (and expensive), Congress forced the heads of the two companies to pick a spot for the rails to meet. They agreed to join their tracks at Promontory Summit, Utah. This made the final track-building score:

  Union Pacific: 1,086 miles of track from Omaha to Promontory Summit

  Central Pacific: 690 miles of track from Sacramento to Promontory Summit

  The Union Pacific may have built more track, but the Central Pacific’s Charles Crocker had his eye on some history of his own. Union Pacific workers held the record for the most miles of track laid in a day, with eight. Charles Crocker announced that his men would beat the record. But he wanted to make sure that once he set the record it would stay set. “We must not beat them until we get so close together that there is not enough room for them to turn around and outdo me,” Crocker told his construction boss, James Strobridge.

  “How are you going to do it?” Strobridge asked.

  “I have been thinking over this for two weeks and I have it all planned,” Crocker said.

  Crocker waited until his men reached the flat stretch of land close to Promontory Summit. He promised his Chinese and Irish work crews four days’ wages if they could build ten miles of track in a day. No problem, they told him

  Beginning before sunrise on April 28, the well-organized teams finished six miles by lunchtime. They took an hour lunch break, then built another four miles and fifty-six feet of good-quality track by sundown. (The most amazing thing about the ten-mile day: just one eight-man team lifted every single seven-hundred-pound iron rail used that day—meaning each man carried 2.1 million pounds of iron.)

  The Golden Spike

  On the sunny spring morning of May 10, 1869, people gathered at Promontory Point, Utah, to witness the meeting of the two railroads. Newspaper reporters got out their notebooks, bands started warming up, and liquor sellers set up tents by the tracks. “Everyone had all they wanted to drink all the tim
e,” said Alexander Toponce, who was there on the historic day. “I do not remember what any of the speakers said, but I do remember that there was a great abundance of champagne.”

  Union Pacific officials almost missed the party, since a few of their badly built bridges had already collapsed. Several times the officials had to get out of their train, trip past broken sections of track, then get on a new train and continue west. They finally made it to Promontory, where they watched a Chinese team lay the final rail connecting the two railroads. A specially made spike of gold was set in place. On the spike was the inscription “May God continue the unity of our country as this railroad unites the two great oceans of the world.”

  At this moment a telegraph operator named Watson Shilling became the most important person in America. Huge crowds in cities all over the country were waiting to explode with excitement the moment the railroad was completed. Shilling sat by the tracks, ready to send out the news.

  “Almost ready,” Shilling tapped out to the waiting nation. “Hats off. Prayer is being offered.”

  A few minutes later, an update: “We have got done praying. The spike is about to be presented.”

  Then: “All ready now, the spike will soon be driven.”

  Then the Central Pacific’s Leland Stanford stepped forward with a hammer. The plan was for him to tap the golden spike, just for show. He lifted the heavy hammer over his shoulder, and …