Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The Union Pacific confronted one challenge the Central Pacific was largely spared. By the 1860s the Indians of California had been so devastated and demoralized that they posed little threat to the construction crews. But the tribes of the Great Plains were as formidable as they had ever been. Epidemics had scourged them, if not as badly as some of the tribes that lived in closer quarters, yet those who survived developed a degree of resistance to the diseases. The Plains tribes, including the Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapahos, understood that the railroad signaled a mortal threat. The Indians had harassed the wagon trains heading to Oregon and California, stampeding horses and cattle or exacting tribute for not doing so, but because the emigrants typically traveled in large groups, and because they clearly were just passing through the Indian lands, the tribes saw little reason to contest their passage.

  The railroad was a different matter. Where the emigrant trains left tracks that blew away in the next prairie wind, the railroad tracks were fixed to the earth for all time, apparently. The railroad tracks disrupted the movement of the buffalo, on which the Plains peoples depended. The towns and depots the Union Pacific planted along the line sat squarely in territory the Indians called their own. Until now the Plains tribes had been spared the experience of the Eastern tribes, the Oregon tribes and the California tribes: of being physically displaced by large numbers of settlers. The railroad suggested that the Plains exception was coming to an end.

  The tribes fought back. War parties of Sioux and Cheyennes attacked the surveyors and construction crews. At first the attacks were demonstrative, involving the theft of horses, destruction of equipment and removal of survey markers, but little loss of life. In time they grew more serious. Indian raiders in 1867 killed several workers, mutilated the dead and left the remains as warning to the others.

  The most spectacular, though not the most lethal, attack involved a trainload of government officials, investors and journalists brought from Washington to inspect and publicize the construction. A band of a hundred Indians surrounded the train and its military escort. The visitors weren’t injured physically, but their composure was wounded, and they returned east with tales of the ferocious savages that still roamed the West.

  Their stories prompted demands that the government take action against the Plains tribes. “We’ve got to clean the damn Indians out or give up building the Union Pacific Railroad,” said Grenville Dodge, superintendent of construction for Union Pacific. “The government may take its choice!” Thomas Durant, overall head of the Union Pacific project, appealed to Ulysses Grant, the ranking general at the War Department. “Unless some relief can be afforded by your department immediately,” Durant said, “I beg leave to assure you that the entire work will be suspended.”

  TRAVELERS THROUGH THE SIERRA NEVADA HAD THE GOOD sense to avoid winter crossings. The Donner party had demonstrated what became of those caught by the snows that buried the passes in drifts twenty, forty, sixty feet deep.

  The crews of the Central Pacific set aside such sense, yielding to the demands of the partners to build as many miles of track as possible before meeting the Union Pacific. The crews battled the snow till it drifted so deep in the passes they couldn’t shovel it aside. Winters in the Sierra aren’t uniformly cold; mild winds off the Pacific often lift daytime temperatures above freezing. The snow would start to melt. But overnight it would freeze again, now into solid masses of ice that defied any number of shovels. The crews turned to picks, then to explosives.

  Eventually the construction engineers concluded that the best way to keep the route clear was to catch the snow before it hit the ground. The crews built long shed roofs over the roadbed. These allowed the track-laying work to proceed regardless of the weather and, once the rails were in place, protected the line from the elements.

  For most of the way across the mountains, the crews carved the roadbed from the mountain faces. But in several spots they had no choice but to bore through the mountains themselves. They took cues from the miners, who had been boring and blasting mine shafts into the Sierra for more than a decade. The process was dangerous. The black blasting powder could prematurely ignite; loose rock could cave down on the crews. And it was slow, with progress measured in inches per day.

  Snow shed. This structure and others like it kept the route and track clear of the deep Sierra drifts.

  The Central Pacific partners grew impatient. Though the federal payout per mile in the mountains was three times the price for the plains, Leland Stanford and company knew that the Union Pacific was covering far more than three times as much ground as the Central Pacific crews. The tunnels were costing the partners money.

  The Central Pacific engineers explained to Stanford and the others that there was an alternative to black powder: nitroglycerin. It was new, and it had a reputation for being touchy. An early experiment by the Central Pacific with nitro had resulted in several deaths when a worker inadvertently hit some nitro with his hammer.

  The slow pace of progress in the mountains grew more frustrating by the day. The crew of hundreds of men could go no faster than the few who could crowd into the tunnel and do the blasting and mucking. Eventually James Strobridge determined to try nitro again. He enlisted a Scottish chemist named James Howden, an expert on nitroglycerin and its properties. Howden trained the blasters in its use, and before long it became another tool among many. It was still dangerous, of course. “Many an honest John went to China feet first,” recalled a Central Pacific engineer.

  Chinese workers on the Central Pacific. Here they are tackling the crest of the Sierra Nevada, digging and blasting the Summit Tunnel.

  But the nitro was several times as powerful as the black powder, with the additional benefit that it was smokeless, so the muckers could move right in and start hauling out the rubble. The faster progress seemed worth the danger. Mark Hopkins heard from Charles Crocker after an inspection. “Charles has just come from the tunnel and he thinks some of them are making three feet per day,” Hopkins noted. “Hurrah for nitroglycerine!”

  WHILE THE CENTRAL PACIFIC WAS DOMESTICATING NITRO-GLYCERIN, the U.S. army was taming the Plains Indians, at least sufficiently for the work of the Union Pacific crews to proceed. More soldiers arrived, and they kept the Indians away from the workers. The Central Pacific was still grappling with the Sierra granite when the Union Pacific crested the Rockies in southwestern Wyoming. The Union’s Thomas Durant shared the news with the Central’s Leland Stanford. “We send you greeting from the highest summit our line crosses between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, 8200 feet above tidewater,” Durant wrote. “Have commenced laying iron on the down grade westward.”

  Stanford knew that Durant’s teams had built many more miles of road than his own had. And he understood that Durant was rubbing this accomplishment in his face. But Stanford also knew that the Union’s greatest challenge, the Wasatch Mountains, lay ahead, while the Central’s, the Sierra Nevada, would soon be behind. He refused to be provoked. “Though you may approach the union of the two roads faster than ourselves, you cannot exceed us in earnestness of desire for that event,” Stanford said. “We cheerfully yield you the palm of superior elevation; 7042 feet has been quite sufficient to satisfy our highest ambition.”

  Though Stanford yielded to Durant in elevation, he wasn’t going to yield in anything else. Once the Central crews came out of the mountains, they tore across the desert of Nevada as swiftly as the Union crews had flown across the plains. Yet still their chiefs pressed them to go faster, even at the sacrifice of construction quality and road safety. “Make it cheap,” the Central’s Collis Huntington demanded of the crews. “Run up and down on the maximum grade instead of making deep cut and fills, and when you can make any time in the construction by using wood instead of stone for culverts &c., use wood, and if we should have now and then a piece of road washed out for the want of a culvert, we could put one in hereafter.”

  Huntington’s partners agreed. Mark Hopkins, noting that the Railroad A
ct required construction to meet the approval of federal inspectors before the company was paid, remarked that approval wouldn’t be a serious problem. The Central Pacific—and the Union Pacific—had friends in the right places. “We know the commissioners will readily accept as poor a road as we can wish to offer for acceptance,” Hopkins said.

  As the crews of the two companies drew closer to each other, negotiations began over where the actual meeting would take place. Neither side wished to concede any mileage to the other it could possibly claim for itself. A committee of Congress finally decreed that the joining of rails should take place at Promontory Summit, on the north side of the Great Salt Lake.

  Nothing at so remote a spot in America had ever received such broad national attention. Reporters rode special trains, one from Omaha, the other from Sacramento. Dr. James Stillman traveled in the train that carried Leland Stanford. Spring had already arrived in the lowlands of California, but snow still clogged the passes of the Sierra Nevada. Yet the sheds allowed easy passage. “We are cribbed in by timbers, snow-sheds they call them; but how strong!” marveled Stillman. “Every timber is a tree trunk, braced and bolted to withstand the snow-slide that starts in mid-winter from the great heights above, and gathering volume as it descends, sweeps desolation in its path; the air is cold around us; snow is on every hand; it looks down upon us from the cliffs, up to us from the ravines, drips from over head and is frozen into stalactites from the rocky wall along which our road is blasted, midway of the granite mountain.”

  From the sheds they passed into the tunnels drilled through the rock. “We are in pitchy darkness in the heart of the mountain,” Stillman wrote. They emerged into the brilliant light of a sunny day at high altitude. Below and to the right lay Donner Lake. Stillman and the others couldn’t help thinking that no one crossing these mountains would ever again suffer the fate that had befallen the poor party trapped there two decades before.

  Yet dangers persisted. Work crews cutting trees above the track, uninformed of the schedule of the special train, had felled a large trunk that lay athwart the track. The train, rounding a bend, had to apply full brakes. A reporter riding the pilot, or cowcatcher, in front of the engine dove to the side to save his life. The engine was damaged; the cars had to be hitched to a substitute.

  Stanford’s train included forty-niners who recalled the trials of the Nevada desert. “Several of our party were among the overland emigrants,” Stillman wrote, “and they pointed out where, one by one, their animals perished, where they abandoned their wagons, and where their guns—the last article they could afford to part with—were planted, muzzle downward, into the hillocks in the desperate struggle for water and life.” Even as the veterans of the trail recollected the old days, they savored the new. “It was a country that one could not travel over too fast.”

  The joining ceremony was delayed when the train carrying Thomas Durant and the Omaha contingent was held up by Union Pacific crews who hadn’t been paid on time. The crews demanded $200,000 before they would let the officials and reporters go. They eventually settled for $50,000, amid suggestions that the kidnapping was a sham, a trick devised by Durant to speed payment of money owed him and his partners. In time much greater shenanigans would be uncovered in the financing of the Union Pacific; for now the ploy, if such it was, seemed in keeping with Durant’s close-to-the-vest approach to management. “Durant is so strange a man that I am prepared to believe any sort of rascality that may be charged against him,” one of his associates declared.

  The epic moment came in May 1869. Not since Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox had the nation so eagerly awaited news of national importance. Telegraph wires were linked to the rails and to a symbolic golden spike that would tie the two ends of the line together; upon the moment of joining, an electric signal flashed to both coasts. News correspondents appended their breathless accounts. “THE LAST RAIL IS LAID!” shouted the Associated Press. “THE LAST SPIKE IS DRIVEN! THE PACIFIC RAILROAD IS COMPLETED! THE POINT OF JUNCTION IS 1086 MILES WEST OF THE MISSOURI RIVER AND 690 MILES EAST OF SACRAMENTO CITY.” The Liberty Bell was rung in Philadelphia; cannons were fired in Washington; church bells clanged in New York and Boston and other cities. San Francisco had celebrated earlier, when the original ceremony was supposed to be held; it celebrated again, with cannons, rifles, side-arms, bells and whistles.

  The meeting of the rails. At length the epic project was completed, at Promontory Summit, north of the Great Salt Lake.

  36

  SAINTS AND SINNERS

  MOST WESTERN SETTLERS APPLAUDED THE APPROACH OF the railroad, delighted that it would bring the outside world closer. If they noticed that it embodied the largest federal subsidy given to any part of the country in American history until then, they didn’t obviously fret. Only later would the legend of Western individualism develop; at the time, the Westerners were happy for all the help they could get. Those many thousands of Westerners who took advantage of the Homestead Act, another huge federal subsidy, felt doubly blessed.

  One particular group of Westerners, however, had decidedly mixed feelings upon the approach and completion of the Pacific railroad. The Mormons had encountered unremitting hostility in the East, and been driven from one state to another; their prophet, Joseph Smith, had been killed by an anti-Mormon mob in Illinois. Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, decreed that the earthly safety of the Latter-day Saints required leaving the United States. At that time—the mid-1840s—Mexico still lay to America’s west as much as to its south. Young determined to cross the Rocky Mountains and find a home for the Saints in Mexican territory, beyond the reach of American law and the baleful influence of American gentiles.

  Then the American war with Mexico began, threatening to frustrate the Mormon exodus by Americanizing the Saints’ projected home. But Young could be flexible when necessary. He shifted from expatriatism to patriotism, coordinating with the U.S. army in raising several hundred young men to serve against Mexico. And he apprised the government of the Mormons’ plans in moving west. “The cause of our exile we need not repeat; it is already with you,” he wrote to James Polk. “Suffice it to say that a combination of fortuitous, illegal and unconstitutional circumstances have placed us in our present situation, on a journey which we design shall end in a location west of the Rocky Mountains, and within the basin of the Great Salt Lake, or Bear River valley, as soon as circumstances shall permit, believing that to be a point where a good living will require hard labor, and consequently will be coveted by no other people.”

  Other Saints were less diplomatic. “We owe the United States nothing,” declared one Mormon editorialist. “We go out by force, as exiles from freedom. The government and people owe us millions for the destruction of life and property in Missouri and Illinois. The blood of our best men stains the land, and the ashes of our property will preserve it till God comes out of his hiding place, and gives this nation a hotter portion than he did Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  The Mormon trek became a defining chapter in the history of the Latter-day Saints, combining adventurous elements of the westward movement generally with religious sentiments that might have been pulled from the Book of Exodus. Like Moses and the Israelites, Young and the Mormons left for the West when they could, not when they would. Too late to cross the Rockies before the first snows, they established winter quarters on the west bank of the Missouri River in Nebraska Territory. The Mormons’ previous flights had sharpened their evacuation skills; now the group functioned like a well-trained army. Within weeks they built a regular village of sod houses, log cabins and even a few brick buildings. Their town had streets and blocks, and zoning: this part for residences, that for stores and workshops, and that over there for stockyards and slaughterhouses. Young and the other church elders combined religious and secular authority; their dual mandate made their community more orderly than any other on the frontier, or perhaps anywhere in America. Yet authority and obedience couldn’t keep all the Saints alive; infectious dis
ease swept through the town, as it recurrently swept through all the river towns. Several hundred died.

  In the spring of 1847 Brigham Young led a vanguard out of their winter quarters up the Oregon Trail, which they followed to South Pass. Beyond the pass they met Jim Bridger, the mountain man, who, in response to Young’s queries, expressed doubt about the Salt Lake basin as a spot for a large settlement. It was very dry, he observed, shaking his head.

  Sam Brannan showed up a short while later. Brannan made his pitch for California, but the very things that attracted Brannan to California—its fine weather, fertile soil and good harbors (gold hadn’t been discovered yet)—repelled Young. For Young, the less attractive a place was, the more he liked it. The Mormons wouldn’t be escaping the jurisdiction of the United States, but they could still hope to elude its close supervision.

  Young’s party headed southwest. Young fell ill; he was riding in a wagon when the train emerged from the Wasatch Mountains east of present Salt Lake City. Raising his eyes to take in the desolate wastes of the Salt Lake desert, he declared that this was the place. This was where the new Zion would be planted in the wilderness.

  THE MORMON MIGRATION TO UTAH OVERLAPPED THE AMERICAN emigrations to Oregon and California. It was like those emigrations in some ways but distinct in others. Tens of thousands of Saints made the same dusty journey across the plains and mountains the emigrants to Oregon and California made. Most were American citizens, but a striking number, many more than in the migrations to the Far West, were immigrants fresh off the boat. Mormon missionaries were active in Europe; thousands of new converts crossed the Atlantic before crossing North America.