by H. W. Brands
Meanwhile the Union Pacific took a special interest in Sherman. His brother Charles was appointed a federal director of the line. (Ostensibly guardians of the public interest, the federal directors in fact were creatures of the companies. “They are not worth an iota to the government,” Huntington privately conceded.) An old friend and wartime comrade of Sherman’s, Grenville Dodge, became the railroad’s chief engineer. Thomas Durant named the Union’s first locomotive the General Sherman, and he treated the real general to the inaugural ride on the initial stretch of sixteen miles running west from Omaha.
The ride was rough, with the guests seated on nail kegs resting on flatcars. But the rhetoric was appropriately enthusiastic, recalling to Sherman’s mind a speech Edward Baker had given on a similar occasion, regarding Sherman’s own railroad in California. “Baker had electrified us by his unequalled oratory, painting the glorious things which would result from uniting the Western coast with the East by bands of iron.” That had been before the war, which swallowed up Baker (at the Battle of Balls Bluff) and a generation of America’s youthful manhood, and forestalled the feat he forecast. Sherman perceived a better chance of success this time, but despite the enthusiasm of Durant and everyone else associated with the Union Pacific, he didn’t see success coming easily or soon. “When the orators spoke so confidently of the determination to build two thousand miles of railway across the plains, mountains, and desert, devoid of timber, with no population, but on the contrary raided by the bold and bloody Sioux and Cheyennes, who had almost successfully defied our power for half a century, I was disposed to treat it jocularly.” To some of his fellow guests that day, he declared, “This is a great enterprise, but I hardly expect to live to see it completed.”
As military commander for the Missouri region, Sherman was responsible for maintaining peace with the Sioux and Cheyennes and other tribes of the plains. He didn’t anticipate a great deal of trouble, at least not at first. He wrote Grant in August 1866 that the Indians were “pure beggars and poor devils more to be pitied than dreaded.” To be sure, the Indians got into scrapes with white settlers, but the latter were usually to blame. The settlers wanted the army to “kill all the Indians,” Sherman told Grant, and they behaved in a manner to force the army’s hand. Sherman had scant sympathy for the settlers. There would be no offensive against the Indians if he could help it. “I will not permit them to be warred against as long as they are not banded together in parties large enough to carry on war.”
This last part of Sherman’s statement was the crux of the difficulty. As the railroad crews pushed out across the plains, the Indians realized that the threat to their way of life posed by the railroad was like nothing they had encountered before. However numerous the overland emigrants had been, clearly they were just passing through, and the less they were molested the sooner they’d be gone. But the railroad altered the landscape— the Indians’ home—permanently. Towns were even now springing up beside the rails, and settlers were arriving. Whether or not the Indians— or anyone else, for that matter—fully recognized at this early date what the railroads would do to the buffalo, the chief sustenance of the Indians and of the entire culture of the plains, it was apparent that the Indians’ way of life was under mortal assault.
Predictably, the Indians struck back. In an initial statement of purpose, a coalition of Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos surprised a contingent of U.S. cavalry and wiped it out. The attack sent chills across the plains and prompted renewed demands for army action.
Sherman’s condition for leaving the Indians alone—that they not threaten white predominance in the West—obviously was not being met. He responded with the same vigor as in the Atlanta campaign. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux,” he told Grant, “even to their extermination: men, women and children.” As events proved, Sherman’s temper, and his concern for his troops, had got the better of him in this instance; he never pursued an extermination campaign. But his change of mind from just a few months earlier, when he had seen no cause for an offensive against the Indians, was striking nonetheless. He assured Grenville Dodge that “we can act so energetically that both the Sioux and the Cheyennes must die, or submit to our dictation.”
In time the Sioux and Cheyennes did some of both, but meanwhile they terrorized the construction gangs. The spring of 1867 brought a series of attacks along the rail route. An engineering crew was ambushed despite its military escort; a soldier and a surveyor were killed, the latter dying twenty-four hours after being scalped and mutilated. A separate band of Indian raiders killed another surveyor and stole a herd of cattle. A war party attacked a train that had reached the end of the track; three men were killed. A group of Cheyennes pulled up the rails on one stretch of the line; when a locomotive derailed, the Indians killed and scalped the engineer and brakeman. The most shocking attack, albeit not the most violent, occurred against a trainload of dignitaries who came out from Washington to inspect the construction. A hundred Indians ambushed the train; seeing the size of the group, they contented themselves with stealing livestock before disappearing.
The raids on the railroad were part of a broad counteroffensive against the white presence in the West. The famous newsman, Henry Morton Stanley (who hadn’t yet discovered David Livingstone in Africa), described the Indians’ style of warfare and what it appeared to presage:
When the opportune moment arrives, from every sandhill and ravine the hawks of the desert swoop down with unrivalled impetuosity, and in a few seconds the post or camp is carried, the tent or ranch burnt, and the emigrants are murdered. It is generally believed here that if the present suicidal policy of the Government is carried on much longer, the plains’ settlers must succumb to the unequal conflict, or unite in bands to carry on the war after the manner of the Indians, which means to kill, burn, destroy Indian villages, innocent papooses and squaws, scalp the warriors, and mutilate the dead; in fact, follow in the same course as the red men, that their name may be rendered a terror to all the Indians.
In the short run the Indian offensive threatened to halt the railroad construction. Grenville Dodge declared, “We’ve got to clean the damn Indians out or give up building the Union Pacific Railroad. The government may take its choice!” Thomas Durant cabled Grant at the War Department, “Unless some relief can be afforded by your department immediately, I beg leave to assure you that the entire work will be suspended.”
Neither Grant nor Sherman was willing to see the construction abandoned. Sherman considered summoning volunteers for a campaign against the Indians, but dropped the idea from fear it would make things seem worse than they were. Instead he authorized the enlistment of four companies of Pawnees, whose knowledge of the plains, combined with their traditional hatred of the Sioux and Cheyennes, made them invaluable allies. The Pawnee companies were assigned to guard the rail crews, and though they had little effect on the larger war, they allowed the work to continue.
At the same time, Sherman addressed the overall question of the future of the Indians on the plains. He communicated to their leaders that if they wanted peace, they would be allowed to live in peace, although not necessarily where they desired. On the other hand, if they chose war, they would get war. In September 1867, Sherman headed a commission delegated by President Andrew Johnson to deliver precisely this ultimatum. The meeting took place at Fort Laramie; hundreds of Indians came, including the principal chiefs of the Sioux and Cheyennes. The chiefs complained that the railroad and the settlers were destroying the Indians’ way of life; game was already growing scarce and their women and children were going hungry.
Sherman offered no false hope that the traditional ways could be salvaged. The only answer for the Indians was to accept the land—the reservations—the government was offering them. “If you don’t choose your homes now, it will be too late next year,” he said. The white men were coming, whether the Indians liked it or not. “You can see for yourselves that travel across the country has increased so muc
h that the slow ox wagons will not answer the white man. We will build iron roads, and you cannot stop the locomotives any more than you can stop the sun or the moon.” The one decision left to the Indians was how to accept their defeat. “We now can offer you this: choose your homes and live like white men and we will help you.” If the Indians resisted, they would be crushed. “Our people in the East hardly think of what you call war out here, but if they make up their minds to fight, they will come out as thick as the herd of buffaloes, and if you continue fighting you will all be killed.”
STANFORD AND THE Central Pacific had fewer Indian problems than Sherman and Union Pacific, but the western builders had troubles the easterners didn’t. As John Frémont, the Donner party, and countless other trans-Sierra travelers discovered, those mountains caught snow like no other range in North America. Drifts of twenty, forty, sixty feet weren’t uncommon, and in the spring, as warm days and cold nights alternately thawed and refroze the banks, the drifts compacted into iron walls of ice. Stanford later remembered one place where a drift measured at sixty-three feet had been compressed into eighteen feet of ice, which could be removed only by pickax and blasting powder, at enormous expenditure of effort and money and with discouraging loss of time.
The winter of 1866–67 was especially severe. At one point a snowplow driven by five locomotives, one behind the other, bogged down in the drifts. Extrapolating, Stanford calculated that nearly half the year would be lost to the snow and ice. Someone had suggested snowsheds: long, roofed structures to cover the track and keep the snow off. One day at lunch with Crocker, Stanford took out a pencil and began scribbling figures. Before the meal was over, the two men had decided to build the sheds by the time the next snows fell.
The granite of the Sierra batholith was, needless to say, harder than the snow and ice. Ten tunnels had to be blasted and burrowed beneath the ridges that separated the Sacramento Valley from Nevada; the longest of these, the summit tunnel, was surveyed at sixteen hundred feet. Black powder—the same employed in the mines of the Mother Lode—was the explosive of first resort, but as time pressed and the rock resisted, the sappers resorted to nitroglycerine. This new compound was highly unstable. A careless (and uninformed: the precise nature of the cargo was strictly secret) dockhand in Panama blew himself, dozens of his fellows, and most of the wharf to smithereens when he dropped one of seventy crates bound for California. Two weeks later a similar explosion atomized the Wells Fargo freight office in San Francisco.
Stanford and the others realized that some informational efforts were required to prepare the public, and the Central Pacific workforce, for the new explosive. A representative of the manufacturer made a show of splashing the liquid on a stone and smacking it uneventfully with a hammer. An engineering consultant declared the material “free from all danger” if handled properly. The company’s engineers pointed out that due to its greater detonating power, nitroglycerine could actually be safer than black powder, since so much less was needed.
In the end, the efficacy of the nitro overrode concerns for safety. Employed in the summit tunnel, where workers blasted inward from both ends and outward from a central shaft dug down to grade level, it sped the burrowing process. “We are getting up pretty near to 2 ft. per day per face,” Crocker reported. “Nitroglycerine tells.”
Eventually the Central Pacific crossed the Sierras, and the Union Pacific crossed the Rockies. Durant needled Stanford about the more rapid pace of his company’s construction. “We send you greeting from the highest summit our line crosses between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, 8200 feet above tidewater,” Durant telegraphed. “Have commenced laying iron on the down grade westward.” Stanford responded calmly. “Though you may approach the union of the two roads faster than ourselves you cannot exceed us in earnestness of desire for that great event,” he said. “We cheerfully yield you the palm of superior elevation; 7042 feet has been quite sufficient to satisfy our highest ambition. May your descent be easy and rapid.”
In November 1868, Stanford journeyed to Utah to sound out Durant regarding the meeting place of the two roads. The two men sidled around the subject, with neither wishing to suggest a junction that might yield ground or profits to the other. “I did not try to do anything with Durant, nor he with me,” Stanford informed Hopkins. “We had general talk in the main.” Durant preferred the Union Pacific’s chances in the field, betting that his crews could grade, lay, and spike faster than those of Stanford’s Central. Stanford accepted the challenge. “We parted with the understanding expressed by me in so many words that we had done nothing to commit our respective companies to anything,” he said. “To which he assented.”
The final race was on. Grading crews of the two companies pushed far ahead of the layers; north of the Great Salt Lake they built competing roadbeds that paralleled and on occasion even crossed each other. (Subsequent stories of violence and sabotage between the Chinese crews of the Central Pacific and the Irish of the Union Pacific were exaggerated, and elided the fact that much of the work for both companies in Utah was done by the Mormons.) As both sides realized, the race would be to the fast, not the fastidious. “Run up and down on the maximum grade instead of making deep cut & fills,” Huntington advised Crocker, “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.” Hopkins concurred, summarizing the main objective: “to build road as fast as possible of a character acceptable to the commissioners.” This last condition posed little problem. The friendliness of the commissioners, who had to approve the construction in order for the railroads to receive their money and land, had been guaranteed by the adroit application of financial enticement and political pressure. “We know the commissioners will readily accept as poor a road as we can wish to offer for acceptance,” Hopkins told Huntington.
In the end, after much lobbying by both sides, Congress decreed that the meeting place would be Promontory Summit, on the north shore of the Salt Lake. Though this left the Central short of Ogden, the depot for the Salt Lake Valley, Durant and the Union Pacific agreed to sell Stanford and the Central the intervening sixty miles.
The ceremony of meeting was scheduled for May 8, 1869. Stanford set out from Sacramento in a special train bearing assorted invitees. High drifts of snow still covered the Sierras, but the train passed unhindered. One of the guests, Dr. James Stillman, recorded his wonder at the snow- sheds that made the passage possible.
We are cribbed in by timbers, snow-sheds they call them; but how strong! 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.
The snowsheds took the train to the summit tunnel. “We are in pitchy darkness in the heart of the mountain,” Stillman wrote. Then light again, then more snowsheds, then a breathtaking view of the most heartbreaking scene in all of California: Donner Lake, with all the chilling memories it conjured.
Along the Truckee River the party almost met disaster. (“We came near driving our last spike,” Stillman said.) Work crews on the slope above, unaware of the approach of the special train, let a massive log roll down onto the track. A Sacramento editor, riding on the pilot—or “cowcatcher”—in front of the engine for a better view, dove off for his life. The train plowed the log aside, yet sustained substantial damage in the collision. At the first opportunity the cars carrying Stanford and the others were transferred to a fresh engine.
The Carson Desert brought memories of harder days. “Several of our party were among the overland emigrants,” Stillman recorded, “and they pointed out where, one by o
ne, 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.” To cross the desert at their current pace almost boggled the mind. But speed was welcome and fully appreciated. “It was a country that one could not travel over too fast.”
Stanford’s train reached Promontory in good time for the laying of the final tie. Yet Durant, coming from the east, was detained by contractors who hadn’t been paid, and who thought this an opportune moment to demand what they were owed, for themselves and their workers. They halted Durant’s train and told him he couldn’t pass till he handed over $200,000. Durant wired for money while one of his assistants wired for troops. Both messages, carried on the lines along the tracks, were intercepted by the rail workers, who wired back that if troops intervened, the ransom would be taken out of the hostages’ hides. Moreover, the Union Pacific could expect a strike all along the road, clear to Omaha. The threat was convincing; the troops remained in their barracks, and $50,000 soon reached kidnap headquarters. The kidnappers called this sufficient and released the hostages.
