Rival Rails: The Race to Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad

by Walter R. Borneman

  Following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, Stevens located possible passes across the Continental Divide and then met up with McClellan’s troops in the Bitterroot Valley south of what would later become Missoula, Montana. Young McClellan, who would go on to frustrate Abraham Lincoln as his dilatory commander of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War, showed his lifelong disposition to glory without risk when he decidedly overestimated the snow depth on passes through the Cascades and twice refused to cross them. Civilian engineers subsequently made the trips without incident.12

  Stevens’s command numbered more than two hundred and was by far the largest of the parallel surveys. And, as might have been expected, given his political appointment, the governor’s report was the most enthusiastic. When it came to reporting any negatives, Stevens was decidedly understated if not outright misleading. The new governor went so far as to assert that the snow here “would not present the slightest impediment to the passage of railroad trains.”13

  In the end, this unbridled boosterism hurt the credibility of the Stevens survey, and many agreed with the expedition naturalist George Suckley, who noted, “the Governor is a very ambitious man and knows very well that his political fortunes are wrapped up in the success of the railroad making its Pacific terminus in his own territory.”14 It would be a while before railroads followed the Stevens route to the Northwest.

  Governor Stevens’s large entourage was definitely the exception and not the rule. Captain John W. Gunnison, an 1837 graduate of West Point and one of Colonel Abert’s topographical engineers, led a company west along the 38th parallel that numbered several dozen men, among them Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith and civilian artist R. H. Kern.

  This was the south-central route so ardently championed by Thomas Hart Benton and the one upon which Benton’s son-in-law, John C. Frémont, had already met with disaster when his party got lost in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado in the winter of 1848–49. Gunnison’s key goal was to find a railroad pass through or around the San Juans in the vicinity of Frémont’s wintry ordeal.

  Gunnison was no stranger to the West. In 1849 he had accompanied Captain Howard Stansbury along the Platte River trails from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Bridger in the western reaches of Wyoming. Stansbury was under orders to survey the area between Fort Bridger and the Great Salt Lake, giving particular emphasis to the gold rush trails leading westward across the Great Basin to California.

  On their return east the next year, Stansbury and Gunnison struck a beeline across southern Wyoming, well south of their outbound trace along the established trails over South Pass. In the process, they crossed the wide open flats of the Great Divide Desert, snaked between the Laramie and Medicine Bow mountains, and emerged on the high plains near the upper reaches of Lodgepole Creek, a tributary of the South Platte.

  Stansbury and Gunnison didn’t know it at the time, but in extensively mapping the Great Salt Lake Basin and investigating a transportation corridor directly eastward from there, they had done on a small scale what the topographical engineers would soon be ordered to do throughout the West.15

  In 1853 Captain Gunnison was supervising harbor improvements in Milwaukee when he received orders to head west again. He led his men from Fort Leavenworth and up the Arkansas River, eventually crossing Sangre de Cristo Pass into Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The view from the crest of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains made it clear that any route directly west led into the labyrinth of the San Juan Mountains. Frémont had already been there and floundered.

  Instead Gunnison and his party followed a Ute Indian trail that ran toward the low hills between the northern end of the San Juans and the high points of Mount Antora and Mount Ouray. At first it seemed too good to be true. The approach “by the Sahwatch creek,” noted the expedition report, “opens very favorably for the construction of a railroad.” The gentle grades continued, and the column crossed the Continental Divide atop 10,032-foot Cochetopa Pass, said to mean “pass of the buffalo” in Ute. But the ease of this crossing on September 2, 1853, was deceptive of the terrain that lay ahead.16

  From Cochetopa Pass, the route led down the river that would soon bear Gunnison’s name. When the river disappeared into a deep and dark canyon—“Black Canyon” would be an apt description—the party crossed the Blue Mesa and Cerro Summit divides and descended into the arid Uncompahgre Valley.

  By now Gunnison had his doubts about the feasibility of a railroad through such terrain. “For a railroad route,” Gunnison wrote of his course through central Colorado, “it is far inferior to the Middle Central [route] by Medicine Bow River and the Laramie plains” and would require an “enormous expense” of tunneling, bridging, and spanning gullies. So skeptical did Gunnison become of the Colorado route that he noted it would have been “a waste of labor to add even a crude estimate of the cost of so impracticable an undertaking.”17

  But an even deadlier blow than Gunnison’s frank assessment struck Benton’s 38th parallel dream as the Gunnison party crossed the deserts of Utah. Early on the morning of October 26, in the valley of the Sevier River, Paiute Indians, who had recently been victimized by a California-bound wagon train, attacked the survey party. Gunnison, Kern, and six others were killed.

  Lieutenant Beckwith did an admirable job of salvaging the expedition, but the tragedy overshadowed its results. After wintering in Salt Lake City, Beckwith surveyed passes through the Wasatch Mountains to the Wyoming plains, tying into the route that Stansbury and Gunnison had taken east in 1850. Then Beckwith continued westward across the Great Basin along the 41st parallel all the way to California.

  Combining this route with Stansbury and Gunnison’s earlier reconnaissance across southern Wyoming and comparing it to the eventual route of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads shows Beckwith to be about as prescient as anyone could possibly be. His achievement, however, caused little stir at the time.

  For one thing, the expedition’s star topographer, Captain Gunnison, lay dead. For another, the strongest proponent of the 38th parallel route, Thomas Hart Benton, was not pleased that the party detailed to confirm his choice should end up espousing a route so far north. Finally, Beckwith was an artilleryman with little topographic training, and he did not include construction cost estimates in his final report because Gunnison himself had questioned their worth.

  So with Gunnison’s own words damning the Cochetopa Pass–38th parallel route through Colorado, and with Beckwith lacking the political and scientific clout to champion the southern Wyoming–41st parallel route, this survey, too, failed to rise above the others.18

  Command of the third major survey—the 35th parallel between Fort Smith and California via Albuquerque and the pueblos of the Zuni Indians—was given to another topographical engineer, Lieutenant Amiel W. Whipple. Initially this route may have been more important politically than it was geographically. If the topography of this route proved at all acceptable, it might offer the perfect political compromise between north and south.

  The 35th parallel route was far enough south that the various southern interests championing Springfield (Missouri), Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans might be willing to rally behind it. Stephen Douglas and the Chicago crowd might be placated because the Illinois Central Railroad running from Chicago to points south would likely connect with any eastern terminus as a north-south feeder line. Senator Benton would grumble and thunder, of course, but even he would find it preferable to a more northerly route than the one he advocated. What might convince supporters of the extreme northern route to support it was evidence that Governor Stevens’s assessment of snow conditions in the Northern Rockies and Cascades was overly optimistic.

  So Lieutenant Whipple’s party traipsed west from Fort Smith, Arkansas, in July 1853, staffed with the normal contingent of surveyors and scientists. The initial leg between Fort Smith and Albuquerque along the Canadian River was by now both well known and well traveled as a southern alternative to the Santa Fe Trail. The real questions lay we
st of Albuquerque.

  Joined by an additional escort commanded by Lieutenant Joseph C. Ives, the combined party marched west from Albuquerque and then picked its way along the Little Colorado River, across a divide south of the San Francisco Peaks, and down the Bill Williams River to the main Colorado River. It was a route that steered well clear of the yawning Grand Canyon a short distance to the north.

  From the mouth of the Bill Williams River, Whipple turned north and crossed the Colorado near spindly rock pinnacles called “the Needles.” Then the column struck west across the Mojave Desert and eventually came upon the Old Spanish Trail, which it followed south across Cajon Pass. Lieutenant Robert S. Williamson had already scouted Cajon Pass as part of his survey work in California and pronounced it difficult for a railroad. Whipple concurred, but overall he was quite pleased with the 35th parallel route.

  Compared to the overt boosterism of Governor Stevens for the northern route and Captain Gunnison’s decided disdain for the central Colorado Rockies, Whipple’s report was well balanced. Recognizing that a more detailed analysis of his findings was required, even Whipple, however, could not refrain from being caught up in the excitement of a possible railroad.

  “There is no doubt remaining,” he concluded, “that, for the construction of a railway, the route we have passed over is not only practicable, but, in many respects, eminently advantageous.” The main drawback seemed to be Whipple’s highly inflated cost estimate: a whopping $169 million, almost double later revised numbers.19

  That left Jefferson Davis’s and William Emory’s first love: the southern route along the 32nd parallel. For reasons already mentioned, Davis was slow in commanding a more detailed look at this terrain. With time running out in the fall of 1853, he divided the task between two parties. The western half fell to Lieutenant John G. Parke, who had been assisting Lieutenant Williamson in scouting California passes.

  Receiving his orders a few days before Christmas 1853, Parke led fifty-eight men east to survey the southern tributaries of the Gila River. In general, Parke stayed well south of the main river and passed through Tucson and the Chiricahua Mountains—American territory subsequent to the signing of the Gadsden Purchase treaty.

  By the time Parke reached the Rio Grande, he confirmed Emory’s first impression of this pathway and reported generally gentle terrain without the rigors of high mountain passes or steep grades. The major drawbacks to the route were a lack of timber for construction and water for operating thirsty steam locomotives. Parke recommended that experiments to drill artesian wells be commenced immediately.20

  The eastern half of the southern route was left to Kentuckian John Pope. Leaving the Rio Grande near present-day Las Cruces, New Mexico, on February 12, 1854, Pope’s first order of exploration was to find a suitable pass through the Guadalupe Mountains. Two and a half weeks later, the terrain became rocky as the route wound up a narrow canyon. But Guadalupe Pass proved short, and “from the summit, the view over the surrounding country was at once grand and picturesque—the southern peak of the Guadalupe [El Capitan] towering majestically above all.” By nightfall, Pope and his men were encamped at a green oasis they called “the Pinery,” thankful that there was “an abundance of everything requisite for camping at this place.”21

  East of the Guadalupes, Pope kept to the southern edge of the vast mesas of the Llano Estacado and made for the Red River, some 50 miles north of the hamlet of Dallas. Pope found conditions similar to those in the western section. The grades were quite manageable. The arid plains would have to be tapped with artesian wells, but the climate was milder and less fickle than along the northern routes.

  Perhaps because he understood the political benefits of Lieutenant Whipple’s 35th parallel route, Pope noted that an eastern terminus of the 32nd parallel route at Fulton, Arkansas (in the extreme southwest corner of the state), might just as easily satisfy the various interests of Cairo, Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans.22

  Indeed, the only major drawback to the southern route came from the work that Lieutenant Williamson conducted in California. It seemed that there was no easy direct route between Yuma, at the mouth of the Gila on the Colorado River, and the port of San Diego. This meant that the California portion of the southern line might end up running along Lieutenant Whipple’s Mojave route and thus make sleepy Los Angeles its western terminus rather than San Diego.

  So what had the surveys accomplished? Their stated goal had been to find the most practical and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. Despite all that was learned about the western landscape, science did not provide one clear and overriding choice of railroad route. Because it did not—perhaps could not—the issue of a western railroad was thrown back into the cauldron of sectional rivalries that was slowly coming to a boil. Before steel rails were laid far west of the Mississippi, there would be war.

  One of the few who might have stopped it—or at least removed the transcontinental railroad question from the list of fractious issues—was Jefferson Davis. With New Englander Franklin Pierce as his presidential ally, might Davis have been able to broker a compromise that joined his fellow southerners with Stephen Douglas’s Illinois interests in support of the 35th parallel route?

  It is an intriguing question. In 1858, when once more a senator from Mississippi, Davis appears to have eschewed the sectional politics of the issue, although by then it was too late. “In Congress, with all due respect to my associates,” Davis told the Senate, “I must say the location of this road will be a political question. It should be a question of engineering, a commercial question, a governmental question—not a question of partisan advantage, or of sectional success in a struggle between parties and sections.”

  Congress’s attempting to fix a route, Davis argued, “revives political dissensions and sectional warfare, of which, we surely have enough on other questions. If the section of which I am a citizen has the best route, I ask who that looks to the interest of the country has a right to deny to it the road? If it has not, let it go where nature says it should be made.”23

  The results of the surveys were initially published in 1855 in a three-volume summary and then in a complete report of thirteen volumes. Save for the deceased Captain Gunnison, the major participants were all strong advocates for their own routes. Turned loose to resolve a political debate, the topographers and scientists of the surveys fanned it further with their individual enthusiasms. But they put the lines down upon the map of the West, and in time, transcontinental railroads would be built along them.

  And despite its inability to agree on one railroad route to the Pacific, Congress took a significant step toward tying together the country’s far-flung coasts when it authorized regular overland mail service. The highest of the stations that winning bidder John Butterfield built to operate the line was at the Pinery—the desert oasis that John Pope’s men found so inviting beneath the sentinel of Guadalupe Peak. John Butterfield, however, was not the only one looking to span the continent.

  2

  Learning the Rails

  Leipsic, Delaware, was an unlikely place for a mountain railroader to be born, but Quaker roots ran deep there and nurtured in the townspeople an inner strength and quiet self-assurance. In 1836, at Kinsale Farm on the outskirts of town, Matilda Jackson Palmer gave birth to her first son, who was christened William Jackson—a good Quaker name matched with her own maiden name.

  When William Jackson Palmer was five, his family moved to what were then the outskirts of Philadelphia. In 1840 greater Philadelphia was the second largest urban area in the country and no stranger to the acrimonious abolitionist debates already percolating throughout the North. The Palmers’ circle of friends included many ardent abolitionists, among them Charles Ellet, Jr., one of the most accomplished civil engineers of the day.

  In 1853 Ellet’s work as chief engineer of the Hempfield Railroad got young Palmer his first job, that of a rod man on a surveying party locating the line. Later gobbled u
p by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the Hempfield was being built in southwestern Pennsylvania to serve that region’s developing coal mines.

  “Nothing stops us,” Palmer reported to a boyhood friend, “for a railroad line must be a straight one … it cannot avoid a hill or go round a pond or choose its own walking. It must tramp right over the one and ford the other and walk by the points of the compass.”1

  Palmer’s apprenticeship on the Hempfield Railroad lasted two years. In the spring of 1855, when he was eighteen, his mother’s brother, Frank H. Jackson, appears to have been his chief sponsor in loaning funds and arranging a trip to England and the Continent. Palmer’s letters of introduction included one from J. Edgar Thomson of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

  The chief engineer of the London and North Western Railway was a large shareholder of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and, thanks to Thomson’s letter, he gave Palmer the freedom of the road. The young man made the most of it, “spending the time principally on the locomotives, and in visiting towns and famous places along the line.”

  By the time Palmer returned to the United States in June 1856, the satisfaction of railroading that he had first experienced on the Hempfield was thick in his blood. After a brief stint with the Westmoreland Coal Company, twenty-one-year-old William Jackson Palmer went to work for J. Edgar Thomson as his confidential secretary at the then generous salary of $900 a year.2

  If one sought a mentor in building fledgling railroad systems, it would have been difficult if not impossible to find one more astute than J. Edgar Thomson. Born in 1808 in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, Thomson learned engineering from his father, a civil engineer who counted among his credits work on the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal.