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

by Walter R. Borneman

  Dodge City suffered through far worse and more prolonged violence several years later when the Santa Fe opened major cattle pen operations there. Among the leading players then were two brothers named Bat and Ed Masterson. They had arrived in town with the railroad, working to grade 4 miles of the Santa Fe’s line in surrounding Ford County between Fort Dodge and infant Buffalo City in the summer of 1872. But when it came time for Raymond Ritter, one of the many grading subcontractors, to pay them, the brothers received only a few dollars and a promise that Ritter would return shortly with the balance—the sizeable sum of some $300.

  As time went by and Ritter failed to reappear, the Mastersons realized that they had been duped. They hunted buffalo and did odd jobs to make ends meet. Then in the spring of 1873, Bat heard that Ritter had been seen farther west at the Santa Fe’s most recent railhead. The rumor was that he was headed east on the next train with quite a roll of cash.

  When the eastbound train steamed into Dodge City, young Bat boarded the cars alone, marched Ritter off the train at gunpoint, and soon recovered his overdue account. Ritter was quick to scurry back on board and head out of town, while Bat “led the way to Kelley’s to set up drinks for the cheering, back-slapping crowd” of new admirers. After that, Bat Masterson was “considered a man to be reckoned with” in Dodge.

  With a growing reputation, Bat was elected county sheriff in November 1877, defeating a three-hundred-pound tough named Larry Deger by only 3 votes, 166 to 163. Ed Masterson was appointed city marshal a few weeks later. The Masterson boys—Ed was twenty-five and Bat barely twenty-four—were eager to prove themselves.

  They got their chance a few weeks later when six armed men tried to hold up Santa Fe trains on the line east of Dodge City. The gang’s first attempt at a water tank east of Kinsley failed when the eastbound passenger train did not stop to take on water as they had expected. The robbers then rode into Kinsley and waited at the depot for the westbound Pueblo Express. In the process, they held the station agent on the platform at gunpoint, but overlooked some $2,000 in the company safe.

  As the train pulled into the station, the agent broke free from his captors and shouted a warning to the train crew. As he did so, he leaped across the tracks just in front of the slowing locomotive and used it to shield himself from a hail of gunfire. The train robbers attempted to board the locomotive, but the engineer opened the throttle and sped down the track.

  The holdup had been foiled, but the Santa Fe wanted to send a strong message that it would not tolerate such lawlessness. The railroad promptly circulated posters “offering one-hundred-dollar rewards for the capture, dead or alive, of each of the outlaws.”

  Bat Masterson organized a posse and captured two of the robbers, Dave Rudabaugh and Ed West, in a blinding snowstorm near Crooked Creek, south of Dodge City. Two other gang members were arrested in town when they showed up with thoughts of busting their comrades out of Bat’s jail. By then the Santa Fe had dispatched a special train to haul the prisoners to the jail in Kinsley. Bat tried unsuccessfully to capture Mike Rourke, the reputed ringleader, but Rourke was arrested in Ellsworth, Kansas, some months later. The sixth gang member was never caught.

  In the end, Dave Rudabaugh avoided prison by turning state’s evidence against his captured accomplices, who all served time in Leavenworth.

  His protestations of turning over a new leaf were without merit, however, and Rudabaugh would go on to a lawless spree in New Mexico—crossing paths with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid—before being killed by outraged citizens in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1886.

  Bat Masterson’s dogged pursuit of the train robbers added to his reputation and placed him in good stead with the Santa Fe, which would soon have cause to call on his talents again. Ed Masterson was not so lucky. In April 1878, he was summoned to quell a disturbance by Texas cowboys at one of Dodge City’s ubiquitous dance halls. Ed was gunned down when he tried to disarm one of the rowdies, a cowboy named Jack Wagner, but he managed to return fire and mortally wound his assailant.

  Bat did not arrive on the scene until a few minutes later. Tall tales to the contrary, he did not go on a wild spree of revenge but lawfully arrested possible participants. They were later released when the dying Wagner confessed to killing Ed.10

  Just how wild and lawless Dodge City really was during those cattle years will always be debated, but there is one oft-told story to sum it up. There are as many versions as there were saloons in Dodge City, but the general line has a surly and at least slightly inebriated cowboy boarding a train somewhere along the Santa Fe line through Kansas. When the conductor demanded his ticket and asked where he was going, the fellow retorted that he had no ticket and was going to hell. “Give me a dollar,” replied the conductor, “and get off in Dodge.”

  As winter approached the plains in the fall of 1872, Pete Criley’s construction crews pushed the Santa Fe line westward from Dodge City, laying more than 100 additional miles of track. In mid-December they reached the state line—or so they thought. Behind them was a construction season of 303 tough days and almost 300 miles of track since they had struck west from Newton.

  But while the men celebrated in the most recent railhead boomtown, “State Line City,” federal surveyors announced that according to their measurements, the state line and the certainty of the railroad’s land grants was still 4 miles away. Criley quickly gathered up those who were sober—and undoubtedly some who were not—and went to work once more.

  “ ‘State Line City’ is being removed four miles farther west,” the Hutchinson News reported, “in consequence of the government survey establishing the State line that far from the estimate of the A. T. & S. F. R. R. Company. As the city is built out of tents, we presume that no great difficulty is experienced.”

  But with construction materiel running low, Criley had to scavenge assorted rails and ties from back down the line, even tearing up a couple of sidings to get the required rails. Finally, on December 28, 1872, the construction boss was able to wire Topeka rather grandly: “We send you greeting over the completion of the road to the State line. Beyond us lie fertile valleys that invite us forward … The mountains signal us from their lofty crests, and still beyond, the Pacific shouts amen! We send you three cheers over past successes, and three times three for that which is yet to come.”11

  But what was yet to come? With its herculean advance across Kansas, the Santa Fe had cut off the parallel Kansas Pacific line some 50 miles to the north from the lion’s share of the cattle trade. But as other railroads built directly into Texas, the Santa Fe itself could not rely on the likes of boisterous Dodge City and other cow towns as its profit centers for very long.

  “The road cannot remain on the prairie in the Arkansas valley, but must be pushed on to a profitable terminus in the cattle regions of southern Colorado, and the silver mines of the territory,” the Kansas Daily Commonwealth declared as the state line was reached. “The A. T. & S. F. road will not be completed until it is stopped by the waves of the Pacific, and has been made the fair weather transcontinental route of the nation.”12

  But for the moment, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe was financially exhausted by the demands of its frenzied 1872 construction season. While building to the Pacific sounded grand, tapping the markets of Colorado and reaching the New Mexico town of its name were its immediate priorities. Neither would be easy. Up ahead, the Colorado railroad scene was becoming quite crowded.

  6

  Straight West from Denver

  Denver in the 1860s was still a dusty, bawling infant of a town. In 1858, reports of a few light pans of placer gold from nearby creeks had somehow mushroomed out of proportion. Wildly overstated and nowhere near Zebulon Pike’s grand peak, the find nonetheless encouraged tens of thousands to paint “Pikes Peak or Bust!” on their wagons and head west, hopeful of duplicating the success of the California Gold Rush a decade earlier. Disappointment and despair swept many back across the plains, but enough stayed along the foothills of the Rocki
es to stake out a future.

  A group of Kansans laid out a town site where Cherry Creek empties into the South Platte River and named it after James W. Denver, the governor of Kansas Territory, in whose jurisdiction they were. In 1861 Kansas became a state, and its far-flung western county was split off as Colorado Territory—organized less on its own merits than to permit a clean western boundary to Kansas. Four years of civil war in the East, declining placer operations in the mountains to the west, and a disastrous flood took their toll, but Denver was still there to welcome the vanguard of the postwar rush. The town quickly figured in the plans of railroads with transcontinental goals.

  Arriving in Denver in May 1862 as Colorado Territory’s second governor, John Evans wasted no time in promoting a railroad connection with the East. A medical doctor by training and a real estate investor in Chicago, Evans had helped to organize the Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad in 1852. Then, as a member of Chicago’s city council, he’d been instrumental in getting its right-of-way into the city. It would not be the only time that Evans would mix politics and railroads.1

  Prospects for Colorado looked quite promising, the new governor told a large gathering from the balcony of his Denver hotel upon his arrival. This was because Congress was completing the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, and it had not one but two railroads pointed toward them.

  Noting that Kansas was subject to severe droughts and Nebraska occasionally beset by drowning rains, Evans claimed that the railroad bill safeguarded Colorado in either event because it provided two routes from the Missouri River—what would become the Union Pacific from Council Bluffs and the Kansas Pacific from Kansas City. “Whether famine reigns in Kansas, or drenching storms farther north, you will always have a source of supply,” Evans boasted.2

  Indeed, the governor’s railroad enthusiasm knew no bounds. On one of his early trips from Denver, Evans inspected Berthoud Pass, a high passage in the Continental Divide, about 50 miles west of Denver. When a surveyor reported that a wagon road was feasible, but a railroad would require a 3.5-mile tunnel, Evans optimistically suggested that gold might be discovered during the tunnel’s construction.

  A few months later, Evans was back in Chicago trying to convince the other 157 members of the unwieldy board charged with organizing the Union Pacific that the railroad should build through Colorado because of its mineral prospects. In return, he received only a gratuitous statement acknowledging that the development of settlements in all the western territories was a welcome impetus to the construction of the road. 3

  By the time Evans returned to Colorado in November 1862—this time he brought his family along as permanent residents—the growing territory was on a collision course with the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes that roamed the eastern plains. Tensions culminated two years later when, without warning, army and militia units attacked a peaceful Cheyenne camp on Sand Creek, killing over 150, more than half of them women and children. The role that Governor Evans played personally in this atrocity would be long debated, and ensuing recriminations were enough to force him from office.

  Despite this, Evans was only getting started with Colorado politics and its railroads. The ex-governor asked John Pierce, one of the assistants on the 1862 Berthoud Pass survey, to take a second look at the pass in the hope that a temporary track might be laid across its heights prior to the construction of a tunnel.

  Sure, said Pierce, a temporary track could be run over the pass by a series of switchbacks “with no trouble,” but if Evans was determined to reach the Pacific through Colorado, there was an even better route. It would also require a tunnel under the Continental Divide, but it would be less than half the length of the Berthoud bore.

  Pierce’s suggested alternative ran southwest up the South Platte River from Denver, crossed the wide basin of South Park, hopped across the upper Arkansas River, and burrowed under the divide at the headwaters of Chalk Creek. “The richness of the country and the abundance of fuel on the line through Colorado,” Pierce concluded, “… demand that these passes should at least be surveyed in a thorough manner.”

  But the Union Pacific was not interested in either route—Berthoud Pass or Chalk Creek. In fact, the Union Pacific’s chief engineer, General Grenville Dodge, had little interest in traversing Colorado by any route. John C. Frémont’s wintry folly lost in the San Juans, John Gunnison’s grim assessment of the Black Canyon as a railroad route, and Dodge’s own personal experience in a November blizzard atop Boulder Pass (now called Rollins Pass) had convinced him to stay well clear of Colorado’s mountains. No doubt the Central Pacific’s challenges in the Sierra Nevada only added to his conviction.4

  Try as he might, Evans couldn’t budge the Union Pacific crowd. Its main line would be built across Wyoming and only nick the corner of Colorado Territory at Julesburg. Denver despaired, but rallied to organize the Denver Pacific Railroad to build from Denver to the Union Pacific at Cheyenne. It might have been only a short line, but Denver was determined to have a railroad with transcontinental connections. With the Kansas Pacific still deep in Kansas, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe not yet out of Topeka, a connection with the Union Pacific was the logical and most promising choice.

  John Evans joined the Denver Pacific’s board of directors, and four months later, in March 1868, he was elected its president. The first task of the president of any paper railroad was to raise funds for construction. Without a federal land grant or deep-pocketed investors, the most likely source was county bonds. Local voters were asked to approve a bond issue; the county willingly exchanged its bonds for unmarketable railroad stock because it wanted a railroad built; and then the railroad sold the county bonds—marketable securities instead of unmarketable stock—to finance its construction.

  There was, of course, an inherent element of lobbying in this process. Sometimes it went far beyond mere arm-twisting. When a representative of the Kansas Pacific pointedly suggested that the advancing railroad would bypass Denver and head south unless surrounding Arapahoe County floated $2 million in bonds to support it, the locals responded with outrage at the apparent blackmail.

  No doubt William Jackson Palmer would have finessed the proposal better, but at the time, he was completing his western survey and brashly telling the Big Four that the Kansas Pacific planned to build to San Francisco with or without them. Indeed, that southern bent by the Kansas Pacific may have been what Denver feared most. With the Union Pacific wedded to Wyoming, if the Kansas Pacific bypassed Denver to the south, instead of two transcontinental railroads—as Governor Evans had boasted back in 1862—Denver might end up with none.

  Thanks in part to the indelicate demands of the Kansas Pacific, Arapahoe County turned to the Denver Pacific as its railroad savior and voted $500,000 in bonds for the construction between Denver and Cheyenne. But even these county bonds proved difficult to sell. Eastern capital markets were salivating over the U.S. government bonds from the Central Pacific and Union Pacific with their government-guaranteed interest, and there was no rush to buy Arapahoe County bonds no matter what the yield.5

  Finally, Evans went hat in hand to Sidney Dillon and Thomas Durant, who along with brothers Oakes and Oliver Ames were the principal powers building the Union Pacific. When their negotiations were complete, the fledgling Denver Pacific agreed to grade the right-of-way, provide and lay the ties, and build the bridges. Dillon and Durant, through their Crédit Mobilier construction company, would supply and lay the rails and provide the rolling stock—this for a majority of Denver Pacific stock and the lease of the road to the Union Pacific. So much for local control, but Evans and the Denver Board of Trade deemed any railroad preferable to none.

  There were, however, two additional requirements in the agreement. Evans and his Denver railroad would have to build an extension toward the mining camps—that was in everyone’s best interests—but they also had to apply to Congress for a land grant for the main Denver-to-Cheyenne route. After all, for Dillon and Durant, the masters of the Crédit Mob
ilier, working without a land grant would have been akin to a high-wire performance without a net.

  “I am very busy with my R. R. bill,” Evans wrote his wife from Washington in July 1868, but his efforts to secure the land grant were not encouraging. Bills introduced in both the Senate and the House were referred to the Committee on the Pacific Railroad and promptly died quiet deaths. Recognizing that he needed much more political clout, Evans turned to unlikely allies. He went to see John D. Perry, William Jackson Palmer, and their associates at the Kansas Pacific, which was still pondering its future in western Kansas.

  The two railroads joined forces, and after some complicated legislative maneuverings, Congress granted the Denver Pacific alternate sections of land for 20 miles on either side of its right-of-way from Denver to Cheyenne and the right to sell $32,000 of bonds per mile. As part of the deal, the Kansas Pacific relinquished its prior land grant rights north of Denver in exchange for $32,000 per mile of much-needed bonds between the Kansas-Colorado line and Denver. It also received a perpetual right-of-way over the Denver Pacific tracks to be built from Denver to Cheyenne.

  Wait a minute, said Dillon and Durant. Competitive Kansas Pacific trains operating over its planned Denver Pacific subsidiary was not what they had in mind. The specter of traffic east of Cheyenne being split between the Union Pacific to Omaha and the competing Kansas Pacific to Kansas City via Denver was frightening. But Dillon and Durant were themselves broke at the moment as they raced the Central Pacific to Utah. They had no way to stop Evans from working with the Kansas Pacific. Instead they backed out of the Denver Pacific construction deal. The result for the Union Pacific was that it would wring its hands over Kansas Pacific competition for the next decade.6