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

by Walter R. Borneman

  More than a century later, the Tehachapi Loop remains as William F. Hood designed it. Trains over 4,000 feet in length pass over themselves when climbing or descending the route. Dozens of trains wind around the loop daily on what is routinely the busiest single track of mountain railroad in the United States.4

  South of Mojave at Palmdale, the Southern Pacific confronted a second barrier to the Los Angeles Basin. Rising above 10,000 feet, the San Gabriel Mountains blocked easy access to Los Angeles from the north. To the northeast, the San Bernardino Mountains culminated in the 11,502-foot San Gorgonio Mountain above the pass of the same name, but this eastern gateway to Los Angeles was almost 100 miles out of the way and intended as the railroad’s exit.

  There was one other possibility. A geologic fault between the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains had the effect of creating a natural ramp between the Los Angeles Basin and the Mojave Desert. Attention had long focused on a route from the Mojave across the 35th parallel, south of the Grand Canyon. But as more became known about the Colorado Plateau, some looked at the map and thought it plausible to connect Southern California with the Union Pacific at Salt Lake City by building north of the Grand Canyon.

  One proponent of such a venture was Senator John P. Jones of Nevada. Jones began by building a narrow gauge line from the piers at Santa Monica, which he helped to develop, to downtown Los Angeles. This provided the town with a second rail link to the ocean, and, after Huntington and the Southern Pacific wrestled control of the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad away from local interests, Jones’s line became the hometown favorite. But his Los Angeles and Independence Railroad had bigger plans than simply providing competition for Huntington.

  Jones, who had made a princely fortune in silver from Nevada’s Comstock Lode during the 1860s, was interested in developing mining properties around Death Valley, principally near Panamint and Independence, California. The natural ramp between the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains, called Cajon Pass, not only offered a direct route from Los Angeles to Death Valley, but by following the eastern edge of the Mojave Desert, it pointed straight north to Salt Lake City.

  “Join hands with our natural allies [Jones’s Los Angeles and Independence] and carry that narrow gauge through the Cajon Pass at a gallop,” cried a local newspaper. “Time is everything, the Southern Pacific operates against us.”

  Even without this railroad threat, John P. Jones was not a favorite of the Big Four. The senator was also trying to tax the Central Pacific’s land grant holdings in Nevada—no small thing considering that seven million acres were involved.

  While Huntington worked in Congress to amend the Southern Pacific’s land grant to include Cajon Pass, Jones hired a young engineer named James U. Crawford away from Tom Scott’s Texas and Pacific and sent him into the mountains to survey the Cajon route. Making a cursory inspection by horse and buggy, Crawford determined that with 20 miles of track and an 1,800-foot tunnel punched through the sandstone atop the pass, he could be out of the Los Angeles Basin and streaking toward Salt Lake City.

  By November 1874, survey stakes lined the pass, but the work was not easy. “We are camped on the summit of the Cajon, about 31 miles north of San Bernardino,” Crawford reported. “It is very cold. Snow among the pines reaches down close to our camp. Bears are numerous, and frequently interrupt our surveying.”

  A month later, a crew of rival Southern Pacific engineers and surveyors fresh from the Tehachapi Loop arrived on the Cajon scene. By then, Crawford had laborers felling trees and blasting rock. A wintry rain began to fall, and it pummeled the pass for three days, turning the area into a quagmire of bottomless salt flats and sluice box gullies. By the time falling temperatures and ferocious winds lashed a blizzard across the pass, Crawford’s men were secure in makeshift huts, but the Southern Pacific crew was literally blown out of the pass, tents and all. Score one for Senator Jones’s Los Angeles and Independence.

  While Huntington fumed, Crawford’s men drilled their way 300 feet into Cajon’s rocky spine before coming to a stop. Cajon Pass didn’t defeat Senator Jones, but the declining silver prices of the 1870s did. While the Big Four chuckled, Huntington bought the Los Angeles and Independence from Jones for a meager $100,000 in cash, a $25,000 note, and $70,000 in Southern Pacific bonds. Once again, there might be railroads with different names in Los Angeles, but they all had the same owners. 5

  Meanwhile, Huntington had been taking no chances on reaching Los Angeles from the north—with or without Cajon Pass. Even as work progressed on the Tehachapi Loop, Huntington had workers laboring away at the second of the Southern Pacific’s twin engineering feats. This one was to be a single tunnel over a mile long.

  From Palmdale in Antelope Valley, the Southern Pacific’s route climbed to the head of Soledad Canyon and then wound down the Santa Clara River, looking for a way through the western end of the San Gabriel Mountains. Finding none, Hood chose to tunnel through the range just south of Santa Clarita.

  Day and night, 4,000 men and 300 animals labored through a mountain of crumbly rock and subsurface water that required extensive redwood timbering. A shaft was sunk near the middle of the tunnel to permit work on four faces at once—inward from each portal and outward in opposite directions from the shaft. When the headings met on July 14, 1876—almost fifteen months after work began—the San Fernando Tunnel was 6,966 feet in length and the longest railroad bore in the world.

  On September 5, a special train of five cars loaded with 350 invited guests left Los Angeles and headed north to inspect the results. It took a long ten and a half minutes at about 7.5 miles per hour to make the pitch-black passage, and “time dragged heavily” through what one reporter called “the dark abyss.” But the train emerged to bright sunshine, and at Lang in Soledad Canyon, its passengers found “an army of about 3000 Chinamen standing at parade rest with their long-handled shovels” in a line on either side of the roadbed.

  Charley Crocker greeted the Los Angeles contingent, and an hour later a similar special arrived from the north carrying Leland Stanford and dignitaries from San Francisco. They all watched as two crews working from opposite directions laid the remaining 500 feet of track in a contest that lasted all of eight and one-half minutes.

  Crocker then drove a golden spike to signal the completion of the line from San Francisco, around the Tehachapi Loop, through the San Fernando Tunnel, and into downtown Los Angeles. The Southern Pacific men, the Los Angeles Evening Express enthused, “have not only lived up to the letter of their promises, but in the face of difficulties that were fairly gigantic, they have reached Los Angeles sooner than the most sanguine of us expected.” The next day, regular service was inaugurated between San Francisco and Los Angeles, with express trains making the run in twenty-four hours.6

  • • •

  Amidst half-hearted pledges of cooperation between San Francisco and Los Angeles—and while San Diego interests eagerly awaited their turn—the question was, where next? What to do with the seasoned crews that had just bested the Tehachapi Mountains and bored through the San Gabriels?

  The answer was obvious to any interested observer. San Diego could wait. While Tom Scott plugged away in Texas, and Colonel Holliday’s Santa Fe still struggled in Colorado, the Southern Pacific would build east out of Los Angeles, control San Gorgonio Pass for itself, and race southeast across relatively open country to the Colorado River crossing at Yuma.

  To counter competitors’ claims—Scott was the most vocal—that the Southern Pacific’s advances amounted to nothing short of a railroad monopoly in the West, Huntington tapped a California businessman named David D. Colton to be his lieutenant and, for a time, the figurehead president of the Southern Pacific. Red haired, heavy set, and with a mercurial temper, Colton was an odd choice. But he had Charley Crocker’s blessing, and in the press of business, Huntington concurred.

  Colton’s tenure with the Big Four was to be tumultuous and short lived. He would die in 1878, and for years his widow
would carry on a highly public feud with the Big Four for his alleged interests. But for the present, Huntington was Colton’s alter ego, and Colton pushed the Big Four’s plans as strenuously as anyone. This was particularly true when it came to besting Tom Scott, whether in the halls of Congress or among the sand dunes of Yuma.

  In trying to jumpstart the Texas and Pacific after the panic of 1873, Scott sought to add a federal subsidy to the land grant that the railroad had already received. Shrewdly, he tied his request to the growing reconciliation with the South and lobbied for southern congressional support by arguing that a subsidy for a southern road was but a narrow slice of the federal largesse that had been benefiting northern railroads since the end of the war.

  Huntington countered by saying that the Southern Pacific would build the South a southern transcontinental between Yuma and El Paso without subsidies other than the land grant already awarded to the Texas and Pacific. Scott dug in his heels, of course, and firmly opposed any transfer of the land grant as well as any authority for the Southern Pacific to expand outside its present charter limits of California.

  “Scott is making a very dirty fight, and I shall try very hard to pry him off,” Huntington told his new front man Colton, “and if I do not live to see the grass growing over him I shall be mistaken.”

  Huntington was quite capable of planting his own innuendo. Scott could play the monopoly card against the Big Four, but Huntington countered that what Scott was really after was the formation of a Pennsylvania Railroad–dominated transcontinental system such as Scott had sought earlier with the Kansas Pacific.

  All Scott had to do, Huntington told his southern friends, was turn the eastern axis of the Texas and Pacific northeast and point it toward St. Louis instead of Memphis, and the South would be left without a transcontinental link. Huntington, on the other hand, promised that if the Southern Pacific were given free rein to race east, it wouldn’t stop until it reached New Orleans.

  “We must split Tom Scott wide open if we can and get rid of him …” Colton told Huntington. “He is the head and front at this time of all the devilment against the C.P. & S. P.… He is today the most active and practical enemy, we have in the world.”7

  And Scott appeared to hold a powerful advantage in at least one respect. The Southern Pacific’s own 1866 congressional land grant extended eastward only to the California-Arizona border, presumably the middle of the Colorado River. There was no hope for similar land grants in Arizona and New Mexico as long as Scott and the Texas and Pacific were opposed.

  So instead Huntington used all means possible to secure a franchise from the Arizona legislature for a simple right-of-way across the territory. There was no land grant involved because almost all land was federally owned, but the territorial legislature could convey a right-of-way for public purposes across such land under authority granted to states and territories by the Right-of-Way Act of 1875.

  Wanting no delays, Charley Crocker inspected the Yuma crossing in the spring of 1877 and selected sites for a bridge. Several miles downstream from its confluence with the Gila, the Colorado cut through a low line of sandy-colored bluffs. While generally flowing north to south, the big river was making one of its many twists and turns and was actually running east to west at this point. Just below the bluffs, the river was still somewhat constrained by high banks that offered suitable abutments for a bridge.

  To cover all bases, Crocker obtained a bridge charter from both the state of California and the territory of Arizona. But reaching the crossing with rails from the California side presented its own set of legal problems. The Fort Yuma Military Reservation occupied the California bank, and in order to access the bridge site, Southern Pacific tracks had to cross military land, something that required the permission of the secretary of war.

  Crocker started up the chain of command with General Irvin McDowell, who sixteen years earlier had been the Union’s scapegoat at the First Battle of Bull Run. Now McDowell was in charge of the army’s Department of the Pacific, with headquarters in San Francisco. Showing McDowell the plans for the bridge, Crocker argued that it would be of little value unless track could be laid across the reservation to reach it.

  McDowell passed the request on to Secretary of War George McCrary, who immediately came under intense lobbying pressure—for and against—from Huntington and Scott. Deciding to pass the buck, McCrary ruled that only Congress could permanently decide the issue. But in the interim, he gave the Southern Pacific permission to lay temporary tracks across the reservation, so long as the railroad agreed to remove them if Congress denied the right-of-way. In order not to show favoritism to the Southern Pacific, McCrary accorded the same arrangement to the Texas and Pacific, even though its railhead was 1,000 miles away.

  While McCrary’s action created some uncertainty for the Southern Pacific, Huntington was not one to hesitate. He had long believed that it was far better to ask for forgiveness afterward than to sit idly waiting for permission beforehand. So, in July 1877, work started on the Yuma bridge from the California side. It was to be 667 feet long and include a swinging drawbridge that would allow steamships to pass up or down the Colorado River.

  About this time, the majority of troops at Fort Yuma were ordered north to Idaho to join the pursuit of Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce Indians. Only Major T. S. Dunn, one sergeant, and two privates were left at the fort. Early in August, Dunn inspected the Southern Pacific’s “temporary” tracks as they were being laid across the reservation. They certainly had a look of permanence about them, and Dunn reported that fact to Secretary of War McCrary. In reply, the secretary telegraphed an order to halt all construction on the tracks and the bridge immediately. By that time, however, rails were within a few yards of the half-built bridge.

  Not to be denied, Crocker insisted to General McDowell that the half-built bridge was likely to be destroyed by the river’s current unless the Southern Pacific was able to salvage it. More telegrams were exchanged, and on September 6, McCrary authorized enough work on the bridge structure to protect it from destruction. Crocker intended to do just that, but rather than pulling up piles, he secured the bridge from damage by rapidly completing the structure and anchoring it firmly to the Arizona bank of the river.

  “So far as going on and finishing the bridge is concerned,” Crocker wrote Huntington, “we have given orders to our men there not to quit till they feel the point of the bayonet in their rear.…”8

  The completed bridge had six spans of 80-foot wood trusses supported by piers and pilings driven into the hardpan of the riverbed. On the Arizona side, the draw span was 93.5 feet in length. It rested on the final pier of the truss sections and pivoted on another pier near the shore to allow boats to pass through the deepest part of the channel. Toward the Arizona shore from this pivot pier, which would later be replaced with a circular concrete foundation, a wooden truss ran to the river-bank.

  Once the bridge decking was in place, spiking rails across it could be done in a few hours. Under orders from Secretary McCrary, poor Major Dunn was forced to mount a rotating guard with his four-man garrison to prevent that from happening. But it was Crocker who had ready and effective reinforcements close at hand. Surmising that the U.S. Army would not interfere with a civilian train carrying mail and passengers—particularly if it were to be wildly welcomed by the citizens of Yuma—he dispatched just such a special from San Francisco.

  Major Dunn and his outnumbered troops stood guard on the bridge until eleven o’clock on Saturday night, September 29. Assuming in the manner of the time that no laborers would work on Sunday, Dunn and his men then retired. But their sleep was interrupted a few hours later by the dull thuds and throaty clangs of rails being dropped into place. Crocker’s crew had no such apprehension about toil on the Sabbath.

  Dunn and his troopers hurried back to the bridge, but they were literally bowled out of the way by a carload of rails being pushed ahead of a Southern Pacific locomotive. Recovering, Major Dunn ordered the foreman
placed under arrest. The man’s reply was less than courteous and certainly not compliant. Outnumbered by the construction crew as they were, Dunn and his three soldiers could do little but stand aside as another half mile of track was spiked down into the center of Yuma.

  Dawn Sunday morning, September 30, 1877, was announced by the shrill blasts of the first locomotive in Arizona. Yuma’s citizens poured into the streets to give it a hearty reception. After a crew on a handcar inspected the new track, Crocker’s San Francisco Express, gaily bedecked with American flags, rolled into town to a similar reception. Crocker telegraphed Huntington with the news: “Bridge across Colorado complete and train carrying United States mails, passengers and express crossed over to Arizona side of river this morning. People of Yuma highly elated over the event.”

  While Yuma cheered, the battle with the army reverted to the telegraph wires. General McDowell, who may have been feeling as snookered here as at Bull Run, ordered all the reinforcements that he could muster—“one officer, twelve soldiers and a laundress” from San Francisco—and dispatched them posthaste to Yuma. By train.9

  But how could the U.S. Army declare war on the very institution that was winning the West? In a flurry of support that Southern Pacific operatives no doubt encouraged, if not outright orchestrated, Yuma’s mayor, town council, and leading merchants, as well as Arizona’s territorial governor, besieged Washington with pleas not to deprive them of their railroad.

  “By the completion of the Southern Pacific Rail Road to Yuma a new era seemed to have dawned upon the Territory,” almost one hundred Yuma residents petitioned Secretary of War “McCreary,” spelling his name wrong in the process. “By prohibiting the completion of the bridge at Yuma,” they asserted, “our goods are landed on the California side of the Colorado river without shelter from the sun or storms.” They considered it “an outrage to be put to the inconvenience and delay of an expensive and dangerous ferry” when trains could be run into the city.10