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

by Walter R. Borneman

  The San Francisco Daily Alta California added its voice to the fray. In the face of this accomplishment, what was the government to do, the paper demanded with due sarcasm, order “Stanford and Company to work pulling up those piles with their teeth” or “… set us back to the days of Forty Nine, when we crossed the river in a basket covered with the skin of a dead mule?”

  The answer was, hardly. “I do not believe they [the government] will interfere with the mail and passengers, after the track is completed,” David Colton wrote to Huntington, “but at any rate I think it is a good climate on the Arizona side in which to winter an S. P. locomotive, should they cut us off, & it will be a check to our friend Thos. A. Scott.”11

  It was Huntington who got the government’s answer firsthand and at the highest level. The bridge matter was debated in two cabinet meetings, and Secretary of War McCrary’s referral to Congress affirmed, but on October 9, Huntington called at the White House to see President Rutherford B. Hayes.

  “I think I have the bridge question settled,” he reported to Colton afterward. “I found it harder to do than I expected.” According to Huntington, Hayes was at first angry and scolded Huntington that the Southern Pacific had defied the government.

  But then Hayes asked, “What do you propose to do if we let you run over the bridge?” Why, push the road right on through Arizona, Huntington replied. “Will you do that?” the president queried. “If you will, that will suit me first rate.” Hayes promptly issued an order to permit train service across the reservation and into Yuma.12

  But there would be no rapid construction eastward across Arizona. This time, the nemesis was not the government, nor the terrain, nor even Tom Scott. This time Huntington’s partners simply refused to fund another wild expansion. Having gotten a whiff of the dividends that came from an operating profit, all but Huntington were strongly opposed to extending the Southern Pacific until their enormous Central Pacific debt could be brought under control.

  Despite his enthusiasm in reaching Yuma, Crocker was quick to assure Huntington that “taking all things into consideration, I feel that we have all the railroad property that we can well afford to own, and that I would like to get a few eggs in some other basket.”

  Huntington did not give up the idea, of course, but by January 1878, Crocker’s resolve had hardened. “I notice what you say about the importance of doing some work on the Southern Pacific road east of Yuma,” he told Huntington. “I answered that proposition in a late letter which I wrote you. We have no money to spend there now.”

  Even Huntington’s old hardware store partner, Mark Hopkins, shook his head when Huntington asked Hopkins, Stanford, and Crocker to endorse a stack of blank promissory notes so that Huntington might fill them in as required—the ultimate “blank checks.” For the moment, Yuma was the end of the line. Huntington had to be content to control the river crossing there and wait to see what rival might emerge from the chaos in Colorado or the financial woes of Tom Scott in Texas.13

  But there was to be one indirect casualty from the bridge battle at Yuma. Mark Hopkins had not been well for much of the preceding year, complaining in particular of rheumatism. A Chinese herb doctor treated his maladies, and as he showed some improvement, he chose to escape the damp winter cold of the Bay Area and head for warmer climes. Perhaps because Huntington had routinely criticized his partners for never having seen entire sections of their expanding empire, Hopkins decided to combine his desire for hot, dry air with an inspection of the bridge that had caused so much fuss.

  There was no question that Hopkins would be accorded a private car. Accompanied by some Southern Pacific bigwigs, including the railroad’s chief physician, his train chugged south and arrived at Yuma. On the evening of March 28, 1878, while his private car sat on a siding there, Hopkins stretched out on a couch and appeared merely to take a little after-dinner nap. One of the company’s construction engineers later heard Hopkins give a deep sigh and, knowing that it was close to the punctual man’s bedtime, tried to rouse him. The doctor was hastily summoned, but the detail person of the Big Four was dead a few months short of sixty-five.14

  9

  Impasse at Raton

  While his associates momentarily shackled Collis P. Huntington from further expansion, the other southwestern railroads slowly emerged from the economic hangover of the panic of 1873. During this time, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe secured its own rail access eastward from Topeka into the railroad hub of Kansas City. The moves were complex and the number of subsidiaries involved was mind numbing, but the resulting connection was as significant of a transcontinental step as any the Santa Fe had taken previously. In time, it would look to extend even farther east.1

  Out west, after a two-year pause just inside the Colorado border, the Santa Fe continued construction up the Arkansas Valley toward Pueblo, reaching La Junta in 1875 and Pueblo itself early in 1876. After a similar construction hiatus, the narrow gauge Denver and Rio Grande built south from Pueblo and extended 50 miles to Cuchara Junction (near present-day Walsenburg). Here the Rio Grande line forked with the western leg following the Cucharas River to La Veta, and the other leg, continuing south toward coalfields near Raton Pass.

  It would have been an easy matter for the Rio Grande to build into the town of Trinidad at the foot of Raton Pass. Certainly Trinidad cheered the railroad’s advance. But William Jackson Palmer had other ideas. Fresh from his land development successes at Colorado Springs, the general chose to halt the Rio Grande about 4 miles north of Trinidad and establish the new town of El Moro. It was a development strategy that he would employ time after time. But while Palmer and his circle of investors profited from the resulting land speculation, the technique hardly endeared them to the existing towns that were left without a railroad.

  In the case of El Moro, the town fathers of Trinidad were outraged. Some saw the founding of the new town as outright blackmail by the Rio Grande to induce Trinidad and surrounding Las Animas County to vote bonds to aid the railroad’s construction. Even as the Rio Grande paused at El Moro, Trinidad was hotly debating just such a bond issue to support the Kansas Pacific in building to Trinidad.

  The third railroad with its eyes on Trinidad was the Santa Fe. Holliday’s road had made no bones about its ultimate destination since adding the town of Santa Fe to its Atchison and Topeka moniker before it had laid a single rail. Now its management saw an opportunity en route to be welcomed into Trinidad as heroes. After Las Animas County rejected the Kansas Pacific bond issue and local sentiment turned against the Rio Grande because of its halt at El Moro, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe became the hometown favorite in Trinidad.

  The Denver and Rio Grande was completed to El Moro on April 20, 1876. Regular passenger and freight service was inaugurated within a week, and the railroad-sponsored town promoted itself as the logical terminus of stage and freighting operations to and from New Mexico—to the detriment of Trinidad. By the end of the summer, three hundred people were living in El Moro, and several companies had built freight warehouses there.

  Palmer, however, was not pleased with the overall results. Too many freighters continued to haul goods by wagon over the old Santa Fe Trail between Trinidad and La Junta directly to and from the Santa Fe Railroad. Some freighters from the San Luis Valley did the same thing, avoiding the Rio Grande’s La Veta branch and hauling goods to and from the Santa Fe’s railhead at Pueblo instead.

  The advance of the Santa Fe up the Arkansas River to Pueblo had already disrupted the cozy relationship that Palmer and the Rio Grande had with the Kansas Pacific for connecting east-west traffic. Before the Santa Fe’s encroachment, the Rio Grande funneled traffic along Colorado’s Front Range to and from the Kansas Pacific at Denver. Thanks to the Santa Fe’s recent direct connections to Kansas City, it could now compete head-to-head with the Kansas Pacific for east-west traffic.

  In theory, Palmer and the Rio Grande should have been in the catbird seat. By adjusting its rate structure between Denv
er and Pueblo, the railroad could direct traffic either northward to the Kansas Pacific at Denver or southward to the Santa Fe at Pueblo. But as the Santa Fe got more and more of the southern Colorado traffic directly, the Kansas Pacific cried foul.

  Somewhat warily, the three roads entered into a pooling arrangement that required the Denver and Rio Grande to divide its business between the Kansas Pacific and the Santa Fe with the understanding that the Kansas Pacific would not build to Pueblo and the Santa Fe would not build to Denver. This arrangement proved short lived, however, and was soon “crumbling beneath the pressures of mutual distrust and conflicting ambitions.”2

  A major source of the friction was Colorado’s slumbering mining prospects. They were finally beginning to attract attention. A muddy impediment to placer gold mining proved to be residue from silver ore, and by 1877, a rush began for Leadville and a host of other silver mining camps in Colorado’s mountains.

  There would be no lack of competitors attempting to build out of Denver to tap this bonanza—John Evans’s Denver, South Park and Pacific, and William Loveland’s Colorado Central among them—but one major name was to be absent from the race. In fact, it also disappeared from the contest to reach Santa Fe.

  The Kansas Pacific’s construction deal with the Denver Pacific had been calculated to speed the road to Denver and a connection with the Union Pacific, not permanently dissuade it from a southwestern bent toward Santa Fe. But the panic of 1873, growing competition from the Santa Fe, and the Kansas Pacific’s failure to secure Las Animas County bonds had taken their toll. Instead of racing the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande to Pueblo or Trinidad, or heading south into New Mexico, the Kansas Pacific simply abandoned the field and waited for the Union Pacific eventually to absorb it.3

  The Kansas Pacific’s retreat left the Denver and Rio Grande and the Santa Fe to slug it out for both Colorado traffic and the long-sought gateway to New Mexico and beyond. Although owing certain subservience to his East Coast investors, General Palmer was clearly in command of the Rio Grande. As a confrontation with the Santa Fe loomed, that railroad had two equally forceful and effective leaders at its helm. In some respects, their relationship and roles resembled those of J. Edgar Thomson and Thomas A. Scott.

  The senior member of the Santa Fe team was Thomas Nickerson, a leading member of the railroad’s “Boston crowd” of investors. Born in Brewster, Massachusetts, in 1810, Nickerson came from a long line of New England sailors. He spent almost thirty years at sea before investing his profits on land. By 1870, he was a major Santa Fe shareholder. Nickerson became the railroad’s vice president in 1873, and a year later, the board of directors decided that the seasoned sailor was the man to serve as president and lead them out of the financial woes of the panic of 1873. Both cautious and tenacious, Nickerson was slow to change course, but unafraid to sail into the wind.

  Nickerson’s conservatism sometimes frustrated his right-hand man, but once William Barstow Strong received go-ahead orders, Strong knew that he had Nickerson’s full support. Born in Vermont, Strong was almost twenty-seven years Nickerson’s junior. After business college in Chicago, he went to work as a station agent and telegraph operator for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad. Progressively more responsible jobs with Midwest railroads followed, including two tours with the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy. The Santa Fe hired Strong away from the Burlington to become its general manager in 1877, and six weeks later, Strong was also named vice president. Between the two of them, Nickerson and Strong would see the Santa Fe through a far-flung expansion.4

  If Nickerson’s and Strong’s names are not as well known to later generations as those of rail barons Huntington or Jay Gould, it is not because their accomplishments were any less but rather that they undertook them with less bravado. Aside from Holliday’s occasional crowing of his founding role, the Santa Fe management was much more of a team effort than many other roads. While Huntington roared between Washington politics and New York finances, and Gould fixated the high and the mighty of Wall Street with his deals, Nickerson and Strong stayed largely out of the public eye—quiet, efficient, and determined of purpose, but no less calculating.

  And so the battle was joined. Long after the conflict at Raton Pass, George S. Van Law, who at the time was a young surveyor with the Santa Fe, termed the Denver and Rio Grande as having been “cocky and resolute.” Van Law recalled that the railroad “believed in a future life and believed in setting its stakes in the beyond, and doing it first.”

  To be sure, “cocky and resolute” was probably an apt description of Palmer and his associates. After all, they had pretty much been given free rein over a sizeable chunk of Colorado. Certainly their interest in a railroad across Raton Pass dated back to Palmer’s 1867 survey for the Kansas Pacific. But somewhere along the line, their bold plans and long-held dreams ran afoul of the Right-of-Way Act of 1875.

  This was the same act that had permitted Huntington and his Southern Pacific cohorts to secure a right-of-way on the Arizona side of the Colorado River from Arizona Territory. Under the act, any state or territory could grant a railroad a right-of-way across the public domain, but such company was required to file a plat (survey) and profile of its intended route with the U.S. General Land Office to establish its priority over subsequent claimants. Otherwise the first party to begin actual construction controlled the route.

  Well after the Right-of-Way Act became law, Palmer cabled his close friend and business associate Dr. William A. Bell what amounted to his manifesto. “It is understood you understand,” Palmer wrote, “that we stop not until San Luis Park is reached, and I hope not until Santa Fe although for manifest reasons we hold open question of route to New Mexico whether from Trinidad south [Raton Pass] or Garland south [La Veta Pass].”5

  Why then did Palmer fail to file the required plat for the Raton Pass route? With his own railhead at El Moro within sight of the pass and the Santa Fe still 60 miles away at La Junta, Palmer may well have tried too hard to outfox the Santa Fe by masking his intentions. He may have thought that his earlier explorations there preempted the field, or he may have been distracted from the details by his many other ventures: land speculation, coal mines, and even railroads in Mexico.

  None of this, however, seems to excuse what in hindsight appears as both a monumental corporate blunder and the first of two history-changing moments in western transcontinental railroad construction. Palmer, who was so meticulous in so many things, overlooked or chose to ignore the filing requirements of the Right-of-Way Act. Too late, the general realized that he had to take immediate steps on the ground to seize the key passage at Raton.

  The Santa Fe approached the matter very differently. First, William Barstow Strong secured a charter from New Mexico for construction south from Raton Pass. Then one of the Santa Fe’s engineering assistants, William Raymond Morley, spent several weeks surveying the Raton slopes disguised as a Mexican sheepherder.

  Ray Morley was, in fact, the quintessential railroad surveyor. As his obituary opined, “he was no respecter of rules until he had proved them in his own way” and “he asked no man to go where he was not willing to lead.”

  Morley was born in Massachusetts in 1846. Orphaned quite young, he ended up with an uncle in Iowa, where he later lied about his age and joined the Ninth Iowa Volunteer Regiment of the Union army during the Civil War. He got an early look at the business of railroads—albeit destroying them—while following General William Tecumseh Sherman through Georgia. Back in Iowa, he entered Iowa State University but was forced to drop out after his second year for lack of funds.

  Morley found work as a land surveyor around Sioux City and on the Iowa Northern Railroad. Then he went to work for William Jackson Palmer on the Kansas Pacific. The general must have had his eye on the young ex-private, because when Palmer’s wide-flung interests came to include the sprawling Maxwell Grant in northern New Mexico, a vestige of historic Spanish land grants, Palmer offered Morley a surveying job there. By November 1
872, Morley had been promoted to manager.

  With this respectable job in hand, Morley hurried back to Iowa and married Ada McPherson. After a five-year courtship of mostly letters, this genteel, golden-haired twenty-year-old followed her new husband to the headquarters house of the Maxwell Grant in Cimarron, New Mexico. Ada quickly took to the lifestyle, and the couple was soon involved in the rough and tumble of territorial politics.

  When the Maxwell Grant changed ownership yet again, Morley spent the summer of 1876 surveying for the Denver and Rio Grande on its line over La Veta Pass, including laying out the corkscrew of Mule Shoe Curve. Exactly when and why he came to throw his allegiance to the Santa Fe is uncertain. It seems probable, however, that Morley disdained Palmer’s heavy-handed rival town techniques and thought that the Santa Fe was likely to have a larger role in New Mexico than the Rio Grande. So the wiry figure wrapped in a serape carefully avoided the Rio Grande surveyors who were also at work on Raton and quietly made his own calculations.6

  On February 20, 1878, William Barstow Strong and President Thomas Nickerson met in Pueblo to map out their next course of action. That Nickerson should be so far from Boston and out on the road in the middle of winter is evidence that the Santa Fe viewed these next steps as critical to the railroad’s future. “Of course we have no certain means of knowing what was going on,” Pueblo’s Colorado Weekly Chieftain reported of the two men’s joint appearance in town, but “it is predicted by those who know that the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe company will make a big jump when it does start.”

  A week later, while acknowledging, “The air is full of railroad rumors, but nothing reliable,” the Chieftain wryly noted that the Santa Fe had appointed a superintendent of construction, and, “as railroad companies do not appoint superintendents of construction unless they mean to construct something, this looks like business.”7