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

by Walter R. Borneman

  About the same time, surveyors for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe showed up in Tucson and stoked opposing rumors that not one but two railroads might soon be in town. The Santa Fe was exploring routes from Albuquerque southwest to Tombstone and Tucson with an eye toward further construction both west to California and south into Mexico. Despite the rugged terrain on a straight line between Tucson and Albuquerque, the Santa Fe engineer in charge hoped to find “a road of easy grade and reasonably cheap construction.” If that happened, the Arizona Star predicted, it “will make Tucson without question … the Denver of Arizona.”10

  The survey work by the Santa Fe was reported to Charley Crocker. The man who had dug his feet in the most to hold Huntington at the Colorado River was once again urging Huntington to hasten an adequate supply of rails to the front. “I wish you would hurry up the steel,” Crocker admonished, “as when we commence work in Arizona again, we do not want to be detained for lack of material.” Huntington assured him, “I am doing all I can to get rails started but find it one of the most difficult things to do that I ever tried.”11

  By January 24, 1880, there was a sufficient supply of ties and rails at Casa Grande to commence work on the 65-mile extension to Tucson. But no sooner had Strobridge put his construction crews to work than a freak January snowstorm dumped eight inches of snow on Maricopa. Tucson had its first snow in years. The men who had found it too hot to work just months before now lost time because of slush and mud. Barely had the ground cleared when Strobridge reported more lost time because of Chinese New Year celebrations.

  Once engaged, however, the work crews laid more than a mile of track a day. Three weeks later, well past the pointy spire of Picaho Peak and just 18 miles out of Tucson, Strobridge was forced to wire Huntington the result: “End of track Ariz. [February] 26. Out of steel.” Crocker grumbled about the added expense caused by the delay, but used the time to send grading crews east of Tucson to work on the approaches to the crossings of Cienega Creek and the San Pedro River.12

  Crocker continued to fret, but enough rails arrived so that tracks were spiked down along the Southern Pacific right-of-way northeast of the Tucson town plaza on March 17, 1880. That afternoon a train “with No. 41 on the head end, followed by 2 water cars, 13 boxcars, 39 flatcars and 11 construction cars” was welcomed by a cheering crowd.

  Three days later, Crocker and the usual dignitaries arrived for the official celebration. They steamed into town on a special train that was an hour early, and the shrill blast of their locomotive’s whistle sent Tucson mayor R. N. Leatherwood and the local welcoming committee scurrying to the depot site.

  Mayor Leatherwood had already sent numerous telegrams to a list of officials that stretched from the mayor of Yuma to President Rutherford B. Hayes. Also on the list, according to the Arizona Daily Star, was a telegram to Pope Leo XIII noting Tucson’s long ties with the Catholic Church and informing his Holiness “that a railroad from San Francisco, California, now connects us with the Christian world.”

  As the story goes, this was a little too pompous for some Tucson residents, and one prankster fabricated a response from Rome that read: “His Holiness, the Pope, acknowledges with appreciation receipt of your telegram … but, for his own satisfaction would ask where in hell is Tucson?”13

  Jokes aside, Tucson was well satisfied with its railroad. But Huntington and Crocker did not intend to pause there very long. No matter how speculative the Santa Fe’s survey work around Tucson, there could be no denying that while the Southern Pacific was rushing eastward across Arizona, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe had been building southward through New Mexico with equal determination. There might not be a Santa Fe locomotive steaming into Tucson any time soon, but that did not mean that the railroad did not have Arizona in its sights.

  The first railroad car in New Mexico passed into the territory on December 7, 1878. That vehicle had indeed been an Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe car and not a locomotive because the train was being pushed backward over the temporary track across the Raton Pass switchbacks. Tentative though the clanging and clicking of those wheels were, in the next two and one-half years, the Santa Fe would build almost 1,000 miles of track in New Mexico.

  Throughout the spring of 1879, Santa Fe crews under the supervision of A. A. Robinson graded south from Raton Pass, frequently in sight of the wagon ruts of the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. The trail’s old watering stop of Willow Springs became the town of Raton, New Mexico, and as the railroad built farther south, the new towns of Springer and Wagon Mound briefly flirted with the boom of being a railhead.

  South of the oblong butte that gave Wagon Mound its name, the railroad grade passed near Fort Union and the point where the Mountain Branch and the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail rejoined. By the Fourth of July, the rails had reached Las Vegas. Here the railroad was 50 miles due east of Santa Fe, but the southern slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains forced it into a wide loop southward to get around them. In the process, the railroad snaked through a series of S curves along the headwaters of the Pecos River and crossed Glorieta Pass into the watershed of the Rio Grande.

  Meanwhile, trains began using the Raton Tunnel in September 1879, and the elimination of the laborious Raton switchbacks sped up the flow of men and materiel to the construction front. But another event occurred that was much more important to the railroad’s long-term vitality: the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe paid its first stock dividend. With construction rushing forward across New Mexico, here nonetheless was proof that Thomas Nickerson and William Barstow Strong were meticulous managers who knew how to run a railroad and take care of their stockholders. Such solid financial footing would be essential to winning battles yet to come.

  From the summit of Glorieta Pass, the Santa Fe’s line descended steep Galisteo Creek through Apache Canyon, where eastbound grades of 3 percent are still in place. At Galisteo Junction, soon to be renamed Lamy after the archbishop of Santa Fe, the main line streaked southwest to Bernalillo on the Rio Grande. But what about the railroad’s long-sought goal of Santa Fe?

  Ray Morley surveyed every inch of plausible grade between Raton Pass and the Rio Grande. He convinced A. A. Robinson—who in turn convinced William Barstow Strong—that Santa Fe, despite the town’s prominence in their company’s name, was not to be on the main line. It sat in too deep of a bowl and was surrounded by too many hills that demanded heavy grades. Building into Santa Fe simply wasn’t conducive to through traffic. And truth be told, Santa Fe was no longer the economic magnet it had been for a half century on the Santa Fe Trail. The pull now was California and other points west.

  Santa Fe town fathers were far from pleased, of course, but they promoted a local bond issue, and the railroad obliged them by building an 18-mile spur to bridge the gap between Lamy and a location just west of the town plaza. When the rails of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad reached Santa Fe on February 9, 1880, an era ended.

  No one cheered more loudly than a member of the Santa Fe’s board of directors. A scant eleven years earlier, at a picnic celebrating the end of track at Wakarusa Creek just 7 miles out of Topeka, his talk of the railroad building to Santa Fe and the Pacific had been met with hoots of laughter. His name was Cyrus K. Holliday, and now it was his turn to hoot.

  But there was other nostalgia as well. “Yesterday morning the last coach went out of Las Vegas for Santa Fe,” the Las Vegas Gazette reported rather wistfully. “The officers were removed to Cañoncito … [and] we are sorry to see them go. The stage men and employees looked like they were leaving their earthly treasures.”

  What began in 1846 as “a mail every six months brought through under guard” had grown to daily stage service during what the paper called “halcyon days.” As each new railhead was reached, the stage run was shortened until “gradually,” the Gazette concluded, “the iron horse has been driven down the Santa Fe trail.”14

  But the way of the iron horse was hardly smooth. After the completion of th
e line to Lamy, engineer Jake Brown was taking a train up Apache Canyon when he noticed a train coming downgrade toward him at a high rate of speed. Brown reversed his locomotive in an attempt to get back to the siding at Lamy, but then watched in horror as the runaway train’s crew gave up any hope of stopping and simply jumped from their posts.

  The lone exception was the brave conductor, who made his way from the rear atop the swaying cars, frantically cranking brake wheels as he went. He made it to the cab of the locomotive just in time to bring the load to a halt and avoid a collision with Brown’s train. Indeed, runaways on Glorieta Pass were so common that the Las Vegas Daily Optic expressed relief and no little surprise when an entire month went by without one.15

  But others weren’t so lucky. When Ed Stanley’s eight-car freight train left Santa Fe one evening eastbound, the twenty-three-year-old conductor “was full of life—in unusually good spirits.” It was a bitterly cold February night, and as the train climbed up the heavy grades east of town, Stanley graciously invited his brakemen down from the tops of the cars and into the relative warmth of the caboose.

  Unfortunately, it was only Stanley’s second trip on the run behind an engineer who was making his first run on the line. Not expecting any downgrades, Stanley was surprised when the train started to pick up speed beyond Glorieta Pass. The engineer was surprised too, and he whistled an anguished plea for brakes. Stanley and his brakemen scrambled to the top of the boxcars to answer the call. As a brakeman named Charley knelt to tighten the brake wheel on one car, Stanley ran past him and began to crank the wheel on the next car. Just then, the train bounced around a short curve. Stanley lost his balance and, despite a cry of “Oh, Charley!” to the nearby brakeman, he was hurled headlong from the car top.

  The runaway train continued on about 3 miles before it could be brought to a stop and then slowly backed to the point of Stanley’s fatal fall. “His dead body, considerably mangled, was picked up by friendly hands, placed in the caboose and brought to Las Vegas.” The next day, a coroner’s inquest found that “no blame attaches to any one” for the incident, but also acknowledged that the train “had gotten away from the engineer and brakemen and could not be controlled by them.”16

  That no blame was attached despite this acknowledgment was indicative of the relatively cheap value of human lives in those times and a recognition of the inherent danger of railroading. Accidents were part of the acceptable price of pushing the rails west and tying the nation together upon them. Ed Stanley was but one of thousands of ordinary trainmen who—for a few dollars a day—paid the price.

  Such experiences gave rise to many songs, but among the most descriptive was a gospel hymn written about this time. Many a mountain railroader was laid to rest after his last run to the words of “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad.” It urged those who were of good faith to “watch the hills, the curves, and tunnels, never falter, never fail, keep your hand upon the throttle and your eye upon the rail.” The men who operated the Santa Fe across Raton and Glorieta passes, the Rio Grande through the Rockies, or the Southern Pacific over the Tehachapi Loop never faltered.

  The Santa Fe built down the Rio Grande and reached Albuquerque on April 15, 1880. There wasn’t much celebration because the rail yards were located some distance from the old town. This was not from any fit of land speculation but rather to avoid the river bottom and pass through town as quickly as possible. By the end of summer, the Santa Fe’s tracks had been laid another 103 miles south to the little town of San Marcial.

  Now the Santa Fe faced a tough decision about its ultimate objective. Due south down the Rio Grande lay El Paso. To the southwest—just as soon as the railroad could turn the corner of the Black and Mimbres mountains and skirt Cookes Peak—the 32nd parallel corridor ran west toward booming Tombstone, Tucson, and the oncoming Southern Pacific. Beyond lay California. But the Santa Fe was also interested in the ground farther south into Mexico.

  The Santa Fe’s “Boston crowd” of investors had organized the Sonora Railway Company along much the same route that Dr. Bell traveled during his side trip from Palmer’s 1867 survey for the Kansas Pacific. Their investment anticipated significant Mexican mining revenues and a growing Pacific trade in and out of the Mexican port of Guaymas. But on the larger map of the Southwest, the proposed Sonora Railway was also seen as the perfect end run around the Southern Pacific should Huntington prove successful at blocking the way across Arizona.

  During the spring and summer of 1880, Huntington lost no time in pushing the Southern Pacific eastward out of Tucson to counter the threat. Charley Crocker warned Huntington early on, however, not to expect rapid progress as the line dipped into the San Pedro Valley. “There is some quite heavy work, which at very best, will detain us from going on as fast as we have been accustomed to. After that, however, we can go to El Paso any time you want, if the steel is here, surely two miles a day, and if necessary, faster still! There will be no difficulty in reaching the boundary of Texas, by one year from today [April 22, 1880].”17

  By now, the construction of a roundhouse, shops, and mushrooming yards overflowing with freight had convinced Tucson residents that they would not suffer greatly from whatever facilities the Southern Pacific built along its crossing of the San Pedro. But a town of some sort was inevitable at the San Pedro, and the Southern Pacific named it Benson after William B. Benson, a friend of Crocker’s who had substantial mining interests throughout the West.

  Train service into Benson began on June 22, 1880, and for much of the summer, it served as the railhead for construction farther east and stage and freighting service south to the windswept mesas and rocky arroyos near Tombstone. Among those tempted to try their hand in the stagecoach business was a recent arrival in Tombstone named Wyatt Earp. When existing lines offered too much competition, Earp turned to saloon keeping instead and was soon helping his brother, Virgil, with law enforcement chores.

  East of Benson, the Southern Pacific encountered more of the tough ground that Crocker had warned Huntington about, as it climbed out of the San Pedro Valley and crested the northern end of the Dragoon Mountains. At an elevation of 4,613 feet, Dragoon Summit was the highest point on the Southern Pacific west of the Rio Grande—29 feet higher than its projected crossing of the Continental Divide in New Mexico.

  East of Dragoon Summit, there was speedy construction across the smooth Sulphur Springs Valley, much of it a dry lake bed that made for a 20-mile straightaway. Along the way, the railroad named the town of Willcox for Major General Orlando Bolivar Willcox, who was then in command of the army’s Department of Arizona. Willcox had earlier served in San Francisco and been in the chain of the “telegram war” over permission to cross the Fort Yuma bridge.

  Northeast of Willcox, the railroad made a long curve north of the Dos Cabezas Mountains, two prominent rock towers that dominate the view for miles. The wide valley here was what Lieutenant John G. Parke called Railroad Pass on his 1853 survey. William Jackson Palmer’s subsequent survey for the Kansas Pacific confirmed the value of the route, and now Huntington was taking full advantage of it.

  By September 15, 1880, the Southern Pacific was officially opened to the old Butterfield stage station of San Simon, just inside the Arizona border. East of here, tough grades were encountered across Steins Pass astride the Peloncillo Mountains—a much more narrow gap than Railroad Pass. This section of railroad required a helper engine division, and it remains the heaviest grade—about 1.5 percent—on the Southern Pacific main line between Yuma and El Paso.18

  In October, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe general manager William Barstow Strong, who was taking an increasingly active corporate role and would soon become the Santa Fe’s president, met with Huntington in Boston to discuss the narrowing gap between the two roads.

  By then, the Southern Pacific had reached a point 2 miles north of a feisty little silver mining town called Shakespeare. But, alas, Shakespeare was no Tombstone, and the railroad opted to build a new town and name it after
Tucson merchant Charles H. Lord. Meanwhile, the Santa Fe had crossed the Rio Grande near San Marcial and built another 40 miles south. A gap of approximately 150 miles separated the two railheads.

  Certainly Charley Crocker had his dander up about the advancing Santa Fe. The last thing that he wanted was for the Santa Fe to rush westward past the Southern Pacific at Lordsburg and parallel its new line across southern Arizona. Even if the Santa Fe merely crossed the Southern Pacific at some point bound for Mexico, it would siphon off some of the Tombstone trade. Tucson—both on its own and because of Tombstone—was booming and bringing the Southern Pacific handsome profits. “The earnings since we reached Tucson have been immense,” Crocker reported.19

  Consequently, Crocker urged Huntington to arrange for some meeting point with the Santa Fe. “If we don’t make an arrangement,” Crocker cautioned, “we will both make a great mistake.” Huntington had El Paso and points farther east in his sights, and Crocker was concerned that the Big Four’s wheeler-dealer wasn’t giving this aggressive competitor on their flanks enough credit.

  “I very much fear that you are underrating these men and do not give them credit for the energy and persistence which they are showing. They are the only ones that I have feared, or that I now fear,” Crocker lectured Huntington. A week later, Crocker hoped that Huntington would “not get tired of my eternal dinging on this subject,” but that did not keep him from asserting, “those people [the Santa Fe backers] have more power and money than you have given them credit for.”20

  Only reluctantly did Huntington—who had once given his own lecture to David Colton about trusting the staying power of Tom Scott—come to view Nickerson, Strong, and the Santa Fe’s Boston crowd as comparable adversaries. “I did think last winter they would come to grief before this time,” Huntington confessed to Crocker, “but they seem to be stronger now than then.”