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

by Walter R. Borneman

  CHAPTER 5: THE SANTA FE JOINS THE FRAY

  1. U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 3rd sess., chap. 98 (1863), pp. 772–74. Technically, this congressional legislation conditionally granted the lands to the State of Kansas, which accepted them on February 9, 1864, and in turn passed them on to the Santa Fe and the Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Fort Gibson Railroad and Telegraph Company, with the same conditions. The latter road was to build from Leavenworth to Indian Territory.

  2. Bryant, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, pp. 12–13; “The child is born”: Kansas State Record (Topeka), October 7, 1868.

  3. William E. Treadway, Cyrus K. Holliday: A Documentary Biography (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1979), p. 214 (quoting Holliday to Mary Holliday, August 30, 1873).

  4. Bryant, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, pp. 15, 17–18; “old earth slowly careened”: Joseph W. Snell and Don W. Wilson, “The Birth of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 135, quoting Osage Chronicle, September 18, 1869.

  5. Bryant, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, pp. 21–24.

  6. Kansas Daily Commonwealth (Topeka), April 27, 1872.

  7. Joseph W. Snell and Don W. Wilson, “The Birth of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad—Concluded,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 35, no. 3 (Fall 1968): 332–37; “an enterprising railroad town”: Kansas Daily Commonwealth (Topeka), May 30, 1871; “It must be borne”: Emporia News, August 25, 1871.

  8. Bryant, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, pp. 26–29; “This beats anything”: Kansas Daily Commonwealth (Topeka), July 16, 1872; tie boom in Snell and Wilson, “The Birth of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad—Concluded,” p. 348, quoting the Hutchinson News, July 18, 1872.

  9. Snell and Wilson, “The Birth of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad—Concluded,” pp. 351–52.

  10. Bat Masterson is one of those characters whose myth transcends the facts, but perhaps his most solid biographer is Robert K. DeArment, Bat Masterson: The Man and the Legend (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), from which this account of Bat’s Dodge City days is taken, specifically, the grading contract, pp. 19–21; “led the way” and “considered a man,” pp. 32–33; “offering one-hundred-dollar” and the train robbers hunt, pp. 87–95. For Ed’s death, see pp. 97–108.

  11. Bryant, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, pp. 29–31; “ ‘State Line City’ ”: Snell and Wilson, “The Birth of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad—Concluded,” p. 352, quoting Hutchinson News, December 12, 1872; “We send you greeting”: Hutchinson News, January 2, 1873.

  12. “The road cannot”: Kansas Daily Commonwealth (Topeka), December 29, 1872.

  CHAPTER 6: STRAIGHT WEST FROM DENVER

  1. The principal biography of John Evans is Harry E. Kelsey, Jr., Frontier Capitalist: The Life of John Evans (Denver: State Historical Society of Colorado and Pruett Publishing, 1969). Railroads were not the only thing that Evans was interested in building. He was instrumental in founding both Northwestern University and the University of Denver. He ran for Congress in 1854 and campaigned for Lincoln in 1860, which put him in line for a political appointment. He declined the governorship of Washington Territory as too far removed from his Chicago interests but accepted the governorship of Colorado Territory.

  2. “Whether famine reigns”: Rocky Mountain News, May 24, 1862.

  3. S. D. Mock, “Colorado and the Surveys for a Pacific Railroad,” Colorado Magazine, vol. 17, no. 2 (March 1940): 56–57.

  4. Instructions to John Pierce, John Evans Collection, Stephen H. Hart Library, Colorado Historical Society, Denver, Box 7, File Folder (FF) 78 (Evans to Pierce, February 24, 1866), hereinafter cited as Evans Collection by box and file folder number. “The richness of the country”: Evans Collection, Box 7, FF 78 (Pierce to Evans, February 25, 1866); Mock, “Colorado and the Surveys,” pp. 60–61, and Kelsey, Frontier Capitalist, pp. 127, 170–72.

  5. S. D. Mock, “The Financing of Early Colorado Railroads,” Colorado Magazine 18, no. 6 (November 1941): 202–3; Kelsey, Frontier Capitalist, pp. 173–74.

  6. “I am very busy”: Evans Collection, Box 2, FF 17 (Evans to Margaret Evans, July 5, 1868); Kelsey, Frontier Capitalist, pp. 174–75; Mock, “Financing of Early Colorado Railroads,” pp. 204–205; U.S. Statutes at Large, 40th Cong., 3rd sess., chap. 127 (1869), p. 324; Klein, Union Pacific: Birth, pp. 344–45.

  7. Kelsey, Frontier Capitalist, pp. 176–79; Mock, “Financing of Early Colorado Railroads,” pp. 205–6; Palmer Collection, Box 9, FF 304 (Certificate of Interest in Assignment, July 1869); Elmer O. Davis, The First Five Years of the Railroad Era in Colorado (Golden, Colo.: Sage Books, 1948), pp. 38, 90–91; “Everybody and wife”: Colorado Tribune (Denver), June 18, 1870.

  8. “Our long agony”: Palmer Collection, Box 9, FF 701 (Palmer to Queen Mellen, July 2, 1869); “Poor Sheridan!”: Palmer Collection, Box 9, FF 706 (Palmer to Queen Mellen, February 13, 1870); “brisk and lively” and “the water about town”: Rocky Mountain News (Weekly), April 27, 1870.

  9. “the business men”: Davis, First Five Years, p. 72; tie advertisement in Anderson, Palmer, pp. 32–34; construction schedule and Indian raids in Davis, First Five Years, pp. 70, 74, 76, 78, 94–95; “fighting along our line”: Palmer Collection, Box 9, FF 707 (Palmer to Queen Mellen, May 15, 1870).

  10. Rocky Mountain News (Weekly), August 17, 1870.

  11. “In the name”: Palmer Collection, Box 7, FF 552 (telegram, Perry to Palmer, August 16, 1870); “The coach has given”: Rocky Mountain News, August 19, 1870; “the only road”: Rocky Mountain News (Weekly), April 27, 1870.

  12. Davis, First Five Years, pp. 107–8; see also an inserted supplement in Davis entitled “Completion Dates for the First Trans-continental Railway.”

  13. Kelsey, Frontier Capitalist, pp. 180–81. William H. Loveland, who was intent on making the town of Golden, about 15 miles west of Denver, Colorado’s commercial hub, incorporated the Colorado Central and grabbed control of Clear Creek Canyon, leading from Golden to the mining districts of Central City and Black Hawk. Loveland also flirted with the Union Pacific for support of a Golden-Cheyenne connection. When this was not forthcoming, the Colorado Central built down Clear Creek from Golden to connect with the Denver Pacific–Kansas Pacific rail junction just northeast of what remains Denver Union Station.

  14. addressing him as “General”: Palmer Collection, Box 9, FF 700 (Palmer to Queen Mellen, April 16, 1869); “a little railroad”: Palmer Collection, Box 9, FF 706 (Palmer to Queen Mellen, January 17, 1870); “laid the smallest” and “but not near enough”: Palmer Collection, Box 9, FF 706 (Palmer to Queen Mellen, February 4, 1870).

  15. “run from the Missouri”: U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 2nd sess., chap. 120 (July 1, 1862), p. 495; U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 3rd sess., chap 112 (March 3, 1863), p. 807; Bain, Empire Express, pp. 131–32.

  16. Anderson, William J. Palmer, pp. 54–57; “how fine it would be”: Palmer Collection, Box 9, FF 706 (Palmer to Queen Mellen, January 17, 1870). A key difference in construction costs between the gauges was in rails. Early narrow gauge rails weighed thirty pounds per yard compared to fifty-six pounds for standard gauge.

  17. U.S. Statutes at Large, 42nd Cong., 2nd sess., chap. 354 (1872), p. 339; Davis, First Five Years, pp. 152, 163; Tivis E. Wilkins, Colorado Railroads (Boulder, Colo.: Pruett, 1974), pp. 7, 11. The Rio Grande was built largely without federal subsidies or major land grants. After construction began, Congress ratified the railroad’s territorial charter and granted it a right-of-way 200 feet wide through the public domain. It also gave it the same right to condemn private land with appropriate due process that was given to the other Pacific roads under the 1862 act. Finally, the railroad got the privilege of taking timber, stone, and earth from public lands adjacent to the right-of-way and 20 acres of land every 10 miles for station and yard purposes.

  CHAPTER 7: “WHY IS IT WE HAVE SO MANY BITTER ENEMIES?”

  1. Oscar Lewis, The
Big Four: The Story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker, and of the Building of the Central Pacific (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), p. 211.

  2. Stuart Daggett, Chapters on the History of the Southern Pacific (1922; rpr., New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), pp. 120, 122; Atlantic and Pacific Railroad Company incorporation at U.S. Statutes at Large, 39th Cong., 1st sess., chap. 278 (1866), pp. 292–99. The San Jose-to-Gilroy extension was technically undertaken by the Santa Clara and Pajaro Valley Railroad Company, just one of many instances where controlling interests, for a variety of reasons, incorporated what were in essence subsidiary companies.

  3. Lavender, The Great Persuader, pp. 122, 164, 178, 186.

  4. “I notice that you”: Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 2 (Huntington to Hopkins, April 14, 1868).

  5. Cerinda W. Evans, Collis Potter Huntington, vol. 1 (Newport News, Va.: Mariners’ Museum, 1954), pp. 239–40.

  6. Daggett, Southern Pacific, pp. 122–23.

  7. Lavender, The Great Persuader, pp. 265–66.

  8. Lavender, The Great Persuader, pp. 283, 413n2.

  9. Lavender, The Great Persuader, pp. 284–85; Daggett, Southern Pacific, p. 125; see also Lewis B. Lesley, “A Southern Transcontinental Railroad into California: Texas and Pacific Versus Southern Pacific, 1865–1885,” Pacific Historical Review 5, no. 1 (1936): 55; “from a point at”: U.S. Statutes at Large, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., chap. 122 (1871), p. 579; Texas Pacific name change at U.S. Statutes at Large, 42nd Cong., 2nd sess., chap. 132 (1872), p. 59.

  10. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 52–56; Lavender, The Great Persuader, pp. 289–91; Los Angeles and San Pedro dates and census, Daggett, Southern Pacific, p. 127.

  11. “where the money”: Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 2 (Huntington to Hopkins, April 3, 1872). For all his expenditures in pursuit of railroad empires, Huntington stayed quite frugal personally in these lean years, supposedly saying later in life, “Young man, you can’t follow me through life by the quarters I have dropped” (Lewis, The Big Four, p. 213).

  12. “It is possible”: Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 3 (Huntington to Hopkins, October 29, 1872); New York meeting with Scott in ibid. (Huntington to Hopkins, November 30, 1872); “I thought it would”: ibid. (Huntington to Hopkins, December 13, 1872); “I have been out to see”: ibid. (Huntington to Hopkins, December 3, 1872); floating debt analysis in Julius Grodinsky, Transcontinental Railway Strategy, 1869–1893 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), pp. 50–51.

  13. Scott’s offer of $16 million and “while I think the property”: Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 3 (Huntington to Hopkins, January 17, 1873); “sell anything that” and “I am doing all”: ibid. (Huntington to Hopkins, February 15, 1873).

  14. “made up my mind”: Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 3 (Huntington to Stanford, February 28, 1873); “I have never seen”: ibid. (Huntington to Hopkins, March 8, 1873); “You know that”: ibid. (Huntington to Hopkins, March 10, 1873).

  15. “It looks a little” and “If we do not trade”: Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 3 (Huntington to Hopkins, March 11, 1873); “been out today” and “he cannot do anything”: ibid. (Huntington to Hopkins, March 26, 1873). Hopkins and Stanford were also negotiating for a sale of Southern Pacific and/or Central Pacific interests to a group of San Francisco investors fronted by Alfred A. Cohen. Hopkins speculated that Cohen might be working with Scott; see, for example, ibid. (Hopkins to Huntington, February 4, 1873).

  16. “Why is it”: Huntington Papers, Series 2, Reel 5 (Huntington to Hopkins, February 20, 1873); “these hellhounds”: ibid. (Huntington to Hopkins, March 3, 1873); “the truth, but nothing more”: ibid. (Huntington to Hopkins, February 27, 1873); testimony generally and destruction of records in Lavender, The Great Persuader, pp. 291–93. Whether it was correct to say that the Big Four operation involved three, four, or five men depended on the dates. Charles Crocker and his brother, Judge E. B. Crocker, sold many of their interests to the other three in 1871 for $900,000 each. When Charles confronted Huntington in the fall of 1873 for his second installment and learned the dire straits the associates were in, he promptly returned his down payment and rejoined the operations. Huntington wasn’t pleased to divide the pie again but needed the money. By then, the judge was incapacitated from a stroke; he died in 1875.

  17. “the remote cause”: Treadway, Cyrus K. Holliday, p. 215 (quoting Holliday to Mary Holliday, September 20, 1873); for an economic analysis of the panic of 1873, see Rendigs Fels, “American Business Cycles, 1865–79,” American Economic Review 41, no. 3 (June 1951): 325–49.

  18. Grodinsky, Transcontinental Railway Strategy, p. 45.

  19. $14,000 payment and “I would not”: Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 3 (Huntington to Hopkins, October 29, 1873).

  CHAPTER 8: SHOWDOWN AT YUMA

  1. Neill C. Wilson and Frank J. Taylor, Southern Pacific: The Roaring Story of a Fighting Railroad (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1952), p. 57; “The figures are large”: Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 3 (Huntington to Hopkins, November 24, 1873).

  2. Daggett, Southern Pacific, p. 126. Changing the Southern Pacific route created a long and complicated land dispute. Out of the confusion of the priority of railroad land grants versus homesteads acquired from the public domain would come the infamous Mussel Slough land feud, popularized by Frank Norris in his novel The Octopus. The San Joaquin Valley branch was opened to Goshen in August 1872. The continuing Southern Pacific tracks reached another 40 miles south to Delano, California, on July 14, 1873.

  3. Lavender, The Great Persuader, pp. 304–5.

  4. John R. Signor, Tehachapi: Southern Pacific–Santa Fe (San Marino, Calif.: Golden West Books, 1983), pp. 15–18, 56–57, 80–81. An eighteenth tunnel was built in 1885 just outside of Caliente. It was “daylighted” (collapsed and made into a cut) after major flooding in 1983.

  5. “Join hands with” and “We are camped”: Wilson and Taylor, Southern Pacific, pp. 61–62; see also Paul R. Spitzzeri, “The Road to Independence: The Los Angeles and Independence Railroad and the Conception of a City,” Southern California Quarterly 83, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 23–58.

  6. Signor, Tehachapi, pp. 18–19, specifically, “time dragged heavily” and “have not only lived”; time schedule, Evans, Huntington, p. 249.

  7. “Scott is making”: Huntington Papers, Series 2, Reel 5 (Huntington to Colton, March 22, 1876); Lavender, The Great Persuader, pp. 309–10; “We must split”: Grodinsky, Transcontinental Railway Strategy, p. 64, quoting Colton to Huntington, May 22, 1876.

  8. Authorization to prevent waste in Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 3 (McCrary to McDowell, September 6, 1877); “So far as going”: ibid. (Crocker to Huntington, September 25, 1877); Lavender, The Great Persuader, pp. 318–19, 322.

  9. Bridge specifications in David F. Myrick, Railroads of Arizona, vol. 1, The Southern Roads (Berkeley, Calif.: Howell-North Books, 1975), p. 22; “Bridge Across Colorado”: Huntington Papers, Series 1, Reel 13 (telegram, Crocker to Huntington, September 30, 1877); “one officer, twelve soldiers”: ibid., Series 4, Reel 3 (telegram, Crocker to Huntington, October 2, 1877); Lavender, The Great Persuader, pp. 323–24.

  10. “By the completion” and “By prohibiting”: Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 3 (Safford et al. to McCreary [sic], October 1, 1877); “an outrage to be put”: ibid. (Crocker to Huntington, October 5, 1877).

  11. “Stanford and Company”: San Francisco Daily Alta California, October 7, 1877; “I do not believe”: Lavender, The Great Persuader, p. 323, quoting Colton to Huntington, late September 1877.

  12. Huntington’s account of his conversation with President Hayes is in Huntington Papers, Series 2, Reel 6 (Huntington to Colton, October 10, 1877).

  13. “taking all things”: Huntington Papers, Series 4, Reel 3 (Crocker to Huntington, September 1, 1877); “I notice what you say”: ibid., Series 1, Reel 14 (Crocker to Hu
ntington, January 30, 1878); Hopkins’s refusal at Lavender, The Great Persuader, p. 324.

  14. Lavender, The Great Persuader, p. 326; Lewis, The Big Four, p. 139.

  CHAPTER 9: IMPASSE AT RATON

  1. Waters, Steel Trails, pp. 51–53. The Santa Fe’s eastward extension began in December 1868 when the irrepressible Cyrus K. Holliday secured a Kansas charter for the Lawrence and Topeka Railway to run eastward from Topeka. No construction took place until 1872, when a summer’s work quickly depleted all funds. The next year, the Lawrence and Topeka contracted with a new company, the Kansas Midland Railroad, to complete the line, but even then, rails did not reach Lawrence—only halfway from Topeka to Kansas City—until the summer of 1874.

  Meanwhile, an even greater patchwork of interests was building between Lawrence and the Missouri River with the intent of bypassing Kansas City. (The reason for this is best explained by the venture’s name: St. Louis, Lawrence, and Denver Railroad.) The Kansas Midland began to use a portion of this line and then secured trackage rights over yet another road to reach Kansas City via a circuitous route.

  Finally, the Kansas City, Lawrence, and Topeka Railroad, which had originally been incorporated only in Missouri to build from Kansas City to the state line, was induced to build farther west and hook up directly with the Kansas Midland. With this construction under way, the Kansas Midland and the original Lawrence and Topeka merged to become the Kansas City, Topeka, and Western Railroad Company, which was then promptly leased to the Santa Fe.

  While this corporate confusion might seem in hindsight as make-work for lawyers, it was really the result of the state charter, local town support, and general financing issues that confronted all railroads in that era. The important point is that out of this piecemeal construction, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe acquired control over its own direct line into Kansas City.