This iron spike had a small copper plate attached to its top, with two thin wires connected to the telegraph lines that stretched back to the East and across to the West to San Francisco. Stanford was to use a silver-plated maul to tap the spike gently into place; wrapped around its handle were two thin wires, also connected to the telegraph line. When the maul hit the plate, the connection would be complete. All telegraph offices around the nation were on alert for the moment, though the local duty telegrapher warned his superiors far away that once he saw that the blow had come, he would tap three dots on his own line to confirm what the hammer-and-spike connection itself, its signal so weak, might not.
The time was coming fast. The Jupiter and the No. 119 were eased gently toward each other over these final rails. Photographs were taken, hands were shaken. The gold and silver and alloy spikes were dropped into their respective holes and left alone. Workmen started the two iron spikes into the wood—including the one with the copper plate on top, with its wire connected to New York—and left them standing upright, ready for the final blows. A minister from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, offered a valedictory prayer, no more or less platitudinous but mercifully briefer than the speeches that had been offered in the hours since the two locomotives had come into mutual view.
The chief of Union Pacific, Thomas Durant, then knelt, poised to hit the unconnected iron spike; Leland Stanford, the thin wire trailing from within his right hand, likewise fell into a state of genuflection, raised his maul, and glanced back at the telegrapher. In unison both men flexed arms, then dropped their fists and lightly tapped their iron spikes into the wood, while simultaneously the operator tapped his three dots and theatrically whispered to the two suited and kneeling men, “OK.” Around the nation, the word DONE was flashed to a thousand telegraph offices, and a brief bacchanal erupted, inaugurated by the connection, the signal, the event, which in a memorable instant united the rail lines and made a six-month overland journey from New York to California achievable, affordable, and doable in less than a week.
The cannon fire, the bands, the steam whistles, the train horns, the rockets and the mortars, the marching bands, the sudden paradings and the singings, spontaneous or not, of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the church bells and fire alarms and gongs and every train whistle on the entire Union Pacific system—America erupted in such a sound as could have been heard from space. Durant and Stanford shook hands and proclaimed yet more platitudes; the trains edged forward and touched cowcatchers; champagne bottles were opened and foamed stupidly; train engineers reached dangerously across hot metal plates to embrace one another; Chinese suddenly became Irish; and so many people stole the ties that replaced the hurriedly squirreled-away laurel tie (destined, like the precious spikes, for displays, parades, and final glass encasement in museums) that it was feared the line could never be united, because every tie was the last tie, and each was carved up and torn away until guards had to be set beside the line.
There is a particular poignancy to the story, though. For even though he arranged so much of the detail that led to the road’s creation—legislative (for there had to be a Pacific Railroad Bill passed through a divided and fractious Congress), financial (massive sums had to be raised from skeptical and impatient bankers; this short section in Utah alone cost $12 million), and technical (making precise calculations for the ascent of the Donner Pass, working out the curvature of the tunnels and the necessary gradients beside the Truckee River)—Theodore Dehone Judah himself did not live to see and enjoy the realization of his dream. He was bitten by a mosquito in 1863 on one of his transits through Panama and died that autumn. The ceremony had to go ahead without him—and given the profiteering nature of most of the participants who gathered that day, it did so with no more than a perfunctory mention, the briefest nods of acknowledgment. Stanford, Durant, Lincoln—these are the remembered names. Though he has a mountain at the summit of Donner Pass named for him, and a plaque in a park in Sacramento, Theodore Dehone Judah has nowadays all but vanished. Amid all the sound and fury at Promontory Summit in May 1869, he was barely noticed or acknowledged.
And then the crowds melted away, and the summit became quiet and dusty and deserted once again—until the first trains started chuffing by, en route between, if not New York and San Francisco, then at least Omaha and Sacramento. No one suggested that the achievement of that May afternoon had really been for so underwhelming a connection: potential was what the celebration was all about. But the truth was that it would be a while yet before the full realization of Judah’s dream: a clear run from New York to San Francisco. It would be four more years before a bridge was thrown across the Missouri, six more months before a railway line was established between San Francisco and Sacramento. People wishing to go from coast to coast might now do it, for sure; but until March 1873 they had to get down from their train in Council Bluffs and take the ferry across to the terminal in Omaha before resuming what would then be a quite uninterrupted ride to the coast. The bridge was crucial, symbolically. Its third successor still stands; nowadays it groans with slow-growling trains hauling wagons of coal and wheat and corn across the Big Muddy. Amtrak passenger trains crawl across it, too, invariably running late.
There would soon be many other lines built across the country and scores of others constructed to run north and, to a lesser extent, south. Fifty years after the ceremony in Utah, there were 250,000 miles of track that seemingly connected every town and hamlet with almost every other. The smallest of places invariably had a train. There is a famous depot in Winesburg, Ohio. In the classic Western comedy Ruggles of Red Gap, Charles Laughton, playing Ruggles the butler, leaves his bags with a kindly stationmaster in Red Gap, Oregon. And when I wandered the country to all the towns called Paradise, my old Official Guide showed me, deep in the Union Pacific timetables, train No. 545, which would bring farmers’ wives who had been shopping in Salina back home to Paradise, Kansas, each evening at six o’clock, in time to make their husbands’ dinner. Ninety-six percent of Americans, when they went anywhere in the late nineteenth century, went by train.
Freight is the business of what remains of America’s railroads today; and not surprisingly it is at the nation’s center, the omphalos that is Omaha and Council Bluffs and the flat countryside nearby, where freight has its most vivid expression.
It is a railroad phenomenon unrivaled for size anywhere on the planet—the Bailey Yard, an eight-mile-long, three-thousand-acre conglomeration of hundreds of miles of rails and spurs and sidings, where freight cars from all over are sorted, detached from this train and moved to that train, run down long shallow man-made hills onto faraway lengths of line where new trains are being assembled, with coal trains from Wyoming being undone and some of the wagons sent to power stations in Georgia and others to smelters in Alabama and yet others to waiting coal ships headed for Korea, with wagons groaning under stacks of shipping containers from Chicago squealing past to be put on trains bound for a vessel already waiting to unload in Seattle, with a shipment of two hundred wind turbine blades from China brought by way of San Francisco and now to be placed on a mountaintop in Virginia, with lumbering wagons carrying thousands of tons of corn from Iowa headed to Galveston, or iron pellets from Montana heading off to a new smelter in Nevada—and all the cars carrying these and a thousand more mosaic morsels of a vast economy being shifted and rolled and detached and moved and relocked together in a complex computer-controlled dance that the software makers have destined to be quickly accomplished and efficiently handled in as timely and cost-effective and profitable a manner as possible on the various just-in-time schedules that the owners and customers demand.
This is what goes on in Bailey Yard, and Edd Bailey, the onetime blacksmith who worked in a wagon repair shop in Cheyenne and went on to be Union Pacific president, after whom this giant facility was named, could fairly be said to have been familiar with every task accomplished by the thousands who work there, and could most likely have done all of them himself.
The three-thousand-acre site where this all happens is known in railwayspeak as a classification yard, and it is said to be the largest in the world (as Omaha’s Harriman Street control bunker is similarly said to be the largest railroad operations center in the world; everything about Union Pacific is massive, on a global scale). It is also said to offer a daily litmus test of the health of America’s economy. The more business Bailey Yard is doing, the healthier the nation’s balance sheet.
It entirely envelops the town in which it is sited, North Platte, which in the 1930s was a settlement “with no traffic lights; people and vehicles bustle about in unrestrained, comfortable, small-town fashion.” Almost every establishment then sported a portrait of Buffalo Bill Cody, who was essentially North Platte’s patron saint. Nowadays almost every establishment sports the red-and-white-striped shield that is the Union Pacific logo. If ever there existed a railway company town, this is it, and as the railroad’s fortune goes, so goes that of North Platte, Nebraska.
Trains take passengers—and freight, for that matter—only so far: they travel from station to station, not from house to house. And when Henry Ford created a machine, his Model T, a flivver, that for a few hundred dollars and some stoicism on the driver’s part would indeed allow a rider to drive himself and his passengers to and from his very home, that changed everything, once again. So far as human cargo was concerned, the brief supremacy of the train was brought suddenly low by the motor car. Trains required that you travel as the railroad demanded, according to its schedule, along its routes. The automobile, on the other hand, returned to the traveler his freedom to go where he wished, as he wished, and when he wished—and at a velocity never before imagined or known.
Not that early travel by automobile was exactly a picnic. Not long after their invention, cars became fashionable playthings for the adventurous, but the condition of the roads over which they were obliged to travel often rendered the adventure more like a serious expedition, not to be undertaken lightly.
By the time America’s roadways had extended their tendrils clear across the nation, it became fashionable among the adventurous, with their early motors cars, to attempt to ride along them—not so much as pioneers or settlers, nor for the lure of religion or gold, but for the sheer pleasure of travel. For such explorers, there was much advice on offer:
To begin with, limit your personal outfit to a minimum, allowing only a suitcase to each person, and ship your trunk. Use khaki or old loose clothing. Some wraps and a tarpaulin to protect you against cool nights and provide cover in the case of being compelled to sleep outdoors are essential. Amber glasses, not too dark, will protect your eyes against the glare of the desert. You will, of course, want a camera, but remember that the high lights of the far west will require a smaller shutter opening and shorter exposure than the eastern atmosphere.
Carry sixty feet of 5/8-inch Manila rope, a pointed spade, small axe with the blade protected by a leather sheet, a camp lantern, a collapsible canvas bucket with spout and a duffle bag for the extra clothing and wraps. Start out with new tires all around, of the same size if possible, and two extra tires also, with four extra inner tubes. Select a tire with tough fabric; this is economical and will save annoyance. Use only the best grade of lubricating oil and carry a couple of one-gallon cans on running-board as extra supply, because you may not always be able to get the good oil you ought to use.
And, mark this well, carry two three-gallon canvas desert water bags, then see that they are filled each morning. Give your car a careful inspection each day for loose bolts or nuts and watch grease cups and oil cups. Carry two sets of chains and two jacks, and add to your usual tool equipment a coil of soft iron wire, a spool of copper wire and some extra spark plugs.
West of the Missouri carry a small commissary of provisions, consisting of canned meat, sardines, crackers, fresh fruit or canned pineapples and some milk chocolate for lunches. The lack of humidity in the desert sections, combined with the prevalence of hard water west of the Missouri River is liable to cause the hair to become dry and to cause chaps and blisters on the face and hands as well as cause the fingernails to become brittle and easily broken. To prevent this, carry a jar of cream and a good hair cleanser. Use them every night.
The want of pomade and cold cream notwithstanding, what the coming millions of American car owners really needed were proper roads—and being Americans, the best roads in the world. In 1919, Dwight Eisenhower journeyed along the stuttering web of highways that existed between Washington and San Francisco, and during his presidency forty years later, he delivered to American drivers the road system they wanted. In doing so, he would helped bring to an end the golden years of the railway. But at the same time, he succeeded in binding the nation even more closely together, this time by car.
MAJOR EISENHOWER’S EPIPHANIC EXPEDITION
That dark evening in Gettysburg it was raining heavily, and the pages of the diary were getting wet. I had managed to keep my Exxon road map dry, however, and in the dim light, I could just about see on it the way to go. From the hotel on the town’s central square, I was to turn right and head out on Chambersburg Street, drive for a mile to the junction with West Street, and there jog up a little to the north, then straighten out and head back out west again. In three thousand two hundred and some miles, a few weeks of none-too-hard driving, I should reach the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
This was possibly what the young Eisenhower said to himself here on a scorching hot Tuesday afternoon in the summer of 1919. It was also what I was betting on, on that dank autumn evening ninety-two years later, as I turned the Land Rover onto the roadway and started to follow Ike’s exact directions, just as they had been typewritten onto the now dampening pages of my copy of his ragged old diary.
He had written his journal—a slender volume, not thirty pages in all—very much in the clipped military vernacular that was expected of him. It was terse, matter-of-fact, amply salted with abbreviations, acronyms, and paragraphs of technical jargon, and with not an ounce of romance—despite the adventure’s being, and for many still remaining, a thing of almost unbearably romantic association. He was crossing his country, coast to coast, and all of it by road. Most Americans then saw this as the stuff of barely imaginable dreams.
In 1919 the now fast-mechanizing America was becoming a country whose people seemed preternaturally inclined to travel. A social change was in process, with plenty of available money and new transportation technologies fueling it eagerly. Gertrude Stein wrote of America of the time as a space, and a space of time, that was always and forever filled with movement.
There was ample reason. World War I was over in Europe, and demobilized soldiers were back from the front, flush with hoarded cash. A Model T Ford or a Chevrolet 490 cost less than $400, little more than three months’ pay. Four million cars were already on the roads, Ford was selling six hundred thousand of its machines a year, one American in eight already owned a car, and the number would be up to one in six by the 1920s. Farmers were buying small trucks—a quarter of a million were in use in 1916—to haul their produce to market and to collect their fertilizer from the train depot. The stagecoach had all but vanished—although there were still twenty million horses used for conveying people and goods of all kinds—and bus services were beginning to transport the less wealthy from city to city. The taximeter had been invented, and motor taxicabs were available in most cities. The concept of the joyride was quite new and being enthusiastically tested. Industries were springing up close to sources of iron, coal, or water; workers were needed from all over to man them, and migrations were encouraged. The roar of the Roaring Twenties was as much the thunder of internal combustion engines running at full tilt as ever it was the screech of the jazz band on the dance-hall floor.
America’s roads were at the time a national disgrace, but there were plenty of them, with nearly three million miles in use. Only a tenth of these, some 369,000 miles in 1919, were paved with any kind of lasting s
urface. The rest were made of dirt and in a generally appalling condition—with miles of chassis-deep mud the consistency of horse glue, with hundreds of broken bridges, with break-back mountain passes of solid rock, with faint trails that merely sifted their way through blowing desert sands and then quietly vanished, leaving the traveler utterly lost.
Despite the very obviously growing demands being made on them, the country’s roads were simply not keeping up. Their dire state presented a perpetual hindrance to trade, an abiding nuisance to agriculture, and a profound inconvenience to the traveling public. It cost an American farmer almost three times as much to haul a ton of produce as it cost his fermier colleague in France. A congressional report of the time noted drily that to move a peach twenty miles from a Georgia orchard to Atlanta by road cost every bit as much as it did to move one three thousand miles by rail from California to New York.
Lobbying groups of enthusiastic car drivers and automobile makers sprang up in Washington to complain and to press the government to intervene. They wanted a properly funded federal roads plan, which would prevent this authority from being left entirely to the states, with their lack of oversight and the malign local influence of cronyism and corruption. The League of American Wheelmen was among the first to complain. The title of its regular publication said it all: Good Roads was what it was called and what it demanded.*
The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers Page 27