I need to thank the librarians at the University of Montana, the Missoula City Library, the Helena Public Library, Bonnie Hardwick at the Bancroft Library at the University of California in Berkeley, Susi Krasnoo, Dan Lewis, and the staff at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, Jeffrey Spencer at the historic General Dodge House in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Lee Mortensen of the Nevada Historical Society in Reno, the staff of the California State Railroad Museum Library in Sacramento, Richard Sharp at the Library of Congress, Bill Slaughter at the Archives, Church of Latter Day Saints Library, the Hancock County Library in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and the staffs of many county historical or city historical museums that Hugh and I visited in 1997–98.
Ana DeBevoise, on Alice Mayhew’s staff, has been a continual source of support, good thinking, and cheerfulness. The people at Simon & Schuster, from Carolyn Reidy and David Rosenthal on down, have done their usual and as always quite superb and professional job, which I have come to expect but which always makes me feel so lucky. Thanks to all of them.
A heartfelt thanks to the men and women who run the railroad museums in Sacramento (one of the best) and Ogden (also among the best) and Omaha (ditto). Hugh and I spent days examining the exhibits, learning, asking questions.
Many railroad buffs were kind enough to send along information. Among them, Nathan Mazer, Bruce Cooper, and Ray Haycox, Jr. A special thanks to Brad Joseph, who built two wonderful models for me, one of the Golden Spike scene at Promontory, Utah, and the other of the drive of the Central Pacific over the Sierra Nevada mountains. Others who helped in various ways are Helen Wayland of the Colfax Historical Society and Joel Skornika of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art, Madison, Wisconsin.
Hugh and I are grateful to Chairman Richard Davidson, Ike Evans, Dennis Duffy, Carl Bradley, Brenda Mainwaring and Dave Bowler of the Union Pacific, and Philip Anschutz of the Anschutz Corporation, for making it possible for us to ride the rails. I wanted to see the track and grade from up front on a train on the original line. Thanks to Davidson and the UP people, as well as my dear friend Ken Rendell, we rode in the engine on a Union Pacific diesel locomotive from Sacramento to Sparks, Nevada (right next to Reno). Together Ken, Hugh, and I were in the cab (with engineers Larry Mireles and Mike Metzger), going around California’s Cape Horn, climbing and descending the Sierra Nevada, having experiences of sight, sound, and touch that will never be forgotten.
At one point Mr. Mike Furtney of the railroad company, who was with us, said to me, “You know, Steve, there are thousands of men in this country who would pay us anything we might choose to ask to be up here on this ride.” I said I knew that, although at the time I was not aware of just how many train enthusiasts there are in the country. Mike said, “You take the controls for a while.” I said I wouldn’t dare. He said the engineer would be right behind me, and insisted. So I got to drive a train up the Sierra Nevada, tooting on the whistle before every crossing. Somehow they didn’t allow me to stay at the controls for the trip down the mountain.
On the return trip, led by Dave Bowler, we got off and walked through the tunnel at the summit—No. 6, as it was called in 1867. We picked up some spikes and a fishplate. For anyone who has been there and is aware of how men armed only with drills, sledgehammers, and black powder drove a tunnel through that mountain, it is a source of awe and astonishment.
Mr. Davidson gave me and Moira permission to ride in a special train going from Omaha to Sacramento for a steam-engine display. The locomotive would be No. 844, with the legendary Stephen Lee as engineer. The fireman was Lynn Nystrom. This was the last steam engine bought by the UP—in 1943—and it was used until the late 1950s, then neglected, then restored to become the pride of the railroad today.
We rode from Omaha to Sparks in such splendor as we had never imagined. Ken Rendell was with us for the first half of the trip, Richard Lamm for the second. Bob Kreiger was the engineer for the second cab, also steam, called No. 3985.
For the most part we rode in the cab, pulling into sidings for the night. It was extraordinary. I counted more than thirty-seven handles and knobs on the cab’s panel in front of me, none with an explanation of how they worked or why they were there. But throughout the trip Steve Lee would adjust them without looking at them.
The engine is sacred for many reasons. It is in the cab of a locomotive that a mere man can control all that power, it is from there and there only that a man riding on a train can see ahead. It is the eyes, ears, brains, motor power, and central nervous system for the long string of cars it is pulling along.
To be in the locomotive of a steam-driven train, riding from Omaha to Reno, was for me, Moira, Ken, and Dick a memorable experience. First of all, Steve Lee and Lynn Nystrom are big guys, 250 or more pounds each, who put every ounce of themselves into their job, which they love more than nearly anyone I’ve ever met. They are impressive because of their size, their skill, and their personalities. Nearly all the towns we went through in Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada are railroad towns, and so far as we could tell every adult living there knew Steve, Bob, and Lynn. The engineers would whistle, the spectators would wave.
What impressed me the most, however, was the size of the crowds. The local newspaper or the radio station had a small item the day before the UP’s 844 came through, announcing the trip. From what we could tell, every resident was beside the tracks, or up on a ridge we passed under, or out on a bluff that offered a view. Thousands of spectators. Tens of thousands. Among them were all ages and people from both sexes, every one of them with a camera.
I’ve led a life that makes me accustomed to people pointing cameras at me because of the man I’m with, whether a movie star or director or a top politician. I’ve never known anything like this. The size of the crowds, their curiosity, their involvement in the scene were stunning. Much of the time we were paralleling Interstate 80. When that happened, we caused a traffic jam. People went just as fast as the train—at sixty-one miles per hour—and gaped. At one point the automobiles were lined up seven full miles behind us. At rest stops, we would see semi-truck drivers on top of their vans, taking pictures with their little cameras. I asked Steve Lee if he had ever stopped to take a picture of a semi-truck. He said no. He added that the semi-truck drivers never stopped to take a picture of a diesel locomotive.
It was then I learned how America has lost her heart to steam-driven locomotives.
One day on the trip we left the 844 for an afternoon in Cheyenne to go by automobile to the Ames Monument and then on to the site of the Dale Creek Bridge. We walked through the cuts that led to the bridge, where we gathered up some spikes and other items. The gorge itself is more than formidable. I can’t imagine any twenty-first-century engineer deciding to put a bridge across it. I’m sure there are some who might, but I don’t know them.
The most memorable feature of the trip was the presence of Don Snoddy, the historian of the Union Pacific, and Lynn Farrar, who held the same post for decades at the Southern Pacific. They ate meals with us, were with us in the observation car, sat with us at various sidings, and talked. They are wonderful sources. They know damn near everything about the railroads. As one example, riding north of Laramie, they began pointing out grading that had been abandoned. Every town on the line had a story to go with it. Don and Lynn pointed out what happened here, there, all over. They talked about how this was built, and that, or what this or that slang word meant. And anything else. It was a thrill for us to be with them for a week. Then they read the script and saved me from many, many errors. Don was also the driving force behind the trip from Omaha to Ogden.
My thanks to the Union Pacific for making it possible for me and Moira to take the trip that will always sparkle above all others for us.
Introduction
NEXT to winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery, building the first transcontinental railroad, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, was the greatest achievement of the American people in the nineteenth century. Not
until the completion of the Panama Canal in the early twentieth century was it rivaled as an engineering feat.
The railroad took brains, muscle, and sweat in quantities and scope never before put into a single project. It could not have been done without a representative, democratic political system; without skilled and ambitious engineers, most of whom had learned their craft in American colleges and honed it in the war; without bosses and foremen who had learned how to organize and lead men as officers in the Civil War; without free labor; without hardworking laborers who had learned how to take orders in the war; without those who came over to America in the thousands from China, seeking a fortune; without laborers speaking many languages and coming to America from every inhabited continent; without the trees and iron available in America; without capitalists willing to take high risks for great profit; without men willing to challenge all, at every level, in order to win all. Most of all, it could not have been done without teamwork.
The United States was less than one hundred years old when the Civil War was won, slavery abolished, and the first transcontinental railroad built. Not until nearly twenty years later did the Canadian Pacific span the Dominion, and that was after using countless American engineers and laborers. It was a quarter of a century after the completion of the American road that the Russians got started on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the Russians used more than two hundred thousand Chinese to do it, as compared with the American employment of ten thousand or so Chinese. In addition, the Russians had hundreds of thousands of convicts working on the line as slave laborers. Even at that it was not until thirty-two years after the American achievement that the Russians finished, and they did it as a government enterprise at a much higher cost with a road that was in nearly every way inferior. Still, the Trans-Siberian, at 5,338 miles, was the longest continuous railway on earth, and the Canadian Pacific, at 2,097 miles, was a bit longer than the Union Pacific and Central Pacific combined.
But the Americans did it first. And they did it even though the United States was the youngest of countries. It had proclaimed its independence in 1776, won it in 1783, bought the Louisiana Purchase (through which much of the Union Pacific ran) in 1803, added California and Nevada and Utah (through which the Central Pacific ran) to the Union in 1848, and completed the linking of the continent in 1869, thus ensuring an empire of liberty running from sea to shining sea.
HOW it was done is my subject. Why plays a role, of course, along with financing and the political argument, but how is the theme.
The cast of characters is immense. The workforce—primarily Chinese on the Central Pacific and Irish on the Union Pacific, but with people from everywhere on both lines—at its peak approached the size of the Civil War armies, with as many as fifteen thousand on each line.
Their leaders were the big men of the century. First of all Abraham Lincoln, who was the driving force. Then Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. These were the men who not only held the Union together north and south but who acted decisively at critical moments to bind the Union together east and west. One of these men was president, a second was soon to be president, the third turned down the presidency.
Supporting them were Grenville Dodge, a Union general who was the chief engineer of the Union Pacific and could be called America’s greatest railroad-builder; Jack and Dan Casement, who were also generals during the war and then the heads of construction for the line; and many engineers and foremen, all veterans, who made it happen. Dodge and nearly everyone else involved in building the road later commented that it could not have been done without the Civil War veterans and their experience. It was the war that taught them how to think big, how to organize grand projects, how to persevere.
The financiers could move money around faster than anyone could imagine. The Union Pacific was one of the two biggest corporations of its time (the other was the Central Pacific). It took imagination, brains, guts, and hard work, plus a willingness to experiment with new methods to organize and run it properly. Many participated, mainly under the leadership of Thomas “Doc” Durant, Oakes Ames, Oliver Ames, and others. For the Central Pacific, the leaders were California’s “Big Four”—Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins—plus Lewis Clement and his fellow engineers, James Harvey Strobridge as head of construction, and others. Critical to both lines was the Mormon leader, Brigham Young.
The “others” were led by the surveyors, the men who picked the route. They were latter-day Lewis and Clark types, out in the wilderness, attacked by Indians, living off buffalo, deer, elk, antelope, and ducks, leading a life we can only imagine today.
The surveyor who, above all the rest, earned everyone’s gratitude was Theodore Judah. To start with, the Central Pacific was his idea. In his extensive explorations of the Sierra Nevada, he found the mountain pass. Together with his wife, Anna, he persuaded the politicians—first in California, then in Washington—that it could be done, and demanded their support. Though there were many men involved, it was Judah above all others who saw that the line could be built but only with government aid, since only the government had the resources to pay for it.
Government aid, which began with Lincoln, took many forms. Without it, the line could not have been built, quite possibly would not have been started. With it, there were tremendous struggles, of which the key elements were these questions: Could more money be made by building it fast, or building it right? Was the profit in the construction, or in the running of the railroad? This led to great tension.
The problems the companies faced were similar. Nearly everything each line needed, including locomotives, rails, spikes, and much more, had to be shipped from the East Coast. For the Central Pacific, that meant transporting the material through Panama or around South America. For the Union Pacific, it meant across the Eastern United States, then over the Missouri River, with no bridges, then out to the construction site. For much of the route, even water had to be shipped, along with lumber. Whether the destination was Sacramento and beyond or Omaha and beyond, the costs were heart-stopping.
Except for Salt Lake City, there were no white settlements through which the lines were built. No white men lived in Nebraska west of Omaha, or in Wyoming, Utah, or Nevada. There was no market awaiting the coming of the train—or any product to haul back east—except the Mormon city, which was a long way away until the lines met. There were problems with Indians for the Union Pacific, Indians who had not been asked or consented or paid for the use of what they regarded as their lands. For the Central Pacific, there was the problem of digging tunnels through mountains made of granite. That these tunnels were attempted, then dug, was a mark of the American audacity and hubris.
The men who built the line had learned how to manage and direct in the Civil War, and there were many similarities, but one major difference. Unlike a battle, there was but one single decisive spot. The builders could not outflank an enemy, or attack in an unexpected place, or encircle. The end of track, the place where the rails gave out, was the only spot that mattered. Only there could the line advance, only there could the battle be joined. The workforce on both lines got so good at moving the end of track forward that they eventually could do so at almost the pace of a walking man. And doing so involved building a grade, laying ties, laying rails, spiking in rails, filling in ballast. Nothing like it had ever before been seen.
Urgency was the dominant emotion, because the government set it up as a race. The company that built more would get more. This was typically American and democratic. Had there been a referendum around the question “Do you want it built fast, or built well?” over 90 percent of the American people would have voted to build it fast.
Time, along with work, is a major theme in the building of the railroad. Before the locomotive, time hardly mattered. With the coming of the railroad, time became so important that popular phrases included “Time was,” or “Time is wasting,” or “Time’s up,” or “The train is leaving the station.” What is ca
lled “standard time” came about because of the railroads. Before that, localities set their own time. Because the railroads published schedules, the country was divided into four time zones. And it was the railroads that served as the symbol of the nineteenth-century revolution in technology. The locomotive was the greatest thing of the age. With it man conquered space and time.
IT could not have been done without the workers. Whether they came from Ireland or China or Germany or England or Central America or Africa or elsewhere, they were all Americans. Their chief characteristic was how hard they worked. Work in the mid–nineteenth century was different from work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Nearly everything was done by muscle power. The transcontinental railroad was the last great building project to be done mostly by hand. The dirt excavated for cuts through ridges was removed one handheld cart at a time. The dirt for filling a dip or a gorge in the ground was brought in by handcart. Some of the fills were enormous, hundreds of feet high and a quarter mile or more in length. Black powder was used to blast for tunnels, but only after handheld drills and sledgehammers had made an indentation deep enough to pack the powder. Making the grade, laying the ties, laying the rails, spiking in the rails, and everything else involved in building the road was backbreaking.
Yet it was done, generally without complaint, by free men who wanted to be there. That included the thousands of Chinese working for the Central Pacific. Contrary to myth, they were not brought over by the boatload to work for the railroad. Most of them were already in California. They were glad to get the work. Although they were physically small, their teamwork was so exemplary that they were able to accomplish feats we just stand astonished at today.
The Irish and the others who built the Union Pacific were also there by choice. They were mainly young ex-soldiers from both the Union and the Confederate armies, unmarried men who had no compelling reason to return home after Appomattox (especially the Confederates). They were men who had caught the wanderlust during the war, that most typical of all American desires, and who eagerly seized the opportunity to participate in the stupendous task of building a railroad across a wilderness.
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