The next morning, Lincoln, his friends the Puseys, and other citizens of the town strolled up a ravine to the top of the bluff, to view the landscape. From the point where he stood, now marked with a stone shaft and a placard, the vast floodplain of the Missouri stretched for twenty miles north and south and for four miles to the west, to Omaha. What he saw was similar to what Lewis and Clark had seen fifty-five years earlier, in 1804, when they stood on the same bluff. (Their visit is also marked by a statue and a placard.) In 1859 as in 1804, there were no railroad tracks crossing each other, no houses, only unbroken fields of wild grass and sunflowers, but there were a few streets in the rapidly growing village of Omaha running up and down the river hills.
It is unknown whether Lincoln knew Lewis and Clark had been there. Certainly he knew that they were the first Americans to cross the continent, east to west, and that they had reported there was no all-water route.
To his friend Pusey, Lincoln said, “Not one, but many railroads will center here.”36 The next day, in answer to his question, he learned from Dodge how right he had been. He thus began an association with Dodge that would make the two of them the great figures of the Union Pacific Railroad.
IN 1859, one of the most prominent newspaper editors in America, Horace Greeley—founder and editor of the New York Tribune—made a famous trip west to California. He published his account of the trip in his 1860 book An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859. “Let us resolve to have a railroad to the Pacific—to have it soon,” he wrote. “It will add more to the strength and wealth of our country than would the acquisition of a dozen Cubas.” He said he had made the long, fatiguing journey in order to “do something toward the early construction of the Pacific Rail road; and I trust that it has not been made wholly in vain.” But he also said that part of the route he covered, the part over the Humboldt Valley in Nevada and in the desert beyond, was unfit for human life. “I thought I had seen barrenness before,” he wrote, but in that territory “famine sits enthroned, and waves his scepter over a dominion expressly made for him.”37
DODGE returned to Council Bluffs, but not to his businesses. He wanted to build the railroad to the Pacific; he loved doing surveys through virgin country; he loved the life of the camp. He continued to roam up the Platte. Lincoln went into the race for the Republican nomination for president. Norman Judd, who was working for him, wrote to Dodge in May 1860, “I want you to come to the Republican convention at Chicago and do what you can to help nominate Lincoln.”38 Dodge did, along with a strong group of Iowa delegates who were connected with the Rock Island line, including H. M. Hoxie of Des Moines, who later received the contract to construct the first one hundred miles of the Union Pacific; John Kasson of Des Moines, attorney for the railroad and a prominent Republican; J. B. Grinnell, who founded the town and college of Grinnell along the route of the M&M; and others.
In Chicago, Dodge and most of the Iowa delegates joined with other railroad men who considered Lincoln’s nomination and election as vital to their plans to build the Pacific road west from Council Bluffs along the forty-second parallel. They included John Dix, president of the Rock Island, Durant, Farnam, Judd, and others. Together, they were able to get John Kasson to write the railroad plank for the Republican platform, calling for the government to support a transcontinental railroad.III Along with all the railroad men from Illinois, they worked where and how they could for Lincoln—who was appreciative, of course, but who had bigger things on his mind than even the transcontinental railroad, starting with slavery. Dodge, Judd, and the others used every opportunity to let the Iowa and Illinois delegates know that with Lincoln the nation would have a president whose program was bound to include the building of the Pacific railroad along the line of the forty-second parallel.
On issues that had nothing directly to do with the transcontinental railroad, Lincoln was elected. In all the excitement that followed, the railroad men stayed at work. Peter Reed, a friend of Dodge from Moline, went to Springfield, Illinois, and on December 14, 1860, wrote to Dodge. He said he had had a private audience with Lincoln and “I called his attention to the needs of the people of Nebraska and the western slope of Iowa. I said to him that our interest had been badly neglected. I told him that I expected to see some men from Council Bluffs in regard to this matter and that you were one of them. He said that his sympathies were with the border people, as he was a border man himself. I think that we are all right with Mr. Lincoln, especially as we have N. B. Judd with us.”39
Dodge wanted to add his own weight. In early March 1861, just before Lincoln’s inauguration, he joined Farnam and Durant to go to Washington. He wrote his wife, “I came here with Farnam, Durant [and some others] and we are busy before the railroad committees. Compromise measures have passed the House but will be killed in the Senate.”40
Dodge’s group was in the capital on the eve of civil war, contending for a single route for the Pacific railroad, to run from Council Bluffs straight west. Judd was there and helping, although his mind was more on getting the ambassadorship to Germany (which he did). Taking into account all that was going on around Lincoln’s inaugural, it seems near impossible that Dodge and the others were there arguing for their own version of the railroad—but it was happening. Lincoln, on the train from Springfield as he headed east, had taken a turn at driving the locomotive.
Dodge went to the inaugural and told his wife, “Old Abe delivered the greatest speech of the age. It is backbone all over.” Then he got to the point: “It looks as though we can get all our measures through and then I’ll make tracks for home.”41
Two weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, Dodge and two office-seekers called on Lincoln to press the railroad. Dodge wrote his wife, “Politically the skies are dark. Lincoln has a hard task before him, but he says that he thinks he can bring the country out all right. . . . I have carried all my points except one.”42
Dodge went off to New York, where he agreed to drop his personal business in Council Bluffs and identify himself with the Rock Island railroad. Almost a month later, on April 12, 1861, the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter and the Civil War was under way. Dodge put the railroad aside and joined the army. Holding the country together north and south was more important to him than linking it together east and west. But the latter aim never left his mind, or Lincoln’s.
* * *
I. The bed of a railroad track.
II. John A. Dix, president; Henry Farnam, the road’s builder; and Doc Durant, who was an investor and became one of America’s greatest and most successful manipulators and is generally regarded as one of the shrewdest railroad financiers.
III. “A Railroad to the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the interests of the whole country; the Federal Government ought to render immediate and efficient aid in its construction.”
Chapter Two
GETTING TO CALIFORNIA
1848–1859
Oh, California—that’s the land for me!
I’m going to Sacramento with my washbowl on my knee!
LEWIS AND CLARK had led the way to the Pacific. They did so by foot, pole, paddle, sail, or on horseback, whatever worked and whatever they had available. No progress had been made in transportation since ancient Greece or Rome, and none when they got back to civilization, in 1806. Steam power was first applied to boats the following year, and two decades later to the development of the steam-driven locomotive. George Washington could travel no faster than Julius Caesar, but Andrew Jackson could go upstream at a fair pace, and James K. Polk could travel at twenty miles an hour or more overland. The harnessing of steam power brought greater change in how men lived and moved than had ever before been experienced, and thus changed almost everything, but it meant nothing outside the seaboard or away from a major river, or until a track had been laid connecting one point with another.
In 1846, the young republic had completed the process of stretching the boundaries of the nation to the Pacific, in th
e north through a treaty with Great Britain that extended the existing continental line along the forty-ninth parallel; in the south, in 1848, by taking California and other Southwestern territory from Mexico. In Oregon the good land and bountiful rainfall had attracted Americans, but they could only get there via the Platte River Valley and then up the wagon route through the mountains.
Throughout the Pacific Coast, the territories from California north to Washington were like overseas colonies: immensely valuable, but so far away. They could be reached by sea—but the United States had nothing like a two-ocean navy—or overland via carts drawn by horses and oxen. But it took seemingly forever. Americans knew how difficult or impossible it was to defend overseas colonies—even for Great Britain, with the mightiest fleet of all. The French could not hold on to Haiti, or Canada, or Louisiana, just as the British could not hold their North American colonies.
A land communication between the mother country and the colonies was critical—but until the coming of the railroad, the distances separating the United States east of the Missouri from its Western colonies precluded any significant connection save by sea. That meant going around the continent of South America or making a hazardous trip over the Isthmus at Panama. If the United States was to be what Jefferson had dreamed of, an empire of liberty stretching from sea to shining sea, it was imperative that a transcontinental railroad be built as soon as possible.
But where? As noted, up until Lincoln’s inauguration, the slave states blocked the free states and vice versa. This was so even though, after 1848 and the discovery of gold on a branch of the American River about forty miles west of present-day Sacramento, everyone agreed on the need. Indeed, it sometimes seemed as if everyone were going to California. Adventurers came from all parts of the United States and all over the world, from China and Australia, from Europe, from everywhere. By the end of 1849, the population of California was swelling, with more coming. How they got there, with no railroad, is a long story.
CHARLES Crocker said later, “I built the Central Pacific.”1 Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Theodore Judah, and Mark Hopkins could say the same or something near it. For sure, Crocker had lots of help, and people to point the way—but he was the one who could claim without blushing that he built it.
Born in Troy, New York, on September 16, 1822, Crocker commenced selling apples and oranges at nine years of age, then carrying newspapers. “I was always apt at trade, when a boy I would swap knives and could always get ahead. I was a natural leader in everything.” He moved to Vermont to make a living, but “I was too fast for that country. Everything there was quiet and staid. You didn’t dare laugh all day Sunday until sundown came.” He struggled with poverty, working sixteen hours a day for $11 a month. He never went to any school beyond eighth grade. In his twenties, he was certain he could do whatever was required at any job or trade. He was about five feet ten or eleven inches tall, with smooth clear skin, blue eyes, a high forehead, and a tremendous appetite. He was, in many ways, a typical American.2
In 1849, he got gold fever and gathered together his two brothers and four other young men. He purchased four horses and two wagons and his party made its way to South Bend, Indiana, where the members spent the winter working to make some money. In the spring they took off for St. Louis. At Quincy, Illinois, on the bank of the Mississippi, Crocker learned that the Missouri River was still frozen up, so he used the enforced wait to lay in a supply of corn, which he had the young men shell. Then he took the corn down to St. Louis, with instructions for the others to make their way overland with the horses and wagons through Iowa to the Missouri River. In St. Louis he purchased more goods, and set off on the first steamer that ascended the river that spring.
Near Council Bluffs, Crocker reunited with his men. They were all appalled at the price of supplies and food—flour was $25 a barrel and scarce at that. They were offered $3 a bushel for their shelled corn but turned it down. Crocker insisted on staying on the east bank for ten days, to let the horses fatten up on the grass and to wait for the grass on the west bank to grow high enough to pasture the horses. Finally, on May 14, they rafted the river and “the next day started on our trip leaving civilization behind us.”3
Crocker’s foresight was rewarded. Thanks to the shelled corn in one of the wagons, the party could travel faster than those who depended on grass alone. When they got to the Platte River, the road was lined with teams, so much so that they were always in view. Crocker’s party made about thirty miles a day, in part thanks to his leadership. “They would all gather around me and want to know what to do,” he later said.4 Once, when one of his horses strayed away, he went looking and found the horse. The men who were supposed to be looking after the animal were sitting on the banks of the river playing cards. Crocker brought them to the camp, called for all the cards, burned them, and gave a blistering lecture: “We are going across the plains. We don’t know where we are going. We don’t know what is before us. If we don’t reserve all our power we might not get to California. It won’t do to play cards. We must have our wits about us, watch our horses, and keep everything in ship-shape.”5
The Crocker party was going up the Platte River on its northern bank. The Platte, as everyone who traveled it then or now knows, runs a mile wide and an inch deep, with innumerable sandbars and willow stands, and a constant shifting of channels. It was and is immensely picturesque and tremendously irritating to those who had to cross it. Crocker did not. He was on the Great Plains of North America, which stretched out forever under an infinity of bright-blue sky, except when a storm hit, cutting the vision down to nothing. The Plains were flat or gently rolling.
Robert Louis Stevenson described Nebraska: “We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression—on the Plains. . . . I spied in vain for something new. It was a world almost without a feature, an empty sky, an empty earth, front and back. . . . The green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven. . . . Innumerable wild sunflowers bloomed in a continuous flower-bed [and] grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution . . . in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line of the horizon.”6
On May 25, Crocker’s party were camping beside the Platte River, eating supper in a tent. A powerful wind came up, blew down the tent, and scattered the meal. The men’s hats followed along with their plates and pots, all gone. A typical day on the Great Plains. On June 2, the party passed Fort Laramie in Nebraska Territory, on the North Platte branch of the river, where they had someone shoe their horses (they were entering rocky ground) at 25 cents per shoe. There too they met the legendary mountain man and guide Kit Carson, who had brought on a drove of mules from Taos, New Mexico, to sell to California-bound parties.
On June 9, the party crossed the North Platte on the Mormon Ferry, paying $4 for each wagon and 25 cents for horses. The ferrymen told Crocker that twenty-five hundred teams had already crossed.7 Following them, Crocker drove across a barren, sandy, alkali country twenty-eight miles without water to the Sweetwater River, flowing east out of South Pass in the Wind River Range of the Rockies.
On June 15, Crocker stood on the summit of the Rockies at South Pass, seven thousand feet above the sea. Although he was on the Continental Divide, it was “on a plane so level we could not tell by the eye which way it sloped.” The party found and drank at Pacific Spring, the first water they had encountered that flowed west. By June 18, they had covered another seventy-five miles across inhospitable land to make it to Green River. There the men camped to wait their turn for the ferry, paying $7 for each wagon. Because no grass grew around there—it was all grazed away—they drove the horses two miles down the river, to a meadow, for the night. By this time Crocker had in his company about twenty horses and ten men. He would put two men out on guard duty with the horses. On this night it was Crocker’s and C. B. DeLamater’s turn. Since they were the first party there, they selected the cho
icest spot and picketed the horses.
Another party, with about fifty horses and mules and half a dozen men, came up and grumbled about Crocker’s taking the best ground. Toward sunset, Crocker and DeLamater drove their horses down to the river to drink; on returning, they found the new party had staked their horses and mules in the choice spot.
“That ground is ours,” said Crocker. He drove their animals off and staked out his horses. The newcomers were very abusive and threatened to pull Crocker’s stakes.
“You do, if you dare,” Crocker said, as he pulled a pistol and proclaimed his right to the good spot. After some shouting and threats, the newcomers backed down. This was but one of a number of instances when Crocker had to use his pistol to uphold his rights, something he was proud of: he later told an interviewer that “a man who is well assured of his own position and shows bold front, need not fear anybody.”8 And DeLamater said of him, “Charley would look at another man’s pistol and break out in one of his hearty laughs. . . . He was always cool and self-possessed in the presence of difficulties—courageous in maintaining his own rights, never intentionally encroaching upon the rights of others.”9
Many adventures ensued as these young men crossed one of the most demanding, arduous, and exhausting landforms in the world. Crocker and his men would make frequent excursions to examine the picturesque features. DeLamater kept a diary: June 28, “Heavy hail storm. Hail as large as musket balls.” July 4, “Camp in Thousand Spring Valley—were awakened this morning by our guard firing a Salute in honor of the day. They burst one gun trying to make a big noise.”
On July 6, the party came to the Humboldt River, in the process passing the grave of a man killed less than a week earlier by an Indian. DeLamater wrote that, whereas “our hardships had been comparatively light this far,” as soon as they struck the Humboldt the hardships were “thick and fast.” The river—called the “Humbug” by the travelers—was overflowing because of melting mountain snow, so Crocker took them up to the bluffs and across sagebrush and alkali flats to get some grass, camping during the day and traveling at night, all the way to the “sink of the Humboldt.” There “the river spreads out in meadows and sinks into the earth,” DeLamater wrote, but “we fared better than thousands of others. I never saw so much suffering in all my life. We gave medicine here, a little food there, but had to pass on with the crowd, striving to reach the goal, or our fate might be as theirs—sickness—a lonely death—and a shallow nameless grave.”10
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