Promptly at noon, the big watch of the walking boss snapped and he called out “Time!” Every man in the outfit heard him, as did the mules and horses. Everything stopped. The animals were unhitched and put to water. Then the men went to the boarding tent, where their appetites made even the coarsest fare taste good, if not delicious. At one o’clock, the shrill voice of the walking boss was heard and the men went back to work—although after the hearty meal it took a vast amount of profanity to get them stepping again.
The bosses, it was widely agreed, were not tyrants. The average grader had muscles like steel and could take care of himself in a rough-and-tumble fight, and anyway the bosses did not resort to pick handles. There were exceptions, but generally they ruled with comparative ease. And they got the grade done.
When the bosses couldn’t level the grade, the scrapers, drawn by oxen or up to four horses, were called in to do the job. When solid rock was encountered in a ridge line, which was seldom in the Great Plains, the men used hand drills and stuffed the hole with black powder. When the rocks blew apart, the remainder of the cut was dug out and leveled. A cut was done entirely by hand. The men would form an endless chain of wheelbarrows. For fills, the dirt was dumped in. The land yielded nothing but some limestone for masonry work. There was no gravel for ballast, so mainly sand was used.
At night, after supper, the men would play cards or sing songs, such as “Poor Paddy he works on the railroad” or “The great Pacific railway for California hail, bring on the locomotive, lay down the iron rail.” Others were “Pat Malloy,” “Whoop Along Liza Jane,” or “I’m a rambling rake of poverty, the son of a gamboleer.” The low notes of the Jew’s harps and harmonicas floated across the cool night air. The songs were sung almost regardless of harmony and in contempt of tune.
By mid-October 1865, the Omaha Weekly Herald reported that the graders were up to the Loup River (Columbus) and advance teams were rapidly making their way across the next hundred miles. Preparations were being made for putting in the foundations of the Loup Fork Bridge, which, at fifteen hundred feet in length, was “a great work in itself” and was scheduled to be erected in the spring of 1866.22 The trestles were being made in Chicago in accordance with measurements and instructions laid out by the surveyors.
BEHIND the graders came the track layers. In 1865, they made only forty miles, just beyond the Elkhorn River, and their story is best saved for later. Meanwhile, the white population of the Great Plains was increasing. Each year about a hundred thousand persons traveled either part or all of the way across the Plains. Many of them became a part of the 10 percent of transfrontier population occupying what the Census Bureau called the “vacant spaces on the density map.” Historian Oscar Winther comments: “They were the hunters, trappers, traders, miners, lumberjacks, soldiers, government agents, and cowmen; they were the vanguards of migrants en route from old to new locations; they were the packers, teamsters, stage and express men, sutlers, travelers, and floaters of all types.” It was estimated that they numbered 250,000 by 1870.23
DURANT’S problem was money. He brought much of it on himself by his extravagance. He had hoped to raise money through a subscription to Crédit Mobilier, but it had fallen flat. Then, with great fanfare, the UP tried a public stock subscription, but Charles Sherman, the general’s brother who was working for the UP, said that the offering failed so utterly that “not a dollar was subscribed.”24 Another director complained to Durant, “You do spend an awful pile of money.” He borrowed money at 19 percent per annum. “We were deeply in debt,” Oakes Ames recalled, “and very much embarrassed, and we were using our credit to the utmost extent in driving the work along.”25
Much of it couldn’t be helped. There was no timber, and only thin groves of cottonwood, so the immense amounts needed for ties, trestles, buildings, and other purposes had to be shipped up the Missouri River. The UP’s first locomotive, called the General Sherman, had arrived via this route along with two flatcars, with two other locomotives and more flatcars to follow in 1865. The Burnettizer—a machine that treated the cottonwood through a vacuum device that drew out the water in the trees, putting a zinc solution in its place—was also at hand.III Cottonwood made ties that were too soft and perishable, even when Burnettized, but the cost of importing hardwood was prohibitive.
Oakes Ames put in some more of his money and persuaded Cyrus H. McCormick, the inventor of the reaper, and others to buy stock in the Crédit Mobilier. Durant meanwhile drove the work as best he could, which meant primarily by telegraphic orders. He told the contractors to use cottonwood, which when treated would last for three years, long enough for train tracks coming from the east to reach Council Bluffs and thus reduce the cost of hardwood timber ties from Wisconsin. Other telegrams read, “How much track now laid how much do you lay per day?” “Increase your force on ties. Important the track should be laid faster, cant you lay one mile per day.” “What is the matter that you cant lay track faster.” “Run the Burnetizing machine night and day.” “I insist on being fully advised.”26
And so on. What Durant needed was to secure government loans on the track already laid, but the UP got nothing until it had completed acceptable track. Working at a furious pace, the crews managed in 1865 to finish forty miles of road with all the required sidings, station houses, and water stations before the weather laid them off.27
ONE young engineer working for the UP, James Maxwell, who had previously been employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad, was astonished by what he saw in the Platte River Valley: plenty of wild game, along with the excitement of exploring a new country and a little element of danger from hostile Indians to give zest to everything. In a memoir written in 1896, he said, “This was a grass country. On the river bottoms it grew to be over seven feet in height.” Some surveyors said the grass was as much as ten feet high. Maxwell went on, “In riding a buggy a person would have to stand up to see over the top of the grass. In running a line through such grass, he was liable to be lost.” That fall he thought it “very beautiful to see the fires at night, from the various camps, circling around the hills among the short grass, but when the grass in the bottom lands caught fire, it was a grand and appalling sight.” A young surveyor named H. K. Nichols wrote in his diary, “The valley is one of the most fertile I suppose in the states.”28
That fall of 1865, out on the Plains, the young surveyor Ferguson saw unusual sights. Near today’s Grand Island, “for a distance of ten miles the prairie is one vast prairie-dog village. For miles and miles the ground is completely covered with their holes, and on most of them, as far as the eye can reach, you will see them sitting upright on their haunches.” Some of the men shot and ate them, but not Ferguson.
At Fort Kearney, on the south bank of the Platte, there were some four hundred troops in quarters, both infantry and cavalry. At this point four men from the surveyors’ party said they were damned if they would go on, for it was here that the Indian danger became acute and would remain so until the Rocky Mountains. Here too the party received its military escort, a sixty-man company of the Twelfth Missouri Cavalry, which Dodge had just sent to Fort Kearney. “The soldiers were very much dissatisfied at this action,” Ferguson recorded, “and at times were on the point of rebelling against their officers. They said that they had enlisted for the war to fight rebels and not to go out into the western wilderness to fight Indians.” But when the party set out again the following day, half the Twelfth Missouri stayed with the surveyors while the other half stayed with the main party on the river.
Ferguson described the soldiers’ way of making camp. “It is a busy and lively sight,” he wrote, “after the day’s march to see the troopers busily engaged in rubbing down their animals, for whom they have quite an affection, calling them by pet names. Their campfires burn brightly after nightfall and the solemn tread of the sentinel, with bright gleaming carbine, assures us if, in the still hours of night we are attacked, the enemy will receive a warm reception.”
West of
Kearney, “the country becomes wilder and more desolate.” The grass grew several feet in the spring and summer but by mid-September was dead. Vast prairie fires illuminated the country at night, vast volumes of black smoke rose up during the day. “The air is full of flying cinders and the smell of burning grass. We come across vast herds of wild game, mostly antelope.” At night the party slept with loaded arms by their sides, additional ammunition cartridges in their hats beside their heads, along with their loaded revolvers.
The soldiers, who spent the day scouting to the north, often returned with antelope, deer, or part of an elk strapped behind their saddles. By October, the Platte was so low it could be forded everywhere, and at times the men would wade out to the small islands to gather in the grapes that grew in wild profusion.
On November 1, the party reached the hundredth meridian (near today’s Cozad, Nebraska), which had been the objective point. The men expected to return to Omaha, the soldiers to Fort Kearney. They were all eager to do so, for the nights were getting much colder. But their leaders held them over to triangulate the Platte. Finally, at daylight on November 10, they received permission to start home. “At the call of the bugle, the soldiers as one man flung themselves into the saddle and commenced the march.”
But in an hour, they saw two individuals approaching them, who turned out to be Jacob House and James A. Evans. House was a UP division engineer, and Evans a surveyor who had, at Dey’s orders, among other things, run the original line along the north bank of the Platte. They announced that they had come to take charge of the party, which was to continue its survey to the south, down to the Republican River. The decision to go on straight west had not yet been reached; the railroad might well bend to the south, then west to Denver. This news came as “a surprise and a great disappointment to us,” Ferguson recorded. Some of the party said they would not go on.
Evans dismounted and told those who refused to continue to step forward three paces. No one dared.
“All right, men,” Evans proclaimed. “Turn about and march back to the old camp.”
The troops joined the railroaders. The soldiers “complained a great deal. They said that in case of an attack they would leave us to ourselves and do nothing towards our defense.”
The next morning was “very cold.” Clouds laden with snow moved in. The men had to cross the Platte River, which was in places up to their armpits and terribly cold. The following day, “we passed the new-made graves of some twelve men who had recently been killed by the savages.” Snow began, and by mid-afternoon “we were in the midst of a furious storm.” The party pitched its tents in a cottonwood grove. “We all had a terrible night of it. The cold was severe and the ground was so damp and wet that it was next to impossible to sleep. The horses were fed with large quantities of cottonwood limbs.”
After two more dismal nights, Ferguson and the men and troopers started for the Republican. “We are now in the midst of the worst Indian country in the entire West,” he wrote. “It is the very stamping ground of the war parties of various tribes.” No wonder. “This is the great buffalo country of the West,” he noted, “and sometimes a black, surging mass can be seen extending in every direction as far as the eye can reach, the herd running up into thousands and thousands.” The soldiers wasted their ammunition by shooting them in sport, “leaving them on the ground for the wolf and the raven.”
Despite an abundance of animal life such as no modern man has ever seen, and only Lewis and Clark and their men and a few other white men had seen before, Ferguson was struck by the scene. “This is a terrible country,” he wrote, “the stillness, wildness and desolation of which is awful. Not a tree to be seen. The stillness too was perfectly awful, not a sign of man to be seen, and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal.”29
Shortly thereafter, the party returned to Omaha, the soldiers to Fort Kearney. They would start again, from the hundredth meridian, when the weather became fair.
THE 1864 Pacific Railroad Act required the UP to complete the first hundred miles of track by June 27, 1866. Durant had talked confidently of building that amount in 1865, but he didn’t come close. In September 1865, he confessed that the UP would be lucky to complete sixty miles by the end of the year, but he didn’t come close to that either. By December 31, the UP had laid forty miles of track. Because the 1864 bill had reduced the number of miles completed before the bonds would be given out from forty to twenty, that feat meant that, when the government commissioners accepted the UP’s forty miles of track, the railroad would get $640,000 of government bonds ($320,000 per twenty miles, or $16,000 per mile).
In addition, Durant had gathered together in Omaha a set of superb workers who were just waiting for the warm winds of spring before starting out again, either to lay track or to grade or survey. They were tough, hardy, eager. And with the war over, there were thousands of young men, all veterans of either the Union or the Confederate Army, who were looking for work. The UP’s first locomotive had arrived. Further, Durant had faced up to the need for reorganization, on which he expected to get started immediately.
Meanwhile, he was pushing his original surveyors as hard as he could. He had pulled Evans in, but Samuel Reed was still out there, working well beyond the valley of the Great Salt Lake into areas that were a long way away for the UP. Still, Durant wanted to know. In the fall, he had told Reed to find a route from Salt Lake to the Sierra Nevada.
Reed set out, intending to go via the valley of the Humboldt River to the valley of the Truckee, on the California-Nevada border. In November, he wrote to Durant. He was unhappy to report that he had not reached the Truckee, because of lack of water, but he had made a line from Salt Lake to the place where the Humboldt sank into the ground. After that the desert stopped him. Reed reported that he could run a line from the Salt Lake to the valley of the Humboldt “without a cut or fill exceeding 15 feet or grades exceeding 75 feet per mile.”30
That was good news, even though it would be a considerable time before either the UP or the CP could take advantage of it. But the anticipation was running at a fever pitch. The Denver-based Rocky Mountain News spoke for nearly all of America when it stated, “There is one theme everywhere present. The one moral, the one remedy for every evil, social, political, financial and industrial, the one immediate vital need of the entire Republic, is the Pacific Railroad.”31
The editors of the Railroad Record, however, were critical of the way Durant and company were laying the track. “We confess that we are not satisfied,” they wrote. “Neither is the country, which has a right to expect more vigor in its construction.” The sloth and poor-quality construction (for example, sand rather than gravel was being used for ballast), according to the Record, were “an insult to the generosity and magnanimity of the American public.”32
* * *
I. As it was, but when E. H. Harriman took over the road—which was bankrupt at the time, 1901—he straightened it out, using Dey’s original line.
II. Dodge was approximately at a spot on today’s Interstate 80, about twenty-five miles west of the junction of I-15 and I-80, at eight thousand feet of altitude, or fifteen feet short of the highest point on the I-80 system. There is a sign there that points to, alas, geographical features of the countryside rather than Dodge’s adventure.
III. The Burnettizer was a huge, one-hundred-by-five-foot cylinder, sent to Omaha by steamship. By 1866, the company had three of them. After the water was drained and the zinc solution put in, the ties were heated and dried. The ties cost 16 cents each to be processed. The UP saved money in building, but spent much more in replacing the cottonwood ties—but by then the railroad was completed. This was in accord with the general principle: Nail it down! Get the thing built! We can fix it up later.
Chapter Seven
THE CENTRAL PACIFIC ATTACKS THE SIERRA NEVADA
1865
IN 1862, Clarence King graduated from Yale’s distinguished Sheffield Scientific School. In 1863, he crossed the Great Basin a
nd the Sierra Nevada by mule, got a job with the California Geological Survey, began to build his reputation, and, still well short of his thirtieth birthday, landed another job. It was to do the Fortieth Parallel Survey for the federal government along the lines of what would become the first transcontinental railroad.
With a team of scientists, King examined the southeastern corner of Wyoming (today’s Cheyenne) through Utah and Nevada to the crest of the Sierra Nevada. His task on what became known as the “King Survey” was to describe the flora, fauna, minerals, and other natural features. He later became the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey.1
In his book Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, King wrote about those mountains based on his 1866 exploration: “For four hundred miles the Sierras are a definite ridge, broad and high, and having the form of a sea-wave.” On the eastern face, “buttresses of somber-hued rock jut at intervals from a steep wall.” On the western face, “long ridges of comparatively gentle outline” dominate. “But this sloping table is scored from summit to base by a system of parallel transverse canyons, distant from one another often less than twenty-five miles. They are ordinarily two or three thousand feet deep, falling at times in sheer, smooth-fronted cliffs, again in sweeping curves like the hull of a ship, with irregular, hilly flanks opening at last through gateways of low, rounded foot-hills out upon the horizontal plain of the San Joaquin and Sacramento. Every canyon carries a river, derived from constant melting of the perpetual snow.”
This western slope faces a moisture-laden, aerial current from the Pacific. The wind strikes first on the Coast Range, which forces it up, and it there discharges, as fog and rain, a great sum of moisture. “But being ever reinforced, it flows over their crest, and, hurrying eastward, strikes the Sierras at about four thousand feet.” Below, the foothills are habitually dry. Above, it is nearly always wet, for the wind condenses on the mountains’ higher portion a great amount of water that “piles upon the summits in the form of snow, which is absorbed upon the upper plateau by an exuberant growth of forest.”2
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