The profit went to the Crédit Mobilier, whose trustees on December 12, 1867, declared the firm’s first dividend: each holder of ten shares (at $1,000 per share par value) got $600 of the first mortgage bonds and six shares of UP stock, for a total cash payment of 76 percent on the investment. A handsome payoff, with more to come. Oakes Ames started to get congressmen to buy Crédit Mobilier stock. His motive, he later said, was: “We wanted capital and influence. Influence not in legislation alone, but on credit, good, wide, and a general favorable feeling.” He placed the stock with nine U.S. representatives and two U.S. senators, amounting in all to 160 shares for $16,000. Not much, considering the amounts the company was working with, but enough to threaten to set off the biggest scandal of the nineteenth century.50
AT the beginning of November, the Casements and their men had reached within a few miles of Cheyenne. The town had already held an election on August 10 and set up a city government. On September 19, Cheyenne’s first newspaper, the Daily Leader, had been printed. By October 12, the end of track was at Dead Pine Bluffs (now Pine Bluffs), within thirty-five miles of Cheyenne. By October 29, it was within seventeen miles, and the anticipatory tension mounted. The UP was nearly five hundred miles from Omaha.
Jack Casement, like Grenville Dodge, had hoped for more. He wanted to get over Sherman Pass and beyond Dale Creek down to Laramie, but it wasn’t to be. The biggest holdup was ties. Indians had chased tie cutters out of the canyons on the North Platte, so Reed had to buy ties from the Missouri River Valley and have them—inferior cottonwoods—shipped west by train.
Some directors boasted that the UP would finish by 1870 and a man could go from New York to San Francisco in a week. Horace Greeley’s newspaper commented, “It is hard to realise that so great a distance may be accomplished in so short a time.”51 But to the men on the spot, that 1870 promise sounded more like boast than fact. The supply line was longer and growing, thus the flow of material was tricky to coordinate and time. Dodge was hoping to pile in supplies at Cheyenne during the winter to prevent supply problems in the spring, but no one knew what the winter would be like.
On November 16, 1867, the lead article in the Chicago Tribune read: “Dated Cheyenne 11/14/67; Yesterday, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, track-laying on the UP was completed to the city of Cheyenne, and in a few moments the whistle of the locomotive was heard above the noise of the hammers and the rattle of wagons all over the bustling city.” The entire population “rushed wildly to the railroad track,” where there was a banner, “Honor to whom honor is due; Old Casement we honor you.” Jack Casement made a speech. “Before nightfall Cheyenne was left half a mile in the rear. Cheyenne is now connected by rail with Chicago and the rest of mankind.”52
Shortly thereafter, Casement went into winter camp, with Cheyenne as the end of track. Julesburg began moving its tents. Dodge quickly decided that Cheyenne was an even worse Hell on Wheels. He called it “possibly the greatest gambling place ever established on the plains and it was full of desperate characters.”53 But he had his own report to the directors of the UP for 1867 to work on, and cleaning up the town could come later. Much of his work was centered on the exploring he did west of the Black Hills and east of the Salt Lake, where he was the first to make maps, and for which he has never received the credit due him.
Nor has Dodge or his men received credit for what they did to improve the UP in the face of the storms and floods of the winter of 1866–67. But Dodge knew what had been accomplished. In his report he wrote, “The track has been raised, new bridges constructed, larger waterways built, and the old structures enlarged, as shown [necessary] by the floods of this year, the highest and most extensive ever known in the country, and it can now be safely said that a repetition of these floods will not materially injure the road or delay the running of trains.”54
A large part of his report was on the valley of the Snake River and how easily the UP could turn it to advantage, but when Dodge was writing, in 1867, most Americans would have been glad to have one line crossing the country, and few of them dared to think of any others. Not Dodge. And he never hesitated to point out why. “The Pacific slope to-day has less than 1,000,000 inhabitants,” he wrote, “and they are yielding $50,000,000 to $60,000,000 of bullion yearly, with grain plus immense yields of wool, hides, wines, timber, and everything that can be produced in that delightful climate and fertile soil.” He further stated that “the best vegetable productions of the Mississippi and Missouri valleys are dwarfed in comparison with those of California. The wheat crop of California and Oregon for 1867 was 25,000,000 bushels, and far exceeded in value the gold product of both States.” Just think, he concluded, what the product of those states would be when the railroad was completed. Why, they would need two, three, four railroads. “No man to-day can even estimate it.” Finally, he concluded: “Without the Union Pacific railroad the country west of the Missouri river would be a burden to the government, and almost an uninhabitable waste; with it, it will soon be an empire, and one of our principal elements of power and strength.”55
Dodge had never been a man to brag or exaggerate or try to sell something through inflated words. Here, to the men of his time, he appeared to come close, or actually to go over the line. To readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, he appears modest. The reality far outstripped his prediction.
The same issue of the Chicago paper that announced the arrival of the first train to Cheyenne also noted that Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Miss Susan B. Anthony had come by train to Omaha, where they gave lectures “in favor of woman suffrage.”56
In politics, economics, culture, where and how people lived, America was changing.
* * *
I. When the track got beyond Laramie, Congress removed Wyoming from Dakota Territory and gave it a territorial status of its own. At the beginning of 1867, Wyoming had fewer than a thousand white inhabitants; by early 1868, thanks to the railroad, it was estimated to have forty thousand white people. The original idea was to name the territory “Lincoln.”
II. “Springs” has been dropped; the town is now Rawlins.
Chapter Eleven
THE CENTRAL PACIFIC PENETRATES THE SUMMIT
1867
IN 1867, the UP was coming on, a mile a day, two miles a day, sometimes three miles in a day, racking up miles, collecting the government bonds and selling its land grants. Before the year was over, it was penetrating Utah with surveyors, its grading crews were well into Wyoming, and its track layers were past Cheyenne. The company hoped that before 1868 was out it would have its end of track into Utah. Along with Durant and Dodge, its directors, surveyors, supervising engineers, construction bosses, and multitude of workers thought that the UP would lay track all the way to the California-Nevada border, where it would meet the CP and thus win the race.
In 1867, the CP was still short of the summit of the Sierra Nevada. Its progress was measured in yards, not miles. It was collecting no government bonds, it was not selling land grants, it could not sell much or even any of its own stocks and bonds. Meanwhile, it was spending tons of money. It looked likely that the UP would win the race.
The reason was obvious to any observer. The UP was laying track over a relatively flat country, while the CP was in some of the roughest mountains on the continent. The UP had to haul in ties, rails, food, forage, and more, upstream on the Missouri River, but from Omaha out to the west, it carried the supplies forward on its own railroad line. The CP had plenty of water and wood, but it had tunnels to drive through granite mountains. The UP could draw on the settled portions of the country for its workers. The CP had to rely, for the most part, on the Chinese. But if and when the CP emerged from the Sierra Nevada, it would be on the Truckee River and then the Humboldt, where it could make time in grading and track laying just as the UP was coming up against the Wasatch Range.
By 1868, both railroads would be far from their base. As Henry Poor, editor of the Railroad Journal, explained, “The op
erations of a railroad company are like those of an army, the cost and difficulty of the maintenance of which increase in inverse ratio as the scene of its action is removed from its base.” Only a completed railroad could supply the road under construction with its materials and labor force. Thus, Poor said, a given amount of work would cost “thrice as much and occupy thrice the time” for a railroad west of the Mississippi River as for one on the east side.1
In the first few months of 1867, the Chinese worked for the CP in gangs, in eight-hour shifts or sometimes longer, around the clock. They lived in quarters dug in the snow, going to work surrounded by snow. They usually operated in teams of three at a time at the tunnel facing, with four teams working side by side. Of the men who held the drills, one reached as high as he could, another held it at waist level, another down at his toes. The fourth team worked from stepladders that allowed the men to reach the top. Two men pounded. The man with the drill was turning it constantly while holding it firm and in place. The men who were pounding did so with sledgehammers weighing from fourteen to eighteen pounds each. They swung, hit the drill at its far end, dropped the hammer, brought it up again behind them, and swung once more. Alternately, at many times a minute. They could drill four inches of holes, one and three-quarters inches in diameter, in eight hours.
They stopped only to drink some tea, or when the hole got deep enough—one and a half to two inches in diameter, a foot and a half or more deep—for another man to put in the black powder, then the fuse. When the three or four holes were filled, the fuses were lit and everyone retreated down the tunnel to a safe distance. After the explosion, the three-man crew trudged back to the facing to do it over again. The crews were bossed by white foremen, usually Irish, who worked a twelve-hour shift. The progress at each facing toward the middle was between six and twelve inches per day. This was done by all three shifts working around the clock. How many fingers or hands were lost to the hammers we don’t know.
Another break for the teams came when the blasted rock at the base had to be removed. At a signal from the foreman, the remainder of the gang—thirty or so men—moved in with their shovels and wheelbarrows. They would load up the rock, wheel it out of the tunnel to a windowlike opening in the snow, and dump it down the mountain.
More than a dozen tunnels were cut this way through the granite mountains. Most were in curves, laid out by Lewis Clement. When the faces met, they were never more than an inch off line, showing the remarkable accuracy of his calculations and instrument work under the most difficult of circumstances. Van Nostrand’s Engineering Magazine said in 1870 that the undertaking was preposterous, but Clement did it.2 The Summit Tunnel was sixteen feet wide at the bottom, eleven feet high at the top of the spring line, which was nineteen feet high to the top of the arch, a semicircle sixteen feet in diameter.3
Tea was brought to the workers by young Chinese employees, carried on a yoke over their shoulders, one keg on each end of the yoke. They used kegs that had originally been filled with black powder and were washed clean before the tea went in. In California it was known as “powder tea.” The men ate before and after their shift, excellent Chinese food, expertly prepared. The remainder of their time off was spent, besides sleeping on mats in the snow tunnel quarters, in washing themselves and their clothes, gambling, talking, reading. They seldom saw the light of day or a blue sky: they walked to and from work inside the snow tunnels, and there they endured their long, grueling shifts in a dim, dank world of smoky lights, ear-ringing explosions, and choking dust.
IN the High Sierra in the winter of 1866–67, there were forty-four storms. Some were squalls, others much bigger. The one everyone recalled began at 2 P.M. on February 18 and didn’t let up until 10 P.M. on February 22. It added six feet of new snow to that already on the ground. The wind raged on for five more days, building huge drifts.
The wind was so strong men and animals could not face it. Engineer John R. Gilliss, who worked on the tunnels, recounted the time when three of his men were walking with the storm at their backs in order to get to their shack. “Two got in safely. After waiting a while, just as we were starting to look for the third, he came in exhausted. In a short, straight path between two walls of rock, he had lost his way and thought his last hour had come.”4
A storm would begin with a fall in the barometer and a strong wind from the southwest. The thermometer was rarely below twenty degrees at the beginning, and usually rose to thirty-two degrees before its close. That meant the last snowfall was damp and heavy. Then the wind shifted, which scattered the clouds, raised the barometer, and dropped the temperature all at once. The lowest temperature of the winter was five degrees above zero.5
On February 27, the snow began falling again, and it continued until March 2. This storm added four more feet of new snow. At the eastern approach to the Summit Tunnel, the Chinese had to lengthen their snow tunnel fifty feet in order to get to their quarters and on to work. One of the engineers said that whenever he returned to his shack he had to shovel it out before he could enter. Twenty Chinese were killed in one snowslide. Individual workers simply disappeared. Often enough their frozen bodies were found in the spring, sometimes upright in the melting snow, with shovels or picks still gripped in their hands.6
In early March 1867, the Sacramento Union reported that nineteen Chinamen had been killed by a snowslide on the east side of the summit, but that wasn’t so bad—a much larger number had been reported lost, and in any event the road from Emigrant Gap to Virginia City was open for stages drawn by horses. It was believed this road would stay open.7
COMMUNICATION over the mountain was kept up via the Dutch Flat and Donner Lake Wagon Road, five or six hundred feet below the grade and the tunnels. The rocky sides of Donner Peak quickly became and remained smooth slopes of snow and ice. Even the tops of the telegraph poles were buried by drifts. Up to one-half the CP’s labor force was kept busy shoveling. Sometimes after storms the entire labor force was engaged in removing snow.8
Engineer Gilliss found the scene from the Dutch Flat road to be “strangely beautiful at night.” He was drawn by the sight of “tall firs, which though drooping under their heavy burdens pointed to the mountains that overhung them. The fires that lit seven tunnels shone like stars on their snowy sides. The only sound that came down to break the stillness of the winter night was the sharp ring of hammer on steel, or the heavy reports of the blasts.”9
To those who were struggling to get more blasting powder, drills, food, and other supplies to the men working in the tunnels, the sight was much more daunting than inspirational. The teamsters and their oxen had to make their way through new snow that was soft, powdery, and up to their waists or higher, even to their shoulders. The falling snow or the drifts would cover their tracks. Into this the oxen would flounder. Often they would lie down, worn out, to be roused by teamsters twisting their tails. Bellowing with pain, they scrambled to their feet and went on. Gilliss saw one team so fortunate as to have had their tails twisted clear off and thus to have been spared further agony.
The teamsters at first used Canadian snowshoes, but soon learned to abandon them for Norwegian skis. These strips of light wood—ten to twelve feet long, four inches wide, and tapered in thickness from the center to the ends—were turned up in front and grooved on the bottom. They had a strap in the middle, and the men carried poles in each hand in order to steady, push, and brake. A good man could cover as much as forty miles a day on them—that is, with no oxen to urge on.10
The storms cost the CP time and money, and which was more expensive cannot be said. In January, one snowstorm caused drastic damage to a trestle a hundred feet high about two miles below the end of track, at Cisco. A small lake above the trestle, with a dam at the downslope end, was put under great strain by the snow piling up on it. One warm day started a melt which caused the dam to give way. A thunderous surge of water rushed down the ravine and carried away the center section of the trestle.
The bridge had to be repaired
. It was difficult to get to it because of the fifteen feet and more of snow in the woods around it. Loggers and oxen went to work. Swarms of workers cut down huge trees, then whipsawed them into shape for the carpenters, who rebuilt the trestle. In less than a month, by February 4, trains were crossing the trestle once again, bringing on rails and hardware for the three thousand track builders forty miles away on the Truckee River and supplies for the Chinese.11
AT this time, the directors made a costly but necessary decision. One day, over lunch with Crocker, Stanford took out his pencil and began estimating the cost of covering the track with snowsheds in its most vulnerable parts. That meant putting a roof over the track that led through the snow belt. Arthur Brown, superintendent of the bridges, thought the cost to be “almost appalling, and unprecedented in railroad construction.” Yet he confessed that “there seemed to be no alternative.” Huntington was also appalled. “It costs a fearful amount of money to pay all the bills,” he protested to Hopkins, and added, “I sometimes think I would change my place for any other in this world.”12 But it had to be done.
Brown later said, “although every known appliance was used to keep the road clear from snow that winter of 1866–67, including the largest and best snow plows then known, it was found impossible to keep it open over half the time and that mostly by means of men and shovels, which required an army of men on hand all the time at great expense.”13
Lewis Clement designed the snowsheds, which ended up covering almost fifty miles. One of them extended for twenty-eight miles without a break. About five miles were covered in 1867, the rest mostly in 1868.
GUNPOWDER and Chinamen were the only weapons of combat the road builders had with which to fight the earth and stone through which they had to pass, laid in their path centuries ago by the Creator,” according to one of the engineers.14 But the black powder was too slow for Crocker and Strobridge. On January 7, 1867, Crocker wrote to Huntington, “We are only averaging about one foot per day on each face—and Stro and I have come to the conclusion that something must be done to hasten it. We are proposing to use nitroglycerine.” They had read about it in a recent article in the Scientific American.15
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