Dodge said to give him $500 a year. Dent dismissed that offer as an insult. General Dent then told another director that his brother had been treated badly. That director then warned Oliver Ames, “It is not in the interest of our Co. to make enemies in that direction.” The UP gave in and put Dent and his partner on the payroll.3
Worse followed. The corruption all along the line, so often pointed out by Webster Snyder, was now apparent to all. Cries went up. There were mutters of “Off with their heads” and screams of outrage. But nothing happened, because everyone was too busy with his own concerns. Early in April, Snyder wrote Dodge, “I am heartily sick of this outfit that talks so much about cleaning out thieves & yet weakens when in presence of the thieves & will let thousands be stolen under their own eyes.”
There was more. Reports came to Dodge of defective masonry on many of the UP’s bridges. Three spans collapsed when the masonry failed. The arches on two culverts at Lodgepole Creek also crashed because of inferior workmanship. Dodge did a quick inspection and declared the masonry at Bear River “worthless.” He said, “The backing is dirt and free stone set on edge.” He wrote Oliver Ames, “We cannot trust masons who have had the reputation of being No. 1 and honest unless we employ an engineer to every structure to stand right over them.”4
Shortly thereafter, a telegram came in from Utah: “WE MUST HAVE FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS TO PAY CONTRACTORS MEN IMMEDIATELY OR ROAD CANNOT RUN.” And at a time when most American newspapers were recording the march to the summit in minute detail for their readers, the New York Herald ran a sour editorial: “In congress we see the Union Pacific Railroad ring triumphant and its directors and hangers-on flaunt their corruption and their ill-acquired means in the face of all decency and legislative morality.”5
To the directors it must have seemed that this was a hell of a way to run a railroad. Just as their company was on the verge of completing the job, it appeared to be nearing the brink of collapse. The triumphal procession they had anticipated threatened to become a funeral cortege.
THE CP was moving ahead briskly. Indeed, almost without worries. On April 9, it was 690 miles east of Sacramento and that day laid 4.2 miles of track. The next day, it set down 3.1 miles, and the day after that, 4.6. By April 17, it had reached Monument Point, a quarter-mile north of the lakeshore. There the CP had established three sprawling grading camps. The first had a hundred tents, the second another hundred, and the third seventy-five. “Hustle” and “bustle” were the words that came to people’s lips when they saw this hive of activity. As one example, on April 18 a train came from Sacramento. It was thirty-two cars in length. While the Chinese unloaded each car of its rails and ties, others were putting intermediate ties under the rails, which were already spiked into place, and still others were putting in additional ballast and tamping it down.
Monument Point was a spot Durant and Dodge had once thought of as a meeting place, after they had given up on the Nevada-California state line or Humboldt Wells. Now none of that was to be. On April 23, the Alta California reported that the distance separating the two lines was less than fifty miles. “The CP is laying about four miles of track a day; the UP some days have laid the same, on others only one or two miles, from lack of material—principally ties.”6
Although the tracks had not yet joined, increasingly emigrants were moving west by rail rather than wagon trains. On April 26, the newspaper reported that immigrants who had traveled from Omaha to beyond Ogden on the UP hired stagecoaches at the terminus and took them to Monument Point, got on a CP train, and were in California only a little over a week after leaving Omaha.7 There were constant reminders of the change the transcontinental railroad had already wrought. Freight wagons carrying supplies to the end of track from Sacramento and Omaha were constantly rolling past the construction crews. Wells Fargo stagecoaches, which had once spanned the continent, now provided service between railheads. Their run became shorter with each passing day.
The road that was about to be completed had been built, in part, because General Sherman and his army wanted it. So did the politicians, and of course those who settled in the West. Everyone would save time and benefit from its completion, but none more directly than the army. In its task of protecting the frontier and the Far West, the army had sent its units on exhausting marches of sometimes as much as several months just to get to a new post. The expense was terrific, the pain considerable.
But in mid-April 1869, the Twelfth Infantry Regiment, with orders to proceed to the Presidio of San Francisco, took the UP to Corinne, detrained, marched two easy days to the CP railhead, and got on the CP for the trip west.8 It took a week from Omaha to Sacramento, and for both speed and comfort it was a dream. No American army unit had ever before moved so fast or so far for less money or at such ease.
On April 27, the Alta’s reporter was at the end of the CP’s track, 678 miles from Sacramento. The railroad was fourteen miles short of Promontory Summit, and the UP was within eight miles and was laying a mile per day. The UP was coming on even though it still had to finish the Big Trestle and do some difficult rock-cutting. “They may hurry up,” the reporter wrote, “or they may decide to turn to the abandoned grade of the Central Pacific, which is within a few feet of where they are working.” That abandoned grade included the CP’s Big Fill.9
IN 1868, Jack Casement’s men had laid down four and a half miles of track in a single day. “They bragged of it,” Crocker later said, “and it was heralded all over the country as being the biggest day’s track-laying that was ever known.” Crocker told Strobridge that the CP must beat the UP. They got together the material, talked to the men, and did it, spiking down six miles and a few feet in a single day.
Casement had come back at them, starting at 3 A.M., working by the light of lanterns until dawn, and keeping at the task until midnight. At the end of the day, the UP had advanced the end of track eight miles and a fraction.
“Now,” Crocker said to Stro, “we must take off our coats, but we must not beat them until we get so close together that there is not enough room for them to turn around and outdo us.” Ten miles ought to do it, he figured.
“Mr. Crocker,” Strobridge said, “we cannot get men enough onto the track to lay ten miles.” Crocker said it had to be done.
“How are we going to do it?” Stro asked. “The men will all be in each other’s way.”
Organize, Crocker replied. “I’ve been thinking over this for two weeks, and I have got it all planned out.”10
Crocker’s plan was to have the men and the horses ready at first light. He wanted ironcars with rails, spikes, and fishplates, all ready to go. The night before, he wanted five supply trains lined up, the first at the railhead. Each of the five locomotives would pull sixteen cars, which contained enough supplies for two miles of track. When the sun rose, the Chinese would leap onto the cars of the first train, up at the end of track, and begin throwing down kegs of bolts and spikes, bundles of fishplates, and the iron rails. That train would then back up to a siding, and while the first two miles were laid another would come forward. As the first train moved back, six-man gangs of Chinese would lift the small open flatcars onto the track and begin loading each one with sixteen rails plus kegs of bolts, spikes, and fishplates. The flatcars had rollers along their outer edges to make it easier to slide the rails forward and off. Two horses, in single file, each with a rider on its back, would be hitched to the car by a long rope. The horses would then race down the side of the grade kept clear for them.
As this operation was being mounted, three men with shovels, called “pioneers,” would move out along the grade, aligning the ties that had been placed on the grade the night before. When the loaded cart got to the end of track, right after the pioneers, a team of Irish workers, one on each side, would grab the rails with their tongs, two men in front, two at the rear, race them forward to their proper position, and drop them in their proper place when the foreman called out “Down!”
Ahead of the t
rack layers would be two men to handle the portable track-gauge, a wooden measuring device that was four feet eight and a half inches long. They would stay just ahead of the track layers all day long, making sure the rails laid down were just as far apart as Abraham Lincoln had decreed they should be. The spikes, placed by the Chinese workers atop the rails, would dribble onto the grade as the rails were removed. The bolts and fishplates were carried in hand buckets to where they were needed. When the cart was empty, it would be tipped off the grade and the next one brought on. Then the first would be turned around and the horses would be rehitched, to race back for another load.
Next would come the men placing and pounding in spikes. Crocker told Stro, “Have the first man drive one particular spike and not stop for another; he walks right past that rail and drives the same spike in the next rail; another man follows him and drives the next spike in the same rail; and another follows him and so on.” He admonished Stro to have enough spikes on hand so that “no man stops and no man passes another.”
After the spikes were driven in place, five to a rail, would come the straighteners. “One man sees a defective place and he gives it a shove and passes on,” Crocker instructed. “Another comes right behind him and they get the track straight; none of them stop—they are walking forward all the time.” Next would be the crew to ballast the rails. One would raise the track with his shovel placed under a tie. Another would cast a shovelful of dirt under the tie. Then the fillers, one man after another throwing in a shovelful of earth. Crocker told Stro to “have enough of them so that when they are all through you have it all filled and no man stops nor allows another man to pass him.”
Finally, the tampers. There were four hundred of them. “Each one gives two tamps and he goes right along and gives two more to the next and does not stop on one rail, so that he will not be in the way of the next man.”
The crew placing the telegraph poles and fixing the wire would keep pace with the others. And as the rail layers emptied a car, it would be tipped off the track and another one brought on. The empty car would be replaced and taken back to the pile of rails by the horses at a gallop. When a loaded car was approaching down the track, the crew on the empty one would jump off and lift their car from the rails, then put it back after the loaded car went past with unslackened speed. When all the rails had been laid, another train pulling sixteen cars would come up to the end of track. The Chinese would swarm over it and throw off the rails, spikes, bolts, and fishplates and the process would be repeated.
Strobridge heard everything Crocker had to say, considered it, and finally said, “We can beat them, but it will cost something.” For example, he insisted on having a fresh team of horses for each car hauling rail, the fresh horses to take over after every two and a half miles.
“Go ahead and do it,” was Crocker’s reply.11
THEY waited until April 27, when the CP had only fourteen miles to go, the UP nine—and that up the eastern approach to Promontory Summit, heavy work at best, and the Big Trestle not yet done. If Strobridge and his men accomplished the feat, the UP wouldn’t have enough room left to exceed the ten miles.
Crocker offered a bet of $10,000 to Durant, saying that the CP would lay ten miles of track in one day. Reportedly, Durant was sure they couldn’t and accepted the wager.
On April 27, a CP locomotive ran off the track after the crew had put down two miles of track. The accident forced a postponement of the try for the record until the next day. This was somewhat embarrassing, for the UP had its engineers there to watch, along with some army officers on their way to a new mission, and several newspaper correspondents. Crocker laughed it off. On the morning of April 28, before sunrise, a wagon load of UP officials arrived on the scene, including Durant, Dodge, Reed, and Seymour. They had come to watch Crocker’s humiliation and to laugh at him.
What the CP crews did that day will be remembered as long as this Republic lasts. White men born in America were there, along with former slaves whose ancestors came from Africa, plus emigrants from all across Europe, and more than three thousand Chinamen. There were some Mexicans with at least a touch of Native American blood in them, as well as French Indians and at least a few Native Americans. Everyone was excited, ready to get to work, eager to show what he could do. Even the Chinese, usually methodical and a bit scornful of the American way of doing things, were stirred to a fever pitch. They and all the others. We are the world, they said. They had come together at this desolate place in the middle of Western North America to do what had never been done before them.
The sun rose at 7:15 A.M. Corinne time.II First the Chinese went to work. According to the San Francisco Bulletin’s correspondent, “In eight minutes, the sixteen cars were cleared, with a noise like the bombardment of an army.”12 Dodge was impressed. By the end of the day, he was ready to pronounce the Chinese “very quiet, handy, good cooks and good at almost everything they are put at. Only trouble is, we cannot talk to them.”13
The Irishmen laying the track came on behind the pioneers and the track gaugers. Their names were Michael Shay, Patrick Joyce, Michael Kennedy, Thomas Daley, George Elliott, Michael Sullivan, Edward Killeen, and Fred McNamara. Their foreman was George Coley. The two in front on each thirty-foot rail would pick it up with their tongs and run forward. The two in the rear picked it up and carried it forward until all four heard “Down.” The rails weighed 560 pounds each.
Next came the men starting the spikes by placing them in position, then the spike drivers, then the bolt threaders, then the straighteners, finally the tampers. Keeping pace with the crews was the telegraph construction party, digging the holes, putting in the poles, hauling out, hanging, and insulating the wire.
“The scene is a most animated one,” wrote one newspaper reporter. “From the first pioneer to the last tamper, perhaps two miles, there is a thin line of 1,000 men advancing a mile an hour; the iron cars running up and down; mounted men galloping backward and forward. Alongside of the moving force are teams hauling tools, and water-wagons, and Chinamen, with pails strung over their shoulders, moving among the men with water and tea.”14
One of the army officers, the senior man, grabbed the arm of Charlie Crocker and said, “I never saw such organization as this; it is just like an army marching across over the ground and leaving a track built behind them.”15
When the whistle blew for the noon meal, at 1:30 P.M., the CP workers had laid six miles of track. The men christened the site Victory (later Rozel, Utah), because they knew they had won. Stro had a second team of track layers in reserve, but the proud men who had laid the first six miles before eating insisted on keeping at it throughout the rest of the day. As they did.
After taking a leisurely hour to eat, the workers lost the better part of another hour as the rails were bent, a tedious job. It had to be done, because the line was ascending the west slope of the Promontory Mountains and on this stretch of line there were curves. Each rail was placed between blocks and hammered until it was in the proper curve.
Then the others went back to work. By 7 P.M., the CP was ten miles and fifty-six feet farther east than it had been at dawn. Never before done, never matched.
Each man among the Irish track-layers had lifted 125 tons of iron, plus the weight of the tongs. That was 11.2 short tons per man per hour. Each had covered ten miles forward and the Lord only knows how much running back for the next rail. They moved the track forward at a rate of almost a mile an hour. They laid at a rate of approximately 240 feet every seventy-five seconds.
Historian Lynn Farrar provided me with the exact numbers. The actual figures were 3,630 feet of level grade, 44,756 feet of plus grade, and 4,470 feet of minus grade. The percent of rise varies from 0.40 percent (21.12 feet per mile) to a maximum of 1.35 percent (71.28 feet per mile). There were twenty curves ranging from 1 degree to 7 degrees 48 minutes. The beginning of the ten miles at engineer station 549 was on a 3-degree curve. The morning’s work contained eleven curves with a total length of 10,848
feet. In the afternoon the work contained nine curves with a total length of 7,512.5 track feet. The morning work had 2,495 track feet of 6-degree curves, and the afternoon work had 827.5 track feet of 7-degree-48-minutes curve. The slower work in the afternoon was partly due to having to curve some rails but also because the “boys” were running out of gas, and they certainly deserved to go more slowly. The net rise in elevation from start to finish was from elevation 4,400 to 4,809.
THERE were many heroes that day. Crocker, to start with, the man who thought it up and planned it out. Strobridge, who organized everything. All the superintendents and foremen. And of course the workers. The eight Irishmen put down 3,520 rails. The CP paid them four days’ wages. Others straightened or laid 25,800 ties. The spikers drove into those ties 28,160 spikes, put in place by the Chinese—the spikes weighed 55,000 pounds. The bolt crews put in 14,080 bolts.
The army officer told Crocker he had walked his horse right along with the track layers and they went forward “just about as fast as a horse could walk.” He added a supreme compliment: “It was a good day’s march for an army.”16
To demonstrate how well done it had been, engineer Jim Campbell ran a locomotive over the new track at forty miles per hour. Then the last of the five construction trains was backed down the long grade past Victory to the construction camp just north of the lake. There were twelve hundred men piled onto its sixteen flatcars for the ride, smiling, cheering lustily, laughing, chattering, kicking their feet, swinging their arms, breaking into song, congratulating one another. They had done what no men before them had ever done, nor would any to come.
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