A supply train being unloaded at the end of a track, at Mud Creek, near Fort Bridger, Wyoming.
A UP turntable in Rawlins Springs, Wyoming, 1868. All through Nebraska and Wyoming, Grenville Dodge laid out towns that became major centers for railroad repairs and workers, such as today’s Rawlins, Cheyenne, Green River, Laramie, and others.
Lewis Carmichael’s camp in Bitter Creek Valley, three miles east of Green River, Wyoming. Carmichael was a major contractor for the UP and made camp here because in the Wyoming desert between Rawlins and the Green River, water was a major problem.
A cut dug out by Carmichael’s crew in Bitter Creek.
Snow on the Laramie Plains, Wyoming, caused many difficulties for the UP. Sometimes—as for passengers traveling to Grant’s inaugural as president in March 1869, when this photograph was taken—the snow was so deep the passengers tried to shovel it away, or they attempted to walk along the tracks.
The UP’s temporary and permanent bridges cross Green River, Wyoming. Citadel Rock looms over the scene.
A UP construction train at Granite Canyon, Wyoming, chugs its way across what the railroad called the “Big Fill,” at Mile Post 536 from Omaha, between Cheyenne and Sherman Hill. The fill was 375 feet long and 50 feet deep, the largest fill on the UP.
The Petrified Fish Cut two miles west of Green River, Wyoming. Fills and cuts, then more fills and cuts—it seemed it would never end.
The engine Osceola passes through Fish Cut. The locomotive had been confiscated by the government during the Civil War and later turned over to the UP.
The UP’s steam shovel at Hanging Rock, in Echo Canyon, Utah. This was the only mechanical power used to move earth on the entire line.
A UP construction train passes through the cut at the head of Echo Canyon. The view is to the east.
On January 9, 1869, the UP’s track reached one thousand miles west of Omaha, in Weber Canyon, Utah. The railroad put up a sign to mark the achievement. The base of the tree became a picnic spot for tourists.
The UP telegraph corps at work in Weber Canyon. The telegraph line, required by the Pacific Railroad, ran parallel to the road and was critical to keeping New York informed and essential to keeping supplies coming.
Mormon graders at work in Echo Canyon. At the top, they are bringing down rocks for a fill and to make certain no rocks tumbled down to interfere with the scrapers working on the roadbed. In the next photograph, they are digging out a cut. Photos taken in 1868.
Mormons dig out the East Tunnel—the second of four. It was 772 feet long and consumed 1,064 kegs of black powder. As it was being dug, the UP built a flimsy eight-mile temporary track over a ridge. Photo taken 1869.
A UP train crosses the Weber River, having just gone through Tunnel 3. Photo taken 1869.
One of the Casements’ construction trains near Bear River City, Wyoming. Bear River City was one of the worst Hell on Wheels towns.
The dock of the steamships and the Pacific Rail Road Depot at the Sacramento River Wharf, where the CP began. Here rails, spikes, cars, and locomotives, shipped around South America from New York and other eastern ports, were unloaded and started toward the end of track.
Goods from railroad wharves at Sacramento being unloaded onto railroad cars for the CP. From here the material moved east toward the Sierra Nevada mountains.
The CP built the Long Ravine Bridge in September 1865. It was 120 feet long and fifty-six miles east of Sacramento.
Main Street in upper Cisco, California. The CP had unloaded material to take by wagon to the end of track. Cisco, ninety-two miles east of Sacramento, was reached in November 1866. Photo taken summer 1867.
At Sailor’s Spur, a cut is being made in the background and the debris being hauled by one-horse carts to the fill in the area in the foreground. This took enormous patience, since everything was being done by muscle power. Photo taken summer 1866.
Chinese laborers at work from both ends of the Heath’s Ravine Bank in the Sierra Nevada—one cartload of rock and dirt at a time. The trees have been cleared away on both sides of the fill; at the top center are trunks piled up to be cut at a sawmill for ties. Photo taken summer 1867.
Chinese laborers at work on the Prospect Hill cut in the Sierra Nevada.
A CP train going through Bloomer Cut, just beyond Newcastle, California. It was 63 feet deep and 800 feet long. Every foot of the way had to be blasted with gunpowder, and the CP used five hundred kegs of powder a day to do it. It was completed in the spring of 1865 and still stands today, although the line now runs through two tunnels to the north.
Fort Point Cut in the mountains. It was 70 feet deep and 600 feet long. The Chinese hauled away the debris layer after layer.
A freight train rounding Cape Horn, California. Cape Horn is just short (west) of Dutch Flat. It was three miles long. The Chinese laborers did the work of blasting out and making the roadbed. The slope was at an angle of seventy-five degrees and the American River was 1,200 to 2,200 feet below the line of the railroad. One magazine commented, “Good engineers considered the undertaking preposterous.” Work began in the summer of 1865 and was completed in the spring of 1866.
Taken in the summer of 1867, this photo shows a Chinese tea carrier outside one of the thirteen tunnels the CP drilled through the Sierra Nevada.
Another worker is hauling debris out of the east portal of the Summit Tunnel (length: 1,659 feet), which was drilled through both ends and from the inside out in both directions.
The tunnel before completion. The CP began drilling in the fall of 1865, and the Chinese worked twenty-four hours a day. The first train went through on November 30, 1867.
And then the snows came. The winter of 1866–67 was one of the worst ever. The CP tried everything to get through the snow, but even these gigantic plows on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada couldn’t buck their way through. Eventually the CP built miles and miles of snowsheds; next is a photograph taken by Albert Hart of the frame for one of them. This was one of the early, experimental ones, between Cisco and Summit, built in 1867.
Donner Lake as seen from the summit. The west portals of Tunnels 7 and 8 can be seen. The track hugs the mountains and the south side of the lake. Photo taken summer 1867.
In 1868 the CP track got through the Sierra Nevada and down to the Truckee River. This is a Howe truss bridge across the river at Eagle Gap.
Superintendent of Construction James Harvey Strobridge’s car at the end of the track. He was the only man on either railroad to bring his wife and all the other comforts of home. Photo taken probably in summer 1868 in Nevada.
By 1868 the CP was laying out track in the Nevada desert. That meant the men, horses, and engines had to have water. Here Locomotive 49, the El Dorado, fills its containers at Humboldt Lake to take water to the end of the track.
The first construction train to go through Palisade Canyon in eastern Nevada, along the Humboldt River.
An Indian looks down at the CP from the top of the canyon. Photos taken in late 1868.
The race ended in the spring of 1869. Leland Stanford and his party at Devil’s Gate Bridge, east of Ogden, Utah, on Weber River, May 8, 1869. They were just looking around, waiting for the UP to reach Promontory Summit for the driving of the last spike, and for Durant to be released from the workers who had held up his train at Piedmont.
Doc Durant and Strobridge at Emigrant Gap, California.
The UP’s Paymaster Car, at Blue Creek, Utah, a couple of miles east of Promontory Summit. The men are happy to pose for photographer A. J. Russell as they are about to be paid, something that the UP didn’t do very often.
Noon, April 28, 1869, Camp Victory, Utah. The CP’s track layers have just completed putting down and spiking in six miles of track. They would do four more that afternoon, setting a record that still stands.
Done! East and West shake hands in a famous photograph by A. J. Russell. The CP’s engine Jupiter is on the left (it is using wood for fuel; thus the smokestack is round and covere
d by a screen to catch sparks). The UP’s Engine No. 119 is on the right (it used coal for fuel and thus had a straight smokestack).
The Great Event poster.
About the Author
STEPHEN E. AMBROSE is the author of numerous books of history, including Citizen Soldiers, Undaunted Courage, and D-Day, as well as biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He lives in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and Helena, Montana.
ALSO BY STEPHEN E. AMBROSE
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals
The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys: The Men of World War II
Americans at War
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944–May 7, 1945
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II
Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973–1990
Eisenhower: Soldier and President
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913–1962
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944
Eisenhower: The President
Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890–1952
The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point
Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy, 1938–1992
Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment
Halleck: Lincoln’s Chief of Staff
Upton and the Army
Notes
CHAPTER ONE: PICKING THE ROUTE
1. J. R. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War: The Life of General G. M. Dodge (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1929), pp. 51–52. Wallace D. Farnham, “Grenville Dodge and the Union Pacific: A Study of Historical Legends,” Journal of American History, vol. 51 (June 1964–March 1965), pp. 632–50, calls this story “false,” as he does nearly everything else in Dodge’s autobiography and in Perkins’s biography. It strikes me as true, even down to the details.
2. Jeanne Minn Bracken, ed., Iron Horses Across America (Carlisle, Mass.: Discovery Enterprises, 1995), p. 5.
3. Thomas Curtis Clarke et al., The American Railway: Its Construction, Development, Management and Appliances (New York: Scribner, 1889), p. 1.
4. Sarah Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996), p. 136.
5. Quoted in Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., “Henry Varnum Poor,” in The Golden Spike: A Centennial Remembrance (New York: American Geographical Society, 1969), p. 4.
6. Roy B. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), vol. 1, pp. 5–6.
7. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 62.
8. The census shows that Illinois grew from 157,000 in 1830 to 1.7 million in 1860; Iowa from 43,000 in 1840 to 675,000 in 1860.
9. John Hoyt Williams, A Great and Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Times Books, 1988), p. 14.
10. William Beard, “I Have Labored Hard to Find the Law,” Illinois Historical Journal, Winter 1992, pp. 209–20; Charles Leroy Brown, “Abraham Lincoln and the Illinois Central Railroad,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 36 (1943), p. 128.
11. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 155.
12. Ibid., pp. 155–56.
13. Beard, “I Have Labored,” p. 210.
14. Brown, “Lincoln and the IC,” pp. 122–25, 133.
15. Donald, Lincoln, p. 157.
16. Grenville M. Dodge, How We Built the Union Pacific Railway (Council Bluffs, Iowa: Monarch Printing Co., 1997 reprint), p. 5.
17. William Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803–1863 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 295.
18. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, p. 7.
19. Ibid., pp. 16–67.
20. Ibid., p. 19.
21. Dodge, How We Built, p. 6.
22. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, p. 23.
23. Dodge, How We Built, p. 7.
24. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, p. 31.
25. Williams, Great and Shining Road, p. 13.
26. Chicago Tribune, Jan. 14, 1864.
27. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, pp. 54–55.
28. Dodge, How We Built, p. 9.
29. Donald, Lincoln, p. 206.
30. Dodge, How We Built, p. 5; Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, p. 33.
31. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, p. 34.
32. Ibid., p. 35.
33. Council Bluffs Bugle, July 1859.
34. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, p. 37.
35. Council Bluffs Nonpareil, Aug. 12, 1859.
36. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, p. 53.
37. Quoted in George Kraus, High Road to Promontory: Building the Central Pacific Across the High Sierra (Palo Alto, Calif.: American West Publishing, 1969), p. 21.
38. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, p. 55.
39. Ibid., p. 62.
40. Ibid., p. 63
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 66.
CHAPTER TWO: GETTING TO CALIFORNIA
1. Oscar Lewis, The Big Four: The Story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), p. 49.
2. Charles Crocker Memoir, Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley.
3. C.B.V. DeLamater Memoir, Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley.
4. Lewis, Big Four, p. 55.
5. Crocker Memoir, Bancroft Library.
6. Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels and Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson, vol. 15 (New York: Scribner, 1895), pp. 124–25.
7. DeLamater Memoir, Bancroft Library.
8. Crocker Memoir, Bancroft Library.
9. DeLamater Memoir, Bancroft Library.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Collis Huntington Memoir, Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley.
13. David Lavender, The Great Persuader (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 1–7.
14. Lewis, Big Four, p. 222.
15. Ibid., pp. 223–24.
16. Lavender, Great Persuader, pp. 12–16.
17. Huntington Memoir, Bancroft Library.
18. William T. Sherman, Memoirs, 2 vols. printed in 1 (New York: Library of America, 1990 edition, first published 1875), vol. 1, pp. 35–43.
19. Ibid., p. 58.
20. John Debo Galloway, The First Transcontinental Railroad: Central Pacific, Union Pacific (New York: Simmon-Boardman, 1950), p. 80.
21. Lavender, Great Persuader, pp. 48–50.
22. Sherman, Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 87.
23. Ibid., p. 95.
24. Ibid., p. 101.
25. “Mrs. Judah’s Letter [to Bancroft], 12/14/89,” as it is usually cited, is in Anna Judah Papers, Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley.
26. Ibid.
27. Carl Wheat, “A Sketch of the Life of Theodore D. Judah,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 4 (Sept. 1925), pp. 219–22; Lewis, Big Four, pp. 3–5.
28. American Railroad Journal, April 5, 1851.
29. Wheat, “Life of Judah,” p. 222.
30. Sacramento Union, June 20, 1854.
31. Wheat, “Life of Judah,” p. 223.
32. “Mrs. Judah’s Letter,” Bancroft Library.
33. Wheat, “Life of Judah,” p. 229.
34. Lewis, Big Four, p. 11.
35. Ibid., pp. 229–33.
36. Sacramento Union, Jan. 29, 1859.
37. Lewis, Big Four, pp. 236–37.
38. San Francisco Daily Alta California, Oct. 20,
1859.
CHAPTER THREE: THE BIRTH OF THE CENTRAL PACIFIC
1. Quoted in Wesley S. Griswold, A Work of Giants: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), p. 15.
2. Oliver Jensen, The American Heritage History of Railroads in America (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1975), p. 84.
3. Oscar Lewis, The Big Four, p. 17; see also Robert West Howard, The Great Iron Trail: The Story of the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Bonanza Books, 1962), p. 107.
4. Carl Wheat, “A Sketch of the Life of Theodore D. Judah,” p. 238.
5. Lewis, Big Four, p. 17.
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