Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Having completed the location of the M&M, Dodge took a leave and went back to Illinois to marry Anne Brown on May 28, 1854. The couple then returned to his claim on the Elkhorn, where he built a cabin and took out claims for his father and his brother, who joined him in March 1855. Together they plowed the virgin prairie and began to farm. Emigrants crossing Nebraska in 1855 never saw a white man’s house between the Dodge cabin on the Elkhorn and Denver.

  IN July 1855, two exhausted and seriously ill men rode up to Dodge’s cabin on spent horses. Dodge was amazed; one of them was Frederick Lander, the man who had influenced him to go to Norwich University. He welcomed Lander and his companion, helped them off their horses and into the cabin, nursed them, and got their story. Lander said he had been surveying for the government from Puget Sound, in the Washington Territory, to the Missouri River, that he had started with six men but only he and the man with him had survived. Still, he had completed his survey.

  That evening, Dodge and Lander sat on the banks of the Elkhorn, watching the fireflies and talking railroads. “Dodge,” Lander said, “the Pacific railroad is bound to be built through this valley and if it doesn’t run through your claim, I’ll be badly mistaken.”

  “I’ve already figured that it will,” Dodge replied. “How else could it go from the Missouri River if built this far north?”

  Lander reported that Jefferson Davis, the secretary of war, didn’t want the railroad to be so far north. “He wants the Pacific railroad to be to the south. I’m going to oppose his views as soon as I get to Washington.”

  And he did. Davis had reports that stressed the thirty-second parallel as quicker, cheaper, and more dependable than any of the others. Lander, in his report, made a frank comparison of the route from the thirty-second and the one from the forty-second (which would make Omaha or its vicinity the eastern terminus). “The northern route is longer than the southern,” he confessed, “but of central position, it can be more readily defended in time of war; it can be more cheaply constructed; and, when built, will command and unite important and conflicting public and private interests.” He also pointed to a further and enormous advantage—the railroad would stay on flat ground, near water, by following the valley of the Platte.24

  Dodge agreed. He sought the route using the private funds of Farnam and railroad promoter Dr. Thomas Durant, who had interests in the Rock Island. In 1856, Dodge had made a private survey up the Platte Valley to and beyond the Rocky Mountains, and reported to his financiers. Farnam and Durant set out to induce Eastern capital to help complete the road across Iowa, then across the Missouri River into Nebraska and farther west. On the basis of Dodge’s reports, they selected Council Bluffs as the place for the Rock Island to end and the Pacific railroad, when the government decided to build it, to begin. This was an adroit and far-seeing move in 1857, and it induced Dodge to make a claim across the Missouri River and near the town of Council Bluffs. Railroad activity was down, however, because of the Panic of 1857.

  But this economic downturn must be kept in perspective. In the 1850s, an average of 2,160 miles of new track was laid every year. More miles of track were laid in the United States, mainly in the north, than in all the rest of the world, and by 1859 just under half of the world’s railroad tracks would be in the various states of the Union. The brand-new rail network would carry some 60 percent of all domestic freight.25

  The growth of railroads in the United States had been astonishing. The tracks more than doubled in each decade. In 1834, there were but 762 miles. In 1844, it was up to 4,311 miles. By 1854, the trackage numbered 15,675 miles. On January 1, 1864, the amount of completed railway had grown to 33,860 miles, with sixteen thousand more miles under construction, most of it in the Northern states.26

  In 1858, Farnam and Durant—who had a medical degree but never practiced and instead operated on Wall Street, where he was called “Doc”—asked Dodge to visit them in New York City, at the office of the Rock Island Railroad, located over the Corn Exchange Bank. Dodge thus was present at a meeting of the board of directors, where a secretary read his report on the Platte route. “Before he was half through,” Dodge reported, “nearly every person had left the room, and when he had finished only Mr. Farnam, Doc Durant, the reader and myself were present.” Dodge had heard one of the directors say “he did not see why they should be asked to hear such nonsense.” But Dodge told the two remaining directors: “I believe your road will draw the bulk of emigration crossing the Missouri. From Council Bluffs it will then go up the north side of the Platte River along the Mormon trail. The Pacific railroad is bound to be built along this trail.”27

  Farnam and Durant believed him. And they acted on that belief, saying they felt “that if they could stimulate interest in the Pacific road it would enable them to raise funds to complete their line across the State.” Dodge went to work making a grade* east from Council Bluffs.28

  BY no means was anything, much less everything, settled, even though in 1856 both political parties had advocated the transcontinental railroad in resolutions. But whether there would be a Pacific railroad as long as the United States remained half slave, half free, was a long way from being decided. “Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave, and half free?” Lincoln had written to a Kentucky correspondent in 1855.29 If the country did not change, no one could tell where or if the Pacific railroad would run.

  But if the railroad was to be built beside the Platte River, it was the buffalo and the Indians who first picked it out. Then it was used by the mountain men and the fur traders, then by the travelers on the Oregon Trail, then it became the route for the Mormon emigrant trains and their handcarts. It was called the Great Platte Valley Route. Lander and Dodge had seen immediately that this was the route for the Pacific railroad. Dodge once remarked that any engineer who overlooked the Platte Valley route as a natural highway to the mountains was not fit to follow the profession.30

  Peter Dey almost agreed. “Dodge and I read up everything on this subject,” he declared. “We read all the government reports of everything that had been discovered regarding the routes across the continent. Dodge was deeply interested in them and I was to a considerable extent…. He made his claim on the Elkhorn river … [because] it was his belief that the Platte valley would be the line.”31 But Dey wasn’t ready to go as far as Dodge. He said that Dodge had “taken a great fancy to the Missouri River” and that the sprawling, muddy stream held a fascination for him: “He always felt at home along its shores.”

  Dodge, meanwhile, was collecting oral and written information about the country west of his farm and studying the routes from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast. He drew up his own map of the country, “giving the fords and where water and wood could be found, etc.” He called it “the first map of the country giving such information.”32

  The old M&M had new directors in 1856.* They got started by telling the citizens of Pottawattamie County (where Council Bluffs is located) that if the citizens would vote for a $300,000 bond issue for the railroad, they would begin to grade for track eastward across Iowa. Then they crossed the river to Omaha to tell the citizens that, for a $200,000 bond issue from them for the M&M, work would start in Council Bluffs during the year. The Council Bluffs bonds were voted June 13, 1857, but in October the road went into the hands of receivers because the Panic of 1857 caused everything to fall through. Western Iowa and eastern Nebraska saw land that had boomed to $7 an acre fall to $1.

  In 1858, Dodge decided to move across the river and make his permanent home in Council Bluffs, where he went into banking, milling, merchandising, contracting, freighting, and real estate—a good indication of how varied were the interests of businessmen in the Missouri River towns in the late fifties. He bought lots in the “Riddle Tract,” down on the Missouri River floodplain, the same location as the lots Lincoln was willing to assume in 1859 as collateral.

  The Council Bluffs Bugle was very suspicious. “It has been rumored that
G. M. Dodge, in consequence of being so largely interested in the Riddle Tract, was bound to make his surveys in such manner as would insure his own investments.”33 Dodge was buying for the M&M, which wanted to retain a portion of the land for the road’s shops and yards and to subdivide the remainder and place them on the market. Norman Judd, attorney for the M&M and a legal and political associate of Lincoln, borrowed the money from Lincoln to buy seventeen lots for $3,500, using the lots as collateral

  IN the spring of 1859, Dodge went up the valley of the Platte on a third survey for Henry Farnam of the Rock Island. He got back to Council Bluffs on August 11, the day before Lincoln arrived in town. Lincoln had been making some political speeches in Iowa and Nebraska. When he reached St. Joseph, Missouri, he could have taken the only line of railroad across the state to return to Illinois, but instead he had gone aboard a stern-wheel steamboat that toiled up the Missouri River for nearly two hundred miles to Council Bluffs. Lincoln wanted to check out what the situation was with regard to the Pacific railroad, because of—as J. R. Perkins, Dodge’s first biographer, noted—“his far-seeing plans to identify himself with the building of the great transcontinental railroad.”34

  The Republican paper in town, the Nonpareil, gave Lincoln a warm welcome, saying that “the distinguished ‘Sucker’ [Iowa slang for someone from Illinois] has yielded to the solicitations of our citizens and will speak on the political issues of the day at Concert Hall. The celebrity of the speaker will most certainly insure him a full house. Go and hear old Abe.”35

  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.* 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.

  * The bed of a railroad track.

  * John A. Dix, president; Henry Farnam, the road’s bui
lder; 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.

  * “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 the 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.