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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Shortly thereafter, the locomotive Sacramento landed on the levee, and on August 17 a trial trip to Seventeenth Street delighted the delegation from San Francisco, hundreds strong, who made the journey. By January 1, 1856, the road was bringing in $200 a day. By Washington’s Birthday, it had been completed to Folsom and held a grand opening excursion and a ball.31 A railroad had come to the Pacific Coast.

  Over the following months, Judah worked on various railroad surveys and projects; the Sacramento Valley Railroad had a difficult time staying in business, because receipts from the placer mines west of the Sierra fell off and the population of the canyon towns diminished. He was with the California Central Railroad and the Benicia and Sacramento Valley Railroad Company, and then became chief engineer of a yet-to-be-built line called the Sacramento Valley Central Railroad.

  Meanwhile, in 1856, he and Anna made three sea voyages back east, to go to Washington to promote a transcontinental railroad, on the correct assumption that only the federal government could afford—by selling the public lands it held—to finance it. By then the railroad across the country had become an obsession with the young engineer. He was ambitious, accustomed to thinking big and getting done what he set out to do, and eager to seize the opportunity. Anna later wrote, “Everything he did from the time he went to California to the day of his death was for the great continental Pacific railway. Time, money, brains, strength, body and soul were absorbed. It was the burden of his thought day and night, largely of his conversation, till it used to be said ‘Judah’s Pacific Railroad crazy,’ and I would say, ‘Theodore, those people don’t care,’… and he’d laugh and say, ‘But we must keep the ball rolling.’”32

  JEFFERSON Davis’s report on a Pacific railroad route came out in twelve volumes. The reports were almost as valuable as those of Lewis and Clark. They contained descriptions of every possible feature of the physical and natural history of the country, with numerous plates beautifully colored, barometric reconnaissances, studies of weather, and more. But, according to Judah’s biographer Carl Wheat, “It is doubtful if an equal amount of energy was ever spent with so small a crop of positive results.”33 Newly elected Representative John C. Burch of California later wrote, “The Government had expended hundreds of thousands of dollars in explorations, and elaborate reports thereof had been made … yet all this did not demonstrate the practicability of a route, nor show the surveys, elevations, profiles, grades or estimates of the cost of constructing the road.”34

  As everyone expected, Davis recommended the Southern route, New Orleans to Los Angeles. To make it happen, Davis had ordered the importing of a corps of camels to provide animal power in the desert. The United States had paid $10 million to Mexico for the Gadsden Purchase (named for James Gadsden of South Carolina, who negotiated the treaty). The Purchase included the southern part of present-day Arizona and New Mexico, which Davis considered the preferred route to the Pacific. No free-state politician would accept such a route. Nor would Judah.

  IN 1856, Ted and Anna Judah arrived in Washington on their second trip. There he wrote a pamphlet (published January 1, 1857) that he distributed to every member of Congress and the heads of administrative departments, entitled A Practical Plan for Building the Pacific Railroad. He called the railroad “the most magnificent project ever conceived,” but added that, though it had been “in agitation for over fifteen years,” nothing had been done, except for Davis’s useless explorations. Not a single usable survey had even been made. Cutting to the heart of the failure, he wrote, “No one doubts that a liberal appropriation of money or public lands by the General Government ought to insure construction of this railroad, but the proposition carries the elements of its destruction with it; it is the house divided against itself; it [the Pacific railroad] cannot be done until the route is defined; and if defined, the opposing interest is powerful enough to defeat it.”

  What was needed was facts. Facts based on solid foundations—that is, a genuine survey, one on which capitalists could base accurate cost calculations. The capitalists didn’t care how many different varieties and species of plants and herbs, or grass, were located where; they wanted to know the length of the road, the alignment and grades of the proposed railroad, how many cubic yards of dirt to be moved. Any tunnels? How much masonry, and where can it be obtained? How many bridges, river crossings, culverts? What about timber and fuel? Water? What is an engineer’s estimate of the cost per mile? What will be its effect on travel and trade?

  With such information the capitalist might invest. But the facts were not there, because “Government has spent so much money and time upon so many routes that we have no proper survey of any one of them.”

  Judah discussed other factors, such as snow, hostile Indians, probable operating conditions, the development of locomotives, rates and tariffs, and the like. The U.S. Army would benefit.* Then his conclusion: “It is hoped and believed … that Congress will, at this session, pass a bill donating alternate sections of land to aid in the construction of this enterprise.”35

  Judah’s pamphlet was a splendid idea and an eloquent presentation. The land grant solved at a stroke the problem of financing. But although practical and sensible, it said nothing about whether the eastern terminus of the railroad should be in a free state or a slave state. Congress talked about Judah’s proposal, at length, but nothing came of it. A number of bills were submitted, but sectional jealousies defeated every one of them.

  Judah wrote to the Sacramento Union in January 1859 from Washing-ton that “there is no chance this session of Congress to do anything toward developing the Central Route. The President [James Buchanan] is in favor of the extreme Southern Route for the Pacific Railroad, and, it is understood, will veto any bill for a road over any other to the Pacific.”36 By the spring of 1859, it was clear that if California, Oregon, and the other Western territories (especially Washington and Arizona Territories) wanted a transcontinental railroad they must move of their own accord.

  On April 5, 1859, the legislature of California, acting apparently under Judah’s urging, passed a resolution calling for a convention to consider the Pacific railroad. Judah returned from the East to attend as representative from Sacramento. The convention opened in Assembly Hall in San Francisco on September 20, 1859, with over one hundred in attendance. Debate centered on the route to be adopted and the western terminus. Judah said such decisions should be left to the corporation picked to build the road, but the convention adopted a resolution recording its “decided preference” for a central route to Sacramento. Having lost there, Judah won on his motion to keep the government from becoming an interested party by keeping it out as a stockholder; such action, he said, “shuts the door to fraud, corruption, or political dishonesty. It affords no hobby to ride, and presents no stepping stone to power, advancement or distinction.”37

  Judah was on the mark, here and in most other resolutions he sponsored and supported. On October 11, the convention’s executive committee appointed him as its accredited agent to convey its memorial to Congress, a selection that was universally applauded. The San Francisco Daily Alta California newspaper, for example, wrote, “In saying that no better selection could have been made for this responsible duty, we but reiterate what is well known to all who are acquainted with Mr. Judah. Few persons in California have a more thorough acquaintance with the question of the construction of the Pacific railroad than has Mr. Judah, and his services in this capacity will be invaluable.”38

  ON October 20, 1859, Judah and Anna sailed for Panama on the steamer Sonora on their third trip east. He was thirty-three years old. He had shown himself to be a practical engineer capable of building railroads and bridges wherever, whenever. He had built the only railroad then running in California. He had great imagination and a most persuasive way of putting his ideas. He had a gracious wife. Only nincompoops called him “Crazy Judah.” Those who knew what they were about, such as the delegates to the convention or the newspaper editors, called him inspired
. While Crocker, Huntington, and Hopkins were running their stores, and newcomer Leland Stanford was dabbling in politics, and William Sherman had sold out or lost everything in California and was currently a schoolmaster in Louisiana, Theodore D. Judah was preparing the way for the greatest engineering achievement of the nineteenth century.

  * He did once, in 1849 in California, when amoebic dysentery dropped his weight from 200 to 125 pounds. With self-medication, he recovered.

  * It cost $30 million a year to supply the Western troops, by horse or ox team.

  Chapter Three

  THE BIRTH OF THE CENTRAL PACIFIC 1860-1862

  THE railroad Judah wanted, dreamed about, lusted for, was determined to build, had the support, if not the financial backing, of nearly all Americans. The swift growth of California and the West Coast, the obvious fact that as soon as the railroad was built farms and towns would spring up and land values would increase along much of the line across America, the slowness and costs of mail, Indian troubles on the Great Plains and in the Northwest, the so-called Mormon War that sent columns of troops into Utah during 1857-58, the opening of Japan and new commercial treaties with China, among other things, made the desirability of a Pacific railroad obvious to all

  They could not agree on where. It was not just the Southerners who blocked the Northerners; within California, where slavery was never an important issue, the delegates to the 1859 convention from southern California and Arizona objected strongly to a San Francisco or Sacramento terminus. They wanted Los Angeles or San Diego, and argued that, since the Sierra Nevada were almost entirely in California, the railroad would have to be built to the south, where the mountains were not so awesome.

  Building the railroad would be, according to William T Sherman in a letter to his brother John, a congressman from Ohio, “a work of giants. And Uncle Sam is the only giant I know who can grapple the subject.”1

  Sherman was right. No railroad anywhere crossed a continent. To build it would take real men, dedicated men, adventurous men, men of muscle and brain power, men without equal. They must be giants to build it without steam shovels, pile drivers, or power saws, without pipes with water running through them, without portable houses and hospitals, with no internal-combustion-engine trucks and jeeps to move materials, or much of anything else commonplace in the twentieth century to build a railroad. The line had nearly two thousand miles to cross, with great stretches of desert where there was no water, plus vast areas without trees for ties or bridges, stones for footings, or game for food. Then there were three major mountain ranges, the Rockies, the Wasatch, and the Sierra Nevada. There the wind howled and the snow came down in great quantities, the creeks and rivers ran through one-thousand-foot and deeper gorges, the summits were granite, and neither man nor animal lived.

  Over most of the route there were no cities except Salt Lake City, no settlements, no farms, no roundhouses, no water pumps, and, except for the mines on the flanks of the Sierra Nevada, there was nothing to carry in, nothing to carry out. The only way to get tracks forward to the end of line was to carry them across tracks already laid. The road would be of a size unprecedented anywhere in the world, and it would go in advance of settlement through an area whose remoteness and climate discouraged or completely precluded rapid migration.

  In historian Oliver Jensen’s words, to travel the route of the first transcontinental railroad at the beginning of the twenty-first century “is to wonder whether we are today the equals of men who with their bare hands laid those long ribbons of metal over a century ago.”2

  What it would take was the backing of the government, because only the government had the resources—money and land—to finance the project. No corporation, no bank was big enough. In a democracy, it was mandatory to turn to the elected representative body to get the thing done.

  JUDAH had no doubt that it could be done. On October 20, 1859, he and Anna had set out from San Francisco on the Sonora headed for Panama and then it would be on to New York, where he intended to ride a train to Washington to seek money and land from the Congress and the President. Even before the couple left San Francisco Bay, Judah had met California Representative John C. Burch. “Our introduction was immediately followed by a statement to me in detail of the objects and purposes of his mission,” Burch later wrote.3 It was the only thing on Judah’s mind, the sole thing he would talk about. As Burch told a meeting of the Territorial Pioneers of California on April 13, 1875, “Never have I seen a more unselfish laborer for a public work, never knew a more self sacrificing spirit than his.”4

  On the trip Judah worked on a bill incorporating the wishes of the Sacramento Convention, including a terminus at Sacramento. Burch, who accompanied them, went over the bill. He and Judah had become, in Burch’s words, “immediate and intimate friends. No day passed on the voyage that we did not discuss the subject, lay plans for its success, and indulge pleasant anticipations of those wonderful benefits so certain to follow that success.” Burch naturally wanted to know more than just an outline. Judah knew what information was wanted and was ready to answer any and all questions. “On the various provisions of a proper bill to invite the introduction of capital into the work,” said Burch later, “and, in short, on every conceivable point he was armed with arguments, facts and figures, and so thoroughly that all questions of political economy involved were of easy solution to his mind.”5

  BURCH was so impressed with what Judah had to say and the way he said it that he agreed to sponsor Judah’s bill in the House. Anna helped. Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon was also on the Sonora and was naturally in on the Pacific-railroad discussion. One night, at dinner with Burch and Lane, Anna asked, “Would there be any advantage in establishing a Pacific Railway Exhibit on Capitol Hill?” She explained that she had packed the charts her husband had used at the convention, as well as samples of ore, minerals, and fossils she and he had picked up on their Sierra expeditions. Further, she had her sketchbook and a few of her paintings of the mountains. Her husband nodded yes. Burch said it was a splendid idea. Lane agreed.6

  On his arrival in Washington, Judah sought out California’s senators, who read and supported the bill. On December 6, 1859, he got an appointment with President James Buchanan. Together with Burch and Senator William Gwin, he went to the White House to see Buchanan, who had problems of his own but allowed Judah to present the proceedings of the convention in Sacramento. “He received us graciously,” Judah wrote, and “expressed himself generally in favor of the Pacific Railroad.”7 In so doing, Buchanan was reversing his own earlier position, but his Democratic Party—like the Republicans—had in 1856 adopted a resolution favoring a Pacific railroad.8

  Congress had recessed, so Judah and Anna headed west by rail, to promote his railroad bill and to collect “some reliable information with regard to the operating of engines on heavy grades, which becomes highly important in view of solving the question of crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains, as it established the fact that grades as high as one hundred and fifty feet per mile can be overcome and operated with perfect safety.” He found out that such was actually the case with the Baltimore and Ohio, which in crossing the Appalachian Mountains provided an example of what could and should be done. On his way west, he also spoke to investors, and at meetings in New York, Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago, and Cincinnati, in order, as he said, “to awaken as much interest as possible in our efforts.”9

  ON returning to Washington, with Burch’s support, Judah was given a room in the Capitol to promote his railroad. Judah was a born genius at publicity, at pushing projects, and at persuasiveness. At Anna’s suggestion, he made the room into the Pacific Railroad Museum, displaying maps, diagrams, surveys, reports, and other data, as well as her collection and paintings. He had it completed by January 14, 1860, and from then until he left for California a half-year later he was, in his words, “constantly engaged in endeavoring to further the passage of a Pacific Railroad Bill.” Scores of members of both hou
ses, officials of the departments and bureaus, plain citizens, reporters, and editors came to call. “His knowledge of his subject was so thorough,” Representative Burch said, “his manners so gentle and insinuating, his conversation on the subject so entertaining that few resisted his appeals.”10

  More than a few, it turned out. Judah was not convincing enough. There were practical problems—how to get over mountains, across rivers, through deserts—and the location, ever the location. Southerners would not support any railroad north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Judah was in the galleries when Representative Samuel Curtis of Iowa, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad, introduced a bill to build a transcontinental road from Iowa to Sacramento. Curtis had a number of inducements to investors in his bill, including giving land along the route to the corporation that built the road, but his bill differed from the one Judah and Burch were working on in that Curtis proposed a generous government loan of $60 million (thought to be about half of the projected costs). This loan was to be in the form of 5 percent thirty-year bonds which the newly formed corporation could sell on the open market. The debt would be repaid when the bonds matured.

  Southerners tacked onto the measure a provision calling for a parallel route through the Southwest. Missouri and Iowa were fighting over the eastern terminus. Curtis’s bill was sent back to committee for further consideration. That was almost surely a death warrant, but Curtis and his supporters got the bill entered on the calendar for the coming session. It would not be debated until December 1860.