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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  THERE was good news for Judah that spring of 1860. In May, in Chicago, Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president by the Republicans on a platform that called for full government support of the Pacific railway. In June, Congress passed an act granting federal aid to an overland telegraph from Missouri to San Francisco. That act cut through the quibbling over whether or not the federal government could support an internal improvement in states as well as in the territories. (The telegraph line was completed in 1861.)

  There was bad news too. Visitors came to Judah’s Pacific Railroad Museum to gawk, to talk, to be impressed, and to ask questions—chiefly, How do you propose to get across the Sierra Nevada mountains? It was one thing for the Baltimore and Ohio to cross the Appalachians, another altogether to attempt the Sierra.

  “He made up his mind,” according to Anna, that he would never go to Washington again till he had been on the Sierra Nevada and made a survey, so that when he returned it would be “with his maps, profiles, estimates etc. etc. for a railroad across the same.”11 He was sure it could be done, but he had to convince the politicians, so that “what I believe without the surveys I can intelligently show to senators, members of congress, etc. With facts and figures they cannot gainsay my honest convictions, as now.”

  In the summer of 1860, Judah and Anna set sail for California. Judah wrote a report to the executive committee of the convention, which had sent him to Washington. He covered in considerable detail his own activities and what had happened to his bill, and Curtis’s bill, but had to confess that “the debate on the slavery question, and other matters of little moment [sic], left us no time for the consideration of the Pacific Railroad Bill.” Then he made up his expense account. He said the whole trip cost him $2,500, but he was charging the convention only $40, to cover his printing expenses.12

  Never before, one would guess, and never again, one would be certain, has anyone turned in such a low expense account. Never before or since has anyone wanted a railroad so badly. Anna later wrote, “Oh, how we used to talk it all over on the steamer enroute to California in July, 1860.”13 Judah was now determined that, rather than ask Congress again to support some hypothetical company which would pick its own route, they should first organize the company itself and then present to the Congress accurate and definite surveys of its particular route.

  To make that possible, immediately on arrival in Sacramento, Judah set off for the Sierra. He may have been on the payroll of the Sacramento Valley Railroad, whose owners wanted him to hunt for a wagon road from Dutch Flat over the mountains past Donner Lake to the mines in Nevada. Or maybe not—it isn’t certain. In any event, he was doing what he loved best, sleeping in the open, camping out in wilderness mountain country, cooking over a fire, eating with his back to a tree, watching out for mountain lions, taking barometric readings to establish altitude, mapping out a route, noting the flora and fauna, looking everywhere, enjoying life as few people ever have.

  Anna wrote that he went over the different passes, including Henness, Beckworth, and Donner. “No one knew what he was doing! The ‘engineer’ was in the mountains. I remained in Sacramento among friends.”14 Sometimes she joined him on his excursions, painting while he measured.

  Judah was working his way up the ridge line between the North Fork of the American River and the Bear River in California, going from Auburn through Clipper Gap to Illinoistown (soon renamed Colfax), past Cape Horn, on to Dutch Flat, and then, possibly, to Emigrant Gap and Donner Pass. This was rugged mountainous country, extremely picturesque, but it seemed there was no chance for a railroad beyond Dutch Flat. At Cape Horn, for example, two miles above Illinoistown, the drops beneath the old unused wagon road Judah was following were as much as fifteen hundred feet. It seemed to everyone who had been there that it was impossible to build a rail line around Cape Horn.

  Everyone, that is, except Judah. The man who had built the suspension bridge at Niagara Falls knew that it mattered not if grade for the track was built above a fifteen-hundred-foot drop or over a fifteen-foot drop. What interested him most were the widely spaced saddles in the ridge line. By weaving in and out of them, the railroad could ascend toward the ultimate crest of the mountains on an even grade not in excess of the capability of the locomotives, or a maximum of a hundred feet per mile.15

  BY this time, early October 1860, most of America was discussing the presidential election, with the South threatening to secede if Lincoln and the Republicans won. But out in California, Judah was preparing his maps and reports on the Sierra. A letter arrived, from a Dutch Flat druggist, Daniel W. Strong, called “Doc” by his customers. Doc had heard about Judah’s exploring and wanted to show him the old emigrant road from Donner Lake, which had been abandoned after the Donner tragedy in 1846-47. Doc was sure it was the best place to build a railroad, because there the east-west ridge reached the summit of the chain on what amounted to a plateau. Everywhere else the Sierra crested twice, parallel ridges with a deep valley between them. Here there was only one crest, so a railroad climbing up from Dutch Flat would have to surmount only it. The chief engineering problem would be to find a way down a thousand-foot rocky wall past Donner Lake and along Donner Creek to the canyon leading to Utah formed by the Truckee River.

  The day Doc Strong’s letter arrived, Judah set out to see him at Dutch Flat. Anna wrote about what happened when they met. The two men became fast friends immediately. Strong, “truly a mountaineer,” led Judah on horseback up the ridge to Donner Pass. “No one knew what they were doing!” according to Anna. She adds, “Dr. Strong used to tell a thrilling story of their last night in the mountains [when they] came near being snowed in and were obliged to get up in the middle of the night from their camp and started out in the darkness to find the trail and none too soon were they.” Her husband “could not sleep or rest after they got into Dutch Flat and Strong’s store, till he had stretched his paper on the counter and made his figures thereon.

  “Then, turning to Dr. Strong, he said for the first time, ‘Dr. I shall make my survey over this, the Donner Pass or the Dutch Flat route, above every other.’”16

  “The next morning,” Strong wrote, Judah “said to me, ‘Give me some writing materials’—I produced some and he sat down and drew up what he called ‘articles of association’ [for the Central Pacific Railroad] and he shoved them across the table to me and said, ‘sign for what you want’” in the way of stock.17

  IT was mid-October. Judah wanted to create the corporation immediately. Under California laws, it was required that a railroad corporation have subscriptions to capital stock in the amount of $1,000 for each mile of road projected, 10 percent of which was to be paid in cash to the company treasury before incorporation. Judah estimated the mileage from Sacramento to the Nevada state line to be 115 miles, meaning he and Strong needed subscriptions of $115,000. While Judah went to work on a pamphlet designed to entice big investors in San Francisco, Strong worked on the mining communities of Dutch Flat, Illinoistown, Grass Valley, and Nevada City and brought in $46,500. Judah set out to get the nearly $70,000 remaining.

  He wrote a pamphlet, published November 1, 1860, entitled Central Pacific Railroad Company of California.* He opened with the statement that he and Strong had “some newly discovered facts with reference to the route of the Pacific Railroad through the State of California.” He claimed incorrectly that the line was short, only eighty miles from the foothills to Truckee Lake. “No serious engineering difficulties present themselves.”18

  Five days later, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. The next day, the South Carolina legislature called by unanimous vote for a convention to meet on December 20 to consider secession. The only thing that mattered to Judah at the moment was that, with the Republicans in control of Congress and the distinct possibility that the Southern representatives would walk out, the chances for passing the Curtis Bill or something like it were greatly enhanced. All of which gave him added incentive to get the Central Pacific incorporated.


  Anna wrote that “night and day he talked and labored with the capitalists in San Francisco.” On November 14, 1860, he wrote Strong, “I have struck a lucky streak, and shall fill up the list without further trouble. I have got one of the richest concerns in California into it.”19 The next evening, he left Anna at the San Francisco Russ House “firm in the faith that the gentlemen he was to meet that evening in the office of a leading law firm would give him the aid he required to make his survey the following spring; in other words—would be his backers, for the Pacific R.R. Co. He left me in high hopes.”

  Judah was shattered by the reaction. His potential backers scoffed at his idea. For example, how did he know he could build a line across the Sierra Nevada for $70,000 per mile? Judah had not made a proper survey and needed money to do so. And what about the snow? Judah had not a shred of information about how to keep the road free of snow. Besides, there was no guarantee the Congress would pass the Curtis or any other bill aiding the railroad, and even if it did, building the thing would take twelve to twenty years. Judah shook his head—he asserted he could do it in seven years. They said they could make more money quicker in other investments.

  Judah went back to his wife and told her, “Pack your bag, for I am going up to Sacramento on the boat to-morrow. Remember what I say to you to-night so you can tell me sometime. Not two years will go over the head of these gentlemen I have left to-night, but they would give all they have to have what they put away to-night; I shall never talk or labor any more with them—I am going to Sacramento to see what I can do with the wealthy business men of that city.”20

  STARTING the day after he arrived, Judah held several meetings at the St. Charles Hotel in Sacramento, on J Street. At some as many as thirty men were present, at others fewer than a dozen. Dr. Strong was there, along with merchant Lucius Booth, James Bailey (a Sacramento jeweler), Cornelius Cole (later congressman and senator from California), B. F. Leete (one of Judah’s surveyors), and some others.

  One of those present was Charles Crocker—now weighing 250 pounds—who was running a dry-goods store in town, had been present for the organization of the Republican Party in California (1856), and had just been elected to the state legislature. Collis Huntington was also there, with his partner in their general store, Mark Hopkins. So was Leland Stanford, also a storekeeper but intensely involved in politics as a Republican candidate for state treasurer and later for governor.

  “We none of us knew anything about railroad building,” Crocker later said, “but at the same time were enterprising men, and anxious to have a road built, and have it come to Sacramento.”21

  Judah presented his case. He had decided to forget about a transcontinental railroad and concentrate instead on getting up to the California mountains, perhaps crossing them to the Nevada line. According to Anna, what he told the assembled potential investors, nearly all of them Sacramento store owners, was: “You are tradesmen here in Sacramento city, your property and your business is here—help me make the survey, I’ll make you the Central Pacific railroad company and with the [congressional] bill passed, you have the control of business which will make your fortune in trades, etc. etc. If nothing more, why, you can own a wagon road [from Dutch Flat over the mountains] if not a railroad.”22

  Ears turned up and attention concentrated on Judah. Here was what the merchants wanted to hear. They could sell more of their goods, expand their business, and stifle competition. Their property would become more valuable. They could control the traffic from their city to the Nevada mines and thus control that market. Judah told them that he had crossed the crest of the Sierra on twenty-three separate occasions, that he was convinced the Donner Pass route beyond Dutch Flat was the best, and that he had to have financial backing for the purpose of making a careful instrumental survey of the proposed line.

  “I think every one present,” Cornelius Cole later wrote, “agreed to take stock in the concern. Several subscribed for fifty shares each, but no one for more than that. I took fifteen shares … and subsequently acquired ten more.”23 The initial money was to pay for a survey beginning on the levee on Front Street and then heading up the American River.

  Judah had his start. He told Anna the next morning, “If you want to see the first work done on the Pacific railroad look out of your bed room window. I am going to work there this morning and I am going to have these men pay for it.”

  She replied, “I am glad, for it’s about time somebody else helped.”24 Looking out the window later that morning, she saw her husband and a few helpers run their lines down the muddy streets with chains and stakes and heavy brass instruments.

  • • •

  ONE man, in fact, had refused to subscribe at the meeting. He was Collis Huntington, who later admitted: “I did not give anything. When the meeting was about to break up, one or two said to me, ‘Huntington, you are the man to give to this enterprise.’ I gave two or three hundred for a road…. I did not want any of the stock. This railroad was a thing so big there was not much use starting out expecting to do much towards building it. I told Mr. Judah as I left—‘if you want to come to my office some evening I will talk with you about this railroad.’”

  Judah was there the next evening. He talked and talked, and convinced Huntington to put up $35,000 to do a thorough instrumental survey. “I said all right I will pay that, but I will not agree to do anything after that,” Huntington stated about the single best deal he ever made. “I may go on,” he added, “but don’t promise to do anything now but make a survey.” He, his partner Hopkins, Stanford, James Bailey, Crocker, and Lucius Booth were all Sacramento merchants with goods to sell to Nevada miners, who were almost as numerous and as much in need of goods as those in California had been a decade before.25

  “We organized a corps of engineers in the spring [of 1861],” Crocker later said, “and sent them with Mr. Judah at the head to run a line along the mountains to the Big Bend of the Truckee River [today’s Wadsworth, Nevada]. It was merely a trial line; what we called a base line—but from that we found that the grades which Judah had said could be obtained were actually practicable, and were obtained.”26

  JUDAH, accompanied by Strong and others, made his way to Dutch Flat that spring, then waited for the snows to melt before going on. Strong said that it took “pretty much all summer to make the survey to the State Line.”27 At various times Huntington, Crocker, and Stanford joined Judah in the Sierra for a personal look. At one point Huntington, Judah, and a hired Chinese employed to carry blankets and provisions spent a week in the canyon of the Feather River and decided it was wholly impractical for a railroad.

  ON June 28, 1861, with the Civil War already under way, the Central Pacific Railroad of California came into formal existence. It was incorporated with Stanford as president, Huntington vice-president, Hopkins treasurer, James Bailey secretary, Judah chief engineer, and with Stanford, Crocker, Bailey, Judah, Huntington, Hopkins, Strong, and Charles Marsh as directors. Their combined wealth, according to Huntington, was $159,000. Neither Congress, the state of California, nor any syndicates of capitalists had put a single penny into the corporation. California’s first and greatest historian, Hubert Howe Bancroft, commented that for so “stupendous and hazardous an enterprise it appears an act of madness or of inspiration…. Many said that those Sacramento merchants who had ventured upon it would sink their personal fortunes in the canyons of the Sierra.”28

  Stanford had become the Republican candidate for governor, which was still the chief political concern in California, despite the beginning of the Civil War back east. Judah wrote Strong, “Election and politics so monopolize everything here now that our people have very little time to talk railroad matters…. I am trying to put my little road upon its legs, and it looks rather favorable, but like everything else, can do nothing with it until after the election.”29

  On August 7, 1861, Judah was quoted in the Union as saying, “The problem as to crossing the Sierra Nevada has been solved.”30 It had indeed. W
illiam Hood, for many years chief engineer of the Central Pacific, declared in 1925, “Were there now no railroad over the Sierra, the Donner Lake Route would still be selected over all others as the best possible route.”31

  ON September 4, Stanford won election as governor. Three weeks later, Judah placed before the partners his written report on the results of his months of careful work.

  It was a masterpiece. Judah opened by listing the most objectionable features of locating the railroad in the Sierra Nevada: first, the great elevation to be overcome; second, the impracticability of river crossings on account of the deep gorges cut by the rivers; third, that the Sierra possessed two distinct summit ranges to be crossed. But the line he had found ran up the ridge, with maximum grades of but 105 feet to a mile, and with no major canyons or rivers to cross. As for the double summit, he had found a route that entirely avoided the second range. His line ran up the divide between the rivers “from gap to gap” in order to secure the best possible gradients—and was in fact the line followed by the Central Pacific.

  He discussed the snow problem and was unduly optimistic—“a Railroad Line, upon this route, can be kept open during the entire year,” even though the snow would constitute a not inconsiderable problem. He thought that eighteen tunnels, mainly through the mountains towering above Donner Lake, would be driven with relative ease, even the longest, at 1,370 feet. The route contained extensive forests of pitch and sugar pine, fir, and abundant quantities of cedar and tamarack, which would make excellent supports for bridge trusses and crossties and provide lumber for buildings. He concluded the report with a list of the maps and profiles attached to the original copy.32

  If Huntington, Crocker, Hopkins, Stanford, and the others needed any convincing that Judah knew more about the Sierra Nevada and about railroads than anyone else, his report did it. Judah, meanwhile, spent September mapping his surveys, making profiles, and gathering information for use with the Congress. He was confident he could go to Washington on a ship to get at least some aid. On September 2, he had written Strong, “I think the next Congress will be a favorable one to procure lands from the Government, and perhaps it may be money; but of the latter I do not feel by any means so certain; but the lands [i.e., alternate sections granted by Congress to the railroad for every mile built] do not create any debt, and the feeling towards California ought to be a good one.”33 That last phrase was very much on the mark, for California’s gold and silver—and Nevada’s—were helping pay for the war just started, and there was a fear in Washington, sparked by some loose talk in California, that the state might follow the South and leave the Union.