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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  DESPITE Judah’s misgivings, there was more money coming in. In April 1863, as Lee’s army prepared to swing into Chancellorsville to fight General Joe Hooker’s army, Governor Stanford managed to prod the California legislature into donating to the CP millions of dollars in state bonds, to be issued at the rate of $10,000 per mile after the completion of specified amounts of track. In return, the railroad agreed to transport, without charge to the state, convicts for prison, inmates for insane institutions, materials for the state agricultural fair and indeed for all state buildings, and state militia. Stanford also got the legislators to authorize Sacramento and Placer Counties to vote on the issuing of bonds for the purchase of stock from the railroad, as well as the city of San Francisco. In the event, Sacramento voted for $300,000 and thirty acres of city land for the CP’s use. Placer gave $250,000, and San Francisco voted for $600,000.

  Many were jealous of the CP and more than a few were determined to wreck it. A typical slander: “The whole matter resolves itself simply into this: Leland Stanford & Co. have … bamboozled the people out of a stupendously magnificent franchise, worth hundreds of millions …. It is to them, and to them alone, that all the benefits, all the profits inure.” To which the editor of the Sacramento Union quite rightly replied, “If it is worth so many millions, why should not the county of Placer become a subscriber, and thus obtain an interest in those millions?”19 Nevertheless, the sums voted for were not immediately available. They were held up by various court actions. It took more than a year and a half to get San Francisco to pay up.

  WORK on the railroad proceeded, slowly. Judah was out in front of the graders, laying out the exact line through Dutch Flat and over the summit. In the mountains he was always happy. In this case, even happier, because he had hired two young engineers who were proving to be godsends. One was the thirty-three-year-old Samuel Skerry Montague, lured by Judah away from the Sacramento Valley Railroad. Montague was a rangy, slim, black-bearded New Hampshire man. He had failed at gold mining in California but taught himself location engineering. He had an undoubted skill as a surveyor and railroad man, especially with such a master as Judah to teach him. The other was Lewis M. Clement, a Canadian canal engineer hired by Judah because, like Montague, he had an ability to learn.

  One day Judah sent Clement off by himself to do some surveying, to see how he would do. When Clement returned much earlier than anticipated, Judah said sternly, “I did not expect to see you back until you had finished, young man.”

  “I have finished,” Clement replied, as he handed to Judah a complete report. Together that summer Montague and Clement helped Judah and the crews solve many of the engineering problems in building a railroad in one of the world’s toughest mountain ranges.20

  Down in the American River Valley, progress was painfully slow. Still, Crocker was learning. The labor problems were excruciating. Only the bridge over the river went as planned. For the rest, Crocker had to wait until fall for the first rails to arrive, which meant that some of the original grading washed out in heavy rains and had to be redone. That meant more shoveling for the graders, more loading of dirt and debris onto handcarts, more dumping, more cash to be paid out by the CP.

  In the war, meanwhile, at the beginning of May 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia defeated the Union forces at Chancellorsville, and General Robert E. Lee began his preparations to invade Pennsylvania. In the Western theater, Grant began the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi. In California, despite the Union’s heavy losses in battle and the perilous state of the war, work on binding the Republic together east to west continued.

  IN early May 1863, Judah came down from the mountains to attend a directors’ meeting in Sacramento. There the Big Four announced that they were tired of bearing all the costs themselves and wanted every director to be equally responsible for the money required to build the road. Judah was unwilling and unhappy. On May 13, he wrote his friend and Dutch Flat resident Doctor Strong, “I had a blowout about two weeks ago and freed my mind, so much so that I looked for instant decapitation. I called things by their right name and invited war; but counsels of peace prevailed and my head is still on.” Only barely. Meanwhile, “my hands are tied.” Judah reported, “We have no meetings of the board nowadays, except the regular monthly meeting, which, however, was not had this month, but there have been any quantity of private conferences to which I have not been invited.” Thinking it over, Judah added, “I try to think it is all for the best, and devote myself with additional energy to my legitimate portion of the enterprise.”21 He and his assistant Lewis Clement were working at the railroad offices regularly until past midnight, making estimates of the costs of eventual repair shops and other buildings.

  In early summer, Judah had his next report printed and distributed. He used it to reply to a severe criticism raised by L. L. Robinson, who was one of the owners of the Sacramento Valley Railroad and one of the leading figures charging that the CP intended only to build the railroad to Dutch Flat and thereafter make money off the wagon road. Robinson also charged that Judah had made his original surveys over the Donner Pass while he was working for the Sacramento Valley line. Further, he wanted to know why the CP had not used the older line from Sacramento to Auburn and thus saved money. Because, Judah said, first of all the Sacramento line was eight miles longer than his location from K Street in Sacramento to Auburn. Second, the congressional appropriations in the Pacific Railroad Bill of 1862 did not apply to any already constructed road. Third, the bill required American iron rails, whereas the older line was constructed with English rails. Fourth, the Sacramento Valley line was heavily mortgaged, and the federal aid in the bill was to constitute a first lien on the road. Fifth, because the old road needed a great deal of repair and rehabilitation work. There were other reasons, but this was enough.22

  Judah’s report saved the CP, and thus its principal owners, the Big Four. Nevertheless, trouble persisted, and got worse. Judah did not approve of Crocker’s construction methods and was suspicious—rightly—that the other three in the Big Four were sharing the stock of the CP that Crocker & Company were receiving. That July, Huntington returned from New York for a short but squalid visit. The Union had won a three-day battle at Gettysburg and thus turned back the Confederate offensive. On the next day, July 4, Grant had forced Vicksburg to surrender. Still, there was trouble in California.

  Judah wrote Strong, “Huntington has returned and has … more than his usual influence…. The wagon road seems to be a tie which unites them [the Big Four] and its influence seems to be paramount to everything else…. They do not hesitate to talk boldly, openly before me, but not to me, about it. They talk as though there was nobody in the world but themselves who could build a wagon road.”23

  Huntington walked along the riverbank to observe Crocker’s grading and was furious. “I had given orders that the railroad was to go up I Street to Fifth and thence to B Street and out to the levee,” he later said. But Judah had his own ideas and was running over the slough beyond I Street to Sixth and E Streets, and then out to the new levee, where the line diverged to the north and crossed the American River. According to Huntington, at the slough “water overflowed every year,” and Judah’s route would require more of the riprap-stone ballasting to protect the embankment. Work had been going on for several days when Huntington saw it. He admonished Judah, who told him that the other directors had approved his route. “I replied,” said Huntington, “it will cost $200,000 more at least to put the road here, and I then ordered him to move the road.”24

  Huntington was pigheaded, but Judah was also stubborn. He refused to carry out Huntington’s order, and the road is today on his line.

  Huntington and Judah argued about everything. Judah felt that he was being pushed to a back seat as a hired hand on “his” railroad. Huntington was almost contemptuous of Judah. Some five years later, he said in a letter to E. B. Crocker, “There never were two peas more alike than Gen’l Dodge and T D. Judah.” He was one of the very
few men who knew them both, and the only one to compare them to two peas. “If you should see Dodge you would swear that it was Judah,” he went on, “and if you had anything to do with him you would be more than satisfied. The same low cunning that he [Judah] had. Then a large amount of that kind of cheap dignity that Judah had.”25

  In Huntington’s view, Judah had nothing to complain about. The CP had picked him up when no one else would. The directors had raised his salary from an initial $100 a month to almost $500 per month and given him a stock-option plan that let him purchase five hundred shares of $100 stock at half-price. And he still demanded deference. To hell with that.

  At a stockholders’ meeting in mid-July 1863, the crisis came to a head. Huntington proposed adding to the board, while Judah and Strong, along with their friends Bailey and Booth, resisted. By the end of the meeting, the board’s two new members were Asa Philip Stanford and Dr. John Morse, the former Leland Stanford’s brother and the latter Huntington’s friend.

  Judah wanted to mortgage, at 2 percent interest per month, the equipment that Huntington had bought in the East. Huntington argued that such a course would create a crushing interest load for the CP and impair the credit standing he had relied upon with Ames and other eastern men who had loaned the company money. Better to assess the stockholders for additional money to pay up on their stocks more rapidly than originally intended. The directors agreed. Hopkins began demanding that the directors pay for their stock in full, something the others in the Big Four began to do, even as they bought out other shareholders at sharply discounted prices. Hopkins asked Judah to pay at least 10 percent on the stock he had been given in lieu of salary. Judah protested that this was a tax on money already paid him, but he managed—just barely—to do it. Then he returned to the mountains, determined to turn the tables on the “shopkeepers.”26

  Judah felt that the Big Four were outright cheating—especially in the matter of where the Sierra Nevada began, and on the Dutch Flat wagon road—and were guilty of misusing the public trust and public monies.

  Huntington’s next actions deepened his anger. The day after the shake-up of the board, Huntington later recorded, there was “a good deal of hubbub.”27 He overruled Judah on some engineering decisions and, when Judah objected, said bluntly, if Judah and other objectors didn’t like it why not buy out the Big Four? This degenerated into a shouting match. Huntington said, in a snide manner, that Judah could have all the stock of all the members of the Big Four at $100,000 each if he could raise the money.

  As Huntington well knew, Judah and Bailey did not have the money to take that option. But the two men were determined that the Big Four had to go. They went into San Francisco to see if banker Charles McLaughlin, who owned the Western Pacific Railroad, might be willing to buy out the Big Four. But although he was interested, when McLaughlin heard that Huntington was willing to sell he sent Bailey a telegram: “If old Huntington is going to sell out, I am not going in.” Bailey, discouraged, sold out himself, which left Judah standing alone.28

  There were some obvious lessons here. First, how hard it was going to be to raise money for a railroad that so far didn’t run anywhere. Second, Huntington’s reputation was as high on the West Coast as on the East. Third, neither Huntington nor any other member of the Big Four had the slightest intention of selling out unless he had to do so, and even then wouldn’t unless someone had a gun at his head. But for Judah the only lesson was that he could not raise the needed funds in San Francisco and it was necessary to go to New York if he wished to persist.

  Huntington insisted that, since Judah and his friends could not come up with the money to buy out the Big Four, they must sell.29 Judah apparently did, at least to the extent of trading in his five hundred shares of the CP for $100,000 in the CP’s railroad bonds. He also may have sold his share of the franchise of the Nevada Central Railroad to Charles Crocker for $10,000 cash. And Bailey, who did sell out, was replaced on the board by a friend of Mark Hopkins.30

  Judah was still the chief engineer, drawing a salary that was now up to $10,000 a year, although not necessarily paid in cash. At this time he also received $25,000 from the board, though in stock, not bonds.

  But Anna later wrote, “Oh, some of those days were terrible to us! He felt they [the Big Four] were ungrateful to their trust and to him.”31 Judah made contact with money men in the East, most of all Cornelius Vanderbilt, who may have told Judah he was ready to buy out the Big Four but before he did so he wanted more details about the railroad. Probably using the $10,000 he had received from Crocker for Nevada Central Railroad stock, Judah bought tickets for Anna and himself to New York.

  DESPITE the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the summer of 1863 went badly for the Union. There was no follow-up in Virginia against Lee’s army. Out west there was better news: on July 9, the Union forces captured Port Hudson, Louisiana, and thus opened the Mississippi River. But less than a week later, a four-day draft riot took place in New York City, marked by burning, looting, and other outrages. Irish immigrant laborers, lowest paid of all, attacked African Americans and lynched several of them. Regular-army troops were sent from Gettysburg to the city to put down the rioters. There were other antiblack riots in other Northern cities, notably Detroit. At the end of the summer, the Confederates won a major victory in the two-day Battle of Chickamauga, Tennessee, and drove the Union forces back into Chattanooga, where a siege began. The Union had expected victory after Gettysburg. That did not happen. The war still had a long way to go, and many Northerners were beginning to wonder if victory was worth the price in men’s lives.

  Nevertheless, in California the fight going on was over who would own the Central Pacific Railroad. Determined to bring about a change, on October 3, 1863, Judah and Anna set off on the steamer St. Louis. Unknown to the couple, a few days later, while sailing south, they passed the Herald of the Morning, which was coming north after leaving New York months ago, carrying the CP’s first hundred tons of rail, the first locomotive, and other assorted hardware. Three more of the CP’s cargoes were not far behind, carrying three more locomotives. The first came onto the Sacramento levee four days later, with the others soon after. The four locomotives were named the Governor Stanford, the Pacific, the C. P. Huntington, and the T. D. Judah, weighing (respectively) twenty-five tons, thirty tons, nineteen tons, and nineteen tons. Judah knew none of this, but he had arranged to meet Vanderbilt in New York and was confident he could have his way.

  Napoleon, asked what qualities he looked for in his generals, replied, “Luck. Give me generals who are lucky.”

  Judah, up to now, had been lucky enough to cross the Isthmus several times without suffering a single day of sickness. But on this trip, he was caught in a rainstorm and got soaked in helping the women and children on board the steamer. Anna wrote, “I feared for him and remonstrated, for I knew he was doing too much—but he replied, ‘Why I must, even as I would have some one do for you—it is only humanity.’ That night he had a terrible headache and from that time grew worse and worse.”

  He apparently had contracted yellow fever. Anna sat by his bed “night and day to care for him—but it was terrible.”

  One night he roused himself and said, “Anna, what cannot I do in New York now? I have always had to set my brains and will too much against other men’s money—now, what I cannot do!” He also managed to write a letter, with a shaking hand, to Dr. Strong. He said he had a “feeling of relief in being away from the scenes of contention and strife which it has been my lot to experience for the past year, and to know that the responsibilities of events as regards the Pacific Railroad do not rest on my shoulders.” But if he were successful in the East, “there will be a radical change in the management of the railroad and it will pass into the hands of men of experience and capital,” unlike the corrupt and incompetent men then in charge. If he failed, he warned, the Big Four would “rue the day they ever embarked on the Pacific Railroad.

  “If they treat me well,” he wen
t on, referring to the Big Four, “they may expect similar treatment at my hands. If not, I am able to play my hand.” He expected to return from New York with Vanderbilt and others in his party.32

  On October 26, 1863, the same day Charlie Crocker saw the first of the CP rails spiked to the ties, the Judahs arrived in New York. Anna managed to get her husband transported to a hotel on Wall Street. There the surgeon of the steamer left them alone. She kept Judah awake by dipping her finger in the brandy bottle and having him take it that way. A doctor at the hotel cared for him, but, as Anna wrote, “we will pass over that terrible week.” The doctor said that Judah was an overworked man and that such men fell victim to the fever. In a week he was dead. Anna put up a monument for him that contains his name, dates—March 4, 1826-November 2, 1863—and the words “He rests from his labors.”33 She buried him in a quiet country cemetery outside Greenfield, Massachusetts.

  Specifically what Judah had hoped to accomplish in New York is not clear. He wanted to persuade Vanderbilt and others to buy out the Big Four. Why he wanted them to do so is plain enough, but how he thought they could manage the building of the biggest railroad in the country from a continent away is not. He hoped to bring Vanderbilt, his baggage bulging with money, to California with him to buy out the Big Four while he became the chief of construction as well as the chief engineer. With Montague and Clement working for him, he had two of the finest engineering assistants in the country, and he was certain he could do it.

  But there is no indication that Vanderbilt was prepared to plunge into a California-to-Nevada railroad, much less move to the West Coast.