But in an hour, they saw two individuals approaching them, who turned out to be Jacob House and James A. Evans. House was a UP division engineer, and Evans a surveyor who had, at Dey’s orders, among other things, run the original line along the north bank of the Platte. They announced that they had come to take charge of the party, which was to continue its survey to the south, down to the Republican River. The decision to go on straight west had not yet been reached; the railroad might well bend to the south, then west to Denver. This news came as “a surprise and a great disappointment to us,” Ferguson recorded. Some of the party said they would not go on.
Evans dismounted and told those who refused to continue to step forward three paces. No one dared.
“All right, men,” Evans proclaimed. “Turn about and march back to the old camp.”
The troops joined the railroaders. The soldiers “complained a great deal. They said that in case of an attack they would leave us to ourselves and do nothing towards our defense.”
The next morning was “very cold.” Clouds laden with snow moved in. The men had to cross the Platte River, which was in places up to their armpits and terribly cold. The following day, “we passed the new-made graves of some twelve men who had recently been killed by the savages.” Snow began, and by mid-afternoon “we were in the midst of a furious storm.” The party pitched its tents in a cottonwood grove. “We all had a terrible night of it. The cold was severe and the ground was so damp and wet that it was next to impossible to sleep. The horses were fed with large quantities of cottonwood limbs.”
After two more dismal nights, Ferguson and the men and troopers started for the Republican. “We are now in the midst of the worst Indian country in the entire West,” he wrote. “It is the very stamping ground of the war parties of various tribes.” No wonder. “This is the great buffalo country of the West,” he noted, “and sometimes a black, surging mass can be seen extending in every direction as far as the eye can reach, the herd running up into thousands and thousands.” The soldiers wasted their ammunition by shooting them in sport, “leaving them on the ground for the wolf and the raven.”
Despite an abundance of animal life such as no modern man has ever seen, and only Lewis and Clark and their men and a few other white men had seen before, Ferguson was struck by the scene. “This is a terrible country,” he wrote, “the stillness, wildness and desolation of which is awful. Not a tree to be seen. The stillness too was perfectly awful, not a sign of man to be seen, and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal.”29
Shortly thereafter, the party returned to Omaha, the soldiers to Fort Kearney. They would start again, from the hundredth meridian, when the weather became fair.
THE 1864 Pacific Railroad Act required the UP to complete the first hundred miles of track by June 27, 1866. Durant had talked confidently of building that amount in 1865, but he didn’t come close. In September 1865, he confessed that the UP would be lucky to complete sixty miles by the end of the year, but he didn’t come close to that either. By December 31, the UP had laid forty miles of track. Because the 1864 bill had reduced the number of miles completed before the bonds would be given out from forty to twenty, that feat meant that, when the government commissioners accepted the UP’s forty miles of track, the railroad would get $640,000 of government bonds ($320,000 per twenty miles, or $16,000 per mile).
In addition, Durant had gathered together in Omaha a set of superb workers who were just waiting for the warm winds of spring before starting out again, either to lay track or to grade or survey. They were tough, hardy, eager. And with the war over, there were thousands of young men, all veterans of either the Union or the Confederate Army, who were looking for work. The UP’s first locomotive had arrived. Further, Durant had faced up to the need for reorganization, on which he expected to get started immediately.
Meanwhile, he was pushing his original surveyors as hard as he could. He had pulled Evans in, but Samuel Reed was still out there, working well beyond the valley of the Great Salt Lake into areas that were a long way away for the UP. Still, Durant wanted to know. In the fall, he had told Reed to find a route from Salt Lake to the Sierra Nevada.
Reed set out, intending to go via the valley of the Humboldt River to the valley of the Truckee, on the California-Nevada border. In November, he wrote to Durant. He was unhappy to report that he had not reached the Truckee, because of lack of water, but he had made a line from Salt Lake to the place where the Humboldt sank into the ground. After that the desert stopped him. Reed reported that he could run a line from the Salt Lake to the valley of the Humboldt “without a cut or fill exceeding 15 feet or grades exceeding 75 feet per mile.”30
That was good news, even though it would be a considerable time before either the UP or the CP could take advantage of it. But the anticipation was running at a fever pitch. The Denver-based Rocky Mountain News spoke for nearly all of America when it stated, “There is one theme everywhere present. The one moral, the one remedy for every evil, social, political, financial and industrial, the one immediate vital need of the entire Republic, is the Pacific Railroad.”31
The editors of the Railroad Record, however, were critical of the way Durant and company were laying the track. “We confess that we are not satisfied,” they wrote. “Neither is the country, which has a right to expect more vigor in its construction.” The sloth and poor-quality construction (for example, sand rather than gravel was being used for ballast), according to the Record, were “an insult to the generosity and magnanimity of the American public.”32
* As it was, but when E. H. Harriman took over the road—which was bankrupt at the time, 1901—he straightened it out, using Dey’s original line.
* Dodge was approximately at a spot on today’s Interstate 80, about twenty-five miles west of the junction of 1-15 and 1-80, at eight thousand feet of altitude, or fifteen feet short of the highest point on the 1-80 system. There is a sign there that points to, alas, geographical features of the countryside rather than Dodge’s adventure.
* The Burnettizer was a huge, one-hundred-by-five-foot cylinder, sent to Omaha by steamship. By 1866, the company had three of them. After the water was drained and the zinc solution put in, the ties were heated and dried. The ties cost 16 cents each to be processed. The UP saved money in building, but spent much more in replacing the cottonwood ties—but by then the railroad was completed. This was in accord with the general principle: Nail it down! Get the thing built! We can fix it up later.
Chapter Seven
THE CENTRAL PACIFIC ATTACKS THE SIERRA NEVADA 1865
IN 1862, Clarence King graduated from Yale’s distinguished Sheffield Scientific School In 1863, he crossed the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada by mule, got a job with the California Geological Survey, began to build his reputation, and, still well short of his thirtieth birthday, landed another job. It was to do the Fortieth Parallel Survey for the federal government along the lines of what would become the first transcontinental railroad.
With a team of scientists, King examined the southeastern corner of Wyoming (today’s Cheyenne) through Utah and Nevada to the crest of the Sierra Nevada. His task on what became known as the “King Survey” was to describe the flora, fauna, minerals, and other natural features. He later became the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey.1
In his book Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, King wrote about those mountains based on his 1866 exploration: “For four hundred miles the Sierras are a definite ridge, broad and high, and having the form of a sea-wave.” On the eastern face, “buttresses of somber-hued rock jut at intervals from a steep wall.” On the western face, “long ridges of comparatively gentle outline” dominate. “But this sloping table is scored from summit to base by a system of parallel transverse canyons, distant from one another often less than twenty-five miles. They are ordinarily two or three thousand feet deep, falling at times in sheer, smooth-fronted cliffs, again in sweeping curves like the hull of a ship, with irregular, hilly flanks open
ing at last through gateways of low, rounded foot-hills out upon the horizontal plain of the San Joaquin and Sacramento. Every canyon carries a river, derived from constant melting of the perpetual snow.”
This western slope faces a moisture-laden, aerial current from the Pacific. The wind strikes first on the Coast Range, which forces it up, and it there discharges, as fog and rain, a great sum of moisture. “But being ever reinforced, it flows over their crest, and, hurrying eastward, strikes the Sierras at about four thousand feet.” Below, the foothills are habitually dry. Above, it is nearly always wet, for the wind condenses on the mountains’ higher portion a great amount of water that “piles upon the summits in the form of snow, which is absorbed upon the upper plateau by an exuberant growth of forest.”2
The Sierra Nevada that King described are the principal topographical feature of the American Far West. They are a massive granite block. On the eastern front they rise from four thousand feet or more in the north to seven thousand feet or more in the south. The western face is some fifty to sixty miles broad with a gradual rise of 2 to 6 percent. The summits, many enveloped in glaciers, run from six thousand feet in the north to ten thousand feet west of Lake Tahoe in the center. There are twelve peaks exceeding fourteen thousand feet in the south.
IF California was the land of superb natural bays, gold, silver, and other minerals for the picking, fertile agricultural lands, the best weather anywhere in the continent for humans, animals, and plants, and no warlike Indian tribes to resist the coming of the Americans, it was also a land that the Americans could scarcely get to or out of because of that granite block between them and the Eastern United States. It was as if those mountains had been designed to divide California permanently from the remainder of the country. They were too big, too snowy, too steep, too rugged, too extensive, too formidable ever to be crossed easily. The mountains challenged even humans on foot, as the fate of the Donner Party (1846-47) made clear.
The idea of driving a railroad over or through the Sierra Nevada was so audacious as to suck out the breath of those who heard it discussed. The audacity of Ted Judah in proposing it, even though he had found a place where there was just one summit to cross instead of two, and of the Big Four in taking him up on it, was monumental. Nothing like it had been done, anywhere. Not east of the Mississippi River over the Appalachians. Not in Europe. Not in Asia. Nowhere. Charles Crocker, who proposed to do it, later said, “People laughed at the time of building a railroad across those mountains.”3
To get a locomotive through that granite would require tunnels. Without them, no locomotive could get over the summits, even at the passes or with switchbacks. Tunnels through granite had no precedent. To make it happen, a way had to be found. Early in 1865, the Central Pacific went to work on the apparently unsolvable problem.
First money had to be found. That seems hard to believe for a much-needed and much-anticipated railroad whose president was also governor of the state of California, a railroad with millions in bonds pledged to it from the federal government, a railroad that could sell its own stocks and bonds, a railroad that had Collis Huntington raising money in Boston and New York, but it was so. A railroad that was building in the land of milk and honey, gold and silver, needed money. Nevertheless, there was no money at the beginning of 1865, only horrendous expenses.
As soon as the UP and the CP went into the market for rail—they could use only iron made in the United States, by act of Congress as decreed in the Pacific Railroad Bills—the prices jumped 80 percent, from $41.75 to $76.87 per ton, and by 1865 had jumped again, to $91.70 per ton. Shipments via the Panama Isthmus cost $51.97 per ton, meaning that rail delivered at San Francisco cost $143.67 per ton. Then came the charges for transfer from ships at San Francisco to the lighter, then unloading at Sacramento, then for transportation up the Sacramento River.
Locomotives went up in price too. Two engines in 1865 cost the CP $79,752. The CP paid it, more or less gladly, because, as Assistant Chief Engineer Lewis Clement explained to Leland Stanford, “the power of those engines is absolutely necessary to supply materials needed for construction; without these engines there will be delay.”
As the grading and then the tracks made their way up the Sierra Nevada, the expenses increased. As Clement explained, the ground was kept bare for the graders by having half of the men shoveling snow. After storms, the entire grading force was put to work removing snow. There were many other costs, especially as the tunnels began to be driven through the granite and as part of the CP’s workforce moved east of the mountains. But there was no money, either to pay the laborers or for supplies. Until 1865, the CP operated, mainly, on the Big Four’s money or on loans. In 1863 and 1864, not a penny in aid reached the railroad.
Still it operated, even though in the winter of 1864-65 it was down to about five hundred workmen. On January 7, 1865, Strobridge placed an advertisement in the Sacramento Union: “Wanted, 5,000 laborers for constant and permanent work, also experienced foremen. Apply to J. H. Strobridge, Superintendent. On the work, near Auburn.”4
Many applied, few stayed. What the white men wanted was what they had come to California to get—riches. At around $3 per day, the CP was not offering them any riches, but they were broke. New silver strikes in Nevada promised riches. The prospective rich men needed a ride to get there and a stake to support them once there. A week’s work on the CP would suffice. So, of the almost two thousand laborers who signed up to work for Strobridge, fewer than a hundred were there after a week.5
Clement recalled that, among the laborers, “mining was more to their liking than the discipline of railroad work. They were indifferent, independent, and their labor high priced. Labor sufficient for the rapid construction of the Central Pacific was not then on the coast and the labor as it existed could not be depended upon—the first mining excitement meant a complete stampede of every man and a consequent abandonment of all work.”6
Crocker and Strobridge kept at it. By the spring of 1865, Bloomer Cut was graded and tracked.* On April 5, after two years of strife and litigation, the California Supreme Court handed down a favorable decision: it ordered the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to pay to the CP $400,000 in stock bonds as a gift, instead of the $600,000 stock subscription authorized by the citizens of the city in 1863. Thereby, the city avoided being a stockholder, which meant it could not be held liable for debts (but also could not participate in the profits). The CP had paid $100,000 to win the suit, so it realized $300,000. It was the contention of the CP, quite unprovable, that, had the full $400,000 been available in 1864, the CP could have built its track well into Wyoming.
On May 13, 1865, the same day the train began carrying passengers and freight to Auburn, Huntington sent a telegram to Stanford: “I received yesterday twelve hundred and fifty-eight thousand dollars ($1,258,000) United States bonds for account of Central Pacific Railroad of California.”7 That represented the government’s loan to the CP for work completed in 1864, from Sacramento to Newcastle. The company got bonds at $16,000 per mile for the first seven miles, where, according to geologist Whitney and President Lincoln, the Sierra Nevada began, and $48,000 per mile for the next twenty-four miles, to Newcastle. Unfortunately, the CP had already borrowed against the money. Still, it helped.
With the money and the progress, everything was looking up. That summer, Mark Hopkins wrote to Collis Huntington that business was constantly increasing (in the first ten months of 1865, the company would earn $313,404 from the mails, passengers, and freight, with an operating expense of $93,448). The workforce was up to twenty-five hundred and on the increase, despite the desertions for the mines. More iron, engines, and cars were needed as soon as possible. Hopkins thought the CP could build all the way to the Salt Lake and perhaps farther. Meanwhile, he expected it to get to Dutch Flat in 1866. And, he noted, “the public here, in Nevada and at the East begin to exhibit an impatient interest in the progress of the Pacific R.R., which we cannot afford to disregard.”8
THERE was small chance that the Big Four and their workers would disregard the sentiment. In fact, none. The CP was charging ahead. What it needed to keep up the momentum was workers. When the tracks reached Auburn, the railroad was entering the Sierra for real. By far the toughest terrain lay ahead, up to and then down from the summit. In the spring of 1865, the CP went at that problem. By June 10, the railhead was at Clipper Gap, a lumber settlement forty-three miles east of Sacramento and 1,751 feet above sea level. It was now into its assault on the Sierra Nevada. It began reaching toward Illinoistown.
THE CP had gotten that far by using its wits and common sense. In February, a month after Strobridge’s all-but-fruitless call for labor, Charlie Crocker had met with him and raised the question of hiring Chinese. He said some twenty of them had worked, and worked well, on the Dutch Flat and Donner Lake Wagon Road.
“Stro,” as he was known to his friends, was opposed. He said all the whites currently working for him would take off, and anyway what did the Chinese know about railroad construction?9 They couldn’t possibly do the work. They averaged 120 pounds in weight, and only a few were taller than four feet ten inches. “I will not boss Chinese!” he declared.
“They built the Great Wall of China, didn’t they,” replied Crocker. Besides, “who said laborers have to be white to build railroads?”
Strobridge, still skeptical, agreed to hire fifty local (that is, living in Auburn) Chinese and try them out for a month under white supervisors.10
There were in California at that time some sixty thousand Chinese, nearly all adults and the great proportion of them males. They had come for the same reason as the whites, to make money, first of all in the gold-fields. But California law discriminated against them in every way possible, and the state did all it could to degrade them and deny them a decent livelihood. They were not allowed to work on the “Mother Lode.” To work the “tailing,” they had to pay a “miner’s tax,” a $4-per-head so-called permission tax, plus a $2 water tax. In addition, the Chinese had to pay a personal tax, a hospital tax, a $2 school tax, and a property tax. But they could not go to public school, they were denied citizenship, they could not vote, nor could they testify in court. Nevertheless, they paid more than $2 million in taxes. If Chinese dared to venture into a new mining area, the whites would set on them, beat them, rob them, sometimes kill them. Thus the saying, “Not a Chinaman’s chance.”
Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Page 17