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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Gray went because he had been invited by the Big Four to make an inspection of the completed line and the grading beyond the end of track. He had a reputation as one of the best railroad engineers in the country, and had previously been the first chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad. A favorable review by him would have a big effect on the potential bond- and stockholders; an unfavorable one was too painful to contemplate.

  Gray, with a wagon load of instruments and a team of assistants, set to his inspection in late June. He was impressed and more. He found the CP’s line to be of “first quality throughout,” from the seating of its bridges and the quality of its brickwork to the spacing of its ties and the construction of its depots, and had no reservations whatsoever. He sent his report to the President, the secretary of the interior, the CP headquarters, the Railroad Record and other publications.

  The CP was so delighted that, in late July 1865, it published Gray’s report as a pamphlet. Among other things, he wrote: “From the examination I have made, having traveled the distance on horseback or on foot, I feel confident that the railroad can be constructed over the Sierra Nevada … within two years…. It is quite a remarkable feature of your route that so elevated a mountain range can be surmounted with such comparatively light grades and curves.” In short order, the CP made Gray its consulting engineer.31

  The other party, led by Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and a future vice-president of the United States, left Omaha in July for a tour to the Pacific, Colfax went to the end of track of the UP, which was less than halfway to the Elkhorn River, then took stages to Denver. His party included Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican; William Bross, editor of the Chicago Tribune and lieutenant governor of Illinois; and Albert D. Richardson, one of the most distinguished correspondents of the Civil War, from the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley’s newspaper. From Denver the party went on a posh new Concord coach loaned by its owner, Ben Holladay, himself. It reached California in late summer.

  Stanford invited the Speaker and his party to travel with him to the CP’s end of track, then at mile 50 (just short of Illinoistown). Off they went, with plenty of wines, brandies, and good food. Stops were made to inspect tracks, trestling, and culverts, and to view the Chinese workers. Stanford made a grand gesture when the train got to the end of track: he renamed Illinoistown as “Colfax.”

  The reporters were enthusiastic, especially Richardson. He wrote of the Chinese, “They were a great army laying siege to Nature in her strongest citadel. The rugged mountains looked like stupendous ant-hills. They swarmed with Celestials,* shoveling, wheeling, carting, drilling and blasting rocks and earth, while their dull, moony eyes stared out from under immense basket-hats, like umbrellas.”32

  From Colfax, the party moved up the line of the graders by horseback. They rounded the spectacular point of Cape Horn. At Gold Run, sixty-three miles east of Sacramento, the Speaker and reporters got into a six-horse coach and set out for the summit, still forty or so miles away. Richardson saw “an endless sweep of dense forest and grand mountains, among graceful tamaracks, gigantic pines and pyramidal firs.” At the summit, reached shortly after sunset, “the wild, gloomy grandeur is far more impressive than by day. It is boundless mountain piled on mountain—unbroken granite, bare, verdure less, cold and gray.”

  After a night at Donner Lake, the travelers climbed up to the summit to talk with the surveyors. That night, they stayed together in a guest house. Richardson wrote about the company officials who were working on the details of the route over the summit: “The candles lighted up a curious picture. The carpet was covered with maps, profiles and diagrams, held down at the edges by candlesticks. On their knees were president, directors and surveyors, creeping from one map to another, and earnestly discussing the plans of their magnificent enterprise. Outside the night wind moaned and shrieked, as if the Mountain Spirit resented this invasion of his ancient domain.”33

  THAt fall of 1865, the CP went to work on the tunnels. Six of the thirteen that it would have to blast out before getting to the east slope were clustered in a stretch of two miles at the top of the long climb to the summit. The biggest, No. 6, right at the summit and within a few hundred feet of Donner Pass, was, as noted, 1,659 feet long and as much as 124 feet beneath the surface. The facings—where the blasting began—were 150 feet from the summit.

  Clement planned it. In mid-October, when the end of track and supply base were at Colfax, Chief Engineer Montague started the Chinese working in shifts—eight hours per day, three shifts through the twenty-four hours—at each end of the formidable summit. There was only room for gangs of three men. One would hold the rock drill against the granite, while the other two would swing eighteen-pound sledgehammers to hit the back end of the drill.

  Of all the backbreaking labor that went into the building of the CP and the UP, of all the dangers inherent in the work, this was the worst. The drills lost their edge to the granite and had to be replaced frequently. The CP soon learned to order its drills in hundred-ton lots. The man holding the drill had to be steady or he would get hit by the sledgehammer. The man swinging the hammer had to have muscles like steel. When a hole was at last big enough for the black powder, the crew would fill it, set a fuse, yell as loud as they could while running out of the range of the blast, and hope. Sometimes the fuse worked, sometimes it didn’t.

  Often the workers had put in too much powder and most of it blew toward them—harmlessly as far as the granite was concerned, but at great danger to the Chinamen. Clement’s assistant, Henry Root, explained that “more powder was used by the rock foreman than was economical,” for the simple reason that the workers were told that time, not money, was of the essence. At Summit Tunnel alone, three hundred kegs of blasting powder a day went up, costing $53,000 to $67,000 per month.34

  Progress was incredibly slow. With men working round the clock, between six and twelve inches per twenty-four hours was normal.35 Crocker gave orders to establish permanent work camps on each side of the summit, to facilitate the round-the-clock drilling, blasting, scraping, shoveling, and hauling by the Chinese. He figured there was no night or day within a tunnel. The men worked in groups of twenty or so, because only a handful could work at any one time.36

  BY the middle of the summer of 1865, cargoes of Chinese laborers signed up by Koopmanschap had begun arriving in San Francisco.* They were shipped forward by riverboat to Sacramento, then to the end of track by train, then by foot to work on the grading. Strobridge’s workforce soon doubled and continued to grow. The CP had to learn how to put them to useful work, no difficult problem, and to house and feed them, which required some imagination, principally from the Chinese.

  The CP used tents for housing as long as the weather remained warm. The Chinese men, more than half teen-aged and from farm families, were accustomed to spending their days outdoors and sharing crowded quarters at night. One visitor to the CP construction sites wrote, “In a little tent, ten by twelve feet, a half dozen or more Chinamen find abundant accommodations for eating and sleeping.” Tents went up at the facings of each tunnel and at or near the site of grading, putting in sidings, or other work. As noted, the Chinese were divided into gangs of twelve to twenty men, each with a headman and a cook.

  They ate healthy, well-cooked, and tasty food, unlike the white workers. The CP provided the Americans with boiled beef and potatoes, beans, bread and butter, and coffee. If they wanted to spend their own money, the company kept stores that offered dried fish and salted codfish, peaches, cherries, raisins, apples, tomatoes, eggs, beets, turnips, pickles, and more.37 The Chinese paid for all their food. They demanded and got an astonishing variety—oysters, cuttlefish, finned fish, abalone meat, Oriental fruits, and scores of vegetables, including bamboo sprouts, seaweed, and mushrooms. Each of these foods came dried, purchased from one of the Chinese merchants in San Francisco. Further, the Chinese ate rice, salted cabbage, vermicelli, bacon, and sweet crack
ers. Very occasionally they had fresh meat, pork being a prime favorite, along with chicken.38

  The food helped keep the Chinamen healthy. The water they drank was even more important. The Americans drank from the streams and lakes, and many of them got diarrhea, dysentery, and other illnesses. The Chinese drank only tepid tea. The water had been boiled first and was brought to them by youngsters who carried two pails on a sturdy pole across their shoulders.

  Augustus Ward Loomis, a Christian minister who came to observe them, noted that the Chinese set an example for their white co-workers in diligence, steadiness, and clean living. In an article for the Overland Monthly he wrote, “They are ready to begin work the moment they hear the signal, and labor steadily and honestly until admonished that the working hours are ended.” Loomis approved of their habits: “Not having acquired a taste for whiskey, they have few fights, and no ‘blue Mondays.’”39 They did smoke opium on Sundays, their day off, but they did not “stupefy themselves with it. You do not see them intoxicated, rolling in the gutters like swine.”

  They took daily sponge baths in warm water, washed their clothes, and otherwise kept themselves clean and healthy. According to contemporary B. S. Brooks, who wrote a pamphlet about the Chinese, the white worker “has a sort of hydrophobia which induces him to avoid the contact of water.” In contrast, “the Chinaman is accustomed to daily ablutions of his entire person.”40

  The Chinese were ideal workers. Cheap. Did as they were told. Made a quick study and after something was shown or explained to them did it skillfully. Few if any strikes. The same for complaints. They did what no one else was willing or able to do.

  THERE was other good news beyond the Chinese willingness to work and their capability at it. When winter set in at the Summit Tunnel facings, Montague had put them to other work. He continued to get reports from survey teams he had sent as far east as the Truckee River and on into Nevada. From those reports he learned that the location engineers could shave several miles off Judah’s original line and, even better, eliminate two tunnels and perhaps a third.

  Grading above Colfax and tunneling at the summit meant that the CP was into the battle with the Sierra Nevada in earnest. Stanford wrote to President Andrew Johnson, “The grading between Newcastle and Colfax was very difficult and expensive, increasing as the line was pushed up the mountain slope. The cuttings have been deeper, the embankments higher, and more rock work encountered, as the line has progressed eastward…. We have encountered and are now laboring upon the most difficult and expensive portion of the line entrusted to us. This, too, at the very commencement of our efforts.”41

  In general, the men of the CP, including the Chinese, worked like the Irish and other white men working for the UP. The surveyors went first, followed by the engineers, who laid out the exact line. Then came the bridge gangs, so that when the gradings got to the bridge site they could continue. Then there were the men who dug the cuts or who dug and dumped the dirt to make the fills. Next came the track layers with their rails, spikes, fishplates, distance markers, sledgehammers, and ballast. After them the carpenters, who built the roundhouses, depots, and other buildings.

  Unlike the UP, the CP was not concisely organized as a military force. Of course, in California it had no Indians to contend with, for they had nearly all been wiped out. But the military manner of organizing complex outfits fit the CP as much as it did the UP—squads, platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, divisions, with separate commanders and staffs for logistics, planning, intelligence, finance, personnel, and more.

  The bosses on the spot, where the construction was going on, were Charles Crocker and James Strobridge. Crocker was described by his assistant chief engineer, Lewis Clement: “He was a business man in the full sense of the word—prompt, methodical, fearless and confident. He was decided and firm; yet not obstinate. When he was satisfied that he was in the wrong, he was always ready to concede it and apologize.” He kept his word, Clement said. But “he was very quick to act, and sometimes acted too quickly—he acted and then considered it afterwards.” He was the manager of construction, which was a job “no ordinary man could have done.” He wasn’t imposing, despite his bulk: he was less than six feet tall, with a fair complexion, and beardless. “I don’t suppose,” Clement said, “that there was a mile of road constructed that he didn’t go over the ground, either on horse-back or with a wagon; he always wanted to see what had been done and what was being done.” He was out in every kind of weather, “and it made no difference whether it was an American horse or a bucking Spanish pony.” Clement admitted that Crocker “was a large eater and a man of very strong prejudices.”42

  When the job was completed, Crocker was the only one of the Big Four—indeed, the only Californian—who thought to praise and thank the Chinese for what they had done. The Chinese, meanwhile, were called “Crocker’s pets,” and he was known to them as “Mistuh Clockee.”

  Strobridge had lost an eye to a black-powder explosion in Bloomer Cut, but the Chinese respected him without hesitation or stint. Those who had learned English called “Stro” the “One-Eyed Bossy Man.” He could see as well with one eye as most men could with two, and when, as happened occasionally, there was trouble among the Chinese workers, Strobridge could pick out the ringleaders with a glance. He confronted them, usually with an ax handle, and they gave way and he prevailed.43 One white foreman would sometimes spur on his Chinese work gang by clapping a hand over his right eye and striding about as Strobridge did, implying that Stro was about to appear. “Men generally earn their money when they work for me,” Strobridge said.

  Strobridge appreciated what the Chinese did. After a few months with them, he said, “They learn quickly, do not fight, have no strikes that amount to anything, and are very cleanly in their habits. They will gamble and do quarrel among themselves most noisily—but harmlessly.” And Montague reported at the end of 1865, “The Chinese are faithful and industrious and under proper supervision soon become skillful in the performance of their duty. Many of them are becoming expert in drilling, blasting, and other departments of rock work.”

  Leland Stanford, the governor of California who had won many voters by denouncing the Chinese immigrants, wrote to President Andrew Johnson, “As a class they are quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious, and economical.” And he asserted, “Without the Chinese it would have been impossible to complete the western portion of this great National highway.”44

  And what did the Chinese think of their employers? For sure they wanted the jobs. Most if not all of them saved money while working for the CP, and those who went back to China with their savings used the money to live well. Others went to work for the multitude of railroads building new lines west of the Rocky Mountains after the CP was constructed. Many settled in California, where they raised families and became an important part of the population Still, there is no solid answer to the question. For the most part, we just don’t know.

  There are indications, of course, including how many went to work with the CP and stayed with it. The CP’s successor, the Southern Pacific, kept the workers on a regular pension. In 1915, the newsletter of the Southern Pacific carried a letter from a former worker then living in China, thanking the railroad for sending his pension check each month. Another indication came in November 1917. A half-year earlier, the United States had declared war on Germany. A Liberty Loan was sponsored by the government to raise money to fight the war. A group of about twenty San Francisco Chinese, who were the last of the original crew that helped build the CP, enrolled and purchased the bonds.45

  BY the end of 1865, Crocker still needed money. The bill for the blasting powder alone was killing him, even though it was less expensive now that the war had ended and Crocker was able to obtain a great amount of government surplus. But the Big Four had borrowed all they could, or so it appeared. Then, on November 29, the government inspectors examined the track from mile 31 to mile 54, from Newcastle to Colfax, and pronounced it satisfactory. At $48,
000 per mile, the government had to issue $1,104,000 in bonds to the CP to sell. That helped, considerably, but as always the CP had long since borrowed on that money, and anyway it was far short of what was needed.

  Crocker, as head of the construction company, was being paid by the CP in cash, in bonds, and in stock, at the rate of $2 worth of stock for every $1 owed him. The actual value of the stock was about 10 cents per share. He had borrowed, or so he later said, “all the money available, much of it from my personal friends. I owed William E. Dodge & company three and a quarter million dollars.” That wasn’t quite true: the company, not Crocker, had borrowed the money. The other Big Four, plus E. B. Crocker, were silent partners in the construction company.46

  Crocker’s associates rallied to his side. They agreed to help pay his bills; although they were not legally his partners in Crocker & Company, they would stand or fall together. “Go on!” Stanford assured him. “We will stand by you.”47

  By the end of 1865, the CP had fifty-four miles of working track, to Colfax. Less than twenty miles had been spiked that year. But those few miles had cost an astounding $6 million. Only $3,363,300 in stock had been subscribed (not all paid for), and only one block of government bonds had been received. Earnings were up, with net profits at $280,000, which was the best news. Most of the earnings came from freight. The company anticipated 1866 revenues of nearly $500,000 from freight and just over $200,000 from passengers, plus income from the sale of timber. But whatever the anticipations, the sober truth was that the Western branch of the transcontinental railroad had scarcely penetrated the Sierra Nevada.

  * The steep sides of this rocky cut stand today just as the builders left them. The cementlike rock that dulled drills and broke picks and resisted blasting powder shows no signs of disintegration. The line now runs through two tunnels to the north.