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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  * The white men called the Chinese the “Celestials” because they came from the Celestial Kingdom.

  * It is not true, however, despite persistent myth in California, that most Chinese came to the United States to work for the CP. In fact, in 1866 and 1867 more Chinese left the state than entered.

  Chapter Eight

  THE UNION PACIFIC ACROSS NEBRASKA 1866

  THE Union Pacific and the Central Pacific were the first big business in America. Except for the invention of the telegraph, which gave their officials a means of almost instant communication—quite limited because of the cost per word—the railroads had to invent everything: how to recruit, how to sell stocks and bonds, how to lobby the politicians, how to compete, what to build and what to buy, how to order and store necessary items that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Only the government and armies had organized on such a scale. Where the railroads went, they created stopping points complete with water tanks, repair facilities, boarding terminals, unloading equipment, eating places, hotels. From these grew farms, villages, cities.

  Omaha was the first to benefit. In 1865, it doubled in size to fifteen thousand inhabitants, and grew even more in 1866 and each year that followed. During the summer and fall of 1865, small mountains of materials piled up in Omaha. Five of the UP’s seven steamships had the exclusive task of hauling ties, iron wheels and rails, rolling stock, and machinery; the others brought more workers and additional supplies. When weather prevented the graders and trackers from working on their main job, they found employment in Omaha, where a great cluster of shops was located, one of which was capable of building nine flatcars at a time. There was employment for everyone willing to work, making bricks, or making UP buildings out of bricks, at the Burnettizers, on the flatcars, as teamsters, and more.

  The flood of workers meant a severe housing shortage and a growing number of gamblers and prostitutes. The hotel rooms and dining rooms were crude. One UP employee characterized the town’s population as “the closest thing to the Foreign Legion you could find.” Jack Casement wrote his wife that there were no good boardinghouses in Omaha and that the hotel in which he was staying was “cram full and kept very poorly. The meals were nothing that a white man wanted.” He promised her that he was looking for a house to rent for the two of them.1

  West of Omaha, settlement was growing, thanks most of all to the prospect of transportation, but also to a reassessment of the Great Plains. Previously, most Americans had accepted as fact that everything west of the Missouri River was the Great American Desert. But in 1866, the well-known Massachusetts editor Samuel Bowles brought out a book based on his 1865 trip entitled Across the Continent. The Plains, he said, were “not worthless, by any means.” Indeed, they were the nation’s pasture, capable of growing grass that fattened livestock. In time, he said, the railroad would carry eastward beef and leather, mutton and wool, and more. “Let us, then, not despise the Plains, but turn their capacities to best account.”2

  Moses Thatcher, a Mormon crossing Nebraska in June 1866, noted in his diary that “the country is one vast green ocean.” And it was more than the national pasture. “There are some fine farms recently located here,” he wrote. “The small grain such as wheat, oats, barley & corn are looking finely.” A well-known travel writer, Bayard Taylor, saw the countryside a month later and called it the most beautiful he had ever seen. He wrote that “Mr. Horace Greeley’s ‘vanishing scale of civilization’ has been pushed much further west since his overland trip in 1859.” Taylor said Nebraska constituted the largest unbroken area of excellent farming land in the world.3

  A correspondent from the Cincinnati Gazette commented, “The soil is very rich, and the mind falters in its attempt to estimate the future of such a valley, or its immense capacities.” He went on to say, “The grain fields of Europe are mere garden patches beside the green oceans which roll across the Great Plains.”4

  IN January 1865, the three government commissioners came to examine the track already laid. Accompanied by Durant and other officials of the UP, plus the governor of Nebraska and others, on what the Omaha Weekly Herald called “one of the loveliest winter mornings that ever dawned on the word,” in cars pulled by the General Sherman, they rode to the end of track (at Fremont). The Herald reported that the return trip was made at an average speed of thirty-five miles per hour. The commissioners accepted on behalf of the government the first forty miles of track, and on the return to Omaha, they wired the secretary of the interior that they had found the road “in superior condition.” President Andrew Johnson accepted the report the same day, and on January 27 the government issued the bonds, each carrying 6 percent annual interest, payable twice a year.

  According to the Herald, the commissioners were astonished at Durante “personal omnipresence in every department of the work, his vigilant and untiring watchfulness of all details, and the energy and effective push which he had imparted to the Colossal enterprise.”5 The Herald’s praise for Durant was wondrous to behold. In March, the newspaper called him “the Great Manager, who is to railroads what Napoleon was to war.”6

  Perhaps, but Napoleon’s reputation rested on more than forty miles of track. Durant needed to prove the comparison apt. To do that, he first of all needed to establish a solid organization, one with forceful, trustworthy, and capable men to run the company in its many operations, men far better than the ones he had already hired. At the beginning of 1866, he set out to do that. To begin with, he let go his brother Frank, along with Herbert Hoxie and Joseph Henry. He pulled Samuel Reed off his surveying job and put him in charge of construction. Durant gave Reed, forty-seven years old at the time, the title of “superintendent of construction and operations.” Reed was a quiet, likable, methodical man who was a conscientious worker, skilled in his methods. He would supervise all grading, track laying, bridging, and tunneling—a tough, demanding position for which he was perfectly suited.

  In February 1866, Durant put the Casement brothers in charge of track laying. John (“Jack”) Stephen Casement, thirty-seven years old, although only five feet four inches tall, had earned an impressive reputation as a track layer in Ohio. He had risen to brigadier general in the war as a division commander. Stocky, muscular, fearless, “General Jack” could handle anything, and if he couldn’t his brother could. Only five feet tall (“five feet nothing,” according to one wag), Dan Casement was also a veteran. According to a diary kept by one of his UP workers, Dan may have been short and stocky, but “once he lifted a 30 foot rail off the ground without any trouble. It weighed about 600 pounds.”7 Between them the brothers had formed the firm of J.S. & D.T. Casement, which Durant hired and put in charge of laying the track. It was an inspired choice.

  Durant made other adjustments, but by far his best choice, the one that made the UP possible, was to stick to his determination to lure General Grenville Dodge away from the army. At the end of February 1866, having failed to get Dodge to sign on with the UP, Durant sent him a telegram suggesting that Dodge might want to take the field as a surveyor. Dodge declined, but in his telegram of reply (dated March 2) he did offer Durant some advice, based on what he had heard about the disorganization and demoralization in Omaha.

  “Let me impress upon you the importance of commencing the years work by placing at Omaha a chief in whom you have confidence,” he opened, “who in all things you will support and who you can hold responsible that your orders are carried out—and who all connected with the road will know they must obey.” He insisted that the heads of divisions would be “divided interested independent commands.” Dodge insisted that each of the chiefs of a division must be “jealous of his power and rights” and that everything be done to promote “harmony, energy, economy or celerity.”8

  Late in April, Durant went to St. Joseph to meet with Dodge and offer him the post of chief engineer of the UP. The general refused to accept unless he received absolute control. He told Doc that his military experience had convinced him that a divided command
would never work. As chief engineer he would “obey orders and insist on everyone under me doing the same.” Durant agreed.

  On April 27, Dodge went to Omaha and wrote to General Sherman (in St. Louis) requesting a leave of absence so that he could go to work for the UP. In his reply, dated May 1, Sherman agreed, with these words: “I consent to your going to begin what, I trust, will be the real beginning of the great road.”9

  It was indeed. Dodge went to work, beginning by cleaning the stables. He put Jacob House in charge of the headquarters in Omaha. He moved the unhappy Hoxie off his job in Chicago to become the transfer agent, operating out of Omaha. “I would rather be at Omaha under you than to be in the city with a much larger salary,” Hoxie told Dodge. He had been doing many tasks in the city, including freight, and added, “I am heartily sick of this living at hotels, without my wife, and both ends pushing me for freight. I can’t make the river higher.”10

  With these and many other changes, Dodge put the working end of the UP on a military basis. Nearly all his chief subordinates had been in the Union Army, and with but a few exceptions his graders and track layers had been participants in the war. There were thousands of them, with more coming. Military discipline came naturally to them, for they were accustomed to giving or receiving and carrying out orders. Without that military organization, it is doubtful that the UP could have been built at all. The UP had farther to go than the CP, and hostile Indians to contend with, plus shortages and the nonexistence of timber, water, and other necessities.

  Dodge said later that the changes in the railroad world had been caused by what had been learned during the Civil War. “The great principles then evolved have taught the American people that there was no problem in finance or relating to the development of the country so great that its people did not feel able to grasp and master it.”11 Dodge and his subordinates had learned in the army how to deal with problems.

  It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t all done at once. Durant retained the title of “vice-president and general manager,” which meant that Reed, Hoxie, and others still reported to him. Meanwhile, Dodge had to deal with Silas Seymour, whose title was “consulting engineer.” Seymour had no authority, but he answered only to Durant and was able to—and did—create a great deal of mischief.

  The Indians out on the Great Plains posed their own threat. With the Civil War over and the UP building, settlers were moving out into what they regarded as their land. The Homestead Act, giving a quarter-section of land to each settler, was a magnet. Nebraska gained population so fast that in 1867 it became a state, much earlier than expected.

  The Pawnee, living in eastern Nebraska, were “Hang around the Forts,” as the hostile Indians called them. Surveyor Bissell wrote that “the Pawnees were normally friendly,” but also that they “were more degraded in their habits and ways of living than almost any tribe.”12 They had made their peace with the white men, and many of their warriors had become soldiers in the white man’s army.

  But west of Columbus, Nebraska, the Sioux and Cheyenne were predominant, and decidedly hostile. They despised the iron rail, which along with providing great benefits to the whites had an additional disadvantage for the Indians in that it split the Great Plains buffalo herd into two parts, because buffalo would not cross the tracks. The Indians wanted the iron rail, and the men who surveyed for it and the men who were building it and the farmers who were following it and the travelers who were sure to come on it, out of their country. And they had plenty of men, young and even old, who were ready to follow a war chief on a raid, against either the settlements or the surveyors or the graders or the road builders. Thus the UP needed protection from the army, but the army had nowhere near enough men or posts beyond the frontier to provide it.

  This meant the UP’s workers would, in most cases, have to protect themselves. Dodge ordered it. He wanted every man armed. He wanted them all drilled too, if they needed it, but since they were veterans he decided they didn’t. They had to keep their rifles always within easy reach, however—life on the frontier.

  It meant doom for the Indians’ way of life. No longer could they be free and independent, living off the buffalo herds. They could either follow the way of the Pawnee and live on reservations, cared for by the white man, or get killed. As General John Pope, who was replacing Dodge, observed, “The Indian, in truth, no longer has a country. He is reduced to starvation or to warring to the death. The Indian’s first demand is that the white man shall not drive off his game and dispossess him of his lands. How can we promise this unless we prohibit emigration and settlement? … The end is sure and dreadful to contemplate.”13

  Dodge, by contrast, was in agreement with General Phil Sheridan. He had no sympathy for the plight of the Indians, and believed, “There were really no friendly Indians.” That was wrong—the Pawnee surely were—but it set the tone for the UP and, in truth, could hardly have been helped, considering the scope and events of the Sioux and Cheyenne actions.

  The Indians were one problem; the weather was another. The Missouri River could not be navigated until late March or early April. Jack Casement had his crews ready by the first day of spring, more than three thousand of them, and the boarding cars nearly ready for them, but the river was too low for the cars to be sent to Omaha, and besides, the rails could not be shipped until the spring rise deepened the water. By mid-April, the supplies began pouring into Omaha, and the Casement brothers went to work, with Dodge’s full backing. Dodge had long argued, correctly, that nothing would give the UP more credibility than the laying of track with trains running on it. The Casement brothers built it. By June 4, the track layers had reached the hundred-mile post (although the bridge over the Loup River was only a temporary pile trestle), and by late July, the gangs had passed Grand Island (153 miles from Omaha) and were headed for Fort Kearney, two hundred miles from Omaha. The graders, meanwhile, were beginning to grade the third hundred miles. So far the Indians had left both groups alone.

  In May, to anticipate their depredations, Sherman formed a new department, designating it the Department of the Platte. He put General Philip St. George Cooke in command, with headquarters in Omaha, and expressed the hope to Grant that President Johnson and the secretary of war would “befriend this railroad as far as the law allows.”14

  THERE is nothing connected with the Union Pacific Railroad that is not wonderful,” wrote the correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette. “In one sense the road is as great an achievement as the war, and as grand a triumph.” Continuing the image, the reporter went on, “Go back twenty miles on the road, and look at the immense construction trains, loaded with ties and rails, and all things needed for the work. It is like the grand reserve of an army. Six miles back are other trains of like character. These are the second line.”

  Going forward to the end of track, he wrote, “are the boarding cars and a construction train, which answer to the actual battle line.” The boarding cars were each eight feet long, some fitted with berths, others with dining halls, one a kitchen. The construction train carried forward all supplies—ties, rails, fishplates, sledgehammers, shovels, rope of various sizes and length, more than a thousand rifles, and much more.15 It was indeed comparable, in many ways, to an army moving across the landscape.

  Samuel Reed, in Omaha, was responsible for keeping the army supplied. Before Dodge signed on, and even after, he cleared his decisions with Doc Durant in New York. His telegrams to Durant, sent once a day or more, are today in the UP Archives in Omaha, and they constitute a remarkable collection that speak directly to the question, How did the UP do it?

  Here are some examples, all from 1866. Reed to Durant, February 5: “Can change line second Hundred miles will reduce bridges one half [in] timber…. Have ordered the change if you do not approve countermand.” February 15: “Shall I contract for one hundred thousand cottonwood thirty five dollars and plans for car shop.” February 19: “Shall we deliver ties on new line west of Loup fork sixty to eighty teams ready to commenc
e hauling as soon as decided.” February 26: “Notified Harry Creighton to build telegraph line to end of road [but he] will not do it without order from New York.” March 1: “The new line will be better than the old one less bridging less grading and four to six miles nearer fuel and ties.” March 12: “Must have three spans Loup Fork Truss[.] Can make temporary bridges for balance[.] Single pile bents will not stand in channel[.] Piles drove east abutment & three east piers[.] West abutment & west pier half drove.” March 13: “McManus & Hornby propose to build engine house ten stall for twenty thousand [dollars] and car shop for thirty five thousand [dollars] shall I close. Can I contract Loup Fork masonry.” March 20: “Navigation open first boat just arrived.”16

  The last telegram in the preceding sample marked a big moment for Reed and all who worked for the UP. Supplies could now get to Omaha by steamship. This allowed Durant to embark on a bold experiment. He had been told that barges were unsuitable in the shifting water of the river, but he nevertheless had two built and purchased a steamboat, the Elk Horn, to haul them. The boat and the barges made it to Omaha from St. Louis in less than ten days. Durant had opened a new era for shipping on the Missouri River.17

  Reed to Durant, April 7: “I have contracted for 500 cubic yards of stone for foundations and small bridges at $4 per yard delivered on the line of the road. Also for 50,000 ties. Mr. Davis is sawing the timber for Loup Fork Truss bridge [the bridge was to be seventeen hundred feet long]. There is a little more than one third of the piles drove for the temporary bridge over Loup Fork. Grading contractors are commencing their work, [although] the frost is not out of the ground yet. We have just received two rafts of logs the first of the season. There is a good stage of water and I think we shall receive ties and timber rapidly via river from this time. Twelve hundred tons of iron rails have been received. We have more than one hundred thousand ties on the line of the road, inspected and paid for. I can contract for 50000 hard wood ties to be delivered twenty to twenty five miles west of the west end of the second hundred miles.” And so on.