Still, the UP was so far winning the race. Charlie Crocker said he “felt about like resigning” at the time. He got after Strobridge, told him to hurry up.30
• • •
IN mid-May 1867, General James Rusling of the army’s Quartermaster Department got on a CP train at Sacramento, bound for the mountains and beyond. He was going to inspect army posts. When he left, the day was hot and humid, but as he got to Cisco, the chill signified that the train was in the mountains. “We were shivering in winter garments,” commented the general. But the track impressed him and his companions, who were surprised at how well built it was and also at its “audacity.”
Rusling observed grades of over a hundred feet to the mile, “and in many places the track literally springs into the air, over immense trestlework bridges or along the dizzy edges of precipices that seem fraught with peril and destruction.” When the general and his party reached Cisco, the snow reached to the eaves of the hotel.31
Rusling took a “mountain mud-wagon” out of Cisco, through a mixture of slush, mud, and ice. He changed to a sleigh and “then came a long and dreary pull for several miles till we got well across the summit of the Sierras.” Everywhere he looked, there were Chinese at work. They had pigtails coiled around their heads and were wearing blue cotton blouses. Rusling talked to a few of their foremen, who “spoke well of the almond-eyed strangers and praised them especially for their docility and intelligence.”32
One week later, Charlie Crocker was frustrated in his strenuous efforts to put more Chinese on the CP payroll. His brother explained to Huntington that “a want of men” had struck the railroad. “We are scouring the state for men to put on the Truckee, but they come in very slow.” The Chinese had been discovered by the owners of mines and other employments; the CP’s use of Chinese laborers “has led hundreds of others to employ them so that now when we want to gather them up for work, a large portion are permanently employed at work elsewhere that they like better.”
Getting enough Chinese to work on the grades and track was so “very important” that the directors of the CP “concluded to raise their wages from $31 to $35 per month and see if this will not bring them.” It would cost the CP $20,000 more per month, but with the Chinese going to Idaho, Montana, and elsewhere, it had to be done.33
In late May, unbelievably and unacceptably, the Chinese went on strike. “This is the hardest blow we have had,” E. B. Crocker reported. He wanted Huntington “to see what you can do about getting laborers from the East.”34 Initially it was the Chinese who were employed in grading, but they were soon joined by those engaged on the most critical part of the work, the tunnelers. The spokesman for the tunnelers said the Chinese wanted $40 per month rather than the $35 they were collecting, and they wanted the workday reduced to eight hours—which it was supposed to be, but the foremen had not been enforcing that rule. Further, in what was a shock for those (including Crocker and Strobridge) who thought the relations between the CP and its workers were excellent, the Sacramento Union reported that the Chinese wanted to eliminate “the right of the overseers of the company to either whip them or restrain them from leaving the road when they desire to seek other employment.”35
Charles Crocker was convinced that agents of the UP had inspired the strike and issued its demands. The UP’s motive was “to keep us in the mountains while they were building the road over the plains.” But he couldn’t prove it, for the good reason that the UP had nothing to do with the strike, which was inevitable given the shortage of Chinese workers and the manifest need of the CP for more of them.36
The CP tried to entice workers, but it wouldn’t pay $40 per month or reduce the hours. “Charley will go up and attend to it,” E. B. Crocker assured Huntington, because, “if they are successful in this demand, then they control and their demands will be increased.” The CP didn’t want to lose “too much time on the work.” But he also knew that, “when any commodity is in demand beyond the natural supply, the price will tend to advance.” So he had sent a CP agent to the South to try to recruit “5,000 Freedmen. 1 hope it will be successful and they will come soon.”37
It wasn’t to be. The following day, E.B. wrote, “the truth is the Chinamen are getting smart. The only safe way to beat them is to inundate this state and Nevada with Freedmen, Chinese, Japanese, all kinds of labor, so that men come to us for work instead of us hunting them up.” Good luck on that one. The next day, E.B. wrote, “Since my last letter all the Chinamen on the whole line have struck for $45 and a shorter working day.” He still was opposed to paying the expenses of men coming from the East to work, and thought that “a Negro labor force would tend to keep the Chinese quiet as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet.”38
It couldn’t be done. The CP was going to have to deal with the Chinese. Fortunately for the bosses, the Chinese were not militant. Charles Crocker later said, “If there had been that number of whites in a strike, there would have been murder and drunkenness and disorder …. But with the Chinese it was just like Sunday. These men stayed in their camps. They would come out and walk around, but not a word was said; nothing was done. No violence was perpetrated along the whole line.”39
Crocker cut off the men’s provisions. No food got through to them. E. B. Crocker reported, “They really began to suffer.” On July 1, 1867, after a week of such treatment, “Charles went up to them and they gathered around him and he told them that he would not be dictated to—that he made the rules for them and not they for him.” He said that, if they went to work right away, “all would be well, but if they did not, then he would pay them nothing for June.”
The Chinese leaders protested. “They tried hard to get some changes”—a reduction in hours, for example, or an advance of even 25 cents per month. Charlie told them, “Not a cent more would he give.” Most said that they would go back to work, but some of their leaders threatened to whip those who did and burn up their camps. “Charles told them that he would protect any who worked and his men would shoot down any man that attempted to do the laborers any harm.” He would bring on the sheriff and a posse if necessary.
Four days later, E. B. Crocker noted, “The Chinese are working harder than ever since the strike.” They were, at least according to Crocker, “ashamed of the strike. I don’t think we will ever have any more such difficulties with them.”40 Thus did Charles Crocker and his partners show other employers around the nation one way—theirs—of how to deal with strikers.
THE UP and the CP continued to tell tall tales to each other. “I met Durant yesterday,” Huntington wrote to E. B. Crocker, “and he told me that the UP had a tunnel 2,600 feet in length and that it would take two years to get through it. Of course it was a lie.”41 The UP also wanted to talk to the CP about jointly building a great central city at the point of meeting of the two roads. But as E. B. Crocker said, “Cities don’t thrive unless there is a big, prosperous country around. It might happen in 30 or 50 years. You can give them all that great city and not give up much.”42
Both sets of directors and engineers were telling lies to Brigham Young. They needed his Mormons to help make grade and lay track, and they knew he wanted the line to come through Salt Lake City, and they further knew that it never would do so, because to go south of the lake was to get into terrible desert. But even as their surveyors assured them that there was no such possibility, they told Young to hang on, that they would do their best to get to his city.
E. B. Crocker held out an intriguing possibility to Huntington. “I have an idea that in six months or a year from the time the roads are completed,” he wrote, “the two companies will be consolidated. This central city matter is an interesting thing to trade on.” It was almost 130 years after the roads were completed before the two lines consolidated, and the great central city never was built.43
“They [the UP] have been pretty smart in building their railroad,” Crocker said at one point, “but they have never yet come up to their bragging.” They said they would be in
Cheyenne by September 1, 1867, and they didn’t make it until November 8. Still, “it would not do for us to trust in their laziness.” Thinking about it, he added, “What a loving crowd the Union Pacific men must be.”44
STANFORD had run for governor advocating a stoppage of all immigration from China to California, and in his inaugural address in 1862 had denounced the immigration of Asiatic people. The CP’s need for labor changed his mind. In the summer of 1867, the CP was sending agents to China to recruit laborers. A great many of them, in fact, according to E. B. Crocker. “The [Chinese] agents go to get a large immigration to come over and work. They know all about the work and can explain it to their countrymen. They will induce thousands to come over. We shall follow this up and get others to go over to China to hurry up the immigration.” The CP sent handbills and made arrangements with the steamboat company to provide favorable rates for the passage. “We want 100,000 Chinamen here so as to bring the price of labor down.” He further reported, “The new arrivals from China go straight up to the work. It is all life and animation on the line. Charles and Stro feel greatly encouraged.”45
Leland Stanford loved the idea. So did Collis Huntington, who wrote Charlie Crocker on October 3, 1867, “I like your idea of getting over more Chinamen. It would be all the better for us and the State if there should be a half million come over in 1868.”46
• • •
IN August 1867, E. B. Crocker sent a telegram to Collis Huntington: “Summit Tunnel broke through at 4 P.M. Toot your horn. Locomotive on the Truckee is in running order. Track laying commences Monday on the Truckee.”47
The breakthrough was seen by only one single light, and that not the sun but a lantern. There was much broken rock still to be removed from the bottoms. The breakthrough had to be extended up, down, and sideways to complete the whole tunnel. The grade had to be built, the ties put down, the rails laid and spiked.
But that light was exactly where it should have been. Clement had achieved a triumph of the first magnitude in engineering. The Summit Tunnel was 7,042 feet above the sea. This was the highest point reached by the CP. The facings were off by only two inches, a feat that could hardly be equaled in the twenty-first century. Clement had done it with black powder, nitroglycerin, and muscle power. He had not used electric or steam-driven drills, steam engines to power scoop shovels, or any gas-or electric-powered carts or cars to haul out the broken granite. There were no robots, no mechanical devices. Well over 95 percent of the work was done by the Chinese men. They and their foremen and the bosses, Clement and Crocker and Strobridge, had created one of the greatest moments in American history.
The Sierra Nevada had been pierced. The CP had gone through the mountains at exactly the point where Theodore Judah had said it should be done, following a line that he had laid out. Work on the tunnel had begun in 1866. The shaft had been started on August 27, 1866. A year later, the Sacramento Union reported that what “many predicted it would require three years to accomplish has been done in one.”48
Even though they were through the summit, the CP had not a single aid-worthy twenty-mile stretch of continuous track laid. The line east of the summit was not yet connected and would not be until 1868. The UP had built five hundred miles of track since 1865. The CP was 370 miles behind its rival. In 1867, the CP had laid only some thirty-nine miles of track. Although it was beyond the Summit Tunnel, it was only by two and a half miles. There was a seven-mile gap down the mountain to Tunnel No. 13. Crews could not complete the gap until the snow melted. After that gap, there were twenty-four miles laid to the state line. Crocker had managed to get locomotives over to the east side of the summit, and some flatcars and track material But that was all Meanwhile, in October 1867, Huntington wrote E. B. Crocker, “I am sorry to hear your doubts about reaching the Truckee with a continuous line this fall” Still, he said he realized “that all will be done that can be done, and I think Charles can do a little more than any man in America. And if it is not done, I shall know it could not be.”49
The Big Four were telling reporters that the line would close the gap “in two weeks, if the weather holds good.” Charles Crocker told Huntington at the end of October, “The weather is splendid now and the Wise People say we are going to have an open winter, which they also said last winter—from such a winter as last the good Lord preserve us.”50
A few days earlier, Huntington had written to “Friend Stanford” that he had just spent days in Washington getting bonds due the CP from the government. “I had to go to the Interior Dept., then to the President, and then to the Treasury.”51 He was asking for $320,000 in bonds, due the CP since its 1866 report. But the railroad had not laid enough track to justify an examination by government engineers or a grant of bonds. Huntington said, “I was determined to have the bonds if I could. I got a report from the attorney-general that I was entitled to those bonds. I got one from the solicitor of the treasury. I got two cabinet meetings in one week [where] the majority voted that I should have the bonds.”
Huntington stayed at it for nearly a week. “Well,” one Treasury official said to him, “you seem entitled to them, but I can’t let you have them.” Huntington went to see him every day to demand his company’s bonds. He said if he did not get them “I will sit here a fortnight.” After more wrangling, the CP got its bonds.52 But of course they had already been borrowed against, and they could not be sold at par. The CP general counsel Creed Haymund later put it, “I have grown sick and tired of hearing of the generosity of the Government. We built it for them.” Charles Crocker said he would “never have anything more to do with anything that had to be managed in government style.”53
In other words, as was so often the case, the CP was out of money. And it had enormous expenses. Building the snowsheds, for example. In November, E. B. Crocker wrote to Huntington that “you still sneer at pine lumber being stacked up on the line, but if you knew how much it cost us last winter to shovel snow out of those cuts, you would not say another word. Those snow sheds will pay for their cost in a single winter.”
Huntington was also complaining about the cost of keeping the entire labor force at work. Crocker told him it had to be. “All are anxious to complete the mountain work,” he explained, “so as to move into the valley and beyond and not have to come back to the mountains in the spring. They all understand it and cheerfully work Sundays to get through.”54
The Big Four were always looking for another way to make money. Hopkins was thinking about putting out a pamphlet in the German language “to show the value of our land for grape growing.” He thought that the Germans would rush to buy up the land once they knew that “there is no doubt that the grapes raised on our foothills make the best wine in the state.”
Stanford wanted consolidation and monopoly. He once said he expected “to see the time when there would not be more than five great companies in the United States,” and he especially wanted one single railroad. “If all the roads were operated as one road,” he said, “they could regulate prices lower than today and make money, while now they don’t make money.”55 So, through 1867, the Big Four reached out for a monopoly of railroading in California. By the end of the year, the partners owned five railroads—the CP, the Western Pacific Railroad, the California and Oregon Railroad, the California Central Railroad, and the Yuba Railroad—and were considering adding a sixth, the Southern Pacific Railroad. Most of these roads had little finished construction, but they had federal land grants and could be picked up cheap. With them, the Big Four had a near-monopoly on the railroads in California.56
Despite the buying up of other railroads, Charles Crocker & Company was out of money. On October 28, the Big Four plus E. B. Crocker therefore had voted to follow the lead of the UP and the Crédit Mobilier and create the Contract and Finance Company. Charles Crocker became the president. The Big Four hoped to sell some stock in the new company, but as Stanford lamented, “We did not succeed in any quarter in interesting others and finally gave it up.” So each m
an subscribed for one-fifth of the Contract and Finance Company’s stock. Huntington told Hopkins to “take as much as you are forced to but as little as you can.” The Big Four then signed a contract with the new company that gave it the right to build from the state line to the Salt Lake at $43,000 per mile in cash plus an equal amount of CP stock.57 In addition, it would build most of the line for the recently acquired railroads.58
It was obvious to the Big Four that someday soon the Contract and Finance Company would be making huge profits, so they created phony investors who supposedly owned much of the stock. A half-year later, that stock was “sold” to Charlie Crocker, so that the stockholders of the Contract and Finance Company consisted of Crocker and his brother E.B., Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford.59
ON November 30, 1867, the grading through the Summit Tunnel was finished, the track was laid, and the spikes were pounded in. Also on that date, the first scheduled train from Sacramento arrived on the east side of the Sierra Nevada.
The next day, Mark Hopkins wrote to Huntington. “Yesterday we all went up to see the first locomotive pass the summit of the Sierra,” he opened. “It was a pleasant sight to reach such a point where a train would gravitate towards the East. For these years past gravitation has been so continually against us that at times it seemed to me that it would have been well if we had practiced a while on smaller and shorter hills before attacking so huge a mountain.” He confessed to feeling that “our UP friends were too highly favored, but still we have worked on up the mountain—the labored and rapid puff of the engine told how heavy and hard the work.”
Now, he went on, “we are on the down grade & we rejoice. The operators and laborers all rejoice. All work freer and with more spirit. Even the Chinamen partake of our joy. I believe they do five extra percent more work per day now that we are through the granite rock work.” Looking ahead, Hopkins predicted that, from that day onward, “we can trot along toward Salt Lake instead of remaining in each camp so long that the Chinese become sick and tired of it.”
Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Page 29