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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  So Young was keenly aware of the benefits the railroad would bring his people. In February 1868, he told the legislature that, if all went well, within two years “the solitude of our mountain fastness will be broken by the shrill snort of the iron horse.” But although he clearly wanted the road and as soon as possible, critics back east of the Missouri River predicted that the coming of the railroad to Utah would bring a much-desired end to the Mormon way of life—namely, polygamy. In the spring of 1868, the Chicago Republican had a lead editorial entitled “Mormonism Doomed.” The newspaper said the country would soon see that “happy time” when polygamy was gone from the land, thanks to the railroad, which would bring in Gentiles who would soon “overflow and engulf Utah slowly and surely.” The Deseret News, commenting on the editorial, thought it cheeky if not worse for a Chicago paper to teach morality to the citizens of Salt Lake City. Like Young, the editor of the Deseret News had no fear of the outside world, and was ready to welcome it.7

  REASONS to welcome the railroad went beyond getting converted immigrants to Salt Lake City faster and cheaper, beyond importing bulky manufactured goods at less cost, beyond shipping agricultural products to market, beyond making it possible for Utah residents to pay visits to family and friends back east. There was, in addition, the hope that when regular train service east and west was inaugurated Salt Lake City would become a major tourist center.* There were other factors, but most of all there were two needs that came together. The lack of circulating medium (cash money) in Utah meant that the Mormons badly needed work that would be paid for and the cash that went with it, and the lack of labor in the West meant that the UP and the CP badly needed workers.

  In the summer of 1867, Brigham Young, Jr., and his family returned from a trip to Europe. In Chicago, at the end of July, some officials of the UP invited him to ride with them to the end of track. They included Sidney Dillon, a director and head of the Crédit Mobilier, Senator John Sherman, and investor Jacob Cox, governor of Ohio, so naturally Young, Jr., accepted. Of course they talked while riding the rails, and Young noted in his diary that Dillon “wants our assistance in laying out the U.P.R.R. and building the road.” Sherman and the others “were anxious to awaken a real interest in the minds of our people to push this railroad through our Territory.”8 No agreements were reached, or even broached, but a positive contact had been made.

  BY the spring of 1868, the UP was beginning its push across Wyoming while its surveyors were well into Utah and even beyond. The track had reached Evanston (named for UP engineer and surveyor Evans), on the edge of the Utah border, which had been picked by Dodge as a division point for the railroad. The UP’s need for competent, trustworthy workers was critical. Without them, the company might as well give up on any thought of beating the CP to the Salt Lake. For the Mormons, mean-while, with lots of young men who were eager for work and desperately short of money, the spring brought with it another plague of grasshoppers. The insects were consuming the newly planted crops.

  On May 6, 1868, Durant sent a telegram from Fort Sanders to Young in Salt Lake City. With that telegram, the Doctor saved himself and the company from the ignominy of losing the race so badly as to become an object of derision. Of all the countless things Durant did for and against himself and the UP, for all the wonders he wrought, for all his meddling and interference and mistakes, nothing could match this telegram. Doc knew whom he needed and how much he needed them and he didn’t care what it cost. He was willing, even eager, to bet all in order to win all. Not that he ever had any intention of paying up on the debt he encountered when his bet was taken.

  The telegram to Young began, “Are you disposed to take contract for a portion or all our grading between head of Echo Canyon and Salt Lake if so please name price per cubic yard.” The UP would provide the Mormons with “powder, steel and tools as you require at cost and transportation. Work to be done this season.” If Young’s reply was affirmative, Doc said he would send Reed and Seymour to Salt Lake City to arrange details, “so that work may be commenced at once.”9

  A remarkable offer. Young could name his price and set other conditions. What Durant wanted was work, to be started “at once.” Doc was leading one of the two biggest corporations in the United States. He was engaged in a construction campaign that had no parallel. Nothing built in America—or, indeed, in the world—had ever been done on such a scale. Furthermore, the race with the CP was like a war. Every effort by Durant and the UP bosses, as every effort by Huntington and the other CP bosses, was bent to winning. Neither the directors nor those who worked for them or, come to that, those who put up the money cared what it cost. Win now, pay later, was the motto, just as it had been for the North in the Civil War.

  Young answered Durant’s telegram within an hour of its receipt. Yes, he said.10

  Seymour and Reed went straight to Salt Lake City and negotiated. Young agreed that the Mormons would grade from the head of Echo Canyon toward the Salt Lake (some fifty-four miles). Work was to commence in ten days and be completed by November 1. The UP would carry men, teams, and tools from Omaha for free, and provide powder, steel, shovels, picks, sledges, wheelbarrows, scrapers, crowbars, and other necessary tools at cost plus freight charges.

  The Mormons would receive 30 cents a cubic yard for excavations when the earth was hauled less than two hundred feet away, and 50 cents for longer hauls. Cuts made through hard materials were scaled at higher prices. Tunneling was $15 a yard. The UP would pay labor costs on a monthly basis (with 80 percent paid on the 20th of each month). Young wanted $2 and up per day per worker, depending on their talents.

  The contract was drawn, and on May 19, Young gave Seymour and Reed a letter. In it he said he had “carefully examined the figures you are accustomed to giving to grading and masonry work” and was ready to sign if the UP would add 10 percent to the figures, but only if the UP was prepared to give him the contract for building the grade from the mouth of Weber Canyon around the Salt Lake, whether the railroad went south or north. He also wanted Reed to make a depot at the mouth of Echo Canyon to handle the supplies. In return, he promised as many as five thousand men, all ready to take orders and go to work.11

  The contract was signed. Young put notices in the two Salt Lake City newspapers (the Daily Reporter and the Deseret News) calling on all the men who wanted work to report to three of his sons, who were ready to hire. Commenting on a surplus of labor in and around the city, caused mainly by the grasshopper infestation, Young said it was a godsend that the Mormons could turn a surplus of labor into money. The Deseret News stressed that Mormon boys could now find work close to home, and another commentator remarked that the contract would “obviate the necessity of some few thousand strangers being brought here, to mix and interfere with the settlers, of that class of men who take pleasure in making disturbance wherever they go.”12 Some few days later, four thousand men had responded to the call However, rumor had it that as many as ten thousand would be needed, and the Mormons continued to show up.

  They came from the farms around the Salt Lake. Orson Hyde of Springtown, Utah, wrote Young on May 27, 1868: “Much of our wheat in this settlement is eaten off by the grasshoppers; consequently, several are ready to go to work on the rail road.” From Spring City Ward, Andrew Jenson wrote, “Crops destroyed by grasshoppers and people to R[ail] R[oad].” Lewis Barney wrote that the “country was full of grasshoppers and every thing devoured by them and not a morsel of bread to be had to sustain life. Consequently [I went] to work for the railroad.” A good thing too, for Barney was cutting timber for ties and bridges and “I cleared 500 dollars through the summer.”13

  Young sent a telegram to Reed (then at the UP’s end of track in Wyoming) asking him to send “at your earliest convenience” such additional supplies “as your judgment may deem necessary for putting a large force of hands at work at once, for I am anxious to complete the work in time, and the days are passing.”14 They were burning daylight, wasting time, and he wanted to get going.
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  On May 31, from Weber Canyon, Reed sent a telegram to Durant demanding “tools for five thousand men from Salt Lake Valley, men ready to commence work as soon as tools are received.”15 A week later, the first group of westbound Mormon converts from Liverpool came to New York and got on the train; they arrived in Wyoming before June was out. By then another group was en route, with yet another to follow. The total emigration from Europe for Salt Lake City in 1868 was 3,232, mainly from Great Britain, and nearly all ready to go to work.16

  YOUNG had his critics, although few lived in Utah. In the East, they charged that Young was favoring his sons and closest associates as subcontractors, that he was getting a tithe from every laborer, supposedly for the Mormon church but, as one editor of a newspaper knew, that was “just another name for Brigham Young,” who was otherwise enriching himself. The Cincinnati Commercial charged that, whereas Young’s contract called for 30 cents per yard for work done, he gave only 27 cents to his subcontractors “and the Prophet [Young] pockets the odd million.” The Cheyenne Daily Leader on June 15, 1868, charged that the contract between Young and the UP was “outright slavery.” It claimed that Young called for manpower from each Mormon settlement according to its population, and the draftees had to work at wages set by Young. Further, the Leader believed the UP had denied work to Wyoming residents because it was “the settled policy of the railroad company to give large contracts to Brigham.”17

  That was not true. Although at the time there was a widely held impression that Young would undertake all the grading in Utah for the UP, actually the contract for the work for fifty miles east of Echo Canyon, in the direction of Wyoming, was held by Joseph Nounan and Company, a Gentile firm. With Nounan as with Young, there were misunderstandings and miscalculations in the contract, and a good deal of acrimony resulted between the contractors and the railroads. This was usually the case in the construction of railroads at the time.18

  Young had three of his sons—Joseph, Brigham, Jr., and John W.—and Bishop John Sharp hiring and directing the men. Sharp, close to Young, was also his lawyer, and would remain a major Utah railroad leader for decades. Together Joseph Young and Sharp became associated in a firm known as Sharp & Young that took on grading contracts and the boring of several tunnels. The partners soon had fourteen hundred men working for them in Echo Canyon, and working well. Young said they improved rapidly because “they have got used to the labor.”19

  In early June, Young was the principal speaker at a mass meeting in the new Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. He said he had always wanted the railroad and that the Mormons would help to build it. One of his followers wrote, “We felt much better after he did that; we feared he might not be willing and we’d never have a road.” Young also said he expected the line to run through the city, for which the Cheyenne Daily Leader jumped on him. The newspaper pointed out that the line north of the city would be sixty or seventy miles shorter, but it admitted that Young would probably have his way, because “there is more political strength and influence united in him than in any other one person in America.”20

  Well, perhaps, sometimes, in some places, but not always even in Utah. Early that summer, Dodge came to Salt Lake City. Young knew the UP’s workings well enough to know that, though Durant had considerable power, and Reed had power, and there were other men who had to be dealt with, in the end it was Dodge who got what he wanted. Clearly, wherever Dodge sat was the head of the table. He was a man of such strong personality that even such men as Durant gave way—and even such men as Young.

  On this occasion, Dodge had come to tell Young that the UP was going to go around the north end of the lake and would run not through Salt Lake City but, rather, through Ogden. Though Young put what Dodge called great pressure on him to go south instead of north, Dodge held firm. His own surveys and those of others had convinced him that north was the best way to go.

  Young would not quit, not yet. According to Dodge, “He even went so far as to deliver in the Tabernacle a great sermon denouncing me, and stating a road could not be built or run without the aid of the Mormons.”21 Young then approached the CP to accept the southern route, but to no avail, for their surveyors had come to the same conclusion as Dodge.

  Dodge stood firm. He told Young that the Mormons would have to build their own spur line to Ogden if they wanted rail service in Salt Lake City. Young finally, unwillingly, but as gracefully as he could, accepted the decision. A few weeks later, in another Tabernacle sermon, Young said that wherever the railroad went around Salt Lake, “it is all right because God rules and He will have things as He pleases. We can act, but He will over-rule.”22

  At the beginning of June, the Mormons were at work. The Deseret News exclaimed, “We live in a wonderful age.” Admittedly, the railroad would bring in Gentiles, but it would also carry them out.23 Dodge took one look and from then on he couldn’t have enough Mormons working for the UP. They were, he said, teetotalers to the last man, tolerated no gambling, were quiet and law-abiding, said grace devoutly at meals, and concluded each day’s labor with communal prayers and songs.

  One of their songs, a favorite of Dodge’s, written by James Crane, a Mormon railroad grader, ran:

  At the head of great Echo

  The railway’s begun

  The Mormons are cutting

  And grading like fun.

  They say they’ll stick to it

  Till it is complete,

  When friends and relations

  They’re longing to meet.24

  By June 9, they had broken ground for the masonry and grade at Devil’s Gate in Weber Canyon. John Sharp could put only eighty men to work there. He could set no more at the job because the defile in which the men worked was so narrow it couldn’t hold any more. Once he was clear of Devil’s Gate, he used as many as five hundred men on a single job. Through the canyon, Mormon gangs worked as hard and as faithfully as did the Chinese for the CP. They cut timber for bridges and ties, or made grade, or built bridges, or dug tunnels, and more.

  The July 22, 1868, Deseret News said, “A birds-eye view of the railroad camps in Echo Canyon would disclose to the beholder a little world of concerted industry unparalleled.” Historian Clarence Reeder, in his dissertation on Utah railroads, summarized the Mormon construction efforts: “A people working together in harmony under the guidance of their religious leaders to accomplish a temporal task which they treated as though it were divinely inspired.”25

  Samuel Schill was a twelve-year-old that summer. His dad was a teamster hauling supplies for the UP. In June, when the Weber River was high and running very fast, someone asked young Sam if he could swim. Sure, was the answer. Well, then, swim the river, and while you are at it carry over this rope to the engineering party on the other side. The engineers need it to start establishing a ferry here.

  Sam did it, for 50 cents. That was the first money he had ever earned. He earned more working for the railroad, by hauling ties cut by his dad down to the roadbed.

  At night, he later recalled, he would sit around the campfire with the grown-ups, singing such songs as:

  Hurrah, hurrah, the railroad’s begun.

  Three cheers for the contractor, his name Brigham Young.

  Hurrah, hurrah, we are faithful and true

  And if we stick to it, it’s bound to go through.26

  • • •

  HOW good were these Mormons in a job that began with daylight and lasted until dusk, or sometimes went through the night? The authoritative voice is that of Hubert Howe Bancroft in his 1890 history of Utah: “It was acknowledged by all railroad men that nowhere on the line could the grading compare in completeness and finish with the work done by the people of Utah.”27

  In addition to grades and bridges, the Mormons and other UP workers had to drive tunnels. All together the UP had four tunnels. One was in Wyoming, at Mary’s Creek, in the Rattlesnake Hills, a short one of 215 feet, and straight. It was driven through brown sandstone that had to be timbered. The second tunnel wa
s at the head of Echo Canyon. At 772 feet, it was the longest on the line, with long cuts leading to it. The tunnel was driven through weak clay rock that required it to be lined with timber. Work started in July 1868, but it was not finished until May 1869. The railroad ran a temporary track eight miles in length around it. Tunnels 3 and 4 were in Echo Canyon, three-quarters of a mile apart, some twenty-five miles from Ogden. Tunnel 3, on a curve, was 508 feet long, driven through a sharp spur of black limestone and dark-blue quartzite. Begun in September 1868, it was completed in April 1869. Tunnel 4, also on a curve, was 297 feet long, and it was completed by January 1869. In all of these tunnels, the UP gangs used nitroglycerin. No one protested. It was obvious to everyone working on the railroad that the need for speed was paramount, if the race was to be won.

  The several crossings of the Weber River were made with trestles. These were temporary structures. In the judgment of historian John Debo Galloway, in his book The First Transcontinental Railroad—published in 1950 and still a definitive work—“The use of the temporary structures on the rapid advance westward was fully justified by the desire to get the road into operation, since the bridges serve the purpose for which they were erected. Permanent stone and masonry work could be added later. The procedure that was followed by the Union Pacific in its original construction was entirely proper for a railroad building into a new territory.”28

  THE CP watched, worried, and acted. In mid-1868, the CP’s end of track was more than five hundred miles west of Echo Summit, but it was there that Stanford and the other members of the Big Four wanted to go. They were determined to begin the Utah grading at once, and in the process to use the best workforce they could possibly get, the Mormons, So, in the first week in June, Stanford set out by rail and stage for Salt Lake City. But Seymour and Reed had beat him there, and Reed had Brigham Young’s friendship, and a contract with him. Young told Stanford he had all he could do at present to complete the work he had taken on for the UP. After that was done, he intended to make new contracts with Reed, which would take the UP one or two hundred miles west of Salt Lake City.29