It was about this time that Stanford went to Salt Lake City to try to talk Brigham Young into putting his Mormon shoulders to the plow. Brigham had not immediately agreed, Stanford told Hopkins, “Have Charley [Crocker] double his energy and do what is necessary to secure what labor is required to push the road to its utmost. Anything less than the most that can be done will very likely end in defeat.”16
On June 15, 1868, six days after Stanford’s telegram to Hopkins, the CP’s gap between Cisco and Truckee was finally closed. Crocker sent a triumphant telegram to Huntington: “The track is connected across the mountains. We have one hundred and sixty-seven continuous miles laid,”17 A day or two later, he sent three thousand of his Chinese graders, with a fleet of four hundred horse-drawn carts, to Palisade Canyon, on the Humboldt River, three hundred miles in advance of the end of track. Getting supplies and food to them was frightfully costly, but he got to work on it anyway.
On June 18, 1868, the CP ran its first through passenger train from Sacramento to Reno, a distance of 154 miles.* A reporter for the San Francisco Daily Alta California was aboard. He wrote that the train, which departed at 6:30 A.M., consisted of one boxcar stocked with freight, one baggage car with freight and the U.S. mails, and three of the CP’s new passenger cars. The locomotive was the Antelope, which had just been overhauled and painted, with bright-red wheels, a walnut cab, shiny brasswork, and a portrait of an antelope painted on the headlight. A truly fitting picture for the first locomotive ever to cross the Sierra Nevada.
Hank Small was the engineer. He checked out the locomotive, oilcan in his hand. Then he got started. After Roseville, California, “we proceeded on our way and now the mountains appeared so close that it seemed that we could put our hand out of the window and touch them…. The engine blows and wheezes, with short, sharp aspirations and the feeling of weight as we ascend a steep and increasing grade.” At 9:50 A.M., the train had gone up 2,448 feet, to Colfax. Then came the jaws-to-the-floorboard passing around Cape Horn, with passengers looking “anxiously and with evident trepidation into the depths below.” Then came Secret Town and an elevation of nearly three thousand feet.
“Up and up, onward we climbed skyward.” Then came Dutch Flat. Two miles farther, it was Alta at 3,625 feet. The first tunnel, five hundred feet long, was seventy-five miles from Sacramento and forty-five hundred feet above the sea. The snow levels came down to the road. “Chinese are swarming everywhere. They have nearly finished their work in this vicinity and are packing preparatory to passing over the summit into the great interior basin of the continent.”
At 102 miles from Sacramento, “we stand 6,800 feet above the sea. Two miles more and the cars reach the entrance of the great summit tunnel, 1,659 feet in length. We have scaled the great Sierras at last and a plus ultra might be written on the granite walls of the great tunnel before us. We are 7,043 feet above the sea.”
On the west side of the tunnel, “a swarm of Chinese are busy shoveling away the snow, which has come down in great slides bringing with it huge granite boulders upon the tracks.” It took two hours to clear the track. The passengers waited with whatever patience they could muster until conductor George Wood called out “All aboard!” On the trip down to the Truckee, “the snow banks come down so close to the track that the eaves of the car rake them on either side.” The road wound around the precipitous mountainside, almost encircling Donner Lake as it descended, scended, making a circuit of seven miles to gain not more than a quarter-mile.
On it rolled, to the Great Basin of Nevada. “The mighty task is accomplished. Words cannot describe it.” The Chinese onlookers did, in their own way. The Alta California reporter watched them as they watched the train. He called them “John,” and wrote: “John comprehending fully the importance of the event, loses his natural appearance of stolidity and indifference and welcomes with the swinging of his broad brimmed hat and loud, uncouth shouts the iron horse. With his patient toil, directed by American energy and backed by American capital, John has broken down the great barrier at last and opened over it the greatest highway yet created for the march of civilization.”18
Theodore Judah, who did the original surveying, had thought it could be done. He had convinced the Big Four, then Congress, then the President that it could be done. Now that it had been done, he must have looked down from heaven and smiled.
AT the lush Truckee Meadows, the wild grass grew two to three feet high. The California pioneers had stayed there to fatten their horses and cattle before pushing over the Sierra. When the track was open from Sacramento to the meadows, Crocker sent fifty carloads of supplies to Strobridge per day, divided into five trains each hauled by two locomotives. Crocker told Bancroft that those trains “were the heaviest that ever went over the road and the heaviest that ever will probably.”* He said the trains went over the seven miles of completed track just past the summit “and went safely. If the track had not been good, it could not have been done.”19 As quick as the supply trains were unloaded, they started back over the mountains for another load.
The CP was on the move. The Truckee’s Lower Canyon headed east, going through a narrowing meadowland that lay between great bare brown hills, until the river swung left some thirty-five miles past Reno and headed north, toward its outlet at Pyramid Lake. As the end of track moved east, the construction superintendent’s headquarters train, along with dormitory cars, stayed right behind. J. C. Lewis, editor of the week-old Reno Crescent, described it. “A locomotive came rushing down the track having in tow a string of boarding and lodging houses. One and four-story houses, which we called the Hotel de China. In the lower deck was cooking apartments; the second, third, and fourth decks were sleeping and eating rooms. Next several houses of a superior quality for the officials of the company…. Altogether a novel sight and one we shall long remember. We are prepared for anything Charlie Crocker may do in the future.”20
On July 1, 1868, Huntington wrote to Crocker to tell him that he had sent 60, 146 tons of rails from New York, all on fast ships, and he expected to raise the figure to ninety or a hundred thousand tons by the end of the year. Then he added, in a near-perfect expression of his many exhortations and therefore perhaps the most widely quoted of all his words, “So work on as though Heaven were before you and Hell behind you.”21
The same day, July 1, engineer Graham got to the Big Bend of the Truckee, where he set the stakes to found the town of Wads worth. Crocker came up a bit later and walked over the site, and after a half-hour he pointed to where he wanted the engine house and the station buildings for the town. This spot, 189 miles from Sacramento, became the base of supplies for the remaining five hundred miles of construction.
After Wadsworth, where the crews said good-bye to the Truckee, and until the track got to the Humboldt Sink, the route was northeastward across the Great Desert, a vast waste of sand and sagebrush and white alkali deposits, with high mountain ranges to the south and bleak hills to the north. The desert ran nearly a hundred miles, without a tree, without water, without anything that could be used for construction. A popular saying was that “a jack rabbit had to carry a canteen and haversack” to get across it.22
The CP spent big money trying to drill wells, but to almost no avail. Clement remarked, “Tunnels were bored into the mountains east of Wadsworth to develop small springs and when water was found, it was carefully protected and conveyed, in some cases, over eight miles in pipes to the line of the road.”23 The water for men, horses, and locomotives came from the Truckee River and was carried in huge, semiconical wooden vats on flatcars. The vats had big spouts that worked like the spouts of railroad water towers. At the end of track, much of the water had to be transferred to barrels and sent ahead by wagons to the graders. Timbers and boards for ties, bridges, station houses, and other structures, plus wood for fuel and rock for retaining walls and other masonry, came from the Sierra Nevada, where such materials were boundless. It was still expensive to bring them east, but it was done.
&nbs
p; That year the CP had a most unusual but major problem with its Chinese workforce. Charlie Crocker explained it to Huntington. “The most tremendous yarns have been circulating among the Chinese,” he wrote. “We have lost about 1,000 through fear of Indians out on the desert.” It seemed that they had been told “there are Snakes fifty feet long that swallow Chinamen whole on the desert, and Indians 25 feet high that eat men and women for breakfast and hundreds of other equally ridiculous stories.” Crocker solved the problem by sending twenty-two Chinamen taken from different groups “up the Humbolt [sic] to see for themselves and they have just returned and things are more quiet since.”24
The track layers were making great strides, while the graders ahead of them moved even faster. The Alta California described the way the thousands of men at work moved their residence each day. “Camp equipage, work shops, boarding house, offices, and in fact the big settlement literally took up its bed and walked. The place that knew it at morning knew it no more at night. It was nearly ten miles off and where was a busy town of 5,000 inhabitants in the morning, was a deserted village site at night, while a smooth, well built, compact road bed for traveling stretched from the morning site to the evening tarrying place.”25
One good thing about the desert—it was flat. Wadsworth, where the Truckee River turned north, was a bit more than four thousand feet in altitude. From there the route moved up in about as gentle a grade as the Nebraska plains. For 275 miles it gained only a thousand feet of altitude. So, in July and early August, the track layers put down and spiked forty-six miles of iron, or an average of one and a half miles per day.
FROM the beginning of the summer of 1868 to the end, Charles Crocker kept in much closer personal touch with the men. “I used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull,” he told an interviewer, “stopping along wherever there was anything going amiss, and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not up to time.” When he slept, which wasn’t often, it was on the train. When he woke, he could tell from the movement of his car exactly where on the line the train was. When Mrs. Crocker complained that he talked to her too roughly, he would reply, “Well you know that I don’t mean anything when I am abrupt with you.”
“Well,” she replied, “your manner is overbearing and gruff. That is the way you talk with me and with everybody.”
Crocker told his interviewer, “I got so that I was really ashamed of myself. That sort of bearing was entirely foreign to me.”26
ON September 3, government commissioners rode from Sacramento to the end of track to make their inspection. W. H. Rhodes, correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle, accompanied them. Some excerpts from his long dispatch:
Really, the speed is terrific…. Truckee is a young and flourishing town, full of people, who all seem to be busy in the great lumber trade. Hundreds of saw-mills are at work and millions of feet of timber are daily flatted out into boards….
We arrived at Reno and here beheld another new town. The noise of hammer, and plane, and saw re-echoed on all sides, and the city rises like an exhalation. It is a complete mirage on the desert, and will probably be as magnificent.
After spending the night at Wadsworth, the inspectors set out again, one of them scrutinizing the ties, rails, and grade with a spyglass, another lying down to sleep.
The argument being this, that if the passengers could sleep the track must be level, easy and all right. He slept profoundly and did not wake until we overtook the end of the road just 307 miles from Sacramento.
Here we found a very large number of men at work—principally Chinese—laying the track. The scientific part of the job is superintended by white men, but the rough work is done by the Chinese.
Shocking to modern readers, taken for granted by readers in the nineteenth century, the white superintendents of the Chinese were called “herders.”
Rhodes got a horse, “and I rode on a gallop to the front. The grading is completed several hundred miles in advance so that there is no delay in placing the rails. It would be impossible to describe how rapidly, orderly and perfectly this is done, without seeing the operation itself. There are just as many employed as can conveniently work, and no more. Vehicles laden with ties are always in advance, and Chinese with gauge and leveling rod place them across the grade, almost as quick as thought. The car with the rails is brought up at a gallop, and six white men—three at each rail—roll the iron off the car, and drop it upon the track, with the velocity of steam. The empty car is lifted off the track, and then one fully loaded is drawn to the front, and the same operation repeated ad infinitum.”
Rhodes pulled out his watch to time the last half-mile being laid. It was done in “a little less than twenty-eight minutes…. It is a fact, beyond dispute, that this company has laid over six miles of track in a single day.”27 The inspectors judged the final twenty-mile section of the line to be acceptable, and the bonds were issued.
By this time, the crews were picking up speed to a fare-thee-well. “They can and do lay the track now at the rate of four miles a day,” another reporter wrote. He had just talked to Charles Crocker, who told him that, if the additional fifty locomotives then on ships en route to San Francisco arrived soon, the CP would be into Salt Lake City by December. The company already had seventy locomotives at work. The reporter’s conclusion was apt: “This is railroading on a scale surpassing anything ever before conceived.”28
Far to the east, Butler Ives, with a party of twelve men, was making the final location from Humboldt Wells to the Wasatch Range. “They keep me out in these infernal regions of salt and desolation,” he wrote his brother, “because I am familiar with the country & don’t fear the Indians.” Montague had told surveyor Ives that “the necessity for pushing ahead will compel us to sacrifice good alignment & easy grades for the sake of getting light work. Make temporary location by using sharp curves and heavy grades wherever you can make any material savings on the work. The line we want now is the one we can build the soonest, even if we rebuild immediately. Keep this in mind.”29
ON October 21, Huntington wrote to Crocker, “Why doesn’t Stanford go to Salt Lake and stay until the roads meet?” Stanford did, and stayed for almost three months. Huntington went on, “I have got the new line to Echo Summit approved,” which wasn’t quite true. “You must lay tracks to the tunnel. By God, Charley, you must work as man never worked before. Our salvation is you.”30
By the end of October, the line was open to Winnemucca, Nevada. According to the Humboldt Register, the town was “improving rapidly. Several large stores had opened.” The CP made Winnemucca into a division point and intended to build roundhouses and machine shops there, along with other buildings. So, the Register concluded, “the town may yet survive and become an important place.”31
That remained to be seen.* Engineer Graham noted the scarcity of inhabitants in northern Nevada and commented on the sight of empty land: “What settlements were there when the line was being built? Winnemucca was a small town, there was a wayside hotel at Humboldt station, there was a little store at Mill City. I don’t remember any habitations until we touched Corinne [Utah], 20 miles east of Promontory.”32
THAT October, Huntington filed with the Interior Department maps and profiles of the CP’s proposed line from Monument Point to Echo Summit. Secretary Browning accepted the documents, but he was about to become a lame duck, since Republican candidate General Grant was the almost certain winner of the 1868 election. So, when Huntington filed an application for an advance of $2.4 million in subsidy bonds for grading that had been done on the line, on the grounds that the CP’s was the only line, the true line, the one on which bonds could be issued, Doc Durant and Oliver Ames protested mightily. Browning then decided to do nothing until January 1869, after the election, when he would appoint a special commission headed by General Gouverneur Warren to go to the site to determine the best route through the disputed territory. The UP then got Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch to agree that he would not issue an
y bonds until Warren’s commission had reported.
Another government commission, out to inspect tracks already laid and in use, traveled by rail from Sacramento to the end of the CP’s track in mid-November. On December 3, they sent a highly favorable report to Secretary Browning. “On the new portion of the road,” they said, “through Humboldt Valley, cross ties, bridges, and rails are up to standard. Minor defects can be remedied at small cost when hurry of pushing forward the road is over. Heavy trains of rails, ties and fuel are running safely to the extreme end of the road, 445 miles from Sacramento. The road is being constructed in good faith, in a substantial manner, without stint of labor, materials or equipment, and is worthy of its character as a great national work.”33
ON November 9, 1868, a reporter from the Alta California explained how Strobridge and his men could make that great national work press east so rapidly. He wrote that Strobridge was comfortably established in his camp train, which contained hotel, telegraph office, store, kitchen, sleeping quarters, and a “home that would not discredit San Francisco.” In the train were the officials, the clerical force, and some Caucasian workers. Mrs. Strobridge was there, in her boxcar, which was divided into three small rooms, with windows and a narrow, recessed porch on the right side, plus a ventilator in the roof.
Mrs. Strobridge was the only white woman who “saw the thing through from beginning to end.” The men called her “The Heroine of the CP.” Her car was “neatly fitted up and well furnished.” An awning veranda, with a caged canary bird swinging at the front door, gave it a homelike appearance.
Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Page 37