Sometimes the trains did not move even that fast. In mid-February, a week-long storm came over the Sierra Nevada. The Reno Crescent said that up in the mountains the storm was “described as something awful.” Two CP locomotives made it across on the front edge of the storm, with enough iron to lay two miles of track, plus “sixteen cars loaded with ties, four cars loaded with bridge timber, a caboose and passenger cars.”12 After the trains arrived, the storm hit, hard—it was the worst of the winter. Back near Cisco, a snowslide knocked out a trestle bridge and caused a blockade. Several passenger trains were snowbound, and not even nine locomotives pushing one of the largest of the CP’s plows could get through the drifts.
The slides came in those fourteen miles the CP had not yet covered with their sheds. The good news from the storm was that the snowsheds already built had held up throughout the onslaught. More good news: within a week, the snow had melted and the trains were running again.13
For the UP, the weather was equally awful and lasted longer. On January 10, a snowstorm hit Wyoming. The wind was up—indeed, so fierce that snowdrifts covered much of the line. It took a freight train bound for Echo with construction supplies fourteen hours to make the last forty miles. Following the storm came a savage cold wave. For a week the temperature never climbed above zero, and on January 17 it sank to twenty degrees below zero. At Wasatch, a town laid out by Webster Snyder, the UP’s general superintendent for operations, which was the winter headquarters for the Casement forces, desperate work was going on to board up the rough-hewn buildings. “The sound of hammer and saw was heard day and night,” wrote J. H. Beadle as he tried to drink his coffee in a cafe whose weatherboarding was being applied as he had his breakfast. But gravy and butter froze on his plate. Some spilled coffee congealed on the table.
Graders worked in overcoats, which slowed them down considerably. They blasted the frozen ground with black powder, just as the CP’s graders had done. The results were equally disconcerting. When the thaw came, an entire train and the track beneath it slid off the grade made with “chunks of ice” into a gully.14 Superintendent Reed wrote his wife how much he was looking forward to completing the job. When that happened, “I shall want to leave the day after for home, and hope to have one year’s rest at least.”15
In February, the storm that had stopped nine CP locomotives in the Sierra came to Utah. “The most terrific storm for years,” according to one Salt Lake City newspaper. When it hit Wyoming, the storm shut down ninety miles of the UP line, between Rawlins and Laramie, for three weeks. Two hundred eastbound passengers were stuck in Rawlins, six hundred westbound marooned at Laramie. The eastbound passengers were headed for Washington, D.C., to be there for the inaugural of President Ulysses S. Grant, elected overwhelmingly in November.
On February 15, Dan Casement set out from Echo to rescue them, with a road-clearing crew and a big plow. But he found the cuts filled with twenty-five feet of snow and could move forward only five miles per day at best. Then he and some others decided they would have to walk the rest of the way to Laramie, some seventy-five miles. He almost died—or, as his brother Jack put it, “came near going up”—before he finally made it. He reported to Jack, “Have seen a cut fill up in two hours that took one hundred men ten hours to shovel out.” His men, he said, “are all worked out and frozen.” It was “impossible to get through.” As for the trains, they “can’t more than keep engines alive when it blows.”16
No one east of the Missouri could imagine what it was like. Webster Snyder said, “New York can’t appreciate the situation or the severity of a mountain snow storm.” Durant’s answer was to wire Snyder to send eight hundred flatcars to Chicago. “If you can’t send the cars,” he warned, with his usual gracelessness, “send your resignation and let some one operate the road who can.”17
On March 4, Grant became president even before the would-be celebrants stuck in Rawlins got as far as St. Louis. When they arrived, one of them said, “Most of us are much the worse for wear, and we think it will be a long time before we take another ride over the mountains on the Union Pacific Railroad.”18
“Have We a Pacific Railroad?” asked the New York Tribune of March 6, 1869. Not if passengers were stranded in the Wyoming desert and mails detained for three weeks by a mere snowstorm.19 Passengers stranded on the line wrote extremely angry letters to the newspapers. Fifty of them signed a letter to the Chicago Tribune which said that the workmen had refused to help them in any way because “for near three months they had not been paid.” Further, as far as they were concerned, the UP was “simply an elongated human slaughter house.”20
Webster Snyder noticed that some of the letters came from employees of the Central Pacific and wrote his own to friendly newspapers, only to discover that in New York the dailies refused to print letters favorable to his company. No wonder, since their journalists criticized the UP without any attempt at balance (it was, after all, the worst storm in memory).
ACCIDENTS on the lines were frequent. On January 18, a new CP locomotive, named Blue Jay, chugged into Reno looking “prettier than a spotted mule, or a New York school ma’am,” according to the Crescent. Three days later, it chugged back up the Sierra, headed west with a few carloads of passengers, only to run into a stalled lumber train. The Crescent reported that, “bruised, broken, and crippled, it was then taken limping to Sacramento for repairs.” Several cars were smashed, “but fortunately nobody was killed.” One construction train uncoupled in the middle as it was coming down the long grade into Reno. The front half of the train got well ahead, but then the aft cars gained momentum and hit the last car of the front half. The collision splintered eleven cars and crushed two brakemen.21
On the western slope, two Chinamen cutting ties felled a tree across the track. They were engaged in cutting it into lengths for ties and were so intent on the work that they failed to notice the approach of the locomotive. The engineer, coming around a curve, failed to notice the Chinese. Both were run over.22
For the UP, during the great February storm, Engine 112 was overwhelmed by its attempt to plow through the snow. The boiler strained until it could do no more and exploded from the effort. The engineer, fireman, and conductor were all killed, as was a brakeman who was crushed by an overturning car.
As 1868 drew to a close, for one unit of the great UP and CP armies the war had ended. The survey engineers had completed their task—for the UP all the way to Humboldt Wells, for the CP to the head of Echo Canyon. The survey parties were disbanded to cut down expenses.
Some surveyors stayed on to work with the construction contractors, and others went off to lay out lines for new roads. In Maury Klein’s words, “They could take pride in a job well done.” Nothing accomplished by either company “was more impressive or enduring than the final line located through a forbidding, unmapped wilderness bristling with natural obstacles.” Anyone can see for himself in the twenty-first century by driving Interstate 80 from Omaha to Sacramento. Nearly all the way, the automobiles will be paralleling or very near the original grade as the surveyors laid it out. “In later years,” Klein wrote, most of the surveyors would look back on their time laying out the line of the first transcontinental railroad “as the most exciting chapter of their careers.”23 It was also the best work they ever did. Every citizen of the United States from that time to the present owes the surveyors a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.
It was almost as exciting for many of the graders and their foremen. And for them, the first month or two of 1869 were the most memorable. Much of that time, the two companies worked within sight of each other, often within a stone’s throw. On January 15, Stanford wrote to Hopkins to say he thought the CP should get as far as Ogden. To claim more, as Huntington was doing, Stanford thought was “to weaken our case.” Going west from Ogden to Bear River, the grading lines of the two companies “are generally from 500 feet to a quarter of a mile apart, but at one point they are probably within two hundred feet.” Between Bear River
and Promontory, the UP was close to the CP “and crosses us twice,” with other grades running “within a few feet of us.”24
On the rocky eastern slope of the Promontory Mountains, a large gang of Strobridge’s Chinese were grading to the east, while Casement’s graders were building to the west. They were frequently within a few feet of each other. They worked fast, hard, all day long, even though it was obvious to them that one side or the other was wasting time, labor, and supplies. The two grades paralleling each other can still be seen, often nearly touching, occasionally crossing.
The UP’s crews were mainly Irish. They tried to shake the persistence of the Chinese by jeering and by tossing frozen clods at them. The tactics had no visible effect, so they attacked with pick handles. The Chinese fought back, to the Irishmen’s surprise. So the Irish tried setting off heavy powder charges without warning the Chinese, timing them to explode when the CP grade was closest. Several Chinese were badly hurt. The CP made some official protests. Dodge gave an order to cut it out. He was ignored.
A day or two later, when the grades were only a few yards apart, the Chinese set off an unannounced explosion. It deposited a cascade of dirt and rocks on the UP’s Irishmen, several of whom were buried alive. That ended the war.25 The grading crews, however, went on scraping furiously in parallel lines beside each other but in opposite directions.*
The track layers were not in sight of each other, but they were aware of how well the rival line was doing, and they put their entire effort into the job. Never before, or since, has railroad track been laid so fast. By January, the UP’s track was in Echo City, only eight miles from the mouth of Echo Canyon. The first locomotive got there at 11 A.M. “And Echo City held high carnival and general jubilee on the occasion.”26
There was trouble, however. The tunnel just beyond Echo went slowly. It was the longest of the three tunnels the UP had to drill and dig in the Wasatch Range, 772 feet long with deep approach cuts. Though work had started in the summer of 1868, it was far from completed. No nitroglycerin was used, but excavating the tunnel consumed 1,064 kegs of black powder. Meanwhile, the UP workers bypassed the tunnel with a flimsy eight-mile temporary track over a ridge.
The two tunnels to the west were less than a mile apart in the canyon, perched on narrow, curving ledges above steep, rocky gorges. On these tunnels, nitroglycerin was used to speed up the work. A fifth of the tunnel men protested vainly and walked off the job. The remainder used the nitro to make the work go faster. Nitro then ripped out the tunnels at a record pace of eight feet a day.
On January 9, the track reached a tall, ancient pine that stood next to the grading in Weber Canyon. That pine marked precisely the point where the tracks were a thousand miles from Omaha. It surely deserved to be memorialized, so a sign reading “1000 Mile Tree” was hung from its lowest limb. Andrew Russell took a picture, often reproduced, and the base of the tree became a picnic spot for tourists.
By the end of January, light shone through the largest tunnel, the one closest to Echo. The headings had met. The bottoms remained to be blasted out, a job not completed until April, and not until the middle of May was track laid through it.
THE CP spent January laying track from Elko toward Humboldt Wells. On the 28th of that month, the tracks were 150 miles west of Elko. After getting to the Wells, the track would run northeastward to the state line, then on toward Promontory. But Humboldt Wells was still 224 miles from Ogden, and the CP had not yet reached it.
Charlie Crocker came, saw, and threatened the Chinese crews. According to one foreman who was there, “He stirred up the track layers with a stick; told them they must do better or leave the road.”27 That got them to working even faster.
One day, at the end of track, a supply train came up. It carried no rails, only ties. Crocker went back to the forwarding station to confront the man responsible, a man named McWade. As soon as he saw Crocker, McWade called out, “Mr. Crocker, I know about it. Mr. Strobridge has telegraphed me, and I know it was all wrong and I am sorry.”
Grim-faced, Crocker replied, “Mac a mistake is a crime now. You know what we have been trying to do. You know how I have been going up and down this road trying to get the material to you. And here it is—and you have made a mistake and thrown us out of two miles of track today. Now take your bundle and go. I cannot overlook it.”
McWade burst out crying. Finally, he managed to say, “Well it is pretty hard on me. I have been a good, faithful man.”
“I know you have,” Crocker replied, “but there has got to be discipline on this road, and I cannot overlook anything of this kind. You must go. Send your assistant to me.”
Crocker put the assistant in charge. But, having made his point, he relented. “I let him lay off a month,” he said of McWade, “and put him back again. But it put everybody on the alert, and kept them right up to their work. And it did good, because everybody was afraid, and when I came along they were all hard at work, I can tell you.”
Discussing the incident years later, Crocker added, “It got so that I was really ashamed of myself.”28
AS always, finance was a special problem for the UP. The track layers struck, for $3.50 per day. The UP had no choice with regard to these skilled workers and paid what was demanded. They, and all other workers, also got double pay on Sundays. The Mormon workers demanded $5 a day for a man and team, $10 on Sunday, and at least on paper got it, though they were not paid. When Mormon subcontractors refused work in spring sinks or heavy cuts, Casement flung his tireless Irish into the breach.29
On January 4, Snyder had reported to Dodge, “In construction the waste of money is awful…. We are ditching trains daily. Grading is done at enormous expense. The ties cost $4.50 each on the ground…. The company can’t stand such drafts as I know the Construction Department must be making…. Would like to know what I am to be paid.” Twelve days later, Oliver Ames wrote Durant: “Everything depends on the economy and vigor with which you press the work. We hear here awful stories of the cost of the work…. The contract price for ties is but one dollar.”
The bosses had turned on each other. On February 3, Durant had telegraphed Dodge to inform him before issuing orders, as always. “If you cannot find time to report here I shall of necessity be obliged to supersede you.”30 A strange threat to be given to a man who had the President-elect’s full confidence, and of whom Oakes Ames had declared, “Dodge is a perfect steam engine for Energy. He is at work night and day.” And for Durant, Oakes had his own threat. “We must remove him from the management,” he declared, “or there is no value to our property.”31
Such was the word from company headquarters in New York. In Omaha, the bankers were demanding their money, $200,000 in over-drafts from the Omaha National alone. Herbert Hoxie told Dodge, “We must have $750,000 and it ought to be twice that.” Oliver Ames had calls for $2 million with neither cash to give nor collateral to get it. Out on the line, where the work was being done, everyone who counted was upset. “I am afraid the Union Pacific is in a bad way,” Jack Casement wrote his wife. Sam Reed, covering forty to sixty miles a day on horseback to oversee the crews, told his wife, “Too much business is unfitting me for future usefulness. I know it is wearing me out.” But it wasn’t so much the work as the financial strain. Reed added, “The Doctor himself, I think, is getting frightened at the bills.”32
IN Washington, the UP had but to wait before it got ahead of the CP. The Andrew Johnson administration would give way on March 4, 1869, to the Ulysses Grant administration. The President-elect and the high command in the army were as close as could be with Grenville Dodge, and friends with the Casements along with other UP officials. Whereas Johnson’s Cabinet had favored the CP whenever possible, Grant’s could be expected to lean toward the UP.
It all came down to the government loan of bonds to the railroads for miles graded and track laid, and specifically down to which road would get them for the line between the north end of the Great Salt Lake and Echo Summit. Huntington had fil
ed with the Department of the Interior his guesswork map covering the distance, and Secretary Browning had accepted it. Stanford then proceeded on the assumption that the CP’s line on a map, even if little work had been done on it east of Ogden, was the true line of the Pacific railroad, and the only one on which subsidy bonds could be issued. Huntington intended to snatch them. He had filed in Washington for $2.4 million in subsidy bonds, two-thirds of the amount due for that portion of the line.
Dodge and the Ames brothers had hurried to Washington to block Huntington. They were successful, at least to the degree of persuading Browning to hold up issuing the bonds until a special commission had reported to him on the best route through the disputed territory. Huntington responded to Browning’s holdup with a curse and a comment, “The Union Pacific has outbid me.”33
On January 14, 1869, Browning had given the commission his instructions. He ordered the commissioners to “make a thorough and careful ex-amination” of the ground between the two ends of track. If either of the lines was “in all respects unobjectionable,” they were authorized to adopt it. If not, they should make a new location. “You will also designate a point at which the two roads will probably meet.”34
Browning’s actions caused delay, which he must have intended and which was probably the best he could do as a lame duck. Oakes Ames came to Huntington’s hotel room to see if the two roads could make their own settlement. Why not simply split the remaining distance between the two railheads, Ames suggested. That would suit the UP, since it would put the meeting point west of Promontory.
“I’ll see you damned first,” Huntington snarled. How about the mouth of Weber Canyon? he countered. That would greatly benefit the CP.
Ames replied with his own curse. The two men broke off, met again, snarled once more, broke off, met again, until Huntington finally agreed to a joining at Ogden. Beyond that point, he swore, he would not budge.
Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Page 39