by Jim Noles
By then, the clamor for a transcontinental railroad had reached an all-time high. Such a conduit, supporters argued, would not only strengthen political bonds between California and the rest of the Union but, in a very real sense, would strengthen the military defense of the Pacific Coast against foreign powers as well. It would reduce the time and cost of transporting the mail and government supplies. And it would hasten the subjugation of hostile Indian tribes.
With the Railroad Act of 1862, Congress legislated such dreams into reality. It authorized the Union Pacific Railroad to build westward from the Missouri River to the California boundary or until it met the Central Pacific Railroad. President Lincoln later designated Omaha, Nebraska, as the project’s eastern terminus. The act also empowered the Central Pacific to push east (from its terminus in Sacramento) and connect with the Union Pacific.
Equally important, the act provided the means of financing such a colossal endeavor. Pursuant to the act’s provisions and supplemental legislation passed in 1864 and 1866, each railroad would enjoy a 200-foot right-of-way through the public domain and receive twenty sections of land for every mile of track it laid. Each mile of track completed would also earn the railroad company a bond subsidy of $16,000 a mile east of the Rockies and west of the Sierras, $32,000 a mile between the mountain ranges, and $48,000 a mile in the mountains. The act, as amended, even gave the railroad companies the right to raise further capital by issuing their own bonds.
The results of such incentives were what one historian called “financial buccaneering”—a series of corporate arrangements and schemes that would strike today’s businessmen and regulators as unethical at best and illegal at worst. Nevertheless, in 1863, the nation’s focus was not so much on the legal proprieties of the project’s financing as on the monumental work at hand. That work began on January 8, 1863, when the Central Pacific broke ground in Sacramento. For its part, the Union Pacific began work in Omaha on December 2, 1863.
The Central Pacific sorely needed the benefit of its early start. Charles Crocker, the man tasked with overseeing the construction of the line, simply could not keep workers on the job. For every five workers he dispatched by train to the end of the line for construction work, three simply capitalized on the free train ride and pushed on west for Nevada, where the lure of silver mining beckoned. At a time when he needed 5,000 men, he could barely marshal 600.
In desperation, Crocker took the controversial step of recruiting Chinese immigrants. By 1865, he had 7,000 Chinese laboring on the railroad; by 1868, their numbers had grown to 11,000. If not for their labor, the Central Pacific would never have been able to push out of California.
Even with his new labor force, Crocker still faced challenges, in particular, the mountain fastness of the mighty Sierra Nevada range. For months, he and his crews used 500 kegs of black powder a day to blast their way through the foothills and into the mountains. The winters of 1866 to 1867 and 1867 to 1868, cursed with record snowfalls, exacerbated his difficulties. At times, the daily progress was literally measured in inches—and in human life. Approximately 1,200 Chinese workers lost their lives in Crocker’s three-year battle against the Sierra Nevada.
In the East, work did not commence in earnest until the waning days of the Civil War. But when it did, it began with a vengeance. The Union Pacific deployed 10,000 workers in Nebraska and began surveying, grading, and laying track in Nebraska with almost military precision—largely thanks to the organizational and leadership skills of Granville Dodge, a former Union Army general. In fact, many of Dodge’s workers were veterans themselves. Irish immigrants, Englishmen, Germans, Mexicans, and former slaves filled the ranks as well.
Living out of twenty-car work trains, the Union Pacific men rose at dawn each day, six days a week, and, mile by mile, advanced toward the setting sun at an average rate of three miles a day. Surveyors, ranging hundreds of miles ahead of the track under the protection of U.S. Cavalry escorts, staked out the route. Graders followed the surveyors, leveling the track bed. Then came the so-called iron men, manhandling the 700-pound rails into place and hammering them into place on the wooden railway ties—ten spikes to a rail, 400 rails to a mile.
Hard work inspired hard play, and, as the Union Pacific crews worked across the prairie, a parasitic horde of gamblers, saloon keepers, whiskey merchants, pimps, prostitutes, gunmen, and common criminals followed in their wake. The camps that sprung up to support such vice soon earned the nickname “hell on wheels.”
By March 1869, the railroads had bested hostile Indians, unforgiving mountains, scorching deserts, and brutal winters and were racing across the Utah Territory. At this point, each company labored desperately to claim as much track—and government money and land—as possible, laying as much as ten miles of track a day. For a time, the competition was so heated that the two companies could not even agree on where their tracks would join.
Congress stepped in to resolve the dispute. It picked Utah’s Promontory Point (or Summit, as it is often called) as the site where the tracks would join, fifty-six miles west of Ogden. The ceremonies marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad were originally planned for May 8, 1869, but unhappy Union Pacific workers blocked the train carrying company dignitaries and refused to let it pass until their back wages were paid. It was not until May 10, therefore, that the ceremony commenced.
It did so with a host of ceremonial gestures: The presentation of two golden spikes, one by David Hewes, a San Francisco construction magnate, and the other by the San Francisco News Letter ; a silver spike offered as the Nevada Territory’s contribution; and a spike of iron, silver, and gold provided by the Arizona Territory. The Pacific Union Express Company offered a silver-plated sledge; West Evans, the Central Pacific’s tie contractor, provided a polished laurel tie.
After the ceremonial spikes were gently tapped into the tie (and quickly removed), a final, ordinary spike was readied to be hammered into place. A worker handed the sledge to Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific and namesake of Stanford University. He swung—and missed the spike, much to the delight of the hundreds of raucous railway workers crowding around.
Despite the miss, an eager telegraph operator signaled to the rest of the nation that the railway had been completed. Celebrations erupted from San Francisco, where Californians unveiled a banner that read, “California Annexes the United States,” to Philadelphia, where citizens rang an already cracked Liberty Bell.
Back in Utah, however, the sledge was now in the hands of Thomas Durant—the abrasive, ambitious, and hard-driving president of the Union Pacific. He swung—and, like Stanford, missed the spike. Again, the workers roared with laughter.
Other executives and company officers finished driving the last spike home, and once the tie was securely in place, the Union Pacific’s Engine No. 119 and the Central Pacific’s Jupiter rolled forward and gingerly touched cowcatchers.
In the end, some 1,776 miles of track had been laid. The Union Pacific had claimed 1,085 miles; the Central Pacific the remainder. And for the first time, East was irrevocably linked to West.
Even though the stretch of track at Promontory Point was bypassed by a shortcut in 1903 (and torn up for scrap metal during World War II), the historical significance of Promontory Point in Utah’s northern wilderness still resonated in the twenty-first century. In fact, it continued to sound so forcefully that when Utah selected a design for its state quarter in 2007, the image commemorating the completion of the transcontinental railroad edged out a beehive (the state symbol) and a gleeful snowboarder for a spot on the state’s coin.
46
OKLAHOMA
Two for the Price of One
Forty-six quarters into the 50 State Quarters® Program and a state finally gave a nod to its Indian heritage. Even then, however, Oklahoma chose to do so in a rather indirect way with a depiction of the state wildflower, Gaillardia pulchella, better known as the Indian blanket. A swooping scissor-tailed flycatcher, the state bird, co
mpletes the scene.
The road to the Indian blanket’s victory began in 2006, when Oklahoma solicited design concept submissions from its citizens. A review of hundreds of submissions led to the selection of ten semifinal design concepts. Those semifinalists boasted images that incorporated such themes as the state bird and wildflower, a gushing oil derrick, a windmill, a calumet (a traditional Indian “peace pipe”), the state outline, and, on at least half of the ten, a depiction of Ponca City, Oklahoma’s Pioneer Woman statue.
Oklahomans selected five finalists that were submitted to the Treasury Department for review. The U.S. Mint converted the concepts into actual coin images and returned them to Oklahoma for a decision.
At that point, controversy struck. The young mother depicted in Pioneer Woman grasps her young son’s hand in her left hand and, in her right, holds what most people assume to be a Bible. But sharp-eyed Oklahomans quickly recognized that the U.S. Mint’s images of Pioneer Woman on four of the five finalist designs was sans book—Bible or otherwise. Many theorized that the book’s absence was related to Mint-promulgated design policy that deemed “logos or depictions of specific . . . religious . . . organizations whose membership or ownership is not universal” as being “inappropriate design concepts.”
In the end, the flap over Pioneer Woman and her book proved moot. In an online vote, 148,000 Oklahomans cast votes for their favorite design concept. Nearly half—76,643, to be precise—voted in favor of the flycatcher and the Indian blanket.
“Oklahomans have spoken and the results are clear,” Governor Brad Henry concluded. “In the year of our glorious centennial, I felt it was important to give Oklahomans the final word on what will grace our commemorative quarter. Oklahoma has a rich heritage and diverse culture, and so it was a formidable challenge to distill everything that is Oklahoma down to a single design.”
As Governor Henry’s comments reflected, the year 2007 marked the centennial anniversary of Oklahoma’s admission to the Union as its forty-sixth state in 1907. But back in 1907, and in the years that immediately preceded it, one did not need a state quarter design competition to provide a reminder of Oklahoma’s diversity. Rather, the Sequoyah Constitutional Convention of 1905, which sought the admission of the new state of Sequoyah to the Union, underscored that same point quite handily.
The roots of the Sequoyah Convention can be found as far back as 1830, when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. With that legislation providing the necessary authority, President Andrew Jackson aggressively pushed to relocate Indian tribes from their ancestral homes in the East to lands west of the Mississippi River. The immediate result was the “Trail of Tears”—the forced displacement and relocation of the Southeast’s “Five Civilized Tribes” (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole). Tribes such as the Osage and Quapaw, which were relocated to make room for the Five Civilized Tribes, shared in the hardships.
In the West, these tribes and others found a new home in the so-called Indian territory, a swath of unfamiliar land centered on modern-day Oklahoma. Sequoyah—the name of the Cherokee who invented the first Native American alphabet for his people—joined the Cherokee in their new home. Today, such cities and towns as Tulsa, Tahlequah, Ardmore, and Muskogee owe their existence to the Five Civilized Tribes and ancestors such as Sequoyah, who helped establish a pattern of settlement that in many ways mirrored the rest of America.
Like the rest of the United States, however, the Indian territory was not immune to the secessionist crisis that erupted in the middle of the nineteenth century. Some tribes sided with the Confederacy, furnishing the Confederacy with not only the Civil War’s only Native American general officer, the Cherokee leader Stand Watie, but also a brigade of troops.
When the Civil War ended, the decision to support the Confederate States cost the Five Civilized Tribes dearly. In retribution, the U.S. government began settling Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche in Indian territory, thereby cutting into the Five Civilized Tribes’ land. Increasing settlement pressure from the East reduced the Indian territory even further to the approximate perimeter of today’s Oklahoma.
In 1890, when the Oklahoma Territory was organized, the Indian Territory gained a capital “T” but further shrank to merely the eastern half of the present-day state. Then, on April 15, 1897, the Cudahy Oil Company completed Nellie Johnstone No. 1, Oklahoma’s first commercial oil well. Countless more would follow and, in the eyes of many historians, fueled the territory’s drive toward statehood.
As momentum built toward statehood, delegates from the Indian Territory convened what would become known as the Sequoyah Constitutional Convention. In years past, the Indian Territory had broached the idea of—and even lobbied for—independent statehood for the territory, notably at a 1903 meeting in Eufaula. But in 1905, the Five Civilized Tribes came as close as they ever would to creating a new state.
At the time, the land that would one day become Oklahoma was firmly divided into two camps: the “single staters” and the “double staters.” The latter included those representatives of the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes who were determined to hold the federal government accountable for historical treaty promises that they would never be forced to become part of a state or territory without their consent. Notably, their ranks included many of the Indian Territory’s white citizens as well.
On August 21, 1905, 167 delegates convened in Muskogee. Chief Pleasant Porter, of the Creek Nation, served as the convention’s chairman; Charles N. Haskell, a prominent white citizen of the territory and a future governor of the state of Oklahoma, served as the vice chairman. Over the course of twenty-one legislative days, the convention worked to craft the framework of government for the prospective state.
The delegates faced a number of tasks and decisions: How many counties would there be? Where would the county seats be located?
How many jurors would be required to reach a verdict in a civil trial? Could citizens carry concealed weapons? Would Prohibition be the law of the land? How would the state government be organized? What would become the new state capital? And what would the new state be called? In the end, Fort Gibson was offered as the new state capital of a state that would be called Sequoyah (besting other offerings such as “Indianola” and “Tecumseh”) and a proposed constitution was offered to the people of Indian Territory for ratification.
On November 7, 1905, 56,279 men in Indian Territory voted to ratify the Sequoyah constitution; 9,073 voted against it. Buoyed by its victory, the convention dispatched a delegation to Washington, D.C., to press for statehood for Sequoyah.
In the nation’s capital, however, Sequoyah’s delegation met with defeat.
Reflecting on the delegation’s failure, Haskell later wrote:
We presented the constitution to Congress and our delegation urged statehood along the lines we proposed, but, as I feared, that body would not listen to our appeal. Congress flatly told the committee that it did not propose to make a separate state of Indian Territory. . . . They were invited by [Representative Joseph G.] Cannon to protest against joint statehood. They told him if Congress would not give them separate statehood they would be satisfied with single statehood. (Nesbitt 1936, 203)
Less than a year later, President Theodore Roosevelt signed enabling legislation that would make the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory a single state. Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state on November 16, 1907, ironically taking its name from a pair of Choctaw Indian words meaning “red people.”
Despite the failure of the Sequoyah Convention, Haskell took a philosophical view of the turn of events. The convention, he reflected, did more to prepare the Indians for statehood than any other thing done for them. They felt that an honest effort had been made to bring about statehood on the lines promised . . . . That Congress would not grant them this right was an obstacle that could not be overcome. I had pointed out to them in our first discussion of the subject the troubles that were in the way, but I
felt that an honest effort should be made to carry out the agreement the government had entered into with the Five Civilized Tribes. When that effort had been made by some of the leading citizens of Indian Territory whose friendship they could not doubt they were willing to submit to the inevitable. (Nesbitt 1936, 195)
Today, thirty-nine federally recognized Indian tribes are headquartered in Oklahoma—more tribes than in any other state. Of Oklahoma’s 3.25 million citizens, 250,000 are Indians. And but for an unsympathetic Congress in the winter of 1905, their ancestors might have been responsible for a program of fifty-one, rather than merely fifty, state quarters.
47
NEW MEXICO
The Circle of Life
As I write in the summer of 2007, New Mexico’s state quarter has not yet been released. But when it is released in April 2008, it’s just going to be a matter of time, isn’t it? Just a matter of time, that is, before someone shrieks that New Mexico’s coin features the sacred sun symbol of the Zia Pueblo. Thus, that person will argue, the quarter depicts the symbol of a “specific . . . religious . . . organization whose membership or ownership is not universal” in violation of U.S. Mint policy.
The Zia sun symbol may not be “universal,” but as far as New Mexico is concerned, it certainly seems to have universal appeal. After all, the symbol has been found on the state flag since 1925. And when the seven-member New Mexico Coin Commission reviewed over 1,000 design submissions for the state’s quarter, all four of the finalist designs prominently featured the Zia symbol, in a decision that reflected overwhelming popular preference.
“New Mexico’s quarter design is simple, artistic and intriguing,” declared Governor Bill Richardson when he announced the quarter’s design on April 28, 2006. “It would be difficult to incorporate all the facets of our history and culture through any one image or a collage of images. The design is a creative, alluring symbol and a distinct representation of New Mexico.”