Rival Rails: The Race to Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad

by Walter R. Borneman

  But now the pursuit of Jefferson Davis—in whom, under different circumstances, Palmer might have found a railroad mentor to rival J. Edgar Thomson—became a frenzied game of cat and mouse. Davis was reported leaving Charlotte, North Carolina, with wagons loaded with Confederate gold. The purported amount of the treasure and the number of his cavalry grew with every mile that the Confederate president traveled—$2 million, $5 million, and eventually $10 million.

  By vigorous marches, Palmer and his cavalry succeeded in gaining two days on Davis and his escort and then got ahead of them by crossing the Savannah River, effectively cutting off their line of escape to the West. Fearing that Davis might simply abandon his escort and try to slip through with a small party, perhaps via rail, Palmer ordered the line of the Georgia Railroad—one of J. Edgar Thomson’s early projects—cut at Madison, about 20 miles south of Athens, Georgia.16

  Meanwhile, the net was growing tighter. The Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, to whom Palmer had once helped Thomson draft a letter urging a southern transcontinental route, had gone to his home in Crawfordville, just east of Madison. Here he waited for a detachment from Palmer’s brigade to ride into his yard.

  But where were Davis and his reported treasure? On the morning of May 8, while searching for Davis near the forks of the Appalachee and Oconee rivers, the Fifteenth Pennsylvania came upon seven wagons hidden in the woods. They contained $188,000 in coin, $1,588,000 in negotiable paper, and about $4 million in Confederate money, the latter of dubious value. This treasure, however, was the property of the Georgia Central Railroad and Banking Company, spirited away from Macon in advance of Union troops. Reports of a Confederate treasure had been grossly exaggerated, and Davis’s coffers were as empty as his cause.

  Two days later, on May 10, Davis himself was captured by elements of the Fourth Michigan Cavalry of General James H. Wilson’s corps at Irwinton, about 25 miles east of Macon. “General Wilson held the bag,” General George Thomas remarked to his staff, but “Palmer drove the game into it.”17

  Now the war was really over. One day Palmer’s command was riding headlong after Jefferson Davis, and the next it was on its way home. “I was mustered out with my regiment on Wednesday last,” Palmer wrote his uncle, “and am consequently now in the full enjoyment of the beatitude of being a citizen … and I suppose, jobless for the first time in nearly four years.” But he would not remain so for long.18

  The Civil War transformed American railroads just as World War I would later transform the airplane. When America looked up from the carnage of four bitter years, it found that railroads had dramatically increased its mobility, become the arteries of its growing industrial strength, and stood poised to replace covered wagons as the vessels of its western expansion, quickly making good prewar boasts of Manifest Destiny.

  Between 1850 and 1860, the number of miles of railroads in the United States had more than tripled, from 9,000 to 30,000. While many railroads in the South now lay in ruins, most would be quickly rebuilt, and the number of miles of track in the United States would reach 53,000 by 1870.

  This mileage would include the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, but as the guns fell silent, that line’s speedy completion was still not assured. And it soon became clear that while the Central Pacific and Union Pacific were the leading contenders to finish first, they would not have the field to themselves.

  Prewar, regional fears that there would be only one transcontinental line were rapidly disappearing. For starters, with almost lightning speed in the weeks after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War, there was a new breed of observer heading west. These were not the stalwart scientists of Colonel Abert’s Corps of Topographical Engineers but rather the vanguard of capitalism itself. These were people who either would bankroll the ventures or were in positions of political or media power to fan the fires and convince others to ante up for the cause.

  No less a personage than Schuyler Colfax, ex-newspaperman from Indiana and lately Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, hopped a stagecoach with Samuel Bowles, a Massachusetts newspaper editor, and headed west. From the Missouri to Denver took less than five days. “It was a magnificent, uninterrupted stage ride of six hundred and fifty miles,” wrote Bowles, “much more endurable in its discomforts, much more exhilarating in its novelties, than I had anticipated.”

  Colfax, who would soon have Denver’s main east-west street named for him, was transfixed by the railroad possibilities. By the time the party reached Virginia City, Nevada, the ex-Speaker told a crowd, “I believe the Pacific Railroad to be a national and political and military necessity.”19

  In the depths of civil war, Secretary of State William Seward had strenuously agreed. Long a proponent of a transcontinental railroad, Seward saw its importance to national unity: “When this [railroad] shall have been done, disunion will be rendered forever after impossible. There will be no fulcrum for the lever of treason to rest upon.”20

  Indeed, the first transcontinental railroad and the competing lines that raced to network the rest of the West would become the very fulcrum upon which the settlement of half a continent was based and the sanctity of the Union made secure. With an interruption of war, railroads had come of age, and now, so too would the country.

  4

  Transcontinental by Any Name

  While Speaker Colfax’s entourage completed its grand tour of Denver and points west, William Jackson Palmer spent a few weeks luxuriating in the amenities of Newport, Rhode Island. He gave little thought to his decision to leave the army, and events quickly proved the wisdom of his choice. On May 1, 1865, there were 1,052,038 men under arms in the Union forces. Six months later, more than 800,000 had been mustered out, and there was no denying that the army had an abundance of brevet brigadiers.

  But the influence of the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry and the leadership skills that Palmer honed at its head would stay with him all his life. He would always be “General” Palmer, but railroading and not the army would be his first love. No doubt his patrons, J. Edgar Thomson and Thomas A. Scott, would have gladly accorded him a new role with the Pennsylvania Railroad, but Thomson and Scott were themselves looking west.

  Palmer’s Newport interlude was cut short by a terse telegram from Scott. “Can you meet me here [Altoona, Pennsylvania] on Saturday next. I go west for several weeks on Monday next. When you come, make your arrangements to go to Missouri permanently.” Palmer promptly accompanied Scott to St. Louis and arrived there on August 6, 1865. Two days later, he headed west to Kansas to inspect the initial 41 miles of the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western Railroad.1

  Few railroads changed their name as many times as did the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western. Originally incorporated in Kansas Territory in 1855, the railroad was a winner in the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, although the Mississippi and Missouri was accorded the main eastern terminus. For its part, the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western secured the right to build west to a junction with the Union Pacific at the 100th meridian—roughly the middle of Nebraska—and the same government subsidies and land grants for each mile of track laid that were awarded to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific.

  In 1863 a group that included John C. Frémont gained control of the line. With thoughts of immediate political gain, they changed its name to the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division. This was a mouthful that had nothing to do with the original Union Pacific—except for sharing the plums of Congress’s bonds and land grants—but it was calculated to attract investors because of the confusing similarity of names.

  When the 1862 act was amended in 1864, the Eastern Division’s land grants were also doubled, and it was given the right to link up with the Central Pacific if it could reach the 100th meridian before the Union Pacific. Prior congressional victories by the Iowa-Chicago axis aside, such a linkup would have tilted the proposed transcontinental back toward Kansas and Missouri.

  Frémo
nt’s chief partner in the venture was a boisterous self-promoter named Samuel Hallett. Without Frémont’s knowledge, Hallett unabashedly cancelled an existing construction contract, awarded the work to his own company, and then negotiated a series of corporate loans with which to pay himself. While Frémont fumed, Hallett’s new firm hastily laid track from Wyandotte (now Kansas City, Kansas) west to Lawrence and then asked the government for payment.

  But this first section of track proved a shoddy piece of work. When the railroad’s chief engineer, Orlando A. Talcott, refused to certify the first 20 miles of track as complete and ready for the government subsidy, Hallett fired him. Not to be outdone, Talcott wrote directly to President Lincoln and claimed that Hallett’s substandard construction was “the biggest swindle yet”—a statement that would prove hyperbolic considering the railroad construction schemes to come.

  Lincoln referred Talcott’s charge to his secretary of the interior, John P. Usher, a Kansan who was siding with Hallett in his feud with Frémont. Usher showed Talcott’s letter to Hallett, who was in Washington seeking payment. The contractor promptly wired his burly brother back in Kansas to find Talcott and “slap” him. Thomas Hallett took the order to the extreme and beat the bookish engineer senseless.

  Talcott, who was partially crippled from a stroke, waited patiently for his revenge. On the morning of July 27, 1864, Samuel Hallett returned to Wyandotte. As he approached company headquarters, Talcott limped out from the cover of an alley and shot him in the back with a rifle. Hallett died within minutes, and Talcott fled west to Colorado. He eluded capture for some fifteen years, and when finally tried for the murder, he was acquitted by a sympathetic jury.

  This left the Union Pacific, Eastern Division—née Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western—in shambles, both as to its corporate structure and its physical roadbed. John D. Perry, a banker from St. Louis who had made some of the loans to Hallett, sorted through the mess, bought out Frémont, and repudiated Hallett’s construction contract. The roadbed was put in working order, and trains began regular service between Wyandotte and Lawrence in December 1864.2

  By the summer of 1865, as William Jackson Palmer inspected these first miles of track, the railhead of the original Union Pacific was still within sight of Omaha, 220 miles east of the dividing point of the 100th meridian. The Eastern Division’s railhead at Lawrence was about 260 miles east of the line. No wonder that the Union Pacific’s confusing namesake was quick to attract national attention.

  It added to the confusion of names and the importance of reaching the 100th meridian that for a time the Union Pacific main line was considered to be only that segment west from the 100th meridian to the proposed junction with the Central Pacific. This was initially thought to be 150 miles east of the California-Nevada border—Huntington’s “Give me Nevada” compromise.

  The Union Pacific branch line was that portion between the 100th meridian and Omaha. When Congress removed the 150-mile Nevada limit in an 1866 amendment, the Central Pacific was free to build east as far as it could. The Union Pacific was forced to race westward, not only to beat the Central Pacific to as much ground as possible but also to beat the Eastern Division to the 100th meridian and ensure itself the main line.

  From the start, John D. Perry had no interest in the Eastern Division being merely the tail of the Union Pacific dog. There is no better evidence of this than the alliance he made with J. Edgar Thomson and Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Scott had watched and learned from Thomson’s consolidation of the Pennsylvania across the Keystone State during the 1850s. His own experiences with the Union war effort had further convinced him of the necessity of a transcontinental line under the control of one company. Thomson’s mantra, “Build west,” resounded anew.

  A quick look at the map of the United States told the story. The Pennsylvania Railroad was already knocking at the gates of St. Louis through control of a number of subsidiaries. There were several Missouri lines that might be acquired to span that state between St. Louis and Kansas City. West from there, the Eastern Division promised a direct connection with the Central Pacific if it could beat the Union Pacific to the 100th meridian. Failing either that or coming to terms with Huntington and his Central Pacific cohorts, there was the lure of the independent continuation of the Eastern Division toward California.

  To restart the Eastern Division, Thomson and Scott agreed to raise $1 million in eastern capital to match another $1 million that Perry was contributing from his St. Louis contacts and the value of the initial construction. The St. Louis parties thought “Scott drove a pretty hard bargain” by requiring an indemnity for his investors against any claims that might still arise from Hallett’s construction shenanigans. But that was only the beginning. By the time Scott concluded his negotiations with Perry, J. Edgar Thomson held the power to name the odd director to the Eastern Division’s board, otherwise equally split between westerners and easterners.

  To look after their investment, Scott arranged for the appointment of William Jackson Palmer as the new treasurer of the Eastern Division. Quite suddenly, within a week of his arrival in Kansas, Palmer had become Thomson and Scott’s man on the ground in the West. For his part, the not quite twenty-nine-year-old seems to have understood his role perfectly.

  “Young men without money can only make a fortune by connecting themselves with capitalists,” Palmer wrote his uncle shortly afterward. “The heaviest of these reside in the East where they can look after their own affairs. But the best place to invest capital is in the West. Eastern capitalists must therefore have representatives here to attend to their interests if they wish to invest heavily in the West.”3

  Thomson and Scott’s representative that he was, Palmer keenly watched the Eastern Division come to life and sputter west from Lawrence. The railroad reached Topeka, another 20 miles farther, early in 1866. Topeka town father Cyrus K. Holliday no doubt celebrated, but his own railroad enterprise had yet to lay a single mile of track. By fall, the Eastern Division had completed its tracks another 60-some miles past Fort Riley to Junction City, as well as a spur from Lawrence to Leavenworth.

  By the spring of 1867, the Eastern Division had reached Salina, Kansas, but it was still more than 100 miles shy of the 100th meridian. Meanwhile, the Union Pacific, spurred on by the specter of losing any race, had laid an exhausting 247 miles of track in just 182 working days and reached the 100th meridian in October 1866.4

  So the Eastern Division’s race to beat the Union Pacific to the 100th meridian and build west to connect with the Central Pacific proved short lived. But by now it was clear to any knowledgeable observer that the West would be crossed by far more than just one transcontinental railroad. From the Eastern Division’s railhead at Salina, the railroad was confident of its route all the way west to Denver. If the Union Pacific now appeared to control its destiny north of Denver, Thomson, Scott, and Perry simply redoubled their interest in a transcontinental route of their own to the south of Denver through New Mexico and Arizona.

  Those who thought to call John D. Perry shrewd would suggest that the Eastern Division’s destiny bent in that direction as early as 1864, when he chose to stake its line through western Kansas along the more southerly Smoky Hill drainage rather than the Republican River to the north. This may well have contributed to Thomson and Scott’s interest in the line.

  In the spring of 1867, Thomson made a request of Perry. Presuming that few of the eastern directors would journey west for the annual meeting, Thomson nonetheless noted that the expanding company could use a vice president. He suggested William Jackson Palmer for the position and expressed “the personal knowledge which we of the East possess of him would make such a choice especially agreeable to us.” Just so Perry had no doubt that Thomson’s courteous suggestion was in fact a command, all of the controlling eastern directors signed the letter to “heartily concur in his views.”5

  Once appointed, their new vice president was charged with the task of organizing a comprehensiv
e survey of their transcontinental options. Palmer’s primary objective was “to ascertain the best general route for the extension of the company’s road from the end of the track … by a southern parallel, through New Mexico and Arizona, to the Pacific Ocean.” This general direction bespoke the obvious learned from at least four decades of Southwest travel. The initial objective must be Santa Fe and/or Albuquerque and the Rio Grande Valley and thence west via either the 35th or 32nd parallels.

  Lieutenant Amiel W. Whipple, of course, had been over much of the 35th parallel route in 1853 and reported positively on it, although without the benefit of detailed measurements. What Palmer thought of Jefferson Davis’s long-touted southern route along the 32nd parallel—particularly in light of his wartime pursuit of the Confederate president—would become clear only upon publication of his final report.

  Early in July 1867, while Palmer was completing business in the East, the Eastern Division survey party left Fort Wallace, near present-day Sharon Springs and the Kansas-Colorado border. Santa Fe was the goal, and three major routes with a half dozen variations were to be explored.

  The first followed the general corridor of the well-established Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail southwest across the Raton Mountains, past Fort Union, and on to Santa Fe from the south. A second route continued up the Arkansas to the Huerfano River, along its headwaters to Sangre de Cristo Pass, and into the upper Rio Grande Valley to reach Santa Fe from the north.

  The third route followed the Arkansas through its Grand Canyon—later known as the Royal Gorge—to the north side of Poncha Pass, and then south across it to the upper Rio Grande Valley. This latter route was the longest of the three and at first glance appeared wildly circuitous. A closer look, however, showed its advantages in tapping any mineral potential in the Colorado Rockies and in securing a future transit between the headwaters of the Arkansas and Colorado rivers.