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

by Walter R. Borneman

  But for the moment, these Colorado considerations were minor, and the main attention focused on crossing the volcanic mesas of the Raton Mountains directly to Santa Fe. Raton Pass just south of Trinidad at the foot of Fishers Peak was the proven route of the Mountain Branch—perhaps a little steep for a railroad, but passable.

  Thirty-five miles to the east was a second possibility: 7,079-foot Trinchera Pass. When General Palmer caught up with the survey at a camp on its northern approaches, some in the expedition were already singing its praises. An English investor and self-styled adventurer named Dr. William A. Bell called Trinchera Pass “by far the best natural highway across the range.” It had never been crossed with wagons, but there was “no doubt”—in Bell’s mind, at least—“that a very small outlay would make it, not only a shorter, but a better route … than that via Trinidad and Raton Pass.”

  Lastly, there was Cimarron Pass at the eastern end of the range. It was lower than the others by almost a thousand feet and sat on a direct line from Kansas City to Albuquerque. Much of this route followed the ruts of the main Santa Fe Trail. But between the Arkansas River and Fort Union—as many Santa Fe–bound caravans could attest—this route traversed almost 300 miles of “dry and inferior country.”

  Palmer worried that it “does not follow the line of settlements, and of mineral, arable and timber wealth,” but he conceded that if the Cimarron line was “not adopted at first, it must be built eventually, to economize the transportation of through passenger and freight traffic—including all that will originate west and south of Fort Union.”6

  The next major stop was Santa Fe itself. “General Palmer held quite a levee here,” Dr. Bell reported. “His rooms were always crowded with men either interested in the railway or well acquainted with some portion of the country to the westward.” All possible information was obtained about the 32nd and 35th parallel routes, and, according to Bell, “the relative advantages seemed from the reports to be so evenly balanced” that Palmer decided to examine both in detail.

  If Bell is a reliable source, Palmer initially favored Jefferson Davis’s assertion that “the decided preference” should go to the 32nd parallel. But having heard the local testimonials, he now wasn’t so sure. At Fort Craig, about 30 miles south of Socorro on the Rio Grande, Palmer split his survey into three divisions. Two were to continue south down the Rio Grande: one following the known route through Cookes Canyon and into the upper reaches of the Gila River, the other charged with finding any more direct cutoffs. Palmer went with the Third Division, which backtracked to Albuquerque and then struck westward along the 35th parallel.7

  Dr. Bell joined the southern party exploring for cutoffs. This led him into the Mimbres Mountains north of Cookes Canyon at a passage that he named Palmer’s Pass. But the Burro Mountains farther west proved too steep for a railroad grade, and the cutoff party moved south. They joined the main party after crossing the Continental Divide on the broad plateau between present-day Deming and Lordsburg.

  To the west, all acknowledged that the established emigrant trail through Apache Pass past Fort Bowie was too steep for rails. But to the north, between the twin summits of Dos Cabezas and Mount Graham, there was a wide depression that offered a gradual ascent on both sides. This was the key to getting into the drainage of the San Pedro River, a tributary of the Gila. Back in 1853, Lieutenant John Parke had prematurely named it Railroad Pass. Now Palmer’s survey confirmed the worth of Parke’s work.

  From Railroad Pass, while the main survey worked west across the broad salt flats of the Sulphur Springs Valley, Dr. Bell elected to make a wide detour south into Sonora. Considering Palmer’s later exploits in building Mexican railroads, it is reasonable to assume that Bell had more than a passing interest in gaining “information as to the best way to reach the Port of Guaymas in the Californian Gulf.” One affable Englishman was likely to be far better received than a large party overweight with recently discharged Union officers.

  So Dr. Bell trekked southward to Hermosillo and then on to Guaymas, commenting in his diary about everything from making tortillas to the influences of Moorish architecture. While this region was somewhat removed from the unrest of Mexico’s fight against its recent French invaders, Bell found its inhabitants in utter despair and poverty. Perhaps with a mind to more than just a railroad connection, Bell observed, “they seemed to me to look upon annexation to the United States as their destiny, and one to be hoped for with as little delay as possible.”

  But Bell’s report to Palmer on railroad possibilities was not encouraging. If anything, it would confirm the general’s growing bias in favor of the 35th parallel route. Finding the harbor at Guaymas too small and too far up the Gulf of California for easy Pacific access, Bell came to the conclusion that whatever trade there might be in Sonora was best served by local railroads “radiating from the coast inland.” So the good doctor boarded a steamer and sailed north with plans to rejoin his companions.8

  While Bell made this detour, the main party along the 32nd parallel followed the Gila westward, arriving at its confluence with the Colorado River opposite Fort Yuma. Here, Arizona City, described as “a very small place with a very big name,” was nonetheless acknowledged as “an excellent bridging point, the river being confined between rocky bluffs.” Those who gaze at the Colorado at Yuma today might doubt the claim that it was “472 feet wide, and from 12 to 37 feet deep, with a very rapid current,” but it then flowed unchecked to the sea.9

  Meanwhile, General Palmer moved west from Albuquerque along the 35th parallel. His survey passed Inscription Rock (now El Morro National Monument), where in 1853 Lieutenant Whipple added his name to those of numerous Spanish travelers. Then it was west past the Pueblo of Zuni and into the mostly dry headwaters of the Little Colorado River.

  Determined to avoid a line too high on the pine-covered slopes of the San Francisco Peaks, Palmer pushed ahead of his main group and traversed the upper canyons of the Verde River. Backtracking to take a second look, his party dropped into the canyon of Sycamore Creek. An ascent upstream looked impassable for his pack animals; downstream only slightly less so. Then the rattle of Apache muskets and a flurry of arrows made escape all the more necessary.

  From the comparative safety of the cedars lining the canyon rim, the Apaches hollered threats and rolled rocks that resounded “like heavy ordnance.” Palmer got a little melodramatic when he recounted the fray later, writing that the cries of their largely unseen attackers called out, “This country belongs to us—the whole of it; and we do not want your people here, nor your soldiers, nor your railroad.”

  Palmer led a detachment of the accompanying cavalry troop on foot up one side of the canyon in an attempt to outflank them. The Apache seemed more intent on harassment than frontal combat, and, miraculously, no one was hurt. But in the process, Palmer’s group got separated from the main force. When they finally rejoined the column the next day, Palmer learned that as the main force had slowly worked its way out of the canyon via a narrow and precipitous path, the general’s prized gray horse, Signor, had lost his footing and tumbled to his death.

  After Sycamore Canyon, the slopes of the San Francisco Peaks didn’t look so bad. Rather than the tortuous canyons of the Verde, they promised gentle, rolling country and the added benefit of bountiful timber. “The grades up to this place are easy,” Palmer reported, “and the line runs for nearly 150 miles through a dense forest of fine tall pines, which will of themselves be a great advantage to the railroad in many ways.”10

  Hugging the San Francisco Peaks had the effect of pointing the survey due west toward Fort Mojave on the Colorado River rather than a more southerly crossing near the mouth of the Bill Williams River (present-day Parker Dam), as Palmer had originally planned. But this proved fortunate. Their survey line crossed the Colorado 3 miles above the rocky spine of the Needles and proved it almost as good of a crossing of the Colorado as that surveyed at Yuma.

  Then an interesting encounter occurred. Once agai
n, Palmer had gone ahead in the vanguard. He aimed almost due west across the Mojave Desert toward Tehachapi Pass. But the expedition’s botanist, Charles C. Parry, met a man along the Colorado River who claimed to have traversed the Grand Canyon on a raft. This was James White. It was two years before John Wesley Powell’s epic passage, but Parry, and later both Palmer and Bell, were inclined to believe White.

  Historians and Colorado River rats will forever debate the claim, but if nothing else, White’s story shed some light for Palmer on the terrain north of the 35th parallel. It also prompted him to contemplate Grand Canyon railroad routes. In his published report of the survey, Palmer was among the first to call what had previously been known as simply the “Big Canyon” by its much more superlative name.

  “If the Grand Canyon of the Colorado,” Palmer theorized, “… should be ascertained to be narrow enough at the top to be spanned by a suspension bridge at any point on the Colorado Plateau … the temptation of a possible saving of 5,000 feet of rise and fall would warrant a reconnaissance westward in California, to ascertain if this point of crossing could be favorably connected with Tehachapi Pass.”

  That statement wasn’t as outlandish as it now appears, because Lieutenant Joseph C. Ives, coming upriver from the Gulf of California in 1857, had reported the canyon “to be not over 50 yards wide at the bottom, with very precipitous walls.” Palmer, however, quickly went on to say what was the obvious: “The innumerable side cañons, of great depth, with which this plateau everywhere in the vicinity of the ‘Grand Cañon’ appears to be furrowed, might, in any event, render such a line impracticable.”11

  From Tehachapi Pass, Palmer pushed on down the San Joaquin Valley to San Francisco and rendezvoused with the irrepressible Dr. Bell. By now it was January 1868, and the general was anxious to return east and report his findings to his nominal superior, John D. Perry, and to those who held the real power, Thomson and Scott. But he had one important call to make first.

  Months before, out on the Colorado plains just shy of Trinchera Pass, Palmer had bluntly written to Perry what had long been obvious when it came to the confusing name of their railroad. “We can never get along with the Eastern Division, it looks subordinate on the face of it, and leads to constant misunderstanding.” The replacement name that slowly came into usage, and that was officially changed in 1869, was far more descriptive as to both origin and planned destination. The ill-fitting Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division, became the Kansas Pacific Railway.

  That name and Palmer’s enthusiasm for a transcontinental route spoke volumes when the general paid a call in California on Judge E. B. Crocker, Charley’s older brother and nominally the fifth member of the Big Four. Hearing Palmer voice the Kansas Pacific’s transcontinental intentions, Judge Crocker suggested that a southern branch of the Central Pacific might agree to meet the Kansas line at some point on the California border. Palmer was quick to reply that the Kansas Pacific intended to build right on to San Francisco by itself. “I, of course,” Crocker reported to Huntington, “had no reply.”

  While Huntington pondered this news, Palmer hurried east from Sacramento via the Central Pacific. He had not yet publicly committed to either the 35th or 32nd parallel, but his journey across the snowy Sierra Nevada must have convinced him that either was preferable to the line the Central Pacific was still building.

  By the time Palmer arrived back at Fort Wallace, Kansas, on the morning of March 10, 1868, he had been on the trail eight months. In the meantime, the Kansas Pacific railhead, which he had left at Salina, had pushed 100 miles farther west and spawned the new towns of Ellsworth and Hayes, Kansas.12

  While Palmer focused on the route west, it was these towns that provided the Kansas Pacific with much-needed revenue from the growing cattle trade. Texas longhorns were driven to Louisiana in small quantities before the Civil War, but in its aftermath, hundreds of herds with hundreds of thousands of cattle were driven north toward the meatpacking center of Chicago. The Kansas Pacific rails at Abilene, Kansas, welcomed the first herd up the Chisholm Trail in 1867. Abilene got most of the bad press for being a rowdy cow town, but Ellsworth and Hayes weren’t far behind.

  When the full report of Palmer’s Kansas Pacific survey was published the following year, it acknowledged four “practicable and good general routes” from the Kansas Pacific’s growing main line to the vicinity of Albuquerque. Westward from Albuquerque and the Rio Grande, the choice was clearer, essentially Whipple’s 35th parallel modified by straightening the route in western Arizona and crossing the Sierras via Tehachapi Pass.

  When Palmer finally said it publicly, he left no doubt. “The results along the thirty-fifth parallel proved to be of such a favorable character that, with its great advantage in distance and accessibility from nearly every section of the Union to start with, its claims have been found decidedly to outweigh those of the extreme southern line.”

  Palmer trumpeted anew Whipple’s thesis that such a route might indeed please both northern and southern interests. The latter had not been thought too important of late—Jefferson Davis had only recently been released from a Union prison—but this would change as war wounds healed. Palmer also shared Bell’s view about the future of northern Mexico. Among his pleas for government assistance to the Kansas Pacific was the assertion that “the Government should give its assistance, because a railroad is the cheapest and most efficient means of defense to our southern border, until Mexico becomes a part of the United States.”13

  The details of Palmer’s more immediate personal report to Perry and Scott can be surmised by the actions they took as Palmer returned east in March 1868. Perry had already been trying to obtain an additional land grant from Congress for the Kansas Pacific that would extend from Colorado to California. Learning of Palmer’s conversation with Judge Crocker and the general’s enthusiasm for the 35th parallel route, Perry—no doubt with Scott’s concurrence—decided that it was time to sit down with Collis P. Huntington and further divide up the continent.

  Perry and Scott were keenly aware that Huntington’s support, or lack of it, was critical to any favorable land grants for the Kansas Pacific. Indeed, Judge Crocker’s report to Huntington of Palmer’s western visit only strengthened Huntington’s resolve to work behind the scenes to thwart any Kansas Pacific aid. He found willing allies in the Union Pacific who did not like the Kansas Pacific competing with it across the plains.

  To change Huntington’s position, Perry offered the Central Pacific the California portion of any land grant the Kansas Pacific might acquire along the 35th parallel. Huntington bluntly refused, saying that the Central Pacific “would not think of it” and wanted no part of what “would only be a small feeder line to their road.” Instead he countered with a proposal to build the entire western half of the route between Colorado and the Pacific. If Perry wanted Huntington’s support, that was his price.

  Huntington’s seemingly preposterous proposition—after all, under that scheme the Kansas Pacific would have gained little ground—may have been designed to lure in the other players. If so, it worked perfectly because several weeks later, on March 21, Perry again met with Huntington, this time in the company of Thomas A. Scott.

  Scott candidly laid out the pieces of the Pennsylvania Railroad–Kansas Pacific transcontinental plan for Huntington. “Their proposition was that we come in with them and build the road under one organization,” Huntington reported to Judge Crocker. “I of course refused,” Huntington added, saying that he had already ruled out a branch line relationship and in any event “was not aware before that they had anything to give west of Denver.” That, of course, was a dig that the Kansas Pacific’s desired land grants west of Denver would not budge out of Congress without his support.

  Huntington’s intransigence left Perry and Scott with little to negotiate. The meeting ended with them saying that they had to confer with their engineer (Palmer) who was due in Washington in a day or two. But then a few minutes later, Scott, whom Huntington descri
bed as “very sharp,” reappeared at Huntington’s door alone. If Huntington’s version is correct, Scott “said if I would give a certain party a small interest in our part of the line, he thought he could carry it with his people.” Presumably, Scott was alluding to J. Edgar Thomson or perhaps even himself as the one who could “carry” the deal with the Perry crowd.

  Now Huntington really flaunted his power. Playing the likeable friend who was saddled with intractable partners, Huntington told Scott that he didn’t think that his California associates would agree to any dilution of control. Then Huntington may have held the door open just a crack and suggested that he might be able to offer a small portion of the construction proceeds.

  This wasn’t what Scott was after, and he left Huntington a second time, asking him not to mention this subsequent meeting to anyone. If nothing else, Huntington, whose Central Pacific partners still had their hands full meeting the Union Pacific in Utah, had become interested in a second southern transcontinental line. By the end of March 1868, Huntington boasted to Mark Hopkins that before it was over, Scott’s crowd would “agree to what we want, which is: to have the line between, say Denver and San Francisco …”14

  But when Huntington next called on Scott in Philadelphia, it was Scott’s turn to be firm. “Since General Palmer’s return, they have been very stiff,” Huntington told Hopkins. “I could do nothing with him,” Huntington continued with rare exasperation. By the time Huntington got up to leave, he was reduced to bluffing Scott that he would secure his own land grant in California and let Scott fend for himself. This had the desired effect, and Scott replied that he did not want to see that done. Instead he promised to meet Huntington again the next week in New York and to bring Perry with him.