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

by Walter R. Borneman

  As Dillon and Durant bowed out, the Denver Pacific’s board of directors collectively threw up its hands and offered John Evans all the road’s assets and full control if he would just get the road built. Evans agreed and formed a construction company that soon assigned a half interest to R. E. Carr, a director of the Kansas Pacific, who then parceled that half out among Kansas Pacific backers, including a 7 percent interest to Palmer.

  The result was that the Denver Pacific was once again a subsidiary, but this time the controlling interest was the Kansas Pacific, not the Union Pacific. Evans remained president of the Denver Pacific, but its reorganized board of directors counted many Kansas Pacific men, including J. Edgar Thomson, Thomas A. Scott, and Palmer.

  With Kansas Pacific support, the rails of the Denver Pacific started south from the Union Pacific line at Cheyenne on September 13, 1869, and were completed to Denver for last spike ceremonies on June 24, 1870. “Everybody and wife, sweetheart, etc. etc., was there” to watch the construction of the last few miles into town. Meanwhile, the Kansas Pacific, with Palmer as its construction superintendent, rushed its completion to Denver from the east.7

  The Kansas Pacific started west from Sheridan, Kansas, with a vengeance late in the fall of 1869 after the Evans-Carr construction arrangement was finally completed. “Our long agony of negotiation with Gov. Evans is over and the contract agreed upon,” Palmer sighed, as the Kansas Pacific advertised for 50,000 to 75,000 ties to be delivered to its railhead. That was only a fraction of the 2,500 ties per mile that would ultimately be needed, and on the largely treeless plains, they had to come from hundreds of miles away in Colorado’s foothills.

  Located just east of present-day Sharon Springs, Sheridan had enjoyed the boom of being a railhead while the Kansas Pacific paused there and negotiated the Denver deals. But once the Kansas Pacific line crossed into Colorado and reached the towns of Cheyenne Wells and Kit Carson in March 1870, Sheridan soon disappeared. “Poor Sheridan!” wrote Palmer to his fiancée. “There is very little of it left now and there will be less on your arrival. It has gradually and silently taken wings and flown away to Kit Carson.”

  Kit Carson boomed as a railhead and had a “brisk and lively appearance,” but the new town was not without its problems. “The water about town is scarce and bad, and is the very worst I have ever had to drink in my life,” a correspondent for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News reported. “It makes one pause before he washes his face in the morning, and leaves him as dirty as before; renders your coffee black and dark, spoils the color and flavor of your tea, obscures the brilliancy of your morning ‘cock tail,’ ruins the taste of our whisky, and as a beverage, generally, is unpalatable, unhealthy, and disgusting. May a kind providence preserve those who have to use it this summer.”8

  By mid-April, the telegraph line along the Kansas Pacific right-of-way had reached Denver. As the rails followed it west from Kit Carson, it was reported, “the business men of the town don’t like this,” but the railhead was moving on.

  Ties and rails were always in short supply, but now the Plains Indians made a last gasp effort to stop the iron horse. Palmer reported “fighting along our line,” and in one attack west of Kit Carson, eleven graders were killed and another nineteen wounded. Several days later, a raiding party tore down the Kansas Pacific water tank 4 miles east of town. Among the troops hastily assigned to protect the construction crews were cavalry from Fort Wallace (near Sheridan) under the command of George Armstrong Custer.9

  By the end of May, the threat had eased, and with the Denver Pacific closing in on Denver from the north, grading crews began work east from there to meet the advancing Kansas Pacific. Completion was in sight by early August, but the final rush of materiel to the converging railheads was not without mishap. About ten o’clock at night on August 9, a fourteen-car construction train eastbound from Denver and loaded with rails got away from the engineer of number 31. Reportedly, his two brakemen were unable to club down the brakes on the flatcars because the iron rails had been stacked in such a way that it was impossible to operate the brake wheels fully.

  The runaway train raced downgrade at an estimated speed of forty miles per hour, with the engineer frantically whistling “down brakes” to no avail. Up ahead, a string of worker-filled boarding cars was parked in a cut near the end of track. Here the grade reversed and ran uphill, but the combined weight of the iron and the speed of the train were too much to control. The engineer threw his locomotive into reverse and jumped.

  The locomotive struck the first car of the boarding train, and it telescoped into the next two cars. Six tracklayers—including four workers who were sleeping under the cars—were killed and eleven others injured. A special train carrying three doctors, including pioneer Denver physician Frederick J. Bancroft, raced to the scene from Denver.

  Surviving tracklayers were quick to blame the engineer and conductor for the crash. Loose talk of hanging them inched toward action until construction superintendent Leonard Eicholtz intervened and eventually convinced the angry workers that the accident had been “unavoidable.” A hurriedly convened coroner’s jury concurred with that verdict.10

  By the next morning, a wrecker from Denver had the locomotive back on the track and the tangled mess of cars off the main line. Tracklayers continued laying rail eastward and reached Bennett on the morning of August 11. Two days later, crews building westward paused at Bijou (soon renamed Byers) because of a shortage of rails. Now only 10.25 miles remained between the two railheads.

  It would have been a simple matter to keep laying rail eastward from Bennett, but superintendent Eicholtz had something else in mind. The year before, he had witnessed the Central Pacific’s tracklaying record in its final sprint to meet the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit—10 miles and 56 feet of track in less than twelve hours—on April 28, 1869. Determined to beat it, Eicholtz had teamsters haul iron to the eastern end of the gap while his tracklayers got a Sunday to rest.

  Early on Monday morning, August 15, 1870, an American flag—and by some reports, a keg of whiskey—was placed at the midway point. At five in the morning, with dawn just lighting the eastern sky, the two crews went to work. Eicholtz personally directed the western crew, but by midmorning, they were a half mile behind their eastern competitors. An hour later, the eastern crew was ahead 4 miles to 3.

  Inexplicably, Eicholtz’s team on the western end lost more time when it ran out of rail shortly after noon. More iron was hurried forward while the pace on the eastern end slowed as its own supply of iron grew thin. Finally, at 2:53 p.m., the rails touched at Comanche Crossing, just east of present-day Strasburg. No record remains of who claimed the keg—if indeed there was one—but the westbound workers had laid 5.25 miles and 400 feet of track, and their eastbound cohorts, 5 miles, less 400 feet. The Kansas Pacific was complete to Denver, and Eicholtz’s tracklaying record secured: 10.25 miles in less than ten hours.

  With unbridled enthusiasm, John D. Perry wired General Palmer congratulations from St. Louis. “In the name of the company, I thank you and those under you for the able manner in which the important work under your charge has been brought to a successful terminus. I do not know of anything in the history of railroad construction in this or any other country to equal the splendid success exhibited by you yesterday,” Perry concluded, as he made plans to host an opening excursion gala from St. Louis to Denver.

  “The coach has given way before the palace car, and staging for the overland traveler is a thing of the past,” the Rocky Mountain News proclaimed. “For eleven years these coaches have been run with a regularity unparalleled, and afforded our only means of travel … But ‘their occupation is gone.’ The bright coaches will soon be dusty, the shining harness will soon become rusty, and the handsome prancing fours in-hand will descend to the more common-place position of farm or draft horses. The ‘overland boys’ will be known no more for they too will have become scattered.”

  Alongside this nostalgic obituary, there were adver
tisements boasting the new Kansas Pacific Railway. Its Smoky Hill route was pronounced the best connection to the East and “the only road that has unbroken connections with all points East via the great iron bridge over the Missouri River at Kansas City.” Not only would passengers save time by using the Kansas Pacific instead of journeying northward to the Union Pacific, the railroad claimed, but also they would avoid the expense and annoyance of crossing the Missouri River by boat.11

  By boat? Yes, it was true. The claim of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific to have completed the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, contained several qualifiers. To be sure, it was a grand achievement, but one could not yet ride rails without interruption from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There was a 1,500-foot gap across the Missouri River between Omaha, Nebraska, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, and another gap between Sacramento and Oakland, California.

  While the Union Pacific ferried passengers and freight across the Missouri at Omaha, the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad (soon to become part of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy) completed its tracks into Kansas City via a bridge across the Missouri on June 30, 1869. (At the time, this was the only bridge across the Missouri from the Mississippi upstream to Fort Benton, Montana.) At Kansas City, the Hannibal and St. Joseph linked up with the Kansas Pacific and provided uninterrupted rail service eastward into Chicago, crossing the Mississippi over a bridge at Quincy, Illinois.

  A few months later, the California gap on the Central Pacific was closed when the Big Four–controlled San Francisco and Alameda Railroad completed rails into Oakland. That left the 1,500-foot span on the Union Pacific across the Missouri. This gap was closed for sixty-six days in January and February 1870, when temporary track was laid across the frozen river. That lasted until the ice broke up on March 14, and ferry service was resumed. A similar arrangement was made during the winters of 1871 and 1872. The Union Pacific did not complete its massive $2.87 million bridge across the Missouri River at Omaha until March 22, 1872.

  In the meantime, transcontinental rail service on the Kansas Pacific via Kansas City and its bridge was about 300 miles longer than on the Union Pacific via Omaha and its river crossing. No one seems to have been too troubled by the latter, and both lines got plenty of business. However, the fact remains that the final spike of the Kansas Pacific Railway driven at Comanche Crossing, Colorado, on August 15, 1870, marked the completion of the first uninterrupted transcontinental railroad between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

  It ran from the Pennsylvania Railroad at Jersey City, New Jersey, west to Chicago; the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy to Kansas City; the Kansas Pacific to Denver; the Denver Pacific to Cheyenne; the Union Pacific to Promontory Summit; and the Central Pacific to Oakland. This route remained the only complete transcontinental until the Union Pacific’s bridge opened at Omaha nineteen months later. Even so, the golden spike at Promontory Summit garners history’s accolades, while the joining of the rails at Comanche Crossing rates scarcely a footnote. At the time, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe had barely made it from Topeka to Emporia.12

  With the joint Denver Pacific–Kansas Pacific line operational, neither John Evans nor William Jackson Palmer was content to rest on his laurels. Evans was still transfixed—as were many Colorado railroaders of his and the following generation—with the idea of a direct rail link straight west from Denver. The Denver Pacific ran to the north and the Kansas Pacific still eyed Santa Fe to the south, but not even the rocky heights and rugged canyons west of Denver could shake his notion that it was feasible to lay rails directly through this labyrinth.

  When the Colorado Central Railroad blocked the most direct route west along Clear Creek, Evans remembered John Pierce’s description of the route up the South Platte and across South Park. Evans sold his Kansas Pacific stock, and on October 1, 1872, he incorporated the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad. Doing so put him on a collision course with his onetime Kansas Pacific ally, William Jackson Palmer.13

  Palmer, too, was now looking to his own interests. Even before the completion of the Kansas Pacific to Denver, the general had served notice that he was resigning from the company. In the short term, he had personal concerns. The handsome and quite eligible bachelor was to be married to one of the East’s most alluring prospects. With wavy hair and a button nose, she was just turning nineteen when they met in a railcar in St. Louis. Her name was Mary Lincoln Mellen, but everyone called her “Queen,” a testament to how she expected to be treated.

  Queen’s father was William Proctor Mellen, a former law partner of Abraham Lincoln’s first secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, and well connected in eastern financial circles. With Queen accompanying him, Mellen was in St. Louis tending to client interests when they first met Palmer in March 1869. Mellen readily embraced the relationship and aided his future son-in-law with East Coast contacts while availing himself of western investments in Palmer’s enterprises. Palmer and Queen became engaged almost immediately—she persisted in addressing him as “General” for several months until he chastised her to do otherwise—and planned a November 1870 wedding to be followed by the requisite European honeymoon.

  But in the long term, beyond romance, the general also had his own railroad in mind, and he would combine nuptial bliss with fund-raising while in Europe. The object, as he confessed to Queen, was “a little railroad of a few hundred miles in length all under one’s own control with one’s friends, to have no jealousies and contests and differing policies, but to be able to carry out unimpeded and harmoniously one’s views in regard to what ought and ought not to be done.”

  Poor Palmer. To entertain such an idealistic view, he must have been severely infected by the love bug. Surely his prior experiences at J. Edgar Thomson’s elbow and throughout the Kansas Pacific campaign had taught him the folly of any such talk of railroad harmony. But Palmer was a young man on a mission, and when Queen responded enthusiastically, if somewhat naively, to what her beau characterized as his “dream at the car window,” he was off and running.

  Early in February 1870, Palmer told Queen that he had “laid the smallest first flooring … for an organization independent of the Kansas Pacific” that would run north and south along the foothills of the Rockies from Denver south to Santa Fe and beyond. It would go right past their planned homestead at Monument, Colorado, “but not near enough to make it noisy … It won’t hurt—when it is our own railroad, will it?” he teased her.14

  So, on October 27, 1870, in between the completion of the Kansas Pacific to Denver and his marriage to Queen Mellen, William Jackson Palmer filed the certificate of incorporation for the Denver and Rio Grande Railway. Among those joining him as a director was his soon-to-be father-in-law. The next day, the directors elected Palmer the company’s president and authorized him to contract for the construction of the road.

  Aside from its north-south axis, the Denver and Rio Grande was to be quite different from its competitors in one significant respect. For reasons that probably went back to his youthful visits to the mountainous railroads of Wales, in the United Kingdom, Palmer decided to construct the Denver and Rio Grande as a narrow gauge.

  Gauge, in railroad parlance, is the distance between the inside edges of the rails and the corresponding wheel span of the locomotive and cars. Prior to the Civil War, American railroads used various gauges, the interchange of which created havoc when moving shipments from one road to another. The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 mandated that the entire length of the Pacific railroad and its branches be of uniform width so that cars could be “run from the Missouri River to the Pacific coast.” The president of the United States was charged with determining what that gauge would be.

  As might be expected, Lincoln came under intense lobbying from all sides. Collis P. Huntington favored a 5′ gauge because that is how the initial tracks of the Central Pacific were laid. The Mississippi and Missouri also favored the 5′ gauge. Among other roads, the New York Central and the
Baltimore and Ohio advocated their own 4′ 8½″ gauge, which was widely used in Great Britain.

  Lincoln called for a secret ballot among his advisors and then announced for the 5′ gauge without divulging the vote. Urged on by New York congressman Erastus Corning, who by no small coincidence was also president of the New York Central, Congress quickly overruled Lincoln and established the uniform gauge at 4′ 8½″—what thereafter was termed standard gauge.15

  Technically, narrow gauge was anything smaller than standard gauge, although Palmer and others built their narrow gauge lines to a specified width of three feet. Palmer chose the narrow gauge because it could climb steeper grades, turn tighter curves, and in general was less expensive to construct than standard gauge. The flip side, of course, was that the tonnage that could be hauled on any given narrow gauge trip was less than that of comparable standard gauge trains. Time would tell whether Palmer’s decision to build “a baby road” was the correct one.

  The projected routes of the Denver and Rio Grande were both decidedly linear—a direct north-south main line from Denver to El Paso and into Mexico—and territorially expansive: no less than seven branch lines spreading out like tentacles and tapping perceived local markets. Beyond Palmer’s musings to Queen about “how fine it would be to have a little railroad,” the general and his investors thought that they held a distinct competitive advantage over the east-west lines.

  In addition to mining prospects in the Colorado and New Mexico mountains, Palmer foresaw a continued flow of homesteaders like those who had fueled the Kansas Pacific and Santa Fe. But Palmer also was somewhat visionary in anticipating a rush of tourists that he felt certain would seek out the region’s dry climate and grand scenery. Finally, Palmer saw his road as the logical north-south connecting link between the east-west transcontinental lines and the cities that would spring up at those junctions.16