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

by Walter R. Borneman

  The Rio Grande agreed not to build south of its existing railheads at El Moro, Colorado, or Española, New Mexico, on its San Luis Valley branch. Palmer’s original goal of El Paso was extinguished, as was that of Santa Fe. And just to appease Jay Gould in his other ventures, the Rio Grande also promised that it would not build east to St. Louis. Meanwhile, Gould’s stock in the Denver and Rio Grande went from $22 per share in the fall of 1879 to $75 in February 1880.

  Finally, despite an appraisal by the court-appointed commission that the value of the Santa Fe’s construction through the Royal Gorge was $566,216.35, based on A. A. Robinson’s engineering records, the Denver and Rio Grande agreed to buy the 20 miles of line for $1.4 million. The components of the Treaty of Boston were signed as of March 27, 1880, and the first Denver and Rio Grande train ran through the Royal Gorge five days later. Its next major stop would be Leadville. Palmer’s road celebrated its arrival in the booming silver capital on July 22, with a special carrying ex-president Ulysses S. Grant.23

  The Denver and Rio Grande’s payment for the Santa Fe’s construction efforts in the Royal Gorge would soon become nothing but a number on accounting ledgers. In fact, time would quickly blur the history of which company had engineered the route through this difficult passage.

  At the narrowest point in the gorge, Santa Fe engineers initially constructed a wooden-decked trestle that was supported by timber bents and piles of rock. This structure was in place when the first Santa Fe excursion ran into the gorge on May 7, 1879, but the train stopped just short of what reports called “the construction bridge.”

  Within weeks, a flash flood—or perhaps just the normal spring runoff—washed away the wooden structure. (Conspiracy theorists have speculated that this bridge’s collapse was somehow related to the trouble between the two roads, but there is no evidence that anyone other than Mother Nature had a hand.)

  Because the right-of-way at that point was still under court orders, the Santa Fe, through its Pueblo and Arkansas Valley subsidiary, petitioned the court for permission to replace the structure with what came to be called “the hanging bridge.” Named for its construction and not some desperado act, the hanging bridge was supported in part by a rafter construction that spanned the river and was anchored on both sides to the canyon walls.

  This structure passed from the Santa Fe to the Denver and Rio Grande under the Treaty of Boston along with the 20 miles of completed track. Over the years, as locomotive weights increased, the Rio Grande strengthened the bridge several times with elaborate masonry along the riverbed, and the crossbeams spanning the river became more a matter of decoration than strength.

  But in the meantime, the Hanging Bridge had become a staple for tourism on the Royal Gorge route. The Denver and Rio Grande even listed a station on its timetables at the bottom of the gorge as Hanging Bridge. One of the most famous photographs of the structure shows President Theodore Roosevelt surveying the scene. Consequently, “no one in his right mind would have removed the useless supports, or admitted that the bridge did not truly hang.” Some might argue that in terms of publicity value, the Denver and Rio Grande received far more than $1.4 million from the bridge over the years.

  It came to be assumed that the Denver and Rio Grande was alone responsible for this engineering marvel. When the Rio Grande’s J. R. DeRemer died about 1907, “the public press insisted on giving him the credit for designing and constructing the famous Hanging Bridge located in the still more famous Royal Gorge.”

  It was left to A. A. Robinson of the Santa Fe to set the record straight. “I was chief engineer of this construction,” Robinson acknowledged in Engineering News, “and it is due to the late C. Schaler [sic] Smith of St. Louis to say that we visited the bridge site together and decided on the rafter plan of construction.… I engaged Mr. Smith to prepare the detailed plans from which the original bridge was constructed.” History had almost forgotten that the Santa Fe had left a piece of its heritage in the bottom of the narrow gorge.24

  In later years, the Denver and Rio Grande would be characterized as “Colorado’s railroad” and closely identified with the Centennial State. William Jackson Palmer would be hailed as a builder of great cities. But this was far from true in the 1870s. Both Palmer and his railroad were looked at as outsiders in the towns he tried to bend to his purposes—Colorado City, Trinidad, and Cañon City among them.

  If nothing else, the battle for the Royal Gorge showed how tenacious William Jackson Palmer could be when the stakes were all or nothing. Because at least for the Denver and Rio Grande, that is what the Royal Gorge war was about. If Palmer had not been successful—or had abandoned the field as quickly as he had at Raton—the main line west for the Santa Fe might have led to Leadville, over Tennessee Pass, and down the Colorado River bound for Salt Lake City. And the Denver and Rio Grande would have been choked off from the Leadville trade and left with only the marginal traffic of southwest Colorado.

  “The contest for the Grand Canon,” General Palmer reported to his board of directors, “was in reality a fight for the gateway, not to Leadville only, but to the far more important, because infinitely larger, mineral fields of the Gunnison country, the Blue and Eagle Rivers and Utah.”25

  For Thomas Nickerson and William Barstow Strong, the stakes had been high, but never about the Santa Fe’s very corporate survival. In the end, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe lost the battle for the Royal Gorge, but it remained to be seen whether or not it would lose the transcontinental war.

  11

  Handshake at Deming

  As the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe turned away from the Royal Gorge and cast its fate toward a southerly route, the halt in construction that Collis P. Huntington’s associates forced upon him after the bridge battle at Yuma had proven short lived. Money was still tight, the Big Four’s corporate and individual debt still staggering, but there was too much at stake in the American Southwest to pause for very long.

  There were whispers of silver bonanzas in the canyons of New Mexico. Countless boomtowns in the Colorado Rockies boasted of becoming another Leadville. In southeastern Arizona, a rowdy camp called Tombstone promised to rival Leadville in both silver and grit. All around, the West was getting smaller, with a steady influx of settlers and industries.

  And draped across the map—as the Southern Pacific paused at Yuma, the Santa Fe crested Raton Pass, and the Texas and Pacific marshaled its forces in East Texas—there was still the prize to be won of a southern transcontinental rail connection. Sit out a hand, and you were likely to lose the game.

  While Huntington’s partners held the Southern Pacific at Yuma, there was little doubt—in Huntington’s mind, at least—that the railroad would eventually build eastward across the Arizona desert. The original compromise between Huntington and Tom Scott had been for Scott’s Texas and Pacific Railroad to meet the Southern Pacific at Yuma. But where was Scott? For the moment, it appeared that despite its lucrative congressional land grant, the Texas and Pacific was mired in financing woes and construction delays while still near Fort Worth.

  • • •

  With perhaps too much bravado, Huntington unabashedly announced that if the Texas and Pacific was not up to the task, the Southern Pacific would gladly build along the 32nd parallel route without a government land grant or other subsidy. “We should not be asked to wait at the Colorado River indefinitely for an embarrassed and mismanaged connecting company to build 1,250 miles to give us connection,” Huntington fumed to Congress, “when we are ready to construct right along and willing to provide the outlet to the East for ourselves without cost to the Government …”1

  Charley Crocker didn’t share Huntington’s optimism, but as Yuma enjoyed its railhead boom, reports began to circulate that the Southern Pacific was amassing a large quantity of rails, ties, and rolling stock in preparation for just such a burst of construction. The fiery desert heat of the summer of 1878 led to increasingly wilder claims about the extent of these stockpiles. Finally, after
one report of materiel on hand for 200 miles of rail and a 2-mile-long pile of some 500,000 ties, editor George Tyng of Yuma’s Arizona Sentinel dubbed the entire story the “Southern Pacific Mirage.”

  Resorting to mangled poetry after Tyng himself had perhaps been a little touched by the sun, the editor began his verse by observing, “There were men, in brags most prolific, of their pushing the Southern Pacific,” before concluding, “their yarns about ties were proven all lies, they swore they ne’er meditated such falsehoods or said it.”2

  By fall, Tyng was a member of the board of directors of the local Southern Pacific Railroad Company of Arizona after Huntington obtained the road’s territorial charter. With this secured and Crocker still fretting about the money to be spent, the mirage of the Southern Pacific’s advance eastward from Yuma became reality. Early in the morning darkness of October 10, 1878, while the desert was still cool, a locomotive pulled fifteen flatcars, each loaded with 250 redwood ties, across the Colorado River bridge into Yuma. More ties followed and then came flatcars loaded with rails.

  It was a meticulously packaged operation. Each flatcar carried 44 steel rails 30 feet in length, 6 kegs of spikes, 88 steel connecting bars called fishplates, and 3 boxes of bolts—in all, weighing 23,000 pounds and being enough material to build 660 feet of track. By the time tracklaying eastward began on November 18, twenty-car construction trains were arriving in Yuma every other day.3

  Crocker’s construction boss on this extension was James Harvey Strobridge, a hard-driving Yankee who had come to California with the gold rush. He had long ago proven his worth to Crocker on the Central Pacific when things had gotten tough in the Sierras. Showing his organizational skills, Strobridge flung a crew of graders 20 miles eastward to tackle the most difficult rockwork between Yuma and Tucson. Other crews laid track east from Yuma.

  By the end of November, 7.5 miles of track had been spiked into place, and 1,300 men, including 1,100 Chinese laborers, were at work on the line. Editor Tyng commented that the Chinese “move dirt much more slowly than white men but as they have no pipes to fill and no political reforms to discuss, they manage to get in a fair day’s work before night falls.” As for motive power, if the “Santa Monica, No. 2” sounded a little out of place in the desert, this locomotive was a remnant of the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad that Huntington had gathered to his fold.4

  As Southern Pacific surveyors moved eastward ahead of the graders, some of the survey stakes they set replaced older stakes driven by Texas and Pacific surveyors back in the days when Tom Scott was planning for San Diego to be the terminus of his road. At the time, no one on the Southern Pacific seemed to think that might cause a problem.

  Having initially opposed the Yuma extension, Charley Crocker arrived on the scene in December and was quickly caught up in the excitement of the renewed construction. “It seemed like old times to meet ‘Stro.’ out there, and hear him order things around,” Crocker reported to Huntington. Watching the construction across relatively flat country, Crocker enthused, “I do not think we have ever been able to build a railroad as cheaply as this is being built,” and boasted that at thirty miles an hour, the cars rode as smoothly as they did on the New York Central.5

  Initially, water for men, beasts, and machines had to be hauled everywhere. It was even more important than a reliable supply of rails and ties. Local sources were scarce and of dubious quality. Before deep wells were dug, Crocker complained that the alkali content created foam in the boilers of the steam locomotives.6

  By April 1879, rails were spiked down all the way to the town of Gila Bend, and its stagecoach stop soon gave way to a depot. Eastward from there, the 19 miles to Maricopa Summit required a climb of almost 800 feet at a maximum grade of just over 1 percent. By April 29, the line was opened to the new town of Maricopa, which boomed as the railhead for the slightly older settlement (1868) of Phoenix to the north.

  Already the Southern Pacific was in the business of developing Arizona’s landscape and selling its scenery. A five-day special excursion for about two hundred people was operated from San Francisco at a round-trip fare of $40 to promote an auction of town lots. One writer promised, “There is hardly a sunrise, sunset, or midnight in this country that is not replete with either beauty or impressiveness.”

  Although there was initial confusion about which county the new town of Maricopa was located in, the railroad auctioned fifty-one lots at prices ranging from $25 to $1,000. Even Crocker was pleased by the results, reporting to Huntington, “We had a sale of town lots at Maricopa at auction, and sold a little over $10,000 worth, the first pop, so you will see that things are brightening up down that way. There is great talk of new mines being discovered all around, throughout the territory adjacent to the railroad.”7

  But now as a long straightaway stretched southeast toward Casa Grande, Strobridge and some of the same men who had tamed the snowy Sierras were faced with blistering heat—literally. Rails, plates, and tools left too long in the desert sun got so hot at midday that they burned on the hands of workers who touched them. Crocker fretted to Huntington about the approach of summer even as he pleaded with him to maintain a steady supply of rails.

  Huntington could do nothing about the weather, of course, and there were days when he felt equally helpless about the railroad’s orders for steel. By 1879, every major railroad in the United States and countless local lines were aggressively pushing construction on all fronts. Steel mills in the United States and as far away as Great Britain were taxed to their limits. Even as good—and forceful—a customer as Collis P. Huntington sometimes had to wait for promised deliveries.

  Ties were also in short supply. Shipments of stout redwood ties from California flowed over the Southern Pacific, but they weren’t coming fast enough. By the middle of May, 26 miles beyond Maricopa at Casa Grande, Crocker decided to stop construction and wait for cooler weather and more materiel.

  “My idea of stopping the road,” Crocker told Huntington, “was based on the fact that the reserve of ties on hand was pretty much exhausted” and the expectation of new deliveries “so irregular that we could not expect to continue the construction except at intervals.” With the weather getting so hot, “the men could not work much longer to good advantage.”

  By then, Strobridge’s crews had been at it for 139 working days and, as the Arizona Sentinel put it, “been constantly working at high pressure speed since November last, under the disadvantages of warm days, cold nights, scarcity of water and inhaling the dust of 182 miles now accomplished.” So as Crocker stockpiled ties at Casa Grande, the town gathered in traffic from Tucson and points east, well aware that its future as a railhead would be short lived.8

  Sixty-five miles south of Casa Grande, Tucson waited expectantly for the Southern Pacific. Unlike so many towns throughout southern Arizona and New Mexico—including Maricopa, Benson, Willcox, Lordsburg, and Deming—Tucson did not owe its existence to the coming of the railroad. A Papago Indian village stood on the site of Tucson when Jesuit priest Eusebio Kino visited the area in 1692. Franciscans followed, and, in 1775, a Spanish presidio was built there.

  The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican-American War left Tucson in the Mexican province of Sonora. Five years later, it became American territory when the Gadsden Purchase secured the southern watershed of the Gila River and the 32nd parallel route, along which the Southern Pacific was now building.

  Tucson had been on the route of John Butterfield’s Overland Mail until the Civil War halted the line’s operations, but the town thrived nonetheless. The 1880 census counted almost one in six of Arizona’s non–Native American inhabitants—7,007 out of a territorial population of 40,400—as Tucson residents. The town was not only the largest by far in Arizona but also the largest between Los Angeles (11,183) and San Antonio (20,550).

  Now with the railroad almost upon it, Tucson faced new growth and new issues. Some of the Chinese laborers furloughed for the summer at Casa Grande had already m
ade their way into town. Conveniently overlooking the fact that the Americans themselves were relative newcomers to a historically Mexican town, Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star bemoaned this influx.

  “Hardly a stage arrives that does not bring one or more Chinamen to our city,” the newspaper reported in early July 1879. With them came accoutrements. That same week, seven Chinese ladies of questionable virtue—the Arizona Star termed them “Celestial heroines”—arrived and “added to the number already here, make ten in all.”

  The Arizona Star found nothing but trouble with this new wave of immigration, but its afternoon competitor, the Arizona Citizen, struck at the core of the matter. “A good deal of the trouble about the Chinese,” the paper noted wryly, “seems to grow out of their temperate habits, their determination to work for a living and their refusal to be bilked out of their wages.”9

  Meanwhile, there was railroad talk of all sorts. Some reports voiced fears that the Southern Pacific might bypass Tucson. Other rumors claimed that the railroad intended to build a new town complete with roundhouse and machine shops on the San Pedro River 40-some miles to the east and just that much closer to booming Tombstone. Tucson did its best to dissuade the Southern Pacific from either action and deeded the railroad a 100-foot-wide right-of-way through the northeast quadrant of town. It also vacated a strip for depot operations in addition to twelve city blocks for other facilities. To pay for these acquisitions, the town voted $10,000 in bonds by a resounding margin of 139 to 1 among white American males over twenty-one.

  But rumors got so rife that they caused a rising tide of anti–Southern Pacific sentiment. This was reported to Huntington, who was focused on delivering rail shipments to Crocker and holding his transcontinental competitors at bay. He didn’t need local dissension on his flanks. Perhaps remembering the trouble that William Jackson Palmer’s land development tactics had caused the Denver and Rio Grande at Trinidad and Cañon City, Huntington had his managers assure Tucson residents that the Southern Pacific was indeed coming to town and had no major plans on the San Pedro.