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

by Walter R. Borneman

  By the time the first train steamed into Kingman on March 27, 1883, the railhead had finally run itself out of rail. Tracklaying came to a halt for several weeks while more iron was rushed to the front. During the lull, all available carpenters were sent ahead to work on the Needles bridge. With them went 60-foot-long piles of fresh-cut pine from the San Francisco Peaks that were brought to Kingman by rail and then hauled by mule teams to the crossing site.18

  Today the railroad and Interstate 40 cross the Colorado River within yards of each other about a dozen miles south of Needles at Topock, Arizona, where the river channel narrows. But in 1883, the surveyed line stayed on the east side of the river and ran north before crossing the river directly into what became the town of Needles.

  Here the riverbed was very wide, with many braided channels. Long before the Colorado was harnessed by a succession of dams, spring floods—these caused by annual snowmelt high in the Rockies and not the summer monsoons—swept a muddy, brown torrent down the river. That’s exactly what happened at the bridge site in June 1883 as workers attempted to erect a 1,700-foot trestle.

  Meanwhile, Southern Pacific crews were pushing eastward across California’s Mojave Desert. Truth be told, Huntington was in just as much of a hurry to reach the Colorado River at Needles as Strong was. The question of the Santa Fe extending into California appeared to be momentarily resolved, but Huntington was taking no chances. Huntington didn’t intend to force his way across this bridge, but he certainly wasn’t going to permit the Santa Fe much of a toehold on the western bank.

  So, east from Mojave, the Southern Pacific crews raced at breakneck speed. Technically, it was Huntington and Stanford’s Pacific Improvement Company doing the work, and its ranks were again filled with veteran Chinese laborers. The site of Barstow, California, was only an empty valley—a town would not be founded there until some years later. From there east to the Colorado River, the line snaked through 150 miles of desert mountain ranges, crested 2,770-foot Mountain Springs Summit, and descended to the Colorado at Needles.

  The flurry of construction was at times as haphazard as that on the Atlantic and Pacific, but when the Southern Pacific laid rails into Needles, the Atlantic and Pacific crews were still struggling to complete the bridge. This time the agreed-upon boundary at the river would stand.

  Finally, on August 3, 1883, Atlantic and Pacific tracklayers spiked rails across the long trestle and five days later joined those of the Southern Pacific. The 35th parallel route west from Albuquerque was complete, but more important, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe had become a critical link in a transcontinental at last.

  The line wasn’t under one management, let alone one ownership, but it was now possible to travel by rail from St. Louis to San Francisco along a route generally free from the blizzards that routinely plagued the Union Pacific’s route. By the fall of 1883, one could board a Pullman sleeper in St. Louis and travel west to Halstead on the Frisco, then continue to Albuquerque on the Santa Fe, to Needles on the Atlantic and Pacific, and finally arrive in San Francisco on the Southern Pacific.

  The 574 miles between Albuquerque and Needles alone required twenty-four hours via what was unabashedly billed as “express service,” but in time, the gentle grades, moderate climate, and beeline path of this southern route would make it the crux of America’s greatest transcontinental line.19

  At the time, William Barstow Strong and his backers did not pause to celebrate. No matter which way they looked—from Deming or from Needles—they were still hostage to the whims of Collis P. Huntington and the Southern Pacific. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe had become a transcontinental link, but the battle for California remained to be fought.

  14

  Battling for California

  Having long heard the boasts of a chorus of railroad promoters, San Diego waited with increasing frustration to be connected to America’s growing railroad network. Tom Scott’s promise of the Texas and Pacific steaming into town was long dead. Huntington’s exit from the Los Angeles Basin at San Gorgonio Pass en route to Yuma with the Southern Pacific had been without so much as a glance in San Diego’s direction. General Rosecrans had trumpeted his California Southern as San Diego’s savior but then sold to the Big Four before laying a single rail. Still, there were plenty of San Diegans dreaming about railroads.

  Remaining eager to attract a railroad at almost any cost, San Diego pledged six thousand acres of land and a mile of waterfront on San Diego Bay to any bona fide railroad venture. Local real estate developer Frank Kimball and his two brothers upped the ante by promising ten thousand additional acres and another mile of waterfront. Technically, the Kimballs were promoting their own interests at National City, a few miles south of Old Town San Diego, but any railroad would boost the prospects for both locations.

  As this round of San Diego’s railroad boosterism gained momentum, the town found willing allies 100 miles to the north. San Bernardino was nestled in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains near the canyon leading to Cajon Pass. Here was yet another town seething over its treatment by a particular railroad and eagerly looking to ally itself with a competitor.

  The Southern Pacific had bypassed San Bernardino in favor of Colton—named for the Big Four’s chief lieutenant—while en route to Yuma. The Big Four had also quashed the railroad dreams of Senator John P. Jones and the Los Angeles and Independence, but San Bernardino was still promoting the route over Cajon Pass. When railroad negotiations got serious again in San Diego in the fall of 1879, a committee of San Bernardino town fathers led by Fred T. Perris subscribed $40 to cover its travel expenses and made the pilgrimage south to lend its support.

  This time, the railroad men meeting with local leaders were waving more than paper railroads. The interested parties proved to be none other than the same group of Boston investors who were so shrewdly backing the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. The details took almost a year—during which time the Santa Fe resolved the Royal Gorge war and joined the Frisco in buying the Atlantic and Pacific.

  Then in October 1880, the Boston crowd incorporated the California Southern Railroad Company—not to be confused with General Rosecrans’s earlier paper venture—and joined forces with the locals. They announced plans to build north from National City, pass through San Bernardino, and meet the Atlantic and Pacific, well, somewhere.

  There was no better example of the Boston crowd’s commitment to Southern California and a western extension of its main line than the fact that Thomas Nickerson resigned the presidency of the Santa Fe to become president of the California Southern. As for Cajon Pass, no less an expert than the Santa Fe’s Ray Morley took a look at the canyon leading to the Mojave Desert and reportedly proclaimed, “This is nothing; we can go through here easily enough.”

  Morley may have found the Cajon an easy passage, but his cost estimates for the line between National City and San Bernardino were another matter. Promoter Frank Kimball optimistically calculated construction costs for the 127-mile segment at $10,000 per mile; Morley’s estimate was $15,000 per mile. In a subscription circular, Nickerson reported the number as $18,000 but then provided for $25,000 per mile just to be safe.1

  Huntington and his cohorts were adamantly opposed, of course, to any railroad other than their own building through Cajon Pass or reaching out to San Diego via any route. Huntington did not begrudge San Diego a railroad, but he meant to provide one himself in his own good time. The alliance of the locals with the Boston crowd signaled a substantial raising of the stakes.

  As was usually the case, feisty Charley Crocker was blunt in urging Huntington to pull no punches when it came to the Santa Fe. “You could knock their securities a good deal below par through the newspapers,” he suggested to Huntington as the Santa Fe–financed California Southern gathered its forces.

  Huntington no doubt appreciated his partner’s sentiments, but he needed little reminder that a Santa Fe–controlled line across California to San Diego would likely result in steamship
service between there and San Francisco. Such a system would compete head-on with the Big Four’s Bay area monopoly.

  If the Atlantic and Pacific or any other Santa Fe–backed venture could be held at the Colorado River or at least north of Cajon Pass, the California Southern—Boston dollars or not—would still be a line going nowhere except a connection with the Southern Pacific at Colton. Small wonder, then, that Crocker exhorted Huntington to “try and break them [the Boston crowd] down before they come into California.”2

  Construction on the California Southern started north from National City in June 1881. The route connected with adjacent San Diego and then charged up the coast to Oceanside, cut inland to Fallbrook, and wound up Temecula Canyon. Here the Santa Margarita River cut a rocky defile through the Coast Ranges that at first glance seemed to promise no passage for a railroad. But San Bernardino’s Fred Perris, among the engineers surveying the route, was determined to keep the railroad bound for his town via as direct a route as possible. He ordered a line run along the canyon walls, above what a correspondent for Harper’s New Monthly magazine described as “a brawling stream.”

  The local story handed down through the years is that one of the survey engineers—perhaps Perris or possibly chief engineer Joseph O. Osgood—asked an assistant to climb up and determine the high-water mark through the narrowest section of the gorge. More than halfway up the cliff, the man found a cluster of pinecones. Since no pine trees grew locally, the cones had clearly washed downstream from the higher mountains, and their lofty presence indicated that the canyon was susceptible to extremely high flash floods. When this fact was reported to the engineer, his response was a pompous “Nonsense,” and he “proceeded to plot what he considered to be the natural flood level of the canyon—some ten feet above the floor of the gorge.” Time would tell who was correct.3

  Above Temecula Canyon lay the little town of Temecula, which had its roots in vestiges of Spanish land grants. From there, easier ground led north 40-some miles through a town named after Fred Perris and then to Colton. In many places—particularly Temecula Canyon—construction had been more difficult than expected, and President Nickerson was greatly annoyed when he saw that costs were taking every penny of $25,000 per mile and then some. Nickerson investigated, but by then it was too late.

  For once construction had been first-rate. In fact, supervised by chief engineer Osgood, it had been too good. Osgood had spared no expense and built a first-class railroad along a route that by one report “promised inadequate traffic to support the investment.” Whether that pessimistic report—too good a railroad for too little traffic—held true would depend in part on the railroad’s ultimate connections.4

  On August 21, 1882, the rails of the California Southern reached Colton, where the Southern Pacific’s main line lay across its path like a giant snake. The next step was to make a crossing of the Southern Pacific tracks by installing what in railroad parlance was called a “frog.” This was a specially designed crisscross of rails that permitted one railroad to pass across the track of another without derailing. The railroad seeking the crossing was responsible for the cost of installing the frog, and it could not interfere with the normal operations of the first line. The first line, however, was required by law to permit the crossing.

  What actually happened at Colton was far more bizarre. The Southern Pacific had been doing its best to retard the California Southern’s northward construction through a variety of spurious writs and injunctions. These tactics continued at Colton when the Southern Pacific fenced off its tracks and denied the California Southern access to install its frog. The California Southern responded in kind and sought its own court order to force the Southern Pacific to permit the crossing. By the time this order was obtained—no small feat, considering the political influences of Huntington—almost a year had passed, and it was August of 1883.

  California Southern engineer Fred Perris arranged for the construction of the Colton frog in the railroad’s shops at National City. Southern Pacific informants learned of its location, and the local sheriff seized the frog on yet another trumped-up charge. The sheriff then posted men to guard what was in effect the physical key to the California Southern continuing north to join the Santa Fe main line.

  Perris was furious but bided his time. Proving that vigilance is required most when all seems the quietest, the sheriff took a nap just long enough for Perris and a crew to retake the frog, load it on a flatcar, and hurry it north. But simply securing the frog and putting it into operation across the Southern Pacific line were two different matters.

  The California Southern’s onsite construction engineer at Colton, J. N. Victor, telegraphed the Southern Pacific’s assistant superintendent at Los Angeles that all was in readiness to effect a crossing once the Southern Pacific’s overland mail had passed. But as Victor led his crew forward, a Southern Pacific locomotive, tender, and gondola appeared and began a major demonstration of moving back and forth at the contemplated point of intersection. Word spread through the California Southern workers that twenty to thirty armed men were crouched inside the gondola just itching for a fight—shades of the Bat Masterson rumors on Raton Pass.

  When the locomotive finally stopped and stood hissing steam at the proposed intersection, the fire alarm at nearby San Bernardino rang loudly to summon reinforcements for the California Southern. An excited crowd quickly gathered and demanded that the track be cleared. Tensions were so high on both sides that Victor thought it advisable to have the court order requiring the frog’s installation printed and served on each Southern Pacific employee.

  The response was the time-honored “We don’t know anything about it,” and Victor had the order telegraphed to the sheriff of San Francisco to serve on the Southern Pacific’s corporate officers. Victor subsequently reported to California Southern president Thomas Nickerson, “It will probably cost us one to three hundred dollars; but I thought it the best thing to do.”

  In the meantime, the local sheriff at Colton had organized an armed posse to enforce the court order and require the Southern Pacific track to be cleared whenever Victor gave the word. Victor, however, opted to be diplomatic. Because the California Southern had to use the Southern Pacific’s turntable and track and was on its depot grounds, Victor thought it “advisable to work here peaceably if possible.”

  This approach resulted in begrudging overtures from the Southern Pacific crew. After some further posturing, all obstructions were removed, and both sides worked together to install the hotly contested frog that same afternoon. The Southern Pacific workers also agreed to release material for the California Southern extension to San Bernardino that had been held hostage in the Southern Pacific yards.5

  With a truce called in the frog war, if not the greater corporate rivalry, the California Southern crossed the Southern Pacific line at Colton and laid tracks a few more miles into San Bernardino. It operated the first scheduled train into San Bernardino on September 13, 1883, just one month after the rails of the Southern Pacific and the Atlantic and Pacific joined at the Needles crossing of the Colorado River. This meant, of course, that there was still no access for the California Southern over Cajon Pass via any railroad, let alone a friendly one, and that left the California Southern at the mercy of the Southern Pacific, just as Huntington had planned.

  “The Southern Pacific monopoly as completely ignores the existence of the ‘California Southern R. R.’ as though they had never heard of it,” grumbled a San Diego merchant; “they refuse to receive or deliver freight to or from it in spite of the law to the contrary.”

  It didn’t help matters that in the early 1880s, the city of San Diego was less than a quarter the size of Los Angeles. The 1880 census showed a similar disparity between the surrounding counties: 33,381 in Los Angeles County versus 8,018 in San Diego County. Without a line of its own into the San Diego area, the Southern Pacific was doing all that it could to maintain or increase that disparity in favor of Los Angeles. When newcomers “fin
d out how much it costs to get here,” the same San Diego merchant continued in despair, they “stop at Los Angeles.”6

  San Diego and the California Southern were not alone in their frustrations. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe had long felt the hand of Huntington and the Southern Pacific—whether it was the brush-off handshake at Deming or the dilemma confronting the railroad at the Needles railhead of the Atlantic and Pacific. When one California newspaper learned that the Southern Pacific was building east from Mojave to confront this invader to the Golden State, it brashly predicted, “They [the Southern Pacific] are expected to gobble up the Atlantic and Pacific, scales, tails and fins.”

  But William Barstow Strong and the Santa Fe had already proven their staying power. In theory under the Tripartite Agreement, the Southern Pacific was supposed to send shipments eastward over the Atlantic and Pacific, and one-quarter of those revenues were to service the interest on the Atlantic and Pacific’s bonds. It wasn’t nearly that smooth in practice. With the Central Pacific to the north and the Southern Pacific to the south, Huntington could be very choosy about how much traffic he allowed to flow eastward to Needles for the Atlantic and Pacific.

  In the Santa Fe’s 1883 annual report, President Strong was forced to admit that while the company had completed another prosperous year, gross revenues remained on par with 1882. Despite the new connections with the Southern Pacific at Needles, Strong found himself reprising his report after joining the Southern Pacific at Deming: through traffic via the new connection had been very disappointing because Huntington was still directing the lion’s share either north over the Central Pacific or south over the Southern Pacific.