by Tim Slessor
It is little wonder that there was pressure to build a railroad. After all, by the middle of the century the nation well understood the technology; indeed, it had already laid more than 12,000 miles of track - about a third of all the track in the world. But that was all in the eastern states. Now, surely, it was time to build westward. “We are on one side at the extreme of the globe”, wrote Asa Witney, one of the earliest lobbyists. “Build this railroad, and we are of the center - with Europe on one side and Asia and Africa on the other.”
That was the language of geo-politics, and, while the pragmatists saw the project as making more secure the nation’s transcontinental reach, others saw it as a first thrust for an American imperialism that might, one day, reach out across the Pacific. But, while the dreamers and the romantics talked about “a road to the Indies”, the moneymen and the promoters, who were more astute or more cunning (it came to same thing) than the dreamers, saw the whole enterprise in much simpler terms: it would be a splendid way of amassing huge personal fortunes. Their whispered reasoning was that, in a project that was obviously going to cost as-yet uncalculated millions, and on which the accountancy would largely be under their own control, there would be some very rich and easy pickings.
The route that the line should take was much argued; it depended (as, to this day, do many big federal projects) on the home states of the lobbyists. But, in the end, what one might call a “central route” was chosen - on the entirely reasonable grounds that it would be the most easily engineered; it would follow, for much of the way, the relatively easy gradients that had been used for the preceding 20 years by the Overland Trail to California.
So, in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, under the compelling slogan that this was to be “The Grandest Enterprise under God”, the first westward rails were laid in Omaha. Over 1,800 miles away, in Sacramento, work also began. The government’s thinking was that two companies - they called themselves the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific - would build towards each other until, one day, they would join their rails somewhere in the middle. The men in control of each company, many of whom were visionary rogues, had long recognized that it would be many years before the volume of traffic would be sufficient to bring them any significant dividends from their holdings of company shares. So, instead, they would have to take whatever they could finagle in the shorter term. Contracts could be rigged, funds siphoned, specifications fiddled, stock manipulated, congressmen bribed, auditors persuaded, escrow accounts milked, and promises broken. At the Union Pacific end, the arch-villain was Thomas Durant; the tricks he and his conspiring colleagues played were still being unraveled in lawsuits 60 years later. Indeed, even to this day, financial historians argue about some of that cabal’s more esoteric maneuvers. Shades of Enron.
In California, the birth of the Central Pacific was in the hands of four men. All were merchants who, during the preceding decade, had already made small fortunes in the goldfield supply business. Over the next 20 years, Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker would accumulate much greater wealth. Maybe the Big Four (as they were known) were not quite as grasping as the men at the top of the Union Pacific, but they seem not to have been far behind. Their names are still honored all over California: on banks, hotels, universities, beaches, and countless streets, parks and boulevards.
In the end, perhaps the venality of the promoters (“their scrupulous greed and dishonesty”, as one commentator neatly put it) did not matter too much. Indeed, perhaps the thinking of those financial sharpshooters was exactly what the nation needed because, spurred by the temptation of such prodigious pickings, they bent all their energies to making sure that things happened.
To spur the two companies, the government had agreed to hand each of them enormous tracts of land - land that it did not bother first to appropriate from the owners, the Indians. For every mile of completed track, the companies would get a strip of land (including all mineral rights) running away from the railroad line on alternate sides; each strip would be 1 mile wide and 10 miles deep. Further, for every mile of track across the plains, the government would hand out bonds worth $16,000; this would rise to $32,000 in the more difficult foothills, and then to $48,000 through the mountains.
With inducements like that (and, incidentally, I once got into a genial argument with a Republican westerner who claimed that the building of the railroad was a supreme example of unsubsidized private enterprise), it is no wonder that corruption was endemic and, at the same time, that a race should develop between the two companies to build as much of the line as possible. Because there was no designated point at which the two lines would meet, it was in each company’s interest to lay rails as quickly as possible over as many miles as possible, and thereby to collect the maximum reward. Each hoped that its rival would run into some major and delaying problem.
In fact, both companies had problems right away. Out in California, quite apart from the cost of bringing all the rails and locomotives around Cape Horn (more than 20 cargoes were on the high seas at any one time), progress was slowed to a crawl by the mountains and snows of the California Sierras, only 70 miles up the line from the optimistic start in Sacramento. At the Omaha end, over 1,800 miles away, work was stalled for over a year, partly by the civil war, and partly by poor organization and squabbling amongst the promoters. When, at last, the Union Pacific got its internal problems sorted out - largely because the impatient government pushed it into appointing an army engineer, General Grenville Dodge, to take charge - progress accelerated until, by the summer of 1867, the line was being hammered across the flatlands of Nebraska at the rate of nearly a mile a day.
To reach that pitch, a whole slew of management decisions had to be implemented. Thousands of laborers had to be recruited, some to work at the Omaha supply base, others to be railed out to the ever-advancing end-of-track. Out there, they had to be supplied with everything from water to tobacco. Beef herds had to be bought up and then driven cross-country to the rail camps; the workers expected a diet of at least 2 lbs of meat a day. Back east, contracts had to be negotiated for enormous quantities of rails; locomotives and rolling stock had to be designed and commissioned; shovels, picks, hammers, crowbars, wheelbarrows, earth-scoops and a hundred more tools had to be ordered. Then, all these thousands of tons of hardware had to meet at Omaha on the far Missouri. From there everything had to be fed along the single track to the west.
Out on the plains, at the railhead, there was an even greater need for disciplined organization. Today, the proceedings would, no doubt, be the subject of “critical-path analysis” and “system logistics” regulated by a bunch of stop-watched consultants pouring over flowcharts. Back in those days, it seems that General Dodge and his lieutenants just got on with the job. Those lieutenants were the Casement brothers, two ex-Army engineers. Jack Casement was responsible for the day-to-day progress of construction out at the railhead. His brother Daniel, back in Omaha, was the logistician. Once a day, he would dispatch a loaded train up the line. On arrival at the railhead a day or two later, its 400-ton cargo (enough for about 1 mile of track) would be quickly dumped onto the ground alongside the track. Then, empty, the train would reverse until it met the next train; they would pass each other on a temporary stretch of double track laid for this specific purpose. Meanwhile, the just-delivered rails and all the other bits of hardware would be dragged forward by a continuous stream of mules.
Far ahead were the surveyors. Behind came armies of pick-and-shovel men who, with wheelbarrows and mule-drawn scoops, leveled the right of way, preparatory to the men who actually laid down the rails. These were the iron men, chosen for their sheer physical strength. In gangs of six, they would manhandle each 700-pound rail into its final position. They were paid $2 a day - big money in those days. Sometimes, they were offered double wages to work even harder and longer than normal. With that inducement, on several occasions they managed to bang down 4 miles of track in a single day
. Once they laid nearly 6 miles.
Oh, it’s work all day,
No sugar in your tay,
A-workin’ on the U-pee Rail-way.
They made up many such songs, presumably more grunt than melody, to help them with the straining rhythm of their labors. One can guess that the big investors back east sang an even sweeter song as they collected the $16,000 and the 6,400 acres for every completed mile.
At 80 or 90-mile intervals a supply camp would spring up. Some have long since grown to respectable towns - places like Grand Island, Lexington, North Platte, Sidney, Julesburg, Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins. Others just faded back into the sagebrush when the railhead moved on. But whether they grew or died, for a few weeks these were the wildest places in the West. It was not just the railroad gangs that made them so. There was a whole population of parasites who came sweeping up the line from Omaha: gamblers, girls, saloon-keepers, quacks, card-sharps, pick-pockets, gunmen, and all kinds of itinerant ne’er-do-wells. They all had the same aim: to separate the railroad gangs from their pay as quickly as possible. They brought their accommodation with them: prefabricated wooden shacks with canvas roofs which could be erected overnight and just as quickly disassembled and moved on to the next Hell-on-Wheels. Along with the R’n’R provided by these temporary settlements, it is said that murders ran at the rate of one a day, or double on holidays - though there were not too many of those.
Usually the railroad company would set up its supply camp on one side of the line; the makeshift bars and brothels would bed down on the other. Perhaps that is why, even today, the railroad track running through many a western town is still seen as the dividing line between the respectable and the raffish, between the right and the wrong side of the track. But back in the late 1860s, mere “raffishness” would have been a wholly inadequate description of a place whose sole purpose was gambling, drinking, brawling and fornication. Listen to Henry Stanley (yes, he of Dr. Livingstone fame) writing about Julesburg in 1867: “This is the wickedest city in America.... Civil law is as yet too new to be an impediment to the unwashed canaille [rabble], and it certainly offers no terror to the women who travel about undressed in the light of day.... These women are expensive articles. Everyone seemed bent on debauchery and dissipation.”
***
One of the first and wildest of all those Hells-on-Wheels established itself at a spot they called North Platte, 300 miles up the line from Omaha. Unlike some of those places, it never died. Indeed today, 140 or so years later, a couple of miles west of its now respectable Main Street there has grown what they claim as the largest marshalling/shunting yard in the world. The Bailey Yard, bang in the middle of the continent, is the hub of the Union Pacific network. It was surely worth a visit - the more so as my map showed a Visitors’ Center with an observation tower from where one could, presumably, look out over the enormous spread of a railroad going about its daily business. Unfortunately, after a 150-mile drive I found that the Visitors’ Center was closed, for “major refurbishment”. So they suggested instead that if I drove back a mile or so, “You’ll get a real good view from the highway overpass on Buffalo Bill Avenue.” Well, given that I had driven all morning to get there, it was that or nothing. But a marshalling yard, from whatever vantage point and no matter how big, does not really lend itself to lyrical description. So, instead, here are a few statistics: the place is 4 miles long by 1 mile wide (about 2,500 acres) and it contains over 300 miles of track; over 2,500 UP employees, working night and day, handle (sort out? re-arrange? shuffle?) up to 15,000 freight cars (empty and loaded) every 24 hours. In that time as many as 150 trains come throbbing slowly through the yard. Some stop to be “sorted”. Others rumble straight on to destinations over 1,000 miles away. So vast is this spread that many of the movements of the shunting engines, and the switching of the trucks from one track to another, are radio-controlled - no drivers. The cargoes? Everything imaginable: grain, cars, lumber, newsprint, heavy machinery...you name it. But coal, millions of tons of it (in 36-40 trains every day) is the biggest load. And I will come to the intriguing “how come” of that a little later.
***
On the far side of the continent, the Central Pacific was in financial difficulties, even though someone paid the state geologist to certify that the more or less level terrain of the line’s first 70 miles out of Sacramento was so steep that it qualified for the “mountain payment” of $48,000 for every mile. The problem was that, presently, as the line really did rise through the foothills of the Sierras, the rate of advance dwindled to just one or two twisting miles a week. Now, reaching right into the hard-rock mountains, daily progress was sometimes measured in mere yards. Even with the by-now-legitimate mountain subsidy, the backers were still losing money.
In summer, the mountain terrain was difficult enough; but in winter, the workers had to contend with freezing temperatures, blizzards, landslides and 30-foot snowdrifts. The line was surveyed to crest at over 7,000 feet, but well before that altitude was reached it was obvious that the line would have to be protected with nearly 20 miles of wooden “tunnels” to hold off the weight of drifting winter snow, at the prodigious cost of $2 million. (The line is still protected by over 15 miles of such snow-sheds.) And there was another problem: even if conditions had been easier, many of the construction crews were not much attracted by the idea of working for a mere $2 a day when, instead, they might gamble on making much better money on the nearby Nevada gold and silver fields. They deserted in hundreds. At one time, there were fewer than 1,000 workers left from the 5,000 who had started. Work almost stopped.
This desperate problem had to be met with a desperate solution. Charles Crocker, a leading partner in the whole enterprise and the man who had assumed overall command, looked around for an alternative source of labor. Mexicans were a possibility, but their legendary inertia was held against them. However, by this time there was a scattering of Chinese in California; many had come to make a living by picking through the abandoned tailings of those miners who had now moved on to richer pickings in Nevada. Crocker put the “Chinese idea” to the construction boss, a bad-tempered Irishman called James Strobridge. He was downright scornful. Those weedy, rice-eating “orientals” would, he said, have neither the strength nor the stamina to stand the pace. Maybe Crocker reminded Strobridge that the forebears of these same rice-eaters had managed to build the Great Wall. Anyway, with more desertions every day, the track-boss was forced to take a chance on a crew of just 50, for a week’s trial.
When building the railroad, the Union Pacific would replace their temporary wooden bridges with more permanent stone constructions, as here in 1868
Almost immediately, they proved to be harder working and more reliable than the deserting whites. At $1 a day they were cheaper too. (Ethnic equality, let alone political correctness, had not yet been invented.) Within a few days, Strobridge was asking Crocker for more of the same. Within a few weeks, the Central Pacific had found a further 4,000 of these fragile rice-eaters and, within months, in response to advertisements back in Canton, 10,000 more had been shipped in. Initially, among the remaining white workers, there was resentment and even riots against what they saw as scab labor. But the management solved the problem by sacking most of the more bad-tempered whites and promoting the rest from pick-and-shovel workers to foremen. Strobridge had been won over; indeed, he became an ardent advocate of his new workforce. In the end, partly by sheer weight of numbers (15,000 Chinese were working on the line), and partly by their stoic determination, they broke through the Sierras. It had taken three years. In the process, though no one bothered to count, it is reckoned that at least 500 Chinese workers perished - in accidents, in snow slides, and sometimes in the sub-zero cold. And some were lost to a new and unstable invention known as “blasting powder”. The Sierras saw the world’s first significant use of nitro-glycerine, a compound recently “invented” by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel.
&n
bsp; ***
We foreigners do not think of sunny California as sometimes being beset by heavy snows. It is true that much of the place has never seen a snowflake. But I can recall how, some years ago, when I was directing a documentary sequence about the overland wagons coming through the High Sierras, we ourselves had to take refuge in the comfort of a motel for a full 36 hours. The road in and out was closed until the storm passed and the snow plows could do their work. We were within a mile or two of the railroad; occasionally, despite all those snow-sheds, that too is closed.
***
Once onto the Nevada desert, with what was now a well-tuned workforce, backed by an assured supply route coming through the mountains, the Central Pacific raced away. There was much time to make up. And every mile completed was money in the pockets of the promoters. True, there were still some problems: desert temperatures were frequently above 1000F, every drop of water for both drinking and for the locomotives’ boilers had to be railed in, and the Chinese, sensing their worth, were asking for a pay rise of an extra $5 a month. After some haggling, the Chinese (Crocker’s Pets, as they were now known) got their money. Deservedly.