American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

by H. W. Brands

  THE CHINESE CONTRACT laborers—“coolies,” in American parlance, derived from the Urdu and Tamil of South Asia, where expatriate Chinese had long worked for the British—were particularly suited to the construction work on the railroads. The Central Pacific required thousands of workers, the cheaper and more vulnerable the better. Chinese labor contractors were well positioned to deliver what the company required. The Chinese workers, once they signed their indentures, couldn’t effectively complain of low wages or difficult conditions, which were issues between the contractors and the foremen hired by Stanford and his partners. The only recourse for dissatisfied workers was flight—abandonment of the labor contract and escape into the Chinese population in California and the neighboring states. This was a drastic step, in that fugitives from labor contracts, especially when Chinese, couldn’t expect much sympathy from the courts if their contractors caught them and delivered their own form of exemplary justice. Yet it happened often enough (and among other nationalities as well) that the same corporate-friendly Congress that liberalized the compensation to the railroad companies wrote a law authorizing the federal government to enforce labor contracts concluded on foreign soil. Fugitives from the construction gangs who had signed such contracts henceforth had to deal not only with the contractors but with federal marshals.19

  Beyond its other attractions to employers, the contract-labor system was ideally attuned to the requirements of strikebreaking. For all their industriousness, the Chinese weren’t the first labor choice of Stanford and his associates. As a Republican candidate for governor in a largely Democratic state, Stanford had taken pains to show that while he opposed slavery, he didn’t much care for people of color. “I am in favor of free white American citizens,” he declared on the stump. “I prefer white citizens to any other class or race.” Upon his election as governor, Stanford explicitly included Chinese in his nonpreferred category. “To my mind it is clear that their settlement among us is to be discouraged by every legitimate means. Large numbers are already here, and unless we do something early to check their immigration, the question which of the two tides of immigration meeting upon the shores of the Pacific”—the Euro-American and the Asian—“shall be turned back, will be forced upon our consideration when far more difficult than now of disposal.”20

  But Stanford knew the difference between politics and business, even if he didn’t always honor it. The fact that California was the most cosmopolitan state in the Union (as a result of the gold rush) simply made white voters more susceptible to racist and xenophobic arguments, which Stanford wasn’t above employing. But when some of the Irish workers the Central Pacific had imported from the East to commence the construction began complaining about pay and working conditions, Charles Crocker told his foreman to try Chinese. The foreman was skeptical. “I was very much prejudiced against Chinese labor,” he admitted afterward. “I did not believe we could make a success of it.” Yet the Chinese came cheap and easily. The foreman negotiated a deal with a labor contractor who delivered Chinese workers at $26 a month, compared with $30 a month plus board for white workers. The Chinese were initially assigned only the most unskilled jobs: moving dirt, hauling rocks. But as they proved their value there, they were tested on more-demanding tasks. When Irish stonemasons went out on strike, Crocker demanded that the Chinese be used as strikebreakers. His foreman complained that he couldn’t make masons out of the Chinese, causing Crocker to retort, “Didn’t they build the Chinese Wall?”21

  Before long there were no jobs the Chinese weren’t doing. The most difficult stretch of the road east of Sacramento rounded a cliff a thousand feet above the American River. Called Cape Horn from its steepness and inherent danger, the cliff confronted the engineers with a daunting task: to carve the roadbed from the wall of solid stone. While they were puzzling how to tackle the job, a Chinese crew chief pointed out that his people had experience of this sort of thing along the Yangtze River at home. The engineers told him to put that experience to use.

  With reeds brought up from the Sacramento delta, the Chinese wove baskets large enough to hold a man. They ran ropes through eyelets at the tops of the baskets to hoists anchored at the crest of the Cape Horn cliff. By now the Chinese crews were facile in the use of black powder (a Chinese invention, some of them pointed out), and the best of the blasters were lowered in the baskets to the line of the roadbed, where they drilled holes in the rock, tamped in the powder, lit the fuses, and signaled to be pulled out of the way before the charges ignited. In time the work assumed a regular tempo, till hundreds of barrels of black powder were going up in flame, concussion, and smoke. The canyon echoed with the roar of the blasts, followed by the rumble of the freed rock as it disappeared into the depths of the gorge.22

  Long before this stretch of the road was finished, Stanford and his partners had become convinced of the value of the Chinese. “Without them it would be impossible to go on with the work,” Mark Hopkins declared.23

  The appreciation of the Central Pacific partners for their Chinese employees had limits, though. As the work progressed, the efficiency of the Chinese crews became apparent to other employers in the West, especially operators of mines, who began to bid up the price of Chinese labor. “We have proved their value as laborers,” Crocker’s brother Edwin, the chief attorney for the Central Pacific, explained. “And everybody is trying Chinese, and now we can’t get them.” The Chinese railroad crews demanded a raise, to $40 per month, and a reduction in hours, from eleven per day to ten. Till their terms were met, they wouldn’t work.

  The Central partners determined not to give in. “If they are successful in this demand, then they control and their demands will be increased,” Hopkins warned the others. Edwin Crocker put the danger differently. “The truth is,” he said, “they are getting smart.”

  The partners were smart, too, and cunning. By now the war had ended, leaving millions of former slaves free and looking for employment. A black man in California named Yates suggested to Stanford that the Central Pacific apply to the Freedmen’s Bureau for help in transporting willing black workers from the South to California. Stanford shared the proposal with his associates, who thought it brilliant. “A Negro labor force would tend to keep the Chinese steady, as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet,” Hopkins asserted. As things developed, the idea never materialized. But the possibility that it might softened the demands of the Chinese even as it stiffened the resolve of Stanford and the others to resist their demands.

  What broke the Chinese strike was a tactic more direct: the threat of starvation. Charles Crocker ordered the provisioners to the Chinese camps to stop supplying them with food. “They really began to suffer,” Edwin Crocker recalled. “None of us went near them for a week—did not want to exhibit anxiety. Then Charles went up, and they gathered around him, and he told them that he would not be dictated to, that he made the rules for them and not they for him.” The hungriest of the strikers agreed to return to work, but others vowed violence against the waverers. “Charley told them that he would protect them, and his men would shoot down any man that attempted to do the laborers any injury. He had the sheriff and posse come up to see that there was no fighting.”

  The show of force, combined with the empty bellies of the workers, terminated the strike. To prevent a recurrence, the Central associates brought in new gangs. “There is a rush of Chinamen on the work,” Edwin Crocker wrote two weeks later. “Most of the fresh arrivals from China go straight up to the work. It is all life and animation on the line.”24

  THE PROBLEMS CONFRONTING the Union Pacific were different in kind from those facing the Central, but not in degree. Where the workers of the Central battled mountains and forests, those of the Union Pacific contended chiefly with distance. From Omaha the route stretched west across the Nebraska prairie, rising slowly onto the High Plains till it reached the Rockies in southeastern Wyoming. The construction crews were a city on wheels, supplied by the single track they left behind as they inched
toward the setting sun. Nearly everything had to be imported: food, often water, fuel, even most of the building materials. When the California crews of the Central Pacific needed stone for footings or bridgework, they simply borrowed some of that which they had already subtracted from the Sierra batholith; the Nebraska crews of the Union had to cart stone from hundreds of miles away. For the ties beneath the rails, the Central crews sawed the giant trees that had blocked their way; the Union ties grew in forests far distant from the line.

  Labor at times was equally scarce. When the construction commenced, large numbers of the able-bodied males in the states east of the Missouri were off to war. Those who hadn’t enlisted were in great demand with civilian employers and hence were in no hurry to head to the hardship assignment of railroad construction on the frontier. Thomas Durant and his superintendent of construction, Grenville Dodge, struggled to fill the ranks of their workforce. At one point they considered enlisting Indians who had been taken prisoner in the frontier fighting that accompanied the Civil War. Ultimately they turned to labor contractors who applied the same techniques in Ireland that the Chinese contractors employed in China. Yet perhaps because the Irish spoke the language of the American majority, because they encountered less pervasive hostility on the part of native-born Americans, or because they had a better chance of escaping their contracts and disappearing into the local population, they tended to be more rambunctious than the Chinese. “What a happy time we have been having here for the last four weeks,” one of Dodge’s lieutenants reported ironically during one difficult stretch. “With drunken Irishmen after their pay, I can assure you it is enough to make men crazy.”25

  The end of the war eased the labor problems of the Union Pacific, but other problems remained. The largesse of the federal government guaranteed the future of the road, but employees and contractors had to be paid in the present, and funds often fell short. “We must have five hundred thousand dollars to pay contractor’s men immediately or road cannot run,” a payroll officer telegraphed headquarters at a crucial moment. The funds eventually arrived, but barely in time to prevent a mutiny among the men.26

  Under other circumstances the kink in the cash flow would simply have slowed the project; delays have been a part of construction since the Pyramids. But the legislation authorizing the railroad gave the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific strong incentives to lay track as quickly as possible. The compensation structure, of payments keyed to mileage completed, compelled the two lines to compete with each other. Every mile one company built represented so many thousands of dollars and sections of land precluded to the other. The construction became a great race, with the Central crews tearing east and the Union crews west. The competition provided the country an entertaining diversion in the years after the war, but it was hard on the nerves of the company executives, on the account balances of suppliers unable to collect their due, and on the backs of the workers driven to labor long days for months on end.

  ONE PROBLEM WAS peculiar to the Union Pacific. By the middle of the nineteenth century relations between the Indian tribes living within the boundaries of the United States and the American government had reached a kind of equilibrium. Andrew Jackson and his immediate successors had driven all but a scattered remnant of the Eastern tribes across the Mississippi River to Arkansas and what would become Oklahoma, where they struggled to make a living on parcels of land far smaller and more limited in resources than their former homes. The tribes of the West, especially those of the Plains and the mountains, remained comparatively undisturbed. To be sure, diseases inadvertently introduced by traders and other travelers to the Indian country had caused devastating losses of population. But these were partially offset by the advantages of contact with the Euro-Americans, especially the acquisition of trade goods and horses. Metal knives and cooking utensils facilitated daily chores, while firearms extended the range of hunters. Horses wrought a revolution in the culture of such tribes as the Comanche and the Sioux, making them true nomads and their warriors a formidable light cavalry. The Comanches became the scourge of the southern Plains, while the Sioux grew dominant on the northern Plains.27

  White Americans certainly knew about the Plains tribes. The Comanches were the reason the Mexican government had invited American settlers into Texas; unable to hold Texas against Comanche forces invading from the northwest, the Mexicans intended the Americans to be a buffer. In the event, the Americans made off with Texas, but not before coming to know and respect the Comanches (whom they wouldn’t subdue for many years). A decade later American emigrants on the Oregon Trail encountered the Sioux, Pawnee, and other northern tribes. Historian Francis Parkman became sufficiently fascinated by the Sioux to abandon his books and spend a summer among the tribe, whom he described in The Oregon Trail, an account that soon became a classic. Many more Americans met the Plains tribes during the gold rush. The Indians haunted the dreams of most of the gold seekers but rarely bothered them in daylight. The emigrants greatly outnumbered the Indians, and as long as they stuck together they experienced few difficulties. From the Indians’ perspective, the emigrants were less a threat than an opportunity. They didn’t covet the Indians’ land, lusting for faraway gold instead, and en route they made good customers. They needed meat, horses, and other items the Indians were happy to supply on a sellers’ market.

  The railroad was a different matter. The Indians didn’t take long to realize that the iron road was a permanent presence. Already it brought small armies of construction workers and the accoutrements of civilization their presence required. Towns sprang up along the line, and soldiers guarded the towns and camps. The Indians knew from experience and hearsay that wherever the railroad went, white settlers followed. Farmers fanned out from the rail lines, plowing and fencing land the Indians had used for hunting. Already white hunters were killing the buffalo, on which the Indians depended for physical and cultural sustenance.

  Anticipating these events, the Indians struck at the tip of the spear, the Union Pacific crews. In the spring of 1867 parties of Sioux and Cheyenne conducted a series of attacks against surveyors, engineers, and construction gangs. Sometimes they spared the workers, satisfying themselves with stealing or destroying their equipment and, in the case of survey markers, spoiling their work. Other attacks were more deadly. One war party surprised an engineering crew, killing a surveyor and one of the soldiers escorting the crew. Another war band ambushed a train that had reached the current end of the line; three men were killed. A party of Cheyennes tore up a section of track and killed members of the crew of the locomotive that derailed as a result. When a trainload of investors, government officials, and other distinguished individuals came out from Washington to inspect the work, a hundred Indians attacked the train and its military escort. The dignitaries escaped bodily harm, but a shudder of insecurity rippled back up the line to the national capital.

  The Indian offensive threatened to stop the construction quite literally in its track. “We’ve got to clean the damn Indians out or give up building the Union Pacific Railroad,” Grenville Dodge declared. “The government may take its choice!” Thomas Durant told Ulysses Grant at the War Department: “Unless some relief can be afforded by your department immediately, I beg leave to assure you that the entire work will be suspended.”28

  The Indian problem was larger than the Union Pacific, though Dodge and Durant had difficulty seeing it so. And its solution took longer than they wanted to allow. But the War Department did find sufficient forces to get the construction crews past the most dangerous zones, and the locus of the heaviest fighting shifted elsewhere.

  THE CENTRAL PACIFIC confronted no comparable problems with Indians, largely because the hordes of gold seekers had driven the California Indians to the edge of extinction a decade before. But the inanimate troubles it encountered almost made Stanford and the others wish for enemies of flesh and blood. The granite of the Sierra gave way to the black powder of the Chinese sappers only slowly; pressed to accele
rate the excavation, the Central’s engineers turned to nitroglycerin. This liquid explosive was far more potent than powder, but because it was new—having been invented in Italy just two decades earlier, and employed in large-scale construction only now—it posed peculiar challenges. It was supposed to require a detonator but occasionally ignited on its own, leaving advocates of its use to their imaginations in explaining what went wrong. A spontaneous explosion in New York City prompted one pro-nitro observer to declare, evidently with a straight face, “It is perfectly safe and harmless and simply blew up from maltreatment and in self-defense.” The Central tried nitro once but gave it up after a worker killed himself and some others by accidentally striking a charge of the stuff with his sledgehammer.

  Yet in early 1867, when the construction had slowed to less than a crawl deep in the granite heart of the Sierra, in what would be the longest tunnel on the route, the Central tried it again. James Strobridge brought in a Scotsman named James Howden, a chemist familiar with nitro. Howden pointed out that the liquid was eight times as powerful as powder and had the additional benefit of producing less smoke, so workers could begin clearing the rubble from explosions sooner. He trained the crews in its use, and soon it became a regular part of their arsenal. Accidents still happened, to be sure. “Many an honest John went to China feet first,” one of Strobridge’s engineers observed afterward. But the improvement in performance seemed worth the risk, at least to the directors. “Charles”—Crocker—“has just come from the tunnel and he thinks some of them are making three feet per day,” Mark Hopkins reported. “Hurrah for nitroglycerine!”29

  From the stony bowels of the earth, the Central crews emerged to the icy slopes of the Sierra. As numerous travelers, including the ill-fated Donner party, discovered over the years, the western slopes of California’s highest range catch snow in quantities almost unimaginable to easterners. Drifts of twenty, forty, sixty feet weren’t uncommon, and as warm days of approaching spring alternated with still-freezing nights, the drifts compacted to solid walls of glacial ice. Stanford later recalled a spot where sixty-three feet of snow had become eighteen feet of ice, which required pickax and blasting powder to remove.