Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  Near Wyoming the train began a long ascent into the mountains. The train stopped at various stations along the way to pick up and distribute bags of mail and to change engines and crews; whenever the stop was long enough, Bisland made sure to walk around for a few minutes, filling her lungs with the cold air and shaking out her limbs to get the blood moving. The mountain air brought a strange exhilaration, a sense of impending good fortune. “It is,” said one of the reporters, “like sublimated champagne.” By nightfall the train was approaching the Utah territory. The stars here were not the softly glowing planets she remembered from her girlhood in Louisiana; here they shone as keen and brilliant as swords. Much of the earlier delay had been made up in crossing Wyoming, but at Evanston, near the Utah border, the train was still twenty-eight minutes behind schedule; three-quarters of a million dollars hung on their timely arrival in Ogden. At Evanston a new, more powerful engine was brought on, as was a new engineer. Bill Downing was a mountain engineer, a large, bluff Irishman apparently blessed, or cursed, with a complete absence of fear; among railroad people he was known as Cyclone Bill. He understood that it was his business to get to Ogden on time, and he meant to do it. “It is seventy-six miles to Ogden,” he told one of the reporters, “and I will not be happy until I make it in seventy-two minutes.”

  That kind of speed was impossible down Weber Canyon, the reporter said, but Downing was resolute. He would, he announced with a disarming cheerfulness as he climbed into the cab, “get us to Ogden—or hell—on time.” Several times during the course of that ride, Bisland later reported, the betting stood ten to one on Hades.

  At precisely 12:55 A.M., Cyclone Bill pulled out the throttle and the train lurched into motion. Using every pound of steam the engine could handle, the train climbed the eastern slope of the Wasatch mountain range, its speed increasing as it neared the summit, where it paused momentarily and then, with a stomach-lurching plunge, began its race downhill. The train careened wildly around the mountain passes, swept across plateaus, shot through tunnel after tunnel, going faster and faster; still the engineer did not ease up on the throttle. The local superintendent for the Railway Mail Service, James E. White, tried to joke that Downing was straightening out all the curves on the line, but there was no laughter in the car. Someone murmured that it would be a terrible thing to run off the track. No one said anything to that—derailments happened more often than anyone in the car cared to think about, and particularly at high rates of speed. An isolated mountain pass late at night, it didn’t need saying, would be the worst possible place to derail. To Elizabeth Bisland the train felt like a runaway horse; one of the reporters compared it to “some insane monster striving to free himself.” Its roar reverberated like a cannonade off the rocky sides of the canyons. At Devil’s Gate, where the track was not as crooked, the train seemed, impossibly, to pick up speed. The car rocked side to side like a ship in a storm, and some of the passengers actually became seasick, turning, in their urgency, to the nearby cuspidors. The warm, crowded car took on an unpleasant aroma. One man began to writhe on the floor in terror and was handed a flask of brandy to calm himself. From the rear platform of the car the passengers could see a shower of sparks trailing behind them; the tracks looked like two lines of fire in the night. “The telegraph poles,” Bisland wrote, “reeled backwards from our course and the land fled from under us with horrible nightmare weirdness.” She was not sick, but she could feel her nerves beginning to give way. Everyone sitting down held tight to the armrests; those who had mistakenly imagined they might sleep clutched the sides of their berths to keep from falling out. The train passed into the longest tunnel on the road, more than seven hundred feet cut out of hard red clay and sandstone; for endless seconds the blackness outside the windows seemed to grow still blacker. Just beyond the tunnel was the approach to Echo Canyon, where the declivity was 250 feet per mile and the road was said to be as crooked as a ram’s horn. Here the tracks hugged close to the hillsides, running along a narrow strip of earth high above the canyon. They could hear the steel wheels grinding on the curves; behind them the double stream of fire was almost continuous. James White got up to check the speed indicator that had been installed in the car and gasped at what he read there. Incredibly, a mile through Echo Canyon had been run in fifty-two seconds. Ahead lay an even more treacherous bit of road, the reverse loop at Antelope Gap. The train hit the first curve at full speed, and as it did, one side of the car was lifted into the air, so that only one set of wheels still clung to the tracks; there was an awful moment of suspense and then the car managed to right itself, the wheels landing down with a bump, before the train hit the reverse turn and the other set of wheels went up. Finally General Manager Edward Dickinson could take no more. “Let the schedule go!” he shouted to C. E. Brown, the Union Pacific press agent. “Pull the bell rope, Brown, then run forward and tell Downing to stop this if he wants us to reach Ogden alive.”

  Brown passed the orders up to the engineer, but Bill Downing, checking his watch, replied that he regretted he could not oblige them. When that word came back, Dickinson sprang to his feet, ran to the rear platform of the car, and pulled the brake with all his might. The speed began to slacken.

  Still, the fast mail train arrived at Ogden on schedule. The final seventy-six miles had been covered in sixty-five minutes—the shortest time ever recorded on that stretch of track. Having made good on his promise, Cyclone Bill Downing dismounted from his cab; casually remarking that these night rides were prone to give a man a cold, he passed through the swinging doors of a bar on the corner and was not seen again.

  JUST FIFTY-THREE MILES west of Ogden stood the railroad station at Promontory Summit, Utah, where only two decades earlier, in 1869, the final spike in the transcontinental railroad, the legendary “Golden Spike,” had been hammered into a ceremonial tie of polished California laurel. There the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific, and the nation, only a few years earlier torn apart in civil war, had been joined together by the railroads. A trip across the country from coast to coast, which had previously demanded months of hard travel by covered wagon, or a sail all the way around the tip of South America, could now be completed in less than a week. It was, proclaimed General William T. Sherman, “the most important event of modern times.”

  As was much remarked upon at the time, before the introduction of the railroad the president of the United States could travel no faster than a Roman emperor had, modern horses being no swifter than those of the ancient world; the steam locomotive, however, was an “Iron Horse,” one that could reach speeds upward of sixty miles per hour, and moreover could run through snow and blazing heat, up and down hillsides for hours at a time, and never get tired. There seemed no end to the ways in which it was superior to the domesticated animals of the natural kingdom. “It carries its own food and water, just as a camel carries its spare supplies for the long journey over the sands,” noted an awestruck observer in the 1870s. “It can carry greater weight than an elephant, can drag a heavier load than a team of oxen, make a longer journey than a string of camels, and go with its load more rapidly than the fleetest racehorse!” The locomotive was more like some immense, roaring creature out of myth, and indeed some writers of the time, Charles Dickens among them, saw in it not a horse but a fire-breathing dragon.

  At the time the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, 46,844 miles of railroad track had been laid throughout the United States; just twenty years later that number had nearly quadrupled, to 161,276 miles. Train tracks ran over rivers, across deserts, even through mountains. There seemed no obstruction, natural or human, that could not be conquered. Across the Great Plains, facing hostile Sioux and Cheyenne, the railroad was extended with the help of the U. S. Army. “This railroad will be built … and if your young men will interfere the Great Father, who, out of love for you, withheld his soldiers, will let loose his young men, and you will be swept away.” So was a gathering of Indian chiefs informed by William Tecumseh Sherman, head
of the army, who had been named after a Shawnee warrior of earlier times. “The railroad men in Omaha have an infallible remedy for the Indian troubles,” the Chicago Tribune would later report. “That remedy is extermination.” The Indians hated the railroad in part because it divided the great herd of Plains buffalo, who refused to cross the tracks; the buffalo themselves were wiped out by hunters who shot at them from the train windows as they passed. (“In no parts of the 250 miles ranged by the buffalo are bleached buffalo skulls and bones out of sight from the railroad cars,” noted a writer for the Quaker journal The Friend, adding, “Their extinction is only a question of time.”) Trains brought immigrants from cities to the countryside, and emigrants from the countryside to the cities. They carried coal, lumber, iron, steel: commodities of which the railroad was itself the single largest consumer. By 1880 fully three-quarters of all the steel produced in America got turned into railroad tracks. The railroad industry was the nation’s first big business, the fortunes of men named Vanderbilt, Harriman, Gould, Morgan, and Carnegie tied, directly or indirectly, to its growth. The Pennsylvania Railroad employed more workers than the state of Pennsylvania; some of the larger railroads controlled assets greater than those of the U. S. Treasury. “The railroad kings have of late years swayed the fortunes of American citizens more than the politicians,” James Bryce observed in his 1888 book The American Commonwealth. “When the master of one of the greatest Western lines travels towards the Pacific on his palace car, his journey is like a royal progress. Governors of States and Territories bow before him; legislatures receive him in solemn session; cities and towns seek to propitiate him, for has he not the means of making or marring a city’s fortunes?” Perhaps inevitably, railroad executives began to accord to themselves the sort of language normally reserved for heads of state: they delivered “ultimatums,” divided competitors into “enemies” and “allies,” negotiated “treaties,” launched “wars” to protect their “territory.” The president of the Union Pacific Railroad, Edward H. Harriman, was once in Vienna for a meeting with Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary; the emperor was late for the appointment, and when an aide offered apologies for the delay Harriman airily brushed them aside, saying, “I, of all people, know the problems of empire.”

  In 1889, the noted civil engineer Thomas Curtis Clarke wrote, “The world of to-day differs from that of Napoleon more than his world differed from that of Julius Caesar; and this change has chiefly been made by railways.” When America still maintained a slower, more agrarian pace, a traveler on a stagecoach or canal boat was deemed to be on time if he arrived on the designated day; in a rapidly industrializing country arrivals were organized by the railroad timetable, the station clock, the conductor’s pocket watch. Distances that had always been measured in miles could now be measured in hours and minutes, and though the distance itself was immutable, the time between places could be reduced. New York, of course, had moved no closer to Philadelphia, but a trip that had once taken seven days now required less than seven hours. The country seemed to be growing ever smaller, more tightly knit: everywhere seemed closer than before.

  Indeed, time itself had been forever changed by the railroads. Until the latter decades of the nineteenth century, communities had the power to establish their own time zones in what was known as “local mean time,” determined by the position of the sun as it passed overhead. The state of Illinois contained twenty-seven different time zones, Wisconsin thirty-eight. In Pittsburgh the train station had six clocks, and each one showed a different time. When a clock struck noon in Washington, D.C., the time was 12:08 in Philadelphia, 12:12 in New York, and 12:24 in Boston. Local mean time was a perfectly fine standard when a day’s travel brought one only to a nearby town, but far less so when trains could cover a mile in a single minute and railroad companies operated in several states at once. The B&O Railroad, for instance, ran its eastern trains by Baltimore time, its Ohio trains by Columbus time, and those out west by the time of Vincennes, Indiana. Trains were moving at speeds never before seen, with the ever-present risk of catastrophe if one collided with another, and the widespread confusion about the exact times of arrivals and departures was, if nothing else, a major safety issue (particularly as railroads frequently ran trains in opposite directions on the same stretch of track). In October 1883, representatives of the largest railroad companies met at a General Time Convention in Chicago, at which it was decided to divide the country into four time zones, corresponding to the mean sun time at the meridians near Philadelphia, Memphis, Denver, and Fresno. This action had been taken without the consent of the president, the Congress, or the courts, but almost immediately it became the de facto law of the land. On Sunday, November 18, 1883, clocks across the country were changed to the new railroad standard; that Sunday became known as “the day of two noons.” Local mean time was gone; now everyone was living by railroad time. As one Indianapolis newspaper observed in a widely quoted editorial: “People will have to marry by railroad time, and die by railroad time. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time, banks will open and close by railroad time; in fact the Railroad Convention has taken charge of the time business, and the people may as well set about adjusting their affairs in accordance with its decree.”

  The locomotive, its plume of smoke trailing behind it like a war pennant, now seemed to be a natural feature of the landscape, and to most Americans it represented progress, modernity, even beauty. In his poem “To a Locomotive in Winter” Walt Whitman extolled the “fierce-throated beauty” of a railroad train. “Type of the modern!” he chanted, “emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!” Ralph Waldo Emerson apotheosized railroad iron as “a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.” His friend Henry David Thoreau took a different view. “We do not ride on the railroad,” he wrote in Walden; “it rides upon us.”

  NOVEMBER 18–19, 1889

  Nevada Desert to San Francisco

  Elizabeth Bisland had been traveling for less than four days, and already she was exhausted; she had slept poorly since leaving New York, and even now, a day later, she could still feel the terrifying hour at the hands of Cyclone Bill Downing, a shakiness in her muscles like that which remains after a fever. At times, in her seat, she found herself actually shivering with fatigue and “nameless, undefined apprehensions.” Her immediate plans were still maddeningly indeterminate. She was due into San Francisco early Tuesday, the nineteenth of November; her Pacific steamship, the Oceanic, was not scheduled to leave until Thursday, but John Brisben Walker was at present negotiating with the owners of the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company to have the departure time moved up two days. She did not know how much he was offering the steamship officials, and there was no word yet on their decision, but Walker was a very persuasive fellow. Those two days saved would lower her final total, of course, but privately Bisland hoped that she might spend her time in San Francisco more in the manner of the lilies of the field, as she had recited so many times as a girl: neither toiling nor spinning. Human beings, she had come to believe, were simply not made to travel a mile a minute. How was it possible to move nearly a hundred feet in a single second? What sort of toll did that take on the nervous system? She wondered how coming generations, who would surely travel one hundred or even one hundred fifty miles an hour, could possibly handle the strain of it. Some process of adaptation to the new environment would doubtless take place: humanity, it seemed, always found a way to bear what had previously seemed unbearable.

  The American West was turning out to be a larger and more inhospitable place than she had ever imagined, and gazing out the train window, her traveling rug pulled tight around her, she fondly recalled the tropical climate in which she had grown up, the gardens lush with roses and camellias and black-eyed Susans, so different from this forbidding landscape, too hard, too drab, too cold, too dry. For long hours through northern Nevada the mail train passed little but sagebrush and sand, mile after mile as barren a
nd lifeless as the photographs she had seen of the surface of the moon. The ground was white with alkali, as if covered in snow; the fine white dust seeped through the windows of the train, making her skin feel sticky and uncomfortable and reddening her eyes so that reading became difficult. The endless white of the sands was relieved at times by a backdrop of jagged red cliffs, their tops carved by eons of wind and rain into ancient-seeming forms. Dark pools of shade, like a mirage of water, gathered in front of the cliffs. The sun was very bright here, but the air was cold and dry. The only signs of life were the occasional stray jackrabbit or coyote, and unexpectedly, breathtakingly, like a storybook come to life, clusters of tepees.