All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  Railway enthusiasm surpasses political correctness. A jovial African-American man was proud to show me around the St Hyacinthe, one of the plush sleeping cars built by the Pullman Company (founded by George Pullman) which became a global concept. But what surprised me most was the openly genial way he sported the uniform that he explained would have been worn by ‘Negroes, who were only allowed on board these cars as porters’. It was, he said, one of the most prestigious jobs open to African-Americans right up until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. With an African-American standing for president, he found no problem accepting that the injustice of the past was what it is: something belonging to the past. The railroad helped change American in more ways than one.

  Just how the transcontinental railroad came to be built is a story worth a book of its own1 and requires at least a brief diversion here. The discovery of gold had changed California forever: by 1850 it was declared a state of the union, even though the rest of the union was half a continent away. Lewis and Clark had blazed a trail across the hostile wilderness but it was not a route that invited the average citizen to follow on horse and cart, though, as we shall see, some did. Since its capture from Mexico, California was the United States’ newest, and with the discovery of gold possibly richest, colony. But it was still that: a colony of a country on the far eastern seaboard. It was far from obvious that the huge expanse of land in between, populated by suspicious and increasingly hostile natives, would ever join it.

  The 3,000-mile overland route from coast to coast was risky in the extreme and with no roads or clear tracks a long and incredibly arduous traverse. The safer way was not exactly quick either – or particularly safe. It meant rounding Cape Horn, a hazardous business at the best of times, and was in total a journey of 18,000 miles that took over six months. It wasn’t cheap either. Clearly, if California was ever really to belong to the United States, something had to be done. Thus was the concept born that would grandly be known as America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’, a phrase that managed to imply that creating a single country to span a continent had somehow been decreed by God.

  The very first railway engines to be seen in the United States had been four British coalmine engines imported in 1829. Christmas Day 1830 marked the opening of the first passenger line at Charleston, North Carolina. What followed was an explosion into empty space. Within 10 years the lines of track had multiplied from 23 to 2,800. By 1857 the eastern United States had half the entire world total of railway lines. The man who would make a serious start on the project of a railway line that would cross a continent was a civil engineer called Theodore D. Judah who was brought to California – via the fearful Panama route – by the promoters of the new state’s first rail project: the 22-mile-long Sacramento Valley Railroad which linked the city to the western terminus of the Pony Express. But by the time he had finished their task in 1856 Judah was convinced he could build something a lot longer than 22 miles: a railroad that could cross a continent.

  Judah had managed to catch the eye and ear of a young Kentucky-born congressman called Abraham Lincoln, who friends in the Republican Party said was going to do well. Judah lobbied in Washington and in Sacramento and by 1860 managed to put together the business interests of four California businessmen (all originally from upstate New York), who were also supporters of Lincoln’s campaign for the presidency. Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins were partners in a Sacramento hardware store, Leland Stanford operated a grocery business and Charles Crocker ran a dry goods company. Modest businesses but they had all done extremely well out of the gold rush and had money to spare. Allowing Judah to persuade them to put it into his ‘madcap’ scheme was the best business decision any of them would ever make. They were to become known as The Big Four, eventually controlling a transportation and property empire that stretched halfway across America, and would be admired and detested in almost equal measure.

  All of them knew in detail the problems of getting from California to the nation’s financial capital, New York, and its political capital, Washington. Huntington had first made the journey at the age of 27 in the early flush of the gold rush. Rather than the epic round-the-Horn ocean trip, he was one of the first to try the Panama ‘short cut’: boarding a steamer from New York down past Florida and the tip of Cuba – an eight-day journey in itself – to a fly-blown port at the mouth of the Chagres River (which then belonged to Greater Colombia). There they had to disembark via native canoes and hire Indians to help them downriver, sleeping on the muddy shores, then trekking over the mountains for five days to reach so-called Panama City which turned out to be nothing more than a sea of tents in an ocean of mud plagued by frequent epidemics of malaria and cholera. From there they trekked on through 24 miles of jungle to the coast to wait for a northbound ship to call. Judah himself had been seriously ill on the same route. In 1863 on his way back to New York to try to raise more funds, he contracted yellow fever in Panama and subsequently died of it that November, only a few weeks after the Gov. Stanford arrived in Sacramento.

  What created the political will needed for such a vast undertaking was the outbreak of the civil war between North and South. California sided with the North – providing crucial supplies of gold – though the fighting was half a continent away. But the conflict highlighted the potential of secession in a disconnected nation spread over such vast distances. The North declared it a political necessity for the survival of the union. The groundbreaking for the great project took place at the intersection of Front and K Streets in Sacramento, right outside Huntington’s and Hopkins’ store, in January, 1863, a full two years before the war ended. The completion of one of the wonders of the nineteenth-century world was not to be achieved without greased palms, dodgy dealing, and the labour – and death – of thousands of Chinese workers who more than any other group forced the route over the seemingly impassable barrier of the central Rocky Mountains.

  Boarding the train just after 11 in the morning for what is one of the most scenically beautiful railway journeys in the world, it’s hard to imagine how they even started, let alone breached the summit of the peaks ahead. And I’m not hanging off a cliff in a basket loaded with gunpowder! But in case my imagination fails, there are two volunteers from the Railroad Museum on board for the mountain crossing section to give passengers a running commentary on one of Amtrak’s most spectacular routes. The American word for these guys is ‘docent’, which is not a term I’ve ever heard before, but is widely employed to describe these keen, usually elderly, well-informed volunteers. It has the huge advantage of sounding more scholarly than ‘anorak’.

  But I am being unfair. The term ‘trainspotter’ is used so widely and pejoratively in Britain that we automatically conjure up a vision of some bloke with thick specs standing under grey drizzly skies in the aforementioned anorak, cowl pulled up over his head, myopically recording locomotive serial numbers in a notebook. Maybe it’s the weather – sunshine does wonders for the soul – but the California equivalents tend to be bright-eyed ‘seniors’ – retirees with a spring in their step – conveying a genuine enthusiasm for not just the technicalities of the railroad but the history and circumstances of its construction.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you may think the land around here is pretty flat,’ drawls the laid-back voice over the intercom as we pull out of Sacramento past a vista of suburban houses, brown scorched fields, roads and trailers with not a molehill in sight, never mind the mountains we know lie ahead. ‘The elevation above sea level here is just 80 feet,’ and it is so palpably flat that the next thing we pass is an airfield: ‘This here’s McClellan Field, an important military base for more than 60 years, only relatively recently turned over to the local county for development as an industrial site.’ A little further on we pass through a drab landscape of industrial development, but the onboard guide manages even to squeeze an iota of interest out of this: ‘Right now you’re lookin’ at the works of the Blue Diamond Company.’ Ooh, we stare, wondering where they dig up br
illiant stones in this unlikely landscape. ‘It has nothing to do with diamonds,’ the docent lets us down gently, ‘but is the largest almond-processing facility on earth, dealing with most of the one million pounds (450 tonnes) of almonds produced in California each year.’ See: anoraky for sure, but interesting too.

  We’ve barely left the outskirts of the city and there’s still no perceptible increase in gradient when the docent comes in with what is obviously one of his most practised lines: ‘Okay now, you’ve heard tell of people trying to move a mountain, well right here’s where four men moved an entire mountain range.’ He’s not kidding either. ‘You see folks, when they passed the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, which laid down the financial support for building the railroad, they agreed there would be more government money made available for sections over the mountains. ‘’Cept those congressmen back in Washington DC had no idea where the mountains began, had they? So they decided the mountains would begin where President Lincoln said they began. Thing is, old Lincoln, he didn’t much know either. So he asked the state geologist Josiah D. Witney, man they named the highest mountain in the USA outside Alaska after. Crocker, one of the Big Four, took Whitney out here in his buggy and got him to say the Arcade Creek, which we’ve just gone over’ – we crane our necks to look out the window – ‘was where the Sierra Nevada started. Lincoln said that was good enough for him. So there you go, folks, who said faith couldn’t move mountains?’

  It’s a good story – and true! – and gets the laugh it deserves. This is a regular scheduled daily train, not a tourist excursion, but the docents have managed to create a jokey school day-out atmosphere. On the other hand, most of my fellow travellers do seem to be here at least as much for the spectacle as the means of transport. If they simply had wanted to get from A to B they would have flown.

  ‘Now this here town,’ the docent meanwhile starts up again, as we pass through what seems to me like nowheresville suburbia, ‘was originally known by the romantic name of Junction – because it was a junction – but in 1864 the people who had moved here, followin’ the railroad, were allowed to choose a better name. They called it after the prettiest girl in town: Junction became Roseville. It didn’t make the town any prettier though.’ Another laugh. ‘And more than a century and a half later, if anything, things have got worse,’ this as we pass though a vast wilderness of sidings and freight trucks. ‘Although the local people probably wouldn’t agree: the western freight lines invested $140 million in the 1990s to renovate Roseville as the most important rail yard west of the Rockies.’

  Eventually, some miles further on, the land does just noticeably begin to rise and our guide points out we are at a less-than-colossal 100 feet above sea level when we reach the nondescript little town of Auburn: ‘The courthouse which you can just see over there, was built in 1894 and’ – the usual tone of expectant awe – ‘is still in use today.’ The ‘old building’ stuff is gradually beginning to lose its amusement value to the extent of becoming comic.

  ‘It’s just two miles south of here that gold was first discovered in California in 1848, at a place called Sutter’s Mill. Auburn grew up to be the administrative centre for the area, and long before the present ancient [sic] courthouse was built the grounds in which it stands were known for meting out justice in the form of hanging for the growing number of outlaws who decided there were fatter pickings to be had stealing from the miners than to join their number.’

  There’s not the slightest doubt now that we’re going seriously uphill, and fast, through a couple of tunnels and along tracks that seem increasingly to cling to the side of steeply-wooded gorges. All of a sudden the slowly rising land becomes foothills which in a matter of a few miles become mountains – reinforcing how mad the notion of a railway across them must have seemed 150 years ago. Just looking out the window as we climb rapidly on winding tracks, the idea of cutting a track into this mountainside falling away at an angle of nearly 75 degrees seems virtually impossible today and unimaginable with the engineering equipment of the mid-nineteenth century. It seemed pretty much the same to the men tasked to build it who found it hard to believe the engineers had decreed this to be the only feasible route. Amazingly the solution was genuinely ancient even if it did come from another continent.

  In 1865 on a trial basis 50 Chinese who had come to California to seek work were taken on by Central Pacific as casual labourers. They turned out to be more reliable and hardworking than most of the rest of the workers, many of whom were Irish and had been shipped in – at great expense – from New York and the east coast, but were given to fights, drinking and simply running off to work the gold mines. The Chinese took less time off work for sickness, inebriation or injury than any other workers. They also brought their own food – because they preferred it – but that made them cheaper too. It also had the unacknowledged bonus that it made them healthier.

  It was the Chinese who had a solution to the seemingly impossibly steep slopes. One of the foremen approached the site boss and explained that they had long experience in this type of work from the days when their ancestors built fortresses along the Yangtze gorges. What he needed, he explained, was a supply of reed to be sent up from San Francisco. The reed was duly ordered and the Chinese began weaving it into round, waist-high baskets with eyelets at the top which could be fixed to a cable and suspended from a pulley mechanism high above. One at a time workers would climb into the basket to be lowered from a bluff above and would use small hand drills to bore a hole into the mountainside into which they would fix a black powder charge – it was after all a Chinese invention. Then they would light the fuse and shout to be hauled out of the way before it exploded.

  It was incredibly successful, though not without casualties. Exactly how many died in the operation is not recorded; although the Central Pacific paid its Chinese workers the same as its European workforce, it didn’t bother to keep track of their fatalities. But it was a spectacular piece of work, the result of which can still be admired today on the rocky bluff known as Cape Horn where the train crawls along a hairpin bend etched into the side of a pine-clad canyon wall that drops 1,800 feet to the American River below.

  ‘In the olden days,’ the docent tells us, ‘trains would stop here for passengers to get out, stretch their legs and admire the view, but that was in the days when travel was less hurried.’ Given that the 40 miles an hour, which is the most we can manage at this point due to the gradient, hardly seems hurried, it is a pity they gave up the custom.

  The Chinese became known as ‘Celestials’ because they described their homeland as the ‘Celestial Kingdom’, but I can’t help thinking it’s because so many of them found themselves ascending to heaven rather earlier than intended. One way or another the railroad builders were so impressed that they began actively recruiting in China and by the time the transcontinental route was finished in 1869 there were more than 10,000 Chinese on the company’s employment register.

  James Strobridge, who was in charge of construction on this section of the route said of his Chinese workforce: ‘They learn quickly. They do not fight, have no strikes that amount to anything, and are very cleanly in their habits. They will gamble and do quarrel among themselves most noisily – but harmlessly.’ On the odd occasion when there was any trouble Strobridge settled it himself by picking out the ringleaders and confronting them with an axe handle.

  Getting the railway built was big business that went far beyond the labours of construction. Except where the railway passed through cities and over rivers the companies that built it were granted 10 square miles of land on each side of the tracks for every other section of one-mile track built. In total, during the 21 years from 1850 to 1871 the land the railway companies were granted by the federal government – with no reference of course to the Native American peoples who might foolishly have thought their centuries-old occupation of it gave them some rights of ownership – amounted to 175 million acres, or one tenth of the total land mass of today’s continent
al United States. The Big Four became very big indeed.

  As we continue relentlessly uphill the docents, taking turns to fill in rather like a pair of news anchors, explain that part of the gradient here was cleared by hydraulic miners, who simply sprayed the rock and gravel with high velocity water until it gave way and crumbled and they could sieve gold from the run-off. The quantities to be obtained in certain areas were hardly commercial and the railroad was actually laid over a gold-bearing gravel surface. But if it was one thing to declare it uneconomic to mine, it was quite another to scare off penniless prospectors who continued to spray the gravel even after the tracks were laid, eroding the bed. In the end the railroad company had to hire armed guards to keep them at bay. Meanwhile the mud and gravel run-off pouring downhill clogged both the American and Sacramento rivers so badly that eventually the state court in 1884 declared it illegal, thereby passing California’s first environmental law.

  Up here though the main value of the land is its spectacular rugged beauty and the fact that railroad or no railroad – and the modern winding highway also notwithstanding – it remains remote and relatively inaccessible. Particularly in winter. We are now a mile above sea level and several thousand feet above the Bear River that winds its way through the deep canyon below. Even nearly 90 years after the Chinese labourers first blasted their way along these ledges, trains could come close to disaster in the wrong weather conditions.

  One of our docents has taken to the microphone again now with a tone of voice that suggests he is reading a ghost story in front of the fire in a log cabin. ‘These mountains can also be terrible places,’ he says quietly. ‘Back in the winter of 1951 the City of San Francisco ‘Surfliner’ train became trapped after an avalanche blocked the track ahead. The train stopped but got caught in a heavy snowfall – the like of which nobody had ever seen before – which dumped more than 16 feet on top of it. That train was stranded. For nearly four days, the 196 passengers and a crew of 30 were trapped. A major rescue attempt involved not just everything at the railway company’s disposal but also army, air force and workers for the power and water companies who maintained high-mountain reservoirs. In the end they only got to them when a footway was dug through the deep snow to reach the end carriage. All the people on board that train escaped to be taken to safety in a fleet of 11 private cars with only a few minor injuries and, remarkably, no fatalities.