Until the Last Spike

by William Durbin

  When the Pullman workers went on strike in 1894, Sean met the famous socialist Eugene Debs. Sean was impressed with Debs’s ideas on workers’ rights and when he saw the strikebreaking tactics of the Pullman Company, he decided to become a labor activist. Sean went to work for the American Railway Union and spent the rest of his life working in the Chicago area as a union organizer.

  John also quit the Pullman Company and went to work for a man named William Wrigley, who had just introduced a new spearmint flavor of chewing gum.

  Sean and Molly had three daughters and two sons. Two of their daughters became schoolteachers, and one became a suffragette, who dedicated her life to campaigning for women’s right to vote. One of Sean’s sons went to work for the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which had been founded by Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the mechanical reaper. The other son became an engineer on the Chicago and North Western Railroad, continuing the family tradition of working on the railroad.

  Following their retirements, Sean and John started a guiding service on Lake Michigan. They specialized in walleye fishing and operated their popular charter boat until 1928. Sean died on May 10, 1931, at the age of 79.

  The completion of the transcontinental railroad in May of 1869 is an achievement that is often compared in both scope and difficulty with America’s effort to put a man on the moon one hundred years later. This comparison is particularly apt, for the 1969 Apollo space mission concluded a decade that was filled with the same sort of social unrest that pulled our country apart in the 1860s. In the same way that President Kennedy inspired U.S. citizens to rally in support of the space program, Abraham Lincoln urged his fellow Americans, who were then in the midst of a great Civil War, to put their full effort behind the building of a railroad that would connect New York and San Francisco.

  When a telegraph operator at the golden spike ceremony clicked out the message signaling the completion of the railroad, wild parties began all across America. Omaha shot off a one-hundred-cannon salute. Chicago hosted a seven-mile-long parade. Philadelphia rang its famous Liberty Bell. Washington, D.C., officials dropped a huge ball from the capitol dome as people cheered, and in every little town throughout the country, factory whistles screeched, fireworks exploded, and crowds roared.

  Back in 1856, people had laughed at Theodore Judah when he had suggested that the United States build a railroad from New York to San Francisco. “Crazy Judah,” the newspapers called him. They drew cartoons and wrote editorials making fun of him. Yet he refused to give up his dream.

  Unlike Dr. Hartwell Carver and John Plumbe, who had petitioned Congress to build a transcontinental railroad in 1832 and 1838, respectively; and unlike Asa Whitney, who had proposed building a railroad from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean in 1848, Judah refused to give up. He was so committed to his idea that he continually lobbied Congress from 1856 to 1859 to authorize the construction of the transcontinental railroad.

  Judah knew that with the discovery of gold in California and the rapid growth that had followed, America needed to link its east and west coasts with an efficient system of transportation. Traveling to California by ship took from six to nine months depending on the weather, and shipwrecks were a fact of life that travelers had to accept. Overland travel by wagon was equally dangerous. The trip took several months, and the risks of being killed by bandits or Indians, or dying from exposure during the desert and mountain crossings were great.

  When Congress ignored Judah’s petitions, he went West at his own expense and surveyed a rail line through the rugged Sierra Nevada Mountains. As an experienced engineer, Judah plotted a workable route and estimated the miles of track and the length of the many tunnels that would be needed to cross the mountains. Despite the fact that his survey proved the railroad could be built, Congress refused to act.

  The main problem stalling Congress was the slavery issue. The South feared that if the West was opened up to settlement, the new states would join the antislavery coalition of the North. They couldn’t risk upsetting the balance of power. Steamship and stagecoach companies also lobbied hard against the railroad, knowing that they would lose much of their business.

  Though most people still insisted on calling Theodore Judah by his nickname, “Crazy Judah,” four wealthy California businessmen finally listened. In 1860 Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford met with Judah and offered him financial support. A year later these men, who soon became known as “the Big Four,” organized the Central Pacific Railroad Company. At this same time the Civil War began, and with the secession of the South, opposition to the transcontinental railroad suddenly disappeared.

  At the urging of President Abraham Lincoln, Congress quickly passed the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. The terms of this act were generous, offering mileage payments that varied according to the difficulty of the terrain. The government backed flatlands at $16,000 per mile; the foothills $32,000; and the mountains $48,000. The Railroad Act also granted huge tracts of land for every mile of track completed. Not only were the railroad companies offered a two-hundred-foot right-of-way on either side of their tracks, they were also given alternate sections of land that totaled 6,400 acres per mile.

  “The Big Four” immediately began scheming to see how they could make more money. They set up a corporation called the Contract and Finance Company and hired themselves to do $32 million worth of work for a fee of $90 million. They also planned to overcharge the government by lying about where the mountains really began, thereby increasing their mileage payments.

  When Judah found out that his partners were dishonest, he immediately set sail for New York, hoping to replace his investors with men who were more interested in the public good. However, while taking a shortcut across Panama, Judah contracted yellow fever and died shortly after. He would never see his dream become a reality.

  The Union Pacific followed the same pattern of dishonesty and public deception. Thomas Durant, one of the founders of the Union Pacific, got together with a speculator named George Train, and started a company called the Credit Mobilier of America. Like the C.P.’s Contract and Finance Company, the U.P.’s Credit Mobilier was set up for the sole purpose of over­charging the government and the U.P.’s stockholders. If the actual cost of construction was $30,000 per mile, the U.P. typically charged $50,000.

  Because both Durant and the “Big Four” were making huge contributions to congressional campaigns — Collis Huntington alone gave five hundred thousand dollars a year to congressmen — the government was slow to look into the conduct of the railroads. The U.P. even tried to hold off investigations by selling company stock to congressmen at a big discount.

  By the time Congress finally got around to checking the records, the railroad builders had literally taken their money and run. Estimates vary over the amount of cash that these officials swindled from the government. An 1873 New York Sun newspaper article that examined the building of the transcontinental railroad claimed that the C.P. directors had pocketed at least $63 million during their construction project. Further investigation revealed that the U.P. had billed the government $73 million for only $50 million of work.

  However, charges were never filed against any of these men. Huntington avoided prosecution by claiming that a fire had destroyed all his records; Durant retired to the Catskill Mountains and remained silent during the investigations; Stanford went on to endow the university that bears his name and later accepted an appointment to the U.S. Senate; while Crocker built a $1,250,000 mansion. The only official from either company who did his best to tell the truth was Oakes Ames of the U.P. For his honesty, he was condemned by a vote of congressional censure, while his associates escaped blame. The well-intentioned Ames was humiliated and he died shortly thereafter.

  As sad a comment as this makes on the life of Oakes Ames and the thousands of other honest Americans who were swindled out of their money, the objective of the Railroad
Act was accomplished. While only five miles of railroads existed in this country in 1852, by 1890 there were 72,000 miles of track. Railways quickly became the lifeline of American commerce. Industrial products, raw materials, and people could move with an ease that had previously been unimaginable.

  By linking our two coasts together, the transcontinental railroad brought instant prosperity to the Great Plains. As additional rail lines were built, rising real estate values attracted waves of land developers and speculators from back East. The market demand also increased for lumber and for silver, lead, and copper ores that were shipped back East for processing and sale to rapidly expanding industries. Farmers could now market their crops efficiently, and factories could supply the settlers with manufactured goods. With access to new plows and harvesting equipment, advanced strains of seeds, and superior breeds of livestock, farm production soared. And as the farmer’s productivity increased, so did the East’s demand for their products, fueling an agricultural boom that transformed the West from an open wilderness to a series of rail-connected settlements in only a few short decades.

  Though the building of the transcontinental railroad represented a great accomplishment, there was also a darker side to this achievement: In their haste to complete their project, the railroad barons did much harm that could have been avoided. They swindled investors out of hard-earned money. They took advantage of thousands of immigrant workers, reducing the Chinese in particular to the status of slave labor. They also encouraged the killing of great herds of buffalo and the confinement of large numbers of Native American people to marginal lands called reservations. At its best, this new railroad proved the theory of Manifest Destiny — the concept that it was our God-given right to claim all the land west of the Mississippi — but at its worst, it represented unbridled greed.

  The trip from New York to San Francisco, which had taken as long as eight or nine months by ship before the coming of the railroad, could now be accomplished in a single week. Theodore Judah’s dream of linking our shores had finally been realized. Though Judah had died several years before the golden spike ceremony, when Governor Stanford commissioned an artist to paint the famous event, he made a special request that Judah be pictured alongside the honored joiners of the rails. So in death the visionary Judah ironically took his rightful place beside the founders of the transcontinental railroad.

  After grading the roadbed (top), the workers laid the rails (bottom). The material for one mile of track filled forty railroad cars. Each mile of track took four hundred sections of rail (weighing almost six hundred pounds each), twenty-four hundred wooden ties, and four thousand iron spikes.

  In the great race to build the transcontinental railroad, Thomas Clark Durant led the Union Pacific Railroad Company. Durant’s obsession with wealth was evident in his flamboyant suits and coats and his penchant for hosting lavish parties. He hoped that gaining control of the Union Pacific would allow him to make lots of money quickly, and he cofounded the Credit Mobilier for just that purpose.

  Theodore Dehone Judah was an American railroad engineer who played an important role in laying the groundwork for the transcontinental railroad. He worked tirelessly to gather both political and financial support for the venture. With the financial backing of four prominent railroad investors, known as the “Big Four,” Judah founded the Central Pacific Railroad Company in 1861.

  Construction boss General Jack Casement stands proudly in front of his work train, which carried supplies and housed carpenters’ and blacksmiths’ shops, mess halls, and washhouses. Casement, a fierce-looking former brigadier general, was notorious for the bullwhip he carried.

  Railroad workers lived in dormitory cars like these (top), which were part of Casement’s construction train. Because the sleeping areas smelled horrible and were full of vermin, many workers built and lived in sod huts, like the ones at this graders’ camp in Casper, Wyoming (bottom).

  The Dale Creek Bridge was one of many bridges and tracks laid in haste during the great race. Rails laid on frozen ground buckled during the spring thaw, and some bridges were so weak they could hardly bear a train’s weight and were swept away in the spring floods. All of this unusable track eventually had to be relaid, at enormous costs.

  Benton, Wyoming, was one of many “hell-on-wheels” towns, which were known for their rough-and-tumble saloons and dance halls. These towns provided workers with little to spend their money on but liquor, gambling, and women, often resulting in drunken brawls, shootings, and knifings . Two months after Benton was set up, it was deserted, with only trash, abandoned shacks, and a cemetery full of murder victims left behind.

  In the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, the land west of the Missouri River was promised as a permanent home for the Plains Indians, including Sioux, Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and other tribes. Angered when the railroad moved across the Missouri River and into their hunting grounds, the Indians began to attack the railroad workers (top) and the railroad itself, uprooting rails and tearing down telegraph wires. The railroad, and the settlers that would follow it, threatened the Plains Indians’ land and buffalo (bottom), which they depended on for their material and spiritual value.

  Although the Central Pacific Railroad workers had frequent delays on their eastward-moving path because of snow in the High Sierra, once the Union Pacific Railroad got as far west as the Rocky Mountains, they, too, had trouble with drifting snow covering the tracks. Here, Union Pacific workers begin the difficult task of shoveling out a snowbound train.

  Many of the Irish, German, and Italian immigrants employed by the Union Pacific believed themselves to be far superior to the Central Pacific’s Chinese workers. The difference in their wages served to reinforce this discrimination: The Chinese earned between $27 and $30 a month, while other immigrant workers were earning $35 a month. As the rails neared Promontory Summit, the crews were working side by side. Tensions rose, and workers on both sides were killed as a result of explosions that were deliberately set off without warning.

  The No. 1 General Sherman was built by Danforth, Cooke & Company of Paterson, New Jersey, and was brought by steamboat to Omaha, Nebraska, in June 1865. This woodburning engine was the top of the line of all motive power used by the Union Pacific Railroad.

  The “golden spike” that was to join the two sides of the railroad on May 10, 1869, was not golden at all: The gold and silver spikes that were initially dropped into place were discreetly removed and replaced with ordinary iron spikes. Embarrassingly, both Leland Stanford of the Central Pacific and Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific missed the spike when they took their swings. In the end, it was a regular rail worker — one who had probably driven thousands of spikes in his work on the railroad — who drove the last spike and ended the race.

  After the last spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, the Jupiter of the Central Pacific (left) and the No. 119 of the Union Pacific (right) were moved nose-to-nose. The engineers broke champagne bottles on each other’s trains, and a telegraph operator gave the three-dot signal for “done,” initiating celebrations across the country.

  This broadsheet advertises the grand opening of the transcontinental railroad. With the completion of the railroad, settlers poured into the West. Able to go cross-country in six or seven days, they no longer had to face a month-long trip by rail and stagecoach or an arduous five-month-long journey by wagon train.

  Modern map of the contintental United States, showing Chicago, Illinois, and the transcontinental railroad.

  This detail shows important stations along the transcontinental railroad route, along with Promontory Summit, Utah, where the two sides of the railroad were joined.

  William Durbin is the author of many critically acclaimed novels for young readers, including The Broken Blade, Wintering, The Darkest Evening, El Lector, and The Winter War, among others.
His works have garnered honors such as Junior Library Guild Selection, Bank Street College Children’s Book of Year list, American Library Association’s Amelia Bloomer list, New York Library Books for the Teen Age list, Great Lakes Book Award, Minnesota Book Award, Maud Hart Lovelace nomination, Jefferson Cup Series of Note Award, America’s Award commended title, and a Book Sense Summer Pick.

  William Durbin says, “I was inspired to try my hand at writing for young people after I met a fellow Minnesotan named Gary Paulsen at a writing conference. Though I’d mainly been publishing poetry and critical essays, he convinced me that writing for kids was more rewarding. ‘Write what’s real,’ he said, ‘and kids will respond.’ I’ve been trying to follow his advice ever since.”

  A former teacher, William Durbin has supervised writing research projects for the National Council of Teachers of English and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. He lives on Lake Vermilion in Northeastern Minnesota with his wife, Barbara. They have a son, Reid, and a daughter, Jessica.

  For additional information, visit his website at williamdurbin.com.

  I would like to extend special thanks to my editor, Amy Griffin, and to the production staff at Scholastic for the care they have taken in the preparation of this manuscript.

  For assistance with my research I would like to recognize Bob Hanover of the Golden Spike Monument; Lori Olson of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming; Thomas Taber of the Railroad Historical Research Center; Don Snoddy of the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Omaha; and the staffs of the Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota, the University of Minnesota Duluth Library, and the Virginia Public Library.