“When you come right down to it,” Kruttschnitt allowed, “there is no reason.”
“Well,” Harriman calculated, “in the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific we have about eighteen thousand miles of track and there must be some fifty million track bolts in our system. If you can cut an ounce off from every bolt, you will save fifty million ounces of iron, and that is something worthwhile. Change your standard.”
Before his trip was finished, Harriman would have countless more such interactions—each helping, bit by bit, to bring the Union Pacific into the modern age.
* * *
RAILROAD HISTORIANS HAVE debated whether the Union Pacific was as decrepit as Harriman’s advocates made it out to be, or whether they exaggerated the challenges to magnify his accomplishment. One can make the case that the post-1893 depression left the UP in no worse shape than some other western rail lines. But it is certainly true that at the time of Harriman’s appearance on the scene, the railroad’s own officials considered it ill-suited to serve the traffic that he expected to materialize. Much of the track and facilities still displayed the corner cutting and slipshod engineering of the race to Promontory three decades earlier. The rails were too light, the roadbed not properly ballasted, the grades too steep, and the route mapped out to circumvent topographical challenges rather than meet them head-on, resulting in hundreds of excess miles of rail.
“The depots were roughly constructed of boards nailed upright on the framing, the cracks battened, and without foundations other than posts,” recalled William L. Park, who had joined the railroad as a brakeman in 1875 and rose to the position of general superintendent. “The stone work consisted of native stone, which very rapidly disintegrated.” Drainage culverts were “primitive [and] very cheaply constructed. . . . The tools and appliances were crude. . . . There were no signals or railroad crossing protection. . . . The ties were small and of irregular size. . . . None of them were treated [with preservatives] at that time; they were in their native condition.”
Years of neglect compounded these shortcomings. Jay Gould and other buccaneering owners had plundered the enterprise of millions of dollars of earnings while spending less than $180,000 a year on upkeep. Harriman reported to the board that of the company’s 10,634 freight cars, more than half were too old to be serviceable and most were too small to carry freight profitably.
There was no denying, furthermore, that the Union Pacific had been grievously dismembered during its receivership. “All its feeders, as well as its through connection to the Pacific had been cut off,” reported William Z. Ripley, the leading railroad expert of the period.
It was not only the neglected and shrunken condition of the road itself, but the destitution of the countryside that made the Union Pacific look like a lost cause to skeptics like Pierpont Morgan. The Panic of 1893 produced the deepest and most prolonged depression of the post–Civil War period. “Never before has there been such a sudden and striking cessation of industrial activity,” fretted the Commercial and Financial Chronicle in mid-September of that year. “Mills, factories, furnaces, mines nearly everywhere shut down in large numbers. . . . The complete unsettlement of confidence and the derangement of our financial machinery . . . had the effect of stopping the wheels of industry and of contracting production and consumption within the narrowest limits, so that our internal trade was brought almost to a standstill—and hundreds of thousands of men thrown out of employment.”
The devastation was still evident two years later, during Harriman’s grand tour. The depression had exposed the nation’s apparent prosperity in the first years of the 1890s as an illusion. The pre-1893 boom had been fed by a frenzy for agricultural land, luring thousands of migrants to the prairie, many of them innocent of the barest fundamentals of agriculture. Land values reached ridiculously inflated levels: “If it was called a ‘farm,’ and if somebody stood ready to cultivate it, Eastern moneylenders were willing to finance the development of it.” Speculators bought up large tracts, subdivided them into parcels too small even for subsistence farming, and sold them to homesteaders from the East, saddling the buyers with mortgages far larger than the properties were worth.
The downturn brought a tidal wave of farm foreclosures, bank failures, and the depopulation of the agricultural zone as ruined settlers returned East. Harriman saw from his observation car that “the great tracts of land bought by speculative syndicates were no longer salable and remained uncultivated; town sites were abandoned, and municipalities which had floated loans in the East ceased to exist,” related his biographer George Kennan.
Morgan had not been alone in thinking of this destitution as almost a permanent condition, or at least one destined to last so long that investing in a recovery was imprudent. When Harriman returned from his tour fairly vibrating with optimism about the economic potential of the railroad and the territory, Otto Kahn dismissed it as “pretty wild talk,” even after Harriman revealed that he had put his own resources into buying up all the Union Pacific stock he could find at prices below $25 per share.
“Union Pacific common is intrinsically worth as much as St. Paul stock,” Harriman told Kahn, referring to the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, one of the most financially robust roads in the country. “With good management it will get there.” To Kahn, the comparison between the Union Pacific and the St. Paul seemed fanciful. “I did not take it seriously,” he wrote years later. “Union Pacific, just emerged from wreck and ruin: St. Paul, an old seasoned dividend payer that had passed with ease through the panics and devastations of the preceding years, and was even then selling above par!” Before a decade passed, however, Harriman would indeed get the Union Pacific there, and beyond.
* * *
HARRIMAN’S PAINSTAKING SCRUTINY of the West as he traveled the Union Pacific line revealed to him signs of an economic turnaround that eluded bankers and investors who surveyed the American economy chiefly from behind their desks and at lunch with one another. His conversations with farmers and cattlemen and bankers in the heartland convinced him that the downturn was bottoming out and made him a believer in the untapped potential of the western United States. Upgrading the Union Pacific so it would be capable of handling the coming surge in traffic, therefore, was imperative. Even before returning from his journey, he telegraphed the railroad’s board for permission to launch a renovation program valued at $25 million. The reasons he gave in a follow-up wire were that “he clearly discovered signs of returning prosperity after the period of long depression,” recalled Kahn; “that he believed this prosperity would assume proportions corresponding to the depth and extent of the long-drawn-out and drastic reaction that preceded it; that labor and materials were then extremely cheap, but would begin to advance before very long, and that the Union Pacific should begin to put itself in shape.”
Twenty-five million dollars: The sum made the Union Pacific’s directors quail. Someone remarked within Kahn’s hearing that if Harriman’s recommendation were followed “the Union Pacific would find itself in receivers’ hands again before two years had passed.” Kahn agreed: “It seemed a pretty hazardous thing to venture upon this huge outlay simply on a guess of coming unprecedented prosperity.” The board deferred taking action on Harriman’s wire, waiting for his return. As it happened, he already had begun to let contracts for the work and equipment he deemed necessary. Once he returned to New York he browbeat his fellow directors into ratifying the decisions he had made without them.
Harriman concluded that the Union Pacific needed heavier locomotives than its fifty-ton engines, and longer freight cars; with such equipment a thousand tons of freight would cost scarcely more to carry than five hundred, but the profit would be exponentially larger. Running such equipment, however, required heavier rails laid on a well-ballasted roadbed; curves had to be straightened and grades sheared down. The western part of the road featured grades as steep as eighty-seven feet in height to the mile; Harriman decreed a maximum of forty-three feet. His engineers set about t
he work with equipment that had never been seen before on a railroad—grading machines, dump wagons, steam shovels—and that in some cases had to be invented on the spot. When Harriman was finished with the Union Pacific, the road would reflect in every detail “the chisel and the straightedge of the Harriman engineers,” judged Frank Spearman, an authoritative chronicler of the railroads at the turn of the twentieth century.
Harriman’s crews did battle not only with the judgments of the railroad’s original designers, which had not been challenged in the intervening three decades, but with Mother Nature, whose quirks had dictated the original route. They assumed the task of cutting mountains down to size and filling whole valleys with gravel and earth. The Dale Creek crossing just west of Cheyenne required a fill 900 feet long and 130 feet deep. “In these granite wastes the engineering figures assumed at once unheard-of proportions,” Spearman wrote. “Cubic yards went into the calculations in millions instead of thousands.”
Harriman treated the original right-of-way unsentimentally. Between Omaha and Ogden, Utah, a distance of nearly a thousand miles as the crow flies, the crews abandoned 150 miles of the old line (the equivalent of the entire New York Central between New York City and Troy) and built a new, straighter roadbed that saved twenty-two complete circles of curvature and 40 miles in distance. They widened and ballasted 196 miles, installed one million new ties, laid forty-two thousand tons of new rails and strengthened four thousand feet of wooden bridges with steel superstructures. Two hundred light locomotives were sold for scrap and 4,760 new rail cars with twice the capacity of the old were added to the fleet. Scarcely any request for equipment went unanswered. “We heard that a couple of compound locomotives had been ordered,” William Park recalled; “when they arrived there were sixty of them. Some freight cars were needed; five thousand were ordered.” All this was accomplished in the first sixteen months that Harriman was in charge.
No money was spared, but neither was human capital, which was treated pitilessly. “The pace, of course, was terrific,” Park recounted, “and men sometimes fell by the wayside—those without brains or brawn got out of the way—but the elimination was through the survival of the fittest. There was no favoritism; those who made good were remembered while those who did not were forgotten.”
The reconstruction demanded not merely new equipment but innovative industrial techniques. The railroad’s maintenance shops in Omaha bustled with pneumatic equipment for handling heavy materials, and a facility for burnettizing wood ties—bathing them in a solution of zinc chloride to fend off rot—was expanded and refurbished.
Not all the improvements required the most modern technology. The railroad solved the problem of unloading recalcitrant herds of sheep from livestock cars by employing trained goats. This drew the attention of a government lawyer twenty years later, in the course of a federal lawsuit.
Park was on the stand. “The mention of goats is interesting to me,” the lawyer remarked. “What do you mean by the use of goats in that connection?”
“In the night it was a very difficult matter to get the sheep out of the cars, and we finally hit on this scheme, which I think is peculiar to the Union Pacific,” Park explained. “A goat was taken up into the car and walked around through the sheep, and as he walked out they seemed impelled to follow him.”
“You say you ‘employ’ these goats,” the lawyer asked sarcastically. “What salary do you give them?”
“We give them chewing tobacco,” Park replied. “That is about all they get out of it.”
All told, rebuilding the road through the Rockies amounted to a spectacular feat of engineering and sheer human determination. But one project stands apart. J. B. Berry, the road’s chief engineer, was ordered to shorten a twenty-one-mile stretch of track in the Wasatch range just west of Salt Lake City by ten miles and reduce the sixty-eight-foot grade to Harriman’s forty-three-foot maximum. This meant drilling a tunnel fifty-nine hundred feet through a mountain. It would be known as the Aspen tunnel.
On the surface this was not necessarily a greater challenge than those the crews already had faced on their transit through Wyoming—“The contractors uncovered a little of everything in the Rockies, from oil pockets to underground rivers,” recounted Spearman. But this time they were fighting their way through “a mountain that for startling developments broke the records in the annals of American engineering.” The crews encountered deposits of shale, sandstone, oil, and coal underground, as they had in other locations. Here, however, the geology seemed to be diabolically alive. The tunnel’s path refused to stay put for two days at a time. “It moved forcibly into the bore from the right side, and when remonstrated with stole quietly in from the left; it descended on the tunnel with crushing force from above and rose irresistibly up into it from below.”
Iron plates, bolted to the tunnel walls at night, “looked in the morning as if giants had twisted them.” Sixteen-foot steel beams were contorted into S-shapes as though they were as pliant as rubber. Twelve-by-twelve pine timbers snapped like toothpicks; one day an engineer standing on what he thought was solid pine got propelled three feet into the air by the surging floor. Workmen became superstitious about the unruly forces deep underground. Their fears were validated one day when a gas pocket ignited, “ejecting men, mules, and timber from the mouth of the tunnel like a cannon’s shot,” in Park’s words. (“It took brave men to go back into the headings after the funerals,” he added, without revealing just how many funerals there had been.)
The problem eventually was identified as a layer of shale that swelled and twisted when exposed to air. Only after a stretch of seven hundred feet was lined with a reinforcing floor of steel and concrete to tame the willful geology was the tunnel completed—in 1901, more than a year late. The men, Park reported, had “conquered, and one morning Mr. Harriman appeared on the scene,” as though to celebrate personally the victory over “so many unexpected obstacles.”
The transformation of the UP under Harriman’s leadership became the stuff of legend—and the goals he set became the benchmark for railroads coast to coast. Harriman, having originally taken weeks to inspect the Union Pacific from end to end, put the road in such tiptop condition that in an emergency a few years later he was able to ride it and its tributaries from San Francisco to New York, a journey of 3,255 miles, in the record time of seventy-one hours and twenty-seven minutes. The trip lowered the previous record by nearly eleven hours, of which ten were saved on the rails of the Union Pacific alone. John W. Gates, the Gilded Age barbed-wire and oil tycoon known as Bet-a-Million Gates for his freewheeling gambling style, would remark that in his experience, which included travel over nearly every railroad line in the country, the Union Pacific ranked as “East or West . . . the most magnificent railroad property in the world.”
One of Harriman’s pioneering initiatives would be turned into legend by Hollywood. This was his effort to end train robberies on the Union Pacific. The railroad’s route through Wyoming “had long been a Mecca for outlaws,” Park related. That stretch of track was especially vulnerable to raids because the roadbed was hemmed in by mountains on both sides, affording robbers “opportunities for the ‘get-away’ which is essential in the highwayman’s profession.” Typically, the raiders would strike in early evening and be safely on their way to the canyon-etched foothills known as the Hole-in-the-Wall country before a posse could be assembled.
Two members of the protean community of outlaws, Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, aka Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, have been credited with the longest successful string of bank robberies of the period. They would be immortalized in a 1969 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, as was Harriman’s solution for the repeated robberies: the creation of a team of special agents to be shuttled along the Union Pacific tracks on their own train and supplied with horses that could travel a hundred miles in a day. The presence of a rapid-response brigade, superbly equipped and trained, disco
uraged raids on the Union Pacific and prompted robbers to concentrate their attentions on competing lines. Among the agents’ leaders, Joe La Force (or Lefors) would become legendary in his own right as the hero of several fictional potboilers published around the turn of the twentieth century.
* * *
Seeking to quash train robberies on the Union Pacific, Harriman outfitted a special car with strong horses and expert lawmen. In an episode memorialized by Hollywood, the posse seen here assembled to track down perpetrators of a robbery outside Wilcox, Wyoming, on June 2, 1899, attributed to the gang headed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The bandits’ participation was never conclusively determined.
* * *
“The expense was infinitesimal,” Park stated of this private defense force, “compared with fruitless expenditures to capture the outlaws after robberies had occurred, to say nothing of the bad advertising such incidents gave to a railroad.”
For Harriman all this effort and expenditure was first and foremost a business proposition, a necessity for making the road “the best line through the Rocky Mountains . . . so that we could operate it to advantage and at the least cost, and permit more business to go over it,” he would testify in 1909, a few months before his death, while fighting a federal lawsuit aimed at breaking up his transportation empire. But he left no doubt that he considered the heroic reconstruction of the Union Pacific a matter of personal pride. Asked in the witness box whether similar projects had not taken place “on all of the American railroads,” he replied, “No, sir, not to that extent.”
“Haven’t every one of them spent millions in improvements?”
“They are now, but they have not done it as quick as we did.”
“No other railroads have improved as the Union Pacific has?”
Iron Empires Page 23