Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (40 page)

E. B. Crocker held out an intriguing possibility to Huntington. “I have an idea that in six months or a year from the time the roads are completed,” he wrote, “the two companies will be consolidated. This central city matter is an interesting thing to trade on.” It was almost 130 years after the roads were completed before the two lines consolidated, and the great central city never was built.
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“They [the UP] have been pretty smart in building their railroad,” Crocker said at one point, “but they have never yet come up to their bragging.” They said they would be in Cheyenne by September 1, 1867, and they didn't make it until November 8. Still, “it would not do for us to trust in their laziness.” Thinking about it, he added, “What a loving crowd the Union Pacific men must be.”
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S
TANFORD
had run for governor advocating a stoppage of all immigration from China to California, and in his inaugural address in 1862 had denounced the immigration of Asiatic people. The CP's need for labor changed his mind. In the summer of 1867, the CP was sending agents to China to recruit laborers. A great many of them, in fact, according to E. B. Crocker. “The [Chinese] agents go to get a large immigration to come over and work. They know all about the work and can explain it to their countrymen. They will induce thousands to come over. We shall follow this up and get others to go over to China to hurry up the immigration.” The CP sent handbills and made arrangements with the steamboat company to provide favorable rates for the passage. “We want 100,000 Chinamen here so as to bring the price of labor down.” He further reported, “The new arrivals from China go straight up to the work. It is all life and animation on the line. Charles and Stro feel greatly encouraged.”
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Leland Stanford loved the idea. So did Collis Huntington, who wrote Charlie Crocker on October 3, 1867, “I like your idea of getting over more Chinamen. It would be all the better for us and the State if there should be a half million come over in 1868.”
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•   •   •

I
N
August 1867, E. B. Crocker sent a telegram to Collis Huntington: “Summit Tunnel broke through at 4
P.M.
Toot your horn. Locomotive on the Truckee is in running order. Track laying commences Monday on the Truckee.”
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The breakthrough was seen by only one single light, and that not the sun but a lantern. There was much broken rock still to be removed from the bottoms. The breakthrough had to be extended up, down, and sideways to complete the whole tunnel. The grade had to be built, the ties put down, the rails laid and spiked.

But that light was exactly where it should have been. Clement had achieved a triumph of the first magnitude in engineering. The Summit Tunnel was 7,042 feet above the sea. This was the highest point reached by the CP. The facings were off by only two inches, a feat that could hardly be equaled in the twenty-first century. Clement had done it with black powder, nitroglycerin, and muscle power. He had not used electric or steam-driven drills, steam engines to power scoop shovels, or any gas-or electric-powered carts or cars to haul out the broken granite. There were no robots, no mechanical devices. Well over 95 percent of the work was done by the Chinese men. They and their foremen and the bosses, Clement and Crocker and Strobridge, had created one of the greatest moments in American history.

The Sierra Nevada had been pierced. The CP had gone through the mountains at exactly the point where Theodore Judah had said it should be done, following a line that he had laid out. Work on the tunnel had begun in 1866. The shaft had been started on August 27, 1866. A year later, the
Sacramento Union
reported that what “many predicted it would require three years to accomplish has been done in one.”
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Even though they were through the summit, the CP had not a single aid-worthy twenty-mile stretch of continuous track laid. The line east of the summit was not yet connected and would not be until 1868. The UP had built five hundred miles of track since 1865. The CP was 370 miles behind its rival. In 1867, the CP had laid only some thirty-nine miles of track. Although it was beyond the Summit Tunnel, it was only by two and a half miles. There was a seven-mile gap down the mountain to Tunnel No. 13. Crews could not complete the gap until the snow melted. After that gap, there were twenty-four miles laid to the state line. Crocker
had managed to get locomotives over to the east side of the summit, and some flatcars and track material But that was all Meanwhile, in October 1867, Huntington wrote E. B. Crocker, “I am sorry to hear your doubts about reaching the Truckee with a continuous line this fall” Still, he said he realized “that all will be done that can be done, and I think Charles can do a little more than any man in America. And if it is not done, I shall know it could not be.”
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The Big Four were telling reporters that the line would close the gap “in two weeks, if the weather holds good.” Charles Crocker told Huntington at the end of October, “The weather is splendid now and the Wise People say we are going to have an open winter, which they also said last winter—from such a winter as last the good Lord preserve us.”
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A few days earlier, Huntington had written to “Friend Stanford” that he had just spent days in Washington getting bonds due the CP from the government. “I had to go to the Interior Dept., then to the President, and then to the Treasury.”
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He was asking for $320,000 in bonds, due the CP since its 1866 report. But the railroad had not laid enough track to justify an examination by government engineers or a grant of bonds. Huntington said, “I was determined to have the bonds if I could. I got a report from the attorney-general that I was entitled to those bonds. I got one from the solicitor of the treasury. I got two cabinet meetings in one week [where] the majority voted that I should have the bonds.”

Huntington stayed at it for nearly a week. “Well,” one Treasury official said to him, “you seem entitled to them, but I can't let you have them.” Huntington went to see him every day to demand his company's bonds. He said if he did not get them “I will sit here a fortnight.” After more wrangling, the CP got its bonds.
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But of course they had already been borrowed against, and they could not be sold at par. The CP general counsel Creed Haymund later put it, “I have grown sick and tired of hearing of the generosity of the Government. We built it for them.” Charles Crocker said he would “never have anything more to do with anything that had to be managed in government style.”
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In other words, as was so often the case, the CP was out of money. And it had enormous expenses. Building the snowsheds, for example. In November, E. B. Crocker wrote to Huntington that “you still sneer at pine lumber being stacked up on the line, but if you knew how much it cost us last winter to shovel snow out of those cuts, you would not say another word. Those snow sheds will pay for their cost in a single winter.”

Huntington was also complaining about the cost of keeping the entire labor force at work. Crocker told him it had to be. “All are anxious to complete the mountain work,” he explained, “so as to move into the valley and beyond and not have to come back to the mountains in the spring. They all understand it and cheerfully work Sundays to get through.”
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The Big Four were always looking for another way to make money. Hopkins was thinking about putting out a pamphlet in the German language “to show the value of our land for grape growing.” He thought that the Germans would rush to buy up the land once they knew that “there is no doubt that the grapes raised on our foothills make the best wine in the state.”

Stanford wanted consolidation and monopoly. He once said he expected “to see the time when there would not be more than five great companies in the United States,” and he especially wanted one single railroad. “If all the roads were operated as one road,” he said, “they could regulate prices lower than today and make money, while now they don't make money.”
55
So, through 1867, the Big Four reached out for a monopoly of railroading in California. By the end of the year, the partners owned five railroads—the CP, the Western Pacific Railroad, the California and Oregon Railroad, the California Central Railroad, and the Yuba Railroad—and were considering adding a sixth, the Southern Pacific Railroad. Most of these roads had little finished construction, but they had federal land grants and could be picked up cheap. With them, the Big Four had a near-monopoly on the railroads in California.
56

Despite the buying up of other railroads, Charles Crocker & Company was out of money. On October 28, the Big Four plus E. B. Crocker therefore had voted to follow the lead of the UP and the Crédit Mobilier and create the Contract and Finance Company. Charles Crocker became the president. The Big Four hoped to sell some stock in the new company, but as Stanford lamented, “We did not succeed in any quarter in interesting others and finally gave it up.” So each man subscribed for one-fifth of the Contract and Finance Company's stock. Huntington told Hopkins to “take as much as you are forced to but as little as you can.” The Big Four then signed a contract with the new company that gave it the right to build from the state line to the Salt Lake at $43,000 per mile in cash plus an equal amount of CP stock.
57
In addition, it would build most of the line for the recently acquired railroads.
58

It was obvious to the Big Four that someday soon the Contract and Finance
Company would be making huge profits, so they created phony investors who supposedly owned much of the stock. A half-year later, that stock was “sold” to Charlie Crocker, so that the stockholders of the Contract and Finance Company consisted of Crocker and his brother E.B., Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford.
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O
N
November 30, 1867, the grading through the Summit Tunnel was finished, the track was laid, and the spikes were pounded in. Also on that date, the first scheduled train from Sacramento arrived on the east side of the Sierra Nevada.

The next day, Mark Hopkins wrote to Huntington. “Yesterday we all went up to see the first locomotive pass the summit of the Sierra,” he opened. “It was a pleasant sight to reach such a point where a train would gravitate towards the East. For these years past gravitation has been so continually against us that at times it seemed to me that it would have been well if we had practiced a while on smaller and shorter hills before attacking so huge a mountain.” He confessed to feeling that “our UP friends were too highly favored, but still we have worked on up the mountain—the labored and rapid puff of the engine told how heavy and hard the work.”

Now, he went on, “we are on the down grade & we rejoice. The operators and laborers all rejoice. All work freer and with more spirit. Even the Chinamen partake of our joy. I believe they do five extra percent more work per day now that we are through the granite rock work.” Looking ahead, Hopkins predicted that, from that day onward, “we can trot along toward Salt Lake instead of remaining in each camp so long that the Chinese become sick and tired of it.”

Summing up, Hopkins quite rightly said that the Summit Tunnel was “a thing never before done.”
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What had been accomplished was astonishing. Samuel Bowles, in his book on riding the Central Pacific rails in 1869, says of the portion through California, “These miles of road, ascending and descending the great California range of mountains, are without parallel in expense and difficulty of construction, and in variety and magnificence of scenery, among the entire railroad system of the world.” He spoke of the cost—a million dollars in gold for black powder alone—and commented, “This mountain range, with all its doubts and difficulties and cost of construction,
reared itself at the very beginning of the whole enterprise on the Pacific side.” It had to be attacked first. Therefore, “the courage and the faith of the California pioneers and executors of this grand continental roadway rise to the front rank.”
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They had transported all their materials around South America or through Central America. They had overcome lawsuits, opposition, ridicule, evil prophecies, monetary uncertainty, and losses. They had organized a vast laboring force, drilled long tunnels, shoveled away snow, set up sawmills, hauled locomotives and cars and twenty tons of iron over the mountains by ox teams. Nothing came easy. But they had done what other capitalists and engineers and politicians and ordinary folks thought impossible, drilled tunnels through the Sierra Nevada, most of all the tunnel at the summit.

Now they were through, and, in Hubert Howe Bancroft's words, they were ready to enter into the competition with the Union Pacific. Not just for bonds and lands but for prestige. “It was the grandest race that ever was run,” Bancroft wrote. Compared with it, “the Olympics were a pretty play.” The finish line was the completion of “the most stupendous work that men had ever conceived, and one of the most far-reaching in its results.”
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It was a work that was to change the whole world.

A
S
the UP came out of Nebraska to begin its assault on Wyoming and the CP got through the Sierra Nevada, the railroads' race toward each other became the top of the news. The anticipation of a transcontinental railroad, generally predicted to happen in 1870, mounted throughout 1868. Every newspaper in America carried the story nearly every day or week on its front pages. Lecturers filled Chautauqua halls with their “I was there, I saw it” speeches. The illustrated monthly magazines, along with the heavy-think journals, featured it. E. B. Crocker wrote Huntington in April 1868, “There seems to be a perfect mania for transcontinental railroads.”
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