Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (41 page)

It mattered to every citizen. This was no “isn't that interesting” item but, rather, one that already had, or was destined to have, an economic effect on the entire populace. One Nevada reporter caught this in an article he wrote in the summer of 1868. He opened his report: “The gap in the great span of iron that shall wed the two oceans is decreasing day by day…. No longer is the long and drowsy journey by the way of Panama deemed safe or expeditious by the busy man whose time is as coin to him …. The long and tedious stage ride grows less each day…. The Overland route is preferable even in winter for all practical purposes of travel.” He noted, “Every day sees a huge train of sixty cars laden with timber, ties and railway iron pass Reno [Nevada] on its way to ‘the front'”—i.e., to the end of track.
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The economic benefits of the railroad (and of the telegraph, with the line being built right alongside the tracks) to the business traveler were obvious. People eager to sell products to the populace of California and the West Coast, and to buy from there fruits and vegetables, and to enjoy the minerals from the mines, could scarcely wait. The California and West Coast residents referred to everything east of the Missouri River (or, increasingly, east of the end of track) as “the States”—or, more poignantly, as “home.” They wanted to get there, if only for a visit, and only the railroad made it possible for them to get there in a week rather than months, at a cost of not much more than $100 rather than $1,000 or more.

In August 1868, a correspondent for the
Chicago Leader
wrote that it might even be possible in the year 1869 that “old men, who predicted that the road would be built, but ‘not in our time,' may have an opportunity of bathing in the Atlantic one week and in the Pacific the next—or sleigh-riding in New York on Christmas, and pulling ripe oranges in Los Angeles on New Years.”
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The story of the building of the first transcontinental railroad traveled. If it was not the top of the news in Western Europe, it was close, especially in Germany and even more in Ireland and Britain. In France, Colonel W. Heine, a Civil War veteran currently serving as secretary of the U.S. Legation at Paris, gave a lecture on the railroad to the French Geographical Society. At the urgent request of the society, Colonel Heine repeated it to a public gathering that drew a large and enthusiastic audience. He spoke of the “intelligence, the liberality and the foresight of the American Government in having taken the initiative in the creation of so grand an enterprise.” To widespread approval, he paid homage to Lincoln, “who had the honor of signing the land-grants of the greatest railroad of the world with the same pen that had decreed the abolishment of Slavery.” Throughout his speech, Heine drew cheers and ovations from the audience, who only wished that their government had the land to give away and the foresight to follow the Yankee lead. One of his remarks that drew a loud response bore testimony to “the perseverance of the men of the North, who at the time when all the world thought them lost, lost no time in organizing victory across three mountain ranges as well as on the field of battle.”
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Nearly everyone in the United States knew that, like winning the war, building the railroad was not easy. A reporter for the
New York Tribune,
sent to Salt Lake City in 1868 by Horace Greeley, opened one dispatch by reminding “even those readers who have little idea of the character of the Rocky Mountains generally” that they were not a “single long chain but a confused assemblage of elevations, and of chains of elevations of all descriptions.” Indeed, the Rockies were “Alps on Alps…. This immense assemblage of mountains is seamed and divided by innumerable valleys, and by canyons or mountain passes, a valley being an immense canyon.”
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Within the United States, the railroads received an abundance of criticism for their routes, their methods of construction, how they hired and paid a labor force, how they managed their finances, and more. Given the amounts of bonds the government was loaning the railroads, and the land it was giving away, criticism was inevitable. It centered mainly on what some reporters and politicians saw as cheap construction. They charged that the UP and the CP were failing to lay a first-class track. The UP's ties were cottonwood. The rails were substandard. The CP didn't move fast enough. The UP added miles to what was needed, just to get extra government bonds and land. The curves on both railroads were too sharp, the upgrade was too steep, the ballast was too much sand on the UP, the bridges were made of wood rather than iron and in any event were insubstantial, and so on. In short, the roads were being built too fast, too cheaply. The shoddiness was encouraged by the race set up by Congress. According to critics, the race was the fundamental error.

To the
National Intelligencer
of Washington, D.C., the roads were “simply a speculation, nothing more or less.” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., charged in the
North American Review
that the UP “was destined to be the most powerful corporation in the world; it will probably also be the most corrupt.” It would bring its investors “the largest possible profit, with the least possible risk.” Isaac Morris, a government inspector, said the road was being built much too rapidly because the temptations in lands and subsidies had been “too great for poor, avaricious human nature to resist.”
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Some editors and reporters disagreed. A Utah reporter declared: “The rivalry between the two Companies has already been a benefit to the public in the increased amount of road built in a comparatively short space of time to what it would have been if no competition had existed; and if it causes the completion of the entire road in a year's time less than was first calculated upon, so much the better.”
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The
New York Tribune
was of the opinion that the government was
saving money on the railroads, not giving it away. In an 1868 editorial, the
Tribune
calculated that, whereas the government was accustomed to paying as much as 40 or 50 cents per ton per mile to haul supplies to troops in frontier outposts, the UP had reduced that rate to less than 10 cents per ton per mile. That meant that, though the cost of government supplies in 1867 was $699,698, it would have cost $2,625,536 had the supplies been transported by wagons. The government had saved nearly $2 million in one year alone, and that in a year when the track had only reached the Nebraska-Wyoming border. Meanwhile, the value of its pub-lie lands alongside or near the railroad had gone up far more than what the government would have received for
all
its lands had there been no railroad. The
Tribune
reflected the optimism of the vast majority. “We shall look for a great stream of travel over the Pacific Railroad next year,” the paper declared, “and its completion will give a wonderful impetus to mining, settlement and industry throughout the new Territories, as well as on the Pacific coast.”
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M
OST
of the men who built the UP had participated in winning the war. They and a vast majority of their fellow countrymen in the North were well aware that during the conflict a great deal had been learned about how to build and maintain a railroad. They understood that the lessons were now being applied to the transcontinental railroad. Those lessons—or principles, as Dodge called them—had, in his words, “taught the American people that there was no problem in finance or relating to the development of the country so great that its people did not feel able to grasp and master it.”
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No problem. Not mountains, not deserts, not Indians, not finances or swindlers, not distance, not high interest rates or a scarcity of labor, not politicians whether venal or stupid, not even a civil war or its aftermath. Americans were a people such as the world had never before known. No one before them, no matter where or how they lived, had had such optimism or determination. It was thanks to those two qualities that the Americans set out to build what had never before been done.

G
ENERAL
Dodge was one who had helped bring about victory in the Civil War. He was also instrumental in getting the Pacific Railroad Bill
of 1862 and its amendments in 1864 through the Congress. He had then become the chief engineer of the UP, and as such he was going into 1868 full of hopes, plans, and ambitions. Dodge said he wished to build the way to the Salt Lake, almost five hundred miles from the end of track on the last day of 1867, and then endeavor to meet the CP at Humboldt Wells, which was 219 miles west of Ogden, and to do that in the spring of 1869. Maybe—perhaps—who knew?—the UP track layers could meet the CP at the California state line.
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That was hubris. But for the most part, Dodge had prepared the UP for 1868. To the west, he had surveyed across Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, right up to the California state line. To the east, the Chicago and North-western Railroad had reached Council Bluffs, Iowa, and with a temporary bridge over the Missouri River supplies could be gotten to Omaha at a much faster rate than ever before. Dodge and his subordinates had piled up an immense amount of rails (sixteen hundred carloads of track iron from the Chicago and Northwestern alone), spikes, fishplates, ties, and other supplies in Omaha, and had shipped enough to Cheyenne to keep the Casements and their men busy for a long time. And they in turn had plenty of men. Further, the railroad, in reaching the Black Hills, was now close to ample supplies of good timber for bridges and ties, which could be floated down mountain streams to the work itself, thus providing great relief to the strain on transportation from Omaha.

Ahead of the UP through Wyoming, there was relatively easy going. Even better news for the directors, who were as always concerned about money, was that, for the next 150 miles from Cheyenne onward, the company would be receiving $48,000 in government bonds for each mile of track laid and accepted. From there on it would be $32,000 per mile. From Omaha to Cheyenne, they had received only $16,000 in bonds per mile.

Greatly encouraged by all this welcome news, the directors told Dodge “to build as much road as possible in 1868.” He and the men working for him and thousands working for them set out to do just that.
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In January 1868, Dodge wrote his construction superintendent, Sam Reed, “You must do more hard work in 1868.”
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D
ODGE'S
plans, like those of the CP, rested on a clause in the law (put into it in 1866) that allowed each company to grade three hundred miles in advance of a continuous line of track and collect part of the government
bonds for each twenty-mile segment graded. If Dodge could lay track to within one hundred miles of Ogden, then the UP could send its grading crews as far west as Humboldt Wells.

The CP, for its part, if it could get track into Ogden, could advance three hundred miles eastward, well into Wyoming. Its problem was that the gap between the end of track at Donner Lake was still several hundred miles short of Humboldt Wells, which is what gave Dodge the thought that the UP might make it to the California state line before the CP got east of it.

Huntington had his own plans. In April 1868, he drew a red line across a map of a preliminary survey and sent it to Secretary of the Interior Browning. The line ran north of the Salt Lake, across the Promontory Mountains to Ogden, then eastward into the Wasatch Range and up a northern fork of Echo Creek. The map was fraudulent, but Huntington backed it up with a letter that lied about where the CP had its end of track. If Browning would approve, CP grading crews could occupy the ground in and east of the Wasatch. It helped that one of Huntington's lobbyists was Thomas Ewing, Jr., a former associate of Browning. It also helped that Browning had an intense hatred of the UP, or at least of Doc Durant, which he regarded as one and the same. On May 15, he approved Huntington's line as far east as Monument Point, Utah, but withheld his decision to Promontory and beyond.

Possession of Utah was at stake. “It is an
important matter”
Huntington told Stanford.
“We should be bold and take and hold possession of the line to Echo.”
Oakes Ames, meanwhile, stressed the UP's need “to build 3 miles a day until next Dec. or Jany and get to Salt Lake before the Central.” Whether the UP could do that was to be seen. The CP crowd relied on the divided counsels of Durant, Dodge, the Ames brothers, and other officials of the UP. “Ha! Ha!” E. B. Crocker told Huntington. “What a time the Union Pacific folks have. That is a trouble we do not have [because] we are all united.”
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President Johnson's Cabinet reached no firm decision on how far the grading could go. The Congress stayed aloof from the controversy. The railroads went ahead surveying as far as they could and making grade as fast as possible. Soon enough they were making grade beside each other in Utah, the CP going east and the UP going west, on parallel roads.