Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (45 page)

Doc Durant took it all in. He pulled at his goatee, then managed to mumble, “I withdraw my objections. Of course we all want Dodge to stay with the road.”
51

Three days later, after traveling from Fort Sanders to Omaha on the UP, Dodge entertained Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan in his house in Council Bluffs. They talked about the war, and the coming election, and of course about Durant and the UP. Dodge managed to get in some digs against the CP.

The showdown at Fort Sanders has gone into the history books as decisive, but Dodge was not yet clear of Durant. The vice-president fired off from New York a series of telegrams to the men in the field. He wanted more speed. To Reed: “Work day and night…. Increase track-laying to 4 miles a day.” To Evans: “Notify Casement that 16,000 feet of track per day won't do.” To Casement: “What prevents your doing 5 miles per day.”

On August 8, Dodge wrote Ames, president of the UP, that Seymour was still in command on the line while Durant controlled company headquarters in New York. He charged that Durant's orders were “to skin and skip everything for the purpose of getting track down, & your temporary Bridges will now hardly stand to get trains over them.”
52
Meanwhile, Seymour was trying to ruin “the finest location
that was ever made”
with his excessive grades and curvature. And he warned, “Somebody will have to answer for the
swindle.
I doubt whether a mile of Road will be accepted, with such a location.”
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D
ESPITE
all the harassment, the Casement brothers and the men under them continued to move west. The undulating double row of glistening
rails stretched on, on, on. Every twenty miles or so the Casements laid a side track. One of their workers said, “There we sorted material for the front and our engine went back to bring up material needed at the front. Then it would go back to the end of track and throw off iron, ties, spikes and bridge timbers on both sides of the track.” The side tracks were filled with supply trains bearing hundreds of tons of iron and thousands of ties.

The last terminal base, by late summer well past Rawlins, was brimming with riotous life, grotesque with makeshift shacks and portable buildings. There too was the Casements' takedown warehouse with dining room. Toward the end of track, the construction trains waited their turn, among the dining cars, the bunk cars, the combined kitchen, stores car, and office car, each eighty feet long. Among them there was, sometimes, the Lincoln Car, for Durant or other notables.

At the end of track, Casement directed the work of a thousand and more men. The track layers were the elite of the force, experts in their job, selected by the Casements for their physical strength, endurance, coordination, and ability to learn. The supply teams, three or four hundred of them, plodded back and forth along the grade, covered with desert dust, red with pulverized granite, white with soda and alkali, blue with Irish dudeens. The line of wagons toiling on, bearing ties, hay, and other supplies up the interminable grade, stretched out. On the grade, ahead of the track layers, tiny antlike figures delving, plowing, scaling, cursing as they finished the grade. Scattered throughout there were three hundred or more African Americans, former slaves. The
Salt Lake Daily Reporter
noted that, out in the Wyoming desert, “as the successive gangs of graders advance in this direction they close together until it seems as if every inch of ground was covered with men, and that there would be no room for any more.”
54

Everyone worked fast, at top speed, partly because that was what Dodge, Durant, and the Casements wanted, partly to stay ahead of the track layers or the telegraph men or to keep up with the crews making the bridges, or to satisfy an eager public and to realize the full utility of the road once finished, or just to get the hell out of that infernal desert, or most of all to beat their rivals on the CP. But, no matter how fast they went, they did their best. By 1868, for example, there were almost no Cottonwood ties, and the crews were rapidly replacing existing ones.

By the end of the summer of 1868, the
New York Tribune
asserted that
the railroad project was, and would continue to be for years to come, “the great absorbing fact of the West.”
55

For sure it drew the reporters. Durant put out a call for them to come see for themselves, and that summer they did so, in a party headed by Charles A. Dana of the
New York Sun.
They dubbed themselves the Rocky Mountain Press Club. It was a rousing success, and led to two months of good stories as well as increased sales of UP stocks and bonds. A few weeks after their tour, Schuyler Colfax, Grant's running mate, toured the road. After him came a band of professors from Yale. They were all impressed, although Jack Casement complained that the visitors were “a great nuisance to the work.” But his men laid four miles of track in one day, which mightily impressed the professors. They, like everyone else in America—or, indeed, the world—had never seen anything like it.
56

In August 1868, the track was thirty miles past the bridge over the North Platte River, almost seven hundred miles from Omaha. On September 21, the end of track was just outside Green River.
*
In a few days, the town had become another Hell on Wheels. A month later, it had been left behind. From July 21 to October 20, seventy-eight working days excluding Sundays, the Casement crews had laid 181 miles of track, an average of 2.3 miles per day. They often did three miles, sometimes five, and once (October 26, 1868) set a record of almost eight miles in one day, for which they got triple pay. They did all this in altitude as high as most mountains, in scorching sun or freezing nights, with ill-tasting water. Durant was so pleased he wired the news of eight miles in one day to Oliver Ames, declaring that the feat “has the
ring
of work in it” and was “the achievement of the year.”
57

A reporter for the
Western Railroad Gazette
told how it was done through a “barren alkali desert, with nothing but distant mountains to invite the eye or cheer the hope.” He wrote that, in the process of laying track, “there is no limit to its speed except the ability of the road to bring up the ties and rails. For the track laying a picked force of about four hundred men are employed.” The ties were carried ahead a mile or two from the supply train by horse-drawn wagons and laid by a special team. The rails were brought forward “to the very edge. Two are dropped to their
places, the car pulled by a trained horse over them, and two more dropped, and so on, while the moment they fall men adjust them exactly, others follow with spikes and rivets and others still with shovels and bars to level and straighten the whole work.” When the car was empty it was tipped off the track and sent back for another load while a fresh one came to the front. And so it went, without pause.
58

More good news followed. Secretary Browning had appointed a three-man Special Commission to look at the charges of scandal and defects in construction, charges that were widespread and widely believed. But on November 23, the commission, composed of Brigadier General Gouverneur K. Warren, Jacob Blickensderfer, and James Barnes, reported that the line had been “well constructed.” The members unanimously agreed that Dodge had picked “the most favorable passes on the continent” along with “favorable alignment unsurpassed by any other railway line.” Further, “so few mistakes were made and so few defects exist” as to be “a matter of surprise.” Overall, “the country had reason to congratulate itself that this great work of national importance is so rapidly approaching completion under such favorable auspices.”
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In early November, the end of track was 890 miles west of Omaha. Another Hell on Wheels was born, Bear River City. It was typical. Brigham Young assured the shocked Mormons that it wouldn't last long. Bear River City was just short of the Wyoming-Utah state line, on the Bear River, on the eastern side of the Wasatch Range. Meanwhile, Jack Casement reported that he was “straining every nerve to get into Salt Lake Valley before the heavy snows fall. Thirty more days of good weather will let us do it.”
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A
T
the other end of the line, at Omaha, the UP was also moving ahead in giant strides. In late November, the
Western Railroad Gazette
reported, “The first corps of workmen have arrived for building the great Union Pacific Railroad Bridge.” The contractor was L. B. Boomer of Chicago, who had built so many of the UP's bridges and was generally thought to be one of the best (if not
the
best) in the country at his job. The location would be from Council Bluffs to Omaha. When it was finished, it was hoped within a year, and the UP had hooked up with the CP (at a point yet to be determined), there would be a continuous line of rails running from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The bridge work, the
Gazette
said, would “be prosecuted with all the energy which money, men and skill can
impart to it.” The bridge would be “an immense structure” and would cost about $2 million.
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S
UCH
progress alarmed the men of the CP. Collis Huntington was the only man among the Big Four who had met Durant, and in 1868 he had sent his appraisal to Mark Hopkins: “You have no ordinary man working against you. Durant is a man of wonderful energy, in fact reckless in his energy, and it looks to me now as though he would get to Salt Lake before we can.”
62

That was certainly accurate. But even as the Crédit Mobilier paid out nearly 300 percent in one year's dividend, the UP was desperate for cash. “Money is awful tight and we have large amts to pay,” Oliver Ames moaned. “We hope to get through but things look Blue.” To Durant he wrote, “The demands for money are perfectly frightful.” Undaunted, the trustees of the Crédit Mobilier on December 29 declared a 200 percent dividend payable in UP stock, even as Ames ordered Durant to “cut off all useless expense and economize everywhere.” Ames took the sting out of his message with the qualifying phrase “where it will not delay work.”
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Durant was unfazed. He was determined to beat the CP not only to Ogden but beyond, at least to Humboldt Wells if not farther west. To do that, he needed to get the UP track through Echo Canyon, Utah, down to Ogden and, he hoped, beyond, before the winter froze the ground and covered it with snow. To that end, on December 18 he sent a telegram to Casement: “How fast are you sending men to head of Echo? We want 2,000 as soon as can be had.”
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The race was into its final stretch. The men working for the UP and for the CP, from the top on down, were in sight of each other. In late September 1868, Frank Gilbert sent a dispatch to his newspaper, the
Salt Lake Daily Reporter,
stating that General Dodge had just made a trip from Promontory to Humboldt Wells. In the area between the north end of the Salt Lake and Humboldt Wells, the UP had “four locating parties, and two construction parties of engineers, while the Central Pacific Company also have six parties of engineers between the same points. We understand that the lines of the two companies are being run nearly parallel, and everything now seems to indicate that there will be two grades if not two roads, between the Lake and the Wells.”
65

*
Professor John Wesley Powell, on his way to his epic journey of exploration down the Colorado River, arranged to take the UP from Omaha to Green River. There he put into the river and descended to the Colorado.

*
The North Platte River comes out of the Sierra Madre range, flows north until it receives the Sweetwater River, then turns northeast to skirt the Medicine Bow Mountains, then southeast out of Wyoming into western Nebraska, until it joins with the South Platte River at the Nebraska town of North Platte.

H
E
was a man noted for his firmness, intelligence, fairness, decisiveness, good looks, and ability to put the long-term interests of those in his charge ahead of their short-term gain. Like the top politicians, he had a remarkable memory for facts and figures, geography, who owed what favors or money to whom, the names of his competitors and his followers and their wives. He knew who had taken what position on this or that issue, and when, and what his own position had been.

That these are the qualities of a leader needs no elaboration. He was the perfect man to say to his brethren, when they were a thousand miles away from any settlement, “This is the place,” and make it into a garden. His people said to him that they were ready to follow him wherever he chose to lead. Had it not been for his generally feared or despised religion, he quite possibly might have been a president of the United States, and, depending on the time, a good or even a great one. As it was, he founded Salt Lake City and made it and his Mormon religion into a great city and religion. In the process, he played a major role in building the UP and the CP.

Brigham Young was a six-foot, two-hundred-pound individual, quite tall and heavyset by mid-nineteenth-century standards. He had a commanding presence. The
New York Tribune'
s reporter Bert Richardson described him as someone who had “secretive eyes, an eagle nose, and a mouth that shuts like a vise, indicating tremendous firmness.”
1

He had become head of the Mormon church when its founder, Joseph Smith, was assassinated, and he led the faithful members to near Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1846. From that point, where Grenville Dodge later lived and Lincoln visited in 1859, Young had led the first party up the Platte River Valley, then through what became Wyoming and on to the Salt Lake, where he founded the city.