Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (54 page)

The two tunnels to the west were less than a mile apart in the canyon, perched on narrow, curving ledges above steep, rocky gorges. On these tunnels, nitroglycerin was used to speed up the work. A fifth of the tunnel men protested vainly and walked off the job. The remainder used the nitro to make the work go faster. Nitro then ripped out the tunnels at a record pace of eight feet a day.

On January 9, the track reached a tall, ancient pine that stood next to the grading in Weber Canyon. That pine marked precisely the point where the tracks were a thousand miles from Omaha. It surely deserved to be memorialized, so a sign reading “1000 Mile Tree” was hung from its lowest limb. Andrew Russell took a picture, often reproduced, and the base of the tree became a picnic spot for tourists.

By the end of January, light shone through the largest tunnel, the one closest to Echo. The headings had met. The bottoms remained to be blasted out, a job not completed until April, and not until the middle of May was track laid through it.

T
HE
CP spent January laying track from Elko toward Humboldt Wells. On the 28th of that month, the tracks were 150 miles west of Elko. After getting to the Wells, the track would run northeastward to the state line, then on toward Promontory. But Humboldt Wells was still 224 miles from Ogden, and the CP had not yet reached it.

Charlie Crocker came, saw, and threatened the Chinese crews. According to one foreman who was there, “He stirred up the track layers with a stick; told them they must do better or leave the road.”
27
That got them to working even faster.

One day, at the end of track, a supply train came up. It carried no rails, only ties. Crocker went back to the forwarding station to confront the man responsible, a man named McWade. As soon as he saw Crocker, McWade called out, “Mr. Crocker, I know about it. Mr. Strobridge has telegraphed me, and I know it was all wrong and I am sorry.”

Grim-faced, Crocker replied, “Mac a mistake is a crime now. You
know what we have been trying to do. You know how I have been going up and down this road trying to get the material to you. And here it is—and you have made a mistake and thrown us out of two miles of track today. Now take your bundle and go. I cannot overlook it.”

McWade burst out crying. Finally, he managed to say, “Well it is pretty hard on me. I have been a good, faithful man.”

“I know you have,” Crocker replied, “but there has got to be discipline on this road, and I cannot overlook anything of this kind. You must go. Send your assistant to me.”

Crocker put the assistant in charge. But, having made his point, he relented. “I let him lay off a month,” he said of McWade, “and put him back again. But it put everybody on the alert, and kept them right up to their work. And it did good, because everybody was afraid, and when I came along they were all hard at work, I can tell you.”

Discussing the incident years later, Crocker added, “It got so that I was really ashamed of myself.”
28

A
S
always, finance was a special problem for the UP. The track layers struck, for $3.50 per day. The UP had no choice with regard to these skilled workers and paid what was demanded. They, and all other workers, also got double pay on Sundays. The Mormon workers demanded $5 a day for a man and team, $10 on Sunday, and at least on paper got it, though they were not paid. When Mormon subcontractors refused work in spring sinks or heavy cuts, Casement flung his tireless Irish into the breach.
29

On January 4, Snyder had reported to Dodge, “In construction the waste of money is awful…. We are ditching trains daily. Grading is done at enormous expense. The ties cost $4.50 each on the ground…. The company can't stand such drafts as I know the Construction Department must be making…. Would like to know what I am to be paid.” Twelve days later, Oliver Ames wrote Durant: “Everything depends on the economy and vigor with which you press the work. We hear here awful stories of the cost of the work…. The contract price for ties is but one dollar.”

The bosses had turned on each other. On February 3, Durant had telegraphed Dodge to inform him before issuing orders, as always. “If you cannot find time to report here I shall of necessity be obliged to supersede you.”
30
A strange threat to be given to a man who had the President-elect's full confidence, and of whom Oakes Ames had declared, “Dodge is
a perfect steam engine for Energy. He is at work night and day.” And for Durant, Oakes had his own threat. “We must remove him from the management,” he declared, “or there is no value to our property.”
31

Such was the word from company headquarters in New York. In Omaha, the bankers were demanding their money, $200,000 in over-drafts from the Omaha National alone. Herbert Hoxie told Dodge, “We must have $750,000 and it ought to be twice that.” Oliver Ames had calls for $2 million with neither cash to give nor collateral to get it. Out on the line, where the work was being done, everyone who counted was upset. “I am afraid the Union Pacific is in a bad way,” Jack Casement wrote his wife. Sam Reed, covering forty to sixty miles a day on horseback to oversee the crews, told his wife, “Too much business is unfitting me for future usefulness. I know it is wearing me out.” But it wasn't so much the work as the financial strain. Reed added, “The Doctor himself, I think, is getting frightened at the bills.”
32

I
N
Washington, the UP had but to wait before it got ahead of the CP. The Andrew Johnson administration would give way on March 4, 1869, to the Ulysses Grant administration. The President-elect and the high command in the army were as close as could be with Grenville Dodge, and friends with the Casements along with other UP officials. Whereas Johnson's Cabinet had favored the CP whenever possible, Grant's could be expected to lean toward the UP.

It all came down to the government loan of bonds to the railroads for miles graded and track laid, and specifically down to which road would get them for the line between the north end of the Great Salt Lake and Echo Summit. Huntington had filed with the Department of the Interior his guesswork map covering the distance, and Secretary Browning had accepted it. Stanford then proceeded on the assumption that the CP's line on a map, even if little work had been done on it east of Ogden, was the true line of the Pacific railroad, and the only one on which subsidy bonds could be issued. Huntington intended to snatch them. He had filed in Washington for $2.4 million in subsidy bonds, two-thirds of the amount due for that portion of the line.

Dodge and the Ames brothers had hurried to Washington to block Huntington. They were successful, at least to the degree of persuading Browning to hold up issuing the bonds until a special commission had reported to him on the best route through the disputed territory. Huntington
responded to Browning's holdup with a curse and a comment, “The Union Pacific has outbid me.”
33

On January 14, 1869, Browning had given the commission his instructions. He ordered the commissioners to “make a thorough and careful ex-amination” of the ground between the two ends of track. If either of the lines was “in all respects unobjectionable,” they were authorized to adopt it. If not, they should make a new location. “You will also designate a point at which the two roads will probably meet.”
34

Browning's actions caused delay, which he must have intended and which was probably the best he could do as a lame duck. Oakes Ames came to Huntington's hotel room to see if the two roads could make their own settlement. Why not simply split the remaining distance between the two railheads, Ames suggested. That would suit the UP, since it would put the meeting point west of Promontory.

“I'll see you damned first,” Huntington snarled. How about the mouth of Weber Canyon? he countered. That would greatly benefit the CP.

Ames replied with his own curse. The two men broke off, met again, snarled once more, broke off, met again, until Huntington finally agreed to a joining at Ogden. Beyond that point, he swore, he would not budge.

On January 29, Stanford discussed the matter in a letter to Hopkins. The commissioners would begin their examination on February 1, he said, “and from the instructions and straws in the wind I fear this thing is set up against us. The far off distance of our track and slow progress works against us with great force. It is trying to ones nerves to think of it.”

Stanford blamed not Ames or anyone else with the UP, or Browning, but Huntington. In Stanford's view, Huntington was “trying to save what a want of foresight has jeopardized if not lost. I tell you the thought makes me feel like a dog; I have no pleasure in the thought of Railroad. It is mortification.”
35

O
N
February 16, the CP was twenty miles east of the Wells, this at a time when the UP was twenty miles east of Ogden with its track. The CP's biggest problem was not laxness on the Chinese crews' part, but get-ting supplies up to the end of track, brought on not by McWade's mistakes but by haphazard ship arrival in San Francisco and by the blockage caused by the great storm in the Sierra.
36

A lack of locomotives was not the cause. Huntington had shipped them to California almost faster than Crocker could use them. The
Reno Crescent's
editor called the roll of the new ones to make their way through his town:
Fire Fly, Grey Eagle, Verdi, Roller, White Eagle, Tiger, Hurricane, Jupiter, Mercury, Herald, Heron.
There was no apparent limit.
37

By February 29, the CP had made another twenty miles in thirteen days, which for all previous track-laying crews would have been spectacular progress but for the CP was disappointing. The line was forty miles east of Humboldt Wells, almost into Utah, but it was still 144 miles from Promontory. The UP on that date had track up to Devil's Gate Bridge on the Weber River and was thus but six miles from the mouth of Weber Canyon and sixty-six miles from Promontory. But the CP was closing the gap.

P
ROMONTORY
Summit was a flat, almost level circular basin more than a mile in width. It stood a little more than five thousand feet in elevation, some seven hundred feet above the level of the lake. It separated the Promontory Mountains to the south from the North Promontory Mountains and stood at the northern end of the Great Salt Lake, or the beginning of the thirty-five-mile-long rugged peninsula that thrust itself into the lake.

There was no terrain problem in grading and laying track across the summit basin, but getting up to it on either side was difficult. On the west side the approach was over sixteen relatively easy miles, but on the eastern slope the ascent required ten tortuous miles of climbing at eighty feet to a mile, including switchbacks. For the UP this was the last stretch of difficult country. There were projecting abutments of limestone to cut through, and ravines requiring fills or bridges. The most formidable of the ravines was about halfway up the eastern slope.

The CP had got there first. It was a gorge of about 170 feet in depth and five hundred feet long. On either side there was black lime-rock that had to be cut through, sometimes at heights of thirty feet and always as much as twenty feet. In November 1868, Stanford, accompanied by two of his engineers, arrived to see it. He took one look at the projected line and ordered Clement to lay out a new one to avoid an eight-hundred-foot tunnel through solid limestone. Clement said that was going to be an awfully big fill. Stanford agreed, predicting that it would require ten thousand yards of earth.

In early February, the CP put five hundred men, Mormons and Chinese,
to work. They were supplemented by 250 teams of horses, to pull the carts that carried the earth to the fill sites. One by one they came forward, tipped the cart, and returned for the next load. One hundred fifty feet above, on each end at the top of the gorge, blasting crews were at work. They used nitroglycerin and black powder to make the cut. They made the holes for the explosive with drills, just as had been done at the tunnel facings, or, if one was available, they used crevices in the stone. After pouring in the powder, they worked it down with iron bars.

Sometimes the bars striking the rocks sent off sparks that set off the nitro or the powder. Huge rocks were sent tumbling down the mountainside. Once a man was blown two or three hundred feet in the air. When he came down he had broken nearly every bone in his body. The same blast burned a few others, and three were wounded by flying stones. On another occasion three mules were killed by an unexpected blast.
38

It took almost three months to make the fill. It is still there today, still causing viewers to gasp and to shake their heads in disbelief, especially if they are carrying a photograph showing how the UP overcame the gorge.

Had either railroad built a causeway or bridge across the Great Salt Lake, most of the difficult work could have been avoided and many miles saved. Dodge thought about it, put enough energy into it to have the lake sounded, and decided it couldn't be done. In 1868, the lake was fourteen feet higher than it had been in 1849, when first sounded. It was not feasible to build, Dodge decided, because “the depth of the lake, the weight of the water, and the cost of building was beyond us, and we were forced north of the lake and had to put in the high grades crossing Promontory Ridge.” By the time the Union Pacific put in the causeway at the beginning of the twentieth century, the lake was eleven feet lower than when the original survey was made.
39

H
UNTINGTON
labored in Washington. He had called at the office of Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch almost every day in January, to demand the CP's bonds for advance construction work as far as six miles east of Ogden, but Secretary McCulloch was always too busy to see him. Huntington was sure the CP was entitled, because Secretary Browning had approved his map. And if the CP got the government bonds for the route from Promontory to east of Ogden, obviously the UP could not
be entitled, because the government was not going to give away two sets of bonds for a line through the same territory.