Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (62 page)

With regard to the government bonds, generations of American students have been offered a black-and-white view. The bonds went not only to the CP and the UP but to six companies chartered to build the second, third, and so on Pacific railroads. In the textbooks, as in the lectures, the government was handing out a gift. Now, for those of us who were in college in the 1950s, the classes were taught by professors who had taken their own graduate training in the 1930s and had thus been brought up to blame big business for everything that went wrong, especially the Great Depression. Those professors who were not New Deal Democrats were socialists. They all knew that it helps the anti-big business case if you can call those bonds a gift.

But they were not a gift. They were loans, to be paid back in thirty years or less. The requirement was met. In the final settlement with the railroads, in 1898 and 1899, the government collected $63,023,512 of principal plus $104,722,978 in interest, making a total repayment of $167,746,490 on an initial loan of $64,623,512. Professor Hugo Meyer of Harvard looked at those figures and quite rightly said, “For the government the whole outcome has been financially not less than brilliant.”
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An automatic reaction that big business is always on the wrong side, corrupt and untrustworthy, is too easy, and the error is compounded if we fail to distinguish between incentives, for example, and fraud.

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roads went through major changes in the century and a third after they were built. And major expansion. The UP built Dodge's longtime dream, the Oregon Short Line. The CP expanded throughout California and became a major part of the Southern Pacific Company. The SP built and acquired another transcontinental line, the one Jefferson Davis had first favored, from southern California through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana. By 1900, the SP had trains operating
from Portland, Oregon, and Ogden, Utah, to New Orleans. By 1950, the track stretched fourteen thousand miles across twelve states, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, and through the states bordering the Mississippi River up to East St. Louis, Illinois.

The UP went into receivership, had Charles Francis Adams—of all people!—and later Jay Gould as its president, then E. H. Harriman, then others. But as the country turned into the twenty-first century, it remained one of the oldest and richest corporations in the world. In 1993, it acquired the Southern Pacific and named all the roads it controlled the Union Pacific.

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men who built the CP were mainly Chinese. For the most part, as individuals they are lost to history. Many of them stayed with railroad work and performed handsomely on the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, the Oregon Short Line, and others. Dodge hired them whenever he could, saying, “The Irish labor with its strikes, its dead fall whiskey shops and reckless disregard of all our interests, must be gotten out of the way.”
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In nearly every Western railroad town, there used to be a Chinatown. Mostly they are gone now, victims of discrimination and modern times.

The Irishmen working for the UP also found jobs on other railroads, or they got work at the various mines in the West. They too were discriminated against—“no dogs or Irishmen allowed”—but not so thoroughly as the Chinamen. They and their sons and daughters and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren went on to participate fully and actively and with success in American life.

Firemen, brakemen, engineers, conductors, mechanics, welders, carpenters, repair-shop men, the clerical force (male and female), the foremen, directors, supervisors, and everyone else who worked for either the UP or the CP stayed with railroads. For their careers, and so too for their children, followed by the third generation and beyond. These are the people who make up the force that made the modern railroad. They repair it, improve it, take care of it, make sure the damn things run. More than in almost all other professions, railroading is something a family is proud of and wants to remain a part of.

Railroad people are special. Like all the rest, they lose jobs, have to move, are underpaid, and otherwise have a lot to bitch about. But on the
job, they love being next to and able to run and being responsible for all that fabulous machinery. They love being around trains. More than the rest of us, they hold the locomotive in awe.

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Big Four were also railroad men, in their own way, and they managed to remain working for the railroad—small wonder considering how rich they got from building and running the CP. Charles Crocker kept to construction, serving as the boss for the Southern Pacific Railroad of California. In 1884, he brought about the consolidation of the Central and Southern Pacific roads and was then involved in the construction of the California and Oregon road from San Francisco north to Portland. He built a mansion in San Francisco said to have cost $1.5 million. It was a showplace of the city, but it was destroyed in the 1906 fire. Crocker died in 1888, with a fortune estimated at $40 million.

Collis Huntington remained a railroad king, playing his role in the CP as it gathered unto itself what seemed to be every California railroad, and then expanded nationally as it formed the SP. He tried to sell the CP to financier Darius O. Mills in 1873 for a total price of $20 million, but he was rebuffed. He was therefore stuck with running the system and remained at the head through many problems and decades. The more power Huntington got, the more outspoken his views on the proper relationship between capital and labor became, and thus the more people hated him. He embodied the dark side of unbridled capitalism. He spent much time and money lobbying congressmen to vote the way the CP and then the SP wanted—that is, against any government regulation. He ran the CP and then the SP like a medieval king.

But there was a bright side, the things he did, the work he put in, the bounce he kept in his step. His largest investment, outside the SP, was in the Chesapeake & Ohio. He had acquired it in 1869. Among other things, Huntington founded the town of Newport News, Virginia, as the deep-sea terminus for the Chesapeake & Ohio. He built a mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco and bought another on Fifth Avenue in New York. He died on August 13, 1900.

Stanford stayed in the railroad business. With his great wealth, he did other things too, including building extensive vineyards in Tehama County, California. He also had a large ranch called Palo Alto, where he bred and ran fine racehorses. He is credited with raising the grade of California
horses, and his original methods of training have been widely adopted.

In 1884, Stanford was the one who suggested organizing the Southern Pacific company under the laws of Kentucky, and, the next year, bringing the CP under its umbrella. In 1885, he was elected by the California legislature to the U.S. Senate. This came about at the expense of A. A. Sargent, Huntington's personal friend. The two men feuded. In 1890, Huntington accused Senator Stanford of using the SP's influence to gain his election, and that year Huntington became president of the SP, a position Stanford had held since 1885. Stanford remained in the Senate (where he did nothing of distinction) until his death on June 21, 1893.

Of the Big Four, Hopkins's name is known for the hotel in San Francisco. Crocker is pretty generally unknown today. Huntington is remembered primarily because of the town and beach named for him. But “Stanford” is a name known to everybody, because he had the good sense to found a university and name it after his son, who died in 1884, just two months shy of his sixteenth birthday. The next year, Stanford founded Leland Stanford Junior University. From then until its opening in 1891, he was active in setting the curriculum and picking the faculty and administration for what became one of America's and the world's finest institutions. Because of it, not because of the CP or the SP or the governorship or the long period in the Senate, Stanford's name is remembered today.

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Ames brothers have also faded from general recognition. They thought they would make money and get great credit from their association with the Union Pacific. And the railroad did commission a famous architect, H. H. Richardson, to design a monument to the two men, sixty-five feet high. It stands at Sherman Summit, right beside the grade that used to carry the tracks of the road. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, the road was relocated southward (which also cut out the Dale Creek Bridge). The monument stands today, isolated and alone even though it is but a mile or so from Interstate 80 coming out of Cheyenne and headed toward Ogden, and has its own exit on the highway. With a sign. But only a handful of hard-core railroad buffs go there, and most of them once only. In Maury Klein's words, the Ames brothers “risked their fortunes and their reputations on the grandest enterprise yet
undertaken by Americans. In return they received not praise but censure as participants in the major scandal of an age busy with scandals.”
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Doc Durant got involved in the UP not so much to become famous as to make money. More than anyone else on the line, he is associated with getting it built fast. He insisted on speed in everything. He worked hard at it constantly from 1864 to 1869 and once said he did not remove his clothes for a week. He was the one who had the honor of tapping in the Golden Spike. But he was forced off the board in May 1869. His health broke. He lost almost everything he owned in the Panic of 1873, and his grandiose scheme to develop the iron and timber resources of the Adirondacks, including a railroad from Saratoga across the St. Lawrence into Canada, failed. He lived his later years in the Adirondacks and died there on October 5, 1885, neither rich nor famous. He had made a lot of mistakes, done lots of things wrong, but this must be said of Doc: without him, don't ask me how they would have built the Union Pacific in so short a time.

Grenville Dodge rightly gets most of the credit for building the UP. It was a stupendous project and his great ambition. In January 1870, he resigned as chief engineer of the UP and soon became chief engineer of the Texas and Pacific Railway (it collapsed in the Panic of 1873) and then joined with Jay Gould in developing railroads in the Southwest. During the next ten years, he was associated with building nearly nine thousand miles of road. After the war with Spain, he was a partner in the Cuba Railroad Company and helped build the line from Santa Clara to Santiago.

The Cuba Railroad was his last. By that time, his surveys alone totaled over sixty thousand miles. Not many men, in his lifetime or later, spent so many nights sleeping on the ground. But he was also active as a railroad lobbyist and as a projector, builder, financier, and director of railroads. His record places him high among the railroad builders of the world.

In his retirement, Dodge was active in the Society of the Army of the Tennessee and other patriotic organizations. He was the richest man in Iowa, but with nothing like the fortunes of the Big Four. He lived in a grand Victorian house in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Though it was modest by San Francisco or New York standards, it was entirely fitting for Dodge, who had from his office window something that no one on either the West or the East Coast had—a view of his beloved Missouri River. He died on January 3, 1916.

•   •   •

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dreamers, led by Judah; the politicians, led by Lincoln; the financiers, led by the congressmen and the Ames brothers, Durant, and Huntington; the surveyors, led by Dodge and Dey and Judah; the generals, led by Grant and Sherman; the engineers, led by Clement, Montague, Reed, and others; the construction bosses, led by Strobridge and the Casement brothers; the railroad men; the foremen; the Chinese, the Irish, and all the others who picked up a shovel or a sledgehammer or a rail; and the American people who insisted that it had to be done and who paid for it, built the transcontinental railroad.

None of this might have happened if different choices had been made, by any one of the foregoing groups and individuals. But a choice made is made, it cannot be changed. Things happened as they happened. It is possible to imagine all kinds of different routes across the continent, or a better way for the government to help private industry, or maybe to have the government build and own it. But those things didn't happen, and what did take place is grand. So we admire those who did it—even if they were far from perfect—for what they were and what they accomplished and how much each of us owes them.

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1
J. R. Perkins,
Trails, Rails and War: The Life of General G. M. Dodge
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1929), pp. 51-52. Wallace D. Farnham, “Grenville Dodge and the Union Pacific: A Study of Historical Legends,”
Journal of American History,
vol. 51 (June 1964-March 1965), pp. 632-50, calls this story “false,” as he does nearly everything else in Dodge's autobiography and in Perkins's biography. It strikes me as true, even down to the details.

2
Jeanne Minn Bracken, ed.,
Iron Horses Across America
(Carlisle, Mass: Discovery Enterprises, 1995), p. 5.

3
Thomas Curtis Clarke et al.,
The American Railway: Its Construction, Development, Management and Appliances
(New York: Scribner, 1889), p. 1.

4
Sarah Gordon,
Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829-1929
(Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996), p. 136.

5
Quoted in Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., “Henry Varnum Poor,” in
The Golden Spike: A Centennial Remembrance
(New York: American Geographical Society, 1969), p. 4.

6
Roy B. Basler, ed.,
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,
9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55), vol. 1, pp. 5-6.