Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (17 page)

Judah believed what he said. He wanted more stock. So did others. In November, he and his friends James Bailey, who had accompanied him to Washington, and grocer Lucius Booth purchased more stock (Judah was being paid as chief engineer in small amounts of stock), although not nearly so much as Charles Crocker, who, along with Huntington, Stanford, and Hopkins, “resolved [in Crocker's words] that we would go in and subscribe enough stock to organize the company and control it.”
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Each bought an additional 345 shares. Crocker eventually ended up with a hundred thousand shares.

J
UDAH
spoke of the Central Pacific as “my railroad,” but it wasn't, any more than the railroads back east he had built, or the Sacramento Valley Railroad, were his. He had thought of it, dreamed of it, laid out the line for it, gone to Washington to convince the Congress and the President to get behind it. He had invited in the men who financed it. But it wasn't his.

With the onset of winter in 1862-63, the men whose railroad it was went to work. The Big Four wanted to make big money, just like Doc Durant, George Francis Train, and their cohorts. Big money meant the same as with the UP, milking the construction. So Charlie Crocker drew up a contract awarding the Charles Crocker Contract and Finance Company and several minor companies the right to build the first stretch of the road. That would be Sections 1 to 18, from Sacramento to today's Roseville. This was later amended, but its essence remained.

It was an almost identical device to the Crédit Mobilier. The Big Four awarded to Charles Crocker & Company the contract for building the road as well as for supplying all materials, equipment, rolling stock, and buildings. Even better than the Crédit Mobilier, according to railroad historian Robert E. Riegel, was the ability of Crocker & Company “to get its accounts into such shape that no one has ever been quite able to disentangle them.”
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All the Big Four were involved in Crocker's company, but not Judah. Huntington was in New York, which became his permanent home as he raised money and bought needed equipment and supplies, leaving Hopkins with his power of attorney. Judah and Bailey protested, and Judah said at a board meeting of the CP that he openly doubted Crocker's ability to do the work. But two days after Christmas, the board awarded
Crocker & Company the contract. Two days after that, Crocker resigned from the CP board (keeping his stock) to avoid charges of conflict of interest.
*
His contract named him the general superintendent and called for paying him $400,000 for the first eighteen miles of track, with $250,000 in cash, $100,000 in CP bonds, and $50,000 in stock.

This was almost too much for Judah. He felt “his” railroad was being stolen from him. He suspected, correctly, that all the Big Four were owners of the construction company. He feared they might bankrupt the CP to profit from its building. He wondered why the CP's treasury was either low or bare while there was always plenty of money for the wagon road out of Dutch Flat, in which he had no interest.
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Judah had a right to complain and he used it often, but, then, the Big Four were also putting in their time and reputation, plus their money. In an interview years later, Crocker pointed out, “We actually spent our own money building that road up to Newcastle [beyond Roseville] and it left every one of us in debt.”
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(Crocker sold his store for the money.) Stanford was trying to get funds from cities—Sacramento and San Francisco especially—and counties and the legislature. Huntington was selling stocks and bonds in the East. But except for loans from the Ames brothers and a few others, the Big Four were operating on their own.

But operate they did. On January 8, 1863, the company had its groundbreaking event. Governor Stanford was there, and Crocker—but Huntington was in New York, Hopkins declined, and Judah was in the Sierra Nevada. Though it rained and was otherwise miserable, there was a large crowd representing every section of the state, high officials, preachers to bless the work, and many ladies. The
Sacramento Union
called attention to the stands, with the national flag adorning each end, a brass band playing “Wait for the Wagon,” and a large banner bearing a representation of hands clasped across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with “the prayer of every loyal heart, ‘May the Bond Be Eternal,'” printed on it.

Crocker introduced Stanford. The governor gave a long and dull speech, including this pledge: “There will be no delay, no backing, no uncertainty in the continued progress.” After he was done and a prayer
made, Stanford took up a shovel and turned the first earth for the road. Then Crocker turned a spadeful and made a short speech. He promised, “All that I have—all of my own strength, intellect and energy—are devoted to the building [of this road].”

The rhythmic “thud, thud,” of the CP's steam pile driver—its only modern technology—could be heard working on the banks of the American River. The little ten-horsepower driver was lifting a nineteen-hundred-pound hammer three times a minute and placing thirty-foot pilings into the riverbed at the rate of seven a day. Crocker picked up on the sound and told the audience, “The work is going right on, gentlemen, I assure you.”
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After four decades of agitation, promotion, boosters, politics, demands, concerns, embarrassments, alarm, consternation, delays, and more, the first transcontinental railroad was under way. As the
Sacramento Union
put it, “Everybody felt happy because, after so many years of dreaming, scheming, talking and toiling, they saw with their own eyes the actual commencement of a Pacific Railroad.”

N
OT
until February did the ground dry out sufficiently for Crocker to get to work making a grade for the road. The only other work actually under way was the construction of the bridge over the American River at Sacramento. Getting laborers was devilishly difficult. “Most of the men working on the road were merely working for a stake,” Stanford recalled. “When they got that, they would go off to the mines, and we could not hold them, except in rare instances, more than a very little while.” Small wonder in California, where their base pay was less than $3 a day. The
Union
announced that there were two hundred men at work on the grading, but the work they did was widely separated, and as the diggings went upriver and thus got closer to the gold and silver deposits more men walked off the job.

Crocker decided to take charge himself. He would learn railroad construction by doing it. He later said, “If it becomes necessary to jump off the dock in the service of the company, instead of saying, ‘Go, boys!' you must pull off your coat and say, ‘Come on, boys!' and then let them follow.”
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He put all of his 250 pounds into it, bringing energy and dynamism to the job. And he so loved doing it he even gained weight over the next few years.

He shortly had redwood pilings up to thirty feet long stacked on the Sacramento levee, waiting to support the future railroad bridge over the American River, along with timbers for trestles, and imported ties as well Soon the materials were coming in at the rate of a schooner-load a day. Judah, meanwhile, in New York, had ordered forty-two freight cars, six locomotives, six first-class passenger coaches, along with switches, turntables, and other track equipment for the first fifty miles of the CP—leaving Huntington to find some way of paying for them, which he did, despite having to bid against the federal armies.
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T
HE
Pacific Railroad Bill specified that the Sierra Nevada would commence where Lincoln said they commenced. This was a matter of great importance to the men paying the bulk of the cost of building the line. They decided to work on Lincoln, the man responsible, first of all through officials in California. Governor Stanford asked the state's official geologist, Josiah D. Whitney (after whom California's highest mountain is named), where was the point at which the mountains began.

Whitney set off in a buggy with Charles Crocker as his guide. Whitney felt that of course the Sacramento River was the ultimate base of the region's tilt, and thus the place where the mountains began, but the land to the east was as flat as it could be. Crocker took him to Arcade Creek, about seven miles to the east, and there showed Whitney a fan of reddish earth that came out from the foothills. Whitney said that seemed to him as fair a place to begin as any, and put that opinion down on official paper.

If the CP could get Lincoln to accept that opinion, it would move the Sierra Nevada fifteen miles west, thus bringing the railroad an extra $240,000 in government bonds.

Aaron Sargent, Judah's old friend, was no longer in the Congress but still in Washington, and he took the information to the President. He showed Whitney's report to Lincoln and argued for Arcade Creek as the beginning point for the Sierra. Lincoln said that seemed about right to him. As Sargent commented, “Here you see, my pertinacity and Abraham's faith moved mountains.” (Another report has Lincoln saying, “Here is a case in which Abraham's Faith has moved mountains.”)
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Judah was opposed. There was no way the mountains began at Arcade Creek. He refused to sign an affidavit, telling Strong he could not because “the foothills do not begin here.”
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But his protest went unheeded. The Big Four were glad to get the extra subsidy. Judah complained to Anna, “I
cannot make these men appreciate the ‘Elephant' they have on their shoulders, they won't do what I want and must do.” He went on, “We shall just as sure have trouble in Congress as the sun rises in the east if they go on in this way. They will not see it as it is. Something must be done.” But as to what, he couldn't figure. He certainly couldn't come up with the money to pay for that something. Nevertheless, he told Anna, “I have brought them a franchise and laid it at their door. Rightly used it gives them unlimited credit throughout the world, and they would beggar it!”
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D
ESPITE
Judah's misgivings, there was more money coming in. In April 1863, as Lee's army prepared to swing into Chancellorsville to fight General Joe Hooker's army, Governor Stanford managed to prod the California legislature into donating to the CP millions of dollars in state bonds, to be issued at the rate of $10,000 per mile after the completion of specified amounts of track. In return, the railroad agreed to transport, without charge to the state, convicts for prison, inmates for insane institutions, materials for the state agricultural fair and indeed for all state buildings, and state militia. Stanford also got the legislators to authorize Sacramento and Placer Counties to vote on the issuing of bonds for the purchase of stock from the railroad, as well as the city of San Francisco. In the event, Sacramento voted for $300,000 and thirty acres of city land for the CP's use. Placer gave $250,000, and San Francisco voted for $600,000.

Many were jealous of the CP and more than a few were determined to wreck it. A typical slander: “The whole matter resolves itself simply into this: Leland Stanford & Co. have … bamboozled the people out of a stupendously magnificent franchise, worth hundreds of millions …. It is to them, and to them alone, that all the benefits, all the profits inure.” To which the editor of the
Sacramento Union
quite rightly replied, “If it is worth so many millions, why should not the county of Placer become a subscriber, and thus obtain an interest in those millions?”
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Nevertheless, the sums voted for were not immediately available. They were held up by various court actions. It took more than a year and a half to get San Francisco to pay up.

W
ORK
on the railroad proceeded, slowly. Judah was out in front of the graders, laying out the exact line through Dutch Flat and over the summit.
In the mountains he was always happy. In this case, even happier, because he had hired two young engineers who were proving to be godsends. One was the thirty-three-year-old Samuel Skerry Montague, lured by Judah away from the Sacramento Valley Railroad. Montague was a rangy, slim, black-bearded New Hampshire man. He had failed at gold mining in California but taught himself location engineering. He had an undoubted skill as a surveyor and railroad man, especially with such a master as Judah to teach him. The other was Lewis M. Clement, a Canadian canal engineer hired by Judah because, like Montague, he had an ability to learn.

One day Judah sent Clement off by himself to do some surveying, to see how he would do. When Clement returned much earlier than anticipated, Judah said sternly, “I did not expect to see you back until you had finished, young man.”

“I
have
finished,” Clement replied, as he handed to Judah a complete report. Together that summer Montague and Clement helped Judah and the crews solve many of the engineering problems in building a railroad in one of the world's toughest mountain ranges.
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Down in the American River Valley, progress was painfully slow. Still, Crocker was learning. The labor problems were excruciating. Only the bridge over the river went as planned. For the rest, Crocker had to wait until fall for the first rails to arrive, which meant that some of the original grading washed out in heavy rains and had to be redone. That meant more shoveling for the graders, more loading of dirt and debris onto handcarts, more dumping, more cash to be paid out by the CP.

In the war, meanwhile, at the beginning of May 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia defeated the Union forces at Chancellorsville, and General Robert E. Lee began his preparations to invade Pennsylvania. In the Western theater, Grant began the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi. In California, despite the Union's heavy losses in battle and the perilous state of the war, work on binding the Republic together east to west continued.