Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (20 page)

By the end of the first week of June, Crocker's men had laid track to Newcastle. Passenger trains began the run from Sacramento to Newcastle. There horse-and ox-drawn stages met the train and carried customers to Auburn; Dutch Flat; Steamboat Springs, Colorado; Virginia City, Nevada; and intermediate towns.

Huntington came back to California in June, to straighten things out. He persuaded the others that each man could do a little more. “Huntington and Hopkins,” he said, “can, out of their own means, pay five hundred men for a year. How many can each of you keep on the line?” They said 150 men each. The result was an agreement to keep eight hundred men working for a year.
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O
N
June 14, the Dutch Flat and Donner Lake Wagon Road opened. It belonged to the Big Four, who had paid $350,000 for it out of their own funds. It would soon be doing a million-dollar-a-year business. The owners of the Sacramento Valley Railroad, much put out, published a pamphlet entitled
The Great Dutch Flat Swindle!!
It claimed once again that the CP had no intention of going beyond Dutch Flat, that its only plan was to build to that point, stop, and make money through the wagon road. The pamphlet ignored the surveys by Montague beyond the California-Nevada border, but it did cause some consternation among the stockholders of the CP.

C
HARGES
from L. L. Robinson and others who owned the never-built San Francisco & Washoe railroad had to be met. They were accusing the
Big Four of personal corruption. So effective were their charges that the Placer County Board of Supervisors, which held some $250,000 in CP stock, appointed two of its members, A. B. Scott and D. W. Madden, to investigate the Central Pacific's books. They worked their way through the books and concluded that the charges against the company were “evidently a machination of the brain of some individual who has no regard for the true interests of Placer County.”
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I
N
March 1864, Lincoln appointed Grant as commander-in-chief of all Union forces. At the beginning of May, Grant sent the Union Army of the Potomac into the Battle of the Wilderness, which was indecisive despite horrendous casualties. But he still continued the offensive in northern Virginia, fighting a five-day battle at Spotsylvania in which he lost about ten thousand men, and he still continued after Lee. On June 1-3, he fought the Battle of Cold Harbor, losing about seven thousand men in one hour. But he continued to attack, and by June 18 he was besieging Petersburg, south of Richmond. General Sherman, meanwhile, started from Chattanooga into Georgia and by July was besieging Atlanta. On September 1, he captured and later burned the city. This victory raised Northern morale, as did the Union Navy's capture of Mobile, Alabama, on August 23. So did the early-October victory over Confederate cavalry at Winchester, Virginia. On October 31, Nevada became the thirty-sixth state. And on November 8, Lincoln was re-elected. It now appeared certain that the Union would be saved, North and South. It was up to the railroads to bring it together East and West.

T
HE
CP may have been broke, but as Huntington liked to brag, at any one time it had an average of about $1 million worth of equipment in transit. At the beginning of July 1864, the Big Four got some rare good news. Huntington had returned east and he sent a telegram from Washington informing his partners that the Pacific Railroad Bill had been redrawn and they could begin collecting their government bonds for every twenty instead of forty miles of track laid and approved by the government inspectors. There were many other favorable provisions in the bill. They were not home free, but things were looking up. Collecting what was their due from the government, however, proved to be difficult.

In November, the company put out a report on the condition of the line. The CP had some earnings, about $110,000 from passengers, the mail, and freight. Stock sales, however, were a scrawny $723,800 (not counting the subscriptions from Placer and Sacramento Counties). There was no cash on hand. A month later, Sam Montague published his annual report. Bloomer Cut had been finished but not yet tracked. He said that the 396,800 acres of land grants due from the government (but not yet granted) would bring in far more than $1.25 per acre, because it was mainly superb agricultural land. Further good news: his own survey had revealed that he could cut back on Judah's original route and eliminate several tunnels, thus saving time and money.

The bad news was that the cost of building the first thirty-six miles in 1863 and 1864 was nearly $3 million, or what Judah had anticipated spending for the first fifty miles. And not a single tunnel had yet been started. But as for the gaps, Montague had decided to bridge them with trestling, which, if made properly of pine, would last from eight to ten years. They could then be replaced with embankments, transporting the material on the cars at much less expense. Montague went on to report that the CP now had five locomotives, six first-class passenger cars, two baggage cars, and fifty freight cars.
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CP stock was then selling, if it sold, for 19 cents on the dollar. Its bonds went for half of par. Crocker, who admitted that he was suffering from severe insomnia, later recalled of the last part of 1864, “I would have been glad, when we had 30 miles of road built, to have got a clean shirt and absolution from my debts; I would have been willing to give up everything I had in the world, in order to cancel my debts.”
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The day after Christmas 1864, he lamented, “If we only had the Gov. Bonds in hand, that would help our credit amazingly, and crush out our enemies.” But it would be five months before the company got those bonds.
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The Big Four were now fully aware of the prophecy of Judah's remark to Anna: “I cannot make these men appreciate the ‘elephant' they have on their shoulders.”
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What they would do about it remained to be seen.

*
His place on the board was taken by Hopkins's brother E. B. Hopkins, who had just been named interim chief justice of California by Governor Stanford, who was also president of the CP.

T
HE
surveyors came first. It was fitting, since they enjoyed life in the open more than most men. They were like the early-nineteenth-century mountain men, adventurous, capable of taking care of themselves, ready for whatever the wilderness threw at them. They were out in front of civilization, enjoying the views, the air, the campfire, the game cooked over it, drinking pure water from the rivers, creeks, and lakes, exploring the country, mapping it. For the surveyors it was pure joy.

Nothing could be done until they had laid out and marked the line. On flat ground, with no trees, the work involved in surveying was relatively easy, but there is precious little terrain on earth that has no ridges, bumps, ravines, or watercourses. Because a nineteenth-century train could not run up or down an incline of much more than 2 percent or go around a sharp curve, the hills or ridges had to be cut through to keep the tracks close to or at the level. The ravines had to be filled for the same purpose, or else a bridge had to be strung across them. In foothills, not to mention mountainous country, the task was far more difficult.

The surveyors who went first—Dodge, Dey, or Judah—were spared the task of laying out the exact line for the graders to follow, but they had to pick a general course that would work. They had to find passes through the mountains that could be reached from the ridges that kept below a 2 percent grade. They wanted to avoid major lakes and rivers. At stream crossings, they were looking for places that could be bridged without undue difficulty. They hoped to hold the cuts and fills down to a minimum. They hoped to avoid major snowstorms that would fill the road and prevent train passage. In open, relatively flat country, they wanted to be next to or near streams, or at a place where water could be dug, since the steam engines required water to operate, as did the workers, men, and animals. Staying as far away as possible from Indians was another goal, but staying near buffalo and other animals was desirable. Most of all, the CP wanted to find a route that was as straight as possible to the east, while the UP wanted to go straight west.

The surveyors had nearly two thousand miles to cover, over every kind of terrain. They had no airplanes to provide them with a view from above. There were no helicopters, and no balloons. And for nearly the whole of the route, there were no maps. There was almost nothing to indicate settlements, for other than Salt Lake City, there were none of any size and only a few hamlets. Nor were there any topographical maps. They had nothing to indicate lakes or rivers, or the shape of the mountains over or around which the railroad would pass. Like Lewis and Clark and other explorers, they had only a vague idea of what lay ahead.

Despite their handicaps, the original surveyors and the ones who followed to mark out the line for the graders did a grand job. Nearly a full century later, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the surveyors flying in airplanes and helicopters and equipped with modern implements and maps laid out a line for Interstate 80, they followed almost exactly the route laid out by the original surveyors. Travelers in the twenty-first century driving on 1-80 are nearly always in sight of the original tracks.

T
HE
story of Theodore Judah's initial examination for the Central Pacific and his report on crossing the Sierra Nevada has already been told. For the Union Pacific, Grenville Dodge was the first man—he recommended following the Platte River to the base of the Rocky Mountains—and Peter Dey was the second. On September 6, 1862, only four days after the initial meeting of the directors of the Union Pacific in Chicago, they instructed Dey to examine and report to them “the passes between the one hundredth and the one hundred and twelfth parallels of longitude.”

Dey examined three routes west of Julesburg, Colorado. The first followed the valley of Lodgepole Creek coming out of the Black Hills, then went up and over the Black Hills through Cheyenne Pass and down to
the Laramie Plains, The second followed the North Fork of the Platte River through western Nebraska, went over the Continental Divide via the relatively easy crossing called South Pass, then west to the Green River in western Wyoming. The third followed the South Platte River to Denver and then led up the Rockies to cross the Continental Divide at Berthoud Pass.

Dey concluded that the North Fork line would be much too long and dangerous, and going across Berthoud Pass would be beyond the capacity of nineteenth-century track builders and locomotives. Although the Denver newspapers, politicians, and businessmen wanted the tracks to come through the city, Dey was right. In fact, there was no railroad over Berthoud Pass until 1926, Dey picked the route over Cheyenne Pass (later called Lone Tree Pass, then Evans Pass, then Sherman Pass, ultimately changed to Sherman Summit and finally Sherman Hill), On November 4, 1864, Lincoln approved Dey's route.

Brigham Young also wanted the tracks to run through his city. And he was, with Durant's help, a member of the UP board of directors. On October 23, 1863, Young wrote to Durant saying that he had engineers ready to lay out a route through the Weber River Canyon down to Salt Lake City, In January 1864, he asked when Durant wanted him to begin work, promised workers to make the grade and lay the tracks, and reminded Durant that in the Weber Canyon there were “extensive coal beds,” He concluded that he was “in readiness to aid in completing a work of such magnitude and usefulness as the Pacific Railroad,”
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Young's eagerness and the potentially lucrative coal deposits notwithstanding, what was needed most of all, at least at first, was a line through the Wasatch Range into the Salt Lake Valley, Accordingly, Dey recruited two fine engineers, Samuel B. Reed and James A. Evans, to head separate parties to find a passage. On April 25, 1864, Dey wrote to Reed instructing him to run a line from Salt Lake City up to where the Weber River broke through the mountains, then east up the Weber Canyon to Echo Creek, and then on to Wyoming. Dey wanted Reed and Evans to examine other routes, but he thought the Weber-Echo would be best, although he admitted “that is rugged country and there is not enough known of that region to give you more than a general outline,” Dey concluded, “As a general rule it will be safe to sacrifice distance and straight lines to cost of construction, the aim of the company being to secure a line they can afford to build.”
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That last admonition remained to be seen.

•   •   •

R
EED
headed west in April 1864, first by train to the end of track at Grinnell, Iowa, then by stagecoach to Omaha. It was an excruciating ride. In Omaha there was a rush of gold seekers trying to get to the latest discovery, in Montana. “Hundreds pass through here every day,” Reed wrote, “old men, young men, the lame and the blind with women and children all going westward seeking the promised land.” The stage ride to Salt Lake City consumed thirteen days, and he was more than glad to get there, for “I have never been in a town of this size in the United States where everything is kept in such perfect order. No hogs or cattle are ah lowed to run at large in the streets and every available nook of ground is made to bring forth fruit, vegetables or flowers for man's use.”
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