Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (46 page)

In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, right after the UP was founded, Doc Durant communicated with Young about the best route across America. Young sent one of his many sons, Joseph A. Young, with a party of Mormons, to do some surveys. So eager was Young to have a railway come to Salt Lake City that he paid the expenses of the party. Joseph Young reported on a number of routes, but the one he liked best, and the one eventually picked by Dodge, was up Weber Canyon and then Echo Creek. When Samuel Reed came to check this out the next year, 1864, he reported that the line was much more favorable than had been anticipated.
2
Brigham Young was thus involved from the beginning with the route to be followed by the Union Pacific. He was also one of the original shareholders. He bought five shares and, wonder of wonders, actually paid in full for them. So from the first he had been an enthusiastic promoter.

But there was a widespread rumor among the “Gentiles” (as Mormons called non-Mormons) that Young's opposition to commercial intercourse with outsiders, along with his disapproval of efforts to mine precious metals in Utah, made him a railroad opponent. That was the opposite of the truth. According to a contemporary Mormon historian, during the original Mormon crossing of the plains to Salt Lake Valley, Young had pointed to where the railroad tracks would one day run. In 1852, he had signed a memorial to Congress asking for a transcontinental railroad. In a December 1853 letter to Congress, he remarked, of the prospective road, “Pass where it will, we cannot fail to be benefitted by it.” He became a friend of Samuel Reed, and helped the UP do its surveys, and referred to the telegraph and the railroad as the two “great discoveries of our age.” In January 1866, he told the Utah legislature that the want of a railroad was “sensibly felt” and that its completion was “to be viewed as very desirable.”
3

In August 1866, he wrote to Reed to congratulate the UP. “We watch its progress Westward with great interest,” he said in his telegram, “as every mile of track which is laid lessens the weary distance which stretches on every side of us.” Dodge sent Young a query about the route.
Young replied that it was “impracticable” to run a line through the desert in the winter. Dodge had asked what had happened to the camels Jefferson Davis had imported when he was secretary of war, hoping to use them as pack animals for the construction. “There are no camels here,” Young replied (they had gone wild and were living in New Mexico), but he would do whatever he could to help the railroad.
4

In 1867, as the railroad got closer to Salt Lake City, Young said, “This gigantic work will increase intercourse, and it is to be hoped, soften prejudices, and bind the country together,”
5

A
S
the head of the church and the power behind politics in a state that was heavily Mormon, Young had nothing to fear, as he well knew. If it was not true that nothing happened in Utah until Young had given it his blessing, it almost was. He had, for example, long emphasized the value of a community that combined agriculture with manufacturing. He wanted commodities made at home, and for the most part got them. He urged his people to strive for independence, and they did.

As a religious leader he had a gift. He sent his disciples out to recruit, especially in England, He urged the converts to come to Utah to participate with the community of Saints in a full life, and they did. In 1867 alone, for example, some five thousand adults came to Zion, mainly from England. By that time, they could ride from New York City to Omaha for $25 for each adult, and from Omaha to North Platte for $10. There Young had wagons pulled by oxen waiting for them (in 1868, when the UP track ran past Laramie, a record number of wagons, 534, were sent forward from Utah to bring them in). Young estimated the total cost per immigrant from Liverpool to the UP's rail terminus to be $65, much lower than the cost of crossing the Plains before the railroad.
6

Besides bringing in converted immigrants at the lowest price, the railroad made it possible for Utah residents to go back east to shop, buy, visit, convert others. In addition, they could import heavy or difficult-to-make manufactured goods and thereby lower their price too. In this they were just like Californians, or for that matter anyone living west of the Missouri River. And they could ship their products to a ready, indeed eager, market. In 1867 alone, for example, the people of Utah harvested eighty thousand acres of cereal crops, along with seven thousand acres of root crops, and a thousand acres of orchard produce.

So Young was keenly aware of the benefits the railroad would bring his people. In February 1868, he told the legislature that, if all went well, within two years “the solitude of our mountain fastness will be broken by the shrill snort of the iron horse.” But although he clearly wanted the road and as soon as possible, critics back east of the Missouri River predicted that the coming of the railroad to Utah would bring a much-desired end to the Mormon way of life—namely, polygamy. In the spring of 1868, the
Chicago Republican
had a lead editorial entitled “Mormonism Doomed.” The newspaper said the country would soon see that “happy time” when polygamy was gone from the land, thanks to the railroad, which would bring in Gentiles who would soon “overflow and engulf Utah slowly and surely.” The
Deseret News,
commenting on the editorial, thought it cheeky if not worse for a Chicago paper to teach morality to the citizens of Salt Lake City. Like Young, the editor of the
Deseret News
had no fear of the outside world, and was ready to welcome it.
7

R
EASONS
to welcome the railroad went beyond getting converted immigrants to Salt Lake City faster and cheaper, beyond importing bulky manufactured goods at less cost, beyond shipping agricultural products to market, beyond making it possible for Utah residents to pay visits to family and friends back east. There was, in addition, the hope that when regular train service east and west was inaugurated Salt Lake City would become a major tourist center.
*
There were other factors, but most of all there were two needs that came together. The lack of circulating medium (cash money) in Utah meant that the Mormons badly needed work that would be paid for and the cash that went with it, and the lack of labor in the West meant that the UP and the CP badly needed workers.

In the summer of 1867, Brigham Young, Jr., and his family returned from a trip to Europe. In Chicago, at the end of July, some officials of the UP invited him to ride with them to the end of track. They included Sidney Dillon, a director and head of the Crédit Mobilier, Senator John Sherman, and investor Jacob Cox, governor of Ohio, so naturally Young, Jr., accepted. Of course they talked while riding the rails, and Young
noted in his diary that Dillon “wants our assistance in laying out the U.P.R.R. and building the road.” Sherman and the others “were anxious to awaken a real interest in the minds of our people to push this railroad through our Territory.”
8
No agreements were reached, or even broached, but a positive contact had been made.

B
Y
the spring of 1868, the UP was beginning its push across Wyoming while its surveyors were well into Utah and even beyond. The track had reached Evanston (named for UP engineer and surveyor Evans), on the edge of the Utah border, which had been picked by Dodge as a division point for the railroad. The UP's need for competent, trustworthy workers was critical. Without them, the company might as well give up on any thought of beating the CP to the Salt Lake. For the Mormons, mean-while, with lots of young men who were eager for work and desperately short of money, the spring brought with it another plague of grasshoppers. The insects were consuming the newly planted crops.

On May 6, 1868, Durant sent a telegram from Fort Sanders to Young in Salt Lake City. With that telegram, the Doctor saved himself and the company from the ignominy of losing the race so badly as to become an object of derision. Of all the countless things Durant did for and against himself and the UP, for all the wonders he wrought, for all his meddling and interference and mistakes, nothing could match this telegram. Doc knew whom he needed and how much he needed them and he didn't care what it cost. He was willing, even eager, to bet all in order to win all. Not that he ever had any intention of paying up on the debt he encountered when his bet was taken.

The telegram to Young began, “Are you disposed to take contract for a portion or all our grading between head of Echo Canyon and Salt Lake if so please name price per cubic yard.” The UP would provide the Mormons with “powder, steel and tools as you require at cost and transportation. Work to be done this season.” If Young's reply was affirmative, Doc said he would send Reed and Seymour to Salt Lake City to arrange details, “so that work may be commenced at once.”
9

A remarkable offer. Young could name his price and set other conditions. What Durant wanted was work, to be started “at once.” Doc was leading one of the two biggest corporations in the United States. He was engaged in a construction campaign that had no parallel. Nothing built
in America—or, indeed, in the world—had ever been done on such a scale. Furthermore, the race with the CP was like a war. Every effort by Durant and the UP bosses, as every effort by Huntington and the other CP bosses, was bent to winning. Neither the directors nor those who worked for them or, come to that, those who put up the money cared what it cost. Win now, pay later, was the motto, just as it had been for the North in the Civil War.

Young answered Durant's telegram within an hour of its receipt. Yes, he said.
10

Seymour and Reed went straight to Salt Lake City and negotiated. Young agreed that the Mormons would grade from the head of Echo Canyon toward the Salt Lake (some fifty-four miles). Work was to commence in ten days and be completed by November 1. The UP would carry men, teams, and tools from Omaha for free, and provide powder, steel, shovels, picks, sledges, wheelbarrows, scrapers, crowbars, and other necessary tools at cost plus freight charges.

The Mormons would receive 30 cents a cubic yard for excavations when the earth was hauled less than two hundred feet away, and 50 cents for longer hauls. Cuts made through hard materials were scaled at higher prices. Tunneling was $15 a yard. The UP would pay labor costs on a monthly basis (with 80 percent paid on the 20th of each month). Young wanted $2 and up per day per worker, depending on their talents.

The contract was drawn, and on May 19, Young gave Seymour and Reed a letter. In it he said he had “carefully examined the figures you are accustomed to giving to grading and masonry work” and was ready to sign if the UP would add 10 percent to the figures, but only if the UP was prepared to give him the contract for building the grade from the mouth of Weber Canyon around the Salt Lake, whether the railroad went south or north. He also wanted Reed to make a depot at the mouth of Echo Canyon to handle the supplies. In return, he promised as many as five thousand men, all ready to take orders and go to work.
11

The contract was signed. Young put notices in the two Salt Lake City newspapers (the
Daily Reporter
and the
Deseret News)
calling on all the men who wanted work to report to three of his sons, who were ready to hire. Commenting on a surplus of labor in and around the city, caused mainly by the grasshopper infestation, Young said it was a godsend that the Mormons could turn a surplus of labor into money. The
Deseret News
stressed that Mormon boys could now find work close to home, and another
commentator remarked that the contract would “obviate the necessity of some few thousand strangers being brought here, to mix and interfere with the settlers, of that class of men who take pleasure in making disturbance wherever they go.”
12
Some few days later, four thousand men had responded to the call However, rumor had it that as many as ten thousand would be needed, and the Mormons continued to show up.

They came from the farms around the Salt Lake. Orson Hyde of Springtown, Utah, wrote Young on May 27, 1868: “Much of our wheat in this settlement is eaten off by the grasshoppers; consequently, several are ready to go to work on the rail road.” From Spring City Ward, Andrew Jenson wrote, “Crops destroyed by grasshoppers and people to R[ail] R[oad].” Lewis Barney wrote that the “country was full of grasshoppers and every thing devoured by them and not a morsel of bread to be had to sustain life. Consequently [I went] to work for the railroad.” A good thing too, for Barney was cutting timber for ties and bridges and “I cleared 500 dollars through the summer.”
13

Young sent a telegram to Reed (then at the UP's end of track in Wyoming) asking him to send “at your earliest convenience” such additional supplies “as your judgment may deem necessary for putting a large force of hands at work at once, for I am anxious to complete the work in time, and the days are passing.”
14
They were burning daylight, wasting time, and he wanted to get going.

On May 31, from Weber Canyon, Reed sent a telegram to Durant demanding “tools for five thousand men from Salt Lake Valley, men ready to commence work as soon as tools are received.”
15
A week later, the first group of westbound Mormon converts from Liverpool came to New York and got on the train; they arrived in Wyoming before June was out. By then another group was en route, with yet another to follow. The total emigration from Europe for Salt Lake City in 1868 was 3,232, mainly from Great Britain, and nearly all ready to go to work.
16

Y
OUNG
had his critics, although few lived in Utah. In the East, they charged that Young was favoring his sons and closest associates as subcontractors, that he was getting a tithe from every laborer, supposedly for the Mormon church but, as one editor of a newspaper knew, that was “just another name for Brigham Young,” who was otherwise enriching himself. The
Cincinnati Commercial
charged that, whereas Young's contract
called for 30 cents per yard for work done, he gave only 27 cents to his subcontractors “and the Prophet [Young] pockets the odd million.” The
Cheyenne Daily Leader
on June 15, 1868, charged that the contract between Young and the UP was “outright slavery.” It claimed that Young called for manpower from each Mormon settlement according to its population, and the draftees had to work at wages set by Young. Further, the
Leader
believed the UP had denied work to Wyoming residents because it was “the settled policy of the railroad company to give large contracts to Brigham.”
17