Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (49 page)

C
HARLES
Crocker promised his partners in the CP that he would build a mile per day in 1868. They hoped so. But Collis Huntington thought Crocker could aim higher. On January 1, he wrote to E. B. Crocker, “I think you do not know the importance of extending the Central Pacific east of the [Salt] Lake to the Wasatch Mts.” If he were in charge of construction instead of purchasing materials and raising money, Huntington said, “I would build the cheapest road that I could and have it accepted by the [government] Comm[ission] so it moves ahead fast.”

Three weeks later, Huntington told Charlie Crocker to build as fast as he could. “When a cheap road will pass the Commission, make it cheap.” He wanted Crocker to “run on the maximum grade instead of finishing making deep cuts and fills, and where you can make time in construction by using wood instead of stone for culverts and pilings, use wood.” If the road washed out, Huntington advised, fix it later.

E. B. Crocker told Huntington a day later, on January 22, that he had heard the UP had set a goal for itself of four hundred miles in 1868. The CP intended to do as much, but “there are four essentials: 1st money, 2nd labor, 3rd ties, 4th iron and rolling stock. The 2nd and 3rd we got here, and the 1st and 4th depend on you.” The iron that was supposed to be coming wasn't “coming on fast enough,” Crocker complained. “What you ship after June 1st will not reach the terminus of the track in 1968. We need you to send more iron, fast.”
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Huntington's letters and telegrams to the other members of the Big Four, and theirs to him, would fill volumes. He wanted them to make track faster, to get farther east, to defeat the UP at whatever cost. He would sell bonds or borrow to get the necessary money, he would buy the material and ship it to California. They wanted him to be reasonable, but meanwhile to speed up the shipments of material and to sell more bonds and bring in more money. What follows is a small sample of the exchange, from January 1868.

Huntington to E. B. Crocker, January 3: “You have been hurrying me up to sell bonds but it turns out that I am selling them faster now than you can print them. I want 3 million in the next 3 months.”

Charlie Crocker to Huntington, same date: “Everything was done that could be done with the labor we could get and we used every exertion to procure more labor the whole season [of 1867]. Therefore I console myself & say
well done.
I am confident that the same number of men and horses never accomplished more work than was accomplished on the CP in the year.”

Huntington to E. B. Crocker, January 5:

You write that you don't think that there are enough fish plates for all the iron as though that was a new idea to you. I wrote you early last summer asking about fish plates and
you
wrote back that you would not need them before 1868.

You wrote me some months ago that Charlie would write soon with an order for the number and kind of locomotives we'll want for 1868 and I have not seen it. Next week I will finish buying 24 locomotives: 12 with 8 wheels, 5 ft. drivers and 16×24 cylinders; and 12 with 10 wheels, 4 ft drivers and 18×24 cylinders, and I hope to have all of them on the way by the first of May.

Huntington to Mark Hopkins, January 6: “I have just received a dispatch from Crocker which reads ‘send immediately 300 flat cars, we are going for 300 miles in'68; must have rolling stock.' I hope you will make the 300 into
400
miles.”

E. B. Crocker to Huntington, January 8: “I met with one of the officers just in from China. He says that right after Chinese New Years (which is Feb. 5) every steamer which leaves China monthly will have from 800 to 1,000 men and he intends to send them all on to our work. Thousands more will come by sail, so we should have enough.”

Huntington to E. B. Crocker, January 13: “And then if we could find first the man (which would be very difficult) to go over and to live on the UP Road, and work amongst their men and send them over to our road. The right man could do that now. He should be found out. By all that I can learn they have a man that can lay more track in a day than any other man in the United States.”

Leland Stanford to Huntington, January 16: “We will increase the workforce beyond what it has ever been. Every one now seems to be fully up to a resolute determination. I think we can build 300 to 350 miles this year.”

E. B. Crocker to Huntington, January 22: “$705,000 in sales of bonds is splendid. We will have to start a printing mill to keep you supplied. If you think we do not understand and appreciate the importance of reaching Salt Lake first, you are mistaken. We do, so send the iron.”

Mark Hopkins to Huntington, January 27: “We don't expect to make a road of the character we have been building through the mountains, but the cheapest possible one. We will build as fast as possible to be acceptable to the commissioners. And we already know the commissioners will readily accept as poor a road as we can wish to offer.”

Huntington to E. B. Crocker, January 29: “I sold 2 million of our first mort. Bonds today and got the price up to 98 per cent and interest. I expect to go to par in the next weeks. [Completing the tunnel through the summit did wonders for the value of the CP bonds.] The UP is at 90 per cent.”

E. B. Crocker to Huntington, January 31: “As far as paying for men to come here, that will not work. They leave as soon as they get here and chuckle at the thought of having swindled us. No, the Chinese are our men. They cost only about ½ and we have plenty of men here for foreman and to do the skilled work. You say the UP have a man who will lay more track than any other man in the U.S. Perhaps so, but we will see next summer.
You send the iron along fast and in time.”

Huntington to E. B. Crocker, February 3: “I am satisfied that almost anything can be done that we really make up our minds to do and that we can build to Weber Canyon this year if we make up our minds to do it.”
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A
LL
the iron and other material Huntington was buying and shipping to California came at tremendous expense. Strobridge estimated that the
railroad line would have cost 70 percent less than it did had economy been a consideration, but the line was built “without regard to any outlay that would hasten its completion.”
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Almost twenty years later, Lewis Clement wrote to Leland Stanford on the subject of the cost of building the line, a letter that Stanford submitted to the U.S. Pacific Railway Commission, which was investigating the finances of the UP and the CP Clement said that in 1863 iron rails cost $41.75 per ton. But Congress had required both railroads to buy American-made rails only, and by 1866 the cost was up to $76.87 and by 1868 to $91.70 per ton at the rolling mill. The rails had to come around Cape Horn or via the Isthmus of Panama to get to San Francisco, then were lightered (taken by smaller ships) to Sacramento, then taken by rail (and, until 1868, by wagon or sled over the summit after Cisco) to the end of track. Cape Horn was cheaper than the Isthmus but it took longer, so in 1868 all the rails came through Panama. It cost $51.97 per ton to ship the rails through the Isthmus, which put the cost of rail delivered to San Francisco at $143.07 per ton, with more expenses to come to get the rails to the end of track.

In 1865, Clement wrote, two engines cost $70,752 at the factory, then almost $16,000 more to ship. “But their power was absolutely necessary to supply materials needed for construction; without those engines there would be delay.”

In 1868, the costs remained high, or were up. Building the snowsheds was one factor, but there were many others. It cost money, for example, to ship the men and materials around the break in the track just east of the summit. In Nevada, “everything was expensive.” Barley and oats for the horses and mules was $280 per ton, hay $120. “Water was scarce after leaving the Truckee and Humboldt Rivers” and had to be hauled for steam and general use. “There was not a tree that would make a board on over 500 miles of the route, no satisfactory quality of building stone. The country afforded nothing. The maximum haul for ties was 600 miles and of rails and other material 740 miles.”
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Of course, the UP had the same or similar problems and difficulties until it got to the Wasatch Range, but for the CP, despite the handicaps, it was heavenly to be out on the desert making a mile or more per day instead of in those accursed mountains making a foot or a few yards per day.

•   •   •

A
major expense, and a task that kept Clement working in the mountains for long periods in 1868, was making the snowsheds. It had to be done. In the winter of 1866-67 and again in 1867-68, half—and sometimes all—of the labor force had to be used to shovel the snow. Beyond the danger of the work, there was the constant threat of avalanches. Clement would send men hauling black-powder kegs to reach the threatening combs of great masses of compact snow leaning over the granite bluffs. “It required courage and determination and the call for volunteers for this daring undertaking was always answered.”
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In 1867, Crocker and Stanford had discussed the problem of snow. Stanford had taken out his pencil and begun estimating the cost of covering the vulnerable sections of the track with snowsheds. The cost was appalling, but as Arthur Brown, the CP's superintendent of bridges and buildings, said of the winter of 1866-67, “It was impossible to keep the road clear from snow or open over half the time and that mostly by means of men and shovels, which required an army of men on hand all the time at great expense.” So Stanford and Crocker decided to do it. In the summer of 1867, Brown, then thirty-eight years old, got started. That year he had built about five miles of experimental sheds, primarily above and below Cisco, wherever the track ran through a deep cut and was thus even more vulnerable.

In June 1868, when some of the snow had melted or been removed, permanent construction began. Brown had twenty-five hundred men working for him. He kept six trains constantly busy bringing on timber and spikes and bolts. He kept every sawmill in the Sierra busy and used sixty-five million feet of timber and nine hundred tons of bolts and spikes. Workers were paid top rates, $4 per day for carpenters and $2.50 to $3 for common laborers. The total length of the sheds was thirty-seven miles. Nine miles west of the summit and four miles east of it, the sheds ran almost continuously. The cost was over $2 million. “It costs a fearful amount,” Huntington said. Brown called the cost “unprecedented in railroad construction.”

There was no alternative, as Brown later said. “As the road was then rapidly progressing up the valley of the Humboldt, it became a matter of the most vital importance that the sheds should be so far finished that the supplies and building materials for construction ahead should not be interrupted” when the snows returned in the fall. The expense was increased because Brown had to keep the track clear for the traffic of construction
trains going to the front, and because of the number of men kept busy shoveling snow all through June and into July.
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On June 16, Mark Hopkins wrote to Huntington about the men doing the shoveling. “This work was commenced as early in March as the storms would permit,” he said, “and has been continued by all the men who could be found willing to work themselves blind & their faces pealed and scared [sic] as though they had been scalded in the face with scalding water.”
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When the snow was cleared away to make room for work, the CP built two types of sheds. First, where the gallery was exposed to the terrible avalanches of snow and ice from the steep and rocky slopes, it was extended back up the slope of the mountain several hundred feet from the center line of the road. Thus the galleries were built along the side of the mountains in such a way that the slope of the roof conformed with that of the mountain, so that the snow could pass over easily. Second, massive masonry walls were built across ravines to prevent the snow from striking the sheds at right angles. They were strengthened on the downside by boulders. There it was necessary to build the sheds of enormous strength by bracing them against the mountainside, framing them and interlacing them with beams and crossbeams.
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The job wasn't completely finished until 1869. The CP thought it up and did it, though other railroads, most notably in the Alps, later copied it. It was an engineering feat of the first magnitude—“the Longest House in the World.” The biggest one ran twenty-nine miles, which made it “The House Without End.” It had one hundred million board feet of lumber, and it withstood the Sierra snowfalls; in one season, sixty-five feet piled up.
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One of the problems was sparks from wood-burning locomotives that would get into the timber and set it afire. Initially the locomotives burned pinewood. The link-and-pin coupling was in use. The crews would “wood up” the tenders, from three to five cords at a time. The woodsheds were mainly beside the sidings. They were filled in September and October with a full winter's supply. Chinese gangs on work trains did the loading and unloading. When a fire got a start in one of those woodsheds, it was impossible to stop it, and it burned for hours, sometimes days. Fire was always the archfiend, because not only were all the station buildings and sheds built of lumber but of course all the trestles and truss bridges.
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