Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (53 page)

There were always shortages on both sides. Some were caused by the vagaries of ocean travel. “We have in Cal. 183 miles iron and only 89 miles spikes,” Crocker telegraphed Huntington on January 20, “and 81 miles iron and 75 miles spikes to arrive in sixty days. It is very unsafe to half-spike the track at this season of the year.” That same day, Hopkins asked Huntington by telegraph, “Will you send spikes by steamer to make up deficiency?”
8
That would cost more, but then, Huntington often said he never did anything until he had Mark Hopkins's approval.

S
TROBRIDGE
had a talk with Charlie Crocker. “I don't like to have those Union Pacific people beat us in this way,” Strobridge declared. “I believe they will beat us nearly to the State Line”—that is, between Nevada and Utah.

“We have got to beat them,” Crocker replied. He thought it could be done.

“How?” Strobridge asked. “We have only got ten miles of iron available.” But Crocker would not give up his hopes. When Jack Casement's men of the UP laid four and a half miles of track in a single day, Crocker said that “they bragged of it and it was heralded all over the country as being the biggest day's track laying that ever was known.” He told Strobridge
that the CP must beat it, and Stro got the materials together and laid six miles and a few feet. So Casement got his UP men up at 3
A.M.
and put them to work by lantern light until dawn and kept them at it until almost midnight, and laid eight miles. Crocker swore he would beat that.
9

W
EATHER
was against both companies, although this was mainly their own fault, because they insisted on building through the winter. The CP's grading and track laying were at altitudes of up to five thousand feet and sometimes higher. At Humboldt Wells, Nevada, and to the east into Utah, where Strobridge's graders were at work, temperatures went to eighteen degrees below zero in mid-January and stayed that low for a week. By the end of the cold spell, the soil was frozen solid to a depth of nearly two feet. The graders could not use their picks or shovels. Instead, they blew up the frozen ground with black powder.
*
The explosion split the earth into big pieces. Crocker called it building grade with “chunks of ice.” When warm weather came in the spring, he recalled, “this all melted and down went the track. It was almost impossible to get a train over it without getting off the track.”
10

Thirty-year-old Henry George, the future economist, at that time a reporter for the
Sacramento Union,
rode over the track in April and wrote that it had been “thrown together in the biggest kind of a hurry.” His train, he said, often could move no faster than an ox team.
11

Sometimes the trains did not move even that fast. In mid-February, a week-long storm came over the Sierra Nevada. The
Reno Crescent
said that up in the mountains the storm was “described as something awful.” Two CP locomotives made it across on the front edge of the storm, with enough iron to lay two miles of track, plus “sixteen cars loaded with ties, four cars loaded with bridge timber, a caboose and passenger cars.”
12
After the trains arrived, the storm hit, hard—it was the worst of the winter. Back near Cisco, a snowslide knocked out a trestle bridge and caused a blockade. Several passenger trains were snowbound, and not even nine locomotives pushing one of the largest of the CP's plows could get through the drifts.

The slides came in those fourteen miles the CP had not yet covered
with their sheds. The good news from the storm was that the snowsheds already built had held up throughout the onslaught. More good news: within a week, the snow had melted and the trains were running again.
13

For the UP, the weather was equally awful and lasted longer. On January 10, a snowstorm hit Wyoming. The wind was up—indeed, so fierce that snowdrifts covered much of the line. It took a freight train bound for Echo with construction supplies fourteen hours to make the last forty miles. Following the storm came a savage cold wave. For a week the temperature never climbed above zero, and on January 17 it sank to twenty degrees below zero. At Wasatch, a town laid out by Webster Snyder, the UP's general superintendent for operations, which was the winter headquarters for the Casement forces, desperate work was going on to board up the rough-hewn buildings. “The sound of hammer and saw was heard day and night,” wrote J. H. Beadle as he tried to drink his coffee in a cafe whose weatherboarding was being applied as he had his breakfast. But gravy and butter froze on his plate. Some spilled coffee congealed on the table.

Graders worked in overcoats, which slowed them down considerably. They blasted the frozen ground with black powder, just as the CP's graders had done. The results were equally disconcerting. When the thaw came, an entire train and the track beneath it slid off the grade made with “chunks of ice” into a gully.
14
Superintendent Reed wrote his wife how much he was looking forward to completing the job. When that happened, “I shall want to leave the day after for home, and hope to have one year's rest at least.”
15

In February, the storm that had stopped nine CP locomotives in the Sierra came to Utah. “The most terrific storm for years,” according to one Salt Lake City newspaper. When it hit Wyoming, the storm shut down ninety miles of the UP line, between Rawlins and Laramie, for three weeks. Two hundred eastbound passengers were stuck in Rawlins, six hundred westbound marooned at Laramie. The eastbound passengers were headed for Washington, D.C., to be there for the inaugural of President Ulysses S. Grant, elected overwhelmingly in November.

On February 15, Dan Casement set out from Echo to rescue them, with a road-clearing crew and a big plow. But he found the cuts filled with twenty-five feet of snow and could move forward only five miles per day at best. Then he and some others decided they would have to walk the rest of the way to Laramie, some seventy-five miles. He almost died—or,
as his brother Jack put it, “came near going up”—before he finally made it. He reported to Jack, “Have seen a cut fill up in two hours that took one hundred men ten hours to shovel out.” His men, he said, “are all worked out and frozen.” It was “impossible to get through.” As for the trains, they “can't more than keep engines alive when it blows.”
16

No one east of the Missouri could imagine what it was like. Webster Snyder said, “New York can't appreciate the situation or the severity of a mountain snow storm.” Durant's answer was to wire Snyder to send eight hundred flatcars to Chicago. “If you can't send the cars,” he warned, with his usual gracelessness, “send your resignation and let some one operate the road who can.”
17

On March 4, Grant became president even before the would-be celebrants stuck in Rawlins got as far as St. Louis. When they arrived, one of them said, “Most of us are much the worse for wear, and we think it will be a long time before we take another ride over the mountains on the Union Pacific Railroad.”
18

“Have We a Pacific Railroad?” asked the
New York Tribune
of March 6, 1869. Not if passengers were stranded in the Wyoming desert and mails detained for three weeks by a mere snowstorm.
19
Passengers stranded on the line wrote extremely angry letters to the newspapers. Fifty of them signed a letter to the
Chicago Tribune
which said that the workmen had refused to help them in any way because “for near three months they had not been paid.” Further, as far as they were concerned, the UP was “simply an elongated human slaughter house.”
20

Webster Snyder noticed that some of the letters came from employees of the Central Pacific and wrote his own to friendly newspapers, only to discover that in New York the dailies refused to print letters favorable to his company. No wonder, since their journalists criticized the UP without any attempt at balance (it was, after all, the worst storm in memory).

A
CCIDENTS
on the lines were frequent. On January 18, a new CP locomotive, named
Blue Jay,
chugged into Reno looking “prettier than a spotted mule, or a New York school ma'am,” according to the
Crescent.
Three days later, it chugged back up the Sierra, headed west with a few carloads of passengers, only to run into a stalled lumber train. The
Crescent
reported that, “bruised, broken, and crippled, it was then taken limping to Sacramento for repairs.” Several cars were smashed, “but fortunately
nobody was killed.” One construction train uncoupled in the middle as it was coming down the long grade into Reno. The front half of the train got well ahead, but then the aft cars gained momentum and hit the last car of the front half. The collision splintered eleven cars and crushed two brakemen.
21

On the western slope, two Chinamen cutting ties felled a tree across the track. They were engaged in cutting it into lengths for ties and were so intent on the work that they failed to notice the approach of the locomotive. The engineer, coming around a curve, failed to notice the Chinese. Both were run over.
22

For the UP, during the great February storm, Engine 112 was overwhelmed by its attempt to plow through the snow. The boiler strained until it could do no more and exploded from the effort. The engineer, fireman, and conductor were all killed, as was a brakeman who was crushed by an overturning car.

A
s 1868 drew to a close, for one unit of the great UP and CP armies the war had ended. The survey engineers had completed their task—for the UP all the way to Humboldt Wells, for the CP to the head of Echo Canyon. The survey parties were disbanded to cut down expenses.

Some surveyors stayed on to work with the construction contractors, and others went off to lay out lines for new roads. In Maury Klein's words, “They could take pride in a job well done.” Nothing accomplished by either company “was more impressive or enduring than the final line located through a forbidding, unmapped wilderness bristling with natural obstacles.” Anyone can see for himself in the twenty-first century by driving Interstate 80 from Omaha to Sacramento. Nearly all the way, the automobiles will be paralleling or very near the original grade as the surveyors laid it out. “In later years,” Klein wrote, most of the surveyors would look back on their time laying out the line of the first transcontinental railroad “as the most exciting chapter of their careers.”
23
It was also the best work they ever did. Every citizen of the United States from that time to the present owes the surveyors a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.

It was almost as exciting for many of the graders and their foremen. And for them, the first month or two of 1869 were the most memorable. Much of that time, the two companies worked within sight of each other, often within a stone's throw. On January 15, Stanford wrote to Hopkins
to say he thought the CP should get as far as Ogden. To claim more, as Huntington was doing, Stanford thought was “to weaken our case.” Going west from Ogden to Bear River, the grading lines of the two companies “are generally from 500 feet to a quarter of a mile apart, but at one point they are probably within two hundred feet.” Between Bear River and Promontory, the UP was close to the CP “and crosses us twice,” with other grades running “within a few feet of us.”
24

On the rocky eastern slope of the Promontory Mountains, a large gang of Strobridge's Chinese were grading to the east, while Casement's graders were building to the west. They were frequently within a few feet of each other. They worked fast, hard, all day long, even though it was obvious to them that one side or the other was wasting time, labor, and supplies. The two grades paralleling each other can still be seen, often nearly touching, occasionally crossing.

The UP's crews were mainly Irish. They tried to shake the persistence of the Chinese by jeering and by tossing frozen clods at them. The tactics had no visible effect, so they attacked with pick handles. The Chinese fought back, to the Irishmen's surprise. So the Irish tried setting off heavy powder charges without warning the Chinese, timing them to explode when the CP grade was closest. Several Chinese were badly hurt. The CP made some official protests. Dodge gave an order to cut it out. He was ignored.

A day or two later, when the grades were only a few yards apart, the Chinese set off an unannounced explosion. It deposited a cascade of dirt and rocks on the UP's Irishmen, several of whom were buried alive. That ended the war.
25
The grading crews, however, went on scraping furiously in parallel lines beside each other but in opposite directions.
*

The track layers were not in sight of each other, but they were aware of how well the rival line was doing, and they put their entire effort into the job. Never before, or since, has railroad track been laid so fast. By January, the UP's track was in Echo City, only eight miles from the mouth of Echo Canyon. The first locomotive got there at 11
A.M.
“And Echo City held high carnival and general jubilee on the occasion.”
26

There was trouble, however. The tunnel just beyond Echo went
slowly. It was the longest of the three tunnels the UP had to drill and dig in the Wasatch Range, 772 feet long with deep approach cuts. Though work had started in the summer of 1868, it was far from completed. No nitroglycerin was used, but excavating the tunnel consumed 1,064 kegs of black powder. Meanwhile, the UP workers bypassed the tunnel with a flimsy eight-mile temporary track over a ridge.