Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (8 page)

Huntington was a long way from California and from building a railroad. On the first days out of New York, his concern was with the health of his mates and fellow passengers. Except for him, they were all seasick, vomiting nearly every morning and night and always full of queasiness. They had gone around the tip of Florida and past Cuba before the sea settled down. On March 23, after eight days at sea, the
Crescent City
hove to a mile or so off the mouth of the Chagres River. Huntington went ashore in a native canoe, along with some others, to discover that Chagres was a miserable place. He managed to hire natives to get 260 people to Panama City. It took three days to get the passengers and baggage to Gorgona, the headwaters of the river—a miserable trip. The passengers had to sleep for a few hours each night on a mud bank or
slumped in the canoes. The natives had only poles to push the canoes along, and they had to be on the way at dawn in order to utilize every moment of daylight.

At Gorgona the Americans faced a twenty-mile trail over the low mountains, a trail full of potholes and fallen trees. By the end of March, the rainy season had begun and mud was everywhere. It took two days to cover the twenty miles. At the end of the trip, all were appalled by Panama City. It rained continually. Mud, mildew, and fungus oozed everywhere. Sanitation in the tent city was lacking or completely absent. Unwashed raw fruit caused epidemics of dysentery. Malaria and cholera were common, as were threats of smallpox. Vice, depravity, and selfishness thrived.
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Huntington and his companions had hoped to catch the
Oregon
as it steamed north on its maiden voyage, but they missed it and had to wait for another ship. The argonauts settled down to wait, meanwhile fighting with each other. Not Huntington. He went into business, selling his medicines (badly needed) and getting other stuff to sell. On his way from Gorgona, he had noticed ranches with food and other provisions—such as primitive cloth, rush mats, and the like—for sale. The business thrived. His buying and selling required frequent trips through the fever-laden jungle. Huntington estimated that he made the crossing at least twenty times. “It was only twenty-four miles,” he recalled. “I walked it.” What was for other men sheer agony was for Collis Huntington a challenge.

Once he varied his routine. There was a decrepit schooner on a little river. “I went down and bought her,” he recalled, “and filled her up with jerked beef, potatoes, rice, sugar and syrup in great bags and brought everything up to Panama and sold them.” Stuck on the beach at Panama City for nearly two months, Huntington managed to make $3,000.
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May 18, Huntington and his companions escaped via the Dutch bark
Alexander von Humboldt,
with 365 passengers plus crew. Once away from the coast, the
Humboldt
was becalmed. Day after day the bored passengers went through beans, weevily biscuits, tough beef, and vile-tasting water. After a week, all provisions had to be rationed. Finally, on June 26, five weeks since setting off, wind finally stirred the sails. Still, not until August 30, after 104 days at sea, did the
Humboldt
enter San Francisco Bay. Huntington gazed at one of the world's most magnificent harbors, but what he most noticed was the deserted ships. On inquiry, he discovered that, when ships tied up at the wharves, all the crew—from wherever—immediately deserted and headed for the gold.

He had made it, and in the process he earned more money in Panama than he had had with him when he started. And he had avoided tropical fever. But it had been a trip of nearly half a year, dangerous and arduous beyond description, something he never wanted to do again.

O
NLY
those who were young, physically fit, and full of ambition would dare try to cross Panama, or go overland, from the eastern United States to the Pacific. There was a third way, by boat around Cape Horn, but that took at least six months and was eighteen thousand miles long, not to mention dangerous and expensive.

Lieutenant William T. Sherman went via that route in the first year of the Mexican War, 1846. A West Point graduate in 1840, he had been on recruiting duty in Zanesville, Ohio, when the war began. For Sherman it was “intolerable” that he was missing the hostilities. He left his sergeant in charge and made his way east, traveling by stagecoach (there were no trains west of the mountains). At Pittsburgh he found orders relieving him from recruiting and putting him in Company F, Third Artillery, which was gathering at Governors Island to take a naval transport to California. He took trains from Pittsburgh to Baltimore, then Philadelphia, and finally New York, “in a great hurry” for fear he might miss the boat. He made it, along with 113 enlisted men and four other officers from the company, plus Lieutenant Henry W. Halleck of the Engineers.

The
Lexington
was at Brooklyn, at the Naval Yard, making preparation, which meant taking on the stores sufficient for so many men for such a long voyage. The War Department authorized the officers to draw six months' pay in advance, so they could invest in surplus clothing and other necessaries. When the ship was ready, on July 14, 1846, a steam tug towed her to sea.

Off the
Lexington
sailed, for the tip of the continent. On fair days the officers drilled the men in the manual of arms, or put them to work on the cleanliness of their dress and bunks, with some success. They played games, never gambling, “and chiefly engaged in eating our meals regularly,” according to Sherman. “At last,” he added, “after sixty days of absolute monotony, the island of Raza, off Rio Janeiro, was descried.” After a week in port, taking on supplies, the ship was off again. In October, the
Lexington
approached Cape Horn. “Here we experienced very rough weather, buffeting about under storm stay-sails, and spending nearly a month before the wind favored our passage and enabled the course of the
ship to be changed for Valparaiso,” At last the swelling sea at Cape Horn was left behind, and two months after leaving Rio, the
Lexington
reached Valparaiso.

There the officers replenished their supplies and the voyage was resumed. Now they were in luck: for the next forty days, they had uninterrupted favorable trade winds. Once they had settled down to sailor habits, time passed quickly. Sherman had brought along all the books he could find in New York about California, and he the other officers read them over and over. About the middle of January, the ship approached the California coast, but when land was made, there “occurred one of those accidents so provoking after a long and tedious voyage.” The navigator misread the position of the North Star, and the ship was far north of its destination, Monterey, the capital of Upper California. The captain put about, but a southeast storm came on and buffeted the ship for several days. Eventually it got into the harbor.
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It was January 26, 1847. The
Lexington
had left New York 202 days earlier. She was a United States Navy vessel, with a crew of fifty. Her passengers were all young men, fit and eager. The ship of no nation tried to stop her or impede her progress. Yet it took her over half a year to get from New York to Monterey. Her route was the only way to get any goods too large to be handled by horses and a stagecoach from the East Coast to the West Coast.

Besides Sherman's Company F, Third Artillery, there were other American military units, navy and army, either in or making their way via land or sea to California, which the United States was taking over by right of conquest. Sherman traveled up and down the coast, finding the country very lightly populated. San Francisco, then called Yerba Buena, had some four hundred people, most of them Kanakas (natives of the Sandwich Islands). There was a war on; gold had not yet been discovered.
19
But the conclusion of the war, the taking of full legal possession by the United States, and the discovery of gold, all in the next year, led to the rush to California.

The problem of getting there remained. Crossing the Great Plains on one of the emigrant roads meant more than half a year and included crossing the Rocky Mountains, then the Great American Desert, then the Sierra Nevada range. Taking a ship to Panama meant the extreme dangers of catching a mortal fever while crossing the Isthmus and hoping to catch another ship headed north at Panama City. Going all the way
around South America by ship was expensive, boring much of the time, and often dangerous. California became a magnet for the argonauts from around the world, especially from the United States, but it must be doubted that ever before had such a desirable place been so isolated.

S
TILL
they came on. One was Mark Hopkins, born on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario on September 3, 1814, who worked as a storekeeper and then a bookkeeper in New York City. About five feet eleven inches tall and weighing 160 pounds, with a straight nose and a neatly cropped beard and dark hair, he cut a handsome figure, and by age thirty-five was making a good salary. He could have been thought of as a man settled in his ways, but it wasn't so. When news of the discovery of gold reached him, he joined with twenty-five others to form a mining company, the New England Trading and Mining Company. The partners invested $500 each. With the money they bought supplies and mining equipment that none of them knew how to use.

In January 1849, they set sail for Cape Horn. It was the beginning of a 196-day trip plagued by storms, bad food, not enough drinking water, and a tyrannical captain. They finally arrived in San Francisco on August 5, 1849. The partners quarreled and soon broke up.
20
After some fruitless wandering around San Francisco and up in the mountains, looking for a spot to start a store, Hopkins in February 1850 went to Sacramento to set up shopkeeping. It was, as it happened, at 52 K Street, next door to a store Huntington had opened. Both men lost their investments in the terrible fire of 1852. Both immediately rebuilt. Out of shared interests and mutual troubles, they developed an abiding affection for each other, different though they were in ages and personalities. They became partners and switched from general-store merchants to dealing in heavy hardware for farms and mines.
21

C
ROCKER,
Huntington, Sherman, and Hopkins were part of a wave of immigration into California. The forty-niners, who came before statistics keepers from the government appeared to count them, were followed by more fortune seekers some years, less in others. In 1850, a record 55,000 emigrants, nearly all male, headed west from the Missouri bound for California. About 5,000 died from a cholera epidemic, so the next
year the emigration count was down to 10,000. But by 1852, it was back up to 50,000. By 1860, more than 300,000 argonauts had made the overland journey.

They came whatever the cost and danger, the boredom or the time lost, the misery of the journey. In 1850, the year the territory became a state, there were in California, according to the U.S. Census, 93,000 white residents and 1,000 Negroes. Some 86,000 of the white population were males, 7,000 females. They were young, more than half under age twenty-four. A decade later, by 1860, the population had jumped more than four times, to 380,000 whites. It included 53,000 “other races,” mainly Chinese, but those under twenty-four years of age still predominated. As Lieutenant Sherman put it, “During our time, California was, as now, full of a bold, enterprising, and speculative set of men, who were engaged in every sort of game to make money.”
22

Although they came from different ports and different continents and by different routes, the bulk of the Californians were young Americans who had families back east. They were accustomed to a civilized life—cities, towns, newspapers, roads and wagons, mail, industries. A bit of this was available in California, but there were no industries to serve the population's needs. There was no foundry to make iron products, especially railroad tracks, no plant to make carriages, either horse-drawn or for a train, or one to make a locomotive, or a gun, or powder. It took months to receive a letter, more months to deliver a reply.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, California led the world in technology and transportation. America and the remainder of the world followed the trend set in California. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, California had made no progress at all. Whatever folks wanted, they had to import, which was terribly expensive and took what seemed like forever.

Most of the young Americans in California were there to pan for or, later, to mine gold, or to make money, wherever and however. “Not only did soldiers and sailors desert,” William Sherman noted, “but captains and masters of ships actually abandoned their vessels and cargoes to try their luck at the mines. Preachers and professors forgot their creeds and took to trade, and even to keeping gambling-houses.”
23

There were exceptions. Crocker, Huntington, and Hopkins were storekeepers. Sherman was in the army. But what the state needed was men to plow, to harvest, to sail ships, to engage in manufacturing, to build houses, roads, bridges, and railroads.

There were few among the argonauts who had such skills. In November 1849, Sherman was ordered to instruct Lieutenants Warner and Williamson of the Engineers to survey the Sierra Nevada, to look for a way for a railroad to pass through that range, “a subject that then elicited universal interest,” But Lieutenant Warner was killed by Indians, and that cast a pall over the whole enterprise.
24
In any event, there were no rails or spikes or locomotives of any kind in California.

Nor any railroad, come to that, but one was wanted. In 1852, a group of optimistic Californians formulated plans for a railroad to run north and east from Sacramento to tap the rich placer-mining regions of the lower Sierra slopes. Captain William T Sherman was one of the group. The name of the line was “Sacramento Valley Railroad,” and stock was sold at 10 percent down. The next year, after a trip east, Sherman resigned from the army and became a banker in San Francisco and vice-president of the Sacramento Valley Railroad. But the need for an experienced railroad engineer became obvious, and in late 1853 the president of the corporation sailed to New York to find such a man. He conferred with Governor Horatio Seymour of New York State (elected 1852) and his brother Colonel Silas Seymour, who knew and recommended a twenty-eight-year-old engineer, Theodore D. Judah.