Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (9 page)

Ted Judah was born on March 4, 1826, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His father, an Episcopal clergyman, moved to Troy, New York, while Ted was still a boy. Ted passed up a naval career to go to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, where he graduated with an engineering degree. It was an age and a place of great railroad-building. Young Judah threw himself into it with gusto, imagination, and energy. From 1844 on, he was continuously engaged in planning and construction, mainly of railroads. He worked on the Troy and Schenectady Railroad; the New Haven, Hartford and Springfield Railroad; the Connecticut River Railway; the Erie Canal; and several other projects.

At age twenty-one, he married Miss Anna Ferona Pierce, daughter of a Greenfield, Massachusetts, merchant. She was an artist, a lively writer, a splendid personality, and the perfect choice as someone to help his career. She moved with her husband twenty times in a half-dozen years. They went to Niagara Falls, where he planned and built the Niagara Gorge Railroad, one of the great feats of engineering of the 1840s. In an 1889 letter, Anna Judah wrote, “Our cottage on the banks of the river, between the falls and the suspension bridge, is still there, with the beautiful view of both falls and whirlpool rapids below the bridge. He selected
the site, built the cottage, there had his railroad office and did his work for that wonderful piece of engineering,”
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Obviously he was a man of many talents, most of all for the America of his day, where everything was booming, and where engineers who knew what they were doing were in great demand.

In 1854, Judah was in Buffalo, building part of what would later become the Erie Railroad system. An urgent telegram from the Seymour brothers summoned him to New York City. He went, had a meeting, and three days later sent Anna a telegram: “Be home tonight; we sail for California April second.”

He got back to Buffalo that evening. “You can imagine my consternation on his arrival,” Anna wrote. He burst through the door and blurted out, “Anna, I am going to California to be the
pioneer railroad engineer
of the Pacific coast. It is my opportunity, although I have so much here.”

She was not about to stand in his way. He had read and studied for years the problem of building a continental railway, and talked about it. “It will be built,” he used to say, “and I am going to have something to do with it.”
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Big talk for a young man still in his twenties. But he was a quick study, hard worker, inventive, sure of himself, not much on humor, and supremely competent—which is why nearly every railroad then being built in the East wanted Judah to be its engineer. Besides being fully employed, Judah had reason to be suspicious of California—everything had to be imported, and his brother Charles, already there, had told him in correspondence something of the harshness of life there. He went anyway, not so much to build the little Sacramento Valley Railroad as to find the route, and the money, and the construction gangs, to build the first transcontinental railroad.
27

He could hardly wait to get going. In April 1854, three weeks after meeting with the Seymours and the president of the Sacramento Valley Railroad, he had swept up Anna, returned to New York, and was off by steamer for Nicaragua. The ship was crowded, mainly men searching for wealth. But Judah found a number of men returning to California, and he sat at the dining table with them, soaking up all he could about the new land. At Nicaragua he and Anna proceeded by the Nicaragua River and Lake for the Pacific Ocean, where they boarded a crowded Pacific Mail steamer bound for San Francisco. In the middle of May, they arrived in San Francisco. Judah proceeded at once to Sacramento, where he immediately got to work for the Sacramento Valley Railroad.

Until that time, no train whistle had ever been heard west of the Missouri River. Nevertheless, the Californians wanted, needed, had to have a railroad connection with the East. The state legislature passed resolutions demanding that the federal government make it possible. This wasn't calling for the impossible, for by 1854 train technology had advanced far enough to make a transcontinental railroad feasible.

The track structure of a railroad is a thing on which everything else depends. By 1850, Robert L. Stevens's development of all-iron rails in place of wooden rails with a strap-iron surface had been adopted everywhere—and in form and proportion it is still in use today. Stevens also developed the hook-headed spike for fastening the rail to the wooden ties, and connected the rails together at the ends by a rail chair, a device in the rough shape of a “u” that was spiked to the joint tie. Another development: wooden ties surrounded by ballast had replaced the stone blocks (which gave a too-rigid support). Locomotives, developed mainly in the United States, had by 1850 increased in weight and power (by 1860, they were up to forty to fifty tons, with four lead wheels and four driving wheels, thus designated a 4-4-0). New devices were constantly being added, including the reversing gear, the cab for engine driver and fireman, the steam whistle, the headlight, the bell, the equalizing levers and springs, engine brakes, and more, even the cowcatcher on the front of the locomotive. New passenger and freight cars had evolved. Bridges were built to carry trains across rivers and gorges.

It had been thought originally that human beings could not travel at sixty miles per hour, that trains could not climb an incline or go around a curve. But soon engineers discovered that they could climb a grade of 2 percent, or 106 feet per mile, and that a train could manage a curve of ten degrees (radius 574 feet). And sixty miles per hour did not harm the passengers.
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O
N
May 30, 1854, Judah reported to the owners of the Sacramento Valley Railroad that the line from Sacramento to Folsom, on the western edge of the Sierra, was more favorable than any he had ever known. There were no deep cuts to make, no high embankments to be built, and the grade was nearly as regular and uniform as an inclined plane. A railroad could be built at a cost of $33,000 per mile, including everything. He had counted the potential freight-and-passenger traffic on the route
and calculated probable earnings for the corporation. They would be huge. “With such a Road and such a business,” he concluded, “it is difficult to conceive of a more profitable undertaking.”
29
He was too low on his cost estimate and too high on the earning potential, but not by much.

In June, the
Sacramento Union,
one of the leading newspapers in the state and one where Judah had friends, reported, “Mr. Judah is pushing the survey and location with as much rapidity and energy as is consistent with correctness.”
30
By June 20, his surveys had reached Folsom. On November 30, the Sacramento Valley Railroad, financed by stock on which investors had put 10 percent down, signed a contract with a well-known firm of Eastern contractors, Robinson, Seymour & Company, for a total of $1.8 million, of which $800,000 was paid in capital stock at par and $700,000 in 10 percent twenty-year bonds ($45,000 per mile).

On February 12, 1855, actual grading commenced with a one-hundred-man workforce. Robinson, Seymour started sending rails and rolling stock on the clipper ship
Winged Racer.
It arrived in June. On August 9, the first rail west of the Missouri, and the first in California, was laid. Two days later, Judah, assisted by three officials of the company, carried a handcar to the tracks and took the first ever railroad ride in California, for a distance of four hundred feet.

Shortly thereafter, the locomotive
Sacramento
landed on the levee, and on August 17 a trial trip to Seventeenth Street delighted the delegation from San Francisco, hundreds strong, who made the journey. By January 1, 1856, the road was bringing in $200 a day. By Washington's Birthday, it had been completed to Folsom and held a grand opening excursion and a ball.
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A railroad had come to the Pacific Coast.

Over the following months, Judah worked on various railroad surveys and projects; the Sacramento Valley Railroad had a difficult time staying in business, because receipts from the placer mines west of the Sierra fell off and the population of the canyon towns diminished. He was with the California Central Railroad and the Benicia and Sacramento Valley Railroad Company, and then became chief engineer of a yet-to-be-built line called the Sacramento Valley Central Railroad.

Meanwhile, in 1856, he and Anna made three sea voyages back east, to go to Washington to promote a transcontinental railroad, on the correct assumption that only the federal government could afford—by selling the public lands it held—to finance it. By then the railroad across the country had become an obsession with the young engineer. He was ambitious,
accustomed to thinking big and getting done what he set out to do, and eager to seize the opportunity. Anna later wrote, “Everything he did from the time he went to California to the day of his death was for the great continental Pacific railway. Time, money, brains, strength, body and soul were absorbed. It was the burden of his thought day and night, largely of his conversation, till it used to be said ‘Judah's Pacific Railroad crazy,' and I would say, ‘Theodore, those people don't care,'… and he'd laugh and say, ‘But we must keep the ball rolling.'”
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J
EFFERSON
Davis's report on a Pacific railroad route came out in twelve volumes. The reports were almost as valuable as those of Lewis and Clark. They contained descriptions of every possible feature of the physical and natural history of the country, with numerous plates beautifully colored, barometric reconnaissances, studies of weather, and more. But, according to Judah's biographer Carl Wheat, “It is doubtful if an equal amount of energy was ever spent with so small a crop of positive results.”
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Newly elected Representative John C. Burch of California later wrote, “The Government had expended hundreds of thousands of dollars in explorations, and elaborate reports thereof had been made … yet all this did not demonstrate the practicability of a route, nor show the surveys, elevations, profiles, grades or estimates of the cost of constructing the road.”
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As everyone expected, Davis recommended the Southern route, New Orleans to Los Angeles. To make it happen, Davis had ordered the importing of a corps of camels to provide animal power in the desert. The United States had paid $10 million to Mexico for the Gadsden Purchase (named for James Gadsden of South Carolina, who negotiated the treaty). The Purchase included the southern part of present-day Arizona and New Mexico, which Davis considered the preferred route to the Pacific. No free-state politician would accept such a route. Nor would Judah.

I
N
1856, Ted and Anna Judah arrived in Washington on their second trip. There he wrote a pamphlet (published January 1, 1857) that he distributed to every member of Congress and the heads of administrative departments, entitled A
Practical Plan for Building the Pacific Railroad.
He
called the railroad “the most magnificent project ever conceived,” but added that, though it had been “in agitation for over fifteen years,” nothing had been done, except for Davis's useless explorations. Not a single usable survey had even been made. Cutting to the heart of the failure, he wrote, “No one doubts that a liberal appropriation of money or public lands by the General Government ought to insure construction of this railroad, but the proposition carries the elements of its destruction with it; it is the house divided against itself; it [the Pacific railroad] cannot be done until the route is defined; and if defined, the opposing interest is powerful enough to defeat it.”

What was needed was facts. Facts based on solid foundations—that is, a genuine survey, one on which capitalists could base accurate cost calculations. The capitalists didn't care how many different varieties and species of plants and herbs, or grass, were located where; they wanted to know the length of the road, the alignment and grades of the proposed railroad, how many cubic yards of dirt to be moved. Any tunnels? How much masonry, and where can it be obtained? How many bridges, river crossings, culverts? What about timber and fuel? Water? What is an engineer's estimate of the cost per mile? What will be its effect on travel and trade?

With such information the capitalist might invest. But the facts were not there, because “Government has spent
so much
money and time upon
so many routes
that we have no proper survey of any one of them.”

Judah discussed other factors, such as snow, hostile Indians, probable operating conditions, the development of locomotives, rates and tariffs, and the like. The U.S. Army would benefit.
*
Then his conclusion: “It is hoped and believed … that Congress will, at this session, pass a bill donating alternate sections of land to aid in the construction of this enterprise.”
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Judah's pamphlet was a splendid idea and an eloquent presentation. The land grant solved at a stroke the problem of financing. But although practical and sensible, it said nothing about whether the eastern terminus of the railroad should be in a free state or a slave state. Congress talked about Judah's proposal, at length, but nothing came of it. A number of bills were submitted, but sectional jealousies defeated every one of them.

Judah wrote to the
Sacramento Union
in January 1859 from Washing-ton that “there is no chance this session of Congress to do anything toward developing the Central Route. The President [James Buchanan] is in favor of the extreme Southern Route for the Pacific Railroad, and, it is understood, will veto any bill for a road over any other to the Pacific.”
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By the spring of 1859, it was clear that if California, Oregon, and the other Western territories (especially Washington and Arizona Territories) wanted a transcontinental railroad they must move of their own accord.