The Great Railroad Revolution (27 page)

Yet the plan worked. The scale of the operation can be illustrated by one telling statistic: Crocker spent more than $1 million on the black powder (gunpowder) that was used to blow holes into the rock, although toward the end of the project nitroglycerin, which was far more effective though more unstable and dangerous, was used occasionally. The constant explosions in the tunnels could prove deadly for those outside. There were numerous accidents, as the vibration and noise set off avalanches that sometimes buried whole work camps. One avalanche, near the Summit Tunnel, swept away twenty Chinese, whose bodies were found only after the spring thaw. Although no record was kept of the total death toll, suggesting a deplorable lack of care on the part of the company, estimates suggest that between five hundred and one thousand Chinese laborers perished on the Central Pacific.

On the Union Pacific, where conditions were easier and required less use of explosives, there were fewer deaths as a result of accidents. However, the workers faced a far greater danger from the violent conditions of the terrible temporary settlements that sprang up near their work sites. These
notorious “Hell on Wheels” towns moved along with the tracks and became dens of iniquity, violent places where life was cheap, law enforcement was nonexistent, and disease caused by the unsanitary conditions claimed many more lives than accidents on the work sites. The first of these temporary towns had been North Platte, Nebraska, where the railroad stopped for the winter of 1866–1867. As Stephen E. Ambrose has described, it soon “bulged with gambling dens, houses of prostitution, taverns, music halls, hotels and an occasional restaurant.” The residents were mostly workers waiting for warmer weather, with nothing to do but with a lot of spare cash burning holes in their pockets: “The chief entertainment came from getting drunk, getting laid, and losing all their money to gamblers.”
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Robbery was endemic and murder not uncommon, given that most of the men were veterans who were used to carrying firearms. According to one contemporary newspaper report, “Not a day passes but a dead body is found somewhere in the vicinity with pockets rifled of its contents.” Charles Savage, a photographer, provided the most apt description when he said of Corinne, Utah, a town blessed with no fewer than eighty ladies of the night, that “it was all on the wrong side of the tracks.”
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Although these accounts may sound exaggerated, their veracity is borne out by the fact that four times as many Union Pacific men were murdered in these towns than were killed in work-related accidents. Gun battles were commonplace, and the worst, in Laramie, Wyoming, during the final stages of construction, resulted in five deaths and fifteen injuries. The bosses of the Union Pacific did, at times, try to curb the lawlessness, but with equal brutality. When matters got out of hand in Julesburg, Colorado, where local gamblers had squatted on land belonging to the railroad, the Casements, supported by two hundred men, marched into town and ordered them to leave. Faced by their refusal to do so, John Casement simply instructed his men to start firing indiscriminately. When Dodge arrived later to see what had happened, Casement pointed to a row of graves and said, “General, they all died but bought peace. Julesburg has been quiet since.”
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In fact, Julesburg existed for only five months, and its only legacy was a cemetery with more than a hundred bodies.
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These Hell on Wheels towns had no equivalent on the Central, as its mainly Chinese workforce was far more docile and disciplined, helped by the fact that they mostly favored the soporific drug of opium rather than alcohol.

By the spring of 1867, all the tunnels on the Central, except Summit Tunnel, had been finished. Crocker, though, decided to bypass the tunnel so that the race across the desert could begin in earnest. He set graders to work on the other side of the uncompleted Summit Tunnel, but his plan failed because, with no railroad support to transport the rails and ties, little progress was made in terms of laying tracks during the year. The Summit Tunnel was finally completed at the end of November 1867, and, to celebrate, seven hundred guests were carried up in a special train to a temporary terminus near the summit, where, after a formal ceremony, an enormous snowball fight broke out.

By the end of 1867, five years after the groundbreaking ceremony in Sacramento, only 131 miles of track had been laid by the Central, and even this section was not continuous because the climb up to Summit Tunnel remained uncompleted on both sides. Progress had been further hampered by the need to build no fewer than 40 miles of snowsheds, at considerable expense, to protect the track. These were essentially open barns with pitched roofs built over the railroad to prevent the tracks from being swept away by avalanches. Whereas snow was the main winter hazard, fire posed a serious risk to the sheds in the summer. Built, like the station structures, out of timber, they were horribly vulnerable to the wood-burning locomotives whose dramatic bulbous smokestacks did not stop the occasional emission of red-hot cinders.

Whereas the Union Pacific, laying track by the mile, was making vast amounts of money in bonds and land grants, until this point the Central had been continuously short of cash. Indeed, historians have struggled to explain how the company remained solvent given the lack of progress, the cost of labor and materials, and the corruption. But somehow the Central Pacific survived, thanks to the machinations of the four Associates and Crocker's refusal to bow to an unprecedented threat of industrial action from the Chinese workers who continued to receive barely a dollar a day.

The spring of 1868 was to be the turning point in the Central's fortunes. The tracklayers had reached the strategically placed town of Reno, Nevada, at the foot of the eastern side of the mountains that only came into being because of the railroad and was, in fact, named by Crocker at a ceremony in May 1868. As soon as the winter ice began to melt, Strobridge sent a team
of men back up the Sierras to lay tracks on the 7-mile gap on the eastern slope of the mountain, completing the 154-mile continuous route between Reno and Sacramento. The first through train rumbled along the line in mid-June 1868. As if to demonstrate the scale of the achievement, its passengers had to wait near the summit while the Chinese workers cleared the tracks of snow. According to a local reporter on that epoch-making journey, the banks of snow were so close to the tracks that the cars scraped against them, bringing down lumps of ice. The completion of the route through the mountain was important in two respects. First, the Central Pacific was now entitled to claim the government subsidies, which began to flow into the company's coffers, greatly facilitated by the fact that inspectors made only the most cursory efforts to check that the work claimed for had been completed before sanctioning payment of the money. Second, the line could now be used to supply the work sites at the railhead, greatly improving the efficiency of the construction process.

Soon, the Central was averaging a mile of track a day—the kind of pace the Union Pacific had enjoyed on its easy stretches—by adopting some of its rival's methods. Now that the terrain was flat, the Central avoided any expensive engineering by keeping to the contour lines, even if that meant long detours and snakelike curves. After all, payment was by the mile, and no one had specified the route. Since now the cost per mile was far less than the subsidies paid by the government, it was almost as if such—quite literal—chicanery had been deliberately built into the legislation. In subsequent years, fortunes would have to be spent by the rail companies on realigning the track, but that was of no concern to the four Associates.

Another of the Union Pacific's ideas copied by the Central was the work train. Strobridge put together a similar contrivance, equipped with sleeping and dining accommodation, together with shops for carpenters and the men erecting the railroad's inseparable companion, the telegraph lines. Strobridge ensured that construction of the latter kept pace with the tracklaying to ensure he could wire progress to Sacramento every evening. The best car was reserved for Mrs. Strobridge, who kept it so neat and homely that a newspaperman dubbed her “the heroine of the Central Pacific” and suggested that her mobile home was the equal of any back in San Francisco. Strobridge's effort, however, came nowhere near to matching later
versions of the Casements' work train, which, toward the end of the project, comprised no fewer than eighty cars. A stunning reflection of the growing flexibility of the railroads, it included a bakery car, a complete feed store and saddle shop, a combined telegraph and payroll car, and even a butcher's car kept filled with fresh beef from a herd driven alongside the train as it progressed westward.

Supplied by Strobridge's trains, which echoed the modern “just-in-time” style of logistics, there was nothing to stop the Central from speeding across the Nevada landscape, memorably described by Dee Brown as “five hundred miles of white alkali beds burned by the sun, waterless, treeless, bare of vegetation except for patches of gray sagebrush and stunted junipers.” The California pioneers in their wagon trains had dreaded crossing this desert, which proved fatal for many of them, but for the railroad builders, it was an opportunity for easy money at thirty-two thousand dollars per mile from the taxpayer. So eager were the Associates to cash in on this potential bonanza that they sent surveyors several hundred miles east to Wyoming, “where they encountered the red-flag markers and theodolites of the equally eager Union Pacific surveyors.”
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Both parties sent spies to assess progress, but these were easily identified and regaled with tall tales to take back to their masters.

The desperation of both sides to lay as much track as possible led in 1868 to one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of American railroads, a vivid demonstration of how the project was animated by competition rather than cooperation. Here an unlikely religious sect, the Mormons, enters the story, as their leader, Brigham Young, had the chutzpah to sign up as a contractor with both railroads. First, he agreed with Dodge to grade a route across Utah and back eastward through to Wyoming. However, given the sparse population, the Mormon settlers who had chosen Utah as their God-given land represented the only significant group of labor, and now Leland Stanford traveled to Utah to persuade Young to grade a similar route for the Central Pacific. Young took on this second role unabashedly, having been promised that his Mormon crew would be paid double the wages of the Chinese workers. Therefore, during the autumn of 1868, two separate crews of Mormons prepared separate parallel routes across Utah, one of which would never be used, with both bills ultimately being met by the unfortunate
American taxpayer. The Union Pacific had its own mountain range, the Rockies, to contend with. In April 1868 its rails reached the highest point in the whole enterprise. Sherman Summit—named after General Sherman in gratitude for his efforts in protecting the railroad against Native American attacks—was, at 8,242 feet above sea level, a full 1,000 feet higher than the Central's Summit Tunnel in the Sierras, a fact that Dodge never tired of pointing out to Crocker. At this stage, too, the company was completing its most impressive engineering project, the bridge across Dale Creek, Wyoming, 650 feet long and 130 feet high, the largest trestlework on the line and a flimsy structure that swayed alarmingly in the wind and received sanction from the government inspectors only after the engineers lashed it down with cables. This jerry-built bridge was, perhaps, illustrative of how speed above all else was the determining factor in many of the engineering decisions made by both companies during construction, as it had to be replaced by an iron structure just a year after the opening of the line.

In one key respect, the Central's bosses were cannier than their Union Pacific rivals, and that was the way in which they dealt with the Native Americans. The relationship between Native Americans and the iron horse had, quite understandably, been a difficult one, made even harder by the eagerness of some settlers, and, indeed, their politicians, to use any attack as an excuse to launch a genocidal campaign. The recent “Indian wars” had seen massacres carried out by both sides—though the Native American death toll was far greater—and Durant and Dodge may have felt they had little choice but to arm their men in the expectation of attacks from Native Americans. They were, however, unnecessarily aggressive in their approach and made no effort to conciliate the local tribes. The construction of the railroads was, as the best chronicler of the transcontinental rightly suggests, “the Native Americans' story, too, for their territory was breached and their way of life was an impediment and they were brutally, calculatedly shunted aside.”
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This was frontier country where there were strong, at times even blurred, links between the military and railroad men, and both groups were keen on “disposing of the Indian menace.” The relationship between the military and the railroads was embodied in the person of John Evans, who as governor of Colorado had encouraged genocide, culminating in the massacre of more than one hundred Cheyenne, mostly women and children, at
Sand Creek in 1864. Despite his clear responsibility for the bad relations between Native Americans and the settlers, he was too useful as a local politician not to be offered a lucrative directorship with the Union Pacific. Such atrocities as Sand Creek inevitably provoked a response from the Native Americans that resulted in numerous attacks and hampered progress on the railroad. Dodge ensured that arms were always available to his men, but nevertheless railroad employees, especially surveyors who operated far from the main work sites, were sometimes killed.

It was, in fact, the men working on the Kansas Pacific, which was being built simultaneously with the Union Pacific, who bore the brunt of Indian attacks, and these became the origin of the myriad tales of cowboys and Indians with which generations of children would be regaled. The Kansas Pacific, also known as the Union Pacific Eastern Division, was initially sanctioned by Congress as part of the original Pacific Railroad Act with the same generous land grants and was envisaged as a branch line off the Union Pacific, connecting Nebraska with Kansas. However, the route was changed, and, rather than heading north up to Nebraska from Fort Riley in western Kansas, the line followed the path of the Smoky Hill River and then on to Denver, Colorado, taking it through the main hunting country of several tribes of Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne. The small town of Abilene, Kansas, became a crucial transfer point where herds of cattle, driven up what became known as the Chisholm Trail from Texas, were loaded onto trains heading for the growing stockyards of Chicago. Abilene and similar towns on the Kansas Pacific Railroad quickly became permanent versions of the lawless Hell on Wheels towns of the Union Pacific, and their seedy saloons were the haunts of the drovers who soon became known as “cowboys.” Sporadic exchanges of gunfire broke out along the Chisholm Trail as the cowboys drove their cattle across Native American land. It was the railroad, though, that bore the brunt of Native American antagonism, and as the iron horse proceeded westward, they directed their fire against it. They hated this “snorting, whistling monster” that violated their territory and drove away the game on which their very survival depended.
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When the tracks reached the plains west of Salina, nearly halfway between Kansas City and the Colorado state boundary, the Indians began to attack in a more concerted way. By the spring of 1867, Indian hunting parties
were regularly attacking railroad workers' camps, and the graders needed military protection. General Sherman, who was in command of military forces in the West, had devised a plan to drive Native Americans away from the route of the railroad to create a large swath of “no-man's-land.” With the military burning tepee villages and killing indiscriminately, a protracted and bloody war broke out in the Great Plains on both sides of the Kansas Pacific.