The Great Railroad Revolution (28 page)

The tracks became a forbidden area for Native Americans, and the more bloodthirsty military commanders simply ordered the killing of any found near the railroad. The skirmishes had little of the romance of the westerns that immortalized them but rather were short, bloody battles that left many dead and maimed on both sides. Dee Brown suggests it was the railroad workers, often unarmed, who bore the brunt of the attacks, but their story has largely been left untold: “A few hundred railroad workers in Kansas and Nebraska probably took more punishment from Indians than did all the thousands of cowboys from Texas to Montana.”
²³
The reality of the situation is hard to extract from the myths and tales that have formed the huge canon of western films and books.

The Indians at times managed to derail trains, but they could never inflict permanent damage on the iron road. Nevertheless, they aroused such fear that the Kansas Pacific took to distributing guns to its passengers. As the military resistance on the Kansas Pacific intensified, groups of Indian raiders shifted their operations to the Union Pacific, but they achieved only one notable success, the ambush at Plum Creek in August 1867. A team of repair workers, including a Briton, William Thompson, was sent to Plum Creek in Nebraska on a handcar to investigate a break in the line. There had not been any Indian activity in the area, so they were taken by surprise when they were ambushed by a group of Cheyenne who had cut the telegraph wires as well as ripped up a section of track. Thompson's four colleagues were killed instantly, and he was shot, knocked to the ground, and scalped. He survived by playing dead and watched helplessly as the following train was derailed and plunged down the embankment, killing the two-man crew. Although the pain from his skull was excruciating, Thompson took advantage of the Cheyennes' interest in the loot from the freight wagons to escape. Picking up his scalp, which they had dropped, he hid for a while and then,
remarkably, jogged back the fifteen miles along the track to Willow Island, the nearest station. He had kept his scalp in a bucket of water, hoping that a doctor would be able to stitch it back, but his effort was to no avail, and it resides today as a gruesome relic in the Union Pacific Museum in Council Bluffs, Nebraska. The Plum Creek attack hardened the attitude of the Union Pacific toward the Native Americans, and General Sherman redoubled his attacks to clear the swath of land needed for the railroad. Inevitably, the military and the railroads prevailed, although it would take a couple of decades before the Native Americans were finally suppressed.

In contrast to the Union Pacific, the Central adopted a much more conciliatory approach to the Native Americans. There were, admittedly, fewer of them on their territory, but they could have been equally troublesome had the same aggressive attitude prevailed. Instead, the Central made deals with them, offering the chiefs passes to ride on the trains and allowing the rest to ride free on the freight cars whenever they wanted. The Central even employed both male and female Native Americans along side the Chinese and noted that “the women usually outdid the men in handling crowbars and sledgehammers.”
²⁴

By the end of 1868, it was clear that the transcontinental would be completed the following year, far earlier than originally envisaged. The only doubt remained about precisely where the two railroads would meet. By the beginning of 1869, the Central Pacific had reached Carlin, Nevada, nearly 450 miles from Sacramento, whereas the Union Pacific's rails stretched nearly 1,000 miles west of Omaha to Evanston, Wyoming.

This remarkably rapid progress had not gone unnoticed. The story of the transcontinental was already becoming the stuff of legends, which it remains today. All America was watching, excited and eager for a conclusion. In the autumn of 1868, swarms of newspaper reporters began arriving from the East, dispatching daily bulletins from the front, as if it were a war zone, with details of every mile of track laid and tales of the derring-do of the army of laborers. Never before had the construction of a railroad line become an issue of such moment. The corruption that underlay its building would be exposed later, but for the time being, nothing was allowed to get in the way of this epic achievement.

The great race, which had been launched a year previously, was now being fought in earnest. At the start of the year, the gap between the two railroads
was just 400 miles, and, thanks to the crazy contest across the desert between the two railroads, much of the intervening section had been graded in parallel lines by the Mormon contractors, who now departed the scene as the main railheads reached Utah. Although the location of the obvious meeting point was pretty clear to the engineers of both railroads, their acquisitive employers continued to work on their separate routes in an attempt to maximize their mileage. The ultimate absurdity was in the Promontory Range, where the Central Pacific line crossed a deep valley on a large embankment, only for the Union Pacific to ford it with a trestle bridge just fifty yards away. The proximity of the two parties inevitably led to hostility. At one point the Irish of the Union blasted away rocks without warning their Chinese rivals above, several of whom were hurt by flying debris. The Chinese promptly retaliated by deliberately cascading rocks down the slope, burying several Irish workers. Fortunately, the defiance of the Chinese, whom the Irish, like Strobridge before them, had underestimated, prompted a truce before these antics cost any lives.

The precise location of the meeting point was sorted out not in the desert of Utah but half a continent away, in Congress. There, another type of war was being fought by representatives of the railroads lobbying their respective friends. Whereas Huntington of the Central had the ear of the incumbent president, Andrew Johnson, Dodge and Durant were close to president-elect Ulysses S. Grant, the former Civil War general, who as the Republican candidate had visited the Union's work site shortly before his victory in the 1868 election. The decision he made soon after he took office in March 1869 was a fair compromise: he decreed that the railroads should be joined six miles west of Ogden, at Promontory Point in Utah. For all its lofty place in American folklore, Promontory was just a temporary town, a street of tents and false-fronted wooden shacks stretching a few yards from the railroad line, set in a bleak, waterless basin surrounded on three sides by mountains. It was just over 1,000 miles from Omaha and just under 750 miles from Sacramento, which showed that the Union Pacific had won the race, building a third more track than the Central.

If the ceremony was all about PR, so was a stunt organized a few days before the ceremony by Crocker, who had taunted Durant by suggesting that 10 miles of track could be laid in a day. Durant responded by wagering $10,000 that it could not be done, and Crocker and Strobridge made
elaborate preparations to ensure all the equipment was in place. A crew of eight men, whose names—which betrayed their Irish origins—have been immortalized in the history books, was handpicked to carry and spike the rails. In twelve hours, a full working day, they had passed the 10-mile point by 50 feet, and Crocker could claim the money, though Dodge, who viewed the proceedings, complained it was a con because so much preparation had been undertaken beforehand.

The eventual meeting of the two railroads took place on May 10, 1869, a couple of days later than originally planned. The reason for the delay, according to Durant, was that a section of the Union Pacific's track had been washed out in a rainstorm, but Dee Brown, the chronicler of the railroads of the West, says this was a cover story for a rather better tale that almost prevented the ceremony from taking place: “On May 6, when the Union Pacific special [carrying VIPs from the East for the ceremony] pulled into Piedmont, Wyoming, an armed mob of several hundred railroad workmen surrounded Durant's private car, switched it onto a side-track and chained the wheels to the rails.”
²⁵
The workers were protesting about their overdue wages, and their action is thought to have been supported by Brigham Young, who was also owed considerable sums for his grading contract. The involvement of Young, a powerful local man, would explain why the military failed to respond to Durant's pleas to be released, and eventually he had to wire to New York for the money to be paid. The amount Durant's kidnappers managed to extract from him remains unknown, though some estimates suggest as much as $235,000. Meanwhile, the Casements were forced to entertain Stanford and the other Central dignitaries with a trip along the line to Ogden, Utah, on a train stocked with “a beautiful collation and oceans of champagne,” an expense that would not have pleased the hapless Durant, either.

On the big day, Stanford and Durant shared the duties of the traditional ceremony of knocking in the last two spikes. Even this historic demonstration of the Central and the Union finally cooperating with one another was marred by the collective incompetence of the two company heads, who together missed the spikes with their first attempt at wielding the sledgehammer. The ceremony, in truth, was a pretty confused affair. Few witnesses were able to hear the speeches, and, with no cordon around
the main players, it was impossible for onlookers to see what was happening. Nevertheless, “oratory and whisky flowed in almost equal measure,” and not just in Utah.
²⁶
Across America, a large proportion of the 40 million population, alerted by telegraph, celebrated. In Chicago, a seven-mile-long parade jammed the city streets, while in New York a hundred-gun salute was fired in City Hall Park and Wall Street business was suspended for the day. Across the newly connected continent in San Francisco, the party carried on well into the night. In Sacramento, birthplace of the Central, thirty locomotives that had been specially brought together were steamed up to whistle out a celebratory but tuneless concert.

After the golden spikes had been hammered in and the champagne drunk, there remained a rather thorny question: What, precisely, had all this effort been for? Certainly not to allow people to travel from one coast to another, the province of the affluent, of immigrants seeking a better life and occasional adventurous travelers like Robert Louis Stevenson (see
Chapter 7
), a traffic that was by no means able to justify the expense or even pay for the operating costs.

There are two ways of viewing such grand schemes of transportation infrastructure. Some are built to meet an existing need, filling an acknowledged gap, such as the world's first major railroad line, which connected the already busy towns of Liverpool and Manchester. Or they are constructed to connect undeveloped regions as a way of attracting settlers and stimulating economic development. Almost all major railroad lines designed for passengers fall into one of these categories, and there is no doubt that it was the latter description that befitted the transcontinental. This type of project, however, invariably requires government support and usually a lot of it. There was no potential for immediate profit from the transcontinental, given the enormous distances it covered and the lack of local traffic. Without government subsidies, it would never have been possible to build the line, but, of course, that is no excuse for so much taxpayers' money ending up in the promoters' pockets.

In fact, the various supporters of the project had been divided over what the railroad was actually for. There was no shortage of proffered reasons. Asa Whitney had harbored the fanciful dream of exploiting the vast markets of Asia;
²⁷
the Wisconsin settlers wanted military protection from the “Indian
menace,” despite the fact that it was the railroad that provoked the worst attacks from Native Americans; then there was the vague notion that the line would open up the West for European settlers, but there was no certainty that they would come. The truth is that there was no clear purpose: “For all the fanfare that accompanied the building of the first Transcontinental, and for all the romantic nonsense that has been written about it since, the importance of this accomplishment for many years was mainly psychological.”
²⁸

There was no cunning plan. The building of the transcontinental was like such feats of exploration and endurance as the conquest of Everest or the journey to the poles, often undertaken simply because “it's there.” The most coherent of the various motives, but still a vague one, was the notion of conquering the West, and that was what was celebrated at Promontory Point on the day the last spike was hammered in. The West was a movable feast drummed up by the early railroad promoters for whom it meant west of wherever they happened to be or even just anywhere sparsely populated, such as, oddly, in one example of rail promotion, northern Vermont. The West was seen as a land of plenty, a biblical vision that was America's manifest destiny. The first editor of the
American Railroad Journal
, D. Kimball Minor, had repeatedly used precisely that description in his journal, calling the land between the Great Lakes and the Rockies “the garden of the world.” The West was to be America's empire, “a metaphor that emphasized fertility, the potential richness that lay locked in the untapped western regions.”
²⁹
By midcentury “the West” had come to mean the lands west of the Mississippi, but that was still a pretty imprecise concept. Before the railroads, there had been some sparse settlement in the West, mostly by newly arrived Spanish-speaking immigrants, but the lack of transportation meant that they could only eke out a life of subsistence. The prairies were not blessed with great forests out of which homes and fences could be built, game was sparse once the vast herds of buffalo had been wiped out by settlers with guns, the climate was harsh, and much of the land was not particularly fertile. The stagecoaches, wagon trains, and mail companies like the Pony Express had all struggled to provide any kind of regular connection with the East for these sparsely populated areas.