Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (37 page)

Best of all for the UP, what Dodge found between Laramie and Utah was an open prairie of comparatively low elevation (about seven thousand feet). In two months his party had covered fourteen hundred miles on horseback. He had laid out a preliminary line for the surveyors from Julesburg to the Salt Lake, and in the process made the first map of the Great Basin and southern Wyoming. It was a country in which the UP could sink artesian wells to a great depth and keep the water tanks full by using windmills. “The work of building the road there was unexpectedly light,” Dodge later wrote, “and it almost seems that nature made this great opening in the Rocky Mountains expressly for the passage of a transcontinental railway.”
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The Sioux and Cheyennes thought the Basin and the Great Plains to the east had been made for them. They continued their raids, although nothing quite so big as the Plum Creek affair.

President Johnson appointed a Peace Commission, with Sherman on it. The commission went from tribe to tribe to parlay with the chiefs and sign treaties. A big conference was held in September at North Platte, with the railroad as the main subject. Pawnee Killer and others were there, and Sherman made a speech. He told the Indians, “This railroad will be built, and if you are damaged [by it] we must pay you in full, and if your young men will interfere the Great Father, who, out of love for you, withheld his soldiers, will let loose his young men, and you will be swept away.” That was blunt enough. So was what followed: “We will
build iron roads, and you cannot stop the locomotive any more than you can stop the sun or the moon, and you must submit, and do the best you can.”

Pawnee Killer, who had stopped two locomotives, stomped out of the council in a rage. He swore to end the railroad building. Sherman was as determined as the Cheyenne chief “Whether right or wrong,” he wrote his brother the senator, “those Roads will be built, and everybody knows that Congress, after granting the charters, and fixing the Routes, cannot now back out and surrender the country to a few bands of roving Indians.”
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T
HE
Casements and their men were almost at Nebraska's western border, near mile 440. The company's rolling stock had grown to fifty-three locomotives, eleven hundred freight cars, ten passenger cars, five baggage cars, and sixty handcars, plus one paymaster's car, one cooking car, twenty-five caboose cars, twenty-five coal cars, one officers' car, and one president's car (the old Lincoln Car). The UP had 350 mechanics and carpenters working in Omaha and North Platte who could turn out twenty cars a week and do all the railroad's mechanical repairs.”
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All this cost money. The UP had it. Commencing in July 1867, the promoters found a ready market for UP bonds. The Casement brothers and their workers, after all, had laid 260 miles of track in eight months and were surging forward. No such railroading had ever been dreamed of. Further, when the UP got to the mountains, not very far distant that summer, the government loan of bonds would rise to $48,000 per mile. In addition, the UP announced at the end of August that its earnings during the three preceding months alone had been nearly three-quarters of a million dollars; deducting expenses of a quarter-million dollars, the net operating profit was almost a half-million. The UP's own bonds, equal in numbers and price to those loaned by the government, sold well.
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Also encouraging was that the Ames brothers and their Boston allies held 52 percent of the Crédit Mobilier stock, and had used their control to oust Durant from every office in the company. And Henry V. Poor, editor of the
American Railroad ]ournal,
had just written, “There is nothing connected with the Union Pacific that is not wonderful.” In an editorial, he added, “The Union Pacific bonds are the safest and best investment at the same price in the country. Their security is absolute.”
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Durant did hold on to his UP stock and his office there, but he and the Ames brothers
remained at loggerheads, with Durant looking to milk the government through the construction charges while they wanted to build a railroad that would return profits of its own.

Bond sales continued to be solid. In October, $672,000 were sold; in November, it was $700,000; in December, $2,450,000, or a total for the three months of $3,822,000. The U.S. government had accepted 240 miles of track at $16,000 per mile, to a total of $8,160,000 in loaned government bonds, and the price per mile was about to go up. The UP earned $3,465,000 for the year 1867, with operating expenses, including taxes, at $1,404,000, making $2,061,000 in net earnings.

The profit went to the Crédit Mobilier, whose trustees on December 12, 1867, declared the firm's first dividend: each holder of ten shares (at $1,000 per share par value) got $600 of the first mortgage bonds and six shares of UP stock, for a total cash payment of 76 percent on the investment. A handsome payoff, with more to come. Oakes Ames started to get congressmen to buy Crédit Mobilier stock. His motive, he later said, was: “We wanted capital and influence. Influence not in legislation alone, but on credit, good, wide, and a general favorable feeling.” He placed the stock with nine U.S. representatives and two U.S. senators, amounting in all to 160 shares for $16,000. Not much, considering the amounts the company was working with, but enough to threaten to set off the biggest scandal of the nineteenth century.
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A
T
the beginning of November, the Casements and their men had reached within a few miles of Cheyenne. The town had already held an election on August 10 and set up a city government. On September 19, Cheyenne's first newspaper, the
Daily Leader,
had been printed. By October 12, the end of track was at Dead Pine Bluffs (now Pine Bluffs), within thirty-five miles of Cheyenne. By October 29, it was within seventeen miles, and the anticipatory tension mounted. The UP was nearly five hundred miles from Omaha.

Jack Casement, like Grenville Dodge, had hoped for more. He wanted to get over Sherman Pass and beyond Dale Creek down to Laramie, but it wasn't to be. The biggest holdup was ties. Indians had chased tie cutters out of the canyons on the North Platte, so Reed had to buy ties from the Missouri River Valley and have them—inferior cottonwoods—shipped west by train.

Some directors boasted that the UP would finish by 1870 and a man could go from New York to San Francisco in a week. Horace Greeley's newspaper commented, “It is hard to realise that so great a distance may be accomplished in so short a time.”
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But to the men on the spot, that 1870 promise sounded more like boast than fact. The supply line was longer and growing, thus the flow of material was tricky to coordinate and time. Dodge was hoping to pile in supplies at Cheyenne during the winter to prevent supply problems in the spring, but no one knew what the winter would be like.

On November 16, 1867, the lead article in the
Chicago Tribune
read: “Dated Cheyenne 11⁄14⁄67; Yesterday, at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, track-laying on the UP was completed to the city of Cheyenne, and in a few moments the whistle of the locomotive was heard above the noise of the hammers and the rattle of wagons all over the bustling city.” The entire population “rushed wildly to the railroad track,” where there was a banner, “Honor to whom honor is due; Old Casement we honor you.” Jack Casement made a speech. “Before nightfall Cheyenne was left half a mile in the rear. Cheyenne is now connected by rail with Chicago and the rest of mankind.”
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Shortly thereafter, Casement went into winter camp, with Cheyenne as the end of track. Julesburg began moving its tents. Dodge quickly decided that Cheyenne was an even worse Hell on Wheels. He called it “possibly the greatest gambling place ever established on the plains and it was full of desperate characters.”
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But he had his own report to the directors of the UP for 1867 to work on, and cleaning up the town could come later. Much of his work was centered on the exploring he did west of the Black Hills and east of the Salt Lake, where he was the first to make maps, and for which he has never received the credit due him.

Nor has Dodge or his men received credit for what they did to improve the UP in the face of the storms and floods of the winter of 1866-67. But Dodge knew what had been accomplished. In his report he wrote, “The track has been raised, new bridges constructed, larger waterways built, and the old structures enlarged, as shown [necessary] by the floods of this year, the highest and most extensive ever known in the country, and it can now be safely said that a repetition of these floods will not materially injure the road or delay the running of trains.”
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A large part of his report was on the valley of the Snake River and how easily the UP could turn it to advantage, but when Dodge was writing, in
1867, most Americans would have been glad to have one line crossing the country, and few of them dared to think of any others. Not Dodge. And he never hesitated to point out why. “The Pacific slope to-day has less than 1,000,000 inhabitants,” he wrote, “and they are yielding $50,000,000 to $60,000,000 of bullion yearly, with grain plus immense yields of wool, hides, wines, timber, and everything that can be produced in that delightful climate and fertile soil.” He further stated that “the best vegetable productions of the Mississippi and Missouri valleys are dwarfed in comparison with those of California. The wheat crop of California and Oregon for 1867 was 25,000,000 bushels, and far exceeded in value the gold product of both States.” Just think, he concluded, what the product of those states would be when the railroad was completed. Why, they would need two, three, four railroads. “No man to-day can even estimate it.” Finally, he concluded: “Without the Union Pacific railroad the country west of the Missouri river would be a burden to the government, and almost an uninhabitable waste; with it, it will soon be an empire, and one of our principal elements of power and strength.”
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Dodge had never been a man to brag or exaggerate or try to sell something through inflated words. Here, to the men of his time, he appeared to come close, or actually to go over the line. To readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, he appears modest. The reality far outstripped his prediction.

The same issue of the Chicago paper that announced the arrival of the first train to Cheyenne also noted that Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Miss Susan B. Anthony had come by train to Omaha, where they gave lectures “in favor of woman suffrage.”
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In politics, economics, culture, where and how people lived, America was changing.

*
“Springs” has been dropped; the town is now Rawlins.

*
When the track got beyond Laramie, Congress removed Wyoming from Dakota Territory and gave it a territorial status of its own. At the beginning of 1867, Wyoming had fewer than a thousand white inhabitants; by early 1868, thanks to the railroad, it was estimated to have forty thousand white people. The original idea was to name the territory “Lincoln.”

I
N
1867, the UP was coming on, a mile a day, two miles a day, sometimes three miles in a day, racking up miles, collecting the government bonds and selling its land grants. Before the year was over, it was penetrating Utah with surveyors, its grading crews were well into Wyoming, and its track layers were past Cheyenne. The company hoped that before 1868 was out it would have its end of track into Utah. Along with Durant and Dodge, its directors, surveyors, supervising engineers, construction bosses, and multitude of workers thought that the UP would lay track all the way to the California-Nevada border, where it would meet the CP and thus win the race.

In 1867, the CP was still short of the summit of the Sierra Nevada. Its progress was measured in yards, not miles. It was collecting no government bonds, it was not selling land grants, it could not sell much or even any of its own stocks and bonds. Meanwhile, it was spending tons of money. It looked likely that the UP would win the race.

The reason was obvious to any observer. The UP was laying track over a relatively flat country, while the CP was in some of the roughest mountains on the continent. The UP had to haul in ties, rails, food, forage, and more, upstream on the Missouri River, but from Omaha out to the west, it carried the supplies forward on its own railroad line. The CP had plenty of water and wood, but it had tunnels to drive through granite mountains. The UP could draw on the settled portions of the country for
its workers. The CP had to rely, for the most part, on the Chinese. But if and when the CP emerged from the Sierra Nevada, it would be on the Truckee River and then the Humboldt, where it could make time in grading and track laying just as the UP was coming up against the Wasatch Range.

By 1868, both railroads would be far from their base. As Henry Poor, editor of the
Railroad Journal,
explained, “The operations of a railroad company are like those of an army, the cost and difficulty of the maintenance of which increase in inverse ratio as the scene of its action is removed from its base.” Only a completed railroad could supply the road under construction with its materials and labor force. Thus, Poor said, a given amount of work would cost “thrice as much and occupy thrice the time” for a railroad west of the Mississippi River as for one on the east side.
1

In the first few months of 1867, the Chinese worked for the CP in gangs, in eight-hour shifts or sometimes longer, around the clock. They lived in quarters dug in the snow, going to work surrounded by snow. They usually operated in teams of three at a time at the tunnel facing, with four teams working side by side. Of the men who held the drills, one reached as high as he could, another held it at waist level, another down at his toes. The fourth team worked from stepladders that allowed the men to reach the top. Two men pounded. The man with the drill was turning it constantly while holding it firm and in place. The men who were pounding did so with sledgehammers weighing from fourteen to eighteen pounds each. They swung, hit the drill at its far end, dropped the hammer, brought it up again behind them, and swung once more. Alternately, at many times a minute. They could drill four inches of holes, one and three-quarters inches in diameter, in eight hours.