Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (42 page)

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P
ush is the word for this season,” Sam Reed proclaimed at the start of 1868, and, like most of the leaders in the field for the UP, he pushed himself hardest of all. His telegram copy book, in the UP Archives in Omaha, shows just how hard. The copies cover all types of work and consist in large part of the kind of telephone conversations a twenty-first-century businessman would have with his superiors and subordinates. What follows is a tiny selection.

January 28, Reed to J. Lathrop at the end of track: “If you want anything from Omaha you will have to send it here to be approved.” Same day, Reed to G. W. Frost in Omaha: “Send for Dale Creek bridge four sets blocks for one inch line and one coil of seven-eighths line, two clamps that will span thirty inches to clamp timber for bolting Congdon will explain, three one and one quarter inch augers.”

Same day, Reed to M. F. Hurd at the end of track: “Put the station house on the north side of main track west of turntable track.” Same day, to Lathrop: “I have ordered ten dozen shovels and six dozen picks and handles for Carmichael.” Same day, again to Lathrop: “Is there any dirt cars at the station. Mulloy picked up some Sunday if there send one with ox for dumping to Miller and Co.” Same day, to Hurd: “On section 288 estimated 4000 yards earth instead of 6500 as you telegraphed look into it.”

Same day, to Frost in Omaha: “Send my bridge timber in preference to iron. Eighteen to twenty cars of Iron intended here daily must be cars enough to load timber in Chicago if there is any instead of sending it forward.” Same to same, also January 28: “Have you paid Bent and CO for 50 tons of hay furnished me some time since.”
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Here is another sample, all telegrams dated March 13, 1868. Reed to H. Bissell at Dale Creek: “Send a man over and count the boxes of bolts that have been received at the Bridge soon as possible and give me the answer.” Also to Bissell: “Has Butterfield put on another gang of raisers. How is he getting along raising the bridge.” To Frost in Omaha: “There was received here yesterday a lot of three inch plank. I have not ordered lumber of that description.” To Lathrop: “How many boxes of Dale Creek Bridge bolts have you received since February 1st and are there any at your place.” To H. M. Hoxie in Omaha: “Are there any boxes of Dale Creek Bridge bolts at Omaha. If so send them forward. 109 boxes have passed Chicago. 83 received here.” To Lathrop: “Were the bolts shipped by team from your place or sent to end of track and shipped from there. We are short at bridge, not all received.”

On it went. To Lathrop again, also March 13: “In Reynolds and Dowling bill for supplies, I find 300 pounds whole pepper. Does he want that amount.” To Bissell at Dale Creek: “There is a man in Omaha that represents that he is hiring men for Hall. Send a man to Hall's Camp and find out if he wants the men.” Again to Bissell: “There has been sent from Carmichael to Dale Creek 109 boxes of bolts and washers if not received let me know immediately.” To Lathrop: “How much hay received from Casement since January 1st to March 1st. How much from McDonald. How much wood used in Casement's boarding car and sent to them at Cheyenne since January 1st.” To Bissell: “Have you received the 109 boxes or only the 86 boxes of bolts and washers.” To Lathrop, same day: “Bissell reports only 86 boxes bolts and washers received at the bridge. Where are the balance.” To W. Snyder, Omaha: “Michael Haley is authorized to hire men for Hall. Send good rail road men only men wanted.” Also on March 13, Reed sent a thousand-word telegram to H. C. Crane, the UP's secretary in New York.
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R
EED
was “talking” to men in New York, Chicago, Omaha, and at the end of track. That the telegraph would keep up with the end of track was a requirement of the Pacific Railroad Act, and in any event absolutely necessary to the building of the road. There was a regular work gang for the telegraph. The poles were brought to the front on the material trains and distributed by wagons. One gang fastened the cross-arms to the top of the poles while another group, under a foreman, dug the holes. A third gang erected them. A wire was brought forward in a wagon and unwound from a reel as the wagon moved ahead. A wire gang raised the wire and fastened it to the insulators.

There was an intense rivalry between the telegraph gangs and the track gangs. Sometimes the telegraph workers were delayed by a lack of poles, but when that happened they connected the wires to a temporary telegraph set. That way, communication between Cheyenne, Omaha, Chicago, and points east and the end of track was never lost.
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Or, rather, almost never: the buffalo had a way of using the poles as scratching posts and would sometimes knock them down.

Besides the buffalo, Reed's problems included liquor. On March 28, he sent a wire to Secretary Crane: “As soon as a party of men commence at work a lot of tents are put up on the vicinity and whiskey furnished to the
men.” As a result, robbery and murder were commonplace. “Whiskey ranches interfere materially with our men. Two men were shot Thursday night. Can something be done through Congress to stop the indiscriminate sale of whiskey in the vicinity of our work.”

M
ORE
examples of how the telegraph was used by the men making the line, the following all from April 9. Reed to L. Carmichael at Dale Creek: “I have written you this morning to put on night gang on cut west of bridge. Keep as many men on them as can be worked night and day.” To Reynolds and Dowling at Dale Creek: “Put night gang on first cut west of bridge. Keep as many men on as can be worked night and day there are plenty of carts you can have if you want more to surface road bed.” To M. Hurd in Cheyenne: “Can you let us have an engine and 2 empty box cars for an hour or two.” To Furst & Bradley in Chicago: “Send me one hundred more scrapers.” To G. W. Frost in Omaha: “Send on No. 3 tonight for immediate use 6 relays, 6 sounders, 6 keys, 6 switches, 2 coils insulated copper wire 6 clip boards.” To Hurd: “Have you the level notes from Sta 1500 west. Want to start engineering party out with Creighton Saturday.”

To M. F. Seymour at Dale Creek: “Have 9 boxes bolts from Pittsburgh will send them up to Summit tomorrow noon will send to Snyder for 500 extra.” To W. Snyder in Omaha: “Please send me on express train as soon as you can have them made 500¾ inch bolts 22¾ inches long answer.” To A. L. Thompson: “There are three cooking stoves at Mulloy shanties near Summit. You can have one. You will have to take down some of your shanties at Dale Creek for what lumber you want.” To J. E. Boyd in Omaha, with a copy to Gustavus Ames in Omaha: “When will you have a force on your work west of Little Laramie.” And, finally, the last one of the day, to G. W. Frost in Omaha: “Pay bill just received. You have charged for shovels $20 per dozen. I can buy them in Cheyenne for less.”
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Just before going to sleep that night, Reed wrote his wife, “I have too much for any mortal man to do.”
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So did nearly every man working for the UP, although it would be difficult to imagine anyone working more hours or harder than Reed. Still, he kept his optimism. On March 18, he had sent a telegram to his rival, Charlie Crocker. “My men have stuck stakes in the Humboldt Mts. We'll meet you there.”

Crocker laughed at the audacity. “He won't find his stakes when he arrives,” he told a reporter. “I'll have trains running that far by the end of this year.”
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Reed was living in Cheyenne, as were the Casements and the workers. Dubbed the “Magic City of the Plains,” the town had grown from nothing, when Dodge platted and staked it out in July 1867, to a town of a few thousand that was selling lots at a record pace. Frame buildings were replacing tents. Leigh Freeman, the son of a UP employee, had been a telegrapher at Fort Kearney when he founded a newspaper, the
Frontier Index
(later in Cheyenne). In 1866, he moved his printing press (and thus the newspaper) by wagon to North Platte. He continued to follow the railroad westward, setting up in the Hell on Wheels towns and providing the UP's workers with news and entertainment.
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T
HROUGH
the winter of 1867-68 and indeed up to and even beyond the beginning of spring, the storms had kept most of the crews from working. On February 28, 1868, for example, Reed sent a telegram to Secretary Crane saying he had “just returned from the mountains [Sherman Pass] where I have been storm bound since last Monday. The storm has been more severe than any other this season. All the cuts were full of snow and it will take ten days to two weeks to clear them.”
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By the beginning of April, the worst seemed to be over, and the frost was leaving the ground. The Casement brothers and their men were eager, or, in the typically American phrase, “raring to go.” By April 5, the track-laying crews had covered ten miles and had nearly reached Sherman Summit at 8,242 feet of altitude, the highest point of any railroad anywhere. Or, as Reed put it in an April 7 telegram from Cheyenne to Secretary Crane in Omaha, “Track laid over highest railroad summit on the Continent. S. B. Reed.” Graders meanwhile had started down the west slope toward Dale Creek, four miles beyond Sherman and thirty-five miles west of Cheyenne.

A
T
Dale Creek, the engineers and the crews had to build a bridge over the creek. To support the effort, Dale City had come into existence. In December 1867, the
Frontier Index
had noted its presence: “We are informed that this is a right pert place, just now; contains about forty buildings,
with a population of about six or seven hundred railroaders, tie men, teamsters, wood choppers, etc., and a good prospect of a steady increase for some months to come.” The workers were there to make grade, dig the cuts, and otherwise prepare for the coming of the bridge trusses, most of all to build masonry foundations for the big trestle. In March 1868, a post office came to Dale City.
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The bridge would be 126 feet above the streambed and seven hundred feet long, making it by far the highest bridge of the UP, ever. To stand at the site today, or to look at its photograph by Andrew Russell, is to be filled with astonishment. How could they possibly even imagine such a thing, much less do it? A bridge, built entirely of wood, 126 feet above the creek bed and seven hundred feet long? Sufficiently strong to carry a locomotive, a tender, a string of passenger or freight cars, while swaying in the Wyoming mountain winds? With a mile of cut on the west side and nearly as much on the east, through solid rock? Daunting at best, quite probably to most engineers impossible. Yet the UP did it, in what was one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century.

All this to get the tracks over Dale Creek. Engineer Hezekiah Bissell called it “a big bridge for a small brook that one could easily step over.” When the track got near Sherman Summit, the
Cheyenne Daily Leader
said the next day that “a vast and varied amount of freight and passengers went to the end of track today. There were five car loads of iron and spikes, twenty-five dirt scrapers, twenty quarters of fresh beef, patent plows, men's boots, gunnies of ham, cases of pepper-sauce, sacks of grain, bales of clothing and working men with Winchester rifles, carpet bags, blankets and every other conceivable article of tools, food and wearing apparel.”
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Meanwhile, the grading crews were moving on west.

As Reed's telegrams show, the construction superintendent and the men working for him made the bridge a top priority. Reed especially stayed after the company supplying the trusses. The wood was cut in Michigan, then shipped to Chicago, where it was fashioned to specification into double-framed trestles with bents spaced forty feet apart. Then it was shipped by rail (across the temporary bridge over the Missouri River from Council Bluffs to Omaha) to the end of track.

Except for the Russell photographs, the UP made no record as to the detailed plans of the bridge and the actual work of building it. In October 1946, the only description the Engineering Department of the UP could find was: “Dale Creek is crossed by a pine timber trestle ridge of 40-foot
spans, with double bends resting on piers of granite masonry raised only to a small height. The roadway is suspended by a low truss frame resting on these bents…. The timber trestle was replaced in 1876 with an iron bridge known as the ‘spider web,' it appeared so slender, 707 feet long, 127 feet high at the deepest point.”
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Progress on the bridge was enough to make even Reed indulge in a little smile now and then, but on April 14, when the bridge was half finished, a storm came up. Reed sent a telegram to the Chicago firm, “Wind blowing a gale, no work being done on bridge. Do not ship the truss bridges until further orders.” He ordered a transit and levels sent to the bridge, and the bridge wired for more cables, then more, then even more.
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Engineer Bissell was there to see the near-catastrophe. “The bridge men were scared out of their wits,” he wrote in his diary, “and doing nothing to save the thing.” Bissell sent men to the contractors, telling them “to bring every rope and chain they could get hold of to the bridge as soon as possible. When the ropes first came, no one dared to go and put them on to guy the bridge. I finally induced two or three to go, and soon there were plenty of others. I probably saved the bridge.”
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Two days later, April 16, Durant, Dodge, and a party of big shots arrived in Wyoming. They were there to watch the first train go over Sherman Summit. “In the presence of such a large number of distinguished army officers and citizens,” Dodge told Secretary Browning in a telegram, Durant insisted on pounding in the last spike on the final rail at the summit. After that was done, Dodge reported, “the Union Pacific Rail Road crossed the Summit of the mountains this day, the highest elevation reached by any rail road in the world.”
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