Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (43 page)

What a day! What a week! On April 23, Reed wrote his wife, “Bridge finished.” The track was over the bridge, the cuts through the rock on either end were nearly done, which meant a “great load off my mind.” Meanwhile, James Evans had already surveyed a location from Fort Sanders, just west of Dale Creek, all the way to Green River. Two weeks later, on May 6, he had completed the final line and was able to telegram Dodge triumphantly, “We save considerable in distance and altitude both over the preliminary lines.”
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By then the graders were approaching the Green River, and Reed planned to go to Salt Lake City to convince Brigham Young to get the Mormons started grading east up the Weber Canyon.
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•   •   •

T
HE
Casements were pouring it on. The railroad was over the divide of the Black Hills and had nothing to impede it from there all the way to the Wasatch Range. On April 21, Jack Casement wrote his wife, “I have never been hurried up more in my life.” He loved it. “Have crossed the high Bridge [at Dale Creek] today and want to commence laying three miles a day at once.” He, his brother, Dodge, Durant, all the workers on the railroad were on the march with clear objectives in front of them—Weber Canyon, Ogden, Promontory, Humboldt Wells. At three miles per day, maybe even more, nothing could stop them.

“We are now
Sailing,”
he wrote on May 2.
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A few days later, the road ran down the Black Hills' western slope all the way to Laramie. With the grade ready for track clear to Green River, more than half the way through Wyoming, the Casement construction train and the crew were ready to roll. Many others were ready to follow. Leigh Freeman moved his printing press to Laramie and set about publishing the
Frontier Index
there. In its first issue, May 5, the paper predicted that Laramie would soon rival Chicago. When it was only two weeks old, the
Index
boasted, “Laramie already contains a population of two thousand inhabitants.” The UP was now building the ramshackle Union Pacific Hotel beside the tracks and a $10,000 windmill to pump water for its men and engines (it was the largest ever erected).
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The grade went nearly straight north out of Laramie. Then, just past Rock Creek it turned straight west across the Medicine Bow River, up to and across the North Platte River.
*
Fort Steele was on the western side of the North Platte River, then, a bit farther west, a town founded by the UP and called Benton, then Rawlins Springs (today called Rawlins). The most important work, after the Dale Creek Bridge was operating, was to get the bridge up and the tracks over it ready for trains at the crossing of the North Platte River. Arthur Ferguson was one of the surveyors assigned to that duty.

On Saturday, April 25, 1868, he and others left Omaha at 5:30
A.M.
on
a train headed west. After a delay of two hours on account of reported Indians ahead, the train arrived in Cheyenne at 6
P.M.
Thus did Ferguson cross Nebraska in one day. In Cheyenne, he “witnessed strange sights. The whole city was the scene of one high carnival—gambling saloons and other places of an immoral character in full blast—streets crowded with men—various houses illuminated—vice having unlimited control, making the Sabbath evening a sad and fearful time.” He went to bed early.

The next day, a construction train took Ferguson to the end of track, at that point five miles west of Dale Creek. Then on by wagon to Fort Sanders, where he and his party slept three to a bed. Continuing the next day along the grade, Ferguson was struck by the land, a “dismal and desolate country, a terrible country, awful, all sage brush and grease weed.” He and four others were in the wagon, with three hundred rounds of ammunition and lots of fear of Indians, especially after passing a short distance from what he called “a camp of several hundred hostile Indians.”

On Sunday, May 3, Ferguson got to the North Platte, but not at the site where an army contingent was camped. So everyone turned out for guard duty, all night long. In the morning it began to snow, and not until May 6 could he and his party get to the proper site and begin their work of measuring, leveling, surveying.

On Tuesday, May 12, Ferguson opened his diary entry, “This has been a fearful day.” He had begun by running the line west of the river, but found that he had lost the tape line and started back over the river to search for it. Everyone piled into the wagon, but the driver didn't know the ford. “The first thing we knew was that the water was floating in the wagon box, and our mules were out of their depth and being swiftly carried down stream by the terrific violence of the current.” The wagon box capsized and all the men were floundering among the waves. Ferguson retained the leveling instrument in his hand but he got tangled up in the wagon box, which was pressing him down. “I immediately saw that it was for me a struggle for life or death and therefore dropped the instrument.” Eventually he got out, but two of his companions were drowned. He said he would never forget “the look of awful terror and despair that had settled on their countenances.” Attempts to locate the leveling instrument, plus the three guns that had gone down, not to mention the bodies of the drowned men, were unsuccessful.
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•   •   •

W
HILE
Ferguson's party was putting up the bridge, men, mules, horses, and wagons went over by ferry. There was quite a bit of horror, including mules and horses drowned, wagons tipped into the river, and so on. On May 17, Ferguson noted, “Two more men drowned in the river yesterday. Quite a number of grading camps are here waiting to cross the river.” But, no matter the death toll, the engineers were concerned with the bridge and, not incidentally, with making some money on the side. Thus Ferguson recorded that on May 20 he and two others bought three lots in the town of Benton, which was not yet founded. Five days later, they sold the lots (for which they had paid $2.50) for $25 each.

Mainly they worked. Measuring, leveling, putting in pilings, staking out bents, then setting in rails and putting sidings on each side of the bridge.

T
HERE
was more excitement, primarily from Indians. Ferguson's diary contains numerous references to their war parties. For example, May 24: “The Indians made a dash on some pilgrims who are camped on the opposite side of the river and succeeded in capturing 19 head of stock.” June 4: “At about sunrise, were attacked by Indians and succeeded in shooting one.” June 20: “The Indians made a dash on the camp and captured some stock and killed one man.” June 21: “Indians killed two men. Both had been horribly mutilated about the face by cuts made by a knife or a tomahawk. They captured one hundred head of stock.” June 30: “Four men were killed and scalped today about two miles above camp.” July 2: “Indians ran off 70 head of cattle and killed two more men last night within three miles of here.”

Ferguson also recorded rumors that had little or no foundation in fact. As one example, July 16: “Out of a party of 25 men who were on the Sweet Water, 24 of them are said to have been killed by Indians.” He also recorded death by accident or by shoot-outs among workers, which in truth were nearly as serious as the Indian threat. June 7: “Two men were shot this evening in a drunken row—one was instantly killed, and the other is not expected to live.” June 26: “This evening another man was shot.” July 7: “This afternoon one man was shot and wounded in the knee and another killed.” July 11: “One of the workmen was killed within five feet of me by the falling of a bent. In falling he was struck on
the head and then fell through the work into the water and was drowned before my eyes. This evening another man was shot and killed, which was occasioned by some personal difficulty.” July 14: “Another man shot this evening.” July 18: “Another man shot last night.” July 19: “Another man and four mules drowned in the river today.”

It was an arduous job that was not finished until July 15, when “the first locomotive crossed the bridge, with two more following directly afterwards.” They were construction trains, pulling freight cars loaded with rails, fishplates, ties, and more. Still, Ferguson could write, with considerable pride, “The bridge is a success.” On July 21, he could record that “the first passenger train that was ever west of the north fork of the Platte crossed the ridge about noon today. Men commenced digging the water tank today. They will work all night.”
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On August 3, Ferguson himself was almost caught by flying bullets. He commented, “It is owing to the carelessness of individuals in our vicinity whose reckless disregard of life and limb in their promiscuous shooting is perfectly outrageous and alarming.”
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Life came cheap on the Union Pacific Railroad, as Ferguson knew as well as any. Nevertheless, he directed his emotions not at the workers who shot their fellows and who were more dangerous than the Native Americans, but at the Indian boys who sometimes killed and often stole from the whites. In fact, the Indian outrages were exclusively committed by teenage boys. The threat of war parties, so severe in 1867, had gone away. This was thanks to the resolution of the veterans who were working for the UP, and to the five thousand troops stationed along the line of the UP between Omaha and the Salt Lake.

Another factor was the quality of the rifles. The Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho were using muzzle loaders, with loose powder, balls, and percussion caps. The U.S. Army soldiers were not much if any better off until 1867, when the Springfield rifle was first issued to the infantry on the Great Plains. It was a breechloader, made from the old Springfield musket, sighted for a thousand yards maximum range. On two occasions in the fall of 1867, the Sioux lost some of their best warriors to the quickness and range of the Springfield, which was a splendid weapon.

Further, the Pawnees protecting some of the graders and others were getting better at their task. In truth, they were living what they regarded as a joyous life. The army furnished them with arms and ammunition, food, clothes, and pay, all this to do what they wanted above all other
things to be doing, fighting their enemies. And if their enemies proved to be too strong for them, they could always retreat to the nearest white troops for protection. In addition, they were now much farther west than they had ever been or would have dared to go by themselves.

David Lemon was an engineer for the UP. Fifty-six years after the event, he wrote a reminiscence of one of his experiences on the railroad. During the first week of October 1868, at night, he was in the cab of a locomotive on the line, with two boxcars of oats and corn followed by twenty-three cars of railroad iron. Sioux Indians had removed bolts and fishplates from the rail joint and torn down telegraph poles to pry apart the rails.

Lemon crashed. “You can well imagine the ugly wreck.” Not until daylight did a relief crew arrive to assist him. Pawnee troops gave chase to the Sioux. When they returned, they had seven scalps. They said the scalps were all from Sioux, “although one of them had long red hair, which was probably that of an escaped white convict who had taken refuge with the Sioux tribe.” That night the Pawnees had a grand scalp dance.
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I
N
the eyes of the men of the UP, the Indians deserved extreme punishment and even more. President Oliver Ames came west and raged, “I see nothing but extermination to the Indians as the result of their thieving disposition, and we shall probably have to come to this before we can run the road safely.”
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General Sherman hoped it wouldn't come to that, but he was ready if it did. British reporter Henry Stanley had been at North Platte, Nebraska, in the fall of 1867, for a peace council. He heard Sherman say to the Indians: “We built iron roads, and you cannot stop the locomotive any more than you can stop the sun or moon, and you must submit, and do the best you can…. If our people in the east make up their minds to fight you they will come out as thick as a herd of buffalo, and if you continue fighting you will all be killed. We advise you for the best. We now offer you this, choose your own homes, and live like white men, and we will help you all you want.”
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Ferguson was more rabid. “I have no sympathy with the red devils,” he wrote in his diary on August 17, “notwithstanding the halo of romance by which they are surrounded by the people of the East, who, secure in
their happy and peaceful homes, know naught of the wild and awful horrors of the West.” He added that, for his part, having been “surrounded by too many perils, and knowing too much of the savage details of Indian warfare,” he wanted them eliminated. “Let the savage strength of the demoniac Indian be broken,” he wrote. “May their dwelling places and habitations be destroyed. May the greedy crow hover over their silent corpses. May the coyote feast upon their stiff and festering carcases, and the sooner the better.”
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As bloodthirsty as that was, Ferguson had the same kind of mixed emotions as most of his fellow surveyors and engineers. To a man, they loved the wild life, the scenery, the game, the swift and clear-flowing streams, the untouched prairie and forest, the flowers and trees, the birds, the opportunity to ride across an unfenced country. And they also loved Indians, as long as the Indians stayed out of the white man's way.

But they were also aware that, as the first white men other than the mountain men ever to come into this paradise, this Eden, this unspoiled country, they had the job of wiping it out by bringing to it the very thing that had brought them into the wilderness, the railroad. Much as they loved the wild country, they were going to tame it. Thus Ferguson observed, “The time is coming and fast too, when in the sense it is now understood,
THERE WILL BE NO WEST.”
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