Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (10 page)

On April 5, 1859, the legislature of California, acting apparently under Judah's urging, passed a resolution calling for a convention to consider the Pacific railroad. Judah returned from the East to attend as representative from Sacramento. The convention opened in Assembly Hall in San Francisco on September 20, 1859, with over one hundred in attendance. Debate centered on the route to be adopted and the western terminus. Judah said such decisions should be left to the corporation picked to build the road, but the convention adopted a resolution recording its “decided preference” for a central route to Sacramento. Having lost there, Judah won on his motion to keep the government from becoming an interested party by keeping it out as a stockholder; such action, he said, “shuts the door to fraud, corruption, or political dishonesty. It affords no hobby to ride, and presents no stepping stone to power, advancement or distinction.”
37

Judah was on the mark, here and in most other resolutions he sponsored and supported. On October 11, the convention's executive committee appointed him as its accredited agent to convey its memorial to Congress, a selection that was universally applauded. The
San Francisco Daily Alta California
newspaper, for example, wrote, “In saying that no better selection could have been made for this responsible duty, we but reiterate what is well known to all who are acquainted with Mr. Judah. Few persons in California have a more thorough acquaintance with the question of the construction of the Pacific railroad than has Mr. Judah, and his services in this capacity will be invaluable.”
38

O
N
October 20, 1859, Judah and Anna sailed for Panama on the steamer
Sonora
on their third trip east. He was thirty-three years old. He had shown himself to be a practical engineer capable of building railroads
and bridges wherever, whenever. He had built the only railroad then running in California. He had great imagination and a most persuasive way of putting his ideas. He had a gracious wife. Only nincompoops called him “Crazy Judah.” Those who knew what they were about, such as the delegates to the convention or the newspaper editors, called him inspired. While Crocker, Huntington, and Hopkins were running their stores, and newcomer Leland Stanford was dabbling in politics, and William Sherman had sold out or lost everything in California and was currently a schoolmaster in Louisiana, Theodore D. Judah was preparing the way for the greatest engineering achievement of the nineteenth century.

*
He did once, in 1849 in California, when amoebic dysentery dropped his weight from 200 to 125 pounds. With self-medication, he recovered.

*
It cost $30 million a year to supply the Western troops, by horse or ox team.

T
HE
railroad Judah wanted, dreamed about, lusted for, was determined to build, had the support, if not the financial backing, of nearly all Americans. The swift growth of California and the West Coast, the obvious fact that as soon as the railroad was built farms and towns would spring up and land values would increase along much of the line across America, the slowness and costs of mail, Indian troubles on the Great Plains and in the Northwest, the so-called Mormon War that sent columns of troops into Utah during 1857-58, the opening of Japan and new commercial treaties with China, among other things, made the desirability of a Pacific railroad obvious to all

They could not agree on where. It was not just the Southerners who blocked the Northerners; within California, where slavery was never an important issue, the delegates to the 1859 convention from southern California and Arizona objected strongly to a San Francisco or Sacramento terminus. They wanted Los Angeles or San Diego, and argued that, since the Sierra Nevada were almost entirely in California, the railroad would have to be built to the south, where the mountains were not so awesome.

Building the railroad would be, according to William T Sherman in a letter to his brother John, a congressman from Ohio, “a work of giants. And Uncle Sam is the only giant I know who can grapple the subject.”
1

Sherman was right. No railroad anywhere crossed a continent. To
build it would take real men, dedicated men, adventurous men, men of muscle and brain power, men without equal. They must be giants to build it without steam shovels, pile drivers, or power saws, without pipes with water running through them, without portable houses and hospitals, with no internal-combustion-engine trucks and jeeps to move materials, or much of anything else commonplace in the twentieth century to build a railroad. The line had nearly two thousand miles to cross, with great stretches of desert where there was no water, plus vast areas without trees for ties or bridges, stones for footings, or game for food. Then there were three major mountain ranges, the Rockies, the Wasatch, and the Sierra Nevada. There the wind howled and the snow came down in great quantities, the creeks and rivers ran through one-thousand-foot and deeper gorges, the summits were granite, and neither man nor animal lived.

Over most of the route there were no cities except Salt Lake City, no settlements, no farms, no roundhouses, no water pumps, and, except for the mines on the flanks of the Sierra Nevada, there was nothing to carry in, nothing to carry out. The only way to get tracks forward to the end of line was to carry them across tracks already laid. The road would be of a size unprecedented anywhere in the world, and it would go in advance of settlement through an area whose remoteness and climate discouraged or completely precluded rapid migration.

In historian Oliver Jensen's words, to travel the route of the first transcontinental railroad at the beginning of the twenty-first century “is to wonder whether we are today the equals of men who with their bare hands laid those long ribbons of metal over a century ago.”
2

What it would take was the backing of the government, because only the government had the resources—money and land—to finance the project. No corporation, no bank was big enough. In a democracy, it was mandatory to turn to the elected representative body to get the thing done.

J
UDAH
had no doubt that it could be done. On October 20, 1859, he and Anna had set out from San Francisco on the
Sonora
headed for Panama and then it would be on to New York, where he intended to ride a train to Washington to seek money and land from the Congress and the President. Even before the couple left San Francisco Bay, Judah had met California Representative John C. Burch. “Our introduction was immediately
followed by a statement to me in detail of the objects and purposes of his mission,” Burch later wrote.
3
It was the only thing on Judah's mind, the sole thing he would talk about. As Burch told a meeting of the Territorial Pioneers of California on April 13, 1875, “Never have I seen a more unselfish laborer for a public work, never knew a more self sacrificing spirit than his.”
4

On the trip Judah worked on a bill incorporating the wishes of the Sacramento Convention, including a terminus at Sacramento. Burch, who accompanied them, went over the bill. He and Judah had become, in Burch's words, “immediate and intimate friends. No day passed on the voyage that we did not discuss the subject, lay plans for its success, and indulge pleasant anticipations of those wonderful benefits so certain to follow that success.” Burch naturally wanted to know more than just an outline. Judah knew what information was wanted and was ready to answer any and all questions. “On the various provisions of a proper bill to invite the introduction of capital into the work,” said Burch later, “and, in short, on every conceivable point he was armed with arguments, facts and figures, and so thoroughly that all questions of political economy involved were of easy solution to his mind.”
5

B
URCH
was so impressed with what Judah had to say and the way he said it that he agreed to sponsor Judah's bill in the House. Anna helped. Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon was also on the
Sonora
and was naturally in on the Pacific-railroad discussion. One night, at dinner with Burch and Lane, Anna asked, “Would there be any advantage in establishing a Pacific Railway Exhibit on Capitol Hill?” She explained that she had packed the charts her husband had used at the convention, as well as samples of ore, minerals, and fossils she and he had picked up on their Sierra expeditions. Further, she had her sketchbook and a few of her paintings of the mountains. Her husband nodded yes. Burch said it was a splendid idea. Lane agreed.
6

On his arrival in Washington, Judah sought out California's senators, who read and supported the bill. On December 6, 1859, he got an appointment with President James Buchanan. Together with Burch and Senator William Gwin, he went to the White House to see Buchanan, who had problems of his own but allowed Judah to present the proceedings of the convention in Sacramento. “He received us graciously,” Judah
wrote, and “expressed himself generally in favor of the Pacific Railroad.”
7
In so doing, Buchanan was reversing his own earlier position, but his Democratic Party—like the Republicans—had in 1856 adopted a resolution favoring a Pacific railroad.
8

Congress had recessed, so Judah and Anna headed west by rail, to promote his railroad bill and to collect “some reliable information with regard to the operating of engines on heavy grades, which becomes highly important in view of solving the question of crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains, as it established the fact that grades as high as one hundred and fifty feet per mile can be overcome and operated with perfect safety.” He found out that such was actually the case with the Baltimore and Ohio, which in crossing the Appalachian Mountains provided an example of what could and should be done. On his way west, he also spoke to investors, and at meetings in New York, Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago, and Cincinnati, in order, as he said, “to awaken as much interest as possible in our efforts.”
9

O
N
returning to Washington, with Burch's support, Judah was given a room in the Capitol to promote his railroad. Judah was a born genius at publicity, at pushing projects, and at persuasiveness. At Anna's suggestion, he made the room into the Pacific Railroad Museum, displaying maps, diagrams, surveys, reports, and other data, as well as her collection and paintings. He had it completed by January 14, 1860, and from then until he left for California a half-year later he was, in his words, “constantly engaged in endeavoring to further the passage of a Pacific Railroad Bill.” Scores of members of both houses, officials of the departments and bureaus, plain citizens, reporters, and editors came to call. “His knowledge of his subject was so thorough,” Representative Burch said, “his manners so gentle and insinuating, his conversation on the subject so entertaining that few resisted his appeals.”
10

More than a few, it turned out. Judah was not convincing enough. There were practical problems—how to get over mountains, across rivers, through deserts—and the location, ever the location. Southerners would not support any railroad north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Judah was in the galleries when Representative Samuel Curtis of Iowa, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad, introduced a bill to build a transcontinental road from Iowa to Sacramento. Curtis
had a number of inducements to investors in his bill, including giving land along the route to the corporation that built the road, but his bill differed from the one Judah and Burch were working on in that Curtis proposed a generous government loan of $60 million (thought to be about half of the projected costs). This loan was to be in the form of 5 percent thirty-year bonds which the newly formed corporation could sell on the open market. The debt would be repaid when the bonds matured.

Southerners tacked onto the measure a provision calling for a parallel route through the Southwest. Missouri and Iowa were fighting over the eastern terminus. Curtis's bill was sent back to committee for further consideration. That was almost surely a death warrant, but Curtis and his supporters got the bill entered on the calendar for the coming session. It would not be debated until December 1860.

T
HERE
was good news for Judah that spring of 1860. In May, in Chicago, Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president by the Republicans on a platform that called for full government support of the Pacific railway. In June, Congress passed an act granting federal aid to an overland telegraph from Missouri to San Francisco. That act cut through the quibbling over whether or not the federal government could support an internal improvement in states as well as in the territories. (The telegraph line was completed in 1861.)

There was bad news too. Visitors came to Judah's Pacific Railroad Museum to gawk, to talk, to be impressed, and to ask questions—chiefly, How do you propose to get across the Sierra Nevada mountains? It was one thing for the Baltimore and Ohio to cross the Appalachians, another altogether to attempt the Sierra.

“He made up his mind,” according to Anna, that he would never go to Washington again till he had been on the Sierra Nevada and made a survey, so that when he returned it would be “with his maps, profiles, estimates etc. etc. for a railroad across the same.”
11
He was sure it could be done, but he had to convince the politicians, so that “what I believe without the surveys I can intelligently show to senators, members of congress, etc. With facts and figures they cannot gainsay my honest convictions, as now.”