Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (48 page)

Beginning November 1, Stanford made his headquarters in Salt Lake City. Among other objectives, he wanted to spy on the UP. He had Lewis Clement with him; Acting Chief Engineer Montague had put Clement in charge in Utah, along with Consulting Engineer George Gray. The three men went out to inspect the preliminary line run by Butler Ives in 1867. They agreed that the line required an eight-hundred-foot tunnel through solid limestone that would cost $75,000 to blast and would delay track laying in the home stretch of the race. A new line laid out at the expense of alignment in order to avoid the tunnel would require a fill of ten thousand yards of earth, with rock cuts leading up to it that would consume more than fifteen hundred kegs of black powder. Stanford ordered it done anyway.

Stanford also wanted to convince his Mormon contractors to start grading toward Monument Point as soon as they completed the hundred miles to the west of that place that they had contracted to do. They expected to be finished in about a month. Stanford wanted them to start the new grading in Ogden, working west toward Monument Point. His thought, apparently, was to establish Ogden as the meeting point for the two railroads. Congress had not yet set the place, and others, including his own partners plus Durant and the other big shots from the UP, had other plans.

By the next month, December 1868, the CP was in apparent control of a line from Monument Point to Ogden. It had finished about two-thirds of its grading, although blasting and filling at Promontory went slowly. The contractors, Benson, Farr & West, gave many excuses, but Stanford “started Brigham after them,” and they began to work faster.
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One of the Big Four who had other plans was Huntington, who was obstinately in favor of the CP's going as far east as Echo Summit and meeting the UP there (the UP had graded from the summit west through most of Echo Canyon, thanks to the Mormons, but its track was still in Wyoming in 1868). Stanford saw nothing to be gained by parallel grading
in Echo Canyon, but still he wished all the bad luck in the world on the UP. “One good storm,” he wrote Hopkins on December 10, “would settle the question of their coming through the Weber Canyon this winter.”
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T
HE
use of codes and of code-breaking goes back to the beginning of writing. It was usually used by governments to hide what they were doing. President Thomas Jefferson had a code system used by Captain Meriwether Lewis to report on the political views of other army officers, and another for Lewis to use while exploring the Louisiana Purchase and the Northwest, in order to fool the Spanish should they happen to intercept Lewis's messages. Sometimes Civil War generals used codes, although, it must be said, not often enough (George B. McClelland uncoded orders were captured by the Confederates before the Battle of Antietam, giving Robert E. Lee a chance to read them).

The first use of codes by businessmen to prevent detection of their doings known to this author was by the CP and the UP. It was inaugurated in 1868, just as the race between the two corporations was headed toward a climax. The purpose was to baffle any wiretapper. A reasonable fear, since all a spy had to do to find out what the opposition was up to was to tap into the telegraph line. (The UP, apparently, couldn't keep a secret; one of its engineers, F. C. Hodges, wrote to CP engineer Butler Ives telling all he knew about the UP's plans and progress. Ives sent the information on to the Big Four.)

The CP's code consisted of symbolic words. “Yelp” was Brigham Young's code name. “Riddle” stood for William Ralston, of the Bank of California. Mark Hopkins had one key to the code, now at Stanford University in his handwriting. He was the only one of the Big Four who habitually used the code. He didn't bother with it on some occasions, as in his one-word reply in 1868 to a Huntington inquiry, “No.” He evidently felt that was sufficiently cryptic.
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The Big Four, especially Huntington and Hopkins, used codes to hide important numbers, like profits, costs, and the like, most of all totals. This may have been to hide the figures from the UP, but there is also a strong possibility that another purpose was to fool government regulators and inspectors. And it worked.

•   •   •

M
ILANDO
Pratt was a Mormon farmer near Ogden who had lost his crops to grasshoppers (“Great clouds of grasshoppers flew over these inter-mountain valleys and would darken the sun like a misty fog, and when night overtook them they would alight upon the ground and devour the crops whenever within their reach”) and thus became a subcontractor for Benson, Farr & West. He helped make the grade to the west of Monument Point, but he still wasn't free of grasshoppers. “Those pestilential things were no respecters of places when night overtook them,” he remembered, “for they would settle down upon the waters of the Great Salt Lake which pickled them in its briny waters by the hundreds of thousands of tons and then cast their carcases ashore until a great wall of these inanimate pests was formed for miles along the lake's shore.” They put forth a “great stench” when the sun hit them the next morning “and cast the aroma of this slowly melting putrid wall upon the windward breezes to be wafted earthward toward our suffering camp.”

Until the grasshoppers came to die, Pratt and his fellows had been taking their bath in the lake each night, “in its refreshing soothing waters.” They quit doing that when the pests came, and began using kerchiefs dipped in camphor solution, which was kept on hand in the camp to battle gnats and mosquitoes. But they soon found they missed the bath so much they decided to bring into action “our railroad implements of warfare and force a gateway through the dormant remains of our insufferable common enemy.” Using horses and scrapers, they forced a way to the lake through the barrier of putrid grasshoppers so that they could again enjoy “the freedom that this great inland salt sea afforded.”

There being no grass around the lake, and with hay selling for $75 per ton, Pratt had to send the horses into the hills with night herders to graze. Such was the life of a Mormon grader.
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For engineer James Maxwell, the grasshoppers posed a special problem. First he lost a black Newfoundland dog, who could not be seen through the swarm of grasshoppers from fifty yards away. Next his train was stopped by grasshoppers. “This seems like a big story,” he admitted, “but it is true and easily explained.” The grasshoppers were so numerous they “covered the rails,” so when he was headed up a grade, his driving wheels slipped on them. And if that seemed unbelievable, consider this: “The chickens seemed to think that they had a bonanza, but very soon they didn't care for any more grasshoppers, and crawled into the tents or
wagons, anywhere at all to get shelter.” A cow nearby who was pestered by the grasshoppers “would run away, whenever an opportunity was offered.”
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W
ORSE
than the grasshoppers was Doc Durant. Always eager to enter into a contract that would be good for the UP, he was also always slow, or unwilling, or unable to pay. Not even Brigham Young could get what he had earned. Here is a sampling of the telegrams Young sent Reed in the last half of 1868. July 31: “Men who have completed or nearly completed their jobs are anxious for their pay. When will you be here.” August 5: “When will you be in this City. Answer immediately.” September 22: “The men are exceedingly anxious to get their pay for day work performed last June and since.”
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None of the messages got any reply.

By October, Young warned Durant that the men were so angry many of them were walking off the job. The
Cheyenne Daily Leader
sneered that the workers were deserting because some of them were “weak in the faith,” but mainly, the newspaper said, they would stay at their posts, because “Brother Brigham holds the whip as well as the reins, and whither he would drive they go.”
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Whatever kept them at work, Young's pleas left Doc unmoved. The UP had, Young declared, paid only a third to a half of the value of the work done. Many subcontractors had borrowed money at 2 percent a month to pay their workers, and Young himself had put out $46,860 of his own money, but neither expedient was enough. He told Durant, “I need money very badly to carry on the work and do not know how to get along without it. Two or three hundred thousand is needed.” He got $100,000.
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Durant put that money to Young's credit in an account in New York, but Young informed him that he had already drawn checks for nearly that amount and he was still $130,000 in arrears. “I have expended all my available funds in forwarding the work,” he wrote Durant, “and if I had the means to continue would not now ask for any assistance. These explanations must be my apology for troubling you in the matter.”
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Young did all he could to pay the men out of his own pocket, but it wasn't enough, and the problem continued into 1869 and beyond. It should not be thought that only Young and the Mormons had to beg, badger, plead, threaten to sue, and otherwise try to force Durant to pay
up. Joseph Nounan and another Gentile contractor, J. M. Orr, had to wait and beg and plead for what they had earned, and been promised, as well.

A
T
the beginning of 1869, Young praised Durant for his “energy and go-ahead-ivness.”
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By then the UP had tracks into Utah and almost down to Salt Lake Valley. That could not have been done without Durant and Dodge and many, many others, but neither could it have been done without the Mormons.

They worked without letup. For sure they wanted their money, but even more they wanted the railroad. The energy they put out could not be measured, but how they did it and what they did were observed. On December 15, 1868, an unsigned reporter for the
Deseret News
had described what he saw along the line. “All the ground not graded east of Echo is covered with men,” he wrote, “who are working night and day. At night huge piles of sage brush make fires by which the work is prosecuted. The frozen ground is drilled, kegs of powder are emptied in the holes, and a long section of frozen earth is blown up almost simultaneously.”

He went on: “The road up Weber canyon is crowded with teams hauling ties, which are deposited about a mile below the mouth of Echo.” Here they were taken up by other teams and distributed on the grade up the canyon. The pile driver was at work for the culverts and bridges. There was a cut in the making that was ninety feet deep and five hundred feet long, on which men were working day and night. “Deep drills are being driven, into each of which a few kegs of powder are put, and huge masses of rock are thrown out and loosened for the crowbar to detach.”

As for the tunnels, “But a faint idea can be conveyed. Sleepless energy is unceasingly occupied drilling, blasting, rending the foundations of the earth, and cutting a passage through rock harder than granite.” The reporter compared the blasts coming from the tunnel facing to “the loud reports of heavy artillery; and the old mountains reverberate from base to summit, ringing back with thundering echoes, as if in anger.”

T
HERE
were many teenagers among the Mormon workers. One of them was Bill Smoot, who was fifteen years old and worked at the head of
Echo Canyon for nine months in 1868. “Boys at my age in those stirring times did a man's work,” he wrote over fifty years later. “We were hardened by the open life we lived and were brought up to work and did, that we might keep body and soul together. There were no drones. Each has his assigned work.” For himself, he wrote, “I caught the railroad fever, even though I had never even seen a picture of a railroad or a train of cars.” He had a team of horses, and with them he hauled ties. In the course of his stint, he earned $1,600, which was “a greater sum than my father had earned in cash money during his previous twenty-two years residence in Utah.”

Smoot lived in a camp not far from another UP camp that held five hundred men, mainly Irish. “They were good workers,” he recalled, “and a jolly bunch of men, but often got the worse from drinking bad whiskey and when they laid off work for a good old Irish wake, they sure let everybody know it for many miles around.”
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The UP and CP graders were working almost right next to each other north of the lake, according to the December 12 issue of the
Salt Lake Daily Reporter,
“in a seemingly fraternal embrace.” But “the frozen ground in the mornings makes work difficult, and unless plowing is done in the afternoon for the scrapers to work at during the next day, progress is tedious and damage to the plows considerable.” Although foremen were talking about giving up the work while the ground was so hard-frozen, their bosses were after them to keep going: the line from Ogden to Promontory Summit could be reached in twenty days if the weather remained favorable. But of course it would not, could not. Men working north and west of Ogden told the newspaperman that nothing could be done until spring, because “they cannot open the ground, it is so hard frozen already.” The reporter concluded, “Notwithstanding the herculean efforts made by both companies, work may have to be suspended on a large portion yet to be done. The elements are obstacles which even railroad enterprise and energy sometimes cannot overcome.” The time had come to call it quits for 1868.

*
The hope was realized. In the first summer of regular service, more visitors stopped at Salt Lake City during the travel months than at any time since its founding.