Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (50 page)

Constant spraying with water helped keep some control of the fires in the snowsheds, but after many years all the wood had to be replaced with concrete. The sheds remain one of the wonders of the CP. They were, until replaced with concrete, one of the wonders of engineering with wood. The timbers were fifteen feet or longer, almost as big as big tree trunks. Photographs of them continue to astonish and amaze. Except for their vulnerability to fire, the thirty-seven miles of sheds would still be there, being used.

In July 1870,
Van Nostrand's Engineering Magazine
said of the work first planned by Stanford and Crocker, then laid out by Clement, then made under Brown's supervision, that the men of the CP “just roofed in their road. They took the giant branches of the pines and braced them against the mountain side, framing them and interlacing them with beam. They sloped the roof sustained by massive timbers and stayed by braces laid into the rock, covered by heavy planks up against the precipice so that descending earth or snow would be shot clean over the safely housed track into the pine tops below. They have conquered the snow.”
11

T
O
the east, out where the desert met the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, CP engineer Joseph Graham was in charge of building the road through Nevada. As he recalled, “On the first day of April, 1868, I set the first stake of the survey of the boundary for Reno. The original town-site comprised about 35 acres extending for about a quarter of a mile between the Truckee River as the south boundary and English Ditch as the north boundary.” Charles Crocker pulled the town's name out of a hat. It was named for Jesse Lee Reno, a Civil War general and hero killed at the Battle of South Mountain in September 1862. The CP sold lots at auction. Because Reno was to be the trade center for the relatively nearby Virginia City, Washoe, and Carson City country, there was a rush of buyers, and choice twenty-five-foot lots sold for $1,200 apiece.
12

H
UNTINGTON
had played a leading role in getting the 1866 Railroad Act amendment passed. The bill authorized the CP to “locate, construct, and continue their route eastward, in a continuous completed line, until they shall meet and connect with the Union Pacific Railroad.” As noted, with no point of junction specified by Congress, the roads were free to build
as far as they could. The race that was therefore set up inspired the directors, the supervisors, the surveyors and engineers, the foremen, and the laborers of both the UP and the CP to go as far and as fast as they could.

There were some requirements. One permitted the companies to grade three hundred miles ahead of the end of track; another permitted them, upon completion of acceptable grade, to draw two-thirds of the government-subsidy bonds before the track had been laid. But first there had to be continuous track—not a problem of any magnitude for the UP, but a big one for the CP.

By 1868, the CP had been under construction for five years, but it had only 131 miles of track in place, and they were not continuous. There was a seven-mile gap on the eastern slope of the Sierra, just east of the summit. To the west the Chinese had laid sixteen miles from Cisco to the summit, but although track had been laid and spiked the line had been abandoned when the heavy snows came. In January, Secretary of the Interior Orville Browning had approved the CP's proposed line from the Truckee River to Humboldt Wells. But the CP still had to get a continuous line from the summit down to the Truckee, and from Cisco up to the summit. It wasn't going to be easy getting that done.

In mid-April, Strobridge moved a large number of Chinese from Nevada back to the still-snowbound region above Donner Lake and to the west and put them to work shoveling out the surveyed line of the unfinished track and on the grade west of the summit. Snow had covered it to depths of ten to thirty feet, with ice on the grade below the snow. Cuts made between Tunnels No. 8 and 10 were simultaneously buried under snowdrifts twenty to sixty feet high. Meanwhile, the completed track running up from Cisco to the summit lay beneath snow so firmly impacted that snowplows couldn't get through. On both sides of the summit, thousands of men had to clear the track. Besides shovels, they used picks and blasting powder.
13

As the finished track progressed, California (and national) politicians were getting after the CP for its freight and passenger rates. On April 14, Huntington wrote Hopkins, “I notice that everybody is in favor of a railroad until they get it built and then everyone is against it unless the railroad company will carry them and theirs for nothing.”
14
Despite Huntington's complaints—which he most certainly regarded as legitimate, and which would continue and increase, as would the political attacks on the CP and the UP—the work went on.

“Keep right on laying rails just as though you did not care for the snow, and we're bound to get to Weber Canyon before the Union Company,” Huntington told Charlie Crocker in a letter on April 15, “If you do that I will forever pray that you will have your reward!”
15

By May 1, 1868, the CP line from Reno to Truckee was completed. The crews were meanwhile clearing the snow near the summit so that the track layers could re-lay the track between Cisco and Tunnel No. 12 and complete the last seven-mile gap to open the line to Nevada.

On May 15, Huntington filed with Secretary Browning a map of the definite location of the CP's proposed line from Humboldt Wells to Weber Canyon. Browning's approval was necessary before the crews could start clearing the grade. At that time, the CP's tracks were five hundred miles west of Echo Summit, yet that was where Huntington hoped to reach. The Pacific Railroad Act forbade the builders to draw subsidies on work done more than three hundred miles ahead of their continuous track, yet the CP officials still wanted to get to grading in Utah. The CP chief engineer, Montague, had his surveyors running lines north of the Great Salt Lake and east of Ogden, in the Wasatch Range, where they were working next to the flags of the UP surveyors near Fort Bridger, Wyoming. The UP surveyors were simultaneously staking out a line across Utah and Nevada to the California border.

It was about this time that Stanford went to Salt Lake City to try to talk Brigham Young into putting his Mormon shoulders to the plow. Brigham had not immediately agreed, Stanford told Hopkins, “Have Charley [Crocker] double his energy and do what is necessary to secure what labor is required to push the road to its utmost. Anything less than the most that can be done will very likely end in defeat.”
16

On June 15, 1868, six days after Stanford's telegram to Hopkins, the CP's gap between Cisco and Truckee was finally closed. Crocker sent a triumphant telegram to Huntington: “The track is connected across the mountains. We have one hundred and sixty-seven continuous miles laid,”
17
A day or two later, he sent three thousand of his Chinese graders, with a fleet of four hundred horse-drawn carts, to Palisade Canyon, on the Humboldt River, three hundred miles in advance of the end of track. Getting supplies and food to them was frightfully costly, but he got to work on it anyway.

On June 18, 1868, the CP ran its first through passenger train from Sacramento to Reno, a distance of 154 miles.
*
A reporter for the
San
Francisco Daily Alta California
was aboard. He wrote that the train, which departed at 6:30
A.M.,
consisted of one boxcar stocked with freight, one baggage car with freight and the U.S. mails, and three of the CP's new passenger cars. The locomotive was the
Antelope,
which had just been overhauled and painted, with bright-red wheels, a walnut cab, shiny brasswork, and a portrait of an antelope painted on the headlight. A truly fitting picture for the first locomotive ever to cross the Sierra Nevada.

Hank Small was the engineer. He checked out the locomotive, oilcan in his hand. Then he got started. After Roseville, California, “we proceeded on our way and now the mountains appeared so close that it seemed that we could put our hand out of the window and touch them…. The engine blows and wheezes, with short, sharp aspirations and the feeling of weight as we ascend a steep and increasing grade.” At 9:50
A.M.,
the train had gone up 2,448 feet, to Colfax. Then came the jaws-to-the-floorboard passing around Cape Horn, with passengers looking “anxiously and with evident trepidation into the depths below.” Then came Secret Town and an elevation of nearly three thousand feet.

“Up and up, onward we climbed skyward.” Then came Dutch Flat. Two miles farther, it was Alta at 3,625 feet. The first tunnel, five hundred feet long, was seventy-five miles from Sacramento and forty-five hundred feet above the sea. The snow levels came down to the road. “Chinese are swarming everywhere. They have nearly finished their work in this vicinity and are packing preparatory to passing over the summit into the great interior basin of the continent.”

At 102 miles from Sacramento, “we stand 6,800 feet above the sea. Two miles more and the cars reach the entrance of the great summit tunnel, 1,659 feet in length. We have scaled the great Sierras at last and a plus ultra might be written on the granite walls of the great tunnel before us. We are 7,043 feet above the sea.”

On the west side of the tunnel, “a swarm of Chinese are busy shoveling away the snow, which has come down in great slides bringing with it huge granite boulders upon the tracks.” It took two hours to clear the track. The passengers waited with whatever patience they could muster until conductor George Wood called out “All aboard!” On the trip down to the Truckee, “the snow banks come down so close to the track that the eaves of the car rake them on either side.” The road wound around the precipitous mountainside, almost encircling Donner Lake as it descended,
scended, making a circuit of seven miles to gain not more than a quarter-mile.

On it rolled, to the Great Basin of Nevada. “The mighty task is accomplished. Words cannot describe it.” The Chinese onlookers did, in their own way. The
Alta California
reporter watched them as they watched the train. He called them “John,” and wrote: “John comprehending fully the importance of the event, loses his natural appearance of stolidity and indifference and welcomes with the swinging of his broad brimmed hat and loud, uncouth shouts the iron horse. With his patient toil, directed by American energy and backed by American capital, John has broken down the great barrier at last and opened over it the greatest highway yet created for the march of civilization.”
18

Theodore Judah, who did the original surveying, had thought it could be done. He had convinced the Big Four, then Congress, then the President that it could be done. Now that it had been done, he must have looked down from heaven and smiled.

A
T
the lush Truckee Meadows, the wild grass grew two to three feet high. The California pioneers had stayed there to fatten their horses and cattle before pushing over the Sierra. When the track was open from Sacramento to the meadows, Crocker sent fifty carloads of supplies to Strobridge per day, divided into five trains each hauled by two locomotives. Crocker told Bancroft that those trains “were the heaviest that ever went over the road and the heaviest that ever will probably.”
*
He said the trains went over the seven miles of completed track just past the summit “and went safely. If the track had not been good, it could not have been done.”
19
As quick as the supply trains were unloaded, they started back over the mountains for another load.

The CP was on the move. The Truckee's Lower Canyon headed east, going through a narrowing meadowland that lay between great bare brown hills, until the river swung left some thirty-five miles past Reno and headed north, toward its outlet at Pyramid Lake. As the end of track moved east, the construction superintendent's headquarters train, along with dormitory cars, stayed right behind. J. C. Lewis, editor of the week-old
Reno Crescent,
described it. “A locomotive came rushing down the
track having in tow a string of boarding and lodging houses. One and four-story houses, which we called the Hotel de China. In the lower deck was cooking apartments; the second, third, and fourth decks were sleeping and eating rooms. Next several houses of a superior quality for the officials of the company…. Altogether a novel sight and one we shall long remember. We are prepared for anything Charlie Crocker may do in the future.”
20

On July 1, 1868, Huntington wrote to Crocker to tell him that he had sent 60, 146 tons of rails from New York, all on fast ships, and he expected to raise the figure to ninety or a hundred thousand tons by the end of the year. Then he added, in a near-perfect expression of his many exhortations and therefore perhaps the most widely quoted of all his words, “So work on as though Heaven were before you and Hell behind you.”
21

The same day, July 1, engineer Graham got to the Big Bend of the Truckee, where he set the stakes to found the town of Wads worth. Crocker came up a bit later and walked over the site, and after a half-hour he pointed to where he wanted the engine house and the station buildings for the town. This spot, 189 miles from Sacramento, became the base of supplies for the remaining five hundred miles of construction.

After Wadsworth, where the crews said good-bye to the Truckee, and until the track got to the Humboldt Sink, the route was northeastward across the Great Desert, a vast waste of sand and sagebrush and white alkali deposits, with high mountain ranges to the south and bleak hills to the north. The desert ran nearly a hundred miles, without a tree, without water, without anything that could be used for construction. A popular saying was that “a jack rabbit had to carry a canteen and haversack” to get across it.
22