Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (51 page)

The CP spent big money trying to drill wells, but to almost no avail. Clement remarked, “Tunnels were bored into the mountains east of Wadsworth to develop small springs and when water was found, it was carefully protected and conveyed, in some cases, over eight miles in pipes to the line of the road.”
23
The water for men, horses, and locomotives came from the Truckee River and was carried in huge, semiconical wooden vats on flatcars. The vats had big spouts that worked like the spouts of railroad water towers. At the end of track, much of the water had to be transferred to barrels and sent ahead by wagons to the graders. Timbers and boards for ties, bridges, station houses, and other structures, plus wood for fuel and rock for retaining walls and other masonry, came
from the Sierra Nevada, where such materials were boundless. It was still expensive to bring them east, but it was done.

That year the CP had a most unusual but major problem with its Chinese workforce. Charlie Crocker explained it to Huntington. “The most tremendous yarns have been circulating among the Chinese,” he wrote. “We have lost about 1,000 through fear of Indians out on the desert.” It seemed that they had been told “there are Snakes fifty feet long that swallow Chinamen whole on the desert, and Indians 25 feet high that eat men and women for breakfast and hundreds of other equally ridiculous stories.” Crocker solved the problem by sending twenty-two Chinamen taken from different groups “up the Humbolt [sic] to see for themselves and they have just returned and things are more quiet since.”
24

The track layers were making great strides, while the graders ahead of them moved even faster. The
Alta California
described the way the thousands of men at work moved their residence each day. “Camp equipage, work shops, boarding house, offices, and in fact the big settlement literally took up its bed and walked. The place that knew it at morning knew it no more at night. It was nearly ten miles off and where was a busy town of 5,000 inhabitants in the morning, was a deserted village site at night, while a smooth, well built, compact road bed for traveling stretched from the morning site to the evening tarrying place.”
25

One good thing about the desert—it was flat. Wadsworth, where the Truckee River turned north, was a bit more than four thousand feet in altitude. From there the route moved up in about as gentle a grade as the Nebraska plains. For 275 miles it gained only a thousand feet of altitude. So, in July and early August, the track layers put down and spiked forty-six miles of iron, or an average of one and a half miles per day.

F
ROM
the beginning of the summer of 1868 to the end, Charles Crocker kept in much closer personal touch with the men. “I used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull,” he told an interviewer, “stopping along wherever there was anything going amiss, and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not up to time.” When he slept, which wasn't often, it was on the train. When he woke, he could tell from the movement of his car exactly where on the line the train was. When Mrs. Crocker complained that he talked to her too roughly, he would reply, “Well you know that I don't mean anything when I am abrupt with you.”

“Well,” she replied, “your manner is overbearing and gruff. That is the way you talk with me and with everybody.”

Crocker told his interviewer, “I got so that I was really ashamed of myself. That sort of bearing was entirely foreign to me.”
26

O
N
September 3, government commissioners rode from Sacramento to the end of track to make their inspection. W. H. Rhodes, correspondent of the
San Francisco Chronicle,
accompanied them. Some excerpts from his long dispatch:

Really, the speed is terrific…. Truckee is a young and flourishing town, full of people, who all seem to be busy in the great lumber trade. Hundreds of saw-mills are at work and millions of feet of timber are daily flatted out into boards….

We arrived at Reno and here beheld another new town. The noise of hammer, and plane, and saw re-echoed on all sides, and the city rises like an exhalation. It is a complete mirage on the desert, and will probably be as magnificent.

After spending the night at Wadsworth, the inspectors set out again, one of them scrutinizing the ties, rails, and grade with a spyglass, another lying down to sleep.

The argument being this, that if the passengers could sleep the track must be level, easy and all right. He slept profoundly and did not wake until we overtook the end of the road just 307 miles from Sacramento.

Here we found a very large number of men at work—principally Chinese—laying the track. The scientific part of the job is superintended by white men, but the rough work is done by the Chinese.

Shocking to modern readers, taken for granted by readers in the nineteenth century, the white superintendents of the Chinese were called “herders.”

Rhodes got a horse, “and I rode on a gallop to the front. The grading is completed several hundred miles in advance so that there is no delay in placing the rails. It would be impossible to describe how rapidly, orderly and perfectly this is done, without seeing the operation itself. There are
just as many employed as can conveniently work, and no more. Vehicles laden with ties are always in advance, and Chinese with gauge and leveling rod place them across the grade, almost as quick as thought. The car with the rails is brought up at a gallop, and six white men—three at each rail—roll the iron off the car, and drop it upon the track, with the velocity of steam. The empty car is lifted off the track, and then one fully loaded is drawn to the front, and the same operation repeated ad infinitum.”

Rhodes pulled out his watch to time the last half-mile being laid. It was done in “a little less than twenty-eight minutes…. It is a fact, beyond dispute, that this company has laid over six miles of track in a single day.”
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The inspectors judged the final twenty-mile section of the line to be acceptable, and the bonds were issued.

By this time, the crews were picking up speed to a fare-thee-well. “They can and do lay the track now at the rate of four miles a day,” another reporter wrote. He had just talked to Charles Crocker, who told him that, if the additional fifty locomotives then on ships en route to San Francisco arrived soon, the CP would be into Salt Lake City by December. The company already had seventy locomotives at work. The reporter's conclusion was apt: “This is railroading on a scale surpassing anything ever before conceived.”
28

Far to the east, Butler Ives, with a party of twelve men, was making the final location from Humboldt Wells to the Wasatch Range. “They keep me out in these infernal regions of salt and desolation,” he wrote his brother, “because I am familiar with the country & don't fear the Indians.” Montague had told surveyor Ives that “the necessity for
pushing ahead
will compel us to sacrifice good alignment & easy grades for the sake of getting light work. Make temporary location by using sharp curves and heavy grades wherever you can make any material savings on the work. The line we want now is the one we can build the soonest, even if we rebuild immediately. Keep this in mind.”
29

O
N
October 21, Huntington wrote to Crocker, “Why doesn't Stanford go to Salt Lake and stay until the roads meet?” Stanford did, and stayed for almost three months. Huntington went on, “I have got the new line to Echo Summit approved,” which wasn't quite true. “You must lay tracks to the tunnel. By God, Charley, you must work as man never worked before. Our salvation is you.”
30

By the end of October, the line was open to Winnemucca, Nevada. According to the
Humboldt Register,
the town was “improving rapidly. Several large stores had opened.” The CP made Winnemucca into a division point and intended to build roundhouses and machine shops there, along with other buildings. So, the
Register
concluded, “the town may yet survive and become an important place.”
31

That remained to be seen.
*
Engineer Graham noted the scarcity of inhabitants in northern Nevada and commented on the sight of empty land: “What settlements were there when the line was being built? Winnemucca was a small town, there was a wayside hotel at Humboldt station, there was a little store at Mill City. I don't remember any habitations until we touched Corinne [Utah], 20 miles east of Promontory.”
32

T
HAT
October, Huntington filed with the Interior Department maps and profiles of the CP's proposed line from Monument Point to Echo Summit. Secretary Browning accepted the documents, but he was about to become a lame duck, since Republican candidate General Grant was the almost certain winner of the 1868 election. So, when Huntington filed an application for an advance of $2.4 million in subsidy bonds for grading that had been done on the line, on the grounds that the CP's was the only line, the true line, the one on which bonds could be issued, Doc Durant and Oliver Ames protested mightily. Browning then decided to do nothing until January 1869, after the election, when he would appoint a special commission headed by General Gouverneur Warren to go to the site to determine the best route through the disputed territory. The UP then got Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch to agree that he would not issue any bonds until Warren's commission had reported.

Another government commission, out to inspect tracks already laid and in use, traveled by rail from Sacramento to the end of the CP's track in mid-November. On December 3, they sent a highly favorable report to Secretary Browning. “On the new portion of the road,” they said, “through Humboldt Valley, cross ties, bridges, and rails are up to standard. Minor defects can be remedied at small cost when hurry of pushing forward the road is over. Heavy trains of rails, ties and fuel are running
safely to the extreme end of the road, 445 miles from Sacramento. The road is being constructed in good faith, in a substantial manner, without stint of labor, materials or equipment, and is worthy of its character as a great national work.”
33

O
N
November 9, 1868, a reporter from the
Alta California
explained how Strobridge and his men could make that great national work press east so rapidly. He wrote that Strobridge was comfortably established in his camp train, which contained hotel, telegraph office, store, kitchen, sleeping quarters, and a “home that would not discredit San Francisco.” In the train were the officials, the clerical force, and some Caucasian workers. Mrs. Strobridge was there, in her boxcar, which was divided into three small rooms, with windows and a narrow, recessed porch on the right side, plus a ventilator in the roof.

Mrs. Strobridge was the only white woman who “saw the thing through from beginning to end.” The men called her “The Heroine of the CP.” Her car was “neatly fitted up and well furnished.” An awning veranda, with a caged canary bird swinging at the front door, gave it a homelike appearance.

The reporter noted long lines of horses, mules, and wagons near the train. At dawn the stock was eating hay and barley. As the sun came up, trains shunted in from the west with materials for the day's work. Foremen were galloping about on horseback shouting out their orders. Swarms of laborers—Chinese, Europeans, and Americans—were hurrying to their work. There was a movable blacksmith shop with a score of smiths repairing tools and shoeing horses. Next to it was a fully equipped harness shop, hard at work on collars, traces, and other equipment.

Down the track, a line of telegraph poles “stretched back as far as the eye could reach.” The telegraph wire from the last pole was strung into the car that was the telegraph office. Its last message the previous evening had been back to Sacramento to report on the progress made that day.

To the east stretched the newly disturbed earth, the grade for the ties and rails. By the side of the grade were the campfires of the Chinese, blue-clad laborers who were waiting for the signal to begin. “They are the vanguard of the construction forces. Miles back is the camp of the rear guard—the Chinese who follow the track gang, ballasting and finishing
the road bed.” The reporter judged that the Chinese were “systematic workers, competent and wonderfully effective because tireless and unremitting in their industry.” Divided into gangs of thirty men each, they worked under American foremen.

When the sun cleared the horizon, the signal to begin rang out. “What at first seemed confusion to the visitor soon resolved itself into orderly action.” A train of some thirty cars carried ties, rail, spikes, bolts, telegraph poles, wire, and more. These were thrown off the train as near to the end of track as possible. There the rails were loaded onto low ironcars and hauled by horse to the end of track. Then came the rail gang, placing the rails on the ties, while a man on each side distributed spikes, two to each tie. Another distributed splice bars, and a third the bolts and nuts for the fishplate. Behind them were the spikers, two to each side. Two more men followed to adjust and bolt the splice bars.

Simultaneously, wagons were distributing telegraph poles along the grade. Men nailed cross-arms onto them, while another gang dug holes for the poles and a third gang erected the poles, keeping pace with the rail gang. “At times lack of wagons make it impossible to keep up the supply of poles, and the telegraph gangs, who pride themselves on never letting the track get ahead of them, utilize sage brush, barrels, ties—surreptitiously taken from the track—or anything else that would keep the wire off the ground until the supply of poles again equal the demand.” Then came a wagon bearing a reel of wire. As the wire uncoiled, it was carried up on the poles and made fast to the insulators.