Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (58 page)

The correspondent for the
Alta
described the scene as he saw it. “Standing here, on this rising ground,” he scribbled in his notebook and then sent off by telegram to his paper, as he watched from Promontory Summit, “a view of the whole field may be obtained. Along the line of the road may be seen the white camps of the Chinese laborers, and from every one of them squads of these people are advancing.” They had to grade four miles and lay track over the ties and spike down before gaining the summit.

On April 30, the CP finished. It had reached the final summit, more than five hundred miles east of the first summit above Donner Lake, all done in less than a year and a half, at a time when all the locomotives, iron, spikes, fishplates, bolts, and more had to come from the East Coast. The
Alta
noted, “The last blow has been struck on the Central Pacific Railroad, and the last tie and rail were placed in position today. We are now waiting for the Union Pacific to finish their rock-cutting.”
20
At the summit basin, tents started to go up, to announce the birth of a new town, Promontory.
*

For the UP, all the cuts were finished but one, and it was grading and laying track in both directions. The Big Trestle was nearly finished, and Casement promised reporters that it would be replaced with a fill in the summer. He didn't explain exactly why the UP would not use the CP's Big Fill.
21

The UP's accomplishment needs to be noted. From April 1, 1868, to May 1869, Dodge, the Casements, and their workers had laid 555 miles of road and graded the line to Humboldt Wells, making the total distance covered 726 miles. Everything had been transported from the Missouri River, over two ranges of mountains, a task never equaled or surpassed. In Dodge's judgment, “It could not have been accomplished had it not been for the experience of the chiefs of the departments in the Civil War.”
22

Today people can still drive—cautiously—down from Promontory eastward on the surface of curving sections of the original but abandoned UP roadbed.
*
One drives through high fills and long, deep cuts. There too can be traced the CP's lines. Sometimes the two cross each other. Going west from Promontory Summit, an automobile and a bike trail follow the original CP track, with the UP grading always visible. These are stark mementos of human failure and achievement, monuments to government stupidity and genius, to the competitive instincts and organizing ability of Strobridge and the Big Four and Dodge, Durant, and the other leaders of the UP, and most of all to the men who built them.

H
ELL
on Wheels was into its last flourish. In Corinne and in the camps of the UP to the west, the whiskey sellers, gamblers, and prostitutes continued to do business in a new place but in the same old way. One reporter wrote, “The loose population that has followed the UP is turbulent and rascally. Several shooting scrapes have occurred among them lately. Last night [April 27] a whisky-seller and a gambler had a fracas, in which the ‘sport' shot the whisky dealer, and the friends of the latter shot the gambler. Nobody knows what will become of these riff-raff when the tracks meet, but they are lively enough now and carry off their share of the Plunder from the working men.”
23

Colonel C. R. Savage, a photographer hired by Seymour for the occasion, noted in his diary that he went to Casement's camp, “where I had the honor of dining with Jack and Dan Casement in their private car. Very pleasant and agreeable reception.” From the car he could see the tent camps, beautiful in the twilight. But they were dangerous. “I was creditably informed that 24 men had been killed in the several camps in the last 25 days. Certainly a harder set of men were never congregated together before.”
24

W
HEN
the UP workers began building east from Promontory Summit, the two railroads had met—or at least almost, given that the last twenty-five hundred feet were not yet in place. And the UP still had some cuts to make, a bridge to complete, some track to lay, so only the CP's locomotives could get to the site. By mutual consent, the Big Four and the UP's board of directors fixed the date of meeting for Saturday, May 8. Dodge reported that it had been set “far enough ahead so that the trains coming from New York and San Francisco would have ample time to reach Promontory in time to take part in the ceremonies.”
25

Beginning on May 3, the companies began discharging large numbers of men and sending others to the rear to work on part of track that had been hastily laid. The two opposing armies “are melting away,” reported the
Alta California,
“and the white camps which dotted every brown hillside and every shady glen … are being broken up and abandoned. The Central Pacific force are nearly all gone already, and that of the Union is going fast. Ninety of the latter left for the East this morning, and a hundred more go tomorrow, and the rest will soon follow.” Those still on the spot were working day and night to finish the grading and the track laying.
26

The
Salt Lake Deseret News
had an item that signified the change: “Business at Corinne is very dull. The merchants there are in a state of perplexity as there is no sale in the town. A great many are leaving in disgust, land speculation is at a discount, and this last-born of railroad towns is pronounced the ‘greatest bilk of any.'“
27

The men were not being discharged and sent back soon enough to please everyone. Colonel Savage wrote in his diary, “The company would do the country a service in sending such men back to Omaha, for their presence would be a scourge upon any community.” He watched as returning
men “were piled upon the cars in every stage of drunkenness. Every ranch or tent has whiskey for sale.” Then he pronounced his own judgment, one that has been quoted countless times since: “Verily, men earn their money like horses and spend it like asses.”
28

Dodge, generous in his remarks about the Chinese, sneered at the ten-miles-in-one-day record. “They took a week preparing for it,” he declared, “and imbedded all their ties beforehand.” That last wasn't true, but he went on anyway: “I never saw so much needless waste in building railroads.” Then he admitted that the UP's Construction Department “has been inefficient.” More specifically, he claimed, “There is no excuse for [the UP's] not being fifty miles west of Promontory Summit.” That was sour grapes. But Dodge closed with a comment that summed up the triumphs and troubles he had seen, one that put his, the UP's, and the CP's achievement in reaching Promontory Summit into perspective. He noted that “everything connected with the construction department is being closed up,” and then concluded, “Closing the accounts is like the close of the Rebellion.”
29

*
Abandoned early in the twentieth century. The new line across Great Salt Lake was opened for traffic on March 4, 1904. The tracks over the summit were torn up in World War II to use as scrap iron.

*
As it would until the last decade of the twentieth century, when the two lines were merged into one Union Pacific.

*
All times were local until the four Standard Time zones were adopted in 1878. The railroads demanded it, for uniformity was critical for their operations.

*
It is no longer in existence, but the National Park Service has a splendid interpretive center there.

T
HE
celebration came with the completion of the transcontinental railroad. When the Golden Spike went into the last tie to connect the last rail, it brought together the lines from east and west. Lee's surrender four years earlier had signified the bonding of the Union, North and South. The Golden Spike meant the Union was held together, East and West.

The nation had known many celebrations, beginning with the Declaration of Independence. Victory in the Revolutionary War, the adoption of the Constitution, the election of George Washington, the peaceful passing on of power, the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition had involved virtually all citizens in celebration. But the annexation of Texas, victory in the Mexican War, the acquisition of California had been marred by the controversy over slavery. And of course most white Southerners could not celebrate Lee's surrender. But present at the pounding of the Golden Spike were former Confederates alongside former Yankees. The ceremony brought together all Americans.

Hyperbole was common in the nineteenth century. In part that was because people had had so little with which to compare inventions, advances, or changes, in part because they just talked that way. Words like “the greatest achievement ever” came naturally to them. Thus the transcontinental railroad was called the Eighth Wonder of the World. The building of the road was compared to the voyage of Columbus or the
landing of the Pilgrims. It was said that the road was “annihilating distance and almost outrunning time.” The preacher at the Golden Spike ceremony, Dr. John Todd, called it “the greatest work ever attempted.”
1
In 1883, General Sherman, in his last annual report as head of the army, called the building of the road “the most important event of modern times.”
2

They may have exaggerated, but for the people of 1869, especially those over forty years old, there was nothing to compare to it. A man whose birthday was in 1829 or earlier had been born into a world in which President Andrew Jackson traveled no faster than Julius Caesar, a world in which no thought or information could be transmitted any faster than in Alexander the Great's time. In 1869, with the railroad and the telegraph that was beside it, a man could move at sixty miles per hour and transmit an idea or a statistic from coast to coast almost instantly. Senator Daniel Webster got it exactly in 1847, when he proclaimed that the railroad “towers above all other inventions of this or the preceding age.”
3

I
N
the twenty-first century, everything seems to be in a constant flux, and change is so constant as to be taken for granted. This leads to a popular question, What generation lived through the greatest change? The ones who lived through the coming of the automobile and the airplane and the beginning of modern medicine? Or those who were around for the invention and first use of the atomic bomb and the jet airplane? Or the computer? Or the Internet and E-mail? For me, it is the Americans who lived through the second half of the nineteenth century. They saw slavery abolished and electricity put to use, the development of the telephone and the completion of the telegraph, and most of all the railroad. The locomotive was the first great triumph over time and space. After it came and after it crossed the continent of North America, nothing could ever again be the same. It brought about the greatest change in the shortest period of time.

Only in America was there enough space to utilize the locomotive fully, and only here did the government own enough unused land or possess enough credit to induce capitalists to build a transcontinental railroad. Only in America was there enough labor or enough energy and imagination. “We are the youngest of the peoples,” proclaimed the
New
York Herald,
“but we are teaching the world how to march forward.”
4

America had the Civil War behind it and the Industrial Revolution ahead. It was an empire of liberty, stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast. The railroad was the longest ribbon of iron ever built by man. It was a stupendous achievement. It had spanned a continent, opened new lands for settlement, opened the mountains with their minerals. It had crossed a frontier of immense possibilities. It had inaugurated a new age, begun what would be called the American Century (which lasted beyond a hundred years).

One year before the rails were joined at Promontory, Walt Whitman began to celebrate this new force when he wrote in his “Passage to India”:

I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier,
I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying freight and passengers,
I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,
I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world,
I cross the Laramie plains, I note the rock in grotesque shapes, the buttes,
I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions, the barren, colorless, sage-deserts …
Tying the Eastern to the Western sea, The road between Europe and Asia….

P
ARTS
of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific ran through some of the grandest scenery in the world, but the spot where the two were joined together was improbable and undistinguished. No one had ever lived there, and shortly after the ceremony no one would ever again. The summit was just over five thousand feet above sea level. To the south the terrain rose sharply, covered with cedar. Its out-thrust offered a magnificent view of the great inland sea, a thousand feet below. To the north the bench again rose to form a parallel parapet. The summit itself was a flat, circular valley, bare except for sagebrush and a few scrub cedars, perhaps three miles in diameter. The only “buildings” were a half-dozen wall tents and a few rough-board shacks, set up by merchants selling whiskey. They ran along a single miserable street.

•   •   •

O
N
May 6, Durant and UP director John Duff were riding a UP train headed west on their way to the ceremonies. Their train was about to pull in to Piedmont, just east of the Wyoming-Utah state line, when, like a bolt of lightning on a clear summer's day, rifle bullets zinged past their car as the locomotive was stopped by ties piled on the track. A mob of some three hundred men, all of them tie cutters and graders for the UP, loomed outside the windows of Durant's car. Just as quick as that, the mob uncoupled the official car, removed the ties from the rails, and waved to the engineer to go ahead. When Durant came to the door of his car to demand what the hell was going on, he was surrounded.