The Age of Gold (63 page)
Authors: H.W. Brands
S
TANFORD AND THE
Central Pacific had fewer Indian problems than Sherman and Union Pacific, but the western builders had troubles the easterners didn’t. As John Frémont, the Donner party, and countless other trans-Sierra travelers discovered, those mountains caught snow like no other range in North America. Drifts of twenty, forty, sixty feet weren’t uncommon, and in the spring, as warm days and cold nights alternately thawed and refroze the banks, the drifts compacted into iron walls of ice. Stanford later remembered one place where a drift measured at sixty-three feet had been compressed into eighteen feet of ice, which could be removed only by pickax and blasting powder, at enormous expenditure of effort and money and with discouraging loss of time.
The winter of 1866–67 was especially severe. At one point a snowplow driven by five locomotives, one behind the other, bogged down in the drifts. Extrapolating, Stanford calculated that nearly half the year would be lost to the snow and ice. Someone had suggested snowsheds: long, roofed structures to cover the track and keep the snow off. One day at lunch with Crocker, Stanford took out a pencil and began scribbling figures. Before the meal was over, the two men had decided to build the sheds by the time the next snows fell.
The granite of the Sierra batholith was, needless to say, harder than the snow and ice. Ten tunnels had to be blasted and burrowed beneath the ridges that separated the Sacramento Valley from Nevada; the longest of these, the summit tunnel, was surveyed at sixteen hundred feet. Black powder
—the same employed in the mines of the Mother Lode—was the explosive of first resort, but as time pressed and the rock resisted, the sappers resorted to nitroglycerine. This new compound was highly unstable. A careless (and uninformed: the precise nature of the cargo was strictly secret) dockhand in Panama blew himself, dozens of his fellows, and most of the wharf to smithereens when he dropped one of seventy crates bound for California. Two weeks later a similar explosion atomized the Wells Fargo freight office in San Francisco.
Stanford and the others realized that some informational efforts were required to prepare the public, and the Central Pacific workforce, for the new explosive. A representative of the manufacturer made a show of splashing the liquid on a stone and smacking it uneventfully with a hammer. An engineering consultant declared the material “free from all danger” if handled properly. The company’s engineers pointed out that due to its greater detonating power, nitroglycerine could actually be safer than black powder, since so much less was needed.
In the end, the efficacy of the nitro overrode concerns for safety. Employed in the summit tunnel, where workers blasted inward from both ends and outward from a central shaft dug down to grade level, it sped the burrowing process. “We are getting up pretty near to 2 ft. per day per face,” Crocker reported. “
Nitroglycerine tells
.”
Eventually the Central Pacific crossed the Sierras, and the Union Pacific crossed the Rockies. Durant needled Stanford about the more rapid pace of his company’s construction. “We send you greeting from the highest summit our line crosses between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, 8200 feet above tidewater,” Durant telegraphed. “Have commenced laying iron on the down grade westward.” Stanford responded calmly. “Though you may approach the union of the two roads faster than ourselves you cannot exceed us in earnestness of desire for that great event,” he said. “We cheerfully yield you the palm of superior elevation; 7042 feet has been quite sufficient to satisfy our highest ambition. May your descent be easy and rapid.”
In November 1868, Stanford journeyed to Utah to sound out Durant regarding the meeting place of the two roads. The two men sidled around the subject, with neither wishing to suggest a junction that might yield
ground or profits to the other. “I did not try to do anything with Durant, nor he with me,” Stanford informed Hopkins. “We had general talk in the main.” Durant preferred the Union Pacific’s chances in the field, betting that his crews could grade, lay, and spike faster than those of Stanford’s Central. Stanford accepted the challenge. “We parted with the understanding expressed by me in so many words that we had done nothing to commit our respective companies to anything,” he said. “To which he assented.”
The final race was on. Grading crews of the two companies pushed far ahead of the layers; north of the Great Salt Lake they built competing roadbeds that paralleled and on occasion even crossed each other. (Subsequent stories of violence and sabotage between the Chinese crews of the Central Pacific and the Irish of the Union Pacific were exaggerated, and elided the fact that much of the work for both companies in Utah was done by the Mormons.) As both sides realized, the race would be to the fast, not the fastidious. “Run up and down on the maximum grade instead of making deep cut & fills,” Huntington advised Crocker, “and when you can make any time in the construction by using wood instead of stone for culverts &c., use wood, and if we should have now and then a piece of road washed out for the want of a culvert, we could put one in hereafter.” Hopkins concurred, summarizing the main objective: “to build road as
fast
as possible of a character acceptable to the commissioners.” This last condition posed little problem. The friendliness of the commissioners, who had to approve the construction in order for the railroads to receive their money and land, had been guaranteed by the adroit application of financial enticement and political pressure. “We
know
the commissioners will readily accept as poor a road as we can wish to offer for acceptance,” Hopkins told Huntington.
In the end, after much lobbying by both sides, Congress decreed that the meeting place would be Promontory Summit, on the north shore of the Salt Lake. Though this left the Central short of Ogden, the depot for the Salt Lake Valley, Durant and the Union Pacific agreed to sell Stanford and the Central the intervening sixty miles.
The ceremony of meeting was scheduled for May 8, 1869. Stanford set out from Sacramento in a special train bearing assorted invitees. High drifts of snow still covered the Sierras, but the train passed unhindered. One of the guests, Dr. James Stillman, recorded his wonder at the snow- sheds that made the passage possible.
We are cribbed in by timbers, snow-sheds they call them; but how strong! Every timber is a tree trunk, braced and bolted to withstand the snow-slide that starts in mid-winter from the great heights above, and gathering volume as it descends, sweeps desolation in its path; the air is cold around us; snow is on every hand; it looks down upon us from the cliffs, up to us from the ravines, drips from over head and is frozen into stalactites from the rocky wall along which our road is blasted, midway of the granite mountain.
The snowsheds took the train to the summit tunnel. “We are in pitchy darkness in the heart of the mountain,” Stillman wrote. Then light again, then more snowsheds, then a breathtaking view of the most heartbreaking scene in all of California: Donner Lake, with all the chilling memories it conjured.
Along the Truckee River the party almost met disaster. (“We came near driving our last spike,” Stillman said.) Work crews on the slope above, unaware of the approach of the special train, let a massive log roll down onto the track. A Sacramento editor, riding on the pilot—or “cowcatcher”—in front of the engine for a better view, dove off for his life. The train plowed the log aside, yet sustained substantial damage in the collision. At the first opportunity the cars carrying Stanford and the others were transferred to a fresh engine.
The Carson Desert brought memories of harder days. “Several of our party were among the overland emigrants,” Stillman recorded, “and they pointed out where, one by one, their animals perished, where they abandoned their wagons, and where their guns—the last article they could afford to part with—were planted, muzzle downward, into the hillocks in the
desperate struggle for water and life.” To cross the desert at their current pace almost boggled the mind. But speed was welcome and fully appreciated. “It was a country that one could not travel over too fast.”
Stanford’s train reached Promontory in good time for the laying of the final tie. Yet Durant, coming from the east, was detained by contractors who hadn’t been paid, and who thought this an opportune moment to demand what they were owed, for themselves and their workers. They halted Durant’s train and told him he couldn’t pass till he handed over $200,000. Durant wired for money while one of his assistants wired for troops. Both messages, carried on the lines along the tracks, were intercepted by the rail workers, who wired back that if troops intervened, the ransom would be taken out of the hostages’ hides. Moreover, the Union Pacific could expect a strike all along the road, clear to Omaha. The threat was convincing; the troops remained in their barracks, and $50,000 soon reached kidnap headquarters. The kidnappers called this sufficient and released the hostages.
The delay pushed the celebration back two days. (California couldn’t wait, and went ahead with the party that had been scheduled for May 8.) As luck would have it, a wagon train hove into view of the Promontory crowd as the final tie was eased into place; the juxtaposition of old and new struck the celebrants as fittingly dramatic. Stanford swung a silver-plated sledge to drive a spike of California gold into a tie of laurel cut from the slope of Mount Tamalpais. Durant did likewise, and the process was repeated with two other spikes: of Nevada silver, and Arizona iron, silver, and gold. Later tales that the two men had missed their marks weren’t borne out by contemporary evidence, and anyway were rendered implausible by the fact Stanford and Durant didn’t actually have to drive the spikes, which were too soft and precious to be roughly handled, and so were merely tapped into predrilled holes. (The confusion apparently arose from the fact that after the ceremonial spikes and tie were removed, ordinary substitutes were put in their place. Stanford took a full swing at an iron spike and did miss.)
Telegraphers of the two companies had rigged wires to the spikes, so that the hammer taps closed a circuit and sent the welcome news of completion east and west. California exulted (a second time); Chicago
cheered; New York and Philadelphia rang the bells, respectively, of Trinity Church and Independence Hall. In Washington, Ulysses Grant, now president, heard the news at the White House.
William Sherman, who had assumed Grant’s old position as commanding general of the army, got the signal at the War Department. “I sat yesterday and heard the mythic taps of the telegraphic battery announce the nailing of the last spike in the great Pacific road,” he wired Grenville Dodge, in congratulation. Promising to try the railroad soon, Sherman said his next trip west would be rather faster than his first, “when the only way to California was by sail around Cape Horn, taking our ships 196 days.”
The people who come to California are bold adventurers naturally. We were dissatisfied with life in Europe and the Eastern states, because it was too slow. We came here to enjoy an exciting life and make money rapidly….It is no uncommon thing to see men who have been wealthy on three or four different occasions and then poor again. “A fire,” “an unfortunate speculation in merchandise,” “a revulsion in real estate,” “a crash among the banks,” “an unlucky investment in a flume,” these are the phrases used every day to explain the fact that this or that man of your familiar acquaintance, though once rich, is now poor. When men fail they do not despair … they hope to be rich again.
—John S. Hittell, Forty-Niner and author
One man works hard all his life and ends up a pauper. Another man, no smarter, makes twenty million dollars. Luck has a hell of a lot to do with it.
—Charles Crocker
If the modern era in American history—call it the age of gold—was born at Coloma in 1848, it reached maturity at Promontory in 1869. By then the youthful effervescence of the Gold Rush years—the race from all over the world to California, the frantic assault on the goldfields, the wild times in San Francisco and the mining camps—was fading into memory. The Forty-Niners were growing arthritic; the placermen had long since been muscled aside by the hydraulickers and quartz borers;
many of the camps had closed and fallen into ruin; San Francisco was dully proper compared to the days of the vigilantes and the nights of the wall-to-wall gambling hells. Mining remained the leading industry in California, but ever more it was an
industry
rather than a vehicle for personal hopes and ambitions. Immigrants still flocked to the state, but they did so for the same reasons they flocked to America generally. California, in short, was becoming more like the rest of America.
Yet something else was happening, something of deeper significance: America was becoming more like California. The change commenced the moment the golden news from Coloma reached the East and the visions of the yellow metal littering the ground set imaginations aflame. In that moment a new American dream began to take shape. The old American dream, the dream inherited from ten generations of ancestors, was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, of Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmers: of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck. This new dream—the dream of El Dorado— wasn’t without precedent in American history. The gentleman- adventurers of the Virginia Company had hoped to strike gold on the James River in the seventeenth century, just as the conquistadors of Spain had struck gold in Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century. But when no gold appeared in the rivers that ran to the Atlantic, the Virginians and other American colonists adopted a different pattern, more pedestrian and better suited to the virtues of sobriety, thrift, and steady toil that facilitated success in an agricultural society and formed the archetype of the original American character.
The golden dream resurfaced and became a prominent part of the American psyche only after Coloma. James Marshall’s discovery electrified the country (and the world), holding forth the promise that wealth could be obtained overnight, that boldness and luck were at least as important as steadiness and frugality—that El Dorado, not some Puritan city on a hill, was the proper abode of the American people.
Under the Puritan aegis of the old American dream, material success required unflagging effort and constant virtue, while failure connoted weakness of will or defect of soul. The California experience provided a persuasive riposte to this received version. Success in the goldfields could come overnight, and signified not virtue but luck. John Frémont was no more virtuous than a thousand other argonauts, but he became a thousand times richer.
Where life was a gamble and success a matter of stumbling on the right stretch of streambed, old standards of risk and reward didn’t apply. In the goldfields a person was expected to gamble, and to fail, and to gamble again and again, till success finally came—success likely followed by additional failure, and additional gambling—or energy ran out. Where failure was so common, it lost its stigma. No one in California counted the failures, only the rich strikes that rewarded the tenth or hundredth try. The entrepreneurial spirit had never been absent in American history; every immigrant to America was an entrepreneur of sorts. But in the goldfields the entrepreneurial spirit took flight, freed from the inherited fetters of guilt and blame. And once a-wing in the West—the region to which America had always looked for its future—the spirit soared over all the country.
The no-fault ethos of the new era was hardly an unmitigated blessing. The age of gold was also the age of speculation, corruption, and consolidation on a scale unimaginable before Coloma. Traders in mining shares, in rail stocks, in gold itself colluded to drive prices up or down, and frequently purchased the cooperation of journalists and government officials to abet their schemes. Industrial magnates forged monopolies to extend their power, creating corporate behemoths that intimidated the public and acted as a law unto themselves.
Yet for all its sordid side, the new American dream was an enormously creative force. It unleashed the energies of the American people, and of the many millions of foreigners who, drawn by this compelling dream, chose to become Americans. (It also unleashed the energies of those who stayed in other countries—or in some important
cases, returned to other countries from America—and emulated the argonauts of California.) It raised the American standard of living beyond anything ever achieved so broadly. It afforded the most basic freedom—freedom from want—to more people than had ever enjoyed such release. And it gave unprecedented meaning to that really revolutionary idea of Thomas Jefferson: that humans have a right to the pursuit of happiness.