It was, as Huntington and Durant were well aware, a season of politics, that summer of 1866, with larger issues crowding out mere adjustments to existing railroad legislation. President Johnson had proclaimed that the insurrection was officially over on April 2 (in all the Confederacy save Texas, which would bow under control in four months). Closer to the White House, though, rebellion over suffrage and southern representation continued to glow like molten iron within his own party, markedly under the leadership of the radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. The year-old Freedmen’s Bureau, empowered to care for freed slaves and administer over abandoned southern lands, was enlarged by Stevens’s congressional rebels to adjudicate civil rights cases through military tribunals, with the bill being passed over the president’s veto in July. A bill granting citizenship to African Americans and for that matter to anyone born in the United States (except Indians) was also passed over Johnson’s veto. A constitutional amendment (the fourteenth) granting citizenship in a like manner and extending federal protection of rights flew through Congress and was dispatched out to the states for ratification. With the radicals in Congress treating the South like a conquered province, with the lines from Johnson’s dragging heels leaving gouges on Pennsylvania Avenue, with most southern states rejecting the Fourteenth Amendment, attention shifted that summer to the nearing congressional elections where Reconstruction policies would either be endorsed or repudiated. Andrew Johnson’s pitiful bid to create a third, more moderate party in August would fail just as badly as his stammering campaign tour would in the autumn. He would be greeted by insults and jeers in every town he entered, and be shouted down by ruffians in some. There would be only two real bandwagons then: the tiny one of the Democrats, and the juggernaut of the Republicans.
In his own inimical way, even the noonday mystery, George Francis Train, was pinning his hopes on political success with a base in the state of Nebraska, stumping for a senator’s seat, counting on the votes of all the settlers who had bought land from his syndicate, the Crédit Foncier, “This corporation had been clothed by the Nebraska legislature,” Albert Richardson would soon report, “with nearly every power imaginable, save that of reconstructing the late rebel States.” Train himself owned some five hundred acres in the city of Omaha, in Richardson’s eye now “the liveliest city in the United States,” and had been busy planning towns all along the railroad right-of-way. More so than the gratitude of settlers, more than the aid of local politicians who were always glad to mount a bandstand and bask in the reflection of Train’s white suit and thundering good oratory, there was the required support of his various corporate partners, without which he knew he would not even get to stand before his voting public. When, after the majestic dust of the state convention had settled and Train found himself bereft of nomination, his fury could not be contained. “George Francis was as he says sacrificed by the Rail Road men and cursed loud and long,” Sam Reed wrote to his wife on July 18. “All the blame was attached to RR men, and he gave us all notice that none that are now in good places will be here in 30 days from the time of his starting for NY, including T.C. Durant. One stagecoach or steamboat could not hold two such men…. George Francis goes from Neb. disgusted with western politics and I think with a large flea in his ear.”1
The apotheosis of talk (and his threats were just talk) was not the only railroad man campaigning that season. There was also the Union Pacific’s new chief engineer, Grenville Dodge of Council Bluffs and of the Iowa Regency Republicans who had controlled the state for years. In his memoirs Dodge would claim that he was above politics and that he was almost surprised to be nominated for a congressional seat from Iowa in the summer of 1866, and that he was elected that fall without raising a finger on his own behalf.
This assertion, repeated as gospel by railroad historians, was finally refuted by Stanley Hirshson, Dodge’s good biographer. The general had maneuvered in the Iowa senatorial campaign in the winter of 1865–66, and Engineer Dodge would take an active, albeit behind-the-scenes part in the Iowa Republican congressional canvass. Regarding this episode, Hirshson says, “Iowa contained no heroes, only villains.” In a compact block of weeks away from the Union Pacific office. Dodge betrayed the Republican incumbent, John Kasson, who for five years had been an ardent, influential Dodge lobbyist for army promotion, pay, and recognition. He stood quietly by as his supporters, including Hub Hoxie and the publisher of the Des Moines Register, both inflated his war record and embarked on a vicious smear campaign of Kasson’s name: starting by calling Kasson a copperhead and a traitor, the Register escalated it to “apostate whoremaster,” taking advantage of the fact that Kasson had just gone through a messy divorce in which his wife had charged him with adultery. Correspondence with his wife was widely published.
Then, as Hirshson noted, the Dodge campaign received reinforcements from an unexpected source. Kasson’s former brother-in-law was the Reverend Doctor William Greenleaf Eliot of St. Louis, the founder of Washington University, the head of the western branch of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, and the future grandfather of T. S. Eliot. The Reverend William Eliot published a pamphlet asserting that Kasson “was a diseased man from dissipation, so that it was not safe for any woman to live with him. He acknowledged to me having been so diseased, and that he had had criminal connection with three different women.” After the convention to Des Moines, Grenville Dodge emerged as the Republican candidate; the humiliated Kasson, who had earlier written his former friend that “I could not believe you would wish to take bread away from me,” got behind Dodge’s candidacy and the principles of Reconstruction in the subsequent campaign. Nationally the Republicans would collect two-thirds of each house in November. And the fifth Iowa district would be sending a new representative—a shy, unambitious, apolitical war hero, as he was described by the Regency’s Des Moines Register. “The myth,” writes Stanley Hirshson, “of Dodge’s indifference to politics was being firmly established.”2
Even out on the plains, in Indian country, it was a political summer. Government administration had been delegated to underlings; policy was dangerously adrift. The interior secretary was nominally James Harlan of Iowa (this was a year after he had fired “the Good Gray Poet,” Mr. Walter Whitman, from his position as first clerk in the Indian Affairs Office in Washington). Harlan was weary of the cabinet and displeased with Andrew Johnson. In Iowa’s January special election Harlan had won back his old Senate seat, which he was to take in 1867 for a six-year term. By July, with the president stumping for his moderate third party, Harlan left the cabinet and returned to private life in Iowa, which for him meant seeing to local political matters. Much of his time he devoted to working for Grenville Dodge’s congressional campaign.3
His reluctant replacement, named in summer and succeeding Harlan when he officially stepped down in September, would be Orville Hickman Browning, who acceded to the embattled President Johnson’s plea for help. This did not bode well for the Union Pacific. Browning, a longtime associate of Lincoln’s, was a balding, fastidious Illinois lawyer who had been appointed to fill out Stephen A. Douglas’s Senate term after the latter’s death. An old-fashioned, Whiggish sort of Republican who was given to wearing anachronistic ruffled shirts and grew queasy with radical “excesses” like emancipation and suffrage, Browning had worked in Washington since 1863 in an influence-peddling law firm with Thomas Ewing Jr. of the Kansas line. This was not Browning’s only reason for looking askance at the Union Pacific. He was also closely tied professionally and financially to a Detroit railroad entrepreneur and lawyer named James F. Joy, whose every association—with the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, with the Hannibal and St. Joseph, with large tracts of Kansas City real estate—would square him off against the Union Pacific. Browning also had little sympathy for the army, chiefly on political grounds. Therefore, his tenure as secretary would cover some of the most difficult times to face the Interior Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a succession of troubles in which the Plains Indians confronted Browning’s department on one flank with the U.S. Army on the other.4
But meanwhile, in June, with Harlan attending to the Iowa canvass, and with Browning working loyally for Johnson’s interests in Washington and Philadelphia and elsewhere, there were the Indian peace talks to get through.
Held as previously announced at Fort Laramie, the parley was a disaster from the start, being two weeks late in convening when the Northern Sioux of the Powder River camps had to be found and coaxed in. Indian Affairs was represented by a well-meaning conciliator, E. B. Taylor, who knew little about Indians and whose advisers on the treaty commission had scant knowledge about the situation on the plains, but who was unshaken in his belief in a humanitarian policy. As soon as the whites’ treaty was laid out, the Powder River leaders, especially Red Cloud, loudly complained: the treaty sanctioned a trail straight across the valuable hunting lands of Powder River, a trail vigorously contested by the Sioux since it was created three or four years earlier by a freebooter named John M. Bozeman, who had sought a fast, cheap route between the Oregon Trail and the new Montana goldfields around Virginia City. The Bozeman Trial, leaving the North Platte river about 70 miles west of Fort Laramie, skirting the Bighorn Mountains before joining the Yellowstone and then the Missouri headwaters, had in just a few years seen a great deal of action as a steady stream of gold-seekers and settlers’ wagon trains thundered through, ignoring the dire warnings of both the cavalry and the Sioux, despoiling the terrain and beginning to ruin the Indians’ hunting. General Patrick Edward Connor’s troops, after erecting Fort Connor where the Bozeman struck the Powder River, had ranged all through the country in 1865, enlisting hostility among the peaceable Arapaho and the resistant Sioux. Now Fort Connor was to be called Fort Reno, and the Bozeman Trail was to be officially recognized.
Commissioner Taylor answered Red Cloud’s angry protests with soothing tones. He knew little about the Bozeman Trail, but guaranteed that it was just a small matter. The Sioux seemed somewhat mollified at the close of the day’s discussions. But then, later in the afternoon, a Sioux leader by the name of Standing Elk spied a large wagon train—two hundred vehicles, seven hundred soldiers, families and personal possessions, a regimental band, followers, and even a herd of a thousand beef cattle—approaching the fort, halting and camping for the night. Standing Elk went to investigate. He asked the commanding officer, one Colonel Henry B. Carrington, where they were going. The colonel answered, “Powder River,” to fortify and protect the trail. His order was to refurbish Fort Reno on the Powder, establish a large new fort up that river’s tributary, and build a third post on the Bighorn River. Within minutes all the Sioux camps knew.
The following day, Chief Red Cloud spoke angrily, calling Taylor a liar and calling the whole treaty process a sham. “Great Father sends us presents and wants new road,” he said, “but White Chief goes with soldiers to steal road before Indian says yes or no.” Issuing a stream of threats, he led his Oglala delegation out. The Northern Sioux disappeared across the North Platte, prepared for a last stand on the Powder River. Commissioner Taylor was left with the conciliatory Brulé Sioux under Spotted Tail, whose hunting territory was unaffected by the Bozeman controversy, and a handful of likewise disinterested Southern Oglala. They, convinced that open war would signal an end to their people, signed the now-worthless treaty. E. B. Taylor—rightly called by one commentator “a fanatical optimist” for his dogged refusal to see matters as they drearily stood—proclaimed that the Laramie talks had succeeded: “Most cordial feeling prevails.” Red Cloud was an insignificant leader, he told Washington. The Northern Oglalas would cause no trouble. Within weeks, Spotted Tail was to report that many of his firebrand warriors were deserting his camps south of the Platte and heading toward Powder River. If this continued, the tribes that agreed to peace would begin to disappear, ceding power to Red Cloud and the others, who were ready for war.5
Dodge himself felt the inevitability of it all, writing to Grant that “our Rail Road will do more toward taming Indians than all else combined.” And that first skirmish involving the Union Pacific, which may have involved Spotted Tail’s deserters, would occur in August, where Plum Creek entered the Platte, and where a trading post and former Pony Express station stood on the south riverbank; already the townspeople had begun dismantling their homes and businesses and were moving across the river to get with the railroad. They would name their new metropolis Lexington, commemorating the Battle of Lexington. It was 230 miles west of Omaha, and the railroad had run on another ten miles, though only work trains were moving. Dodge was at the end of track watching the Casement brothers’ teams at work when he received a frantic wire from the Plum Creek telegrapher, who had spied a war party of Indians ride up from the south, splash across the drought-reduced Platte, and fall upon a stalled freight train. After taking the crew hostage, the Indians began to torch the freight cars. Dodge hurriedly gathered twenty riflemen from the work crew, piled them into his office car (“a traveling arsenal,” he recounted), and an engine quickly hauled them the ten miles to Plum Creek. The raiders were preparing to assault the whistling new arrival when it suddenly disgorged men with blazing rifles; all were army veterans and knew what to do when Dodge deployed them to either side of the embankment. “They went forward as steadily and in as good order as we had seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire,” the former general recalled proudly. The Indians abandoned all thought of their captives and quickly escaped on their ponies.6
All along the line, and out onto the prairie, graders and construction crews kept one eye on the horizon for any suspicious movement. They all became, wrote Reed to Durant, “very timid and at the first appearance of Indians would all leave the work.” More often than not the Indians would turn out to be friendly Pawnee, who were hunting across the sand hills and creeks north of the Platte, but the anxious laborers were taking no chances.7
In mid-August, some would take solace from the presence of General Sherman, who appeared in Omaha with his small retinue and with his brother, Senator John Sherman, to make an inspection of the work to date. Before they headed west on a special train, the general wrote to Grant through his aide, General John A. Rawlins. After having conferred with Dodge he was persuaded that the Union Pacific’s progress “surpasses everything in the way of rapid construction I have ever known.” Passenger service now extended 150 miles, he said, and a new section was about to be opened to passengers which would reach Fort Kearney, some 194 miles from Omaha. Dodge had told him that they had enough iron and ties to build another hundred miles that season. He projected that the tracklayers would reach Julesburg, or Fort Sedgwick, by April of the next year. “I am perfectly satisfied that this road is in excellent hands,” Sherman wrote, “and I propose to give them all the protection and encouragement we can.”8
When Dodge had gotten Sherman’s party out to Fort Kearney, and the general had looked over the situation, he was inclined to be cynical about the magnitude of the Indians’ threat. Since assuming command in the West he had seen a good deal of opportunism in the settlers’ alarmist complaints. He had been plainspoken about how scattered farmers and merchants profited whenever large columns of cavalry appeared. “As usual, I find the size of Indian stampedes and stories diminishes as I approach their location,” he wrote to Rawlins on August 24. But “there is a general apprehension of danger, though no one seems to have a definite idea of whence it is to come. I have met a few straggling parties of Indians who seemed to be pure beggars, and, poor devils, more to be pitied than dreaded.” The more Sherman traveled over the ensuing weeks, inspecting the Casements’ progress and venturing out in an army ambulance-wagon or on horseback, the more he was convinced of this. “All the Sioux have been driven west from Minnesota and the Missouri River,” he wrote a few days later, “and the mountain region of Montana, Colorado, and Utah is being settled up with gold miners and ranchers, so that poor Indian finds himself hemmed in. The Indian agents over on the Missouri tell him to come over here for hunting, and from here he is turned to some other quarter, and so the poor devil naturally wriggles against his doom.” It was a trenchant analysis. The settlers wanted the army “to kill all the Indians,” he wrote still later. “I will not permit them to be warred against,” he vowed, “as long as they are not banded together in parties large enough to carry on war.”9
More potential complainers, certain headaches for the army someday, he knew, were arriving by train and by wagon every day to stake out their farms. Often, as he had seen in Kansas in midsummer, they were locating themselves far from neighbors and offering themselves as tempting targets for livestock raids, shakedowns, or worse. Already there had been a flurry of interest in the next hoped-for metropolis, planted on a flat plain across the Platte from the Kearney post, whose supporters would in future years advance it as a candidate for the state or even nation’s capital. A good-sized contingent of Swedish immigrants had begun congregating there in 1865, but in August Grenville Dodge laid out an official town grid, setting prices for town lots. The prices were tempting: corner lots went for $150 and inside lots for $100 near the station, with discounts made out on the theoretical edge of town, of $75 and $50. Buyers had to pay only one-third down with the balance paid in up to two years; an interesting codicil of the agreement was that the purchaser had to plant shade trees within twelve months.10
On one particular September night in Kearney, a special passenger train stopped for the night on a siding, its occupants improvising beds with boards, cushions, and blankets, upon the backs of seats. Aboard was the roving Herald correspondent, Albert Richardson. He had no sooner returned to New York on a Panama steamer following his “eight-month wanderings” from the Missouri to the Pacific and back again when he set out again to see the railroad’s progress. It may have been during his brief rest in New York that he visited Dr. Durant in the Union Pacific offices. They were, he would write, “among the most elegant in New York. Brussels carpets, and black walnut and marble counters in the rooms of the managers, rare statuary and choice paintings surprised the eyes of visitors. Dr. Durant’s horses were the envy of Central Park, and his yacht was the admiration of the New York Yacht Club. I have seen him entertain a party of ladies and gentlemen upon it, down the bay, through an entire forenoon, as if he had not a care in the world beyond the comfort of his guests; and at one o’clock say nonchalantly, ‘Well, goodbye, I must go ashore; I have a million of dollars to pay before three o’clock. Have your sail out, and don’t return till you get ready.’”
The correspondent had taken a palace car west from New York to Chicago to Atchison, and after a tour of Kansas he had taken a steamer from St. Joseph to Omaha. Impressed with the “wonderful vigor” and growth in Omaha, he had boarded the U.S. Commissioners’ train for an inspection trip to the end of track, 240 miles west where another 20-mile section would be accepted. “Having traveled to Fort Kearny seven times by wagon and coach,” Richardson noted, “I found accomplishing it by rail in a few hours decidedly agreeable.” The next morning, resuming the westward journey, the passengers saw hundreds of antelope from their train. “Some came within two hundred yards, curious to scrutinize the iron monster screeching into their vast domain,” Richardson said. “While in motion we aimed hundreds of rifle-shots at them from the car windows. A single one, from General Merrill, took effect, and sent its beautiful victim limping into the sand-hills.” After such valiant sport, the party reached the end of track, seeing the long sleeping and eating cars of the workmen, “who press forward so fast that only portable dwellings will serve them.” They labored, Richardson marveled, “with the regularity of machinery, dropping each rail in its place, spiking it down, and then seizing another. Behind them, the locomotive; before, the tie-layers; beyond these the graders; and still further, in mountain recesses, the engineers. It was civilization pressing westward—the Conquest of Nature moving toward the Pacific.”11
The torrid drought of the summer had finally broken in early September, and with the seasonal turn toward autumn weather other travelers were at large or making plans in that direction. Dodge, in his official capacity, would be called upon to cater to two separate junkets. Both would be important to the fortunes of the Union Pacific. The first, however, though less of a logistical chore, offered more potential trouble to the chief engineer. Colonel Silas Seymour, that wild card of a consulting engineer whose murky job description and obsequious loyalty to Dr. Durant had bedeviled Dodge’s mentor Peter Dey, who would become the burr in Dodge’s blanket, appeared in Omaha for an inspection trip of the work and for a personal examination of passes in the Rockies and the Laramie/Black Hills. He was accompanied by a government director of the Union Pacific, Jesse L. Williams, a Lincoln appointee and a civil engineer from Fort Wayne, Indiana. For the moment there was one significance for Dodge to make wary note: Williams had sided with Seymour on the oxbow route against the strenuous counsel of Peter Dey. To have two competing engineers sniffing through his territory must have rankled, especially given his ego. Moreover, only a few weeks before Dodge had received his best surveyor’s preliminary report on the Black Hills line. James Evans had endorsed Dodge’s dramatic, Indian-harassed discovery of the previous year, the Lone Tree pass to Crow Creek. Dodge had quickly forwarded Evans’s preliminary line to Durant, calling it the most superior.
And here was Seymour with his habit of finding fault with the diligent work of others. The consulting engineer had reached Omaha via Pittsburgh and Chicago on the luxurious Lincoln Car, from Iowa City taking the necessary stagecoach. Dodge received them cordially, of course, and received fulsome treatment from both. At the end of track, after a suitable inspection, Seymour and Williams had ridden up to Denver, enjoying everything about the Rockies, including an early snowstorm, and subsequently had examined areas where coal and iron might draw the interest of the Union Pacific or its investors. They rejoined Dodge, and James Evans, at Fort John Beauford (soon to be renamed Fort Sanders) on the Laramie River, for a close look at the competing routes through the Black Hills. The two city slickers were delighted. “We were fully mounted as cavalry men,” Seymour wrote to Durant on September 27, “on U.S. horses with our carbines dangling at our sides and our revolvers belted around us (except Mr. Williams who unfortunately had no pistol).” Seymour proudly reported that they had carried “four different kinds of shooting apparatus, so that on the whole we presented quite a formidable & warlike appearance…it was exceedingly fortunate for the Indians that they kept out of our way.” They had been warned that “Indians indulge in mule stealing (and sometimes in scalping their owners),” Williams noted in his own letter, “having recently taken seventy mules from a transportation train.” The engineers were escorted by twenty infantry, half of whom were mounted. With that reassurance, the party took on more of an air of a holiday where fantasies of Wild West prowess could be indulged. Six miles beyond the fort, they sighted a majestic elk stag grazing at the edge of a lake. No thought was given, of course, to letting it survive. “Several shots were fired almost simultaneously,” wrote Seymour, “and after staggering a few rods he fell. When we reached the noble animal, life was extinct.” It weighed at least eight hundred pounds. While soldiers carved out twenty-eight pounds of steaks for the party, leaving the rest for the buzzards, the “splendid” antlers were removed. Seymour, they all decided, would take them to New York and present them, “with the united compliments of the party,” to Dr. Durant. Soon they would grace the Union Pacific’s main office suite.12
The boyish party atmosphere continued as they ascended the western slope of the Black Hills to the virginal Dale Creek valley. Halting there, Seymour waxed eloquent:
We had at last reached the realization of our hopes and dreams, and were actually “camping out” in the mountains. We could roll in the long grass, drink our fill from the sparkling stream, sing and halloo as loud as we pleased, without disturbing any one outside of our own little party. The Indians might be watching us from some of the surrounding crags, and coveting our scalps as trophies for the adornment of their wigwams; or might be planning an escapade for our stock; but what matter—we all felt that innate sense of security and reliance upon ourselves, which always accompanies a wild and roving mountain life; and which, we felt confident, would enable us to cope successfully with five times our number of these savage denizens of the forest.
Living out his fantasy as they continued the reconnaissance, Seymour enthusiastically recorded attempts on the life of a lone antelope on the plain between Lone Tree and Crow Creeks, on a herd of thirty elk in Lone Tree Creek valley, all of whom escaped unscathed, and on a large antelope in Box-Elder Valley, which they surprised while it was napping and which was killed with one shot. Dodge, “whose reputation for skill in bagging much larger game had become so well established during the late war,” preened Seymour, “immediately pronounced me the huntist of the party, and awarded me the beautiful skin as an additional trophy.”13
From Dodge’s point of view, the trip, which ended with some smug self-congratulation soon thereafter, was purely wasted time. His efforts to keep the two visiting engineers entertained and his earnest argument for the Lone Tree–Crow Creek route were unavailing. Seymour and Williams would soon espouse the route up the Cache la Poudre line. This was partly to take advantage of coal deposits, but also because of its easier reach to Denver (which they had visited twice during the trip, listening to the political arguments of their prominent hosts). Dodge himself had already gone on record as being against catering to Denver interests. “The people in Colorado are hostile,” he had written Durant in September, “from the fact that they look upon the other road as their road and ours as having no interest in common with them.”14 But inexplicably, according to the engineering considerations Dodge brought up, Seymour and Williams were urging the Union Pacific into more difficult and more expensive terrain. Both Evans and Dodge had gone over it: the Cache la Poudre line exceeded Lone Tree by nearly two thousand feet in ascent and descent, with higher maximum grades. It even required a tunnel. Dodge could not believe that anyone could seriously dispute him on this. Before too long he would have to journey to New York to make his case personally before the Union Pacific directors.15
Before that, though, he had to play the host one more time.
Thanks to Durant’s incessant goading by telegraph, to an increase in the Casement brothers’ workforce, and to an escalating system of bonuses and inducements, there had been a furious amount of new track work. Durant had ordered Reed to increase passenger ticket prices by 25 percent to all stations west of Fremont, telling him also to “run no trains except construction with passenger cars attached.”16 Reed predicted that iron would be spiked past the 100th meridian in early October. This was significant. The Pacific Railroad Act as amended in 1864 had stretched a finish line of sorts along the meridian; whichever railroad—Union Pacific, Kansas line, or whomever—ran across the prairie and puffed out its iron chest and broke through the line would win the right to keep racing toward a meeting point with the Central Pacific.
On October 6 with a few hammer blows the Union Pacific thereupon became the undisputed main line—finally. Dr. Durant, having decided to throw a blowout to end all blowouts, issued a new string of demands to his employees in Omaha and then sent out no less than three hundred invitations. They went everywhere, and if all responses had been positive the locus of political and economic power in the United States would have shifted, albeit temporarily, to the undistinguished Nebraskan prairie: President Johnson was invited along with his entire cabinet; all members of the House and Senate, most of the commanders of the army and navy, all foreign dignitaries resident in Washington, government directors and commissioners of the Union Pacific, board members, large stockholders, captains of industry, railroad moguls whether they competed or not—all were respectfully invited to join one of two special trains heading west toward Omaha, hop-skipping by stagecoach and river steamer to Omaha where the parties would combine for the ceremonial trip out to the meridian. Bring the wife and kids.
Not everyone on the Doctor’s grandiose list accepted. But the roster of two hundred was certainly distinguished. John Sherman and peppery, powerful Ben Wade of Ohio and New Hampshire’s J. W. Patterson appeared for the Senate, joined by Nebraska’s first two senators-elect; a dozen representatives included the Crédit Mobilier’s railroad congressmen John B. Alley and Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, who in a decade would survive the major railroad scandals and electorally squeak into the White House; the diplomatic community sent an earl from Scotland and a marquis from France; many giants of capital came, including George M. Pullman (who had lent Durant palace cars for the occasion) and Joseph Medill (owner of the Chicago Tribune), railroad tycoons, and of course the Union Pacific board members present included Dillon, Lambard, and Duff, all immensely wealthy men long before they had met Durant. And yes, George Francis Train, and his wife and maid, were there. Grenville Dodge, wife and daughter, were there, as was Hub Hoxie and wife, the brawny little Casement brothers, Dan with his wife, and numerous others—journalists, editors, two photographers. And there were no less than two full musical groups, the oompah of the Great Western Light Guard Band of Chicago and the celebrated Rosenblatt’s Band of St. Joseph. (“Both wind and string instruments,” Hoxie had explained to Durant. “A good one for St. Joseph [but] not number one for New York.”)
They had been plied with rich fare even before they landed in Omaha, and fěted at the Governor’s Ball, at every opportunity orating and congratulating one another. Colonel Seymour, who had met them at the steamship dock, noted that they had been “evidently delighted, and somewhat astonished to find themselves, after a week’s journeying westward from New York, still among people of wealth, refinement, and enterprise.” Poor Sam Reed, who had exhausted himself with preparations, would have been dazzled by all the pomp as well as by the expense. “I hope,” he had written his wife, “that there will be but few in the party.” But by the time they had arrived, he was in bed with typhoid fever. The list of excursionists, as published en route in their own newsletter, had so many honorables, governors, generals, colonels, reverends, doctors, and judges, and so many of their grande dames, that the train, as it rumbled importantly away from the yards and machine shops and round the oxbow and up the Platte Valley, could hardly contain itself.17
There were nine cars pulled by two flag-decorated locomotives: behind a baggage and supply car, there was a mail car “fitted up as a refreshment saloon,” a cooking car constructed by the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne, and Chicago Railroad for the Union Pacific, followed by four passenger coaches built by the Union Pacific in Omaha, followed by the Lincoln Car (“the private property of Mr. Durant,” noted Seymour, “and…therefore devoted principally to his own personal friends and their families”), and finally by the “magnificent” directors’ car, built also by the Pittsburgh line. Dodge, as general host, was everywhere. He “rendered every assistance in his power,” Seymour noted, before modestly admitting his own contributions: “the Consulting Engineer, by his timely presence, was enabled to relieve the others from much, if not all the heavy standing around.” The train proceeded at a purposefully slow pace down the “fine valleys” of Mud Creek and the Papillon. Many aboard exclaimed in “wonder and admiration,” Seymour added, as the Great Platte Valley opened to view. After several stops to examine the bridge structures over the Papillon and Elkhorn Rivers and to admire the “commodious” depot buildings and water stations at Fremont and North Bend, the weary excursionists reached Columbus just after dark.
Just past the station buildings they found “a brilliantly illuminated encampment, which covered several acres of beautiful ground…so arranged as to afford comfortable accommodations for all who wished to leave the cars and enjoy the novelty of a night’s sleep in camp.” Inside a large dining tent they found food to vie “with those found upon the table of our Eastern hotels.” But after dinner the real entertainment began. At Durant’s behest the railroaders had hired a large number of Pawnee from the nearby reservation, and the Indians proceeded to perform a war dance. “Of all the wild and hideous yells, grotesque shapes and contortions that have ever been witnessed by a civilized assemblage in the night-time upon the plains,” Seymour exclaimed,
this was most certainly the climax. The light of the moon, aided slightly by that of a dim camp fire, was barely sufficient to enable the spectators to distinguish the features and grotesque costumes of the savage performers; and the congregation of lady and gentlemen spectators were only too glad to know that the Indians were entirely friendly, and catering only for the amusement of the company, instead of being enemies, dancing and gloating over their scalpless bodies.
Tingling with the thrill of it all, the refined company turned in soon thereafter. Then, just before dawn, the excursionists were jolted awake by “the most unearthly whoops and yells.” Durant and Dodge had arranged for a sham Indian raid by the faithful Pawnee as the morning wake-up call. Disordered heads of the excursionists popped out of tent flaps. Many screamed, wondering “whether they were to be immediately roasted alive, or allowed a short time in which to say their prayers, and write a few parting words to their distant friends,” as Seymour recounted. After calm was restored and the joke explained, and after a sumptuous breakfast, the tents were struck and the travelers climbed aboard the train once again.
East of the Loup Fork bridge the train halted once again on a high embankment. The Pawnee reservation was not far away, and Dodge had arranged for a mock Indian battle between the Pawnee and some of their number dressed up as Sioux warriors. “The shock of meeting was grand and terrific,” wrote Seymour.
Horses reared and plunged against each other. Indian grappled Indian, and both fell to the ground in deadly embrace. Rifles, revolvers and arrows were discharged apparently with deadly effect. Riderless horses, and horseless riders were to be seen roaming wildly over the plain. And all was confusion and intense excitement, until at length the victorious Pawnees brought their vanquished enemies into camp, amid the most tempestuous shouts of triumph and exultation.
Afterward, Dr. Durant tossed several hundred dollars’ worth of presents into the crowd of Pawnee. There was a terrific scramble. And then all visitors climbed smoothly aboard the train and it chugged off westward, passing the embryo towns of Silver Creek, Lone Tree, Grand Island, Wood River, Kearney, Elm Creek, Plum Creek, and Willow Island.
At mile 279, about 8:00 P.M., the train halted for the night opposite Fort McPherson, whose soldiers were charged with protecting the gentle party from real marauders. On the following day Dodge ran a train out to the end of track, some ten miles farther, where Jack and Dan Casement had their men work for the party’s brief enjoyment, laying eight hundred feet of track in a half hour. “So we go,” exulted the editor of the Railway Pioneer, “on our march to the Pacific!” And that night, back at the McPherson encampment and after a musical program, they were treated to a magnificent fireworks display, “much to the amazement, no doubt,” said Seymour, “of the distant savages and wild beasts, who might happen to be the witnesses of this first exhibition of the kind in the great Platte Valley.” Then, after more music, the celebrated phrenologists, Fowler and Wells, mounted the dais. “The professors…called the listeners one at a time to the dais,” recalled Erastus Lockwood, “and made phrenological examinations, reporting their findings in witty remarks to the audience assembled. George Francis Train was one of the victims, and when his diagnosis was given as colossal conceit, the tent went into an uproar—all of which Mr. Train took in good part.”
As if music and fireworks and the cranial bumps of Mr. Train were not enough, on the eastward return the tiring excursionists were treated to a celebration at the Hundredth Meridian monument (during which time many photographs were taken), and a close examination, near Kearney, of a vast prairie-dog colony, some twenty-five square miles in size “and by far the largest town through which they had passed since leaving Chicago,” Seymour wrote. Curious animals who peered out of their burrows were answered with prodigious gunfire; it wounded a number but netted the huntists only one victim, which was surrendered to the cook. “It has come to a pretty pass,” joked one dignitary, “if this grand excursion is reduced to such a strait that its guests are obliged to subsist on prairie dog.” Their humor was increased after dark, during their last hours on the plains, at the lower end of the Platte Valley: Durant had ordered that the prairie be set afire for the excursionists’ delight. “The flames extended in an unbroken line a distance of from fifteen to twenty miles,” Seymour recorded, “and one end of the belt of fire was so near, that we could feel the heat, and distinctly hear the roaring and crackling of the devouring element, as it swept over the plains with almost railroad velocity, and shot up its forked flames into the sombre smoky sky.”
Make no mistake. This excursion was, in Seymour’s estimation, “the most important and successful celebration of the kind, that has ever been attempted in the world.” It also garnered an immense amount of positive publicity for the Union Pacific, coming at a good time when the board of directors’ annual meeting was nearly upon them and when bond selling would have to be increased over the winter months to pay for the next impulsive push westward. Certainly a number of those bonds would have to pay for the prodigious cost of Dr. Durant’s Hundredth Meridian Excursion.
But the last word on that extraordinary event, and on all it signified to the well-heeled celebrants and even more so to the people and the way of life the railroad would displace, belongs to that consulting engineer on the Empire Express, Mr. Silas Seymour, and it comes in the form of the notes he jotted down just after the mock Indian battle at the Loup Fork bridge and published in a popular book. Not many years later, many of those Pawnee, having first been moved aside by the Sioux and Arapaho and then by the government whose shelter they would then seek, would find their way into the proud employ of one William Frederick Cody (“Buffalo Bill”) and his Wild West Show, the sham and the drama and the tingly romanticism of which must have found its inspiration in the Hundredth Meridian Excursion of October 1866. Then, as the Pawnee had fought over the spoils strewn by Dr. Durant, the occasion had moved the consulting engineer to new heights of fancy, a veritable rhapsody of racial superiority. “Perhaps no better illustration could have been given,” he said,
of the extremes of civilized and savage life, standing face to face with each other, than the one now before us. On the one side was the track of the Union Pacific Railroad, upon which stood that great civilizer, the locomotive and train, looking westward over the Loup-Fork bridge, fifteen hundred feet in length; and in the foreground stood the group of excursionists, composed of beauty, intelligence and refinement; while, on the other hand, were grouped these uncouth savages, many of them almost in their normal state, except for the profuse display of feathers and trinkets which bedecked their persons; low and brutal in their habits, and mentally elevated but slightly, if at all, above the level of the beasts that inhabit this vast and beautiful country with them.
But the laws of civilization are such that it must press forward; and it is in vain that these poor ignorant creatures attempt to stay its progress by resisting inch by inch, and foot by foot, its onward march over these lovely plains, where but a few years since, they were “monarchs of all they surveyed.”
The locomotive must go onward until it reaches the Rocky Mountains, the Laramie Plains, the Great Salt Lake, the Sierra Nevada, and the Pacific. Ocean. Lateral roads must also be built, extending in all directions from the main line, as veins from an artery, and penetrating the hunting-grounds of these worse than useless Indian tribes, until they are either driven from the face of the earth; or forced to look for safety in the adoption of that very civilization and humanity, which they now so savagely ignore and despise.18
The Fourth of July parade in Sacramento had been a great blowout, affording the Central Pacific many pages of good publicity. The mule-driven railroad cars proceeding through cheering sidewalk throngs, the beaming Chinese on their floats, the proud dignitaries in their bunting-adorned carriages consumed vast amounts of newspaper ink. Indeed, a banner unfurled from the Crockers’ carriage said it all: “The Pacific Railroad a Fixed Fact!” And the publicity was not over.19
Then, two days later on the western slope of the Sierra at Secrettown, Charley Crocker was just returning from an inspection trip when he encountered a reporter from the San Francisco Alta California, who had just stepped off the cars from Sacramento. The writer, identified in publication only as the Traveling Correspondent (T.C.), had just noted that Secrettown was now “a flourishing entrepot of trade, containing four shanties.” Crocker regretted being unable to escort T.C. over the line but he placed his mule at his disposal and ordered that road superintendents should extend him every courtesy—provided that he stick to the facts in his report. This T.C. promised to do.
Mounting Crocker’s steed, he began the ascent. He noted the thousand-foot-long Secrettown trestle, ninety feet high at one point, and the remarkable Tunnel Hill excavations which had so vexed the engineers (and Mark Hopkins) in the spring when mudslides kept filling in the road cut; they had solved the problem by sculpting six back-sloping benches above the line—some 450,000 cubic yards of slippery soapstone and goop were removed. T.C. paused to remark on the numerous hydraulic mining ditches of Gold Run (about which the Central Pacific had already been forced to pay damages of $30,000 when the line intersected them). He proceeded to dusty Dutch Flat, which had continued to grow despite the disappointment of being located a half mile from the depot. The intervening land, T.C. noted, had grown up in newcomers—it was “odoriferous to the nose and beautiful to the sight with male and female celestials.” Above Dutch Flat there was the Alta station, the highest point to which the Central Pacific had service at present, where he lodged for the night.
The physical beauty of the upper mountains struck T.C. as strongly as did the difficulties presented to the railroaders by terrain, all during the next day. He would note a profusion of culverts, built of granite, and a network of ditches leading to each one “for carrying off every stream of water that could possibly threaten embankments with washing away.” He would be assured that “no water, except that falling directly from the heavens, can touch the embankments.” Wonder piled upon wonder. At Blue Canyon, he saw “the heaviest filling on the road”—600 feet long, 85 feet high in the center, requiring 120,000 cubic yards of earth “to fill up its gaping mouth.” All of it had been done by the little Chinese with mule-drawn dump carts. He inspected the Central Pacific’s first tunnel at Grizzly Hill and the Horse Ravine—cut five hundred feet through rocky cement and boulders, now standing at twenty feet wide and high. But he reserved his unqualified admiration for the prospect at Green Valley—where Leland Stanford had begun his California existence as “an honest miner.” The reporter marveled at a 150-foot-deep railroad cut, some 300 feet long, which had been gouged using water sluices and hoses. “The immense force displayed by it in carrying off earth and large boulders was astonishing,” T.C. said. “The boulders and debris were vomited out on the steep side of Green Valley, where they bounded from rock to rock with reverberating thunder, carrying away trees and making dents of from ten to twenty feet in depth in the earth until the bottom was reached some 1,500 feet down.”
Soon he was identifying with the targets of that monstrous talus through more than mere imagination. Now beyond a finished grade, threading through rough terrain where throngs of Chinese picked away at the mountainside, accompanied by a road superintendent by the name of Morris, T.C. followed an often indistinct pack trail used by engineers and inspectors along the sloping south side of Yuba Valley, about a half mile from its bottom and the Yuba River. Shortly they wandered off the trail, “and then ensued a stumbling over granite boulders, fallen trees, and water courses, through brush and manzanita,” he noted,
sometimes on horseback, sometimes on foot, for about three miles, such as I never in my most daring dreams of riding dreamed of. We kept constantly looking for the trail or for some path which would take us back to the line some quarter of a mile above us, where drilling parties were at work all along blasting granite. We were constantly stumbling upon immense blocks or boulders of granite, which powder had hurled down, and at one time a small blast was fired almost immediately above us, which sent heavy rocks and stones down in our vicinity in a manner not at all reassuring to the safety of our persons or craniums.
Not long after, the pair found their way to safety. After a night’s rest at a place called Polly’s Station on the Donner Lake Road, he went out with Lewis M. Clement, location engineer from Dutch Flat, to the summit, higher and higher up the Yuba Canyon, “through a country of solid granite formation, where drilling and blasting are the weapons used for the industrial progressive warfare.”
The work was, he pronounced when he was finished looking at it, “Titanic.”20
As it was. And it picked up in speed. A week after T.C. published his dispatch in the Alta California, passenger and freight service extended to the rude little settlement of Alta, altitude 3,602 feet. Of course an excursion train of ten cars ran up the sixty-nine miles from Sacramento, filled with dignitaries. “The excursionists were supplied with cold water, lemonade and a stronger beverage which may be called Pacific Railroad Punch,” reported the Union. “Among the men, the last named drink seemed to be the favorite. When Pacific Railroad Punch is freely circulated, speechmaking is almost sure to follow.” There was no lack of speeches that day. In addition, said the Union, “three cheers were given for C. P. Huntington, absent at Washington, three for E. B. Crocker, absent at Washoe, three for Lauren Upson, an early editorial friend and advocate of the road, and three more for the Sacramento Union. The memory of T. D. Judah, the original projector of the road, was proposed and drunk in silence.”21
Efforts intensified. In a few weeks the Union announced that the line had advanced far enough past Alta to ensure service to Cisco, twenty-three miles beyond, that season. “The work of railroad building in this lofty and rugged region—ascending from thirty-six hundred to nearly six thousand feet above the sea—is very heavy,” reported the Union. It was “a succession of deep cuts and huge fills; but the host of Celestial laborers, under the energetic control of Saxon and Celt, is so numerous that the mountainous obstacles are ‘here today and gone tomorrow.’”22 By then Crocker’s laborers were redeployed in three eight-hour shifts, making the work constant; those on the night shift, working on the mountainside and in the tunnels by torchlight or lanterns or even bonfires, were happiest and most productive; it was a torrid summer, “hot enough just about now,” commented the Dutch Flat Enquirer on July 18, “to give a thick beefsteak a decent broil.”23
But hot as it might have been, this was the Sierra, and it had its own climate. The young flagman J. O. Wilder, at work in the survey crew on the crags above Cisco, recorded seeing snow still on the north side of Castle Peak in early August. It might have been a harbinger. Just a year before, in August 1865, the summit work had been all but abandoned when snow arrived. Three shifts—and redoubled efforts—would avoid that. Work up to the announced goal for the year, tiny Cisco at mile 92, was complex. In addition to the recently finished Grizzly Hill tunnel there was the 271-foot Emigrant Gap tunnel (Tunnel 2), which was nearly completed, and the hundred-foot-high trestle bridge across Butte Canyon, in addition to all the rock cutting, grubbing, and grading. “As fast as the gangs of Chinamen were released” from each of these obstructions, recalled the engineer John R. Gilliss, “they were hurried to the summit to be distributed among the tunnels in its vicinity”—there would be seven tunnels crowded within a two-mile stretch. “As an illustration of the hurry,” he recalled “walking two miles over the hills after dark, and staking out the east end of Number 12 by the light of a bonfire; at nine o’clock the men were at work.”24
With their thoughts of the coming winter, the Summit Tunnel (Tunnel 6) naturally commanded not only a strategic but an emotional urgency, being upon completion the longest on the line (at 1,659 feet) and also the deepest (at most, 124 feet). It took many of the men, and when progress at its western and eastern ends was unsatisfactory, engineers decided to sink a vertical shaft down through that solid granite to strike the midpoint of the tunnel line. Then drilling could proceed on two new fronts. It was a good idea, and work on the shaft—roughly eight by twelve feet—began on August 27. “For the first thirty feet it was sunk at the rate of a foot a day,” recalled Gilliss, “after which progress slackened, from delay in hoisting the material with a common hand derrick.” He calculated that they had forty-two feet to go.25
Steam power was plainly the answer. Mechanical engineers in Sacramento quickly scoured the region and found the necessary equipment in the yard of the old Sacramento Valley Railroad, now called the Sacramento and Placerville. It was none other than the first railroad engine to run on California soil, the noble little Sacramento, carted round Cape Horn in the spring of 1855 and christened with champagne by Ted and Anna Judah. By California standards, eleven years was old—and the Sacramento was about to be sacrificed to drill Judah’s line through the summit. Like eager cannibals, mechanics unbolted and pitched the proud smokestack and cab and tank, sending the remaining carcass up to Gold Run on a platform car. Here, at trackside, the engine was jacked up and its wheels removed. Using traveling jacks, it was moved fourteen inches at a time to a gargantuan logging truck fitted with wheels two feet wide. Once it was bolted and braced, a teamster named Missouri Bill hitched ten yoke of oxen to the enterprise. A squad of freighters watched anxiously along with their foreman, a Central Pacific wagonmaster named Pratt. Missouri Bill cracked his whip.
The young surveyor’s assistant J. O. Wilder was helping to lay out the town of Cisco and its sidings, but sometime later the whole story of the engine’s ascent was told to him by Missouri Bill. “All went well till a half-mile east of Dutch Flat,” he recalled.
It was here the engine received its first cussing, for she had been the cause of stampeding a ten-mule freight team. Anyone familiar with mules knows that when they start something they usually finish it to the Queen’s taste, with broken harnesses and tug-chains. This happened every day while on her way up the mountain; even the stagecoach horses would balk at the sight of her, and it finally became necessary to blindfold teams of mules and horses to get them to pass, for they would leave the road and take to the hills or the ravines, whichever looked best to them; and they weren’t particular, either, about what they took along with them. They would endeavor to kick themselves loose of everything before starting for the bushes.
As if this were not enough, the teamsters had to negotiate many soft places in the road, some mudholes being as much as twenty-five feet across. Small trees were cut and laid lengthwise and crosswise, and branches heavily scattered over the top. Often when the grade got too heavy for the oxen, the wagonmaster conscripted a passing freight team for a lift up the grade. Thus they finally reached the divide above Emigrant Gap. “From here to Crystal Lake,” recalled Wilder, “it is down grade—the largest problem of all, for Pratt had to make assurance doubly sure, taking into consideration the heavy weight. This part of the locomotive’s journey was fraught with fear, for one mishap meant loss of time and perhaps engine. With heavy logging chains and chain tackle made fast to big pine trees, they would let down as far as the tackle would permit, then block it. This was repeated time after time until the bottom of each grade was reached.”26
While all of this was occurring, carpenters put up a large structure over the head of the shaft, fifty feet square, which housed the hoisting engine and cable drums (the shaft had been partitioned with timbers into two) along with a machine shop and forges. Moreover, there was generous room for fuel storage—always there was an eye toward winter. Eighty-five days after the shaft was commenced, they hit bottom. Two platoons of Chinese went down, at first sweatily working back to back, nosing east and west. Steadily the burrow enlarged, as did the workforce in those last anxious weeks before the winter storms began to hammer them. The Emigrant Gap tunnel (Tunnel 2) had been finished on September 21, with those crews, and still others below Cisco, redistributed on the mountaintops. As Leland Stanford would say, “We swarmed the mountains with men.”27 The San Francisco Bulletin could not help but be awed by the industry. “The road is entitled to be ranked among the most remarkable achievements of science and labor combined,” it exclaimed. “The elevation which it surmounts exceeds that of all but one of the passes of the Alps, and is the greatest yet reached by any railroad in the world.”28