Seated in his elegantly equipped office at 20 Nassau Street in Manhattan, his staff bustling away and attendant to every whim, Dr. Durant nonetheless found it difficult not to feel ill at ease, even beleaguered in the closing weeks of 1866. A letter from Samuel B. Reed, dated November 29, was at hand, assuring him that Reed’s long bout with typhoid was now over; all the aggravating construction delays in late October and November might be partially blamed on Reed’s indisposition (and inability to urgently supervise), most pointedly on the Loup River bridge, which had halted track construction for weeks until only on November 24. Reed, about to go home to Joliet for a visit to his wife and daughters, thought that the Casement brothers’ tracklayers would reach the end of the third hundred-mile section in less than a week. However, the grading on the fourth hundred was “not as well advanced as it should be,” he admitted. “The Indian scene and severe storms has drove most of the men off the line. Since I have been able to do anything I have used every effort to get as much grading done as possible.”1
It was not much solace, Durant would have thought sourly. And more pressing and urgent reverses could be found anywhere he looked—on his desktop, in his office, in his life.
He was not entirely well. All those telegrams to Omaha—each tiny detail seen to during the spring, summer, and fall, each representing a small portion of his finite mental energy, a waking thought in the middle of the night, an idea scrawled on a scrap at a Manhattan curbside, each mounting upon the previous, exacting a toll upon his powers—sometimes it must have seemed as if he were balancing the entire railroad on his brow. Throwing his huge Hundredth Meridian blowout on the plains came close to finishing him. Then a worried George Francis Train had implored him to see a doctor in late September. “Do it or you will have a stroke of paralysis,” he wrote. “You cant strike the Almighty in the face as you do without getting a lick back. If you get sick the Road will go to the devil.”2
But foremost in the Doctor’s own mind, before his own slouching health, there was the matter of his slipping control of the Union Pacific. On the board of directors there were now dissenters. On October 3, the annual election had deposed three board members he counted on in favor of three he could not, all originally brought into the ring by Oakes Ames. They were Sidney Dillon, the sharp-eyed railroad contractor from Connecticut, an early Crédit Mobilier stockholder and board member; the Bostonian John R. Duff Sr., also ensconced in the Crédit Mobilier for a year and a half and, like Dillon, a wary, experienced railroader; and Oliver Ames, stolid and retiring brother of Oakes Ames, in many ways the emotional counterpart of Mark Hopkins in his like for the shadows of the many boardrooms and office suites he inhabited and, in his family business, the true King of Spades while Oakes tended to national affairs in Washington. The first business of this new Union Pacific board was to let a new construction contract, and Durant naturally assumed that there would be a pro forma extension of the old one. When the Casements’ tarriers had spiked rails to the 100th meridian, the Hoxie contract—overtaken, of course, by the Crédit Mobilier—had expired, even as the Casements had continued westward toward the Loup crossing and their graders had edged closer to the Sioux and Arapaho. Durant thereupon moved, with great self-assurance, that a Union Pacific contracts committee under Cornelius Bushnell arrange with the Crédit Mobilier for the new work.3
While the others on the board waited for the committee’s report at the November meeting, Durant moved ahead—independently, as usual—and signed his own contract. It was with a Chicago bridge builder, L. B. Boomer, who had built bridges for the M&M, and it was for a distance of 153 miles beyond the meridian, which, judging by the Casements’ speed, at least, was not a very great distance. The document was an oddity, cloaking somewhere deep in its language or else somewhere hidden in Durant’s intentions an advantage to the Doctor which is not visible today. Either that or it was a ghastly miscalculation. Remarkably, Boomer proposed to build to the North Platte River for $19,500 per mile, and beyond for $20,000. It was far below Hoxie’s $50,000 per mile for the smooth Nebraska tabletop, and beyond the North Platte the terrain would begin to get interesting. Where was the profit? Where was the profit? Durant had held Dodge’s estimates close to his vest for weeks. Was Durant expecting to pile another layer of expense over Boomer’s, and then take out a larger contract for the Crédit Mobilier (or himself), raking off the difference?
Boomer himself began an obscure maneuver, selling his contract to an intermediary named N. A. Gessner. Clearly things were still in motion. But whatever the plan, it fell flat. At the next meeting, on November 14, to Durant’s utter surprise, Bushnell’s committee moved a Crédit Mobilier contract from the clipper ship magnate John M. S. Williams (another early stockholder). Williams proposed to be paid $50,000 per mile on the plains and $85,000 in the mountains, and he would build 650 miles. Before any action could betaken, though, the Union Pacific board decided to table the question, for Engineer Dodge was on his way east to argue for his Lone Tree route against whatever Seymour espoused. The actual route through the Black Hills/Laramie Hills would crucially affect construction costs from the North Platte westward. The board prepared for a Dodge appearance on November 22. Durant prepared for the board.
Theodore D. Judah, pioneer California railroad engineer, taken shortly before his untimely death in 1863. (California State Library: 1428)
Collis P. Huntington, the hardware storekeeper-turned-empire builder for the Central Pacific, late 1860s. (The Huntington Library: HEH 61/1/2/13)
Leland Stanford, one-term California governor and titular head of the Central Pacific, late 1860s. (California State Library: 8527)
Charles Crocker, brawny Central Pacific contractor, late 1860s: “I knew how to manage men.” (California State Library: 1732)
Edwin Bryant Crocker, “the Judge,” motive force in the Central Pacific who sacrificed his mind and health to the enterprise, taken around 1868. (California State Library: 22,974)
Mark Hopkins, Central Pacific treasurer “who liked to work better than the laziest man liked to loaf,” late 1860s. (California State Library: 23,461)
Dr. Thomas C. Durant, Union Pacific vice president and “first genius for manipulation,” 1869. (Adirondack Museum)
Gen. Grenville M. Dodge, Washington, 1865, before he became the Union Pacific chief engineer. Photo by Mathew Brady. (Library of Congress: US262-15959-815738)
George Francis Train, “the noonday mystery,” Union Pacific stock promoter and land baron, 1860s.
Gen. John S. Casement, the Union Pacific’s banty tracklaying contractor, 1865. (Library of Congress: B812-9072)
Rep. Oakes Ames, the “King of Spades” who distributed railroad stock around the Capitol. Photo by Mathew Brady. (Library of Congress: BH83-2394)
Samuel B. Reed, Union Pacific construction engineer, 1868. Photo by Andrew J. Russell. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell S5)
Gen. William T. Sherman, commander on the plains and friend of the Union Pacific. (Library of Congress: B8172-6454-815738)
Brigham Young, Mormon patriarch and champion of Salt Lake City, late 1860s. (LDS Archives: P94/1-1)
Red Cloud, courageous leader of the Oglala Sioux, late 1860s. (Library of Congress: LCUSZ62-103232)
Spotted Tail, the iron-willed conciliator of the Brulé Sioux. (Library of Congress: LOT12337-2)
Prospect Hill Cut, looking down at the Central Pacific’s Chinese workers and their one-horse dump carts. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 82, x167)
Central Pacific’s Secrettown trestle (mile 62.5), 115 feet long, 90 feet high, 1866. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 48, x179)
Long Ravine Bridge from below, 120 feet high, 56 miles from Sacramento, 1865. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 42, x6224)
Locomotive C. P. Huntington rounding Cape Horn. The American River is 2,000 feet below. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 44a, x781)
Central Pacific snowsheds under construction in the Sierra. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 247, x6351a)
Locomotive C. P. Huntington. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 169. x600)
Depot at Cisco. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 185, x101)
Bank and cut, Sailor’s Spur, showing effects of one-horse dump carts and enormous patience. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 90)
View from Donner Summit, with Donner Lake below, fall 1866. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 125, x6302)
Virginia Street, Reno, Nevada, shortly after its founding. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 286, x636)
Central Pacific tracklaying, Humboldt plains, Nevada. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 317, x6807)
Curving rails with hammers, Ten Mile Canyon (mile 435), Nevada, 1868. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 333, x156)
The Central Pacific construction train pauses, Nevada palisades, 1868. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 338)
Central Pacific construction boss James Strobridge and workers at “Camp Victory,” Utah, after their ten-mile day, April 20, 1869. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 350)
Thomas C. Durant at the 100th Meridian, Cozad, Nebraska, 1866, where ties await rails. Photograph by J. C. Carbutt. (Union Pacific Museum: Carbutt JC208, 5-65)
Union Pacific excursionists disembark at Omaha for the 100th Meridian gala, 1866. (Union Pacific Museum: Carbutt JC200)
Pawnee warriors stage a Wild West show for the 100th Meridian excursionists, 1866. (Union Pacific Museum: Carbutt JC207)
At the 100th Meridian, Thomas C. Durant poses in front of the locomotive Idaho and the excursion train. (Union Pacific Museum: Carbutt JC205, 504801)
Jack Casement’s grim and sweaty tracklayers, Nebraska, 1866. (Union Pacific Museum: Carbutt JC209)
Columbus, Nebraska: saloons and railroad hotels planted on hunting grounds. Photograph by A. J. Russell. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 7-28)
Union Pacific construction officials at their headquarters, Laramie, Wyoming, 1867–68. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 5-1)
West approach, Dale Creek Bridge, Wyoming. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell H2-23)
Union Pacific officials (seated at table) Silas Seymour, Sidney Dillon, Thomas Durant, John Duff; (standing) H. M. Hoxie, Samuel Reed. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell H5-3)
Fort Sanders showdown, 1868, including Sidney Dillon (left), Generals Sheridan (with Dillon), Grant (straw hat, center), Dodge (doorway), and Sherman (to Dodge’s left), and Dr. Durant (on fence). (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 5-141)
“General Jack” Casement, Union Pacific construction boss. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 5-135)
Carmichael’s Cut, Bitter Creek, Wyoming, 1868. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 11-35)
Citadel Rock and temporary and permanent bridges, Green River, Wyoming, 1868. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 2-39)
Mormon graders west of narrows, Weber Canyon, Utah, 1868. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 11-26, R0372)
The “Great Z” track, Wasatch rim, Utah, 1869. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 2-42)
Newfangled steam shovel at Hanging Rock, Echo Canyon, Utah, 1869. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 11-55)
Brooks Cut near Wasatch station, Utah, 1869. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 1-46)
Cliffhanging Mormon surveyors passing equipment upward, 1868. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 6-35)
Dan Casement (in doorway) and construction managers, Echo City, Utah, 1868. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 5-60)
Tunnel 3, Weber Canyon, 1868–69. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 2-35)
Excursion party of Sen. William Patterson pauses at Devil’s Gate, Weber Canyon, Utah, 1869. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 2-33)
The last siding, Promontory, Utah. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 1-47)
Celebrants pose before the Central Pacific’s Jupiter and the Union Pacific’s No. 119. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 1-47)
More dignitaries and spouses arrive to pose. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 1-31)
Union Pacific construction officials, including (seventh from right), G. M. Dodge and (to his right) Silas Seymour and S. B. Reed. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 5-41)
Union Pacific dignitaries, including T. C. Durant (left of track with gloves) and (right of track) John Duff (standing on tie), Sidney Dillon and Silas Seymour to his left; G. M. Dodge (second to Seymour’s left) squares his foot in embankment. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 1-24)
The crowd presses in as the last rail is placed. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 1040)
Gov. Leland Stanford and T. C. Durant brandish their hammers. G. M. Dodge is at Durant’s left. (Union Pacific Museum: Hart 356, 631)
With engines Jupiter and No. 119 touching pilots, Central Pacific engineer Samuel Montague shakes hands with Union Pacific engineer Grenville Dodge. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell 1-2-3)
Dignitaries and laborers mingle at the Golden Spike ceremony as telegraphers tap bulletins at trackside. (Union Pacific Museum: Russell H-1-20)
Cartoonists had a field day after the Golden Spike. Three years later they would have the Crédit Mobilier scandal. (Frank Leslie’s Newspaper)
From Dodge’s point of view, his presentation represented the difference between Seymour—the dilettante who had paid more attention to shooting game and playing Wild West during his “reconnaissance” in the Rockies than he had to hard engineering facts—and himself, who stood for some of the best minds in the business. James Evans had run no less than five lines between the Cache la Poudre and Laramie Canyon, finding nothing that compared to the Lone Tree route. Percy Browne had scoured the mountains west of Denver and found nothing suitable, but he had found a decent line north from that city to connect with Evans’s at Lodgepole Creek. Evans’s party had already run a good line from Denver north to Crow Creek, so one way or the other Denver could be somewhat mollified with a hundred-mile branch line to the Union Pacific. In addition, the landscape north of the city was rich with iron and coal deposits, according to their geologist; it would be a profitable branch for the company. Another crew under Thomas Bates, sent all the way to scrutinize Utah and Nevada, reported that the railroad could run either north or south of the Great Salt Lake (he favored the north); if they wished away the Central Pacific they would take the obvious route through the Humboldt and Truckee Valleys. Intermediate passage between the Laramie and the Utah basin, Dodge told the board, would be solved in the spring and summer. He lost no opportunity to give his men credit. “Often threatened by Indian attacks, sometimes without escorts,” he said, “they have all had narrow escapes, have had stock stolen, camps attacked, and been caught in heavy snowstorms, in extreme cold without fires, but, as yet, we have not lost any lives or any stock of great value.”4
It was an impressive presentation. Moreover, the Lone Tree route with its gentle, uniform grades, its lack of sharp curves, its prospect of less blasting and cutting, would be surprisingly cheaper to construct. At the point on their route where government subsidies increased from $16,000 to $48,000 per mile to reimburse for more difficult terrain, the board was finally able to contemplate high profits. There was no point in looking any further; on November 23 Dodge’s line was approved, along with his branch line to Denver.
This was good news to the Doctor, but he found defeat waiting for him on the following day when the board met to elect a temporary president of the company. John Adams Dix, that tireless supporter of President Johnson during the summer and fall campaign, had been rewarded with the minister’s post to France. Durant, who for three years had been running things behind Dix’s figurehead, was ready to ascend to the throne. It did not work out that way. Before the election began it was revealed that the Doctor had presumed to sign his construction contract with L. B. Boomer “on the company’s behalf.” The New Englanders were furious and quickly paid him back. When ballots were tallied Durant found himself both last and least, having received only his own vote; two votes had gone to the Union Pacific treasurer, John J. Cisco; thirteen went to Oliver Ames. After the congratulations were over the board added a flourish: in a resolution moved by Charles A. Lambard, it was forbidden for any individual to make contracts or indeed do anything on the board’s behalf without its permission.
Durant retired to his lair to lick his wounds. And to plan—both on his own behalf and on the railroad’s. At the beginning of November the North Platte had been bridged—a long trestle on cedar pilings—to the place where, at mile 291, Dodge had laid out the town of North Platte, a junction point. Regular service from Omaha commenced on December 3. By then, the tracklayers had gone on to complete the 305th mile before quitting for the winter. Even with his short leash, as he saw to details in New York and Washington and Omaha and the end of track, Durant had maneuvering room. The new year would prove to be an exciting one. And as a minor but interesting footnote, one of the last details he attended to in that year of 1866 was to write to George E. Pullman in Chicago to recommend one “Eli Lafox (colored),” whom Durant wished “to become acquainted with the duties of attending inspectors’ car on our road. Will you please have him employed in your cars for the present so that he may become familiar with the work?” Thus Eli Lafox may have become the first in a long line of Pullman porters of color.5
After Grenville Dodge concluded his presentation to the Union Pacific board he was off to Washington, not just for the railroad but for himself. On election day, the voters in his western Iowa home district had followed the lead of the state Republican machine and elected him congressman with a clear majority. It was a field day for the radical Republicans all over the nation, to Andrew Johnson’s great chagrin, and on the day Dodge was chosen by the will of the people he had been high in the Rockies near Boulder, holed up in a cabin with a surveyors’ party while a snowstorm raged outside. Years later he claimed with some believability that in the storm he lost track of time and was not aware that he was being delivered into Congress on that day. Six weeks later, he entered wintry Washington; his swearing-in was months off, but he nonetheless made some important rounds. He conferred with General Rawlins and was closeted with General Grant. He also paid a visit to Interior Secretary Browning, to give him details of the company’s plans for 1867, particularly about the Lone Tree line. Oliver Ames, as new Union Pacific president, had also just written the secretary, bringing up the fact that the railroad was about to pass into more expensive mountain territory, earning itself a higher rate of government bonds. “The maps prepared by Gen Dodge…show that the ascent of the Mountains commence when the new line adopted by the Company crosses Crow Creek,” Ames had written. “I would therefore respectfully suggest that the Forty-Eight Thousand dollars of Bonds of the United States…shall commence on the crossing of Crow Creek.” Of course there was no mention of the fact that Dodge’s magic route was going to cost the Union Pacific less than anyone had dreamed.6
The grouse would get on a log and hammer with their wings. On the Sierra slope in the late weeks of fall, this promised a bad dream, portending a rushing, severe winter, and J. O. Wilder in his surveyor’s camp began to prepare himself. In late October in Sacramento, the Central Pacific had unveiled its answer to the mountain snowstorms, a gargantuan snowplow. An assemblage of iron over wood, looking awkwardly like a big black ship perched on a railway car, the plow was 11 feet high, 10 feet wide, and 30 feet long. Engineers swore it would scoop up drifts with its forward end, a wedge which hung down to track level, and fling the snow with its superstructure to either side of the track by as much as 60 feet.7 Wherever there was track they were confident they could clear it.
All of this had been theoretical in Sacramento in mid- to late October, when the only precipitation seen on the lower slope was a steady rainfall. No reverses of weather could prevent Sacramento’s Metropolitan Theater from filling to the bursting point on Thursday evening, October 11, when Mark Twain walked out into the lights to deliver his celebrated lecture on the Sandwich Islands, which had delighted an audience and all of the press in San Francisco some days before. “Without means and without employment,” he would admit in Roughing It, he had returned to San Francisco from Hawaii with no prospects, and out of desperation wrote a humorous lecture, hired a hall, and plastered fliers and advertisements all over town. He had “showed it to several friends,” he said, “but they all shook their heads. They said nobody would come to hear me, and I would make a humiliating failure of it.” It was rather the opposite, and Twain moved his show on to Sacramento with “an abundance of money.” Presumably he had been partially forgiven by the capital’s leading citizens for calling Sacramento the “City of Saloons” only six months earlier in the Territorial Enterprise, Twain was soon to be permanently leaving for the East—by ship this time—and this mild, rainy Sacramento evening was one of the final appearances of the West’s new literary hero. But on the upper slopes, the rain was making life difficult for the railroaders. “No water, except that falling directly from the heavens,” the engineers had confidently claimed to Traveling Correspondent, standing over their ornate drainage systems some months before, “can touch the embankments.” But then two miles west of Cisco, a heavy rain in October overfilled a lake upslope from a hundred-foot-high trestle bridge over Butte Canyon, and when the lake burst its banks it swept away four bents from the center of the bridge. “That bridge had to be replaced,” recalled A. P. Partridge, “with the road blocked to Blue Canyon. Well, we went to the woods and hewed the timber, hauled it to the track by main force, then got some ox teams and hauled it to the bridge and repaired the break.” Before the season would be through there would also be a number of serious mudslides, in the deep cuts and fills between Secrettown and Gold Run, and on an embankment between Emigrant Gap and Cisco; even closer to the city there was a washout of a trestle only nine miles from Sacramento at Dry Creek, causing the derailment of a passenger train running in the night at full speed. “No one was injured,” E. B. Crocker reassured Huntington in a letter reporting the incident, “more than by bruises.”8
The snowplow did not have to wait very long. There was no snow at the summit on October 30, when the tracks were laid to Emigrant Gap, but it began falling in earnest in November, though “just enough to stimulate without delaying the work,” recalled Engineer John R. Gilliss. Snow filled in the cuts and collected overhead of the line, smoothing out the harsh sides of Donner Peak above them and soon cutting off a trail between Tunnels 8 and 9 on the eastern side—“it remained impassable until spring, and communication had to be kept up by the wagon-road, five or six hundred feet below,” Gilliss noted. He could stand at the bottom on the Dutch Flat and Donner Lake Road and look way up to the work crews and never fail to be moved, day or night, but especially after dark. “The scene was strangely beautiful at night,” he recalled. “The tall firs, though drooping under their heavy burdens, pointed to the mountains that overhung them, where the fires that lit seven tunnels shone like stars on their snowy sides. The only sound that came down to break the stillness of the winter night was the sharp ring of hammer on steel, or the heavy reports of the blasts.”
Thanks to the redeployment of crews two months earlier, by the time winter really sat down on the Sierra the tunnel headings were all under ground. “The work was then independent of weather,” Gilliss would say, “except as storms would block up tunnel entrances, or avalanches sweep over the shanties of the laborers.” In the last week of November, despite the snows, Strobridge’s tracklayers spiked their way into Cisco, some ninety-two miles from Sacramento and exactly 5,911 feet above sea level—“a higher altitude than is attained by any other railroad in America,” the Sacramento Union would proudly exclaim. “If keeping the cars running to Cisco from this place can be done,” said the Dutch Flat Enquirer, “it will be done. There may be slides, either above or below this place, during the rainy season, which will stop them for a time, but labor and perseverance will in the end succeed. The old ‘iron horses’ make day and night hideous with their shrieks and puffs and groans as they try to get up hill. A 116 feet grade, with a dozen heavily loaded freight cars, is no ‘sardine.’ It ‘makes the fur fly,’ but they manage to do it somehow.”9
The summit now lay only twelve miles away, but Cisco was enough for the year. Passenger service there would commence late in December, and long before then Crocker would have sent two thousand workers over the top and down into the Truckee Canyon, below the snowline, to begin grading that section. They would be supplied by ox teams on the Dutch Flat road. Eight thousand others were reported at year’s end to be employed in the Central Pacific’s twelve tunnels. “It is expected,” said the Sacramento Union, “that during the year 1867 the road will be completed and in operation to the eastern line of the state, from which point the work of construction toward Salt Lake is comparatively light and can be prosecuted at all seasons of the year at the rate, it is believed, of a mile a day, and to reach Salt Lake City of the 1st of January, 1870.”10
It was a good sort of dream to have. “The snow has been no trouble at all so far,” wrote E. B. Crocker to Huntington on December 28. “It is the least of our troubles—& we no longer fear it.” That, however, was merely dreaming, as events would soon unfold.11
Out at the end of track at North Platte, there was no shortage of dreams—some visionary, some mercenary, and some merely earthy. What had been a brushy, unpopulated, low-lying delta between two prominent bluffs at the confluence of the North and South Platte Rivers, was now on its way to becoming a city of more than five thousand. Jack Casement had frantically worked day and night to complete the North Platte bridge and now was doing the same to ready his winter quarters. Relying partly on prefabricated buildings and on cheap, hastily erected structures, he put up a warehouse (boarding as a subcontractor about 150 laborers in it until the company bunkhouses were finished), a wash house, and a mess hall; he built an ice house, a blacksmith shop, and a slaughterhouse. As a personal side business he started a general store which he planned to leave in the care of a relative; he intended to take advantage of his free freight rate on the Union Pacific, shipping mercantiles and foodstuffs alongside rails and track equipment—and make a killing. Outside the so-called town limits, Casement established a ranch to supply the workers’ beef requirements; after the first of the year he hoped to pick up three hundred head of cattle in Ohio for his ranch. The gangs were a hungry lot—and as these sidelines disclosed, so was little Jack Casement.12
Even so, with several thousand suddenly idle workers concentrated in one place, he would have ample competition to serve them. The first trader had arrived on November 9, almost literally on the heels of Grenville Dodge and his town surveyors; a storekeeper, Andrew J. Miller, moved a building from Cold-water, Nebraska, to North Platte, becoming the town’s first citizen and businessman. Another man named John Burke contributed North Platte’s second building, a log structure used as a hotel which he had moved from Cottonwood Springs. In a giddy month or two the town would bulge with more than three hundred permanent structures and a number of temporary ones, such as a mammoth tent erected next to Miller’s trading post by a man named McDonald, who furnished it with a bar, billiard tables, and gambling devices. And it would be McDonald who would endure the most competition. Each arriving train brought more camp followers to North Platte, and it became easier to find a drink of whiskey than a drink of water. Saloons and more saloons, dice and roulette parlors, and houses (and tents) of prostitution proliferated. Day and night the streets were jammed with drunken railroaders, prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets, and cardsharks—but no lawmen. Winter snows arrived in December and if anything North Platte heated up. In the spring, when the end of track would be pushed farther west and the laborers moved on, the camp followers would simply fold up their tents, dismantle their gimcrack structures, crate their whiskey and corral their women, and ship them out to the new end of track to start up all over again. It was Samuel Bowles of upright Springfield, Massachusetts, who would look at the scene, appalled and outraged, and give it an immortal name: “Hell on Wheels.”13
There was at least one family man in that wild and woolly town, and Frances Casement, back in Ohio with a new infant son, John Frank, pined away for her husband’s reappearance in the household and fretted about his drinking; but she was blessedly ignorant of the moral climate in North Platte. Her husband would be stuck there until almost Christmas. “Dear Jack,” she had written on November 25, “do get home as soon as possible—and darling be careful of your health—and for the sake of our little boy more for your own sake, beware of the tempter in the form of strong drink. There, I thought I was going through with this letter without a mention of that—but I can’t help it now.” Many of her letters, in fact, mentioned his drinking habits—in her later years she would become a temperance leader in the Carry Nation era in Ohio—and his replies were gallant and forbearing and of little reassurance to the lonely, insecure Frances. “We are getting quite a Ranch,” he told her jocularly on December 23. “It is nice and pretty for so far west…no wine or liquor—we have the only temperance house in this country.” By then he may have just received her most insistent letter of the waning year: “If you don’t come home & stay with us some this winter,” she warned, “you will never know any thing more of this baby than you did of your first.” That mention of their deceased five-year-old, now a year gone, must have stung—but General Jack could not help having to go wherever his business took him. The railroad which was to forge a new union in the states was pretty hard on family life in that Christmas season of 1866, and the Casements’ story was not a rare one.14
In the faraway stockade of Fort Philip Kearny, on the Bozeman Trail, some 450 miles northwest of the railroaders’ noisome town, the condition of apartness from loved ones was identical for most—though some of the officers, at least, had the comfort of wives and children with them at the fort: twelve women and eleven children had accompanied them up the trail that summer and watched as the point-tipped log palisade had been erected around a cluster of raw buildings, their only relief from boredom and anxiety the succession of emigrant wagon trains approaching the fort, pausing, and then moving on. The post commander who had encouraged the dependents to come for morale was Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington. Connecticut-born, Yale-educated, a schoolteacher and lawyer whose political appointment in his adopted state of Ohio as adjutant general of militia had actually been a boon to the Union cause, Carrington had organized nine volunteer regiments for meritorious service in Western Virginia—parenthetically, Jack Casement had served in one. Later in the war, transferred to Tennessee to oversee military tribunals, Carrington would preside over the trials of the Confederate guerrillas so earnestly chased down by Grenville Dodge’s spy network. After the war, of course, after Carrington had been ordered to establish forts in Powder River country, he had been the officer whose truthful answer about the Bozeman Trail had caused Standing Elk and Red Cloud and the rest of the Northern Sioux to stalk out of the Laramie peace talks. There is something rather poignant about Colonel Carrington—cautious, truthful, diffident, punctilious, cerebral (he is chiefly known today as a historian, with five good books to his credit), tragically ignorant of the ways of the Plains Indians; sometimes, as at Fort Laramie, at the wrong place at the wrong time; now, at Fort Philip Kearny, though credible and well-meaning, about to suffer unfairly for another’s rash actions and really sheer idiocy. Soldiers and civilians along the dangerous Bozeman Trail would be affected. Jack Casement’s and Grenville Dodge’s men would be affected. A new row of dominoes was poised to fall. It would transpire just out of Colonel Carrington’s eyesight but within, most definitely, earshot.
It would be seen thirty years later in Luzon and Mindanao and a hundred years later in Vietnam—establish a post in a quiet, unpopulated, uncontested place, and almost before one could turn around it would be teeming with enemies. The rolling terrain east of the Big Horn Mountains was the richest and the most beautiful of all of the hunting grounds in Powder River country, and the Crow and Sioux tribes had bitterly fought over it for many years. Now, with the bluecoats, the tribes were at truce—and the trespassers were in trouble. Frantically trying to put up enough cordwood for winter warmth and enough hay for their dwindling livestock, parties of soldiers sent out to forage for supplies were being attacked by the Sioux, who had managed to kill several whites and drive off many of their horses and mules. Carrington had failed to counter these attacks because he had been supplied with mounted infantrymen, not cavalrymen. The former were not very good at shooting astride a galloping horse, and the arms they had were old-fashioned muzzle-loading rifles. In November, however, the colonel had been allayed when a company of cavalry joined the nervous occupants of the fort.
Carrington’s relief did not last; one of the new men was a loose cannon.
In joining Carrington’s force, the 2nd Battalion of the 18th U.S. Infantry Regiment, Captain William J. Fetterman was returning home; he had been an active, decorated member during the war. “He was a type that occurred frequently in the Indian-fighting Army,” writes Ralph K. Andrist in his eloquent saga of the Plains Indians War, The Long Death, “and often did not last very long at the trade. It was a type that was arrogant, contemptuous of Indians and their fighting ability, usually excessively brave, a braggart, and loud talker.” Patrick Connor had been of the same type. So would be Custer. Fetterman, whose ties with many of the unit were stronger than Carrington’s, ties forged in combat while their organizer had been bogged down by administration, immediately began to question and even deride his superior’s caution and respect for the Sioux capabilities. “Give me eighty men,” Fetterman would often exclaim in public, looking scornfully at his professorial commander, “and I would ride through the whole Sioux nation.”15
Vanity and racism were deadly. None in the fort knew for sure, but there were some four thousand warriors camped up along the Tongue River for forty miles. Their leaders had watched the soldiers for months, probing for every weakness, and they had seen that the whites were so prideful that they could effortlessly be drawn into ambush. In particular the cavalry officers tended to ride far ahead of their men, gloriously, futilely waving their sabers, and were easily picked off. In December, after a few skirmishes served as rehearsals, Red Cloud and the other chiefs had decided to try for a large operation in which a large number of the soldiers could be cut down. For his part, Captain Fetterman volunteered to be the prey, proposing to take one hundred mounted men to destroy the tribal villages—but Colonel Carrington refused his permission for the foolhardy mission. On December 21, though, the Indians were ready for him. To begin it, one contingent attacked a wood party and its escort, which had gone about six miles away from the fort, behind a screening prominence called Lodge Trail Ridge; another war party of ten waited until the inevitable rescue force had charged out of the stockade. The ten were bait. Leading the rescuers was Captain Fetterman himself. Carrington had assigned another, more disciplined officer to lead the rescuers, but zealous, vainglorious Fetterman outranked the other and had demanded to be given the plum. Before Fetterman went out with his eighty men, the commander was explicit: “Support the wood train,” ordered Carrington. “Relieve it and report to me. Do not engage or pursue the Indians at its expense. Under no circumstances pursue over Lodge Trail Ridge.” He repeated the order twice.
Instead of going directly to the wood gatherers, Fetterman galloped with his men in a loop and disappeared over an intervening hill, attempting, it seemed, to cut off the attackers from the rear. But the soldiers came upon a small group of mounted Indians who began screaming insults, and the bluecoats chased them to the top of Lodge Trail Ridge. The warriors were joined on the far side of the ridge, below the soldiers, by a few more, amounting to perhaps fifty. Ignoring both his commander’s orders and the object of his rescue mission, Fetterman could not resist the easy prey and ordered his men over the ridge, and they flew down the hillside with rifles blazing. They have been likened to “a crew of schoolboys racing to see who would be first in the water.”16 As many as two thousand Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors were waiting for them, concealed behind boulders and in the high grass; Red Cloud himself insisted he was there, too.
Colonel Carrington had realized soon after Fetterman’s eighty had thundered over the hill and disappeared that they had no surgeon with them. He sent an assistant surgeon and four escorts. They returned in only a half hour, saying that they could not proceed because “hundreds” of Indians had been spotted on Lodge Trail Ridge and in the valley beyond. Carrington could hear distant rifle fire. By the time a large relief column was assembled, the shots had died out. And when the rescuers reached the scene they found that all were dead—the eighty-one bodies had been stripped, scalped, and mutilated. It was said later that Fetterman and another officer had stood at arm’s length and shot one another through the temple to escape being left alive, but the autopsy did not support this romantic theory; a comrade of Red Cloud’s named American Horse later asserted that he had clubbed Fetterman to the ground and slit his throat. Fifty or sixty Indians had also been killed, though their bodies had been removed when the warriors withdrew.17
The nation was stunned by what the army and the press would label “the Fetterman massacre.” It had not been a massacre in the way that Sand Creek had been a massacre; it had been a battle, and without a doubt the most significant battle thus far to be fought on the plains. In every settlement from Omaha west to the Salt Lake—raw, new North Platte included—farmers, ranchers, miners, and railroad workers shivered a little more than they normally would have as the snows began to descend over their holidays, while everyone, white and red alike, waited to see what would happen next.
Thinking about the future, William Tecumseh Sherman lost little time putting pen to paper. The sympathy he had shown the “pure beggars and poor devils” just four months earlier, the forbearance that had him pooh-poohing settlers’ calls for annihilation only three months before, was entirely run out. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux,” he wrote to Grant on December 28, “even to their extermination, men, women and children.” Back in September, after he had gone out along the Union Pacific tracks and beyond, assessing the danger when the danger had ridden north to Powder River, he could not have predicted this. “God only knows when,” he had told Grant back then, “and I don’t see how, we can make a decent excuse for an Indian war.”18
Apparently he had his excuse. And his friend Dodge vehemently agreed. Imploring Sherman to send another ten thousand soldiers to the West, he was free with advice, hoping that the Johnson administration would “not do by you as they did by me—get you well after the Indians, just ready to punish them, and then under the hue and cry of wrong, cruelty, &c., stop you.” No, Sherman should go after the tribes “early with good officers who never give up but follow them day and night, until doomsday if necessary—until they are severely punished for their past wrongs and feel our power, so that they will in the future respect us. They look upon us now as a lot of old women, who do not know whether we are for war, or peace, or both.” Dodge said he intended to make Fort Sanders in Dakota Territory (now Laramie, Wyoming) in a year’s time—but as much as he and the Casements had been hard-pressed to find laborers in 1866, the coming year would be crucial. Especially after what had just happened at Fort Philip Kearny. There was now the worry that the surveyors and track gangs would “leave because of what you and I may know—it is hard to make a lot of Irishmen believe. They want to see occasionally a soldier to give them confidence, and that is all we need to get labor on the line.”19
Paying attention to political as well as economic realities, Sherman would decline to send such a huge fighting force—even for the nation’s project, the Pacific railroad. But he promised Dodge that together, using the resources already in hand, when the track gangs had begun edging into the Black Hills, “we can act so energetically that both the Sioux and Cheyennes must die, or submit to our dictation.”20