24

“Our Future Power and Influence”

The springtime punishment of storms and floods also hit northern California. By April 8, 1867, after a month in which the giant snowplow was in constant use, the Sacramento Union hazarded that the snow season, “one of the fiercest ever known in the Sierra Nevada,” was over. It congratulated the Central Pacific: “The railroad men, though sometimes stopped at Colfax or Alta, persisted in grappling with the obstacle, determined to prove that even in this terrible season, without the instruction of experience and bothered by the settling of a new road-bed, they could run trains to Cisco.” It was noted that for large stretches of the line snow could be simply pushed off the embankment and down into ravines—but that in roadcuts, where there was nowhere to push the snow, the company had been forced to have shovelers transfer it into freight cars returning empty from above. They rolled the snow-laden cars into Sacramento, “to the infinite delight of snow-balling youth.” And the newspaper marveled at the changes in public consciousness that the railroad was making. “There is snow on the hills above Alta, within seventy miles of Sacramento, where the gardens are in bloom and the fields are arrayed in a refreshing green,” the writer said. “And the swift transition from the reign of Spring to the Arctic realm of the Sierra is one of the most novel phases of experience in California.”¹

Almost within hours of this announcement that the snow season was over, the Sierra was slammed again. At Emigrant Gap and above some five feet of new snow fell, making the accumulation deeper than at any time in the season; a week later there was another five feet to contend with. With the lengthening days, Charley Crocker informed Huntington, the snow was “now going rapidly by sun heat—but in all probability we will not be able to commence work above Cisco before the 1st July unless we shovel a large amt. of snow away to get to the work.” Inevitably, the extra snow meant extra runoff, with a resulting mayhem upon culverts, embankments, and bridge approaches all the way down to the capital. “Providence seems to be rather against us this winter,” E. B. Crocker added in a separate letter.²

Still, the Associates felt as if they were holding their own. The Casements’ Irishmen may have been spending their Nebraska winter heading only to perdition, but the Central Pacific’s Chinese had moved ahead under the watchful eye of Charley Crocker and the brutish voice of Jim Strobridge. The Summit Tunnel, in late April, was considered to be halfway done thanks to Chinese prayers and nitroglycerine, and both Crocker brothers felt it would certainly be ready for track by October 1; happily, they had been within two days of running out of the explosive when a fresh shipment of five thousand pounds of glycerine arrived from the East. There had not been a single accident with it. Carpenters hammered busily on a sturdy prototype snowshed, equipped with a steep roof and massive, doubled-up rafters, for later tests. If they were unable to address the heights over the railhead at Cisco until the snows retreated, there was at least remarkable progress shown by the isolated gangs on the eastern Sierra slope. Charley Crocker rode over the top on April 18, finding eight feet of snow at Donner Lake but below, at the pine-shaded confluence of the Little and Big Truckee, only two feet thereabouts and on down.

All along the craggy canyons of the Truckee Crocker found much to be cheerful about. As the Union had reported earlier in the month, “Spring has fairly opened in the valley. The fields are green and grass is beginning to be of service to stock. The river is full of trout, making it a pleasant place to visit at this time.”³ One tunnel was through. Timber for six smaller bridges between Proper Creek and the state line was just being unloaded even as masons completed their foundations and pier footings. A number of sections had been graded and were ready for track. “We think we can follow the snow up & cover the work with men as fast as the snow disappears,” Crocker told Huntington. “We will be compelled to use every exertion possible to connect across the summit this fall.”⁴

Charley Crocker was busy managing his army, and frantically recruiting new ranks. He had hired a Chinese artist to translate their recruitment offers into Chinese and engrave them on a woodblock, printing some five thousand handbills to be distributed all over California and in China. (“The Chinamen all understand it,” the Judge had noted in January, “but it is hard for them to translate it back into English.”) On April 8, the Grass Valley Union noted that “The Chinese are swarming in the direction of the Central Pacific Railroad, and the company has commenced sending them in large numbers beyond the summit of the mountain preparatory to the work of the coming season.” Agents of the company were scouring Nevada County and all of the mining districts, it said, and “within the next thirty or forty days there will be at least twenty thousand of these prospective unbleached American citizens scratching gravel on the great national highway.” Alarmed nativists in the mountains would later be reassured that the number would be far more modest: Crocker hoped for a force of eleven thousand Chinese and twenty-five hundred Caucasians for the season.⁵

Briefly—very briefly—there was the hope that the former progress which had made them proud would soon be dwarfed by the newest emerging technology. At the Summit Tunnel, workers unpacked a newfangled labor-saving gadget which had been exciting the interest of those down in Sacramento since they had heard of it—a steam-powered, compressed-air-driven drill. The mechanic who had brought it up wanted it to be connected to the “Black Goose” hoisting engine, drawing off a little steam, but Strobridge appeared and refused to let them stop the regular work to make the adjustment. He was adamant—even when told the maneuver would take only two hours. His motivation seemed to be partly distrust of the modern contrivance—after all, he had been supervising human muscle over rock since his young Vermont days and that is what he knew. Also, though, there was a little logic, since the hoisting engine had its own limitations; as Hopkins commented, “our progress had reached a point at which it was equal to the capacity to raise.” But he bought the engine and sent up what was necessary to connect it with the present boiler.

It never would be connected, however, at the summit or anywhere on the line. “Strobridge’s refusal to let steam be taken from the boiler there now and Charles’ apparent indorsement surprises me,” the Judge confided to Hopkins on April 1. “It looks as though both were set against drilling machines.” Stanford went up himself to try to persuade Charley Crocker to persuade Strobridge. The Irishman was unmoved. “It puts me out of all patience to see how that drilling machine matter is mismanaged,” the Judge complained to Hopkins on April 15. “I sat right down and wrote the inclosed letter to Charles. Perhaps it is not just right, but I believe it is the truth, every word of it. If you think best send it up to him. The truth is things have got to such a pass that there can’t be a thing done unless it suits Strobridge. Whenever a man gets Charles’ confidence, he swears by him and all he says or does is right.” Even Stanford gave up. “I fear the drilling machines will prove useless,” he told Hopkins. “There does not appear a will that they should succeed, and usually where there is no will there is no way.”⁶

All this new activity required a commensurate energy in raising money. The Judge investigated different bond schemes (such as an 8 percent gold bond pledged to proceeds from their land-grant sales) and became interested in contractors’ methods, asking Huntington to find out about the Union Pacific approach—he had seen a newspaper report of Dr. Durant’s restraining order against a Union Pacific contract and wanted to get to “the bottom of this—what ground or objection did he found it on?” Perhaps there was something they could learn from the Doctor by knowing how the Union Pacific paid for its road—and how the principals profited from it, even now. For his part, Stanford made the rounds of the larger California banking houses and representatives of the great eastern capitalists. It seemed expedient to let them see deeper into the company’s affairs than they ever had before, unrolling maps and profiles and showing them at least some of their ledgers. “They all open their eyes in astonishment at the magnitude & value of our assets,” Crocker reported. “In fact they see the big thing—they see millions of securities to negotiate, exchange, sell, & etc. They all want the business.” In particular Stanford courted the former California senator Milton Latham, who now managed the London and San Francisco Bank, for the Associates wanted to get their securities moving in European markets. Latham’s party of eight ladies and gentlemen were taken on a special capitalist’s junket up to the summit to see the work above Cisco and then to ride by sleigh down to Donner Lake. They were even escorted into the Summit Tunnel, “and I can tell you,” reported the Judge, “that impresses one.”

Both he and Stanford urged Huntington to spend a few weeks in London, where they were certain he could “lay the bonds on the English market.” They arranged more excursions for wealthy and influential San Franciscans, a number promising to spread the good word about the Central Pacific when they embarked on their summer tours of Europe. In that spring of mounting excitement and confidence, it seemed to Judge Crocker that their credit had risen so strongly that they could borrow whatever they needed. It made him a little afraid, confronting the eagerness of so many lenders—and here, very briefly, he had a glimmer of understanding what nervousness Hopkins constantly endured.⁷

Three thousand miles away, Huntington was equally busy raising money. The aggressive bond marketing company of Fisk & Hatch in New York had been handling Central Pacific bonds since 1865, to reasonable return, but until the tracks actually crossed the California border, it would decline to sell bonds for any mileage into Nevada, even if the bonds were legal. So Huntington took the bonds out himself, selling small numbers in New York City and Boston. He obtained the aid of the Central Pacific’s former Railway Congressman, Richard Franchot of Ostego, who sold some in upstate New York. These did not spread very far; Huntington’s greater contribution came through borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars that year, and millions by the time the story was over—borrowing against the company’s government bonds, its California county securities, against each of the Associates’ personal credit. Always there was that ability to make a quarter into thirty cents, a dollar into a dollar and a half—now on what he would have considered a wondrous level a decade before. “He had an instinct for bargains in money,” marvels his official biographer, David Lavender. “Whenever he sensed that interest rates were about to rise (they were much more volatile in those days than now), he borrowed heavily at the lower rates and loaned out the money himself until the railroad’s creditors began dunning him. It was a dazzling performance—but risky.”⁸

Fueled by equal parts of borrowed money and optimism, there were grandiose hopes afoot—and indeed, considering the stubbornness of the Sierra, the state of the Central Pacific’s treasury, and the personal finances of all of the Associates, the aspirations given voice in the spring of 1867 might have seemed delusionary. It seemed, in fact, as if ambition had been rising at the same rate as the snowfall on the mountains, and it opened a rift in the Associates which might well have wrecked them all—ambition it was, and acquisitiveness.

Imagine it from the point of view of the cautious mandarin Mark Hopkins, that abstemious, indoorsy, quiet hardware-store accountant risen to Central Pacific treasurer, upon whose hand the proposed acquisitions could be numbered. First there was the Sacramento waterfront. Early in the year the company petitioned the city of Sacramento to vacate an overflooded area of the city, west of Sixth Street and north of I Street, which had earlier contained streets during a drier and more optimistic chapter of the city’s history. Railroad workshops and other improvements would be placed on that swath once the company had moved enough fill and granite from its mountain quarries to raise it out of swamp and river surges. On April 1, when the city’s board of trustees voted to approve the gift, the Sacramento Union voiced its support: “Certainly the municipal corporation of Sacramento cannot have for many years any purpose of redeeming from the waste of waters and otherwise improving the locality of these mythical streets;” it said—let the work be done by others.⁹ This enterprise, uncontroversial within the ring, had merit in Hopkins’ eyes.

Second, there was the matter of a knobby little island in San Francisco Bay which in the Spanish era had been known as Yerba Buena Island, “but which,” a waggish columnist for the Sacramento Union wrote in March, “latter-day authorities persist in calling ‘Goat Island’ and ‘Wood Island,’ for the reason, I suppose, that neither wood nor goats were ever known to exist there.” At least half a dozen entities now wanted Goat Island—chiefly the Central Pacific. For some time the Associates had considered the prospect of extending their line from Sacramento down to San Francisco Bay. Judah’s original reports had mulled over possibilities, and though they had ceded those rights five years ago, the matter could be reopened. While in earlier times it may have seemed natural to join or run a long line southward around the muddy edge of the bay and then up to San Francisco, what now seemed more alluring was to capture all the traffic of the Orient themselves—by establishing a Central Pacific deep-water port and terminal. Two possible sites, discussed for some time, shared the dubious distinction of once being designated as the state capital before being vacated in favor of Sacramento; there was the sleepy little army-post town of Benicia, on the northern shore of Carquinez Strait, and there was Vallejo, ten miles farther up San Pablo Bay with an inviting offshore site called Mare Island (which would soon attract the attention of the U.S. Navy as a facility). But even more attractive to Huntington—because the choice offered fewer obstacles—was the three-hundred-acre government reservation at Goat Island, lying in the bay midway between bustling San Francisco and swampy Oakland.

Huntington spread the word that the Central Pacific had no interest in the island itself but for enough right-of-way to run tracks around its base to a depot and port, reached by a causeway out to the island. Privately, though, Huntington and Judge Crocker had more on their minds. Of the three hundred acres, the federal government would probably reserve between a fifth and a third of the land for military reasons; at present half a company of soldiers stared at their calendars there and longed for the fleshpots of San Francisco. In his loftier imagination Crocker began to fill in the remaining empty land—with “good substantial wharves,” fireproof brick warehouses, grain elevators, flexible transfer facilities—and he saw opportunities in the isle’s highland for rock fills and the creation of yet more territory on a big shoal off the island’s western shore.¹⁰

Without tipping his hand as to such grandiose plans, Huntington’s assignment was to soften Congress for any grants that were necessary. There was the question of leasing the federal land (for which Congress’s permission was necessary), and also the closing off navigation between Goat Island and Oakland. So, treading carefully, Huntington began to exclaim in Washington (where he had gone to arrange for legislation) that Goat Island was “the most natural ocean terminus of the Pacific Railroad.” Only ninety-one miles lay between this projected “chief seaport” and Sacramento. This, and the fact that in such an arrangement San Francisco would be left wholly out of the picture except for token ferry service—and would thus, optimistically, wither away—appealed to many in the state capital, as well as (of course) Oakland.¹¹ Huntington was confident enough that he could wrangle a right-of-way from Congress that Mark Hopkins made little objection, though he had no interest in extending the line down to the bay or in any other direction save eastward, over the mountains.

But it was the third sudden business opportunity which caused the mild-mannered treasurer to all but blow his top. It was complicated. It involved a spiderweb of mostly imaginary California branch lines, but chiefly the feeble Western Pacific Railroad, an entity chartered to connect Sacramento to the bay. Interestingly, the rights to a bay connection to Sacramento, originally belonging to the Central Pacific, had been assigned by Huntington to San Francisco interests during the furious maneuvering which had accompanied the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act in Washington. On paper it went by a roundabout route down the San Joaquin Valley to Stockton and then westward through foothills down to the shallow southern end of the bay and the marsh-edged town of San Jose. There it had a natural connection to the new proprietors’ San Francisco and San Jose Railroad, which had been chartered way back in 1852 but had taken a decade to come to life. A single 175-mile line from San Francisco to Sacramento was therefore a possibility, but Western Pacific ran into a string of troubles. Only its first twenty miles out of San Jose had been constructed by the winter of 1866–67, and financial problems had not only halted the line at the little mill town of Niles, where Alameda Creek emptied into the bay, but whittled the Western Pacific down to one man, Charles McLaughlin, who was debt-ridden and desperate to get out.

For several years Judge Crocker had wanted them to buy the Western Pacific, and when he learned of McLaughlin’s latest plight he knew they could “get it cheap.” Only Governor Stanford seemed to pay him any attention. McLaughlin then added a winning sales argument to his moribund firm and few prospects: he had been offered rights and property for a rail line northward from Niles up the bayside and over extensive mudflats to Alameda and Oakland. McLaughlin allowed Stanford to assume that this would be part of the deal—and the Oakland businessman who controlled the waterfront, Horace W. Carpentier, chimed in with an offer of some muddy, tide-lapped Oakland real estate.¹² Earlier this may not have been as interesting a deal to Stanford, but now one could stand there at the water’s edge and look across to placid little Goat Island, with the city of San Francisco behind it in the fog; one could feel the salt breezes coming in from the Orient. Still, Hopkins was unmoved—he thought the world of Judge Crocker and Stanford, he told Huntington, trusting them in all aspects but their financial judgment. Charley Crocker sided against his brother. And as to Huntington, who was silent enough on the subject of the Western Pacific to encourage both sides that he favored them, from faraway New York and Washington he had been developing his own enthusiasms: he flirted with the idea of running a simple line from the capital down the Sacramento River to the bay by way of Antioch, but even more fervently with the notion of having the Central Pacific acquire a handful of struggling little railroads north of Sacramento.

It was as if five men had gone in on the price of a lottery ticket and, in a surplus of reckless enthusiasm well before the contest would be decided, three had scattered to the winds, each brandishing an arm’s-length shopping list. The bills continued to pile up, loans and mortgages matured, interest came due, armadas bearing rails and locomotives were expected regularly, brigades of hungry workingmen were deployed all over the Sierra, and nevertheless the shopping carts loaded with their shimmering prizes rolled to a stop before Mark Hopkins and his ledgers. Goat Island. Western Pacific. And here was Huntington with his desires plucked from the shelf of the northern Sacramento Valley: the California Northern, the California Central and Yuba, the California and Oregon. The nearly bankrupt California Central line left the Central Pacific station town of Roseville and went north up the valley to within seven miles of the Yuba River at Marysville. It had been chartered in 1853 by Ted Judah’s friend, Colonel Charles Wilson (late of the pioneer Sacramento Valley Railroad), but Wilson had long ago been deposed by the Robinson brothers and was now trying to seize the California Central back from their bankrupt successors. Wilson owed more money to the Central Pacific than he could ever pay himself, but the Associates had kept stringing him along in case he and his plum became useful. The California Northern, a creation of the Sacramento speculator Sam Brannan, left Marysville and went up the Feather River to the faded foothill town of Oroville, of gold rush fame; Brannan had intended to finish the seven-mile gap to the California Central before losing all his money. Finally, the California and Oregon did not even exist—it was a paper entity consisting of a map (with a line drawn from the Sacramento Valley across the Klamath Mountains into Oregon) and a congressional land grant. The promoters had failed to build even a mile of track, and along the way had come to owe money to the Associates, and as security the Central Pacific had written a mortgage on the land grant. It is not surprising that Huntington—the merchant who loved to corner markets—saw all of these weaknesses, obligations, and dependencies, and began to think: Empire!¹³

They all were thinking big. The Judge and the Governor thought their scheme would control all business to the South, to San Francisco, and to Asia; Huntington had his eye on locking in San Francisco, northern California, and Oregon, and ultimately locking out the Union Pacific from the rest of the Pacific Northwest and Idaho. No wonder an eastern terminus for the Central Pacific at Green River in far-off Wyoming was so attractive: from Green River one could build northwest toward Oregon. The single tentacle of the Central Pacific, draped up the western slope of the Sierra and brought to a halt at the summit, was (in their fondest aspirations, at least) growing a whole octopus.

Here is where trouble broke out among them. The discussions went back and forth, around and around, for months. Then, in late March, the focus narrowed to the subject of the Western Pacific after Stanford talked with Charles McLaughlin (by now desperate) in San Francisco and they agreed on general terms for purchase. The Governor then went up to Sacramento to confer with Judge Crocker and Hopkins; as always the latter spoke disapprovingly of anything which would deter them from their main enterprise. But he did not say no. On the strength of this, Crocker and Stanford went back to arrange details and Hopkins returned to his books, not fully realizing what was transpiring. They stayed in San Francisco for two weeks to get an agreement in shape. “I would give a good deal if Huntington could only be here for a few days to consult,” the Judge wrote to Hopkins at one point.¹⁴ But he went ahead. On April 9, Hopkins received a telegraphed summons to get Charley Crocker and come down to sign the papers. Hopkins replied that he could not leave—but he said in his mandarin way that they should do what they had to, subject to consultation; he was still against it. He went back to his books. The next morning Judge Crocker energetically appeared in the office with a carpetbag full of papers, having come up on the first morning’s steamer. He spread the papers out. His brother came in. The Judge told them to hurry, read, and sign, so he could return on the next boat. And then Hopkins—in his most emphatic manner—planted both his heels and refused. Charley Crocker joined him.

The Judge looked at their stony, irritable faces and was “astonished,” as he would complain to Huntington (“surprised beyond measure,” is how Hopkins saw him). How could they turn down such a bargain? But almost as important, how could they have let him waste two weeks in negotiation? This was a terrible embarrassment—how could he ever show himself to the business community again? For a long moment the Association hung there between them. Finally, Hopkins sighed, locked his office door, and began a condensed study of the documents, the Judge hovering nearby to point out finer details and explain. Stanford had vowed he could raise the purchase money on Western Pacific bonds, and to this the treasurer nodded—Stanford probably could. But of course it was more complicated than that. Finally Hopkins grimly looked up: within twelve months they would have to pay $120,000 in gold, not to forget taxes, interest, and expenses; moreover, they could not afford to divert any of their laborers or finances to work on the Western Pacific anytime soon, especially since they were pressing to build over to the Truckee by the fall, and current expenses were up to $300,000 per month. Furthermore, he said, “our loans on collaterals having no established market value [were] already alarmingly large and dangerous in case of a financial panic.” This was “an extra hazardous year,” he said. It was plainly inexpedient. “It is not sound policy,” he pronounced. “If we do it,” he would warn, “it is only a question of time when we will be cornered and washed out.” But because it was “a financial question,” Hopkins was willing to submit to a vote with the majority ruling. In the meantime, he would sign the papers. Charley signed them. Hopkins invoked his power of attorney and signed for his partner in New York. He cautioned them to do nothing with the contract. And then he telegraphed Huntington: what was his vote?¹⁵ Both Hopkins and Judge Crocker dispatched several long letters explaining their positions. Impatience mounted, especially in Stanford and Crocker. Day followed day.

All they obtained was silence. Ten days later, the puzzled Hopkins sent off another message: why no response? He finally got an answer after two more days, on April 22, but the question was hardly answered by Huntington’s terse, baffling, four-word reply: “Do as you like.”

Both Hopkins and Judge Crocker were mystified. What could he mean? They wired for a confirmation, each then dashing to his desk to compose extensive queries, explanations, and complaints. Hopkins had no confidence in Stanford’s financial judgment, he wrote, but he had much less respect for the Judge’s. “They were presumptuous enough to commit themselves unconditionally without first ascertaining our opinions,” he griped. If Huntington wanted to do it then he would go along—but unwillingly, because it was a dangerous move. “For until I see where the money is coming from…I think nothing should tempt us to withdraw thought, labor or dollars from the Central Pacific.”¹⁶

His hand was even and controlled as he wrote, for that is the way he was—and, tellingly, Judge Crocker’s was shaky, his inkpot in his spleen. “Imagine my surprise when your noncommittal reply came, ‘As you like’—thus throwing the whole thing apparently back upon Hopkins,” he scrawled. “Now I know you are in favor” of the purchase, he said—all of Huntington’s letters indicated that. And while he had his friend’s attention there was the matter of Huntington’s eagerness to pick up the northern roads: “I have a very poor opinion of it,” the Judge said. He now thought they should simply sell out whatever interests they had already acquired (“cheap—very cheap”). He warmed. “I feel myself in a very mortifying position, to go on and spend 2 weeks in fixing the details of the most important trade we ever made, & then to have it all unceremoniously kicked over, in a way that places me in the position of a man claiming power, & yet without any in reality. I shall never want to look McLaughlin in the face again.” But here came the threat: “Nor shall I ever presume again to negotiate a trade with anybody,” the railroad’s attorney was saying. “I prefer to lay back & exercise the imperial veto power over trades made by the others. It will be far pleasanter.”¹⁷

More days of tension and silence as Huntington continued to hang back. Stanford began to threaten to carry out the purchase on his own—which would have been an embarrassment to the united front they presented to the world.¹⁸ And probably it was brawny Charley Crocker who broke the impasse, after his brother had forced him to read all of his letters from Huntington. He may have cast his memory back to boyhood on the Indiana farm and considered whether Ed would ever budge from his position. And then Charley somberly told Mark Hopkins that he could find no “financial objection” in Huntington’s months-old letters. Hopkins acquiesced. “It would seem unreasonably fractious,” he wrote the still-quiet Huntington, “or self-opinionated in me longer to refuse when all are for it.”¹⁹ The trade was officially accomplished on June 8. The Central Pacific absorbed the Western Pacific, its rolling stock, and twenty miles of rails previously ordered but undelivered; McLaughlin retained rights to sell off the land grants. In the next few years Leland Stanford would take a keen interest in the enterprise, which would accordingly be dubbed “the Governor’s Road.”

“Do as you like.” What was Huntington up to that spring? His California partners repeatedly wondered about this in their letters, seasoning their progress reports and requests for materials with complaints and arguments. On the issue of whether the Central Pacific ought to take on a government mail contract, they all thought it was a capital idea; Huntington’s dispatches seemed to frown on it. Hopkins was particularly puzzled. Did not his partner realize that in gaining the mails they could with one swipe deal a serious blow to their competitor, the Wells, Fargo stage company, which crossed the Sierra by the Placerville route, and also to the hope of rivals who had been trying to confuse and divert investors from the Central Pacific in favor of a Placerville-to-Nevada rail route? Getting the mail contract was an economical tactic, Hopkins lectured—far better than engulfing rivals with money or credit at this tentative stage. “Our future power & influence as ‘Rail Road men’ depends more upon our real strength,” he maintained, “than our rapid spread.”

In his letters Judge Crocker repeatedly remonstrated, too. Why had Huntington purchased fifteen hundred tons of iron when they could not lay it for at least a year and a half? On May 8, in one letter to Huntington, he reported on good strides in the mountains—in the Summit Tunnel only 681 feet of granite remained between the headings, and the snow continued to retreat before the grading crews—but Crocker also complained about their communication. The last steamer from the East had delivered a package from Huntington containing the latest U.S. map of San Francisco and the lower end of the Sacramento Valley. “I notice,” Crocker wrote, “the Central Pacific R.R. is entered on it, extending from Sac. to Goat Island,” and it had been inked in Huntington’s hand. But he could not imagine why the line deviated “materially” from the one adopted by the company, and his friend had not enclosed an explanatory letter. Nine days later he took pains to object to Huntington’s exasperating vagueness in wanting “a report” to hand to Interior Secretary Browning and wanting “a report on an estimate”—without telling him what he needed them to say. “It puts me out of all patience when I think of the way you write for these things,” he griped. For want of “half a dozen lines” of specifics, he had to study Huntington’s words and read between the lines. There had to be a better way.²⁰

Part of the problem had to do with the way Collis Huntington worked. He had no clerks, no fetchers and carriers. Much of his time was occupied with correspondence by mail and telegraph, his days spent in a small, shabby Manhattan office at 54 William Street. “Have had only one small room & their is allmost allways some one in talking to me,” he wrote to Hopkins in his crabby hand and with his characteristic spelling, “and you know how difficult it is for me to write when I am disturbed by persons talking to me, so I hope when I get another room I shall be able to get my ideas on paper in better shape.” He rented an adjoining room and hired a bookkeeper in May, and late in the year added a clerk. The comparison of his headquarters with Dr. Durant’s—both were conducting business in the many millions—gave him no end of amusement.²¹

He did get out, selling Central Pacific bonds whenever and wherever he could. In March there had been an important trip to Washington; the congressional session was opening and legislation for the Goat Island easement had to be written and introduced. He also called at Interior Secretary Browning’s office, on April 25, to hand over the Central Pacific’s latest projected location map for Browning’s approval. Based on Butler Ives’s surveying notes, the route passed the California border and the Big Bend of the Truckee River, crossed the Forty-Mile Desert and skirted the Humboldt Sink; it followed the burnt-red Humboldt Valley eastward to the green meadows of the Humboldt Wells, the historic campground on the old California Trail where emigrants had paused to rest and fatten their animals, taking advantage of lush grasses and the dozens of clear springs called “wells” by the emigrants, who thought them bottomless. The new Central Pacific route was 370 miles long, climbing gradually from the Truckee Meadows’ altitude of 4,500 feet to Humboldt Wells at 5,600 feet. Beyond were the Pequop and the Pilot Mountains—and the Utah border, only sixty miles away.

Browning was not in his office when Huntington called. He had been taken seriously ill with an abdominal obstruction two days before, and would not return to his duties until mid-May. Enfeebled for weeks thereafter, bogged down with the Interior Department’s Indian policy and disputes with Secretary of War Stanton and with the army, Secretary Browning would delay his approval for nearly three months, costing the Central Pacific those three cooler months of time for location surveys. Toward the end of April, Judge Crocker impatiently urged Huntington to prod the secretary, not knowing how near death he was. The Judge fretted that they should submit a new map all the way to the mouth of Weber Canyon in Utah—and “if he says he does not know whether the line from the East will be run through Weber Canon, then let him approve the location from Humboldt Wells to the upper end of Great Salt Lake.” Browning, however, followed his own calendar—he would have even if he had been well—to the ever-present exasperation of Crocker and Huntington. There was, after all, much to contend with in Washington in the spring of 1867.²²

Had there ever been so many beggars in the federal city? The streets were crowded with the unemployed, the poorhouses were impossibly full, large sections in all districts remained in ruins, shantytowns sprouted everywhere, many public buildings were still wrecked by wartime misuse, and mud ruled over all. Collis Huntington would have pushed through the sidewalk tumult outside Willard’s, lucky to have found a boardinghouse room as accomodations dwindled with the opening of the Fortieth Congress. And, fighting the same throngs, Grenville Dodge was there to represent Iowa’s Fifth Congressional District, at least for the moment. During the extra session held over the winter until March 3, the two chambers had overriden Democratic President Johnson’s veto of the two bills establishing martial law in the South and forbidding the president from removing any Senate-approved official he had appointed without that body’s permission. Another act vetoed and overridden transformed the Territory of Nebraska into a state. Also, the president was virtually deprived of command of the army, instructed to issue all military orders through the general of the army, Grant. Now, with the merge into the Fortieth Congress, two-thirds of the Senate and the House were now controlled by the radical Republicans, and one could not walk very far, indoors or out, without hearing the bitter word “impeachment.”

Naturally because of his powerful political connections and his experience fighting in the Army of the Tennessee, Dodge was almost immediately invited to a dinner at the White House. Wide-eyed at the sumptuous repast—there were twenty courses “and as many different kinds of wine”—he could not get comfortable. Since New Year’s Day, the president’s dinners and receptions had become increasingly tense, though well attended; several weeks earlier so many guests had jammed into the White House that women fainted and police had to be called to restore order. Now, of the president’s twenty guests, eighteen were radicals. Dodge must have stiffened when Johnson turned to him. “General Dodge, you knew me in Tennessee,” the president said. “It seems to me we should not be so far apart now.” But Dodge was already committed to the other side. He replied, “[I have] no ill feeling toward you, but I cannot sustain in any way your past course.”²³

“Johnson is looking to the future,” Dodge had written home a year before, expressing his hardened opinions; “he believes that the Confederates and their northern sympathizers have more power than the true Union man and they have the most votes and ever since he was made President he has trimmed his sails to that breeze, has sought every occasion to alienate Union men from him…. I tell you that no part of the Republican Party will follow Johnson in his reconstruction policy.” And now Dodge was at the center of things. He had drawn a good seat in the chamber for a novice radical; grinning old Thaddeus Stevens, unquestioned leader of the House and mastermind of the new Republican Party, sat on his right, tottering to his feet and hobbling around the desks on his cane, keeping his troops in line. On Dodge’s left was the old barnburner Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, leader of the growing impeachment movement and the man who would soon spearhead a farcical congressional probe into connections between Johnson and the assassination of President Lincoln. Butler, who was cross-eyed, frequently leaned in Dodge’s or Stevens’s direction to comment on proceedings. “Do you know,” Stevens whispered to Dodge as he probably had to his predecessor, “whether he was talking to me or you?”²⁴

Dodge would have been present as Congress drafted and quickly passed a supplemental Reconstruction act directing the military to enroll southern voters it deemed qualified. Conversations in the hallways of the Capitol orbited mostly around the issue of the South, prominently that month about whether Johnson might try to remove Dodge’s former comrade, General Philip Henry Sheridan, from his post overseeing affairs in New Orleans. But there were many other things on their minds—military matters, transportation issues, statehood questions, Indian affairs—and Dodge found that as chief engineer of the Union Pacific he was better known than nearly all the other newcomers, and he boasted to his wife that many prominent men had turned to him for advice. However, his chair near those two seats of power would in a short while be vacant—as committee assignments were taken up, as the House continued to enlarge and clarify Reconstruction of the South, as Johnson moved conscientiously to execute the laws passed over his veto, as Congress watched the president’s every move and calculated its usefulness in removing him. As representative of the Iowa Fifth District and new point man of the Iowa Regency, Dodge found his days and evenings consumed by patronage demands, interviewing job seekers from home who clogged his office and spilled out into the corridor, answering the torrent of mail he received. For days and days he trudged from agency to agency—being forced to introduce himself and wheedle out spoils for constituents or make sure those in place remained.

Two weeks of this was about all he could bear. He wrote to his wife back in Council Bluffs, “[I have] had the blues ever since I left home.” But so many crucial patronage matters remained that the engineer could not return to his railroad. When he could, Dodge lost no time getting out of Washington, leaving on April 6. “I have no disposition now to come here again,” he told Anne Dodge.²⁵ Perhaps he would return in December to serve his constituents for the second session, or at least part of it.

When Dodge arrived home in Council Bluffs on April 19, the Missouri River was still out of its banks and Reed was frantically supervising the rescue of their tracks from the swollen Platte and its tributaries. Within a week, though, trains were leaving Omaha on a regular schedule and Reed thought his men would be ready to turn to new work in a few days. Everything westward still looked like a disaster, though—hardly the controlled, well-ordered machine they would have wanted when the brass arrived, which they did, by the steamboat Elkhorn from Council Bluffs, on April 27. Dr. Durant was there with Oliver Ames (though they barely spoke), and also their fellow Union Pacific executive board members John Duff Sr. and Springer Harbaugh, and muttonchopped company director Sidney Dillon. The stated reason for their visit was to officially accept the 305 miles of completed work from the Crédit Mobilier, a formality which might have been accomplished with less misery if they had stayed in New York and simply shook their own hands. The officials climbed aboard an inspection train with Grenville Dodge and rolled out toward North Platte.²⁶

All wondered what would happen. The weather had become abnormally hot and uncomfortable. The inspection party went out to the end of track at O’Fallon’s, alighted, and stayed there, for exactly five minutes before setting back east. On the way Oliver Ames looked out at the hot Nebraska prairie west of Fort Kearney and despaired of its ever amounting to anything—what settler or farmer could want it? If the board were smart, it would refuse government land grants, even gifts. So much for the hope of profiting from land sales, he said. There would be little money in this until the project was completed and freight and passenger revenues picked up. Durant begged to differ—the only profit in railroading in their day and age would be in its construction, not in its operation. This set off Ames, which set off Durant. When on May 4 the tense officials returned to Omaha they looked over the accounts, mumbled cryptically among the tiptoeing employees, found time to tell Reed they were “well pleased,” and indicated that there would be some changes. Webster Snyder was to be appointed superintendent of operations; Reed, retaining the position of construction superintendent, would relocate to North Platte, which disappointed him. Later that day, even that small certainty crumbled.²⁷

“They broke up in a row,” reported Samuel Reed, “and no one knows what will be the end.” During the furious argument Oliver Ames warned Durant “about his lawless way of doing work taking the whole thing into his hands—& forbid his doing it without consultation.” Two days later Ames and his supporters climbed aboard the Elkhorn and left for the East. Only the Doctor stayed behind—in a horrible mood. No work had been let west of the fourth hundred-mile section “and will not be until they come to some agreement among themselves in NY,” said Reed, with Ames muttering that the only solution was Durant’s ouster. “The Dr. is jealous of everyone,” Reed told his wife, adding that he didn’t dare do any work until Durant left for the East. “This fight places me in a very unpleasant situation,” he wrote, “and I have a mind to resign my position”—but he decided to get back to work out at North Platte and wait a few days until he heard from New York. A day later it seemed less like a personal crisis. He threw himself into his job.²⁸

Jack and Dan Casement had been hard at work driving their grading and tracklaying crews since the rains and the repairs had been finished. Getting a slow start on grading the fourth hundred miles, they were by early May making decent progress. They had a new contract for the season at $850 per mile, and laborers by the hundreds poured into North Platte to sign on. Dodge’s former medical officer, twenty-eight-year-old Major Henry C. Parry, was headed out past Julesburg to Fort Sedgwick. “I found as I passed through North Platte,” he wrote on May 16, “that the Indians had driven all the traders and miners in from the mountains, and at North Platte they were having a good time, gambling, drinking, and shooting each other. There are fifteen houses in North Platte: one hotel, nine eating or drinking saloons, one billiard room, three groceries, and one engine house, belonging to the Pacific Railroad Company. The last named building is the finest structure in the station. I observed that in every establishment the persons behind the counters attended to their customers with loaded and half-cocked revolvers in their hands. Law is unknown here, and the people are about to get up a vigilance committee.”²⁹

Just over a week later another commentator passed through North Platte. It was the twenty-six-year-old Welshman, Henry Morton Stanley, a rags-to-riches-to-rags adventurer who had found his writing vocation by accident, and who now was on assignment to travel west of the Missouri for the St. Louis Missouri-Democrat; over the course of seven months his dispatches from the Great Plains would attract the attention of James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, who would send him to Africa and commission him to find Dr. David Livingstone. When Stanley descended from the rail coach after a fifteen-hour journey from Omaha, he noted large quantities of freight piled up and covered with sailcloth, beyond which was a vast encampment of more than twelve hundred covered wagons—Utah-bound Mormon emigrants, settlers heading for Idaho or Montana. “The prairie around seemed turned into a canvas city,” he marveled. But as he walked past the emigrants into the cacophony of North Platte, his breath was taken away. “Every gambler in the Union seems to have steered his course for North Platte,” he recorded,

and every known game under the sun is played here. The days of Pike’s Peak and California are revived. Every house is a saloon, and every saloon is a gambling den. Revolvers are in great requisition. Beardless youths imitate to the life the peculiar swagger of the devil-may-care bull-whacker and blackleg, and here, for the first time, they try their hands at the “Mexican monte,” “high-low-jack,” “strap,” “rouge-et-noir,” “three-card monte,” and that satanic game, “chuck-a-luck,” and lose their all. “Try again, my buck; nothing like ‘sperience; you are cuttin’ your eye-teeth now; by-and-by you will be a pioneer.” Such are the encouraging words shouted to an unfortunate young man by the sympathising bystanders. On account of the immense freighting done to Idaho, Montana, Utah, Dacotah, and Colorada, hundreds of bull-whackers walk about, and turn the one street into a perfect Babel. Old gamblers who revelled in the glorious days of “flush times” in the gold districts, declare that this town outstrips all yet.³⁰

By this time Jenny Reed had joined her husband for a visit at North Platte, and though the town was appallingly wild, the couple had one morning of reflection when an Episcopal bishop, D. S. Tuttle, came through on a journey west and lodged at their hotel, finding a room for the two women in his party but being forced to sleep with his male companions in blankets on the floor of a common room. After Reed made their acquaintance he arranged space for them on a flatcar in one of the westering construction trains, saving them fifty or sixty miles of staging and exposure to Indians; before they left, Tuttle conducted a Whitsunday service in the Reeds’ room. “I read the morning service entire,” Tuttle remembered, “except the lesson and the commandments, and we commended ourselves especially to the protection of our Heavenly Father. At North Platte no religious services of any kind are held on Sunday. Men work and trade and buy and sell just as usual, and gamble and quarrel more than usual.”³¹

It was to be a busy season. The immense fields of covered wagons glimpsed at North Platte by Henry Stanley, with their cookfires and noise of livestock and shouting men and playing children and calling women, would be backlogged for weeks, their vanguard having already moved on in escorted wagon trains of twenty-five to thirty, raising dust and deepening ruts up the trails, driving off game in Western Nebraska, the Laramie Hills, and Powder River country. Three days’ ride south of the line scored into Sioux hunting grounds by the trails and the Union Pacific, there was a similar scene of an emigrants’ encampment on the Smoky Hill Trail from Kansas to Denver, bisecting Cheyenne and Arapaho territory with the approaching Kansas Pacific, Eastern Division, railhead punctuating the matter at Spring Creek; and farther south, of course, there was the Santa Fe Trail, which concerned the Kiowa and Commanche. Now, normally with springtime, with the buffalo and antelope herds swollen and distracted by their young, and forage blossoming, the tribes were stirring, too. Could there be anything but a collision, especially with a belligerent, foolhardy career soldier taking command at such a volatile moment?

All winter, back in Washington, closeted with his cabinet and pressed by so many matters, Andrew Johnson had watched the feud between Stanton and Browning—the war secretary was for total war after the distressing Fetterman debacle, and Browning was swayed by his Indian Affairs commissioner and a conciliatory plan involving commissions, treaties, and ultimately Indian settlement on reservations. Johnson, predictably, resolved in both directions: he authorized a commission to investigate the Fetterman engagement and made no utterance to hold back the army. Accordingly, General Sherman ordered a campaign into Kansas, a department that had been almost entirely peaceful in the previous year, under the command of General Winfield Scott Hancock. The forty-three-year-old Pennsylvanian, who had stood like a rock against Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg and had suffered grievous wounds, now intended to show the Cheyenne that “No insolence will be tolerated from any band of Indians whom we may encounter.” Prominent among his expedition of fourteen hundred infantry and cavalry was George Armstrong Custer, reckless hero of Gettysburg and Yellow Tavern, “Boy General” of the Volunteers, now, at twenty-seven, holding the Regular Army rank of colonel and eager for more glories against the Indians.

At Fort Larned in mid-April, the local Indian agent tried to dissuade Hancock from approaching a large camp of Cheyenne and Sioux some forty miles to the west, on the Pawnee Fork River. He predicted that they were still touchy because of the Sand Creek massacre, and would run away—and strike out against the first civilians they encountered. Hancock went anyway. When a Cheyenne delegation met the soldiers, who were deployed in a line of battle, and pleaded for them not to approach the camp because the women and children were frightened, Hancock went anyway. At midnight, he ordered Custer to take his 7th Cavalry and surround the village. These actions could have had only one intent: it was hoped that the encircled Indians would start shooting, provoking another battle—even, perhaps, a massacre. But with the first light of dawn Custer’s men discovered that the Cheyenne had all fled. Hancock thereupon retaliated by looting and burning the deserted Cheyenne village. And true to the prediction of the Interior Department’s field man, the Indians rode northwest to the Smoky Hill Trail, convinced that they had narrowly escaped a replay of the Sand Creek massacre, and attacked and burned three stagecoach stations, killing three people.

In due time Washington declared that south of the Platte the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and the Sioux had made war against the United States. A peace commission would be sent out. Hancock warned the Cheyenne to clear out of the vast hunting range between the Platte and the Arkansas Rivers, knowing that they would not, and he soon withdrew to Fort Leavenworth with most of his force, leaving Custer’s regiment to clean up the mess. At the end of that four-month Kansas campaign, the soldiers had killed two Sioux and two Cheyenne; Custer had been court-martialed and suspended from the army for a year for a grab bag of charges, which included ordering deserters shot, failing to bury soldiers killed in battle, and leaving his post and traveling 250 miles to spend a night with his wife.³²

But before the ashes were completely cooled in the destroyed village on Pawnee Fork, Cheyenne warriors were striking all along the Smoky Hill Trail, running off graders and surveyors for the Kansas Pacific, and Sioux were riding to spread the news and to take revenge in the western Platte Valley and the panhandle and the Laramies, three days north. Fleets of prairie schooners were on the move. Surveyors’ parties had edged out across the high plains and mountains. And twelve thousand graders, timberers, and tracklayers were at work on the Union Pacific.

Meanwhile, on the island of Manhattan in New York, there transpired a different sort of fight, a bloodless one, a war in the boardroom. By the time Durant had returned to the city from his uncomfortable tour, his fellow stockholders in the Crédit Mobilier were determined to throw him, the largest individual stockholder, with 5,558 votes, off the board. The Ames brothers, holding between them 6,015 shares, had important supporters, none more influential at that time than their Rhode Island friend, the retired woolen mill owner Rowland Hazard, who had not only invested heavily in the Crédit Mobilier but lent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Union Pacific. Hazard had grown to hate Durant, whom he considered a crook. Moreover, in the weeks preceeding, Hazard had been trying to meet the Union Pacific’s crushing needs by selling the railroad’s first-mortgage bonds, and nearly every banker he had seen had said that he would deal with Hazard or the Ameses—but not if the Doctor were to continue in authority. They were fed up. Hazard told Oliver Ames that “some radical change must be made.” The annual meeting of the Crédit Mobilier had been set for May 18 in Philadelphia, and Durant had made it known that he was not bothering to attend. The setting was perfect for an ambush.³³

Oliver Ames saw the unsuspecting Durant and his supporter Cornelius Bushnell on May 17 in New York and obtained their absentee proxies for the vote the next day. On May 21 Ames was back in New York with his allies to break the dramatic news: the Doctor had been deposed as president, director, and executive committee member, and Sidney Dillon had assumed those places. Hazard was now on the executive committee along with Oakes Ames’s friend and fellow investor John B. Alley, who had just retired from Congress to tend to his Lynn shoe factory. Hazard also told Durant that he was going to have his financial “defalcations” investigated. The Doctor’s reply was to slam his hat on his head and stalk out of the office—determined to get even.

The following day, at a Union Pacific board meeting, Durant sat inobtrusively until things were quietly under way and then nodded to his lawyer, standing by with some papers, who then handed the sheaf to Ames. It was an injunction—forbidding the execution of the Williams construction contract. The gathering dissolved in shouting and threats. When they resumed the meeting the next day, May 23, tempers were still high, and the Doctor pretended to listen politely to their complaints and accusations with the smugness of someone with the law on his side. But the Bostonians knew a few tricks, also. As Durant sat there, they resolved to hire the eminent attorney Samuel J. Tilden to get the injunction lifted. They also formed a Committee of Five to direct construction to the base of the Rockies, and another committee to settle with the Crédit Mobilier. Two days later, after recovering from the altercations and from stoically putting his signature on nearly a thousand railroad certificates and first-mortgage bonds, Oliver Ames sat down to inform Dodge (who had already heard snippets from Silas Seymour) what was transpiring in the wild East. The coup, he wrote with unbridled sarcasm,

has raised the very devil in that amiable Gent, & he has come down upon us with injunctions and proposes to visit us with every form of Legal Document to keep us honest. Such a lover of honesty and fair open dealing can’t bear to see the money of the U.P.R.R. wasted on such scoundrels as make up the balance of the Board of Directors. I cannot understand such a change as has come over the Dr. The man of all others who has from the beginning stole wherever he had a chance & who is to-day we think holding stock and a large portion of his stock on fictitious claims and trumped up [accounts]. He is now in open hostility to the Road and any orders he may give you or any parties under you should be entirely disregarded.³⁴

Ames continued to redraw the lines of communication and control. He telegraphed Omaha on May 30 to tell Snyder and Reed that the Doctor no longer had authority to act for the company. And on June 6 he again wrote to Grenville Dodge. “I and all in connection with the road here have never been so sanguine of the success and great merit of this Road,” he exulted, “as we are since Durant has been put out of its management. We are now selling from 15 to 20,000$ of our Bonds Daily and are getting our money at much better rates than formerly. The Moneyed Interests here have now much more confidence in us and will I have no doubt soon be applicants for our paper.”³⁵

The financial situation had finally begun to improve—but no one in the East, not the Ameses or Hazard or Dillon or Alley, could entirely count the Doctor out. He still held his post as vice president of the Union Pacific, his stock portfolio still connoted strength, and his genius for manipulation was intact. The fight had simply entered another phase—as had, quickly and tragically, the trouble out west.

“I think this year is our crisis on the Plains,” Tecumseh Sherman had written to Dodge on May 7. He soon had details. East of Fort Sedgwick, in the northeastern corner of Colorado where graders were preparing the line to Julesburg for track, Indians swept in over a ridge and drove off all the livestock of two subcontractors. They “scared the workmen out of their boots,” Dodge would report to Sherman, “so they abandoned the work and we cannot get them back.” It was only the beginning. An engineering party surveying in Lodgepole Valley was startled by raiders, who spared the whites’ lives but took their two packmules and warned them to clear out; almost in afterthought, the raiders pulled up all their survey stakes. Another group working between Lodgepole and Sidney under the direction of an Arkansas engineer named C. H. Sharman watched as a Cheyenne party “swooped down on us and captured about seventy head of stock, mules and horses,” Sharman recalled, “in spite of the soldiers who were supposed to protect us.” A team of woodcutters in the Laramie Hills was attacked and driven off, as was a similar party on the Laramie Plains. Three stagecoach stations were burned, their stock taken. Farther west, at Rock Creek on May 14, a war party bushwhacked an engineering team led by Percy Browne, killing one soldier, and leaving a surveyor named Stephen Clarke for dead after riddling him with arrows, scalping, and mutilating him; Clarke was found alive by his friends before the wolves arrived, but died from shock in camp the next day.

To General Sherman, Dodge questioned whether the army’s departmental commander, General Augur, had either the manpower or the judgment to protect the thousands of civilians along the line. Augur had announced he was leading an expedition north into the Powder River basin as a sign of determination lest the Sioux grow too bold there. But what about the railroad, the mail route, and the telegraph? “The mail will stop unless Augur will protect the stations,” Dodge warned. “You know men will not run those routes with scalping Indians along them, unless troops are there to protect them. And we can not hold our men to our work unless we have troops, and Augur can not furnish them even after the road is built. Our station men will not stay at the tanks and stations, twenty miles apart, unprotected.” The great difficulty, he wrote, was that Augur had only seven or eight companies of infantry to protect some three hundred miles of opened work, and only two companies of cavalry to patrol the whole line. “My engineering parties are driven into [Fort] Sanders, and Augur says it is now impossible to increase their escort, and they are working in the worst Indian country you have got.” Augur should forget Powder River—his command ought to focus on the line, urged Dodge, and let General Hancock take care of the Cheyenne and the Sioux on the Platte and Smoky Hills. Dodge had “smothered all of the recent attacks and kept them out of the press,” he said. “Augur and myself only know it, but should our men get at the real truth they will stampede. Stage agents, telegraph men, emigrants, tie contractors, and railroad men of all description out there are pressing for protection.”³⁶

Dodge, now convinced that the raids were part of a concerted action, had been suppressing the truth about the reopened war from his men while confined to his sickbed in Council Bluffs for two weeks, but he said he was determined to get out on the line; his letter was on its way to Sherman as the roving correspondent Henry Morton Stanley toured the wide radius of trouble from North Platte to Julesburg, interviewing Augur and his commanders, examining the army’s stockades and counting heads, coming to a similar conclusion to Dodge’s: it was a losing battle. “When the opportune moment arrives,” he informed his readers back east,

from every sandhill and ravine the hawks of the desert swoop down with unrivalled impetuosity, and in a few seconds the post or camp is carried, the tent or ranche is burnt, and the emigrants are murdered. It is generally believed here that, if the present suicidal policy of the Government is carried on much longer, the plains’ settlers must succumb to the unequal conflict, or unite in bands to carry on the war after the manner of the Indians, which means to kill, burn, destroy Indian villages, innocent papooses and squaws, scalp the warriors, and mutilate the dead; in fact, follow in the same course as the red men, that their name may be rendered a terror to all Indians.³⁷

Meanwhile, Dodge pressed Percy Browne and his engineers to return to the Laramie Hills, convincing him only by increasing his military escort to seventy men. “I think if they are vigilant active and will fight,” he told Durant, “they can whip what ever comes against them.” However, he added, “we must however expect loss of stock, perhaps some men this summer.” Within a few days he had more grim news to back up this prediction. On May 25, a Sioux war party crept up on a surveyor’s camp, killing one man and stealing the camp’s thirty head of stock; another band rushed a train halted at the end of track, near present-day Brule, Nebraska, killing three men and wounding one, and rounded up thirty-one animals. East of there on the same day near the Overton station, a crew improving the track was attacked, with five out of six men killed and scalped. By then Durant had been alerted to the trouble and immediately wired General Grant in Washington. “Unless some relief can be afforded by your department immediately,” he warned, “I beg leave to assure you that the entire work will be suspended.”³⁸

Dodge was able to go west when three government commissioners arrived in Omaha, expecting to look over the completed track before new federal bonds could be released. The inspectors included a Connecticut congressman, W. M. White, and two army generals, J. H. Simpson and Francis P. Blair; the latter, a former Missouri congressman, had commanded with distinction under both Grant and Sherman at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, and during the March to the Sea, and General Blair could still be considered their eyes and ears. He got an eyeful on May 27 out at Ogallala on the South Platte, where Jack Casement’s men had spiked past mile 342. At noon, while all, workers and dignitaries alike, were on lunch break, their rifles stacked nearby, some one hundred Indians leaped out of a ravine. “In plain view of us,” said Dodge, “they cut out several mules and horses and got away with them before the graders could get to their muskets.” The commissioners, all three men of action, “showed their grit by running to my car for arms to aid in the fight.” After the raid, which had seemed to take only seconds, Dodge lost his temper. “We’ve got to clean the damn Indians out or give up building the Union Pacific Railroad. The government may take its choice!”³⁹

On that very day when General Blair and his fellow commissioners were persuaded in a lightning flash that the government had a crisis on its hands, Sherman, in St. Louis, responded to Dodge’s pleas for help. He was, he explained, being “pestered from all sources” for troops—Kansas, Colorado, Dakota, and Montana, of course, but also New Mexico, Minnesota, and the whole South. General Augur had already been given “a very large fraction” of Sherman’s command because of the importance of the railroad to national affairs, but Sherman promised to increase the troops “if I can get the men.” However, Augur would still be dispatched north to go against the Sioux in the Powder River country. Finishing that unsatisfying letter, Sherman wrote to Grant to tell him of Dodge’s worries. They were “a fair sample of what I get from every quarter, each party as a matter of course, exaggerating their difficulties and necessities and underrating that of others.” But all could see that the region badly needed more soldiers, and Sherman was loath to call for volunteers: “it would stampede the whole country.” He would immediately journey out to the troubled work camps and stockades to see things for himself. “I will go up the Platte,” he wrote Grant, “& find out how the Indians can be so universal.” As he headed west, though, newspapers in Omaha and other western towns began to pick up word of the slaughter of civilians out on the line, and their dispatches were reprinted in the East. Ultimately, as a political result, the Powder River campaign would be canceled.⁴⁰

Scares and panics—real and imagined—became common across the region, even in bustling North Platte, where Samuel Reed recounted a false alarm on May 27: “Mrs. Casement & all the ladies in the North Platte house were badly frightened Sunday evening by some drunken rowdies raising an indian scare. Some men were as badly scared as the ladies.”⁴¹

Other alarms were genuine. West of the tracklayers in Lodgepole Valley, beginning at dawn on June 2, surveying parties along a twenty-mile stretch were attacked. A young Iowa surveyor named Arthur N. Ferguson was roused by the cry “Here they come, here they come, boys!” and everyone in the tents scrambled out of their sleeping bags, grabbing rifles and bits of clothing and emerging to see a mounted raiding party cantering down upon them from the northern bluffs. “Some of our men were almost naked,” Ferguson recorded in his diary. “I had nothing on but shirt, drawers and stockings.” Rifle fire erupted all through the camp, wreathing it in blue smoke. “Here I saw one of the most daring Indians that I ever saw or ever heard of,” said Ferguson. “He had dismounted from his own horse, and was endeavoring to pull up a ‘picket pin’ to which was tied one of our horses, and while trying to do this he was subjected to the fire from the muzzles of at least ten guns, and that within only two or three hundred feet of him.” The raider succeeded “and in the meanwhile escaped as by a miracle from our shots. Now he springs to the back of his horse and endeavors to ride up the steep bluff immediately in front of us, when all at once a bullet strikes him, he sways to and fro in his saddle, as if the force of the bullet came very near to dismounting him; another shot strikes him, he reels and falls to the ground.” One of the whites ran up “to dispatch him,” but he veered away when warned that another raider was drawing a bead on him. “By this short delay we lost the chance of getting a fine scalp,” Ferguson said, “and the other Indians got this wounded man away from us.” All of the surveyor’s livestock but four head were driven off. One of the engineers in the Lodgepole Valley “captured a white woman’s scalp,” Ferguson recorded, indicating that he had seen enough scalps from both sides to be a good judge of them. “It was quite green, having been killed but a few days, to judge from the appearance of it.” From then on, whenever he stood at his instrument he had a rifle lying at his feet.⁴²

Heading out toward the trouble, General Sherman got to Omaha only to be confronted by the sight of a party of junketing U.S. senators and their wives, who were about to climb on the same train to go out to the work. The Lincoln Car had been hitched up, presided over by none other than Dr. Durant, smooth as usual as he glad-handed his illustrious guests, and Citizen George Francis Train. Sidney Dillon was there, too, nervous about what Durant might do so soon after his defeats in the boardroom. Hub Hoxie sidled up to make conversation with the war hero and, anxious to make flattering conversation, he told Sherman that the railroad was planning to name one of its stations after him. “Where is it?” the general wondered. “Down here in Nebraska,” replied Hoxie. “Oh, I don’t want a water station named for me,” Sherman grumbled. “Why, nobody will live there. Where is the highest point on the road?” Hoxie pulled out a map and pointed to a place in Wyoming, labeled “Altimont.” Sherman grinned satisfactorily. “Just scratch out that name, and put down mine.”⁴³

They reached North Platte in a brisk twelve hours, which included one stop along the way while the senators were encouraged to take potshots at a herd of antelope grazing near the tracks. Samuel Reed happened to be on a passing Omaha-bound train and caught a fleeting glimpse here of Dr. Durant, who seemed “cheerful.” During the stop for fuel and water at North Platte, concerned citizens surrounded Sherman to tell him about recent depredations. As if he needed “ocular proof,” several even ran off to the cemetery to exhume some victims to display their wounds, but the bodies were too badly decomposed to be of use.

They moved on. About twenty miles east of Julesburg, the excursion train slowed to a stop. It was the end of track, for the moment, and the Casement brothers’ men gave a demonstration of what they could do. Then there were the requisite senatorial speeches, and even the tight-lipped Sherman said a few words. Then it was Citizen Train’s turn. He delivered a windy, jocular oration which set Sherman’s teeth on edge. “Most of the frontier towns like war,” Train told the audience. “It makes good trade; hence traders and military men become active…. Help me cheat the Indians and I will give you one half! The officer on small salary says ‘extermination’ and the war bugle is sounded.” The general took his leave from the dignitaries soon thereafter, before he totally lost his temper at Train’s ill-considered, half-baked ideas.⁴⁴

Sherman arrived at Julesburg and Fort Sedgwick on June 6 and took stock of the situation. “The Indians are everywhere,” he wired to the governor of Colorado Territory, who had been peppering him with entreaties for aid. “Ranchers should gather at stage stations. Stages should bunch up and travel together at irregular times.” He was conferring with his commanders (including Custer, some weeks before his famous desertion to visit his wife) at Fort McPherson, one hundred miles east, when even luckless Julesburg, at that point merely an assortment of tents and a few frame buildings, was attacked, on June 10. About fifty Cheyenne galloped into the town in the early evening, meeting instant resistance. The shooting—and even the Indians’ war whoops—could be heard inside the stockade at Fort Sedgwick, two miles away, and a cavalry company set off immediately. Major Henry C. Parry grabbed his surgeon’s kit and followed, reaching Julesburg after the raiders had been repulsed. Parry treated five men who had been wounded by arrows. “I never saw an arrow wound before,” he noted, “and regard them as worse than a bullet wound.” Two whites had been killed, scalped, and mutilated, while one Cheyenne had been killed and two wounded before being assisted off by their comrades. Major Parry recorded a gruesome sight: “One of the men killed was lying on the ground, pinned to the earth by an arrow through his neck,” he wrote. “He must have been shot after he had been scalped.”⁴⁵

Back in Washington, the policy struggle within President Johnson’s cabinet continued. Interior Secretary Browning had been absent from his office and from cabinet meetings during his month of illness, during which time peace advocacy had taken a beating. After one angry session on May 28, the still-feeble Browning emerged, complaining about Stanton and his generals: “The War Department seems bent on a general war and will probably force all the Indians into it.” The commission sent out to investigate the Fetterman battle had yet to be heard from, but in weeks it issued the report, signed by three generals, including its chairman, General Alfred Sully, a West Pointer who had been a cruel campaigner against the Sioux in the high plains before the Civil War, and who had helped widen the trouble into the Dakotas in 1863 during the Minnesota punitive expedition. But Stanton and Sherman and the others would not like what Sully would say now: Hancock’s aggressions against the Sioux and Cheyenne in the southern plains had inflamed the entire plains area to the point that the commission could not make peace with the northern tribes. The best course, Sully argued, was for the government to give up the Bozeman Trail as unnecessary, concentrate the army along the Platte route, and earmark eighty thousand square miles of terrain from the upper Missouri to the Yellowstone basin.

Sherman’s characteristic retort was to support the general he had sponsored: Hancock’s forceful actions in Kansas in the spring had actually improved a dangerous situation, he claimed. And if they rode away from the Bozeman forts it “would invite the whole Sioux nation down to the main Platte road.” The reservation idea, however, was something he himself had urged.⁴⁶

Meanwhile, the railroad workers needed support. During his inspection trip Sherman had made particular note of one of General Augur’s units, organized a few months earlier, which would escort him at various times, and which had the express mission of protecting the Union Pacific and warring against the Sioux and Cheyenne. With the exception of its commander and a handful of officers, it was made up entirely of Pawnee from the camps along the Platte—and the recruitment took advantage of the long-standing emnity between the tribes. Pawnee hunting territory, occupied before the tribe’s recorded history but according to traditions by conquest, spread across the Platte Valley, particularly around the Loup Fork. Pawnee were already there when the Sioux arrived, their lands bounded on the west by the habitations of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, on the east by the Omaha and the Kansa and Otoe tribes; and the friction between Pawnee and Sioux was instantaneous, even fiercer than the frequent clashes with Cheyenne. This, however, was generally not the case with Pawnee as European explorers and traders, and eventually emigrants, ventured onto the plains, although from time to time Pawnee would bother wagon trains or stagecoaches, begging or shaking them down for “presents,” or even attempting to collect tolls at river crossings. But as white incursions across tribal grounds increased, the Pawnee had decided that cooperation was preferable to resistance, in contrast to their immediate neighbors.

Treaties in the late 1850s had concentrated the Pawnee on reserved land on the Loup Fork, where they lived in earth lodges and hunted along the Platte; there were numerous attacks on the reservation by Sioux, especially into the 1860s, the Pawnee complaining that they were, like the proliferating white settlers downriver, getting insufficient protection from the U.S. Army. When, in early 1867, General Augur ordered the creation of an army battalion of Pawnee scouts under the command of Major Frank North, he was continuing a tactic of using Pawnee to war against their racial brethren, and he was choosing an officer who had lived among them and who spoke their language.⁴⁷

Frank North’s life would become inextricably linked with the progress of the Union Pacific westward into hostile territory, and consequently with figures of great historical note. His life was also the stuff of dime novels. Colonel William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody in 1867 was reducing buffalo herds for the meat tables of the Kansas line’s construction crews, but after their association began he would say admiringly that Frank North was the best revolver shot, whether standing still or on horseback, whether shooting at running men or animals, that he had ever seen.⁴⁸

“Probably no man in the Government service,” wrote Grenville Dodge, “was ever more worshipped than Frank North by the Pawnees.” Dodge and North had probably met as early as 1856 in Council Bluffs or Omaha, when Dodge was surveying for the Mississippi and Missouri, and when the sixteen-year-old North was traveling west. He had been born in 1840 in Plymouth, Ohio, and, after his father was frozen to death in a storm while working as a land surveyor on the prairie near Omaha, Frank North moved with his mother and brother, Luther, to Columbus, Nebraska. They were near enough to the Pawnee villages to pick up the spoken Pawnee language as well as the sign language of the Plains Indians. Both Frank and Luther (or L.H., as he was known) worked periodically as mail carriers while still in their teens, and farmed and drove freight teams, and one winter Frank earned about $250 by poisoning wolves for their hides, an old Indian and fur-trapper trick. During the war, Luther joined a Nebraska volunteer regiment and later was on the Sully punitive expedition against the Minnesota and Dakota Sioux; Frank became a clerk and interpreter at the Pawnee reservation. In the opinion of George Bird Grinnell, chronicler of the Plains tribes, “Major Frank North was undoubtedly more conversant with the spoken Pawnee tongue than any other white man has ever been.” In late 1864, having been commissioned a captain, he organized and led a company of Pawnee scouts, which joined General Patrick Edward Connor’s Powder River expedition. The association worked. Grinnell would find the key to North’s success as leader of the Pawnee scouts in “the unwavering firmness, justice, patience and kindess with which he treated them,” such qualities a distinct rarity even in the treatment of allies at that time. “He never demanded anything unreasonable,” said Grinnell, “but when he gave an order, even though obedience involved great peril or appeared to mean certain death, it must be carried out. Their commander was at the same time their brother and friend. Above all, he was their leader. Going into battle, he never said GO, but always COME ON!”⁴⁹

Paternalism, the attitude of the times, had its different aspects. In his book about the North brothers, Grinnell recounted Frank North’s bravery and toughness, which in life-or-death situations edged into a semblance of a cruel, angry parent. “He expected in his men the courage and steadfastness that he himself possessed,” wrote Grinnell. “In one fight when he and his scouts were in the open, exposed to the fire of concealed enemies and some of his men showed a disposition to retreat, Frank North said to them, ‘I shall kill the first man that runs.’ No one ran.”⁵⁰ Though only twenty-five during the Powder River expedition, North was called “Father” by the scouts. When his brother joined the company just before it was mustered out in early 1866, Luther found that his brother’s “children” could be terrifically brave and loyal themselves. During a winter cavalry ride from the Platte down to the Republican River in southern Nebraska, Luther North’s scout detail was attacked by a much larger force of about 150 Cheyenne; the bluecoats sped toward nearby Driftwood Creek, intending to make a stand. “But the best laid plans sometimes miscarry,” recalled North, “and when we were about a half mile from the creek my horse slipped on some ice and fell. I landed on my head and was knocked unconscious. Those 10 boys stopped, dismounted and surrounded me with their horses and while 9 of them fought the Cheyennes, the other one rubbed snow in my face and finally brought me out of it, but not until 4 of their horses were killed and 3 more wounded.” Finally they drove off the war party, but it was nearly daylight before the scouts got their injured officer back to camp. “My boys were so well mounted that they could easily have ridden away if they had been willing to leave me to my fate,” he recalled, “but with odds of some 15 to 1 against them, they jumped off their horses, formed a circle about me, fought it out and saved my life—which took cast iron nerve. Is it any wonder that I have always stood up for the Pawnee scouts?”⁵¹

After they were all mustered out, and Luther had gone to Michigan to study accounting, in late February or early March 1867 Frank North received his commission from General Augur and wired his brother to join him and the scouts. “On the way back I was caught in a blizzard,” recalled Luther North. His train was stranded in Iowa for eight days, and when he finally got to Omaha he found the Union Pacific was not running. “I saw a work train being made up to shovel snow,” he recalled, “and hired out as one of the crew for $1.50 a day. We rode in box cars, and it took nearly 24 hours to reach Columbus. I made a quick decision to leave that railroad job for the more exciting adventures of military service; so went home without the usual formalities, but in the meantime Frank North had enlisted his 200 Pawnees and gone on to Fort Kearny. I joined him there a few days later—in March ‘67, the month I became 21 years of age; and my duties as captain of scouts began. The U.P. still owes me for shoveling snow 24 hours; or, maybe, I owe them something, as the distance from Omaha to Columbus at that time was 91¹⁄₂ miles, and the fare 10c a mile—over $9. Anyhow I concluded to call it square with the company!”⁵²

Major Frank North’s Pawnee Battalion was comprised of four cavalry companies, each with a captain, lieutenant, and commissary sergeant, all whites, and the two hundred uniformed and mounted Pawnee, armed not only with old army-issue muzzle-loading guns but with their own bows and arrows and knives. Two companies were sent to Fort Sedgwick to exchange their muzzle-loaders for the new fast and accurate Spencer carbines, and then dispatched into the hills to escort surveyors’ parties; two were ordered to guard tracklayers and graders. Captain Luther North’s company, detailed to the end of track at Ogallala in late May, was trackside at lunch on the day when Grenville Dodge and the government commissioners witnessed the Sioux lightning raid on the graders’ livestock. “We started in pursuit,” North recalled, “and overtook them a few miles north of Ogallala. They abandoned the mules, and in the running fight which followed, one of the Sioux whose horse had been shot was running afoot.” North spied a bow-and-arrow-wielding scout named Baptiste Behale, of mixed Spanish and Pawnee ancestry, who had seen the running warrior and quickly dismounted. “Behale ran up to within a few hundred feet of the Indian,” remembered North, “and shot the arrow, which struck the Sioux in the right side, ranged forward and the point came out of his left side, a little toward the front. The Indian stopped, took hold of the arrow, pulled it through his body, fitted it to his own bow and shot it back at Baptiste. After taking two or three steps he fell dead, without having touched Behale, though it was a very close call for him.” Later North discovered that the slain Sioux of extraordinary courage was the brother of the Brulé leader Spotted Tail.⁵³

As effective as the Pawnee Battalion may have been in helping the work continue, four companies could not be everywhere, especially far in advance of the large concentrations of graders and tracklayers. The surveyors were at highest risk, isolated and strung out in small parties across the most dangerous stretch of the route. One crew led by L. L. Hills was working from the Lodgepole Valley in panhandle Nebraska toward Crow Creek, some 140 miles, with the Laramie/Black Hills rising ahead of them from the plains. James Evans’s team was working along a fifty-mile stretch across the high grasslands west of Crow Creek; to the south of them, the snowy peaks of Colorado could be seen; northward, there was a succession of pine-clad ridges. The Laramie River and its overlooking stockade fort was their summer’s goal. Percy Browne and his crew were given the heaviest responsibility: a demanding 275-mile run northward across grasslands—with the Medicine Bow Range rising to the west and the bluish Laramie Hills standing to the east—climbing westward then to higher sagebrush plains and drier hills, running next along the rim of the Red Desert and imperceptibly across the Continental Divide, past buttes and sandstone hills to Green River. Beyond, in the Wasatch Mountains, T. H. Bates and his men were exploring alternative routes. Day and night all of the teams were in a state of high anxiety. Game trails crisscrossed their paths. Scrapes from travois poles emerged in the dust. Every mile could be seen from a thousand hiding places. Even with lookouts, even with armed escorts in this remote terrain, it was all too easy for members of the engineering parties to be separated or surprised, with tragic results.

On June 12, L. L. Hills and his team of ten surveyors, guarded by six cavalrymen, were on horseback working east from Crow Creek and seeing to final details, the deep blue mountains at their backs. Hills and a helper inattentively allowed themselves to fall behind the rest by about a mile. All of a sudden a mounted Arapaho war party burst out of a ravine, cutting off the stragglers. Most of the Indians occupied the larger group of whites, who leaped from their horses and, returning fire, took cover; other raiders rushed in pursuit of Hills or his assistant, who had spurred off in different directions. After the Arapaho gave up their attack and disappeared, the surveyors searched for five hours for their comrades. The groaning assistant, when found, had been badly wounded by a thrown lance, and then trampled by his own horse; nevertheless, he was able to crawl away to cover. But Hills’s body was discovered with five bullet wounds and nineteen bristling arrows. He was buried there. Late in the year, the young surveyor Arthur Ferguson would be ordered out to exhume the body for reburial at home, a practice taken seriously by the Union Pacific as their advance men were picked off.⁵⁴

“There seems to be a fatality attending many of the best men on the road,” a depressed Samuel Reed wrote to his wife back in Joliet after he learned of Hills’s death. “Last year many a good man connected with the road in various capacities died in Omaha—you know what a narrow escape I had” with his bad bout of typhoid. And this season there were all of these Indian killings. On top of this, it seemed almost too much when his fellow engineer James Evans lost his wife to typhoid fever soon after she had left her husband and other company wives in pestiferous Julesburg to return to Omaha. Reed had seen the bereaved Evans as he went through Julesburg to the railhead, where a special engine waited to speed him to Omaha in time for the funeral. As he wrote this, Reed’s thoughts naturally turned to his own small children, whom he saw three or four times a year, and he asked after them. He was soon to head off to the mountains himself—Dodge was going, too. And although he was quick to reassure his wife that he was to be escorted by Major North and his Pawnee scouts and about twenty-five other armed railroaders, his anxiety was, understandably, about as heavy as the early summer’s heat wave.⁵⁵