From the Donner Lake Wagon Road it stood above in baleful reproach, that mere seven-mile gap separating the ends of track between Strong’s Canyon and Cold Stream. Buried under unknown amounts of snow in the clear bright days of early April, it was both painful to the eye and infuriating to the soul. A seven-mile downhill walk—it would have taken the impatient James Harvey Strobridge much less than two hours to tramp from his boyhood farmhouse in Albany, Vermont, down the tumbling Black River to, say, Irasburg; and for bull-like Charley Crocker, seven miles would have gotten him from the town center of Albany, New York, to his childhood house in Troy. Seven miles was nothing. Seven miles was humiliating. But they were far from home, grown into men with terrible responsibilities, with thousands of workers to command and millions of dollars hanging over their heads as clearly as the late-winter clouds in the sky. These seven miles in the High Sierra may as well have been in Mongolia for all the trouble they represented.
“The weather has turned off warm & the snow is settling fast,” Crocker had written to Huntington in New York on April 4 before leaving Sacramento to see the mountains for himself. At that point Crocker was more worried about getting ties fast enough, once they had commenced tracklaying. “I have fretted & fumed more on that head than anything else,” he confided, adding that the best solution was for himself to go into the sawmill business on the side and “show these fellows how to make ties.” A few days later, on April 10, some four feet of snow fell on the summit and the east face of the Sierra, causing two large avalanches on the exposed line, recently graded and tracked, and on the stage road, delaying travelers for eighteen hours and paralyzing the little work trains supplying graders and trackmen lower down on the Truckee. Now, seeing the gap and ordering Strobridge to begin moving his graders back up the canyon to assault the covering snow, it was plainly too early for Charley Crocker to count it out. Strobridge would have five hundred men wielding shovels at Cold Stream by the end of the second week in April, and a thousand halfway through the third. But they were confronted by an immense amount of snow. And although the days were lengthening, the sunlight reflecting off the mountainsides took a cruel toll on the diggers whether they were working slowly up the gap or pressing higher on the western slope above Cisco toward the Summit Tunnel, where hundreds were still at work. “The snow has blinded a good many,” Edwin Bryant Crocker reported to Huntington, “& we have had to buy up all the cheap goggles in the market. Only think of that. What an item in railroad building.”1
One-eyed Strobridge was still feared among the Chinese legions when they saw him bearing down on them in the mountain glare, and even domestication apparently had little effect on him; earlier in the winter, his wife had joined him at the end of track in the Truckee Canyon, moving into a boxcar which had been converted into a comfortable little one-bedroom apartment with curtained windows and a small verandah recessed in the side where Mrs. Strobridge could rock and knit in the sunny midday. A newspaperman visited them and gallantly pronounced it “a home that would not discredit San Francisco.” Other boxcars had been connected to the Strobridges’ and similarly converted into offices, a kitchen and store, and sleeping quarters for the supervisor’s assistants. Every several days as the track lengthened down the canyon, the cars were pulled down to a new siding and reconnected to the telegraph cables overhead.2 Tracklaying down the canyon continued slowly toward Lake’s Crossing and the infant town of Reno, at that point a small collection of squatters’ shacks, tents, and many wooden stakes poking out of a light covering of snow. The town would be formally born in a few weeks—at auction. Bidders appeared well before auction day on May 9 and camped on the ground, buying up all the available blankets against the still-cool nights and eating all the food. The first lot sold brought the Central Pacific $600, and about two hundred more lots were taken that one day. In a month Reno would boast a hundred houses.3
Grading across the meadows and the lower canyon to the Big Bend of the Truckee was nearly completed—in the late-afternoon light the workers began to think about knocking off when the steep Virginia Mountains shone red above them—and at that place where the Truckee veered north, the company planted a division station called Wadsworth, altitude 4,077 feet, near an old trading post and the remains of a Paiute village. The local Indians had almost entirely withdrawn up into the foothills of the Truckee Range, especially after a short, furious series of battles eight years earlier which had been sparked by the abduction of two Paiute women by some whites, who kept them imprisoned in a trading post on the Carson River. A tribal party, learning where their women were held, attacked the post and killed five abductors. Some days later an angry force of more than a hundred miners swept over from Virginia City and down the Truckee looking for retribution. In a wooded draw the posse was ambushed and mostly cut to pieces, although survivors made it back to the mining camps. A larger force, bristling with Regular Army troopers, met the Paiutes in another battle, but the Indians soon vanished into the mountains above Winnemucca Lake. Very infrequently there would be a raid on a stage or wagon train, but for the most part of five or six years there had been peace. Crocker and Strobridge had instituted a policy by which every Paiute would receive a railroad pass, which all but ended any mischief along their line. But now, as the graders worked toward completion of the bed to Wadsworth, Stobridge had no idea how terrified his Chinese were of Indians, nor that a new kind of Indian trouble, this one wholly imaginary, was beginning to cloud his immediate future.4
Judge Crocker’s concerns were as substantial as iron, however. George M. Gray, the consulting engineer hired in the autumn to bring a greater professionalism to the construction as well as the operations arms, had just completed an inventory of the rails and other iron equipment on hand. The Central Pacific had 122 miles of iron on hand, he said, and the Western Pacific had 20 miles which could be borrowed for the main line, and there were 10 miles stored at Freeport—152 miles of iron in total, less the 7 needed to close the gap at Cold Stream. And sidings had to be figured into the total. “Charles says he is quite confident of completing the connection by June 15,” the Judge wrote Huntington in early April, “& that he can lay 3 miles per day after he gets his forces fairly settled at the work, say by July 1. At that rate the 145 miles would be laid for 49 days—or say by Sept. 1. By that time we trust your shipments will be on hand so that we can keep up the gait.” But he still fretted, wishing that they would have a hundred more miles on hand on June 1 and another hundred by the first of July—only then would he feel they were fully insured. More consultations with his brother and with Strobridge led the Judge deeper into pessimism. While it was true that they could lay rails all the way to Great Salt Lake by the end of the year, he wrote Huntington on April 13, “it is evident now that we shall get all the Iron here laid before the new supply reaches us. It is not your fault, as the frozen streams East prevented you from getting it off early—but remember we have storms & hindrances here which sometimes delay progress & cannot be overcome readily…. Keep sending Iron therefore as fast as you can get it off—until we have enough to lay to the mouth of Echo Canon, on the Central Pacific, & the 100 miles on the Western Pacific.” Totaling up the amounts sent was nothing short of depressing. “It chafes us terribly when we look over the shipments of Iron,” he confessed to Huntington on April 21, “to see how little was got off in Jan. Feb. & March—Jan. 3,698 rails, or only 81⁄2 miles. Feb. 5,856 or 13 miles. March about 21,000 or about 48 miles, not enough to supply the tracklayers one month.”5
Shortly after this was written, the Judge’s load of cares were increased by one which even a fleet of freighters would not drive away. “I have had a slight attack of paralysis,” he wrote Huntington on April 27, the day after he had observed his fiftieth birthday. “The physician tells me it is caused by too much confinement, lack of exercise—so I am going to start next week with Charles & Montague up the Humbolt to 12-Mile Canon, & perhaps to Humbolt Wells.” He would be gone two or three weeks from the office, he added—“Must do it.”6 The level of medical knowledge about diet, blood pressure, stress, and heredity being as primitive as it was, the small stroke E. B. Crocker had just suffered was only an anticipation of a larger, ticking time bomb waiting to go off, and a few weeks’ vacation in Nevada would only temporarily lessen his stress. The work would pile up in his absence and wait for his return.
Overwork and health were looming in Huntington’s mind, too—for days he had suffered from a blinding, “fearful headache” earlier in the month (“I can hardly think and much less write,” he had told Judge Crocker to apologize for one brief and sketchy letter); the pain was as familiar a companion as the small stack of bills of lading for iron leaving New York for the slow sail around Cape Horn to California. On top of what the Californians knew about, Huntington had sent two thousand tons the first week of April and as he wrote Crocker, six strong, “first class” ships were loading in the Hudson and would depart in a matter of days carrying another ten thousand tons. Though with chagrin he realized this would keep the Chinese busy for only ten or twelve days, he jocularly promised “you will have plenty of Iron in the fall” and fumed at the chain of misfortunes beyond his control which kept him from meeting the company’s demand. “The Devil seems to have been among the Rolling Mills,” he complained to Hopkins on April 13. One factory had been put out of commission for two weeks when a shaft broke, and another lost ten days when one of its rollers disintegrated. A third mill had been rolling seventy-five tons per day and was nearly done with its contract when it burned to the ground. Such bad luck made Huntington suspicious. “I have sometimes thought the Union Co, had something to do with mills Breaking & burning,” he told Hopkins, “but I know nothing certain.” He did not blame Durant or Ames when a freighter loaded with twelve thousand tons of iron was disabled and returned to New York, requiring the load to be transferred to another ship. But the thought must have fleetingly occurred to him. He could, however, lay direct blame on the Union Pacific for spoiling his timetable for supplying locomotives. “They bought Engines before we did,” he admitted to Charley Crocker, “and took the capacity of nearly all the best shops for some time, so it will make you short of motive power for the early fall business.” But he hoped to have thirty-seven locomotives on the way “by the final or by the middle of June.”7
When in Washington, he could see that their legislation—all legislation, really, and there were now eighty railroad bills under consideration—had slowed to a walk, such were the concerns about the president’s impeachment trial, which continued across April. Material needs of public servants did not diminish with the reducing pace, however. Judge Crocker was having free rail-road passes printed for all members of Congress. That, they recognized, was coming to be a normal part of doing business. Of course it only began there. Representative Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota appeared in the office to ask for $10,000 “to control some paper in his state.” He was on two important committees—the railroad and land committees—so Huntington gave him $5,000 in a check made out to intermediary Richard Franchot, “but I did not like the way he called for it, and I was sorry I gave it to him.” That same week the postmaster of the House of Representatives kited a check for $1,000 against Huntington in some transaction with a New York congressman, then went to his office “and begged so hard that I finally paid,” he wrote E. B. Crocker, “but I told him never to do it again, and he never will.”8
If he was feeling taken advantage of by some sorts in the capital, he kept alert when it came to the Kansas and Pennsylvania crowd. Securing the western end of the UPED’s transcontinental line through Denver, still as complicated and still as important as it had seemed earlier, depended on Tom Scott and John Perry in the East (for that franchise across Arizona and Colorado) as much as it did the Southern Pacific’s Lloyd Tevis and Horace Carpentier (for ah unimpeded run from San Francisco and Mission Bay up the San Joaquin Valley). It was quite a seesaw balancing act, with Stanford and the Judge working the western end and Huntington guiding the eastern. He had felt the UPED people stiffen palpably upon the return of their tough chief engineer, General William Jackson Palmer, who had been facing Kiowa and Apache in Kansas and snorted at the Central Pacific’s power and stature in the West; when earlier there had been negotiations about the Californians building either to Denver or at least to the Colorado River, Palmer returned from the West insisting that the California land was the most valuable to the company. Sensing no promise with them, Huntington stopped off in Philadelphia to see board member Scott. “I could do nothing with him,” Huntington reported to Hopkins,
and I got up to leave, at the same time remarking that I should follow the instructions of my associates and put in a bill asking aid of bonds and land for the San Joaquin Valley & Arizona and make the bigest fight on that that I was able to. He then started up as though he did not want it done & said if I would give a friend of his an interest he thought we could do something.
Scott promised to see Huntington in New York the following week—and, true to his word, brought Perry with him. They huddled at the Fifth Avenue Hotel until midnight on April 16 and again the next day at the Central Pacific’s office, and finally agreed to meet their lines at the Colorado River and unite in one congressional aid bill. This doubled the urgency, in Huntington’s mind, of buying control of the Southern Pacific, though there were many interests to satisfy. Work on the bill’s several drafts consumed the rest of the month, requiring consultations in Washington and Philadelphia, but finally, on April 28, Huntington wrote to Judge Crocker that he had negotiated a document they could live with, putting it in the name of the San Joaquin line. “I believe we can pass it between this and the 4th of next March”—presidential inauguration day—“and if we could get control of the Southern Pacific I think (with this Bill of ours passed into a law) that it would be worth much money to us.” Realizing that they would take some heat from antagonists in San Francisco, he said that they should get control of the S. P. secretly “and then sell out the San Joaquin Valley to the Southern Pacific. I shall go to work today to get the New York papers to say good natured things about this government aiding a Southern Pacific Road. Shall not have them say anything about the S.J.V. at present.”9
Huntington was in Washington a week later when he learned some news about the Southern Pacific which altered his thinking about Tevis and Carpentier and what the Associates’ strategy should be. Senator Conness’s friend George B. Gorham, who had recently failed in his campaign for the governor’s chair in California, was in Washington in the Senate Secretary’s office; Gorham was also a significant stockholder in the Southern Pacific. He told Huntington the surprising news that Tevis and Carpentier were purporting to control the railroad but actually had “no money or next to none in it.” It would be better to combine with Gorham and another stockholder, the San Francisco lawyer William B. Carr, and “it would take but a trifle” to buy the others out. “I have but little doubt but what a bill can be passed in Congress, giving us large aid,” he wrote Judge Crocker, “in fact a grant worth many millions, and I am inclined to think that it will be the Road that will do most of the through business between N.Y. & S.F.”
And that was not all he was thinking, Huntington told the Judge. He was going to see the president of the Northern Pacific, chartered four years before and expected to one day construct a line from Minnesota to Oregon. Somehow Huntington would “get him to hold his matter over another year and then we go in with him and control the west end of it.” As if in reply—which it wasn’t, as it required two to three weeks for mail to make the steamer passage between California, Panama, and New York—E. B. Crocker’s letter arrived a couple of days later: “Do you ever stop to think where you are leading us, with all your schemes?” “I do not expect to lead you at all,” Huntington replied smoothly. One day there would be three great transcontinental roads, he wrote, not just their one, and by letting others build the northern and southern lines they could take the western ends and get “the cream of the business.”10
Other business on Huntington’s mind concerned coal—those rich deposits in the Wasatch Mountains just waiting to be exploited, coal to fire locomotive boilers, coal to send both east and west on the transcontinental line, coal to forge a rich anchor to their railroad at its eastern extremity. But his spy network was reporting great leaps on the part of the Union Pacific—the bold announcement to build 350 miles in 1868, the certainty that such could be done under a dynamo like General Jack Casement (whom Huntington met in the late winter in Washington, and who had shaken the Californian’s confidence in his own team). Butler Ives had seen the Union Pacific engineers in the Wasatch Mountains. Grading contracts were being taken across Wyoming Territory, and iron was rolling westward. If Durant got the Union Pacific within a hundred miles of Ogden, then by law he could send graders three hundred miles in advance of their continuous track. This would plant the Union Pacific in Humboldt Wells, Nevada.
“I see no way to keep them from occupying the ground for say, 100 miles west of Weber Canon,” Huntington wrote to Judge Crocker on April 17, “but for us to go on and occupy the whole distance into Weber Canon as soon as we get within say, 400 miles, of course claiming that the distance is inside of 300.” His suggestion was to “get a lot of teams and men and material and send them on the Upper Humboldt—but before they stop let them reach Weber Canon, and so as to have everything look fair I would start the work on all the hard points between the Hard work on the Upper Humboldt and Weber Canon, and I would make up my mind to hold all the line to Weber Canon as arbitrarily as though it was held by the great I am.”11
Huntington’s bid for the Wasatch coalfields and the trade of Salt Lake City—couched in a statement sent to Secretary Browning by way of Huntington’s secret lobbyist, Thomas Ewing, who was Browning’s former law partner—conveniently overlooked the seven-mile gap in the Sierra, and alleged that the Central Pacific tracklayers had reached the Big Bend of the Truckee when in fact only the grading parties were there, and it tabulated the distance between the Big Bend and Humboldt Wells as 240 miles, shaving 60 miles from the actual figure. It asked the secretary to approve the Central Pacific route north of Great Salt Lake to Monument Point. He sent it off to the Interior Department and settled down to wait for a reaction. A few days later he discovered that Durant had gone west “to hurry up the work.” With both Dodge and Durant out of town the chances of their discovering Huntington’s scheme before Browning ratified it were lessened.12
Meanwhile, there was a strange thing to report. Charles Tuttle, a director and the secretary of the Union Pacific, had appeared at Huntington’s office on May 7. He offered to buy $1 million in Central Pacific bonds at their regular price of par plus interest and a 1 percent commission. “He stated that he wanted for a party in Europe & that he would make a small commission on them,” Huntington wrote to Judge Crocker. But they were no longer hard up for money and the offer was just too suspicious, so he had politely refused. “I have a man on the track of this,” he wrote, and hoped to know if it had been legitimate or someone’s subterfuge.13 The Doctor was an obvious suspect.
Dr. Durant and Grenville Dodge stood at trackside in a small crowd of laborers, soldiers, and dignitaries in the thin, nippy air of Sherman Summit on April 16, 1868; a locomotive and a few cars waited nearby as Durant raised a sledgehammer and pounded a ceremonial spike to close the connection of Dodge’s magic crossing over the Rockies. It is not recorded whether Dodge felt a stab of resentment at the moment the hammer rang out—at having the executive hound the credit for a route which had nearly cost Dodge his scalp to Crow Indians once upon a time, and which Dodge had had to defend two seasons before against Durant’s and Seymour’s attacks. But there were champagne corks soon popping, and congratulations from Sidney Dillon, Webster Snyder, Casement, and Reed, and the less-welcome handshakes and pleasantries from Silas Seymour and the Doctor, who then had to bustle over to where a patient telegrapher sat inside the little station house—ready to tap out a thumb-in-your-eye message to the Central Pacific.14
“We send you greeting,” Durant’s telegram to Leland Stanford read, “from the highest summit our line crosses between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Eight thousand two hundred 8200 feet above the tide water. Have commenced laying the iron on the down grade westward.”
The reply from Sacramento shot back almost immediately, although Durant did not get it until the next day in Cheyenne. “We return your greeting with pleasure,” Stanford wired, “though you may approach the union of the two roads faster than ourselves, you cannot exceed us in earnestness of desire for that great event. We cheerfully yield you the palm of superior elevation. Seven thousand and forty-two feet (7042) has been quite sufficient to satisfy our highest ambition. May your descent be easy and rapid.”15
Dodge, Reed, Snyder, and the Casements might have echoed Stanford’s last sentence to Durant with a more pointed and personal meaning. But it would have been hard not to feel a sense of eager anticipation after the symbolic event at the summit. Casement’s men had spiked past the Sherman station on April 5, some 549 miles from Omaha. They moved quickly on the downgrade past the beckoning tents of the whiskey ranches which had bedeviled Carmichael’s graders; by Thursday, April 16, carpenters working under Hezekiah Bissell and L. B. Boomer completed the dizzying pine-timbered Dale Creek Bridge, 135 feet high and 650 feet long, anchoring it with guy wires to steady it against the assault of gale winds. Casement’s tracklayers barely missed a beat, on April 21 swarming across what was then the highest railroad bridge in the world and moving into a deep, curving granite cut toward Laramie. “Great load off my mind,” Samuel Reed wrote his wife on April 23.16
Before the tracks were run past the new station at Laramie, a tent town had sprung up on the riverbank, populated by speculators and entrepreneurs and other fast-buck artists. On auction day, the railroad men could barely record the sales quickly enough. Some four hundred plots were sold within a few days at prices ranging from $25 to $260, and in another ten days no fewer than five hundred shacks had been slapped together. The first regular passenger train would ease its way slowly over the new, raw mountain grades on May 9, its coaches raucous with saloon keepers, gamblers, peddlers, tradesmen, brothel owners and their “prairie flowers,” the flatcars spilling over with all of their various paraphernalia and with towering stacks of dismantled building sections. Hell on Wheels had advanced a little farther into the West.17
Union Pacific Construction Across Wyoming, 1868
New merchants needed some kind of civic solidity, no matter what they sold for a living or tolerated from their patrons, so in early May they formed a provisional government and elected a mayor and other officials. Unfortunately, in organizing they were beaten to the punch by the lawless element, which had formed a union of its own. The legitimate government lasted only three weeks—before resigning in fear of their lives. Anarchy would prevail in Laramie throughout the summer and into early autumn, with no meaningful measures being taken by the commander at Fort Sanders other than to enforce a strict off-limits policy for his troopers. Robberies occurred in broad daylight, and nighttime murders were commonplace. On paydays and for several days thereafter, the mayhem would increase dramatically. In such an atmosphere even vigilantes were afraid to strike back.18 Cheyenne, meanwhile, had been partially depopulated at the opening of Laramie, though things were still lively there. C. C. Cope, a brakeman on the regular passenger runs across Nebraska to Cheyenne, boarded at the Rollins House, where “the partitions between the rooms were all boards and papered over; was almost a city of tents at that time and all gambling houses. I can hear the gamblers yelling now, ‘Roundo wins, Coolo loses.’” The vigilantes in Cheyenne continued to ride roughly on the most outrageous miscreants. “Nothing strange to see a man or two,” Cope recalled many years later, “hanging on the telegraph poles as we would be coming east on the train in the morning. The telegraph poles were low and no trouble to swing them over.”19
As with the previous years, violence erupted on other fronts within the sound of the Union Pacific’s train whistle. In April, the brakeman Cope stepped off the train at Sidney, Nebraska, for dinner, where he encountered the conductors Tom Cahoon and Wilkes Edmundson. They told him that they were going fishing down at Lodgepole Creek. “Looking over towards the bluffs we could see quite a few Indians,” he recalled, but they must have decided they were friendly Pawnee so close to the line. Cope climbed back on his train and Cahoon and Edmundson went off to get their fishing poles. “On leaving Sidney,” Cope wrote, “I opened the side door of the baggage car nearest the bluffs, threw down a trunk at the door and sat down. All at once, ‘Bang’—there was an arrow sticking in the trunk between my legs just about six inches too low to get me. I didn’t wait for the second arrow to come, but closed the door, went over to the locker where we kept about fifteen Spencer rifles to use in case of attack, took out a Spencer which was loaded, pushed the door open just far enough to stick out the end of the rifle and let go all the shot that was in it.”
Cahoon and Edmundson were not so fortunate. Footing it a mile and a half out from the station, they were cut off at the creek by a Sioux party. Cahoon was shot and scalped. Edmundson, with several arrows in him, brandished a revolver and kept the Sioux away; his shots drove them off from Cahoon’s body before his companion could be killed. Both survived their wounds. Cahoon worked for the Union Pacific for many years, wearing his conductor’s hat well to the back of his head to cover his bald spot.20
At around the same time, some two hundred warriors attacked a construction party at Dale Creek not far from the bridge, killing two and wounding four, and rustling off twelve head of stock. To the east, at Elm Creek in Nebraska, five track repairmen were surprised and killed. The alarm was up—before the army was prepared to react, much less prevent. Major Frank North had just reorganized his two companies of Pawnee scouts, but the first attack at Sidney was a hundred miles west of his command, which had been placed to patrol the hundred miles of track along the big dip of the Platte between Willow Island and Wood River. The troops nearer to Sidney, at Fort Sedgwick, were unable to track down the raiders who had attacked the Union Pacific train and the conductors, but were now on heightened alert—as were the bluecoats to the west at Forts Russell, Sanders, and Halleck in Wyoming and the new post about to be erected at the North Platte crossing, Fort Fred Steele. Dodge was particularly worried about the tracklayers moving up the southern Laramie Plains, and the graders working northward above them, after learning of the second attack so close to Fort Sanders; he obtained assurances from the commandant, General Gibbon, to deploy escorts and scouts immediately. He also conveyed his trepidation to Oliver Ames. “I have feared this trouble with the Indians,” Ames replied immediately, “and see no way to avoid it unless the Government will feed them or give them such severe punishment that they will not feel that they can rob with impunity. I see nothing but extermination to the Indians as the result of their thieving disposition, and we shall probably have to come to this before we can run the road safely.”21
With a bravado meant to reassure his wife, Jack Casement wrote home from the end of track on the Laramie Plains north of Fort Sanders on April 28. “The Indians are on the Rampage,” he said, “killing and stealing all along the line. We don’t apprehend any danger from them [because] our gang is so large.” Indeed, the ever-expanding force of Irishmen seemed to work with heightened vigor as the days warmed. “We are now Sailing,” Casement wrote a few days later, “& mean to lay over three miles every day.” He had taken on a new enterprise beyond tracklaying, signing a grading contract for a section 150 miles ahead of track—now the commander of “about 500 teams and over a thousand men.” Lewis Carmichael took the next stretch and left in a huge caravan of wagons, teams, and three hundred men bound for the desert and the continental divide. A late-season storm in the second week of May blocked the tracklayers for three days. “I never saw a worse storm,” Casement wrote home, but in the same breath he boasted that the four hundred shovelers were nearly done and that his men could “lay 4 miles a day if we can be kept at work.” Over forty miles of track were ready to be examined by the government commissioners. Just weeks later, Casement had freed up enough men on the Laramie Plains to wire Durant for another grading contract west of Green River.22
Before he had returned east, Dodge received reports from his engineers in the field. Dispatches announcing progress would follow him as he went. James Evans finished his final line from the North Platte all the way across the desert to Green River. “We save considerable in distance and altitude both over the preliminary lines,” he wrote Dodge on May 7. Further west, J. O. Hudnutt had staked the route over the rim of the Wasatch into Echo Canyon, and Jacob Blickensderfer was locating through the mountain canyons toward Great Salt Lake. For Dodge, the urgency of avoiding trouble after seeing Dr. Durant on Sherman Summit was only intensified by having so many hundreds of laborers at work on one line with one will; with a clear scientific line beckoning them on into Utah, it was paramount that the company avoid self-defeat. Before he had gone, he had “a very plain talk” with Durant and Seymour at Cheyenne; Sidney Dillon was there to diplomatically underscore the need for amity. “Dr. Durant assured me that he had no desire to interfere with the work or delay it, but he only wanted to help,” Dodge noted. “I told him we were well organized; that the lines had been well thought out; that all the engineers were very able men and that nobody could go over their work superficially and change it, and Mr. Dillon agreed with me.”23
With Durant’s promises to cooperate in his ears, Dodge finally headed east—there would be time for only the briefest home visit in Council Bluffs and a pass-through at the state Republican conference in Des Moines, where delegates were to be selected for the national party convention, before he had to hurry to Washington. The Republican back rooms of Des Moines, like their counterparts in state capitals all over the nation and indeed in Washington, were in a furor as the party faithful turned on a furious behind-the-scenes campaign to influence senators deliberating on President Johnson’s fate in Washington. Then, delegates like Dodge were on their way to Chicago when the news came that their nominal leader in Washington had been acquitted of impeachment charges on May 16. On that day seven radical Republican senators joined to vote for Andrew Johnson’s acquittal, finding that the prosecutors had failed to prove that the president’s constitutional challenge of the Tenure of Office Act could in any shape or form be judged treason. The radicals thus were one vote short of conviction. In Chicago, the joy and expectations raised by General Grant’s accepting the presidential nomination, with Schuyler Colfax squeaking in on the fifth ballot as vice-presidential candidate, heaped more earth over the bitter contentions. As written, the party platform largely reiterated the articles of impeachment rather than set out a program of peace and prosperity, and the convention adjourned after only two days. But Grant now stood at the top. It was time to move on, win the election, and get down to business—business as usual.24
“I truly regret that, we did not wake up sooner than we did,” mused Collis Huntington in a letter to E. B. Crocker on May 9. He was thinking about the iron not shipped and the locomotives not ordered in the wintertime, and the host of other factors combining to slow their progress—and their promise—now as the summer construction season was truly in earnest. On one score, at least, he had caught the Union Pacific napping. Still waiting to hear from Secretary Browning about the fraudulent route map filed from the Truckee River to Weber Canyon, he had learned on May 5 that the Union Pacific had not filed a location with the Interior Department farther than fifty miles west of Cheyenne. The same day, Thomas Ewing wrote to say that he thought Secretary Browning would approve the Central Pacific location as far east as Bear River that week. “I have written him that we want it to Weber Canon,” Huntington told the Judge.25
Three days later, Oakes Ames was in Browning’s office when the secretary let slip that the Central Pacific was claiming to be within three hundred miles of Great Salt Lake and petitioning to be allowed to occupy the Utah line deep into the Wasatch Mountains. The congressman could not believe his ears. “Can this be?” he wrote his brother in New York. Oliver sent the news back down to the capital to Dodge that the Central Pacific was attempting to “lap over to the East side of Salt Lake. This should not be granted and I think my Brother feels that you will be able to check its adoption.” Furthermore, they had to meet the enemy’s challenge by immediately posting location engineers west of the lake. By the time the letter arrived. Dodge had already heard rumors about Huntington’s scheme while in his temporary office in the Interior Department, and had huddled with Oakes Ames. They went directly to Secretary Browning to complain.26
“Dodge & Ames are fighting us very hard,” Huntington informed Judge Crocker on May 13. However, “the Secy. has agreed to approve any location as far as the north end of Salt Lake, which I told Genl. Ewing to accept. Ewing said that Dodge told Secy. Browning that they would build to Humbolt Wells before we got there.” Dodge cast aspersions on the C.P. surveys—they had been only preliminary barometrical readings done twice by Butler Ives last year, he knew—and he began talking with great familiarity about the terrain north of the lake, “and he finally got the Sec. to agree to give him three weeks to make further surveys,” Huntington related, “and Genl. Ewing says he has got the Secretary to almost say that at the end of three weeks he will approve our location, if there is no further light on the subject.”
Huntington said he wanted to guarantee that—suspecting that the Union Pacific might close in on its own three-hundred-mile proximity that soon. “I told Ewing that if he would get the location within 3 weeks,” he confided to Crocker, “that I would give him $10,000 cash and $20,000 stock which I think will bring the location this week.” Sure enough, three days after Huntington promised Secretary Browning’s old friend and former law partner that $30,000, Secretary Browning approved the Central Pacific location—as far as the north end of the lake. A jubilant wire went westward that day, May 16, to Stanford, even as the cocky-feeling Huntington moved on to write Hopkins. He urged his partner to have a location map drawn for the mileage east of Monument Point down to Weber Canyon—it wasn’t even necessary to base such a map on any further surveys, he said. He felt confident that Browning would approve the new map. And they would then gain possession of the extended line into Echo Canyon—if Charley thought his men could reach that point before the Union company. “They are pushing that point with a terrible energy,” he warned, and they clearly still intended to hold the entire Utah line “and build at their leisure.” This Huntington vowed to prevent. “With money enough,” he assured Hopkins, “we can get the line located to any point that we want, and if so located we would take and hold all we wanted.”27
Not until Friday, May 22, as the brass bands were blaring forth at the Republican Convention in Chicago, did Ames and Dodge learn that the secretary had ratified the Central Pacific location to Monument Point. “They were very mad about it,” Huntington crowed to Hopkins. “They said Browning promised them not to ratify it for 4 months or until they had time to make further surveys &c.” But ratification did not necessarily mean possession, he cautioned. “It looks to me as though the Union would reach a point within 300 miles of Salt Lake long before we do and then they will take the 300 miles and hold it, and I think we should take all we want calling it within the 300 miles & then get within that distance before they could prove it, more as it seems to me that we ought to be able to build three miles in the plain while they are building one in the Wasatch Mountains.”28
Dodge was more than angry at having his engineering words disbelieved by Secretary Browning. He promised they would beat the Central Pacific across Utah. Huntington had taken the Union Pacific’s engineer’s measure at Browning’s office and it had reminded him of his scorn for the man who had gotten him into railroading in the first place. “There never were two peas more alike than Genl. Dodge & T. D. Judah,” he wrote to Judge Crocker. “If you should see Dodge you would swear that it was Judah, and if you had anything to do with him you would be more than satisfied. The same low, thieving, cunning that he had, then a large amount of that kind of cheap dignity that Judah had. So keep him as far from Sacramento as it is possible to do.” The Doctor, though, was even more furious than Dodge, and much more dangerous an adversary. Huntington took care to warn his partners. “You have no ordinary man working against you on this end of the Road,” he wrote, “& Durant is a man of wonderful energy, in fact reckless in his energy.” It was clear to Huntington that the Union Pacific would get to Salt Lake before them—and that the only way they could prevail over them and their own problems with iron and the unclosed Sierra gap was to continue to lie about distances. Now, Huntington had just received a dispatch that Durant would have 640 miles of road done by the first of June. At the rate they had laid the last forty miles, Huntington said, they would be at Salt Lake by the first of December.
“I expect to go to Washington tomorrow night,” he told Hopkins, “and if $100,000 will get the line located to the end of our line as per map in the Interior Department, I shall get it done.”29
Trumped by a storekeeper! Congressman Dodge knew that the Central Pacific route had been ratified illegally. In the twilight of this administration, officials were beginning to look toward the day when they would not be on the public payroll, and Dodge knew that Huntington had hired General Ewing, Browning’s former partner, and that “inducements” had been passed over. “It is putting a block in our way,” he had written Henry Crane in the New York office, “that it may trouble us to get out.”30
But there was even more distracting trouble brewing out west. It was not difficult to sniff out the source: Durant had lingered out in Laramie and Cheyenne after Dodge had returned east, and behind the Doctor there was most certainly the consulting engineer, Silas Seymour. Inexplicably, Durant had ridden into Cheyenne and announced that he was moving the Union Pacific division from Cheyenne to Laramie, meaning the much-anticipated branch line from Denver was to be relocated, and the big Union Pacific machine shops would go up in Laramie. He said he would do it even if it cost him $500,000 personally—although in all likelihood a scheme for personal enrichment lay at bottom. The announcement had paralyzed company land sales in Cheyenne and thrown new landowners and hopeful entrepreneurs into a fury: what kind of double-dealing was this? Durant’s willful change of mind recalled the trouble when he threatened to move his eastern terminus from Omaha to Bellevue; it cost the company thousands in lost revenues and engendered ill will everywhere. The order to change the division would be rescinded—in this case the Union Pacific board would have to step in—but not before it sorely cost the company.31 By then, probably, Durant would have cleaned up, buying depressed Cheyenne real estate.
This was a mere annoyance, and for a few days in early May, at least, Dodge’s suspicions may have been lulled by his own engineer, James Evans, who had written Dodge to report that Durant had questioned him closely about the newly located line between the North Platte and Green River. Although the Doctor was “full of notions,” Evans convinced him that “so far as the line to Green River was concerned, he could bring on his eight thousand men as soon as he pleased.” Evans was “quite satisfied that the only course insuring comfort in dealing with him is to put on a reasonable amount of assurance. I gave him to understand that we could locate the line faster than he could march men and transportation over the road. After that everything was right. Seymour kept in the background and didn’t trouble any. I don’t know what use he is here unless it is to drive teams for the rest of them.”32 If it was amusing to think of a mustache-twirler like Seymour as a dusty, manure-booted muleskinner, the next letter Dodge had received from Evans changed everything.
It was dated May 11, and Dodge had received it as he was readying for the Chicago convention. Evans said that on May 9 he had been handed a notice published by Dr. Durant. No copy had been sent to Dodge. It was dated May 6 at Fort Sanders and titled “General Order No. 1.” “For the purpose of facilitating and perfecting the early location of the line between this point and the Great Salt Lake, and enabling the company to place the large construction force and supplies which are now moving westward, upon the most difficult points without unnecessary delay,” it read, the following points were ordered: Consulting Engineer Seymour and Chief Constructing Engineer Samuel Reed were to examine the entire proposed line to Great Salt Lake. The division engineers and chiefs of engineering parties would furnish Seymour and Reed “all maps, profiles and other information in their possession,” and assist them in every way as they inspected. While the division and constructing engineers would make decisions in all cases of questionable location and choice of routes, all matters were now subject to approval of Colonel Seymour, who was also empowered to make further changes in the line and grades if he deemed them necessary. All locating engineers and their corpsmen were henceforth to report to Reed in the construction division, and they would be needed to plan “temporary tracks, either around or over the most difficult points,” to hasten the work and avoid being stopped by tunnel or bridge projects.
One final point was the biggest slap in Dodge’s face. “In order to prevent unnecessary delay in the work during the absence of the chief engineer from the line of the road,” Durant ordered, “the consulting engineer is hereby invested with full power to perform all the duties pertaining to the office of acting chief engineer, and his orders will be obeyed accordingly by every one connected with the engineer department. Any orders heretofore given by the chief engineer, conflicting with orders that may be given by the consulting engineer during his absence, are hereby rescinded.”33
Dodge digested all of this as he continued Evans’s letter—how upon being handed the circular by Seymour he had instantly resigned, how he agreed to stay on a few days or weeks to finish his office work (but only if he were not subject to the General Order), and how Durant had telegraphed to offer him the temporary post of assistant construction engineer between Fort Sanders and Green River. Evans refused—and disclosed his reasons to Dodge: “Everything connected with it is chaos,” he complained, “and they are building so fast and the work is so light that there is no time to organize it properly.” By the time he could get it organized, Carmichael and the Casements and the others would have rumbled on through. “You can’t hardly imagine how much I have desired to have you on the ground during the past two weeks,” Evans wrote. “Reed is the weakest backed man I think I ever saw.”34
What is going on with Samuel Reed? Dodge may have asked himself. Was the fifty-year-old playing it safe for his job, thinking of his wife and two young girls and the farm in Joliet? He was at base a good man, even if he quailed at the hint of a fight. But Evans had to be retained, and without a doubt others of Dodge’s engineers would be walking off the work in protest. He immediately wrote Evans and said he must accept the supervisory job and try to get along with Reed, that Dodge needed him in the field and that it was important for Evans to obey Reed’s orders.
The next letter arrived from Oliver Ames in New York, who said that Oakes had obtained a copy of the Durant order and wrote him about it. “The whole circular is one of those peculiar exhibitions of character which Durant everywhere exhibits and which shows the impolicy of giving him power which he is sure to abuse always,” Oliver said in his smooth Bostonian way. “I think at our next meeting, we should definitely fix up the powers we intended to give him or repeal altogether the resolution making him agent for this work.” Durant had no power over the location other than in the smallest instances, he wrote, and his moves “will not be sustained by the Board of Directors.”35
Dodge went into a frenzy. How could Ames just blink and smile his patrician smile and talk about eventually doing something about this emergency? “You have allowed such matters to go on for harmony until one after another men leave until no one is left…who has one drop of manhood in them,” he scrawled to Oliver Ames, his anger reducing his usual barely legible handwriting to near gibberish. Dodge wrote that he would resign before he would permit his men to be directed by “a man who has not an honest drop of Blood in his veins, who is connected with the Co. for the sole purpose of bleeding it and who the Co. say they cannot discharge for fear he will Black Mail it.
“It is your duty,” he told Oliver, “to promptly decidedly countermand that order.”36
By May 14 the track on the western slope of the Sierra had been cleared of snow to the lower end of Summit Valley, and Hopkins hoped that in another week they would clear it to the Summit Tunnel. “At this time it averages 7 to 12 ft. deep & almost as solid as ice,” he told Huntington. “Nearly all the men from the Truckee have been brought back & are at work in the snow, shoveling.” Hopkins had just gone over the entire mountain line and could hardly contemplate the crushing task facing his laborers. On the eastern slope at the Cold Stream gap, the snow was so much deeper and so compacted that the workers had to cut in large, descending steps, or benches, down toward where the tracks would be. The deeper the gangs dug, the more snow had to be flung upward to the next higher bench and thenceforth up to the next—“in some places six times over from bench to bench,” Hopkins said, “to get it up to the top of the snow cut & out of the way.” Stanford would recall there were places where a snowfall of 63 feet “was pressed down, perhaps, into not more than 18 feet, but packed as hard as ice, and requiring the pick and powder to make a passage.” By the end of May, the west-slope shovelers uncovered the entrance to the Summit Tunnel; aided by the big snowplow, they worked through the tunnel and began on the downgrade eastward. Ahead, other gangs had worked their way deeper to uncover the headings of rock tunnels they had blasted and chipped out the year before; inside those tunnels they found, to a depth of two or three feet, solid ice, which also needed to be removed.37
Charley Crocker predicted that the force would clear the gap and build the connecting track by June 15—“& then as soon as we get thoroughly organized and drilled for tracklaying,” he assured Huntington on May 20, “we will go after Mr. Genl. Casement’s best work, not for one day but steady every day work & you shall see what you shall see in that line. We have no men on our line with high sounding titles—Generals colonels &c. &c. as we hear of on U. P.—but I think we can build R. R. as well & as fast as they.” He had been all through the Humboldt Canyon with Strobridge—“gone 15 days among the Indians & sagebrush”—and was much encouraged. The stretch of 250 miles would take his graders no more than thirty days to prepare for track, so his strategy was to send no men forward until they had laid rails past Reno and the Big Bend of the Truckee, and past the Forty-Mile Desert and the Humboldt Sink, to the stagecoach station at Oreana. There, in the portal between the Trinity and Humboldt Ranges, they would begin to raise some alkaline dust—sending diggers and blasters far ahead to Emigrant’s Pass and westward, where short but very heavy work was required, while the tracklayers hustled up toward them along the Humboldt—“we will lay the Iron as fast as it arrives here up to the upper end of the Canon,” Charley promised.
Hopkins echoed this a few days later, adding that “‘where there’s a will there’s a way.’ I believe we shall lay all the iron we can get here previous to 1st Oct. and from 50 to 90 miles a month after that. During the long days, Strobridge thinks he can work two shifts of men, eight hours each by day and during clear moonlight nights a third shift—& with horses to haul forward the ties & part of the iron, he thinks he sees how he will be able to handle 300 or 400 tons of iron & the required ties from the end of a track daily.” As the Judge had suspected, for great distances they could actually lay track on the ground after clearing brush away, and graders would follow to raise the track to a proper businesslike level.38
The question was the iron. How they could build all the way to Weber and Echo Canyons by the end of the year if they were going to have a month in August with no rails to lay before those slow-sailing ships began completing their 120-day voyages around Cape Horn? First they debated paying the higher freight charges to send iron by steamship. But by mid-May it was clear to all that Huntington would have to send some iron down to the isthmus. It would be hauled across Panama and reloaded for the voyage up to California, to cover those slack weeks. It would be fearfully expensive—to use one of their favorite expressions—but, as Hopkins wrote, “We think it may not cost as much per ton as we have paid to haul 50 miles of Iron over the summit.” Huntington found that it would cost more—$30 in gold per ton of iron for the isthmus, as opposed to $20 per ton for the Sierra summit—but the difference was immaterial. On May 21, after a rush of telegraphed messages, he put the order through for ten thousand tons to go over Panama. To reduce the cost he had them locate California merchants and shippers willing to send a freighter down loaded with grain, at which point the iron and the grain would change places.39
All five Associates were greatly relieved—although Huntington’s headaches would continue to pound as further disasters struck his iron suppliers. The worst concerned the big Scranton Mills, where a main balance wheel pulled loose at the end of May and flew into pieces—“one piece went through two puddling furnaces and one piece, about half a ton, went out through the Roof,” Huntington moaned to Crocker, “and I won’t pretend to say where it went.” The mill had been producing 150 tons per day but now would be stilled for at least three weeks. Huntington scrambled to fill that gap.40
Knowing iron would take the short cut across Panama removed one care from Judge Crocker, too, but of course there were a host of others. To shake off the scare of his short attack of paralysis he had actually listened to a doctor and taken two weeks away from his desk, and the long rides through the Humboldt Valley with his brother, Strobridge, and Montague had given him a welcome respite. Five minutes back at his office in Sacramento erased it all. The waiting stack of letters from Huntington with their dreams of an empire in the West signaled that they would be tied “down to slavish work the rest of our lives,” he complained to his New York partner. “The detail of our already immense business falls heavily on me, & I am breaking down under it…. So you see it is not strange that I hesitate about taking on my shoulders any more work. I don’t like to say anything but Stanford & Hopkins don’t like to stay in the office any more than they can help—& when I am here they know I will not neglect it, & so it goes on. The mental strain, & the lack of physical exercise will soon use me up, & then what good is it all?” Two days later he felt himself sinking even deeper. “I give up,” he scrawled to Huntington. “I am hopelessly committed to work enough for 3 or 4 lives. I hope to be able to live through it all, but if I do, I shall be a very old man.” His next consultation with the doctor left him with a warning to spend as little time in the office as possible during the summer.41
Hopkins had confided his worries about the Judge to Huntington. “I am fearful we may suddenly lose him some day,” he had written a month earlier after seeing the portly but suddenly frailer Crocker off on his working vacation up the Humboldt. “Though it is possible that others of us who feel more secure of our hold on life may yet go before he does. He is a strong feeder & with healthy strong digestive process that supply an amount of animal vitality requiring abundance of open air & physical exercise. Such natures can’t stand as much confinement as feebler [organisms] who run their machines with a less press of steam.” Whether Hopkins’s concern went beyond lip service is as unrecorded as any offers he may have made to come in to work more often or to take on some of the Judge’s load of responsibilities, just as there is no way to ascertain whether E. B. Crocker partially brought stress upon himself by being unable to delegate responsibility. The fact remains, however, that the Judge stayed at his post longer than he should have throughout the summer, hastening to apologize if he took a few days off. Aside from his administrative duties he remained Huntington’s most vital link with the organization in the West. “I am very sorry to hear that your health is not good,” Huntington wrote him on June 9. “We can’t spare you. Not yet. I know you must be very busy and I can sympathize with you, for with attending to matters in Washington, buying and getting together R. R. material, attending to financial matters &c. &c., I get very tired and sometimes I think that a man can wear out.”42
In the wearing-out business, Huntington gave as much as he received. This was especially straining on the Sacramento partners when it came to the great urgency about Utah in late May and early June, as Huntington sent his cables and letters westward with accounts of his schemes to use the interior secretary as a means to drive a railroad all the way across into the Wasatch coalfields. The Union Pacific’s answer signal—its intent to begin grading across the same territory—drove Huntington from his usual bold and aggressive self into something rasher, even dangerous to the Associates’ common cause, in the opinions of Judge Crocker and Mark Hopkins.
Huntington’s urgings to call four hundred miles three hundred in order to get their own graders within sight of the coalfields—and then “build before anyone could prove to the contrary”—alarmed them. They had been bending truth and geography for years—since they had moved the base of the Sierra twenty-one miles to the west—but this was a lie of a more hazardous order. Let the Union Pacific people do such a thing, wrote the Judge on May 23.
It is in violation of the act of Congress, & is a piece of sharp practice on the part of Durant—which seems to me will not be sustained by Congress or the Sec. of Interior. It places them in the wrong. Will we not be equally in the wrong if we follow suit, & set men at work more than 300 miles ahead of completed road. Bear in mind that ours is a national work, that the public are watching us all. Our strength lies in building railroad fast—& keeping within the law, & acting fairly & honorably, free from all sharp practice.
Better to send a protest to Secretary Browning, he argued. They should then simply grade alongside the Union’s line, confident that their work would get the approval of Congress. “Your dispatch has troubled us a good deal,” he went on. “Of course we can set men at work over there, though at a great disadvantage, & at heavy expense. We cannot send them from here, but would have to send agents, & hire men there.” The morning’s papers had carried a note that Brigham Young had taken a contract to grade from Echo Canyon to Salt Lake City. “It cannot be strictly true,” he said, “because Young don’t take contracts in his own name. The mere letting of contracts amounts to nothing, it is the doing of the work that violates the law.”43
Hopkins sent his own cautionary letter eastward, but they all agreed on one thing: they needed a presence in Utah. “I have been fearful that we have made a mistake in not keeping a good man at Salt Lake for the last, say, 2 years,” Huntington confided to Hopkins, “as I think we want a large quantity of men to work this season in the Wasatch Mts and necessarily a large amount of Provisions to feed them.” Charley Crocker would be the one to send—but he could not be spared. Hopkins and the Judge decided to delegate Stanford—he was the most able-bodied, and as a former governor he would have diplomatic standing both with the territorial leaders and with Brigham Young.
Stanford delayed his trip for a fortnight, however—his wife delivered their first child in eighteen years of marriage, a son they named Leland Stanford Jr., on May 14. The anxious new father finally left, reluctantly, on June 1, after signing over a packet of Contract & Finance Company stock worth some $9 million to Jane Stanford in case something happened to him on the mission. George Gray and Utah governor Durkee had preceded him by a few days; the territorial governor would be ah intermediary for tie contractors on the Bear River and for buying coal properties. “We hope,” said Hopkins, “they will be able to get a Mormon or Gentile force at work there—perhaps let a contract to Brigham Young or his representative for 50 or 100 miles from Salt Lake westward towards Humboldt Wells.”44
There would be no waiting impatiently by the telegraph key to learn of Stanford’s success or failure; there was too much else to do. Huntington kept up the pressure on his partners to get control of the Southern Pacific. He urged them to see who really controlled the line and how they operated, if financier Lloyd Tevis was not truly a front man; where, too, stood William Carr in the picture? Before Stanford had left for Utah he had gone overnight to San Francisco and returned with a roster of directors and a strategem. “None of them are anxious to sell,” Judge Crocker reported. “If any of us were to approach them their ideas of its value would be up in the skies. We can only work through Carr and Tevis. So you see it is not an easy thing to get the control of the S.P.—but we are after it.” The directors had expended very little money, he noted, but they would cite the value of their submerged thirty-acre grant in Mission Bay, the worth of their thirty thousand acres of land grants out to their railhead in Gilroy—between $2 and $5 million, theoretically. “They treat these as so much overplus assets on hand capable of being divided,” the Judge complained, “making no account of the expenditures necessary to obtain these grants. With men so crazy as to figure that way, it is hard to deal, & time must be allowed for the blood to cool.” But of course, other local railroad men were beginning to show interest, and “it is getting complicated.”
Hopkins had concluded that the price would remain too high, but they all assured Huntington their blood was still up; Stanford and Crocker thought it might be best to get Tevis to their side by giving him an interest in the San Joaquin Valley Railroad, and to this Huntington agreed. But perhaps he could drive the price of the Southern Pacific downward by directing their congressmen to enter a bill for the San Joaquin Valley Railroad. “I have not thought it policy to have the S.J.V. Road come to the surface,” Huntington explained, but if it shook the arrogance of the Southern Pacific directors into worrying that the Associates would run right up the valley and over to a deepwater terminal, bypassing them altogether, it would be worth the inevitable press assaults on the monopoly.45
For his part, Huntington had been seeing to other aspects of that monopoly. Complete control of Colonel Wilson’s California Central line up the Sacramento Valley eluded them as long as there were outstanding bonds to buy up, and in New York the last directors balked at signing Huntington’s indemnities to protect against any of their outstanding hidden debts; it was a tedious and frustrating chase, Huntington said, but he hoped to run down all of the leads soon. Vastly simpler was the California and Oregon Railroad business. Since getting a hold on the charter in the fall, they had all been aware that it called for construction of twenty miles by the summer of 1868 or they would forfeit the charter. With no rails to lay and too many irons (as it were) in the fire, their only course was to have the law concerning the California and Oregon changed, extending its time limit. Huntington had gotten the bill introduced in the late winter, and with so many friends in the Senate the extension had passed that body late in May. He pulled out all stops to get it through the House before members would evaporate in July.46
The Goat Island bill continued to navigate through hidden shoals, suffering from sudden adverse winds. In late May, while in the capital, Huntington heard that ordinary real estate concerns such as the grand isolation and breathtaking views of San Francisco Bay might be affecting his cause. “I have been told that some of the military officers have some fine cottages on Goat Island,” he told Judge Crocker. “Very likely that is the reason why it is so necessary for military purposes.” He also had news on the Pacific Railroad tariff regulation bill: it would rest in the Senate committee, “as Morgan, Conness, Stewart, Harlan & Drake are all right on it.” His circle of helpful public servants was expanding by the week; Senator George H. Williams of Oregon stayed at his house in New York for three days, during which time Huntington plied him with hospitality while keeping up a running commentary on business. “He has been rather slow on Rail Roads,” he told Hopkins, “but I think I added something to his R. R. education. He is a first class man and can do us much good.” When Senator Williams returned to the capital he did so as a friend upon whom Huntington would count when their San Joaquin and Southern Pacific bills surfaced later. Congratulating himself on this among many other things, Huntington wrote expansively to Leland Stanford on the eve of the latter’s mission to Salt Lake City to let him know just how well they were doing. “Our bonds are selling very freely,” he said, “so much so that it gives us a large surplus of money, and if the sales should hold up for the next month as they have for the last 3 or 4 months, I shall advance the price to 105.” In fact, he put the price up to 103 in only two weeks.47
With some of that surplus of money—the $100,000 he had told Hopkins and the others about—he intended to take the train down to Washington on the night of Sunday, May 31, to see Thomas Ewing and Secretary Browning about the Utah business, but more trouble with iron delayed him several days; another of their principal suppliers halted when its employees struck for higher wages, leaving Huntington with four ships in port with only partial cargoes. He got one launched fully laden, promising the captain a bonus of $250 if he made the run in 125 days. Huntington finally caught his train to the capital on June 3. “I rode all night in the cars,” he told Hopkins, “was at work at Washington until 3 o’c in the morning thursday and returned friday night, and am about as much used up today as I ever was in my life.” He found official Washington, however, draped in mourning and closed in honor of ex-President Buchanan, whose funeral was on June 4, although Huntington did gain a special audience before the Senate land committee and succeeded in forestalling a land grant about to be awarded their adversaries in the Goat Island case—“I saw two of the committee before they came together,” he told Hopkins after his return to New York, presumably with his satchel a little lighter.48
If Huntington did not see Ewing or Browning that week, he at least cooled down considerably—even to the point of reversing himself. The short trip may have been exhausting, but it gave him time to reconsider his hasty orders sent out to his partners, especially in light of their telegrams and letters calling for caution. “I telegraphed you yesterday not to take possession of the line more than 300 miles in advance,” he explained to Hopkins on June 10. He recognized that the Union Pacific had gained possession of the canyon lands for the present, so he had left letters for Ewing and Browning, making a formal objection about the Union Pacific being allowed to continue westward. “I thought we had better take high ground and confine ourselves to the law until we are where we can make more to break it than keep it,” he said. Replies to his Washington messages arrived shortly. Browning ventured the unofficial opinion that the Union Pacific would beat them to Great Salt Lake, leaving Huntington to fill in the obvious blank as to the outcome of a claims fight. But Ewing’s letter was more positive, encouraging them to stay on the higher moral ground but to build into the Weber orbit as soon as possible and then contest the claim. “If the Genl. is true to us I think it can be made to work, and I have no reason to suspect him,” Huntington wrote Judge Crocker,
except that he is connected with the Shermans by marriage, and they are very close to the Union Co. Charles Sherman is one of the Government Directors in Union Co., but I have no fear of [Ewing] going for the Union Co. unless he gets as many dollars from them as he does from us. But we can only get to Weber Canyon before the Union Co. by pushing our work as work was never pushed before.49
The direction of his “high ground” scheme took on more definition in a letter to Hopkins: they would contrive a location map with their line as far east as Echo Canyon, and they were to indicate the need for a tunnel just east of their line in Echo; then they would wait until Strobridge and Crocker had gotten the track within three hundred miles; Huntington would then try to convince Browning that the Union Pacific should confine itself to the eastern end of the tunnel location until the Central Pacific had finished blasting it through. But a week later, on June 19, Huntington found his confidence eroding—not only in this plan but in whether he was actually accomplishing anything for all of his frenetic activity and the whirlwind of ideas forever swirling in his head. “I have been so much perplexed about our failure to get Iron, as per contracts,” he fretted to Hopkins, “and in getting ready so much more material than we expected to want early in the year, and in getting it shipped, that I have realy had to neglect our business in Washington.” How hard it was to do a competent job on all fronts!50
Feeling the same, though a trifle relieved to have one or two of their New York partner’s schemes deflated a little, Hopkins and Crocker saw another way to burnish their “higher ground” position—by claiming better engineering and construction than the Union Pacific, and certainly greater comfort and convenience on the Central Pacific cars. The Judge was researching how they might break an eastern monopoly on the right to build sleeping cars, which when their service moved into Nevada they would require; any tinkerer in California could solve the problem of converting upright daytime passenger seats into horizontal bunks, but to manufacture any kind of convertible car in California would be to collide with existing patents. Crocker had presciently gotten bills passed in the legislatures of California and Nevada which would invoke the principle of eminent domain in patent law, allowing them to have a patent condemned in state court. “It is rather of a novelty in railroad matters,” he confessed to Huntington, “but I think I can make it stick—for a patent right is no more sacred as property than a man’s house.” In those freebooting times such a notion might actually prevail long enough for them to move forward, or at least use the threat of a lawsuit to blackmail the eastern manufacturer into granting a cheap franchise.51
Mark Hopkins’s contribution was the news that the Union Pacific in its greed and haste was building terribly. A friend returned to Sacramento after an overland journey by rail to Laramie and thereafter by stagecoach to say that “the Union Co. are building road rapidly,” and that he thought “they will reach Salt Lake before we do,” Hopkins told Huntington. “But he says their road is an inferior one compared with ours—that it is an undulating grade, the alignment crooked, their ties are one third less in number than ours & not exceeding one half the size of ours, and none of the road ballasted. He says it was impossible to read a newspaper while riding on their road, but it was easy to read while riding over the newest & roughest portion of ours.” Gone, apparently, was the Associates’ heady resolve to build as cheaply and expediently as the Union Pacific. So Huntington would adopt the claim of quality and safety when he renewed his campaign against the Interior Department.52
Never, however, could the Associates expect their own ride to be smooth. Late in May the Chinese began quietly filtering out of the work camps and heading back toward civilization. It was not a walkout—Strobridge and his pick-handle had been keeping that problem at bay. The foremen thought at first that it was simply out of loneliness or an unwillingness to advance out across the Nevada desert far from established Chinese communities and supply lines, though some of the laborers said they were not making enough money with their constant moving of campsites. Then Strobridge got to the bottom of it. “Worthless white men have been stuffing them with stories,” Judge Crocker reported, “that east of Truckee the whole country was filled with Indians 10 ft. high who eat chinamen, & with big snakes 100 feet long who swallowed men whole.” To counteract this Strobridge organized a junket for fifteen or twenty men—“& we sent good men along with them to show them 100 or 200 miles of the country where the road was to be built…. The fact is there are no Indians on the line until we reach Winnemucca, & then they are harmless like the Piutes on the Truckee, & the Chinese despise them. We have a ticklish people to deal with—but manage them right & they are the best laborers in the world. The white men we get on our work here are the most worthless men I ever saw.”53
Dodge, stuck back in Washington after the Republican Convention, wanting to be nowhere but out with his engineers laying claim to Utah lands north and west of the lake, tried to maintain his vigiliance within the Interior Department building against another coup by Huntington. At the same time he attempted to control the plunging morale in his own corps, long distance by letter, and maintain a firm position with President Ames and the Union Pacific board. Everyone but Durant seemed to be operating in a fog—Dodge included. The chief engineer had seen no maps or profiles of the terrain west of Green River, Wyoming, on the eve of this battle with Durant and Seymour over the Wasatch rim line and the locations through Echo and Weber Canyons. His teams were out in the field, unsuspecting should Colonel Seymour appear to make demands with his spurious authority. And none of the executives in the east had seen a copy of Durant’s “General Order No. 1” with a name signed to it, which led some of them to wonder if it was all just a hoax. Meanwhile, the Doctor and his consulting engineer could operate freely.
Granted, Oliver Ames had replied to Dodge’s bruising letter demanding action, explaining again in his diplomatic way that “This order of Durant as far as it confines itself to construction and a change of location to facilitate construction may be within the scope of that Resolution. But when he interferes with your authority as Chief Engineer and the control of your parties he is entirely beyond his limits, and should not be recognized. I will write him at once.” Dodge immediately had written to warn Ames that he would not pay attention to Durant’s or Seymour’s orders and had so instructed all of his employees. He had followed this with a warning to Jacob Blickensderfer out at the head of Echo Canyon, reiterating that the chain of command through Dodge remained; he should do all in his power to aid Samuel Reed and the construction bosses, and that they were permitted to change lines or grades—but only temporarily. Under the contract they must “build the line we turn over to them,” Dodge had emphasized. “You will therefore turn over to them the permanent location as fast as possible and endeavor to turn it over so fast that they shall make no complaint for want of line.”54
Samuel Reed and James Evans, too, had needed attention. In a benign-appearing move, Durant had ordered Reed and Seymour to continue through the Utah canyons to Salt Lake City, with Reed to arrange with Brigham Young for grading parties. This made sense to all, since Reed had spent time in Salt Lake City and had established good relations with Young and his people. Evans had been appointed to temporarily take over Reed’s duties as chief construction engineer; he had his doubts, as he had written Dodge from Fort Sanders: “I hope [it] will be short, as it is no sinecure. Track, grading and bridge all in a pile together. I think it will be difficult if not impossible to prevent delays…. Everything, of course, is being done in an extravagant manner.”55
Reed had found respite and success in Salt Lake City. “I have not felt so free from care and anxiety since leaving home,” he wrote his wife. When Samuel Reed obtained an audience with Brigham Young, the Mormon leader was eager to discuss obtaining good-paying work for his faithful. In the valley there had been, memorably, plagues of crickets and grasshoppers, but now, with the Saints’ empire firmly established and blooming, there were locusts; for three years running the farmers’ crops had been affected. What surplus there was of hay, oats, and potatoes, Young knew, they would sell to the railroaders. Moreover, as an original shareholder in the Union Pacific, he savored the trains’ approach, still blissfully convinced that the Pacific Railroad could never avoid running through the City of the Saints. Reed had been instructed to be noncommital on which way the railroad would turn upon reaching Ogden. The strategy was correct, Dodge thought: “I knew the importance of upholding that friendship,” he would write, “especially as the Central Pacific were catering to it and trying to influence it.” On May 21 (ten days before Leland Stanford would depart Sacramento on the same mission as Reed) at the Continental Hotel in Salt Lake City, Young signed a contract for $2,125,000, encompassing all grading, tunneling, and bridge masonry from the head of Echo Canyon to Ogden, the onetime fur-trappers’ camp at the junction of the Weber and Ogden rivers, now a burgeoning town in itself.
Young subcontracted the work mostly in small parcels to bishops of various wards; larger and more specialized work was subcontracted to his son, Joseph A. Young, and his elder partner, Bishop John Sharp, a Scot, who was assistant to the superintendent of public works in the city; another local man, Joseph F. Nounan, a Gentile, was another principal subcontractor. All of the subcontracts, large and small, granted a tithe to the church. Later it would be said that Brigham Young profited handsomely from his $2 million railroad construction contract; after his death in 1877, administrators would find that the profit was far lower than popularly thought: $88,000. Though Young’s personal finances were often indistinguishable from church finances, there was in this case little confusion regarding his estate; the railroad project was considered “official,” and those profits went to the church.56
When he signed, Young was grateful for one particular concession granted him by Durant, who wired Snyder in Omaha to “transport passengers on [Young’s] orders or those of his agents, at the same rate charged contractors.” (In New York, Huntington’s spy in Durant’s office apprised him of this. “I am told,” he would write to Stanford, “that Durant gives all the Mormons passes over the Road and I suppose that will give him some hold on Young, as there is…quite a good many Mormons coming from Europe this year.”) After the deal was sealed, Reed had gone up to work with Blickensderfer; the line would roughly follow Reed’s preliminary survey. There, up in Echo Canyon, Reed was to share a tent with Silas Seymour as the colonel began to look over Blickensderfer’s work, and there, Dodge would soon learn, the trouble for his men and himself would begin to increase.57
Before Seymour’s complaints in Echo Canyon began to resound, Dodge saw that his outift’s morale problem was getting serious when he next heard from James Evans:
There will be a great pressure brought to bear to keep me on construction. What the result will be, I don’t know, neither do I care. Rest would suit me better than anything else. The last year has been particularly hard. I feel it most sensibly the work could have been easily gotten along with, but there are other things constantly with me, and I am quite sure that it will lead to a breakdown very soon. As long as I can, will try and do whatever there is to be done. This I suppose is the duty of all of us, if not to ourselves, to those who come after us.58
Dodge could respond as a commanding officer and try to buck up spirits. And three days later, on June 1, Blickensderfer’s letter arrived, requiring more support and guidance from the chief engineer.
The head of Echo Canyon, where he was camped, with its silver-green and aromatic sagebrush everywhere and with the unsettling way in which noises reverberated from the high rocky walls, was far from the fifty-two-year-old Blickensderfer’s native Ohio. His consultations with Colonel Seymour, too, were unlike those he had had previously on the Ohio Public Works Board or the Steuvenville and Indiana Railroad. They were unworldly. As for the setting of their debate, deep, narrow, boulder-strewn Echo Canyon wound for nearly thirty miles, its dusty wagon road bumping alongside the creek below squadrons of diving and swooping swallows and the high, red rock walls; the Harlan-Young wagon train had been the first along it in 1846, followed shortly by the doomed Donner-Reed party. The Mormons’ advance party under Orson Pratt had gone through in 1847, their leader noticing how the overhanging rocks “were worked into many curious shapes, probably by the rains,” the most fantastic being Castle Rock, looking like something right out of a storybook, and others soon earning names like Steamboat Rock, Sphinx, and the Giant Teapot from subsequent emigrants. Samuel Clemens had ridden through Echo Canyon in a stagecoach on his way to Nevada. “It was like a long, smooth, narrow street,” he recalled later, “with a gradual descending grade, and shut in by enormous perpendicular walls of coarse conglomerate, four hundred feet high in many places, and turreted like medieval castles. This was the most faultless piece of road in the mountains, and the driver said he would ‘let his team out.’ He did…. We fairly seemed to pick up our wheels and fly.”59
That Mormon-maintained wagon road may have provided a smooth descent, but Jacob Blickensderfer was being thwarted in setting out anything like it for the railroad from the crest of the Wasatch Divide down toward the junction with Weber River. From an engineering and construction standpoint, he had to worry about physical hazards of steep canyon walls, possible landslides from above, the likelihood of snow obstructions in winter, bad rock cuts, expensive embankments, the serpentine nature of the course, and the possible requirement of tunnels. He had to hope to avoid crossing the creek. He had to tabulate every physical feature of a projected line in terms of how the laborers might run temporary track around it if it posed a problem or delay. And he had to run his lines at an acceptable grade.
Blickensderfer reported to Dodge that he had isolated three possible routes down Echo Canyon, each at a gradient of ninety feet per mile, each with serious drawbacks, and that he had sent his assistants down to develop the three lines more fully so that a clear choice could be made. Unfortunately Seymour and Reed had appeared. Blickensderfer could tell that Reed agreed with all he had done thus far, especially the premise of a ninety-foot grade—“but he does not press his views so strongly as the Colonel does.” Seymour was “a strong advocate of the use of higher grades, and the cheapening of the cost of construction by that means,” Blickensderfer commented. “This strikes me as singular, being the very reverse of his views strenuously urged last season in reference to the Black Hills location.” Seymour told Blickensderfer to run the three lines down the canyon again at a hundred-foot grade, and then to compare the two sets and calculate the savings—and then submit his recommendations. This Blickensderfer agreed to do, but it would cost at least a week of time.
He had gone to give instructions, he related to Dodge, returning to the base camp a week later only to find that Seymour and the acquiescent Reed had already elevated Blickensderfer’s grade through Weber Canyon and Devil’s Gate by ten feet. Seymour sent a messenger to recall surveyors James Maxwell and Thomas Bates away from the important tasks they had been doing and put them onto this relocation. Both engineers had thus lost a week in changing position—bridges had washed out and travel was difficult—and the changes in location would cost at least another week.60
Immediately after reading the letter, Dodge fired off a wire to Blickensderfer and told him that Seymour had no control over his men and no right to interfere. He also wired that he wanted no grade to exceed ninety feet. In New York, Durant got wind of Dodge’s telegram; stepping back once and planning to advance twice, the Doctor wired Seymour himself and countermanded his orders, for the moment supporting Dodge. This game only heightened Dodge’s frustration. “All this conflict of orders was demoralizing to parties, made delays in the work, and was being felt along the entire line,” he said later, “and it was with the greatest difficulty that I kept up the discipline and everything moving.”61
Twice in that one week Dodge went up to New York to contain the damage being done out west. Durant was there—turning the argument away from his general order and the interferences to complain that Dodge had failed to send all of his instructions and preliminary profiles and maps to the New York office; the Doctor seemed unimpressed by the explanation that several of the field reports had been submitted late and that the short-handed department in Omaha had been working overtime to get the material completed, and were often called away for other company business; at present his field engineers in Wyoming were under orders to give their new location maps directly to the grading contractors to avoid delays. Dodge could tell that Durant’s complaints were being lodged as ammunition to get him fired.
Back in Washington on June 4, he wrote Blickensderfer to warn him that Seymour had been sending telegrams to New York filled with objections and dire predictions, but that Dodge had persuaded the board that a ninety-foot maximum grade was best, even if more expensive by half a million dollars. “Col. S. says that the adoption of your line is suicidal policy,” he reported. “Its great cost, deep cuts, high banks, walls, &c. with liability from snow and snow-slides, make a location in the present and prospective, that the Co. will not sustain.” Dodge emphasized that he was leaving the matter to Blickensderfer’s judgment. “If the work is very heavy,” he added, “we will have to put in a temporary track and go around it, say with 140 or 200 ft. grade and thus not delay work on location or delay progress of track. I have thought that track could be laid cheaply, right on Reed’s old line; a short 200 ft. grade would bring it in to the valley that Reed ran down and avoid the very heavy work which it is feared we cannot take out before track arrives there.”62
As for Reed, Dodge did not suspect him of perfidy in remaining silent at Seymour’s side, as opposed to the hot-tempered Snyder back in Omaha. Reed had shown himself to be resistant enough to Durant’s previous machinations to earn the Doctor’s emnity. “While Mr. Reed was a quiet man, and said very little,” Dodge would write, “he was very much opposed to all their movements and all their interference with the work in the West. They not only upset my matters, but his also, and he was in the habit of writing me confidential letters.” Dodge’s understanding of the new duties was that James Evans, reporting to Reed, would attend to the construction campaign from Laramie to Green River, while Reed supervised the important work in Utah.63
The pressure was being exerted upon Blickensderfer from all sides—above, there was the brusque puffball Seymour; eastward, the track was moving up the upper Laramie Plains and about to veer west through the mountains and the Great Divide Desert toward Green River and the Wasatch; and westward lay thirty-mile-long Weber Canyon with its own problems for grading. At the confluence of Echo Creek and the Weber River, the latter canyon presented itself as broad-floored and passable, but within a few miles the rock walls narrowed dramatically, rising in places to four thousand feet, and the bottom of the canyon was filled by the river. It had been named after an early fur trapper, John G. Weber, who pronounced his name to rhyme with “fever.” In 1846 the Harlan-Young party had fought their way through the lower Weber Canyon through endless tumbled boulders, winching their teams and wagons over nearly vertical protrusions of mountainside; later emigrants like the Donners and the Mormons had therefore turned off from the Weber and worked their ways down Emigration Canyon—itself with its own problems. Above the lower Weber there were the strange rock formations called the Witches for the facelike formations topped by witches’ caps, and the Devil’s Slide, two colossal, parallel limestone reefs affixed to the vertical canyon walls which in more innocent times had earned the formation a name for its resemblance to a children’s slide; raunchier trappers, desperadoes, and their successors on the railroad would crane their necks at the sight and make reference to a woman’s anatomy.
Some miles downstream, where it narrowed to the impassable V-shaped gorge called Devil’s Gate, the river would soon flow out between sagebrushy foothills toward the plain and the slate blue great lake beyond. The Promontory Mountains could be seen to the northwest. This uncompromising terrain would soon—the company hoped—begin to yield under the powder, picks, and shovels of Mormon graders. When Dodge finished his letter of June 4 to Blickensderfer he had said that the Union Pacific executives “seem to think that by Sept. 1st track will be at Green River. If so, every foot of line to the valley ought to be covered with men now.” It wasn’t, just yet. Both Dodge and his man in the field knew that they had already lost precious time to make the final location. “I regret that Col. Seymour was sent out,” Dodge wrote to Blickensderfer, “for I was certain that he would cause trouble. There never has been a man on the road that he agreed with; what Mr. Reed thinks of line I have not heard.”64
While Dodge was writing his engineer, Durant, still steaming over their arguments, was composing a wire for Dodge:
I have telegraphed to Weber that all division engineers not complying with general order number one will be discharged. I do not know as the Board will sustain me but I shall not stay in the company if they see fit to keep you in their service to run politics to the neglect of your duties as Chief Engineer.65
The noose had been draped on the ground—and Durant was expecting Dodge to step into it. Notifying Jacob House in the Omaha office that he was leaving Washington on June 15 to resume work along the line, Dodge told him to prepare a camping outfit for a party of about fourteen. He would show Oliver Ames and other board members, and government director Jesse Williams, the terrain and the location lines and have them talk with his surveyors and the construction chiefs, “telling them,” he intended “there was no other possible way for them to meet the continual interferences.” He then wrote Oliver Ames to deflect the barrage of criticism leveled at him and his men by the Doctor. “On behalf of my parties and my chiefs,” he wrote on June 8,
I challenge the world to show an amount of work done by any one before that has been done by them. Summer and winter they have faced all the dangers, steadfastly: two have been killed by Indians, others drowned in crossing streams; [others have] frozen to death and suffered everything that man is heir to in that wild country; and while I have had to neglect some of the details, I have endeavored to so shape their course and work that they would meet most effectually the wants of the company.
He explained the reasonable delays in forwarding maps and profiles, as the original copies had been furnished to contractors, as ordered. Besides, he said, “last year I sent in my report with a box of profiles and maps and as they were never opened for six months and you then said it was not necessary for me to submit all the matters to the New York office…they could be kept at Omaha.” He had “labored under a very great disadvantage,” he added, “in not being appraised in time of what the Co. really desired done. I have had to act almost exclusively on my own knowledge of matters without orders and thereby endeavor to anticipate the demands of the company.” Now, suddenly, rules were changing almost daily, edicts appeared and threw his engineers into turmoil, and Dr. Durant was complaining that Dodge was not only derelict in his duty but that he was disobeying orders. “As a soldier,” he said, “I had to obey orders fully, faithfully and in the spirit given, and to the best of my ability, and I believe I had not varied from that course since I have been in the employ of the company—and if Mr. Durant reflects one moment, he will be convinced I have done all in the power of man.”
President Ames’s reply, as usual, glossed over the source of his chief engineer’s anger—instead of reassurance he passed the treacle; he praised the Blickensderfer findings in the canyons sent earlier by Dodge and treated the whole controversy about the chain of command as if it were a dispute over place settings. “I am quite satisfied we shall be pleased with the course you have taken, in having the parties report to you,” he assured Dodge. “I have never seen the Dr. so courteous and confiding as he has been since I have been here these two days and I should think from Blickensderfer’s letter that Reed and Seymour had not actually interfered with his line but simply asked for aid from his parties in preparing line for contractors.” Ames closed by saying he was looking forward to meeting with Dodge out in Omaha the next week.66
The trouble was of a vastly higher order, Dodge knew, and might not wait until he had gotten out in the field; from each letter and telegram he unwrapped, out popped a new problem. In the few days left to him in the capital, he readied a location map to send to Interior Secretary Browning. It showed the proposed eighty-mile Union Pacific line from the mouth of Weber Canyon to the north end of Great Salt Lake. His accompanying letter asked for acceptance of the new line. He did not resist, of course, pointing out that Browning had accepted the Central Pacific map from Humboldt Wells to the same point north of the lake. “We are,” he said, “nearer that point with our completed road than they are.” Then it was time to close up his congressional office. Once he was out in a tent again in the mountains, face to face with friends as well as adversaries, perhaps he would regain control—before it became total chaos.67
For three months now, several thousand shovel-wielding Cantonese and a small number of whites had labored under the harsh springtime sun to move snow off the deeply covered railroad tracks on the eastern Sierra slope—“all the men who could be found,” Mark Hopkins wrote to Huntington on June 16, “willing to work themselves blind & their faces peeled & seared as though they had been scalded in the face with scalding water.” Down the grade, other teams worked under similarly hard conditions to lay track over the now-bare seven-mile gap. Hopkins had hoped that the closure would be made by June 17 at noon, but it had been snowing and raining on the summit for twenty-four hours and a day’s delay was possible. As it was, he thought, the track would probably be finished within hours of when the snow brigade would chip out the last of the solidly compacted white stuff. Strobridge’s men, however, pushed themselves to the limit, and that night of June 16, Judge Crocker sent a wire to Huntington in New York: “The track is connected across the mountains. We have one hundred and sixty seven continuous miles laid.”68
The first locomotive through would end an excruciating necessity—hauling iron, ties, hay, grain, provisions, and other necessary supplies from the summit for two miles on ox-pulled sleighs and transferring the goods to freight wagons headed down to Coburn’s Station on the Truckee, where the track resumed—even with seventy teams they could manage only half a mile per day. No wonder the section to the Big Bend of the Truckee was still uncompleted. The government commissioners would begin examining the stretch between the 94th and 114th mileposts; by the time they reached the Cold Stream gap it would certainly be closed.
Two days before, Charley Crocker had surprised Hopkins by appearing on his doorstep on a Sunday, greatly agitated. One of the three government commissioners, Frank Denver of Virginia City, Nevada, was apparently ready to block federal approval of the twenty-mile section, and their bonds, in a shakedown. A Sacramento steamship captain supposedly friendly to the Central Pacific had told Crocker, and offered to “fix it up” for them on the best terms possible—he thought $50,000 would do it. Crocker and Hopkins decided that the intermediary was a partner in the scheme. “[W]e would not consent to be blackmailed—whatever generous things we might do with our friends,” Hopkins told Huntington; “we certainly never would ‘stand & deliver’ to a highwayman when we were armed & could defend ourselves.” The next day in Sacramento Crocker saw Nevada governor Bigler, also a government commissioner, who expressed shock and dismay at the scheme and promised to quietly halt Denver from doing any damage or else have him removed. The governor was in a hurry to leave for the Democratic National Convention on July 4, so he compliantly signed most of the Central Pacific inspection papers in advance of his trip, collected the commissioner’s fee of $250, and left a happy and virtuous man. “Denver is a Bummer,” exclaimed Hopkins to Huntington, “of little ability & no standing in Virginia City…and if Union Co’s money or anybody else could be put into his pocket by acting adverse to our interest, he would readily do it.”
Hopkins could give no news, however, on Leland Stanford out in Salt Lake City. All he knew came out of three telegrams: that Stanford had arrived, he had gone up to see Weber Canyon, and he had left for California on June 14. “Nothing good or bad to gratify our impatience,” Hopkins groused. “Nothing satisfactory.”69 Huntington was more than a little irritated that Stanford had been sent on the mission in the first place. “We need a bold, sharp man,” he wrote, meaning the opposite of Stanford.70 What they should have had at Salt Lake City for the past two years was “a first-class man…that is up in the morning and that does not knock off until afternoon. A man that [can] handle the Mormons.” Apparently the Governor liked to sleep in and go home early.71
By the time Stanford and George Gray had ridden back in view of the California Sierra, they found that the Cold Stream gap was plugged, temporary bridges were about finished over the Truckee at the Big Bend and over the Humboldt above Stark’s Ferry, and a small force of graders was completing the stretch to the Humboldt Sink, forty miles beyond the Big Bend; flatcars loaded with rails and ties had begun to be pulled over the summit. But Stanford returned to Sacramento empty-handed, telling them all that Samuel Reed had beaten him to the Mormons and had left the city with a signed grading contract before Stanford had even arrived. Reed and Seymour did return to Salt Lake City as soon as they learned that Stanford was there—but by then the Governor had obtained an audience with Brigham Young.72 The leader was initially “cold and close,” Stanford told Hopkins in a much-delayed letter from Salt Lake City, which trailed Stanford back to Sacramento,
but I have, I think, got pretty near to him. He and everybody here was dead set for the southern route. How to meet this bothered me a good deal, but this afternoon being pressed I was able to find good reasons why they would be most benefited by the northern route. They do not seem, any of them, to be aware of the location from Humboldt Wells to the north end of the Lake. I have not thought it advisable to enlighten them.73
Stanford and Gray “did much to counteract the influence of the Union company,” they claimed, and “convinced Brigham that it was his interest for both Co’s. to meet at Weber or Echo Canon—a point he had not seen.” Stanford said he arranged with one of Young’s sons (and thus with Young himself, although this would remain unacknowledged) to put together a Mormon grading force to work east from Humboldt Wells—on top of the proposed contract, “giving him 10 cents per day for all he will furnish up to a certain number,” Judge Crocker reported, “& increasing as the number of men increase.” Stanford said the agreement would commence “as soon as the supplies can be sent from here”—he had not yet signed a contract. It was enough, he thought, that Young now appreciated the Central Pacific’s position. “I did not think best to offer more to Brigham as that was satisfactory,” he explained to Huntington a month later after Huntington had complained. “But I think we can manage to get what men we may want from Salt Lake. We do not want any yet.” Of course Huntington would disagree—but he was three thousand miles away.74
The first passenger train across the width of the Sierra rattled up to the summit on June 18 and halted at the great tunnel for several hours while “a swarm of Chinese” (in the Alta California correspondent’s words) cleared snow and boulders from a small avalanche just east of the far portal. “The water pours down in torrents from the numberless crevices and seams in the granite walls and roof of the long, dark, cavernous tunnel,” he wrote, “but we struggle through on foot and anxiously inquire after the prospect of getting through.” Once under way, the train was forced to halt again and again to be accommodated by the shovel brigades, but finally it rolled beyond the snow line and descended along the Truckee. “As the first through passenger train sweeps down the eastern slopes of the Sierras,” the newspaperman continued, “John [the Chinese worker] comprehending fully the importance of the event, loses his natural appearance of stolidity and indifference and welcomes with the swinging of his broad brimmed hat and loud, uncouth shouts the iron horse and those that he brings with him.” The train rolled across the California line and on into bustling little Reno just after 8:00 P.M. “Reno is a lively place, and one month from the day the lots were sold could boast about 200 buildings, stores and dwellings,” the Central Pacific chief engineer Samuel S. Montague wrote to his surveyor, Butler Ives, out in Utah. “The day I passed through there on my return, an opera company was to entertain the good folks. On Sunday last I saw a circus tent in process of erection—a circus company performed there last week to an audience of 1,000 people.”75 Montague was as understandably excited by the railroad’s entry into Reno as the editor of the Sacramento Union was unimpressed. “There is a novelty in this event which must for the moment excite general curiosity,” James Anthony wrote,
but further than that, the announcement is of no importance. Long ago the public have justly regarded this much-lauded and patronized transcontinental enterprise as a merely private affair to be used for the enrichment of a very few individuals, without anything like compensating returns to the liberal public, by whom it was started, and by whose money built. The speculators and their snobbish pipers of the truculent press will, no doubt, make a great ado over the event, and herald it far and wide.…But reflecting people, who know better, will be apt to regard it as merely another link completed in the chain whereby a couple of selfish corporations are endeavoring to prove to all the world that gratitude is weaker than avarice, and that it is dangerous to trust any private individuals with the management of such vast public interests.76
In Washington, at least, similar sentiments were beginning to be heard, to Huntington’s great chagrin. With Senators Stewart and Conness he had drawn up a bill for the San Joaquin Railroad from Stockton up the valley and over the Arizona line to the Colorado River, and for the UPED from there to Denver; the bill had been introduced on June 6—only to be denounced in the most angry terms in both chambers of Congress. That many of the critics were in the thrall of the Union Pacific—which had no interest in seeing a southern transcontinental route helped along—did not escape Huntington’s notice. The bill would go down in defeat.
Another failure was his beloved Goat Island bill. Through his cheerleading and other influences the Senate had passed it, 28 to 8, but when it was deliberated by the House it ran aground; at one point Huntington even appealed to Oakes Ames for his vote, which the representative agreed to give. After the bill died, with Ames’s “no” vote helping to bury it, Huntington went looking for him. He cornered Ames at the Willard Hotel. “I told him he was a treacherous old cuss and that I would follow him as long as I lived,” Huntington told Judge Crocker. “I got him mad, as I wanted to, thinking if I did I would get some truth out of him; and he went on and said that he did not work for me; that he thought the Union Co. would want a part of that island…. I really unearthed the old skunk.” As he suspected, Ames and Dodge were already thinking of how they might build down from the Idaho stretch of the Utah-Oregon route, enter California and head for Goat Island themselves.77
Stalls, false starts, fitful progress, and galling retreats continued. The bill granting an extension of deadline for the California and Oregon line, to begin building its first twenty miles up the Sacramento Valley, inexplicably began to lose momentum. “I have written Franchot almost every day for weeks on the subject,” Huntington told Hopkins, “have also written Stewart and Conness, as also Higby & Axtell, and they have all answered that it should be done, and that they thought there would be no opposition &c, but it has not been done…. [I]n the mean time you had better prepare to do what is necessary to be done to save the Franchise without it.” Then, as the Sacramento partners struggled to react to the defeat, in the eleventh hour the extension was passed after all.78
There may have been reverses—but somehow, even those became part of the greater forward momentum, which could especially be felt along the thirty-mile stretch of the Truckee River between Reno and Wadsworth, where sunburned and dazzled shovelers released from snow removal in the Sierra began to concentrate and regroup under Strobridge’s evil eye into tracklaying crews for the push toward the Forty-Mile Desert. Meanwhile, Butler Ives was four hundred miles to the northeast, urging his small surveying crew away from Humboldt Wells into western Utah, feeling that same forward push. In his case it was coming from Chief Engineer Montague, who had ordered him on June 16 to begin the locating survey toward Salt Lake. Soon another team, under Lewis Clement, would begin working westward from the lake toward Ives. “The necessity for pushing ahead will compel us in many places to sacrifice good alignment & easy grades for the sake of getting light work,” Montague had written. “Make temporary location, by using sharp curves & heavy grades (keeping within the max.) whenever you can. Make any material saving in the work. The line we construct now is the one we can build the soonest, even if we rebuild immediately.”79
So Butler Ives pushed east to locate, just as Montague and Charley Crocker moved forward in his footsteps with a force of five thousand Cantonese tracklayers; economy and speed were most urgently on their minds, not the least of their motivation being the completely dreadful, unfriendly terrain ahead.
In Sacramento, Edwin Bryant Crocker could not shake his nervousness over what would transpire in thirty to forty-five days when the available iron would be used up. “We want that iron across the isthmus as early as possible,” he told Huntington. “If we run short, though, I tell our folks, we must beg, borrow, or steal all the Iron we can lay hands on, & that failing lay down wooden rails—& replace them as soon as possible. But the locomotive must move on.”80
