California detained him only ten days—and Collis Huntington would boast many years later of that pellmell race across the continent by rail and special stagecoach relays—“only gone 31 days from New York,” he told a biographer, and “it cost me some money. They ran a race night and day.” On the way west with Stanford, Huntington had spied a party of woodcutters delivering ties down to the grade in Echo Canyon, and ordered the stage halted to see what they were up to. “I asked what the price was,” he recalled. “They said $1.75 each. I asked where they were hauled from, and they said from a certain canyon. They said it took three days to get a load up to the top of the Wasatch Mountains and get back to their work. I asked them what they had a day for their teams, and they said ten dollars. This would make the cost of each tie more than six dollars.” Huntington knew his railroad was taking a similar bite in getting ties down to Nevada from the California mountains, but during his return trip, which included another conference with Stanford in Salt Lake City, he found a sardonic end to his anecdote. “I passed back that way in the night in January,” he said, “and I saw a large fire burning near the Wasatch summit, and I stopped to look at it. They had, I think, from twenty to twenty-five ties burning. They said it was so fearfully cold they could not stand it without having a fire to warm themselves.” Huntington resumed his way back to the East—having had the pleasure of having seen some of Durant’s and Ames’s dollars swiftly and brightly going up in smoke.1
He hoped to reduce their hopes in Utah to embers, too. Stanford had been right about the impracticality and waste of building in the Wasatch Canyons, but Huntington’s fallback plan would buy time by insisting that the Union Pacific be held to a continuous, permanent, first-class line going through—not around—those three time-consuming tunnels in the canyons; Stanford would document where the Union Pacific crossed their preliminary lines up Weber and Echo and wherever their completed grades were sliced over by the graders, and their engineers would sign supportive affidavits, preparing for Huntington to obtain an injunction. One way or the other—and on this Huntington was resolute as he boarded an enemy train in Wyoming—the Central Pacific was going to get at least to the village of Ogden.2 That is, he thought, if his associates did not let him down.
Stanford, meanwhile, had gone north to examine the work—and he returned with glum reports. “There was not as much work done as I expected or as had been represented,” he wrote Huntington. The ground was so frozen that it defeated the small farming plows employed by their Mormon graders, so Stanford wired for fifty large plows to get the ground broken. Even with the slow work he thought Utah matters were such that as soon as possible he could go back to see his wife and baby boy in Sacramento for a few days.3
Out in Nevada, the tracklaying gangs had yet to pick up speed—the supply locomotives, still hampered by green wood and low steam, were supplementing fuel with expensive Mount Diablo coal, inching toward those waiting stacks of good wood upriver. Huntington had sent Charley Crocker a telegram from Salt Lake City, upbraiding him for delays and inefficiencies. It arrived at the Humboldt camp at the worst time. A few laborers turned up with cases of smallpox and it sparked a panic. “The small pox completely demoralized our track laying force,” Charley told Huntington, “& they could not have laid much more Iron if they had it, as very nearly all the White man left the work & most of our best foremen also. We are breaking in Chinamen & learning them as fast as possible. They have much to learn but are apt.” Then, he said, someone handed him Huntington’s telegram. “Strobridge sick with a very bad cold & afraid it was the small pox as the symptoms were very similar. Men running off scared out of their senses. Two cases of small pox among the wood choppers at Elko. Thermometer 10° below zero—& everybody in a demoralized condition—on top of all your dispatch that ‘if we failed it was my failure as I had the means’ &c &c.” Huntington’s telegram was “very encouraging,” Crocker wrote with undisguised sarcasm, “was it not?”4
As Huntington raced back toward the East, his mind full of schemes, the situation in the capital was changing rapidly. When Grenville Dodge had stalked out of the interior secretary’s office on December 19, with Browning’s platitudes in his ears, he immediately launched his campaign to make sure his company prevailed over the Californians. His letter to his former comrade, Secretary of War Schofield, had been only the opening salvo. Every government dignitary he met in the closing weeks of the year and the opening of the next heard his diatribe against Browning and Huntington. By December 30 he finished a twenty-five-hundred-word response to Browning’s rulings, in crushing detail, to go out over Oliver Ames’s signature. The Union Pacific’s location through Echo and Weber Canyons was superior in every way and had been certified as such by the special three-man commission, he said. The grading was all but completed, tunnels were well under way, the Union Pacific track had advanced to the temporary bypass of the big Echo Canyon tunnel. They could therefore not comply with Browning’s written demand to join the Central Pacific line up at the rim of Echo Canyon. “The Central Pacific railroad location must have been accepted by the honorable Secretary through a misrepresentation of the facts,” he wrote, “and as their map in no sense complies with the rules and regulations of the department, under which rule the maps of both companies should be filed, we do not admit that it is, in any sense, the final location of the road, or should in any way control our location or affect our rights.” Moreover, he continued, the Union Pacific “received no notice from the Interior Department of the filing of such a line.” Dodge repeated what he had pressured Browning to concede on December 19—“that filing a map gave no right to one company over another in the building of the road.” He urged reconsideration, “and our location adopted to a point as far west as we have a certainty of building, or, say, to a point equidistant between the ends of the two roads…. This would be fair, impartial, and just to both companies.”5
Oliver Ames signed the letter, but for some reason he held it back for five weeks, until February 10. However, Dodge had made multiple copies; in the interim he evidently shared either the letter or the information and arguments it contained with key congressmen and other members of President Johnson’s cabinet. Knowing that a number of press correspondents were working on stories—it was, in fact, as if they were camped all over the capital, huddled over their own mysterious campfires—he poured his own propellant of news, accusation, and rumor, not knowing (perhaps not caring) how large a flame might result, how explosive it might be, and whether or not he himself might be burned. Snyder, Hoxie, Reed, Evans, and now Blickensderfer had all told him they didn’t care what happened to themselves anymore. Everyone was exhausted, demoralized, fatalistic, and not a little crazed. So Dodge poured and stepped back to see what would result.6
Amazingly, at first Secretary Browning seemed to retreat toward his earlier agreement with Collis Huntington. On January 6, he insisted once again that they join the Central Pacific line at the Echo summit. Ames entreated Dodge to do something. “Is there no way for us to avoid this, and are we to lose our subsidy?” he anxiously wrote his engineer on January 8 from New York.
If this is to be so, we better give up our road where it is and stop our work. I have no idea of doing this as Browning desires. He evidently wants to force us to give up our grading and take that of the Central and build our road on their line or lose our subsidy. The old hypocrite! I thought when he was saying to us that the location of this line in advance of ours gave them no rights he meant what he said, and would simply ask that the roads should be joined when they met.
You must get some immediate action of Congress to have this matter put right and not let our line be sacrificed in this way. The idea that men like Browning are to sit in their office and fix the line on which these roads shall run when they have not seen or examined the line of our road nor know anything of it or either of them. I see no way for us to act if Browning’s action is sustained but to withdraw our forces and wait for Central to build the road. We can’t go on without the subsidy and if the subsidy is to be applied to their line we must pull up our track and put it on their line or quit.
Later that day, after Ames had taken a train up to Massachusetts and had time to think about the matter, he wrote Dodge again. “It would be infamous for such action as Browning is taking to be sustained,” he said, “and your documents can’t be used too quick—to show him up in Congress. Our hope is in Congress. The cabinet will be too deferential, to the head of the Interior Department just now, that its corruption is being exposed, and this action of Browning shows that the head is corrupt.”7
Dodge’s campaign against Browning was already well under way. Many senators and congressmen tied to the army, or to the radical Republicans, or to the net of influence woven by the Union Pacific, were already beginning to speak up. “I was utilizing it very effectively,” he boasted, and as he continued to circulate his long protest letter to the secretary he encouraged the whisper campaign about Browning’s probable crookedness, and he let it get around that the secretary’s order for them to abandon their nearly completed work for the Californians’ imaginary line “was simply nonsense”—and, he vowed, “I proposed to bring it up in Congress unless an adjustment was soon made.”8
Other changes were being made out in Utah, and as Dodge learned about them during those few heady days, his temper rose toward the boiling point. Durant and Seymour were huddled over location maps in Ogden and, to save time and much money, had begun ordering alterations in the approved line up into the Promontory Mountains, which Dodge’s engineers had run with eighty-foot grades. Durant ordered the considerably steeper one-hundred-foot grades. Divisional engineer Jacob Blickensderfer was in Salt Lake City at the time, trying to put his office into order, anticipating a move to a less frustrating post, and he refused to go along. “This makes a cheap line but a higher summit,” Blickensderfer would write Dodge, “and about 3 miles longer and more curvature. Commercially the line is so inferior to the revised 80 foot grade that…I told him it would not answer.” The Doctor’s reply was to fire the dissenting engineer. “You will please consider your services for this company at an end,” he wired on January 2 from Ogden, “from and after the time when you left your work to accept an appointment under the Government.” It was insult upon injury, so typical of Durant: on top of the dismissal, to deny Blickensderfer, a family man, nearly two months’ pay due him during his sanctioned leave of absence to serve on the commission. When word reached Washington—Jesse Williams probably learned first and alerted Browning’s staff—the Interior Department was infuriated.
Dodge heard and immediately wired to countermand the order. On January 6 he followed with another telegram telling Blickensderfer to remain in Salt Lake City and finish the paperwork he was trying to do. Blickensderfer had intended afterward to ride north to inspect the Union Pacific’s surveying and grading work, and even to see if he could document that the Central Pacific line to Echo summit was “an actual falsehood.” Now he wondered if it were worth it. “I claim to be a friend of your road,” he wrote Dodge, and
my sympathies are all with you. Your location I know to be good and that of the C. P. Company, as far as I have seen it, is inferior to yours. I think they have simply imposed an untruth on Mr. Browning, and if so I would be glad to possess evidence by personal knowledge, which I believe exists to prove this to the satisfaction of your friends or the cabinet at Washington if necessary. These being my feelings, I am not disposed to let the bad treatment received from Durant and Seymour influence me, but I am inclined nevertheless to do all for you that I can, and go East fully armed with the best information I can collect. On the other hand I am not inclined to go out on the line, ask questions and drum up facts, with the liability of being snubbed off by any subordinate hireling with the question, ‘What business have you here?’ For I know pains have been taken to let it be known that I am stripped of authority.9
Operations Manager Webster Snyder was out on the line, and his dispatch reached Dodge on January 4. “There is so much to say about the work out here that I can’t do the outfit justice in writing about it,” Snyder told him. “In construction the waste of money is awful. It is the last part of Reed and his outfit and they are making the most of it. The track west of Aspen is not fit to run over and we are ditching trains daily. Grading is done at an enormous expense by day work under supervision of Company’s men and the government subsidy in this section of country will not begin to pay cost of road.” Snyder was ready to jump ship. “Personally,” he said, “I am about worn out and if I had money enough to support my family six months, I would quit now. The company can’t stand such drafts as I know the Construction Department must be making.”10
Such news did not have to go through Dodge to reach Washington in those early weeks of the year and increase the pressure on Secretary Browning, or to surface in the press. Dodge was actively leaking information, to be sure, and quite possibly so were Blickensderfer, Snyder, Jesse Williams, even some of the rebellious investors such as McComb or Hazard. Whatever their sources, critics were popping up in print all over the nation. “What guaranty has the Government that the companies will ever complete their roads?” a Washington correspondent of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune had written on January 5. Congress had granted subsidies without independently determining costs—“hence the evident fraud upon the government.”11
If skulduggery was beginning to be unveiled by Congress and the press, the heaviest, most far-back curtain was skillfully pulled aside early that month by Charles Francis Adams Jr., the thirty-three-year-old Harvard man and grandson of President John Quincy Adams. Adams was trained at law by the eminent attorney Richard Henry Dana, who himself had earned a literary reputation nearly twenty years before with a book based on his year at sea as a common sailor, Two Years Before the Mast. Not long after young Adams had been admitted to the bar he hearkened toward the journalistic side, beginning his career in 1860 with an article in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Reign of King Cotton.” The war had interrupted his rise; Adams enlisted in the state militia as a captain and by the end of the war had been promoted to colonel of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, a negro regiment. After the war, his health broken, Adams had spent nearly a year in Europe recuperating, but he returned to the states determined to make his mark as a writer.
The most likely area of specialty for an enterprising correspondent, he decided, was the railroad industry. His first article for the influential North American Review—a monthly founded by the father of his mentor in law and journalism, Richard Henry Dana Sr. On the “wretched history” of the Erie Railroad, it appeared in April 1868, driving thorns into the sides of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Jim Fisk, among others. He would return again and again to the Erie, but soon after that opening salvo, Charles Francis Adams Jr. turned his sights on the Pacific Railroad, for, as he would write, “The Pacific Railroad is already a power in the land, and is destined to be a power vastly greater than it now is.” Already it “numbers its retainers in both houses of Congress, and is building up great communities in the heart of the continent. It will one day be the richest and most powerful corporation in the world; it will probably also be the most corrupt.”
Adams confessed it was not pleasant to level criticism at the “able and daring men who are with such splendid energy forcing it through to completion.” Undeniably it was important and daunting work, and the men at its head “incurred great risk, and at one time trembled on the verge of ruin.” But the enterprises were riddled with mystery. Of the Central Pacific, he said, “absolutely nothing is publicly known. Managed by a small clique in California, its internal arrangements are involved in about the same obscurity as are the rites of Freemasonry.” But the Union Pacific was closer to home, and rumors were as rife on Wall Street as they were in Washington, and Adams had been listening. Rumors talked about, he disclosed, “a new piece of machinery” called the Crédit Mobilier. No longer would the obscure words be whispered. “The Crédit Mobilier is understood to be building the road, he continued, but what this Crédit Mobilier is seems to be as much shrouded in mystery as is the fate of the missing $180,000,000 of capital stock of these roads.” Now there was litigation over its proprietorship, he noted.
Whoever originated this anomalous corporation, it is currently reported to be the real constructor of the Union Pacific, and now to have got into its hands all the unissued stock, the proceeds of the bonds sold, the government bonds, and the earnings of the road,—in fact, all its available assets. Its profits are reported to have been enormous,—reported only, for throughout all this there is nothing but hearsay and street rumor to rely on. Sometimes it has been stated that the dividends of this association have amounted to forty per cent a month, and they have certainly exceeded one hundred per cent per annum; at any rate, it has made the fortunes of many, and perhaps of most of those connected with it. Nor are these profits temporary; every dollar of excessive dividend of the Crédit Mobilier is represented by a dollar of indebtedness of the Pacific Railroad, with both principal and interest charged to income, and made payable by a tax on trade.
And who, then, he continued, constitutes the Crédit Mobilier?
It is but another name for the Pacific Railroad ring. The members of it are in Congress; they are trustees for the bond-holders, they are directors, they are stockholders, they are contractors; in Washington they vote the subsidies, in New York they receive them, upon the Plains they expend them, and in the Crédit Mobilier they divide them. Ever-shifting characters, they are ever ubiquitous—now engineering a bill, and now a bridge,—they receive money into one hand as a corporation, and pay it into the other as a contractor.
Here, he continued, “is every vicious element of railroad construction and management; here is costly construction, entailing future taxation on trade; here are tens of millions of fictitious capital; here is a road built on the sale of its bonds, and with the aid of subsidies; here is every element of cost recklessly exaggerated, and the whole at some future day is to make itself felt as a burden on the trade which it is to create, and will surely hereafter constitute a source of corruption in the politics of the land, and a resistless power in its legislature.”12
It was a brilliant piece of investigative reportage—a true classic—and an eye-opener for the general public. Adams backed his arguments with as many facts and figures as he could muster, given the mysterious circumstances of both sides of the Pacific Railroad, and he called for a new bureau of transportation to be created within the Interior Department, to educate Congress and the country. “We might then hope to know how large a tax is annually levied on business under the head of transportation, and how large a portion of it is applied to the payment of dividends and interest on paper capital,” he argued. “We might then hope to know how much our railroad system has cost, and by what securities that cost is represented; it might then some day become difficult to deluge the market with forged certificates of stock, and call the so doing ‘a financial irregularity;’ it might even become questionable whether a railroad potentate had the right to double the nominal cost of a public thoroughfare without adding one dollar to its value.”13
Other angry voices were rising, notably that of General Henry Van Ness Boynton, Washington correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette; Boynton was a hero at Chickamauga and now a respected Republican voice who more than once over the years would team with Dodge in party maneuvers. His January articles on the pattern of frauds scrutinized several prominent and obscure companies in Kansas and Iowa, and even the Central Pacific’s Sacramento and San Jose Railroad, which was all but unknown in the East. Horace Greeley reprinted Boynton’s articles in the Tribune, praised them, and took up the call to find about more about the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, and this mysterious Crédit Mobilier.14
This clamor in the columns was impossible for Orville Hickman Browning to ignore. Dodge himself may have shown him a path, sending the secretary an entreaty on January 11: if, Dodge said, the Union Pacific examiners had been too harsh and the Central Pacific examiners too lenient (indeed, he complained, it was “a whitewash”), the department should “have only one commission examine both roads again, in simple justice to both.” It was a howl of protest from a punctilious engineer—and it would dismay the Ameses, who knew that every delay or new level of oversight was going to bury the Union Pacific deeper in debt—but a few days later Browning decided he could delay a public response no further, and edged himself back into safer terrain while pushing the Dodge idea into more stringent territory. He created a new commission to “examine both roads and determine on a point of meeting, even if it takes a completely new location.” So these commissioners would scrutinize it from west to east, and they would have the final say about a meeting point and the approach routes. An enormous amount of work by both companies was, with one stroke, imperiled. Browning appointed Jacob Blickensderfer and General Warren from the Union Pacific special commission, and Lieutenant Colonel Williamson, who had, likewise, inspected the Central Pacific.15
Dodge was beside himself. On top of the worry about Durant changing his lines north of Great Salt Lake, he had this commission—which might make “radical” alterations. He sent an anxious bulletin to Oliver Ames on January 15. Oakes Ames had gone to see President Johnson, the only one who could overrule the cabinet secretary, but the congressman was hardly in a position to sway the president. Oliver Ames was afraid that his chief engineer might run to the newspapers about Browning or Durant or otherwise rock the boat, and quickly reassured him not to fret on either front. “I have telegraphed [Durant] as you suggested that no alteration be made in the line of road as finally located,” Ames said,
and have also written Durant a letter enclosing him a copy of the instructions of Browning. I think he will do what he can to remedy any changes he has made in line. Durant has been as furious in his demonstrations as any one could well be generally but has till now made no important changes in your line…. I hope you will feel that though the Dr. may want power and exercise it without judgment frequently, yet the board of directors are strongly your friends and I hope you will not let your feelings against Durant lead you into any demonstrations against the road.16
That day, the New York Tribune printed a scorching editorial against the crimes of the newly unveiled Crédit Mobilier, the corruption of congressmen who had evidently sold their votes, and the greediness of the whole class of railroaders—“all willing to build railroads from the Sun to the Moon, provided they can have subsidies.”17
Collis Huntington arrived in New York City early in the morning of January 19. Waiting for him in the stack of office mail was the outrageous letter from Secretary Browning—telling him that the new commission would examine the whole line and decide who got the approval and the bonds in Utah. There was no time to consider the makeup of the board beyond Williamson, whom he knew—the inspectors were already on their way west, and he had to react quickly. “The Union Pacific has outbid me,” he concluded.18 Fuming, he hopped on a train to Washington, scrawling off a protest to President Johnson. The Central Pacific, he wrote, was entitled to the subsidies by the previous approval and by the unscrupulous, “temporary and superficial” construction of the Union Pacific company; Ames and Durant had placed their forces “from 50 to 350 miles in advance of their permanent work,” seeking to take advantage of the Central Pacific’s delays in the Sierra Nevada and its more responsible building. By doing so it would swindle the subsidies, steal the trade of Salt Lake City and the region, and snatch the Wasatch coal deposits.19 He posted the protest in Washington and got in to see Secretary Browning—but the Interior Department’s climate was now considerably chillier than before. Browning informed him loftily that it was out of his hands.
“For God’s sake,” Huntington implored his associates, “push the work on…. If I was there I would not take off my clothes or change my shirt until the rails were laid to Ogden City.” He told Hopkins that he was going ahead with a lawsuit against the Union Pacific for trespass upon their approved line in the canyons. “I think by commencing this suit we can cripple them,” he said. The Union Pacific was, after all, skating on the edge of bankruptcy, and Huntington was now in the mood for pushing them all in. “I have felt for the last 100 days,” he explained, “as though I would like a hell of a fight with someone.”20
Stanford was miraculously still in Salt Lake City when the new commissioners got to Utah; Blickensderfer, of course, had been anonymously in town closing down his company duties. “Now can it be possible that we are to lose our work simply because we do not cover it immediately with the rails?” Stanford asked Huntington on January 24. He stayed, looked up the commissioners, and pumped them for all the information they were worth. It seemed to him, he warned Huntington, that they would approve the permanent Union Pacific line in the canyons up to the two-thirds subsidy for advance work, and save the issue of the undone tunnels for later. The Governor ventured to blame himself. “I fear [Huntington] is having a hard time in trying to save what a want of foresight has jeopardised if not lost,” he wrote to Hopkins the next day. “I tell you, Hopkins, the thought makes me feel like a dog; I have no pleasure in the thought of Railroad. It is mortification.”21
On January 30, Huntington received Oliver Ames and Dodge in his hotel room in Washington. Ames got to the point: he proposed the two companies take the distance remaining between their ends of track and meet halfway. Huntington’s response was characteristically unvarnished: “I’ll see you damned first.” He named the mouth of Weber Canyon. Now it was Ames’s turn to lose his composure. He refused and stormed out. There was much pushing him to a solution, though, and he went back to see Huntington. Then the Californian gave a small concession: Ogden, he said, but no farther. Here the parley, if one could call it that, broke down.22 But Huntington was pulling ammunition out of all his pockets: he had wired Judge Crocker to send all the regular twenty-mile commissioners’ reports before the first of March, knowing that the world for them would change for the worse when Grant was inaugurated on March 4. All of the lame ducks in the Johnson administration already had their minds elsewhere—how could he gain advantage?23
In Salt Lake City, General Warren, acting as chairman of the commission, asked Stanford for all the Central Pacific maps, profiles, and reports for the contested land lying between the ends of track. The Governor stalled him; they were all in Sacramento, he said, and would be copied. The Central Pacific continued to deem Secretary Browning’s approval as final, he added. It was rapidly laying track and hastening the grade work. He said, too, that he would accompany the inspectors when they left on February 1. They would take the central Nevada stage route westward and, as if to remain unsullied or undistracted, would even go by coach over the Sierra. The plan was to commence at Sacramento, going all the way to Omaha—and see what they could see.24
The Governor would be leaving Utah with work on the Promontory now well covered. By the time the commission worked its way back there was even the assurance of new accomplishments. Happily, life in eastern Nevada for supervisors and tracklayers alike had changed enormously for the better in only ten days. The smallpox epidemic was almost over; they had established hospitals on wheels, so-called—there is no evidence that any doctors were present. “Only one new case there last week,” Hopkins rather coolly reported to Huntington on January 31. “Nearly all died who went into the pest cars, & those who did not die increased the panic among the men more than those who died and ‘told no tales.’” But at least the men and their locomotive boilers were sufficiently warm. “We have now [an] abundance of good wood on the Humboldt Division,” Hopkins wrote, “plenty of motive power & no complaint of not having cars enough.” Some twelve hundred flatcars were rushing material forward, and Hopkins hoped they could now improve upon previous records—they had laid 38 miles in January, he said, making their total 514 miles from Sacramento. Perhaps they might now reach twenty miles per week—Charley Crocker was going back out to raise the pressure—but Hopkins doubted they could do better, given their experience and organization. Now, though, they were but nine miles from Humboldt Wells, and there was enough iron on the eastern side of the Sierra to stretch all the way to Ogden.25
The commissioners arrived in Sacramento on Saturday, February 8, a day on which Hopkins would gladly note that he had sent Huntington two more twenty-mile reports, and that they had breezed across the snow-whitened meadows at Humboldt Wells and reached milepost 532. When he met Stanford and the newcomers, though, his mood darkened. The Governor was impatient with alarming news to send to Huntington: on the way from Salt Lake he had discovered how disinterested one of the inspectors—the severe one with the barely pronounceable Dutch name—would be. “Jacob Blickensderfer,” he wired, “was the first assistant engineer & assistant in locating the line of the U. P. R. R. from Ogden to Humboldt Wells. Justice demands that L. M. Clement, our first assistant & locating engineer, be added to the commission.” That night there would be a dinner, and the commissioners would observe Sunday there in the capital and then go see San Francisco for a week (during which Williamson had pressing personal business to transact) while the Central Pacific draftsmen finished copying their maps. It would be a useful hiatus while Huntington raised his protest in Washington. Even so, Hopkins was worried. “Warren & Williamson appear like pure minded, good men,” he explained to Huntington, “& competent for the service required.” However, “Blickensderfer is a different appearing man—apparently of puritanic conscience, scrupulous, cold & distant. At the same time a sinister something about his look & manner warning you to beware.”26 The words might have issued from Thomas Clark Durant.
“The Doctor himself, I think,” wrote Samuel Reed to his wife on January 12, “is getting frightened at the bills. He costs hundreds of thousands of dollars extra every month he remains here and does not advance, but retards the work.”27 A plentiful supply of railroad ties lay out in the woods, frozen and buried under several feet of snow after Durant had rashly redeployed his tie contractors’ woodcutters into distribution duties at trackside; graders had been similarly shifted before the frost. Now, in January and February, Durant was paying huge sums to secure yet more ties and to blast frozen ground. It was a shocking, needless waste. Oliver Ames begged him over and over to save them. “It would be an eternal disgrace to us, and to you in particular as the manager of the construction,” he had written earlier that month, “to be forced to suspend for want of funds to continue the work.”
The bills kept pouring in. Joseph A. West, the son of the Mormon grading contractor Chauncey W. West, recalled how tension increased during the parallel grading in the Salt Lake Valley. “Competition for men and teams…became so great that the companies began to bid off each other’s men by increasing wages,” he wrote, “and thus the construction cost became enormously heavy, especially towards its close. Transient labor, too, became the masters of the situation instead of the employer, and as usually happens where the wages are high, the service rendered became very inefficient and undependable.”28 Oliver Ames’s alarm rose with each passing day. “Every thing depends upon the Economy and vigor with which you press the work on Construction,” Ames wrote Durant on January 16. “We hear here awful Stories of the cost of the work and the thieving of our Employees.”29 Durant would not—indeed, now he could not—pay such admonitions any attention.
And the Doctor’s explosive temper was not helping matters at all—not even with the tunnels. For that, finally, newfangled nitroglycerin with all of its dangers would answer. Up at the head of Echo Canyon, the 772-foot bore was moving so slowly at the end of December that Durant had Samuel Reed import a small army of men fresh from the Wyoming rock work to relieve the Mormon contractors and address not only Tunnel 2 but the two smaller ones down in Weber Canyon, which were, respectively, 508 and 297 feet long. Reed put three shifts to work on all. Brigham Young admitted he was glad to be relieved of the pressure. “I could not have asked Dr. Durant to confer a greater favor,” he had written an associate on January 5. But the doctor’s experiment fizzled within a month. “The big tunnel which the company’s men took off from our hands to complete in a hurry, has been proffered back again,” Young noted with satisfaction, a good point having been proved.
They have not less than four men to our one constantly employed, and, withal, have not been doing over two-thirds as much work. Superintendent Reed has solicited us to resume it again. We were well pleased to have the job off from our hands when it was, as it enabled us to complete our other work on the line; but now that it is so nearly complete, probably we shall finish the tunnel. Bishop Sharp and Joseph A. Young are using the nitro-glycerine for blasting, and its superiority over powder, as well as the sobriety, steadiness and industry of our men, gives us a marked advantage.30
The headings of Tunnel 2 were blasted through on January 30, though more than sixty days would pass before the bottoms were cleared out. Not until later in the month of February would the Gentile contractors still working on the two Weber Canyon tunnels be moved to try nitroglycerine on that tough black limestone and blue quartzite. One in five of the laborers immediately went on strike. They were simply fired—nitro would hasten progress enough to let the contractors get by with only two shifts, and the company saved tens of thousands of dollars in the bargain.31
Brigham Young and many of the faithful had been worried about the moral pollution of their settlements when the railroad began importing men from the tough Wyoming camps. The town of Wasatch, altitude seven thousand feet, had become the winter headquarters of the Casement brothers’ tracklayers and, with a population of some fifteen hundred cold and restless souls, was getting fairly wild. J. H. Beadle, who had bought the newly established and struggling Gentile newspaper The Salt Lake Reporter from former General Patrick E. Connor, visited in January and stayed a week, during which time the thermometer ranged from three to twenty degrees below, never rising to zero. “During my stay,” he recorded,
the sound of hammer and saw was heard day and night, regardless of the cold, and restaurants were built and fitted up in such haste that guests were eating at the tables, while the carpenters were finishing the weather-boarding—that is, putting on the second lot to “cover joinings.” I ate breakfast at the “California” when the cracks were half an inch wide between the “first siding,” and the thermometer in the room stood at five below zero! A drop of the hottest coffee spilled upon the cloth froze in a minute, while the gravy was hard on the plate, and the butter frozen in spite of the fastest eater.
This was another “wicked city,” he noted. “During its lively existence of three months it established a graveyard with 43 occupants, of whom not one died of disease. Two were killed by an accident in the rock-cut; three got drunk, and froze to death; three were hanged, and many killed in rows, or murdered; one ‘girl’ stifled herself with the fumes of charcoal, and another inhaled a sweet death in subtle chloroform.”32
Echo City had been swelling in population for several months now; the track reached it on January 15, greeted by the usual brothels, gambling houses, and saloons plying their trades. Bitter cold weather had discouraged a number of laborers from outside railroad work, and though they resolved to go home had wound up penniless in Echo City with nothing but trouble in their hands. Often the sound of gunfire bounced off canyon walls in the clear, cold night air. Holdups, murders, hangings, and unexplained disappearances became common. Beneath a trapdoor in one saloon putative lawmen found a large hole in which seven unidentified bodies lay amid the tin cans, empty liquor bottles, and other refuse.33
Another Hell on Wheels town would soon take root in the Salt Lake Valley north of the Weber mouth, on the west bank of the slow and brackish outlet of Bear River. There Gentile speculators snapped up lots as soon as Union Pacific surveyors had laid out the town of Corinne some twenty-five miles northwest of Ogden, the first non-Mormon town in the territory, and within two weeks there rose more than three hundred frame structures, shacks, lean-tos, tents, and combinations thereof; at least nineteen saloons and two dance halls opened for business, catering to the rough graders imported late in the previous year and to the traders, teamsters, drifters, and ne’er-do-wells who naturally flocked in. “At one time,” J. H. Beadle noted, “the town contained 80 nymphs du pavé, popularly known in Mountain-English as ‘soiled doves.’” The population soared past 1,500, giving the town founders visions of grandeur—Corinne as the beginning of a Gentile empire in Utah, as possible meeting point for the competing Pacific Railroads instead of the Mormons’ Ogden, as eventual successor to Salt Lake City as the territorial center. Former General Patrick E. Connor—onetime scourge of peaceful and unsuspecting Indians, still as anti-Mormon as ever, who was busy now with a tie contract for the Union Pacific and whose hopes for a mining industry in the Utah mountains were beginning to succeed—would become a major force in the flowering of the weed which was Corinne. His aspirations—and the town’s—were destined, however, to wither.34
Corinne was the last “formal” Hell on Wheels town, if such a qualifier may be used, but it was not the last place of iniquity on the line; some thirty-five miles away, up on the Promontory at a place called Blue Creek, a tent town would briefly become, in the words of Mormon contractor Chauncey West’s son, “the toughest place on the continent.” To J. H. Beadle it was, “for its size, morally nearest to the infernal regions of any town on the road.” Many called it Robbers’ Roost. It was too close for comfort for the pious Mormon laborers. “On more than one occasion,” West recalled, “this rough element assembled in broad daylight, with the avowed intention of raiding the camp of Benson, Farr, and West, where they knew large sums of money had to be kept with which to pay off the men, who invariably demanded coin for their services. This constant menace necessitated the employment of a large force to keep watch over the camp.” A company of cavalry from the Territorial Militia had to be stationed there until the work was over.35
Accident reports mounted in the divisional office. The stretch of track across the Utah border had been laid on frost and, in Hub Hoxie’s dolorous report, “goes down all the time—4 miles per hour is the maximum speed allowed,” he wrote Dodge, “and then we are off the track about half the time. The iron will be worthless by spring and there will be no road left.”36 Due variously to bad weather, poor organization, unsound engineering, hasty construction, insobriety, and simple bad luck, the railroaders were indeed plagued that month by a series of accidents, bad breaks, and near misses in the Wasatch canyons. The smaller ones—crushed limbs or lost fingers due to frozen or slippery switches or couplers—were simply recorded; it was becoming either a badge of honor or a rite of passage for track crewmen to be maimed in such ways, but these small dramas were occasionally greatly overshadowed. One night between Wasatch and Echo City, a drover was hauling a sled of freight and hastened his team to hurry across a grade crossing before an oncoming westbound supply train arrived. “It was a beautiful moonlight night in midwinter,” recalled paymaster Erastus Lockwood, the Casements’ brother-in-law,
and the snow was very deep. One of the sleds was about to cross the track when the runners settled down in the snow and the sled box containing the freight rested squarely on the rails. Our engine struck this sled box, tearing it to splinters, and scattering over the snow great quantities of baby shoes, destined for the Mormons at Salt Lake City. These tiny shoes caused us great trouble as they threw our cars off the track, right and left. Fortunately the engine remained on the track and was dispatched to the end of the track in Weber canyon for a wrecking crew, which was brought back in short order and the track cleared, for under no circumstances must the track laying be delayed. All this occurred about two o’clock in the morning; by seven o’clock the track was entirely cleared.
Another accident involved a supply train of some sixteen flatcars, which was on a relatively level segment at the top of Echo Canyon when the last four cars became unhitched; the main part had pulled about a half mile ahead when a trainman happened to look back to see the four trailing and fully loaded flatcars, which were now finding the advantage of the grade. He yelled at the engineer to “go like Hell”—and, with throttle open and whistle screaming, the work train fled before the maverick cars. Two brakemen were aboard the pursuing cars but they were fast asleep. Courting derailment at such high speed, the engineer blew the signal to open switches and clear the track as his train rushed through the night. The trainman had by then worked his way to the back car and ordered some workers to hurl stacked ties down onto the track behind them to stop the runaways. Sure enough, when they struck they catapulted high in the air. Somehow the two brakemen landed in snowbanks and were unhurt.37
General Jack Casement was gone for most of the month of January, on business in Washington with a brief pass through home in Painesville, Ohio. His brother, Dan, had his hands full keeping the men going—until he had his own serious mishap. He was on a train between Echo City and Wasatch with a party of men when the train was overtaken by a fast, furious snowstorm. The engine stalled, and the men thought they could walk to the Wasatch station. “It was too much for Dan,” Lockwood recalled; “the snow too deep, so he begged the others to go on and leave him. But a Captain Alford, who was one of the party, picked him up and carried him the rest of the way.”38
Jack Casement by this time was en route back to Utah to relieve Dan; he expected that Dan would be gone for a month and return, but apparently the near-death experience was so harrowing that once he got home his brother would answer none of Jack’s letters or telegrams until mid-April. General Jack wrote to his wife while passing through Omaha on February 8. “I am afraid the Union Pacific is in a bad way,” he told Frances Casement. “They owe an awfull amount and as we are running a big machine that would run us out of money and in debt besides. I was in a great hurry to get out to the ground—don’t be alarmed for I don’t think we will go to the Poor house.” Three days later he was in Echo City. “The company owe Millions of Dollars,” he told his wife, “and as Congress and the might of Government is working against them and in the interest of the other end of the Road it makes matters look blue. Dan had collected more money than I thought he could, and if the company don’t quarrell too hard amongst them selves we will all come out right.” Not everyone was allowing even that cautious measure of hope. An exhausted Samuel Reed wrote his wife that week to confess that “I wish the last rail was laid; too much business is unfitting me for future usefulness. I know it is wearing me out.” When they were finally done, he said, “I shall want to leave the day after for home, and hope to have one year’s rest at least.”39
As if in reply, a blizzard swept in. First it covered most of Wyoming, filling the great trough that was the Laramie Plains and blocking some ninety miles of track between Laramie and Rawlins for three weeks, stalling trains at isolated stations, marooning passengers, holding up many others whose trains were simply canceled outside of the stricken area—even Dr. Durant, on his way back to New York, who was stuck east of Evanston at the Aspen depot. Dan Casement, heading east on a plow train, intending to keep going all the way home, was awed by the storm’s power and telegraphed Snyder to think twice before sending trains west. “You can’t get trains over this division by sending a snow outfit ahead with provisions,” he warned—the only way to move was to bunch a regular train right on the heels of the big plow and engines, “and as soon as you get through a cut have train follow. Have seen a cut fill up in two hours that took one hundred men ten hours to shovel out. Train west is well organized, but can’t more than keep engines alive when it blows.” James Evans reported that Laramie was snowed in, “having had but two trains from the East and none from the West in six days.” He had tried to work his way west but gave up. “I am afraid,” he wrote Dodge, “that we are going to have some trouble from now on until Spring.”40
Laramie quickly filled with hundreds of impatient westbound travelers, but much graver trouble was up at the Rawlins station, where two hundred passengers on one train were stuck; a number had come from the West in plenty of time, they had thought, to attend the presidential inauguration. Food and water soon ran short. The station restaurant and other establishments in the raw, windswept hamlet took advantage of the situation, charging exorbitant prices, such as $1.50 for a piece of bread and molasses. The train crew consoled themselves with whiskey and refused to stir. Not until ten days had passed, after the infuriated passengers banded together in an “indignation meeting” and sent protest telegrams to the Congressional Pacific Railroad Committee and other dignitaries in Washington (even Collis Huntington received a wire from stranded friends from California), did the crew agree to push forward—but only if the passengers shoveled. In desperation they agreed, at one point clearing a drift a thousand feet long. But when that was open the engineer had only enough steam to carry them into the deepest part of the drift, where the locomotive stalled again. A telegram from divisional headquarters to Rawlins forbade any further sorties. At this point the crew went on a two-day drunk. About fifty passengers then left on foot for Laramie. They arrived there in four days after terrible suffering. “They denounce the road and its management,” a newspaper reported, “in unmeasured terms.”41
Snow had piled up seriously on the eastern Utah border and blown over the rim and down Echo Canyon, but the tunnel crews were of course under cover and Casement’s tracklayers were safely down in Weber Canyon, having passed the thousand-mile post and finally worked their way, literally at the heels of the graders, to the Devil’s Gate; fortunately enough food and construction supplies had been stockpiled by Reed and Hoxie to last the laborers while the track was cut by storms. Reed estimated on February 27 that they had food for perhaps twenty days, but after that, he wrote his wife, “we would be starved out.” Colonel Seymour had taken lodging in an Ogden boardinghouse, and since there was no snow down near the lake, he could not understand why Casement was not already in sight at the mouth of Weber Canyon. He wired Durant to complain that the daily work rate was too slow. “Can’t you induce Casement,” he said, “to strike a three mile gait to Bear River?”42
The Central Pacific was blocked for five or six days in mid-February when a heavy fall of snow and an avalanche took out part of a trestle in Butte Canyon near Cisco. A correspondent of the Virginia City Enterprise was stuck on a snowbound train above Colfax for several days, watching as five locomotives behind a huge snowplow gained a few miles before proving unequal to the growing drifts. An army of shovelers from Sacramento appeared, and after they had been at work most of a day, the reporter decided with a few others to walk ahead nine miles to the Cisco station. “Pits had been dug the first four miles eight feet apart and four feet deep,” he wrote, describing a quick method of work which would eventually allow the plow to barge through the remaining snow, “so it was into one, a scrambling out, into another, and so on, the hardest work possible. Four hours tedious walking and the bridge, a mile west of Cisco, was reached. Here a tremendous slide of snow from the mountain had come down and carried away four ‘bents’ of the bridge, at which a hundred men were at work rebuilding…. The train we left behind us did not get through to the bridge until Tuesday at ten o’clock, making the time from Alta just one week, and every man on the road working his level best.”
Ten feet of snow had fallen on Cisco in just two days; small wonder the railroad had been overwhelmed. The storm demonstrated one thing: “From Truckee to Alta,” the correspondent said, “the Central Pacific Railroad must be shedded—nearly every rod—to be rendered practicable in the Winter. Wherever the sheds are, two engines with a plow can clear the way; in other places, ten are inadequate to the work. We predict the road will be entirely shedded before another Winter.”43 Judge Crocker tended to agree, although when he wrote to Huntington on February 23 he stressed how the covered track had endured. “Our snow sheds were a perfect protection & worked splendidly,” he said proudly. “We must put up a few miles more at each end this summer & we shall be all right.”
The Judge had received a telegram from the Union Pacifics’s Webster Snyder saying that service would open to Ogden on March 20. But Crocker doubted it—it “is a blind,” he scoffed, adding that from what he had heard, the Wyoming snow blockades showed no promise of opening for supplies. Stanford and the commissioners had left on the examination, with Lewis Clement along, empowered by a telegram sent by Secretary Browning to Stanford on February 14. The Judge felt optimistic about what they would find, especially with two Californians now on the board: “Williamson feels a deep interest in sustaining his old report,” he believed. “Warren & he are military chums, & will probably go together, & with Clement to draw the report, it will probably be all right. Blickensderfer is very particular, & I guess is an off ox generally.”44
In those high-pressure weeks the Central Pacific also had its share of accidents. A new locomotive called Blue Jay was on the return trip of its inaugural run over the Sierra—the Reno Crescent had called it “prettier than a spotted mule, or a New York schoolma’am”—when it suddenly and violently caught up with a stalled lumber train. “Bruised, broken, and crippled,” the Crescent mourned, “it was then taken limping to Sacramento for repairs…. [F]ortunately nobody was killed or even wounded.” A decoupling similar to the Union Pacific episode in Echo Canyon occurred on the long, curving downgrade west of Reno, involving an eastbound construction train; the maverick cars overtook the front part of the train, crushing two brakemen and wrecking eleven cars. Another crash a few days later on the same stretch of track occurred after a heavily loaded eastbound freight overshot the depot at Verdi by a mile because it lacked enough brakemen; while the superheated brakes cooled down and the engine was lubricated, a construction train rounded the curve and crashed into the freight, reducing a dozen cars to matchwood.45
Meanwhile, back in Washington, Collis Huntington was avidly pursuing a new goal. In January he had happened upon the codicil of the Pacific Railroad Act allowing the companies to draw two-thirds of their subsidies for grading and other advance costs; probably he had pried the fact that Oliver Ames had been chasing the notion for six weeks, from Browning or someone else in the Interior Department. Wiring Stanford for a progress report on the eighty miles of work between Ogden and Monument Point, the governor had replied that the contractors were not far enough along to support such a claim, especially “considering the fuss that is being made just now about Pacific Railroad matters.” Given that even Stanford had heard in Utah that the Union Pacific was pressing its own claim for advance reimbursement for grading in the canyons, Huntington would not let it go. Assuming that in a few weeks their contractors would have more done, he went ahead and passed the claim into the Interior Department. Apparently someone there tipped off Dodge; on February 10, Oliver Ames filed a protest directly to Browning; he appended Dodge’s exhaustive letter, which Ames had himself signed but not sent. Browning contemplated the insistent pile of documents, considered the railroad controversy airing in nearly every morning’s newspaper, and nervously stopped the Central Pacific claim dead. He did not have to wait long for the angry Huntington to be announced at his office door. Under such pressure Browning agreed to present the application to the entire cabinet at the next meeting, February 26.46
By then Huntington had learned that the cabinet had granted the Union Pacific bonds on completed work to the thousandth mile, in the Wasatch canyons, regardless of the unfinished tunnels, after the company agreed to put up nearly $1.7 million in first-mortgage bonds against its promise to become a “first class road”; it also promised to post half of all subsequent subsidies into the same fund. On the afternoon of Friday, February 26, Huntington was told that while Browning and three other secretaries favored releasing the Central Pacific bonds, the cabinet had decided to table the matter over the weekend while Attorney General William M. Evarts studied it. Huntington spent an anxious few days. But late on Monday afternoon, March 1, the cabinet unanimously agreed to release the bonds for advance work to Ogden. Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch was instructed to issue them immediately.47
Huntington had but two days before the secretary returned to private life on inauguration day, March 4. But for some reason McCulloch declined to release them. Huntington (the sole source for this assertion) said later he suspected that the treasury secretary had been reached by Ames and agreed to delay until Grant took office. So Huntington went straight to McCulloch’s office and vowed he would stay until he got his bonds. The secretary fretted while Huntington simmered in the antechamber—but finally McCulloch sighed and agreed to let them go. “I went out,” Huntington said with great satisfaction, and after eating dinner, “by eight o’clock I found the bonds in my room.” They were in two “untidy” packets; Huntington had agreed to deposit $500,000 from each lot into a Treasury Department “security fund” like the Union Pacific’s, so he was left with a total of $1,399,000.48 Nonetheless Huntington was joyful—he would keep these bonds secret from the Union Pacific people as long as he could, and if this was not an endorsement of the Central Pacific’s right of way to Ogden, he was hanged if he knew a better one.
Had he been delayed twenty-four hours or even twelve, Huntington would not have succeeded in extricating the bonds. The next day, Thursday, March 4, Ulysses Simpson Grant rode to his inauguration alone; President Johnson refused to ride with his betrayer, or even to attend the ceremony. Grant took his oath. One of his first actions was to announce his largely undistinguished cabinet, which caused some perplexity and dismay. “They will bring no strength to Genl Grant, and inspire no confidence in the Country,” Browning would comment sourly. “It is a singularly weak cabinet, and in my opinion will go to pieces ere long.” Before the day was out President Grant stepped into railroad business and issued an order to the Treasury and Interior Departments: no more bonds were to be issued to the railroad companies. This came as no surprise; on December 22 it had been reported that Grant had told Oakes Ames he was opposed to “granting any more money subsidies to the Pacific roads until the finances of the country were in a better condition than at present.”
But more than money was at stake. A few days before his inauguration, Grant summoned Dodge to a private meeting in which the president-elect voiced the hardly surprising news to Dodge that there was evidence of “a great swindle” in the recent work done for the Union Pacific. They had talked about such matters earlier in the year, although with the exception of a privy few, that meeting had been a secret. Then, as now, the engineer saw clearly that a federally mandated reorganization of the Union Pacific was in the works, and that at least one head was going to roll within his company—a doctorly head.49
In the waning months of the Johnson administration Dodge had seen that, as he put it somewhat diffidently many years later, “the administration and departments had lost all confidence in Mr. Durant, and many of the decisions against us came on account of his interference and statements.”50 The whispers of yesteryear about the Doctor’s side deals, hedge bets, stock jobs, hidden interests, secret funds, had risen to outraged shouts, and it was obvious in nearly every wire from Snyder, Hoxie, Blickensderfer, and the latter’s successor as divisional engineer, Theodore M. Morris, that Durant was taking every advantage in this final contest in Utah to emerge richer than a king. Seymour was close behind; as Hoxie—the now respectable, even virtuous former construction contract shill—had warned, “The presence of Silas Seymour at Durant’s heels and putting all kinds of foolish notions in his head will yet ruin the company. Millions of dollars spent for naught to simply gratify Seymour.”51 If Webster Snyder were to believed, Samuel Reed was trying to catch up; Dodge would forever doubt that, and Jesse Williams agreed with him: “Contractors’ engineers the world over are apt to become a little corrupt,” he commented to Dodge, but he believed Reed “merely passed it through,” knowing “it was wrong,” but concluding “to say nothing about it.” But otherwise there was no shortage of crooks out on the railroad—and at their head was Thomas Clark Durant. In the overall feeding frenzy, in fact, the Doctor had been acting close to unbalanced.
“Durant was crazy on his last trip,” Snyder had written to Dodge in mid-February, “& discharging me daily. Seymour and J W Davis dared not let him get out of reach of their voices fearing somebody might expose their operations.” With the paymaster some two months late, the common laborers had been “growling, striking, and generally demoralized,” Hoxie had warned. But thanks to the Doctor, all the field supervisors, and, top to bottom, all the engineers, had been walking on eggshells, uncertain where orders were coming from and which ones to obey. Firing Blickensderfer over Durant’s cost-cutting and dangerous changes in the Promontory lines on January 2 had only been the beginning. The Doctor threatened the replacement, Theodore Morris; sacked two construction engineers, Thomas H. Bates and Major R. J. Lawrence; subjected Hoxie and Snyder to inhuman pressure hoping they would resign; and even blamed Colonel Seymour for delays caused by a bad landslide in Weber Canyon: “You were left with instructions and power that it was supposed would prevent delay,” he raged, and because of such preventable delays, “you are now at liberty to return to New York.” Seymour, though, knew better than to leave at such a time.
But Durant shone his fiercest light upon Dodge, back in Washington and increasingly unresponsive to the Doctor’s provocations; Oliver and Oakes Ames had worried in mid-January that Durant’s threats and insults would goad their chief engineer to resign and go to the press, but the following month the Doctor became positively unleashed. On February 3 Dodge received a summons—“I propose,” Durant wired, “to have a line on the east slope of Promontory located for the best interest of the company without regard to former surveys. Can you come here next Tuesday?” The engineer paid no attention to the telegram, carrying on his pressing business with the Interior Department and his field correspondence, and when he did not appear in Utah on the appointed day, the enraged Durant fired off another summons and a rebuke.
I telegraphed you…not to send instructions west without first submitting the same to me. You are away from the work attending to other business and are not supporting parties. If you can’t find time to report here I shall of necessity be obliged to suspend you.52
What else but some form of derangement would move the Doctor to threaten to suspend the chief engineer for the Washington lobbying that was keeping the company from ruin in those crucial opening weeks of the year? What else, when, after he had returned to New York and turned up the pressure on Dodge in Washington, Durant would then attempt to pin blame for rampant corruption (including, of course, his own) on his chief engineer—within days of the inauguration of Dodge’s mentor and friend as the president of the United States?
You have so largely overestimated the amount to contractors in January that it becomes my duty to suspend your acting as Chief Engineer until you give a satisfactory explanation of the same; a mistake of a trifling amount might occur, but when it gives contractors hundreds of thousands of dollars, it creates suspicion that all is not right. Your immediate attention is requested in order that if you have an explanation to give it may be done before the report becomes public.53
To Oliver Ames the whole situation may have begun to resemble a tightrope walker’s act as seen from the remove of the bleachers—Dodge up there in the dimness at the crown of the tent, and perhaps the whole Union enterprise and all of their financial hopes on that quivering wire, with the malign Durant up on the high platform shaking and rocking it back and forth, and all an observer could do was hope that the walker could steadfastly put one foot in front of the other and gain the far platform—for there was no net.
Nonetheless Dodge was almost cocky with certitude that it was the Doctor who would topple. But what would dislodge him? The righteous press? The suddenly upright Congress? The victorious new administration? Or the wobbly-kneed Ames brothers and the cliquish company directors with their constantly shuffling alliances, intrigues, and plots?
Perhaps it would take that entire army, and all its ammunition. Early in the year, during Dodge’s confidential talk with Grant, after they had touched on matters similar to the ones discussed just six months before in Benton, Laramie, and Council Bluffs, Dodge got the president-elect’s permission to write Oliver Ames and Sidney Dillon to say that “all we had to do was to hold things steady until after the 4th of March,” after which time the whole rotten outfit “would have to get out.” The letter was shown to Rowland Hazard—who, as a steadier, proven, more dependable enemy of Dr. Durant, had already begun to foment a directors’ coup; Hazard wrote to Dodge in the first week of February from New York to say that he had “a plan pretty well matured” which he would be discussing with Ames and Dillon, their attorneys, and a few others, for a maneuver to take place at the annual meeting of the Union Pacific in New York beginning on March 9. Therefore Dodge knew that at least some opposition was rising—even if it were less direct than his own—but for the present “they kept secret all the inside information they had.”54
On the day, February 4, that Dodge was reading Hazard’s letter about the new and mysterious plot/Webster Snyder was sending Dodge some astounding ammunition. “It is news to me but may be old news to you,” the operations manager wrote from Omaha, “that J. W. Davis…is the contractor for building the road west of the Oakes Ames contract.” It was certainly news to Chief Engineer Dodge that young James W. Davis—whom he knew to be their principal tie contractor (though probably in secret partnership with Durant), and who was the brother-in-law of George Francis Train—was now the overseer for the millions in construction money expended from the end of the Ames contract in western Wyoming across all their Utah division. Snyder had heard it dropped casually by Durant in an unguarded moment when the Doctor was not attended by the protective Colonel Seymour, and apparently he wrote, “we assigned the contract for the ‘Trustees for the Contractors,’ whoever they may be—all arranged by Thomas Clark Durant.” It might be, he thought, a repetition of the Doctor’s dummy contract with L. B. Boomer back when they were getting started in Nebraska.55
Such a secret seemed to have a life of its own, and it wanted to get out into the light of day as quickly as possible; before the incredulous Dodge could alert New York, Durant himself disclosed the contract to John B. Alley, who told the Ameses. The next Union Pacific executive board meeting was in a few days, on February 25; when Oakes Ames and the others confronted the Doctor, contending that they had all just “assumed” the Ames contract had been extended, Durant merely assured them an official explanation was forthcoming, though of course, he said, he had been acting with full power to make such an arrangement. And at the meeting it was indeed like old times; Durant began talking immediately and seized the initiative, unleashing a dizzying flurry of financial matters which put the other executives on the defensive.
The meeting carried over to February 26, when Durant handed them the surprise contract and what seemed to be a letter back-dated to November 27. “I found it absolutely necessary,” Durant smoothly explained therein, “in order to carry out the wishes of the board, to commence work on this portion of the road at once. The present organization, with its large outfit of teams, tools, and men, presented the most available means of doing the same. To have created an entirely new organization would cause much delay.” No one was fooled; no one was mollified. Durant did not even bother to explain why he had kept it a secret for three months. Befitting the rules, the contract was referred to a committee for submission to the stockholders. Anyone who troubled to begin reading the contract while the Doctor talked on would see that figures for what the line would cost the Union Pacific were not there; not even Davis’s remuneration was specified. It was simply a blueprint for wholesale robbery—and as Durant continued to raise unrelated financial issues, meaning to keep them befuddled and distracted, there may have been a few seconds of doubt or indecision in the boardroom as to whether he was going to prevail yet again, but one after another in those executive minds rose a date—March 9, the annual meeting—and then a variation on the image of the Doctor’s head, on a silver platter.56
Strobridge’s tracklayers followed the Central Pacific grade across the chilled and dry reaches of easternmost Nevada in the early days of March, with little to look at but sagebrush and bleak hills and mountains lightly furred with pinion and juniper: the heads of the Pequop Mountains and the Toana Range rose to the south; immediately north and west, between ranges of hills, was the opening of the Valley of the Thousand Springs on the old Fort Hall emigrant trail. On March 9 the rails passed milepost 556. Ahead the railroad grade passed through a wide natural corridor between the Goose Creek Mountains standing to the north and the Pilot Range to the south. The salty, sandy Utah border was about twenty-five miles away. “Cold weather has been a serious hindrance,” Mark Hopkins wrote to Huntington. There had been little snow, but operations had been hampered by frozen water sources, and for more than forty miles to the east all creeks were so alkaline as to be useless. Eventually engineers would lay wooden pipes in deep, frostproof covered trenches up into the hills, but for the time being as the track was going down, the big, rolling water tankers would have to serve. They had been slowed to a crawl when they caught up to a grading party, but Charley Crocker now thought their rate would soon pick up to between three and four miles per day—and that would continue until they reached the Promontories, and probably Ogden.
The new government commission had recently passed by the end of track, having been augumented by Lewis Clement at Wadsworth. The inspectors reached Ogden on March 8, and were to spend several days in the eastern valley before commencing up Weber Canyon. Chief Engineer Samuel Montague would stay with the party all the way to Omaha—Stanford had become deeply suspicious of Warren and Blickensderfer the longer he spent with them, Charley Crocker thought Clement too “untested” to be left unsupervised with such types, and both the Governor and George Gray thought that the hostile Warren either wanted “a bid” for his favoritism “or that he has been seen by the other Company,” as Hopkins termed a Union Pacific bribe. Hopkins reminded Huntington about Warren’s lackluster military record (“superceded on the Battlefield by Genl. Sheridan & sustained by Grant”) and his dependence on the ex-president’s patronage (“has since been hanging around Andy at Washington waiting for something to turn up”), hoping these black marks might help the Central Pacific’s case before the Grant administration. In a few days Stanford wired Huntington in cipher from Salt Lake City, urging him to see President Grant and have the commission removed before it issued a report, which it would write in Washington—the influence of the Union Pacific was simply too great. Failing that removal, it behooved them to build as much track as possible—Stanford desperately hoped they could reach Ogden—before the commission submitted its report.57
There was a new development in the situation north of Ogden, Stanford told Huntington in another coded telegram: the Union Pacific engineers had run their final line between Bear River and Promontory, managing to cross the Central Pacific no less than five times and at different grades—varying as much as fifty to eighty feet. It was, Stanford complained, “for the purpose of embarassing us”—at some point he expected his graders would be ordered off this defiant new right-of-way. But he had decided not to make any legal trouble about it; after all, Huntington had already pocketed the bonds for this part of the route, though Stanford did not understand why his partner was still keeping it a secret. When their graders advanced up to this disputed ground north of Bear River, though, “we shall probably have to show our entire hand.”58
On Sunday, March 7, the peaceful and righteous village of Ogden with its fifteen hundred faithful souls entered the modern age—when the tracks of the Union Pacific moved out of the portal of Weber Canyon and over the plain, and were spiked past the log and adobe houses with their struggling little shade and fruit trees, to the place where a depot would stand. Three months before there had still been some debate about whether the railroad would locate to Ogden, as opposed to another town—possibly a Gentile settlement such as the still-nonexistent Corinne. But Brigham Young had convened a meeting of property owners on the western end of Ogden and asked them to sell him their five-acre lots in support of the railroad locating there. All consented, and he bought some 133 acres for yards, repair shops, and the depot, at the price of $50 per acre, and, on behalf of the church, presented the package to the railroad.
The exchange—of land and quiet privacy for business and the disturbing influences of modern society—was not made lightly. In “the old days”—even as recent as some five or eight years before in the time scale of the West—strangers were feared and distrusted in Ogden. “The emigrants parked along the street in their covered wagons,” recalled one of the original citizens, “and all the people were afraid of them and what they might do. The grocers would hide what little money they had in coffee cans and anyone who had any valuables would get them out of sight. They would let the people stay so long, then the sheriff…would gather a posse and drive down the street and fire several shots with their rifles, and that was a signal for the emigrants to pack up and start moving again.” Mayor Lorin Farr had for some years presided sternly over his village citizens, with his small police force hauling in all gamblers and whiskey purveyors who mistakenly set up in town; the law frowned on drunkenness, profanity, pilfering, fist-fighting, and other lamentable practices. Only fifteen months before the arrival of the railroad, Bishop Chauncey West predicted that “the time was not far distant when the police would have plenty to do,” and citizens soon saw this would be true. The past August a policeman reported grimly “that there was some lose women in our town that would bear watching,” and in December the officers arrested six men for “fast driving and loud hollowing in the streets.”59
With these advance alarms, Ogden began to awaken from its peaceful slumber. Less than two years before the councillors had found it necessary to pass laws forbidding “cattle, horses, mules, sheep, calves, swine, or goats” to run at large within the village limits. Ogden still paid a bounty on wolves, and only recently, taxes had been payable in stock or produce.60 Now, to the tune of a steam whistle and a clanging bell, the world began to chug in. Celebration for the arrival of the Union Pacific tracks on Sunday, March 7, was sensibly delayed until Monday, when the faithful could participate. On the day Young would inaugurate a new railroad company to build between Salt Lake City and Ogden—beneath welcoming banners and given a merry prelude by a brass band—Ogden speakers marked the arrival of the “national highway” to Utah. There were residents still living in 1940 to tell Works Progress Administration historians of that day “when the entire populace gathered around in Sunday finery to see the iron monster. Suddenly the engineer blew the whistle, yanked a steam valve, and announced he was going ‘to turn the train around.’ A wild scramble for safety ensued and many ran pellmell through a nearby slough in their fright, ruining their Sunday clothes. Some terrified children were not found until evening.”61 An artillery salute punctuated the affair and, with it, any lingering hopes for solitude.
Trains from the East would not begin arriving immediately, however; though it felt springlike in the Salt Lake Valley, snow still blocked the road in Wyoming. “We hope to get trains through this week,” Jack Casement had written his wife on March 3. “The weather here is very fine Birds are singing in the valey like Spring and farmers in the valey are plowing,” he told Frances. He confessed to being homesick for her and their little boys as he progressed across this “wild looking country” so alien to conventional beliefs. “I have not been to Salt Lake City,” he wrote, “and don’t know as I will I have no desire to toady Brigham.” He warmed to his anti-Mormon fever some days later with the opportunity to show a real discourtesy. “Brigham Young sent me word that he would like to see us lay track,” he chortled. “I sent him word all he would have to do would be to come where we were at work and open his eye. He came here but I think so little of him and his pretensions that I did not stay to receive him.”
Nonetheless, thanks to the alacrity of Young’s grading and tunneling crews, Casement was in Ogden in the “delightful” weather, dealing with springtime mud instead of being somewhere high in the Wasatch Mountains kicking through still-deep snow—and he had ample change in his pockets. “We are getting along nicely,” he wrote on the day they reached Ogden. “I have had much better luck collecting than I anticipated and if the Company pay in New York the Drafts they have given me here, I can send home fifty thousand dollars as soon as the Road is clear again…. I flatter myself I have some tallent for collecting.”62 A few days later, after but one train had struggled through the laboriously shoveled cuts and drifts across Wyoming, the biggest storm of the season commenced—in three days covering all the work again, blocking and stopping all movement between the Wasatch Mountains and the Platte Valley. Casement’s crews had perhaps eight miles of iron left.63
In New York City on Tuesday, March 9, one day before the Union Pacific stockholders’ annual meeting, the board of directors met. Most were in a mood not unlike that of warriors before a pivotal battle. Grim Roland Hazard and John Alley, the dour Ames brothers, the saturnine government directors Jesse Williams and Congressman James Brooks—all assembled with the others, including the stooping, standoffish Dr. Durant, ready for a fight but disagreeing, even at this late hour, about tactics and protocols. They were also all on heightened alert because of a new development revealed the previous Thursday—about which several had spent a long weekend worrying what could done.
On that Thursday, March 4, a New York State Supreme Court justice had refused to approve the Union Pacific petition to move Jim Fisk’s nuisance suit out of state jurisdiction into federal court, following the letter of the legislation sponsored by Oakes Ames and passed eight months earlier. And Fisk’s suit had grown far beyond his initial effort to parlay his $3,200 investment on Durant’s behalf in the fall of 1867 into a $50,000 or $75,000 windfall. Now he clearly intended to grasp those disputed twenty thousand shares, not just compromise on “damages.” Now he may have even been aiming to jostle his way onto the Union Pacific board; now, even worse could be contemplated. Barely three months earlier, in October 1868, using surprise proxies and other subterfuges, Fisk, Jay Gould and Frederick Lane had finally seized control of the Erie Railroad from the rest of its board; they had exiled the outcasts from all governance of the company, then quickly and secretly issued and sold more than $20 million in stock, pocketing the proceeds between the three of them; then they had successfully resisted all litigation by the outmaneuvered directors and bilked stockholders.
Only in their dreams could Durant, Dillon, Bushnell, and the Ameses—and, for that matter, Huntington, Hopkins, and the Crockers—so quickly and effortlessly assemble an empire. Fisk and Gould had then gone on a well-publicized spending spree, buying theaters and opera houses and palatial mansions on Fifth Avenue. Some of the Erie profits had presumably been used to smooth the way toward procuring the large block of Union Pacific stock. What was now especially worrisome for the Union Pacific directors on the eve of their annual meeting was that the superior courtroom in which the Erie litigation was found for Fisk and partners was the same one in which the company’s petition had just been denied. That placement—and the exquisite timing—was no mere coincidence.64
The judge in both cases was George Barnard, who served under the pleasure of the powerful Tammany clubhouse and the Tweed Ring; significantly two Tammany leaders, William Marcy Tweed and Peter B. Sweeny, were now on the board of the Erie Railroad and working closely with Fisk and Gould, so Judge Barnard’s sympathies could be easily guessed. Hazard and the Ames brothers had strong suspicions that behind “Jubilee Jim” stood the wily Doctor; Durant had, after all, conspired with Fisk a year and a half earlier in the boardroom fight, and he had used Judge Barnard two years ago to snare them with an injunction. Their suspicions sharpened when Charles Lambard confided that Durant had recently offered to go in with Lambard and buy out Fisk’s claim for $75,000. Associations were growing before their eyes like poisonous vines, and indeed, once one began counting and measuring them, the greater the danger seemed to loom for the Union Pacific in its vulnerable state—unmanaged, adrift, plundered close to bankruptcy, yet edging so close to completion.
It is questionable whether by this time the Doctor still felt he could control Jim Fisk, like him a shark but whose teeth and appetite dwarfed his own. Canny Cornelius Vanderbilt and Daniel Drew, for all their wealth and power, had been badly chewed up in the Erie struggles, and could offer a cautionary. Even more alarming, in January Charles Francis Adams’s article had touched on the political horror of the vast wealth of the railroad corporations—Adams more feared the Erie than the Union Pacific—serving “the power and patronage” of an entity like Tammany. “Imagine,” Adams said, “the Erie and Tammany rings rolled into one and turned loose on the field of politics and the result of State ownership of railroads will be realized.” Later in March, the New York Times would quote those words while delivering the terrible news that Tammany and Erie were already as good as one; Tammany had made the New York governor, the New York City mayor, two state superior judges, a senator, a city chamberlain, and had even sponsored presidential candidate Horatio Seymour—and Erie was now, warned the Times, its treasury. Suddenly New York did not appear to be a safe or healthy location for the headquarters of the Union Pacific.65
Awareness of much of this, or at least of confusing, disconnected parts of it, swirled around all the directors at 20 Nassau Street during their board meeting on March 9, and in this atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue the directors accomplished very little during their meeting but the appointment of election inspectors for Wednesday’s board election. Conspiracies continued into the night.66
The stockholders’ meeting convened at ten the next morning, and the voting began almost leisurely, until James Fisk himself strode in. He was flanked by several beefy men who were soon revealed to be sheriffs sent by Judge Barnard. Fisk was being called “the Prince of Erie” in the newspapers for his roguish seizure of the Erie Railroad, when he was not being called worse—but he had a genuine danger about him which could not be missed. Three days before Christmas he had arranged for a judge to have the Springfield Republican editor, Samuel Bowles, arrested and jailed in New York for libel, bribing officials to make themselves scarce so that Bowles could not be bailed out. Supporters vied to get the editor released from Fisk’s clutches—the list included Schuyler Colfax, Horace Greeley, Henry J. Raymond, and John Jay, with the aggregate offered sum going well over $3 million, including one offer from the Cincinnati Commercial editor, Murat Halstead, “to buy Ludlow Street Jail.” Bowles was released on $50,000 bond the next day, vowing to explore Fisk’s antecedents in a forthcoming issue of his newspaper. Soon Fisk would be hauling the New York Times financial editor, Caleb Norvell, into court for libel, demanding $100,000 damages; Norvell, too, would be bailed out for $50,000. The evil glow of Jubilee Jim flared brighter.67
And now here was the Prince of Erie striding into Union Pacific headquarters. When Fisk attempted to cast the ballots representing not only his token six legitimate shares but the twenty thousand he claimed from the company, the tellers refused to let him vote. He left with a markedly smug air; the sheriffs stayed behind, and after all the votes had been deposited, they stepped forward brandishing an injunction against the election pending a hearing of Fisk’s grievance. Unsure how to react, the directors debated and brought several motions to move the meeting out of the judge’s jurisdiction, to Washington or Boston. The sheriffs countered by producing arrest warrants—the directors were now in violation of Judge Barnard’s order. Bedlam and outrage: Oakes Ames immediately shouldered out of the room, claiming congressional immunity, while the towering Sidney Dillon, his face purple against his luxurious white muttonchops, forgot the veneer his millions had bestowed upon him and tried to give the bum’s rush to one of the sheriffs. He was deterred and taken in hand, as was President Oliver Ames—who managed to adjourn the meeting. The sheriffs announced that all the directors were under arrest and that they would be conveyed to the Eldridge Street Jail. There was a tumult of outrage—but after some negotiation the sheriffs agreed to a compromise and led away only Oliver Ames and Dillon, not to the hoosegow but to confinement in one of the parlors at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. They were released the next morning after an appearance before Judge Barnard and posting $20,000 bail.68
Durant still professed innocence and ignorance when the directors met soon thereafter on that day, March 11, and the stockholders’ meeting was then reconvened long enough to adjourn for a week, after which time it would resume in Washington. Then a resolute Oliver Ames opened a directors’ meeting to deal with the Doctor. With his sixth sense Durant had foreseen the showdown; he immediately tried to deflect their wrath by resigning the powers given him by the executive committee on July 3, 1868, but his adversaries moved past him to revoke authority of the executive committee itself—it had become, of course, a tool of the Doctor’s—and the supremacy of the board of directors was again unquestioned. In Durant’s place as construction superintendent, the board appointed a committee of Dillon, John Duff, and Hiram Price, who, they hoped, would see the Union Pacific to its meeting place—wherever and whenever that would be. The coming board election, when the Doctor could be removed for good if Hazard’s plan worked, was still left hanging. So was the Fisk lawsuit: the Union Pacific attorneys would again try to move it away from Tammany to the federal courts. So was the question of the current construction contract: was it to be Durant’s jack-in-the-box Davis contract, which left out all the Crédit Mobilier people, or a renewal of the Ames agreement? No one knew. Perhaps federal intervention was their only hope, and a wholesale transfer of their offices to Boston or Washington, where, presumably, Fisk’s tentacles did not yet reach, and where the Doctor’s influence was now greatly reduced, or so they hoped. “We have had a lively time of it,” Sidney Dillon admitted in a letter to Dodge, describing the tussle with Durant, “but we have beaten the enemy so far & have Bearded the old Lion in his den & if we all stand firm he will have to remain there. He seems very tame at this time yet he may be preparing for another leap So we must be careful to watch him close.”69
Newspaper reports of the maladroit meetings, the scuffles, and the genteel jailings were enough to make a starched shirt wilt, and though Jubilee Jim had lately been portrayed in the editorial columns as the devil incarnate, he found himself in the unusual position of being cast as a hero, albeit a roguish one, sword in his fighting hand and lantern in the other. “There is a promise of light to be thrown on the dark doings of some of the Pacific Railroad Companies,” opined the New York Herald on March 13, calling Fisk “Young Erie” and chuckling over his maneuver to imprison the Union Pacific board. The face of his complaint seemed just, the editor said sardonically. “If there is any underhand work going on why should he not have a finger in it?” Meanwhile, the newspapers and their readers could sit back and watch the capitalists fight. The Herald offered advice to both sides: “if the Union Pacific is a bird of the same feather with the modern Erie, we advise them to keep Fisk, Jr. out, on the principle of preserving character. If the directors have made the millions report has assigned them they can afford to compromise with Fisk, and if they will not come down à la Vanderbilt and Drew, we advise Fisk, Jr., to ‘keep pegging away.’”70
Grenville Dodge was still in Washington, sizing up the situation with the new Grant administration and establishing influences in the new Congress, when Oliver Ames, Dillon, Jesse Williams, and other directors arrived in the capital to assist him in lobbying, and there, the annual meeting of the stockholders was extended almost day by day to keep it active. Dodge had some useful contacts in the cabinet, though many editors had been unimpressed with Grant’s appointments: Samuel Bowles had thought them “a little obscure,” the New York World called them an “absolute oddity,” and the Boston Post had complained the men were unexciting.71 But from Dodge’s point of view there was his pale, breathless, tubercular comrade John Rawlins as secretary of war, and, as the new secretary of interior, Jacob Cox, the Ohio school administrator and lawyer who had been a brigadier general of volunteers. Cox had served well in Western Virginia (where Jack Casement had fought), Tennesee (for a time, Dodge’s assignment), and North Carolina (where Cox had rendezvoused with Sherman); for one brief term after the war he was governor of Ohio.
The new secretary of the treasury was also a familiar face to both Dodge and Ames: it was George Seward Boutwell of Massachusetts, like Dodge just retired from Congress. Grant’s original appointment to preside over the treasury had been the merchant prince, A. T. Stewart, whose politics were obscure and whose sole selling point had been that he had been extremely generous to Grant and his election campaign; Stewart had so many conflicts and disqualifications in trade and commerce that he was forced to resign within a week of his installation. Many of Grant’s appointments gave sinecures to retiring politicians who had earned merit in his backers’ eyes, and Boutwell had been one of the congressional framers of President Johnson’s impeachment. He had also deserved, in Oakes Ames’s eyes, an offer for Crédit Mobilier stock earlier in the last term—but Boutwell had judged it a poor investment and declined. Now, at least, Ames’s former fellow delegate led the treasury.
As far as influencing Congress was concerned, Ames hired the former attorney general William M. Evarts as a lobbyist, and retained two eminent Washington attorneys, Caleb Cushing and William E. Chandler, the latter through Dodge’s persuasion. Now the task of keeping old congressional allies and creating new ones from the freshmen began. The first test of influence would be a joint resolution to endorse the Union Pacific’s desire to move out of the Tammany courts into federal jurisdiction and to relocate its corporate headquarters from Tweed’s New York to Boston. Immediately Senator William Stewart of Nevada (with Collis Huntington somewhere behind him) rose, critical newspapers and the Adams account of the Crédit Mobilier in hand, to denounce any such scandalous machinations in Congress. But as Stewart thundered away, Dodge and Ames and their lobbyists encountered surprising resistance in the Senate corridors, even among supposed friends. Cornelius Bushnell had stayed in New York, but when he heard of these unexpected changes of heart he suspected that the Doctor was behind it all—and wrote a very candid and private letter on March 20, in which he untidily lumped several of their antagonists together. “I discovered by this…your hand,” he said to Durant, “as well as Fisk-Huntington & Co.” Whatever Durant’s private aims by deterring their removal legislation, Bushnell warned, he was going to cost them the bonds west of Ogden and play them all right into the hands of Huntington—if not Young Erie as well. “I hope,” Bushnell wrote cautiously, “you have arranged to get Fisk out of the way.”72
Whatever the sources of this new resistence in the Capitol, in a few days Dodge encountered a new problem and a rude shock. Whether he learned from Rawlins, Cox, Boutwell, or one of their subordinates, suddenly on March 26 it was revealed that Collis Huntington had slipped out the closing barn door of the Johnson administration, the prized bonds to Ogden clutched in his fist. Dodge dashed off a complaint to President Grant: the Central Pacific had fraudulently grabbed bonds which rightly should go to his company. “We are now determined to expose the entire fraud,” he wrote to his wife, Anne, that day, “and have the world know what they are.” He would work “day and night” to get new legislation through Congress charging the Central Pacific with fraud—it would be a real “stinger.” That night he got in to see Grant at the White House—and subjected his old commander to three hours of invective against “old Huntington” and his servants in the discredited administration.73
Less than seventy-two hours later, Congressman John Bingham of Ohio—who in 1867 had bought twenty shares in the Crédit Mobilier from Oakes Ames and shortly exchanged them for a like value of Union Pacific bonds—rose in the House chamber to denounce Huntington and Browning and call for an official investigation by the Committee on Pacific Railroads. Dodge’s newest affidavit sped straight to that committee. The Central Pacific map filed with the Interior Department was “false and fraudulent,” he charged. “It has no topography, no stations, no courses, no angles, no scale, nothing by which any line could be identified by it on the ground.” Their mere trial line, which he himself was unable to find in the Utah canyons, directly violated the Interior Department instructions. Therefore, he said emphatically, Huntington had no claim on those advance bonds west of Ogden because by right—and by dint of their completed track through the Wasatch—they belonged to the Union Pacific.74
While Dodge and the lobbyists and lawyers were thus occupied in the capital, another contingent of attorneys were sweating up in Manhattan in Judge Barnard’s courtroom. Jim Fisk and team kept them and their clients busy. On March 11, Fisk had submitted an affidavit calling for the Union Pacific to show cause why a receiver should not be appointed: the Crédit Mobilier ring was depleting the dregs of resources of the Union Pacific, putting the railroad at dire financial risk and cheating its stockholders. The judge had overridden all objections. He appointed a scion of the machine—William Marcy Tweed Jr.—as receiver, and young Tweed instantly and officiously departed for 20 Nassau Street. Durant and Bushnell, their secretaries, treasurers, and accountants were there, their faces imperturbable masks, and when Tweed demanded all assets, property, trusts, bonds, and proceeds of the Crédit Mobilier Company, he was sent from office to office like a puzzled messenger and told that the company had no assets or bonds in the state of New York other than some securities pledged for a loan held by a local bank; they got rid of him by sending him to the bank, where officers refused to discuss, divulge, or divest. Tweed slunk back to court, under the impression that the Crédit Mobilier had already slipped out of town.
In a new affidavit Judge Barnard learned from Fisk that the joint resolution to grant the Union Pacific relief had just been introduced in Congress—it was evident to Fisk that the defendants intented to evade the judge’s jurisdiction and remove the property of the Crédit Mobilier and the Union Pacific from the state, and Barnard agreed. He grimly appointed a court referee to elicit subpoenaed testimony from Durant, but the Doctor had refused to be sworn on advice of counsel; the Union Pacific disputed the right of jurisdiction in the state court proceedings. An angry Judge Barnard hauled Durant into court on March 20 and, in the presence of all the opposing attorneys and Jim Fisk himself, threatened to jail him on contempt of court if he did not swear. Finally the Union Pacific lawyers told him to go ahead, and after he had taken his oath, Durant tersely described the relationship of the railroad to the construction company, and his investment in them, and testified that the Crédit Mobilier had no property in the state, and the Union Pacific very little. When he was directed to produce the books of the Union Pacific, Durant replied, “Well, that I can’t do. They are not in my custody.”
Judge Barnard turned to the affidavits in hand. Fisk claimed that he had been told by some of the defendants of a “secret service fund” of about $700,000, “which they, in substance, admitted was used for corrupt purposes, although they suspected some of their own members of having privately appropriated a large part of it to their own use.” He had also been told that over $500,000 in bribes to members of Congress had been expended in a single year, and that a number of members were given shares of Crédit Mobilier “in their own name or in the names of relatives, friends, or servants, taking the same in trust.” Then a Fisk lieutenant, Adin H. Whitmore, had sworn that from an interested party now out of state he had learned that the directors of the Crédit Mobilier and the Union Pacific were one and the same, that he had been told of the construction company’s long detours, sharp curves, and steep grades, its careless usage and damage of equipment, that it had charged the railroad up to three times the actual construction cost, that the directors had formed fraudulent wood and coal companies, signing fifteen-year contracts for fuel at double the open market price, that a commissioner had been bribed and others taken over dangerous, substandard sections while drunk and asleep.
Reading these affidavits, and the Union Pacific responses, took the entire day. Then the judge ruled in favor of the Fisk complaints: receiver Tweed’s duties were enlarged to “protect” not only the Crédit Mobilier but the Union Pacific—all bonds, proceedings, assets, and properties were to be seized, along with all company records. Tweed was empowered at the sufferance of the court to pay out all debts or expenses of the company from such seizures.75
Two days later, on March 22, they were all back in the courtroom, Tweed with crates of seized papers, little of them helpful. Sidney Dillon testified that the Crédit Mobilier had been incorporated in Philadelphia and since the previous December had removed out of 20 Nassau Street, out of the city, and out of New York state; it had done no business in the city and had no records or assets there. Furthermore, all of Fisk’s and Whitmore’s affidavits were “absolutely false and untrue.” John Cisco, Charles Lambard, and Thomas Clark Durant submitted similar statements. Judge Barnard and Fisk’s attorney questioned the Doctor closely about a number of related matters, and just before lunch, the judge ordered Durant to produce the books. When he heard the refusal, Judge Barnard told him if he did not produce them by 1:00 P.M. he would be jailed. After the lunch recess, Durant testified that he had gone to his offices, that the safe was locked, that the safe key had been in possession of the deputy sheriff, but that the combination was in the possession of his assistant auditor, Benjamin Ham, who was absent. Where, then, was Mr. Ham? Durant replied blandly that Mr. Ham was in New Jersey.
Attempts both by mail and messenger to persuade Mr. Ham to leave his home were for some reason unavailing. Over the course of the next week, as the Court waited, it admitted a copy of the complaint of Henry McComb vs. The Crédit Mobilier of America, at that point pending in the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court, in which, among other things, McComb alleged that there was still a large, undivided surplus of profits held by the construction company, equal to 500 percent of its capital. On March 23 Judge Barnard issued a new injunction barring the Union Pacific from receiving U. S. bonds or issuing new mortgage bonds, and again enjoined it from removing records from the state. And then, on March 30, the judge told the court that he suspected Mr. Ham was being encouraged or prevented to remain out of state. He ordered receiver Tweed and deputies to break or blast open the safe and bring him the contents.76
This was all reported gleefully, and in exhaustive detail, by the newspapers. “The inquiry…into the affairs of the Union Pacific and Crédit Mobilier jobs is a very good thing,” the New York Herald said in an editorial on March 31, “although it does not spring from a very good motive.” The paper urged Fisk to “keep pegging away at the Union Pacific Railroad Company until the cancers which afflict it are brought to light and cured, before they shall have consumed the whole work.” The New York Times agreed. “A great deal of Congressional wisdom has been wasted in pretended efforts to investigate the affairs of these railroads,” it said on April 1, “but two or three days’ work before a Court of justice has sufficed to lay bare one of the most monstrous frauds that was ever perpetrated upon any Government.” The Times was awed by the directors’ systematic stripping of the railroad “of every penny of its funds, so that in a short time its property may be sold under foreclosure of the first mortgage bonds, leaving the United States to look where it may for its paltry loans.” And the efforts of Congressman Ames and his Senate friends had to be resisted. “We think it is about time that Congress should leave this matter alone,” it said.
Bad as may be our State Courts, there is no evidence or appearance in this case of any injustice having been done to these directors; and our Courts have done good service to the public in throwing light upon these transactions. The attempt to transfer the case to the Federal Courts is not inspired by a love of justice, but by a desire to protect gigantic frauds from exposure.77
The next day was Friday, April 2, and the safe at 20 Nassau Street awaited young Mr. Tweed. It was a very large, heavy, regular bank safe, walled in on three sides by massive brickwork, with a burglar- and powder-proof combination bank lock. “There was the safe,” a Herald reporter would write, “behind the iron doors of which the wealth of the company may be hid; in [Tweed’s] hand was the key; and yet, without knowing the combination, it was as useless to attempt to unlock the doors as to try to pry them open with a chisel from a toy toolchest.” When Tweed appeared at the start of the business day he was accompanied by a deputy sheriff and an even dozen special deputy sheriffs. Five muscular, aproned artisans of the iron works which had manufactured the safe swelled the crowd; they carried immense sledge hammers, chisels, and steel augers. The purpose of their call announced, Dr. Durant stepped forward and told Tweed that he and his men were all considered trespassers and would be personally held responsible in civil actions for damages, as well as criminally for the trespass. Tweed merely smiled and ordered his men to begin.
“The men at once took off their coats, rolled up their sleeves and at it they went with their sledge hammers,” said the correspondent, “striking blow after blow at the place where the lock was, and at each blow the sparks flew about as if it were redhot iron.” At one point Tweed wandered out of the noisy, thick-aired room into the corridor when Charles Tracy, the principal Union Pacific attorney, appeared and shouted at the top of his lungs: “I order all you burglars to cease this work and leave the building within five minutes or I shall proceed against you both civilly and criminally!” This threat succeeded in temporarily emptying the place of the accumulation of idlers and onlookers, but not the iron workers or Tweed, and the work continued for more than three hours. Despite all this effort the men were able to penetrate only two layers of steel plate and produce a shallow opening about the dimensions of a book. At 2:30 P.M. the sweating laborers put down their hammers at the appearance of the owner of the ironworks; he heard the Doctor’s threat to prosecute for civil and criminal damages and pulled his men off the job.
“Therefore,” the Herald correspondent said, “the youthful but indomitable Tweed, Jr., like the son of Ossian, or Ossian, Jr., true to the instincts of his race, vowed…that the coveted prize within that safe would not be safe there another hour.” He huddled with the sheriff and deputies and soon sent for a squad from another ironworks. Not long after they had begun their assault, they were through. The inner door had been left unlocked. Tweed rushed in. The sheriff and deputies rushed in. The ironworkers rushed in. The Union Pacific defenders rushed in. Later it was said that there was a melée in which papers, books, records, and even bonds went flying, some disappearing forever, but according to the Herald witness, “a sort of amnesty was proposed,” some company witnesses came forward “with flag of truce brought on the ground, and the youthful conqueror of the safe, with courteous address and chivalric bearing, invited them to enter and be cognizant of whatever might follow from his achievement.”78
While the siege had been shaking the walls of the Taylor Building at 20 Nassau Street, an attorney for Fisk had been upstairs in the meeting room questioning Durant, Bushnell, and Tuttle before a court referee. Their unresponsiveness was like layers of iron plate; so many of the answers were “I don’t know” that the plaintiff’s counsel began to falter, but then he pressed on against Assistant Treasurer Tuttle as gamely as young Tweed several floors below:
Q. Has the company any assets left?
A. Yes.
Q. What?
A. The road.
Q. Has the whole capital of the company, and all that it has received from the government and from its own first mortgage bonds, been already expended?
A. They have.
Q. Has the whole gone into the pockets of the contractors?
A. I do not know whether it went into their pockets or not.
Q. Has it been received by them?
A. Yes.
The exciting announcement that they had cracked the company safe set the torpid room buzzing, and Tweed’s appearance soon thereafter with the Union Pacific’s subscription book, cash book, and contracts book interrupted proceedings. The lawyers, witnesses, and referee sat there for some minutes as he thumbed through the ledgers, trying to make sense of them and respond to questions.
“I don’t understand these books,” he finally said.79
One block over, at the offices of the Central Pacific at 54 William Street, Collis Huntington was enjoying the spectacle. It would have been hard to miss, with full transcripts of the court hearings appearing in the daily Herald and Times, and it would have been hard for him not to enjoy the notion of Durant or Bushnell blinking under the light of official scrutiny, or gulping at the prospect of jail food, with the Tammany judge overruling every single objection of their counsel and the Fisk legal team reading reams of accusations and characterizations into the record for the obvious enjoyment of the newspapers. “Mr. Dillon and certain other officers of the Company had absconded” would be read out before the judge, and the Union Pacific attorney would leap to his feet objecting to the malicious and slanderous “attempt to calumniate in the newspapers,” that Dillon “is a venerable, high-minded and most respectable gentleman. He is a fair dealing man and ‘abscond’ is not a word to use in regard to him.”80 Indeed it would have been hard for Huntington not to enjoy the enemies’ suffering—but in enjoying the bonfire one had to take note of the wind lest oneself be burned.
Down in the Capitol, Senators Stewart and Nye and their other supporters were doing a fine job against the rising temperature, and despite the heat raised by Representative Bingham to investigate the bonds’ release, some newspapers were nonetheless responding well. During one Stewart blast, the capital correspondent of the Sacramento Union noticed that “one of the boss men of its Crédit Mobilier, Oakes Ames, of the House, sat hard by and seemed to enjoy it, as any one could afford to who had made at least a round million out of it.” The New York Times report on testimony in the Senate Railroad Committee on March 31 could have been written by Huntington himself: there had been “no over-issue of Government Bonds” to the Central Pacific and “the Union Pacific Road is far from being completed to Ogden, as alleged.” But while Hopkins continued to send their twenty-mile reports of completed track at a pleasing pace—to milepost 570 on March 17, to milepost 590 soon thereafter—that final report exhausted the last $1.5 million of their $50 million federal appropriation, and it looked as if they might not soon collect those bonds. His Washington lobbyist, L. E. Chittenden, had seen Interior Secretary Cox and was informed that no more bonds would be issued until the special commissioners completed their report and gave their recommendation for a final meeting point and the routes thereto. “You should not lose a moment in advising your California directors of this,” he urged, “that they may pay proper attention to [the] committee whose action may be of grave importance.”81
“Proper attention” might be out of the question at this late date, though anything was possible. But Stanford was in Salt Lake City and reported on March 21 that a train from Omaha had supposedly reached the Wasatch station the day before. “If the road is open and shall remain so long enough the U. P. will undoubtedly shove the material through to take them to the Promontory,” he said. Samuel Montague had looked over the Union Pacific line to the head of Echo Canyon and estimated that the unfinished trackwork and tunnel would be finished in about forty days. Once Casement’s men picked up speed west of Ogden they would first cross the Central Pacific grade in twenty-five miles—Stanford urged Huntington to get their lawyers ready for an injunction to stop them. Meanwhile, Charley Crocker was spurring their Cantonese to higher attainments; Charley thought they would reach Promontory in mid-April. On March 22 they crossed the Utah line at the edge of the barren, gray flats of the Great Salt Desert and established a station called Lucin at milepost 597, within days opening regular train service to that unappetizing place. Fifty even emptier miles ahead was the western shore of the great blue lake. But from then on they had to be more economical than ever. On March 30—the day their tracklayers passed milepost 614—Huntington wired Hopkins: “Call on me for as little money as possible until the road is completed to Ogden. We will get no bonds until that time.” Hopkins of course agreed, but wondered how they were going to prevail. “Unless we are able to make loans here, I don’t see how we can get on with less than $750,000 a month,” he said. “We will see what can be done to make it less—for I comprehend that without Govt. Bonds or 1st Mortg. Bonds to sell, it is not easy to raise large amts. of gold & meet your bills falling due there. I comprehend how our own mistakes have cut us short of millions of Govt. Bonds to help us to the end of the route. I think we all see it now & feel it.”82
Collis Huntington was never one to resist an opportunity to say, “I told you so,” especially to close friends like Hopkins and Crocker, but there would be plenty of time for that later. He had a lengthy statement to give to the Senate’s Pacific Railroad Committee, which would defend the Central Pacific on many disputed fronts, such as the bonds, and lambaste the Union Pacific for its multitude of sins.83 And the germ of a new enthusiasm had taken him, one that would give him control of a new metropolis which would more than make up for the loss of the Wasatch coal mines. He was determined to keep his federal mortgage bonds to Ogden, of course—but why should that flyspeck Mormon village become the junction city for the two greatest railroads when he could cause a new one to be built somewhere north of it, a true national city through which the commerce of the world would run? The Mormons would, if Huntington played his cards right, gullibly sell enough land to finally give the Central Pacific the kind of real estate business it deserved; being less than fifty miles from the coalfields might still make that fuel accessible if they bought up the right stakes. One of Stanford’s assignments from Huntington had been to scout the area north and west of Ogden. Then, as Huntington was readying himself to go to Washington, on April 5, Stanford’s telegram came with its bad news. “It may be important for you to know,” the Governor told him,
that there is not a sufficient supply of suitable water for a terminal station at any point between Rosebud Creek forty miles west of Monument Point and Bear River, where it must be pumped and which at a low state is strongly alkaline. At Ogden is an abundant supply of pure water, a good elevation. Prior to the commencement of our work there was not and is not now a resident along the line between river & the western boundary of Utah excepting those brought here by railroad work. Brigham Young has organized a company to build a railroad from Ogden to Salt Lake city this station.84
All that empty, unpopulated land but no water; they were thus tethered in some fashion or another to Ogden. But Huntington felt he still had room to maneuver. In a fighting mood, he took a train down to Washington, where the new interior secretary had just urged that the Pacific Railroad Act be amended to strike out the provision about collecting advance bonds; Huntington had his own amendment slipped in, fixing the meeting point at Ogden. But Dodge was alert and had the motion blocked; not resting there, he sent out a flurry of telegrams to press agents and newspaper editors urging that the companies be allowed to build until they met.85
But it had become clear to both Dodge and Huntington that they could either stand toe to toe and slam each other until one was dead or compromise before blood lust had the onlookers climbing over the ropes to get them both. The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific had better fix their own meeting point before Congress did it for them; such amity might even appease the scandalmongers. On the evening of Sunday, April 8, Huntington met Dodge in Washington, appropriately at the house of Massachusetts congressman Samuel Hooper, who knew them both and who faithfully held stock in the Union Pacific, the Crédit Mobilier, and the Central Pacific. The negotiations wound through the night—Dodge had wired New York to alert him immediately if Judge Barnard uttered any indication of not releasing their case from the New York courts, which would strongly affect his position—and lasted until nearly dawn. After a few hours’ rest they took up again and negotiated late into the evening.
At one point a messenger delivered a wire to Dodge from Oliver Ames in Boston, who had convened a directors’ meeting; they ordered Dodge not to agree to any point “East of the Eleven hundredth mile Post;” But the engineer well knew how close the whole organization was to collapse. And the Californians already had the bonds. Cox and Boutwell in Grant’s cabinet had told him that the Union Pacific could be enjoined from crossing the Central Pacific’s grades.
He put the telegram away. Then he made the best arrangement he could. Huntington agreed to let the Union Pacific build as far as Promontory Summit, about fifty miles away from each company’s end of track. Such would certify (at least in the engineer’s mind) that Dodge’s grades were superior to the Philistines’ lines in his own company, as well as to his competitor’s; this being an unimportant debate for Huntington, he went along. As they worked it out, the Central Pacific would buy the track from the Union Pacific, for its actual cost, from Promontory down almost to Ogden. At that place, five miles from the village, Huntington would, with the Union Pacific’s aid, build his new Gentile city which would shut Brigham Young and his followers out of the real estate markets and commerce. Of course Huntington and Dodge would keep such a detail secret. The pact would merely stipulate purchase of 47.5 miles of track—to the edge of Huntington’s fantasy metropolis which would, in the course of time and events, never be built—and lease of the five-mile stretch, for 999 years, from the dream to the quiet reality of Ogden. And finally, Huntington and Dodge would arrange for their respective champions in Congress to pass a law officially fixing the point at Promontory Summit, so the bond question would be resolved.86
Telegrams of the agreement sped west to Utah and California and north to New York and Boston. Stanford, in Sacramento, instantly telegraphed Ogden to suspend all grading work east of the Promontory. Crocker was at the end of track, about to go back home for three or four days’ rest; he felt as if he were breaking under the strain of this final push across the desert, nearly treading on the heels of his rock-cutters northwest of the lake and impatiently egging everyone on. “I have not time to spin a long yarn,” Crocker wrote Huntington wearily, “but will merely say that I am doing all in my power to hasten track laying—which does not yet reach your wishes or expectations, nor mine.” Then the wire from the East arrived and helped lighten a crushing load. “While I was building the road, I had all I wanted to do,” Charley would explain.
I didn’t think of anything else. I used to lie in my car, travel over the road, backwards and forwards; I would lie until morning before I could get to sleep. When I came home to Sacramento, my wife used to say, “Why, Charley, what’s the matter, why do you toss about in bed?” “I don’t know,” said I, “unless it is that I am getting old. I cannot sleep as I used to.” And we both decided that it was old-age. When Huntington telegraphed me that he had fixed matters with the Union Pacific, and that we were to meet on the summit of Promontory, I was out at the front. I went to bed that night, and slept like a child.87
In North Easton, Oliver Ames received his notice of the agreement from Dodge. His response might have surprised Dodge, who deserved thanks—Ames’s letter was more strongly worded than anything he had ever sent to the Doctor, who had made his life miserable for several years. “That part of the agreement giving the Central Pacific bonds on the road we build beyond Ogden is an outrage upon us and ought never to have been consented to,” Ames complained, sounding more like Durant or Seymour than his usual genteel self.
We have burdens enough to bear to have some little help in bearing them, but for us to give the Central these bonds and let them pay us for the road when they get ready will I fear break us down. I can’t conceive how you ever should have consented to it. If you had known the condition of the company you would not have done it. Certificates for these bonds have already been sold and it calls upon us to raise money at once to redeem them. When if you had stood for bonds of Government on all the road we build we should have gotten them and had part of our pay, while as it now stands we shall have a quarrel with the C. P. to get any pay out of them.88
If Dodge felt any charge of resentment at Ames’s intemperance, it would have been mitigated by another paragraph of the letter: Ames had sent Dodge a letter discharging Colonel Seymour from duty on the line of road, “to be sent to him or handed to him as you should see fit.” Dodge—of course—preferred a face-to-face meeting. He was going out west to see the final act anyway, and this task would be one of the most agreeable ones of his service. Oddly enough, after he had gotten out on the line, Dodge would decide to hold the letter in abeyance; work came before pleasure, and even Seymour had some small value in the last weeks.89
On the morning after Huntington and Dodge had made their pact, their men in Congress quickly produced a joint resolution on the Promontory Summit connection and an officially sanctioned terminus “at or near Ogden,” with the stipulation that the Central Pacific would buy the tracks as agreed. The resolution also authorized President Grant to appoint a board of five “eminent citizens” to inspect the completed line and note all deficiencies; the president would withhold enough bonds to guarantee that the national road would be brought up to “first class condition.” Finally, the Union Pacific was authorized to move its corporate office to Boston and hold a board election there on April 22. Dodge wired the good news to Sidney Dillon, whose excuse for “absconding” from New York to evade assault charges for pushing a deputy would be that he was urgently needed in Omaha and Utah as a newly appointed member of the board’s final construction committee. Getting the Union Pacific out of the Tammany courthouse had been a particular urgency for them all—it “put us out of the hands,” Dodge would say, “of the New York Blackmailers and pirates.”90
In Judge Barnard’s courtroom, young receiver Tweed had proudly reported on April 3 that he was busy with an inventory; among the large number of books and papers he had found in the Union Pacific safe were “bonds and coupons to the value of hundreds of thousands of dollars.” His time for savoring the prospect of dividing that fortune between Fisk and other creditors deemed worthy by the judge was very brief: Charles Tracy, the principal Union Pacific attorney, told the court that “There were some bonds found there, but they were the bonds of the Company which had never been issued, and, of course, are worth no more than waste paper until they have been put upon the market. They are worth about seven cents a pound as old paper—nothing more.”
Much later it would be revealed that the Crédit Mobilier records so avidly sought had been presciently moved by Sidney Dillon in January to safekeeeping at the headquarters of the New Jersey Central, where he was vice president. And in a few days the case of James Fisk versus the Union Pacific Railroad was pried out of Judge Barnard’s courtroom by a federal judge responding to directions from Washington, who removed it to federal jurisdiction, where the case would drag on for years. The litigation had given the railroaders immense bad publicity at a crucial time—it also caused the value of company securities to plummet—and scandal helped to set the public mind against not only the scalawags but the whole industry as well. “The truth is,” commented the New York Herald, “there is cheating on the grandest scale in all these railroads, and it is only when sharp managers quarrel over the spoils that the public get at the facts.” Before the case was seized away from the angry and petulant Judge George Barnard, there would be time for one good telling finger in the eye: in the transcript published in the newspapers was a list of stockholders, which took up half a column of tiny type. One could, with a little research, turn up some revelations in such a list.91
A Sacramento-bound train was crossing the Sierra on the morning of April 9, when a mishap and an adventure occurred which seized the public imagination on the western slope. Accidents occurred every day on a railroad track somewhere in the nation, and they never failed to excite newspaper editors and fascinate readers. On the morning in question, a messenger for Wells, Fargo named Michael O’Connor was asleep in his compartment in the express car, which was filled to capacity with freight. He awoke to a sensation of heat and suffocation, and found the forward end of the car in flames from, perhaps, the lamp. In the thick smoke he attempted to smother the fire with empty mail sacks but it was too large. He looked for the bell rope to signal but it was already burned. O’Connor leaned out the door only to see that the train was passing through a snow shed and there was no one to signal. Onrushing air was rapidly fanning the flames, and he saw that not only the express car but the whole train was in danger. Somehow he climbed to the roof. “Any person who has seen one of the express cars,” the Union reported, “can readily imagine that the feat of climbing from the door to the roof is a somewhat difficult gymnastic undertaking when the car is standing still; with a train moving rapidly and swaying heavily from side to side, passing close to the timbers of a snow-shed, it was perilous.” Up in the locomotive, the fireman happened to look around to see the amazing sight of a crazy man crouching on a car roof, gesticulating wildly and managing to duck beneath the snowshed timbers only inches away from his head. The train halted as soon as it could on the downgrade, the blaze was extinguished, and O’Connor was, briefly, a hero.92
Meanwhile, the Central Pacific tracklayers were moving bravely under the stern pressures of Strobridge and Crocker, who wrote Huntington that he thought they would reach the rock cuts on the eastern slope of the Promontory Mountains on April 25, and the summit perhaps on the twenty-seventh; Stanford left Sacramento for Ogden on the twentieth, telegraphing Huntington of his speedy arrival only two days later. Charley had told the governor that they would reach the connecting point on the summit on the first of May—but would have to wait at least ten days for the Union Pacific to get up the eastern slope.
Stanford, though, discovered a new crop of troubles just when they all should have been feeling the pressure lessening. Going up to Promontory with the intention of persuading the Union Pacific people to adopt the nearly completed Central Pacific line over the summit, he met Sidney Dillon, who had taken charge of construction. Dillon refused to tell his men to lay track on the completed Central Pacific grade; he said he had no authority, but did not seek it, and kept his contractors busy cutting and leveling the Union Pacific line for track. But the company was not following its own line as dictated by the approved route map, Stanford learned. In their haste and carelessness the graders seemed to be making it up as they went along—Stanford found four unacceptably sharp curves and two lengths of trestling “of a very imperfect character,” he wrote Huntington on April 22. Shaky and insubstantial, one trestle was some 85 feet high and 400 feet long, with the other 20 feet high and 100 feet in length. Any kind of traih would have to go over them at five miles an hour, and heavy freighters were out of the question. Stanford’s engineers glumly estimated that getting this work accepted would cost more than $50,000 in repairs and improvements—whereas the Central Pacific work required less than $10,000 to perfect.
By this time Dillon had gone to Echo City. Stanford wired him to object to the shoddy job which did not adhere to the approved line or to the agreement between Huntington and Dodge. “I told him,” Stanford wrote Huntington, “we could not be expected to pay for temporary work.” The next day in Ogden Stanford ran into Silas Seymour, who seemed sympathetic to his objections. The governor accordingly telegraphed Huntington: “Seymour advises U. P. to take our line” if the government approved. “Time & money both saved by taking our line.”93 But when Seymour wired Dodge en route out west with the proposal, the chief engineer rigidly rejected it out of hand—such was his distrust of the colonel and of the Central Pacific.
Trouble still burned in the Hell on Wheels towns, even in burgeoning Laramie. There, a party of railroad tie cutters on a bender began to break up a saloon. They were arrested and placed in the town jail. A posse of other tie cutters decided to release them, and it seemed that they were about to succeed when a force of vigilantes came to the aid of the beleaguered constables. Gunfire blazed out and wounded a good number on both sides; one policeman was mortally wounded. It would take days to sort out culpability and the charges. Law-abiding citizens worried that their tenuous hold on civility was slipping.94
In the East, Union Pacific credit and securities were also diminishing. Thanks to the Fisk suit and publicity, first-mortgage bond prices fell from a level of 102 to 70 or 65, and the roar from the West for money showed no indication of abatement. In Boston, Oliver Ames had convened a directors’ meeting on April 9 (this was the same meeting in which Dodge had been instructed to settle the meeting point west of Ogden and Promontory); the directors had created a new executive committee of five—Glidden, Bushnell, Brooks, Bates, and Oakes Ames—whose task was to get the company out of its distress. On April 10 the committee published a circular offering stockholders first-mortgage bonds at 85 percent and land-grant bonds at 55 percent, the limit pegged to their current stock holdings, on strictly cash terms; unbought bonds would be offered to those stockholders who had purchased their limit but who would pledge to quickly transact for the new securities. Oakes Ames was nearly out to the edge of his available credit, but he manfully bought all entitled bonds and offered to take more if others did not step forward. Few did—Glidden and Ames were reduced to begging some of the directors and stockholders (who had gladly taken profit allotments in cash) to now help give the company a push. The committee hoped to raise at least $7.7 million in cash for the $11.3 million in bonds at par value, but the money only trickled in, scarcely assuaging the great thirst for cash out west.95
“I am still here on a gridiron,” Jack Casement wrote to his wife from Echo City, worried for the future but willing to grit his teeth and hold on, doing his part.
Things look awfull bad and I cant hear a word from New York. I can close up the work now and have some money left if the Banks dont burst. We owe our men about 90,000$ and have 160,000$ in the Banks at Omaha and Cheyenne. The banks are loaded with UPRR paper and if the company dont send some money here soon they will bust up the whole country. The company owe us over 100,000$ but we can wait on them if there is any show of helping them out.
Bad as things were for his contracting company. Casement thought that “we are in the best fix of anyone and can’t help but come out something ahead.” His men would be finishing their tracklaying very soon, “but the Lord only knows when we will get paid for it.”96 Other outfits were indeed doing poorly, their men complaining and threatening to strike—Dodge wrote Oliver Ames that “men will work no longer without pay & a stoppage now is fatal to us.” Material was still scarce. By April 22, Dodge had reached Council Bluffs on his way out to the work, and Webster Snyder wrote him to despair of the new building committee under Sidney Dillon—which to Snyder promised business as usual. “I judge that Seymour and Reed have gotten hold of Dillon,” he said,
and are making the most of it. He takes their word for various matters without examining for himself and is telegraphing me to do various things which I know are not right, and which he would not do if S. and R. were not writing dispatches for him. I wish you could go out and look through the outfit. It ought to be done quickly or there will be nothing left. If T.C.D. comes here with any authority, I propose to quit at once.97
That day in Boston, Thursday, April 22, the postponed annual stockholders’ meeting convened at the shipbuilding offices of Glidden & Williams, on State Street. From wherever they happened to be, Dodge, Snyder, Blickensderfer, Jesse Williams, Secretary Cox, President Grant, Charles Francis Adams, Horace Greeley, and all the rest, expectations rose about the long-expected election of officers, and the ouster of Thomas Clark Durant. But after a few resolutions confirming the move to Boston and the creation of the new committees, the meeting adjourned without holding the election. This did not sit well with everyone. Glidden and John M. S. Williams wired Dodge to “Please hurry Duff and Dillon back and all Government directors, yourself with them, so that we can have an election. We are not safe until we do.” But a majority of directors had decided it was too dangerous to go up against Durant until the project was done. That might be, the rationale went, only a matter of a few weeks—Dodge’s wire, received that day, reported “Central Pacific Railroad, eighteen miles from Promontory Summit. We are twelve miles from Summit.”98
Charley Crocker was hell-bent on entering the record books, and no general or colonel or other lofty-titled gentleman was going to show him up. The Union people had crowed over putting down four miles in a day, and Crocker’s men had gone better with six; then Casement had spiked eight. “Now we must take off our coats,” Crocker had told Strobridge, “but we must not beat them until we get so close together that there is not enough room for them to turn around and outdo me.” In the last week of April the time had come, and Crocker told Strobridge they would lay ten miles in a day. “How are you going to do it?” the supervisor wondered, “the men will all be in each others’ way.” Crocker laughed. “You don’t suppose we are going to put two or three thousand men on that track and let them do just as they please? I have been thinking over this for two weeks and I have it all planned.”
The feat was announced for April 27, but a locomotive derailed and postponed it twenty-four hours. At dawn on the twenty-eighth, though, Crocker’s army was impatient to begin. Dodge, Reed, Jack Casement, Dillon, Duff, and Seymour were invited to watch the work. Crocker had indeed planned everything, and although Dodge and Casement would grumble later that the Central Pacific had cheated a little by embedding its railroad ties beforehand, what ensued over the daylight hours was a miracle for the era. One by one, platform cars dumped their iron, two miles of material in each trainload, and teams of Irishmen fairly ran the five-hundred-pound rails and hardware forward; straighteners led the Chinese gangs, shoving the rails into place and keeping them to gauge while spikers walked down the ties, each man driving one particular spike and not stopping for another, moving on to the next rail; levelers and fillers followed, raising ties where needed, shoveling dirt beneath, tamping, and moving on—“no man stops,” Charley Crocker directed, “nor allows another man to pass him”—and no man, Irish or Chinese, did more than one task, each a cog in that large, dusty, sweating machine advancing up the incline toward the summit. At midday Crocker sent the last train forward, “two train-loads with two engines upon it,” he commented proudly, “and it was the heaviest train that ever went over the road,” and “it went over the very six miles we had laid in the morning, and went safely, and if the track had not been good, it could not have gotten over.” He offered to relieve the tracklayers with a reserve team—but they were adamant about finishing out the day themselves. All would get four days’ pay for the feat.
A detachment of soldiers was nearby, and came out to watch the work. “Mr. Crocker,” the commander exclaimed later that day, “I never saw such organization as that; it was just like an army marching over the ground and leaving a track built behind them.” He had walked his horse alongside the men and measured their progress as “just about as fast as a horse could walk…a good day’s march for an army.” The afternoon’s pace even included the necessary bending of rails for curves, as always done by brute strength with sledges. Other Central Pacific workers kept the telegraph wire unreeling during the day, stringing it up on freshly planted poles, and when they were all finished the news was flashed to Sacramento. “We got our forces together and laid ten miles 185 feet in one day,” Crocker would chortle later, “and that did not leave them room enough to beat us on; they could not have done it anyhow, I believe, because [when] they laid eight miles they had lanterns, and we did not use them, we laid our ten miles by daylight.”99
Dodge might have quibbled over petty details like distributing the railroad ties ahead of time, but the commander in him appreciated what Crocker had accomplished while the manager in him appraised the Cantonese tracklayers and found them eminently desirable as employees—“very quiet, handy, good cooks and good at almost everything they are put at,” he admitted to Anne Dodge. “Only trouble is, we cannot talk to them.”100
Stanford was also out at the end of track, and on the ten-mile day he wired Huntington in a final plea to get the Union Pacific officers to stop their steep grading and sharp curving on the eastern slope, and their temporary constructions, and just adopt the completed Central Pacific grade. It would be a hopeless cause, despite Huntington’s wired assurances to both Stanford and Judge Crocker that the agreement called for adoption of the Central Pacific line to Ogden; “they send no orders to the contractors,” the Judge complained from the Sacramento office. In this matter as in so many others inertia dictated; with Dodge and Ames against it, apparently the government commissioners and the interior secretary had decided on a status quo policy which would “not require serious action by the Government,” as a Union Pacific lobbyist wrote Dodge.
All of the Governor’s work adjusting the grades on the eastern slope would be for naught, though there was still ample reason to complain about the quality of the newer work—“the track passes over a piece of trestle which if we had possession we would not attempt to run over,” the Judge protested, “but would immediately replace with new trestle or fill.” And Stanford’s reports home about prickly conditions on Promontory Summit also prompted the Judge’s commentary. “The U. P. people at end of track act ugly about everything,” he told Huntington, “& talk that we will never get possession of the track to Ogden. Of course this settles nothing, but shows the animus of the ruling spirits.” Crocker had been trying to negotiate with Webster Snyder in Omaha about setting through rates, with some difficulty: the Judge proposed setting the rate from Sacramento to Omaha at $125 in greenbacks, divided equally between the two companies. Even $100 for first-class passage was acceptable, and when the steamship companies responded by lowering their fares Crocker could see dropping “down to 90, 80, & even to 60, when we get cars enough to take the crowd, & if it should prove necessary.” But he expected resistance to the idea of equal division of tariffs; the distance from Sacramento to Promontory was 690 miles, and to Ogden, 744 miles; between Ogden and Omaha it was 1,032 miles, or 1,776 in total. “The great cost of surmounting the Sierras, and operating without coal or cheap fuel, entitles us to an equal division between the two roads,” he argued. Truly, this would be a controversy not easily settled, and if Snyder was not the one with the power to negotiate he hoped Huntington would get someone sent out before this last late work was done.101
As the company’s major task was nearly completed, the Associates looked toward the growing empire—and to new horizons. Work had continued, albeit at a slower pace through the late winter and spring, on the Southern Pacific (with a twenty-five-mile report ready for the commissioners) and the Western Pacific (with twenty miles); the latter had been slower because of the timber shortage and the number of bridges required between Sacramento and Stockton, and the many swollen freshets which had made construction difficult at that time of year. Consolidation of the California & Oregon with the Yuba Railroad was still held up by evasive Yuba bonds and unresolved debts, which Hopkins and the Judge were not willing to absorb. Crocker was also looking for ways to improve their Oakland waterfront property; the nearest rock for landfill was, ironically, on craggy Goat Island, and although the local army commander said he had no military objection to their mining it, the Judge knew this was something Huntington must handle in Washington.
With his reduced physical strength. Judge Crocker’s office time was mostly consumed with these corporate interests in the state, but he—like Stanford and Hopkins—was enthusiastic about what might be a significant sideline to their railroad business. Lloyd Tevis and D. O. Mills had come to the Associates proposing they all form a Pacific Express Company, with a capital of about $8 million, with the Associates having a majority of the stock but none of the management duties. “One thing is certain,” Crocker wrote Huntington, “the express business between here & Salt Lake & on this coast will be of vast magnitude…while the business between Salt Lake & the East will be comparatively small.” Of course cooperation with the Union Pacific would be necessary. “In fact,” the Judge said, “Durant & Stanford agreed that the Cos. would co-operate in the matter & do nothing without mutual consent.” Time was growing short, but it seemed important that they get something in place before the two companies joined track at Promontory.102
Quickly, of course, this became only a matter of days. On Saturday, May 1, Charley Crocker scribbled a telegram to New York. “Our track is completed,” he informed Huntington jubilantly. “The U. P. will meet us on the Eighth or Tenth of May.”103
The four special commissioners—Warren, Blickensderfer, Clement, and Williamson—were still in Washington at the end of April, expected to finish their report and recommendations on both roads within days. But Dodge had already found a distressing amount of faulty construction in western Wyoming and Utah which was certain to raise flags; some of it was so bad that he would never let a train cross. The principal bridge contractor, L. B. Boomer, had sent Dodge a written protest refusing to put any more prefabricated bridges on their masonry, which had been done by subcontractors working for Dodge’s former assistant, James Evans. “Three of his bridges have gone down, the masonry failing to support their weight only, no cars having run over them,” Dodge wrote Oliver Ames glumly. “Two others are giving way.” He had seen bad work like this back on Lodgepole Creek, but said he was going out himself to inspect. “Though closely watched it seems we cannot trust masons who have had the reputation of being No. 1 and honest, unless we employ an engineer to every structure to stand right over them while they put in a drain that will hardly cost as much as the engineer’s salary.” A few days later, having reached western Wyoming to see things for himself, he found things in shambles. Seymour had on a whim moved the location of a bridge over Black’s Fork, and Evans had done likewise on the span over Green River, both now requiring a train to lurch and veer onto the new tangent. Dodge ordered the temporary track and bridges left in place and wired he would not accept the permanent structures for the line. Worse than the bad engineering was the outright thievery. “The contractors who put in masonry on Sulphur Creek should not be paid,” he wrote angrily to Sidney Dillon, who was now deciding—with a logic known only to himself—which bills would be honored.
The abutments of five bridges are breaking and tumbling down. The Masonry on Bear River is worthless, the backing is dirt and free stone set on edge, and I doubt if there is a bond in any one of the piers. They are now delivering red sandstone there to put a course on top to cover their miserable work. I do not believe the masonry will hold up a truss and the placing of heavy sandstone on the piers will only help crush them. I should put truss on trestles and rebuild the entire work.104
Similar problems became evident along Bitter Creek. A. P. Wood, the construction engineer working for Reed, had been ordered earlier in the winter to put up permanent bridges when the government directors threatened to hold up their reports on the sections. “I want you to go there and select the best rock you can find,” Reed had told Wood, “and get a force of quarry men and masons at work.” As Wood later recalled,
Any man of judgment knew that Bitter rock was worthless for bridge masonry. But what were we to do? An emergency existed. We could not build the railroad without money. I did as I was told to do. I soon had two or three of the smallest bridges completed and the track changed to the main line. This satisfied the directors and they allowed the money to flow again, and all went well until warm weather came, when the masonry dissolved, the bridges became unsafe and the road was put back on the temporary crossing.105
Expediency was one thing, but what Dodge had been astounded to find along the line was clearly of a lower order. Snyder had been warning Dodge of the corner-cutting and the plunder, but to his discredit the chief engineer had been too busy to pay full attention, and unwilling to suspect some of the people he knew personally as being corrupt. To the end he would vouch for James Evans and Samuel B. Reed, for instance, and most historians have gone along, probably with good reason. Meanwhile, the complaints poured into the Operations Department, and Snyder obligingly forwarded them in typical high dudgeon. Excess material and tools stood all along the line until employees or passersby darted in like hungry fish to get a nibble. In Utah, Silas Seymour had seized a stack of company lumber and had set carpenters to work on a two-story house on a Union Pacific–owned lot, and it seemed that even Jenny Reed—who had come out to Echo City with her children some months before—was readying the company-provided quarters for shipment back to Joliet. “Seymour the Colonel looks at these things as his private property,” Snyder was told, “while Mrs. Reed marks all furniture, bedding etc. with S. B. R.—may they long live and prosper.” Snyder was ready to burst with indignation. “I am heartily sick of this outfit,” he ranted to Dodge on May 4, “that talks so much about cleaning out thieves & yet weakens when in presence of the thieves & will let thousands be stolen under their own eyes while looking after old flaws & scrapes.”106 He would not be surprised, and in some measure would be relieved when, in less than three months, Oliver Ames would sack him, blaming the messenger instead of the miscreants.
In New York on Friday, April 30, Jim Fisk served injunctions on all the banks where he thought money belonging to the Union Pacific or Crédit Mobilier might still be lurking, “but,” as Oliver Ames told Dodge, “we were too sharp for them. Bushnell was advised by one of Fisk’s men who had been watching us for weeks, that the injunctions were to be served, and so he was prepared for them.” The Fisk operative said that his employer would not pay him as agreed so he offered to work for Bushnell. Meanwhile, things were still lively at 20 Nassau Street; despite the fact that all signs for the Union Pacific company were removed from the lobby and the upstairs corridors and the offices were vacated, Durant had craftily rented the rooms for himself. Incomprehensibly, not all the records had been removed when the doctor took possession; he gleefully seized the trustees’ books. His private secretary, Henry C. Crane, refused to give them to the Union Pacific, although he permitted treasurer Benjamin Ham to at least look at them and make copies. On some level Ames had been warned by the proceedings in Judge Barnard’s court that his company’s accounting practices were in criminal disarray—contractors’ and suppliers’ drafts by the hundreds, representing millions upon millions of dollars, appeared in New York and were paid without question or oversight approval of a company officer, the casual revelation of which dumbfounded most of those hearing it in the courtroom. It was, though, worse than anyone might have expected. As he peered at Crane’s handwriting, Ham found one mysterious entry after another: drafts paid out with cryptic, dubious, or nonexistent explanations, duplicate and triplicate payments, with Crane unable to explain any of them. One $10,000 draft had been paid on a note Crane failed to reclaim, but he said he could not remember whose note it was or when it was paid. Taken together, the holes in those accounting books amounted to a good-sized grave for the corporation, and Ham as well as the Ames brothers despaired of ever completely plumbing their depths. “When we can get our Books away from NY and cleaned out from that sink of corruption,” Oakes Ames grumbled to Dodge, “we shall feel safe and not until then.”107
Any vision of safety Congressman Ames might have experienced was purely illusory. And he could not fathom what had overtaken the usually steady Sidney Dillon out west; his wires were verging on the hysterical, and his demands for money went beyond comprehension. Oliver Ames wired him and John Duff to cease drawing on the now-nonexistent New York office and the bank accounts they were rushing to close. Dillon’s telegraphed reply was like a howl from the wilderness: “We must have five hundred thousand dollars to pay contractors’ men immediately or road cannot run.” Oakes Ames wondered wanly if Dillon knew what he was doing. “He wants to draw on N. York and Boston both,” he commented on May 4 to Glidden and Williams in Boston, “and for all kinds of sums and [I] think he must be confused in his operations and the large amounts he wants to draw rather surprises me.”108
By this time Dr. Durant was on a westbound train, intent as vice president on being the ranking Union Pacific officer at the joining ceremony—and taking credit for the whole gigantic enterprise. President Ames had been advised to stay in Boston by company attorneys because of outstanding legal matters, and told by them that as long as he commanded from the new home office, the Doctor could usurp no more powers; the edict had already gone forth that only Dillon or Duff was authorized to approve any more expenditures. Durant, however, was never short of schemes.
On May 6, a Thursday, Grenville Dodge wired Ames that the two companies would connect their rails on Promontory Summit on Saturday, May 8. Everywhere in the nation, citizens readied themselves for a tumultuous outpouring as the Atlantic and Pacific coasts were finally, after decades of expectation, linked by twin bands of iron, at unimaginable cost and only barely foreseeable benefit.