Transcontinental Railroad I
Episode WM14: Working on the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads
No recorded lecture accompanies this lesson.
Transcontinental Railroad
Many times the wrong train took me to the right place. —Paulo Coelho
Introduction
In 1787, Alexander Hamilton made the 90-mile trip from New York to Philadelphia to attend the first Constitutional Convention. It took him three days, no faster than, say, Julius Caesar would have taken 2,000 years earlier. At the end of the 18th century, people still traveled overland no faster than a horse could carry them—a slow horse, given road conditions.
If you define a railroad as cars running on a track, the first appeared in the 16th century and were custom-built for European mines. A key innovation was flanged wheels to keep the cars on the track. Lacking a power source, they were pulled by men or horses.
Credit for inventing the first self-propelled vehicle generally goes to French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, who in 1770 built the world's first full-size, self-propelled mechanical vehicle. But it was a land vehicle—effectively the world's first automobile.
In 1804, British inventor Richard Trevithick developed a steam locomotive that ran on tracks. He used it to drag a load of iron nine miles at five miles per hour. The age of the railroad was born.
Early trains were handicapped by the weakness of iron rails, but improvements in track materials and design made by engineers such as George Stephenson soon made railroads practical. More innovations followed.
In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, in England, was the first train to carry both freight and passengers—at 15 miles per hour. That same year John Stevens built the first steam locomotive in the U.S. and demonstrated it on the lawn of his home in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O to Monopoly players), the first railroad company in the U.S., was chartered two years later.
Railroads grew quickly in the 19th century and became a major force in the economic and social life of nations around the world. In the wide open spaces of the U.S., trains were especially important.
As more track was laid, railroad companies sprang up, especially in the Northeast. The first phase of railroad development, from 1828 to about 1850, involved connecting relatively large cities to one another. Railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt built the New York Central, which connected New York and Boston in the East with St’ Louis and Chicago in the West. The Erie Railroad connected New York City to Buffalo, and later Chicago.
Most, but not all, European countries conformed to Great Britain’s track width (gauge) of 4 feet 8.5 inches between the inside faces of rails. In Russian and Finland, they settled on 5 feet; in Spain and Portugal, 5 feet 6 inches. Though the U.S. eventually conformed to Britain’s standard, some states initially had different gauges.
The steam-powered locomotive was cutting-edge technology for decades, but by 1900 electric engines were operational; by the middle of the 20th century, diesel-electric locomotives were the rage.
Specialty cars were developed to transport freight and passengers. Freight cars (called “goods wagons” in Britain) included closed boxcars, open-top gondola and hopper cars, and flatcars. To carry specialty freight, tank, livestock and refrigerator cars were invented. Coaches, dining cars, and sleepers were developed for passengers.
Tracks Across the Nation
In 1832, a Michigan newspaper ran an editorial urging a cross-country railroad. Since the Unites States then had only 130 miles of track, most people dismissed the idea.
With the 1848 discovery of gold (see lessons 13-14), fortune seekers poured into California. Traveling overland took at least five months and often cost lives. As many saw it, the West would never truly be settled until train tracks linked the coasts.
Clearly a transcontinental railroad would reduce the risks of going west. It would shrink the journey from months to days and knit the country together. But no businessman would attempt such a project without government help. The distances, costs, and risks of failure were too great.
It was only through the Government’s help that anything this gargantuan in size could be accomplished, much like landing on the Moon. It was not rugged individualists who built the railroad; it was rugged corporations. It was the rugged federal government that came up with the federal loans and the land grants that enabled it to be built.—T.H. Watkins, historian
The Route
On a chilly October day in 1860, engineer Theodore Judah and Daniel “Doc” Strong urged their horses along a ridge toward Donner Pass (elev. 7,017’) in the High Sierra. It had been a strenuous ride to the pass. But as they dismounted and looked east, a smile broke over Judah’s face.
Doc Strong, actually a druggist from Dutch Flat, pointed out the old emigrant road snaking up from Donner Lake. It was the route the first pioneers had taken to California. Though mostly abandoned after the Donner Party tragedy 13 years earlier, Strong said it offered the best chance for the railroad Judah wanted to build. Other routes across the rugged Sierra range passed over two summits; the Donner route posed only one.
That night, as Judah and Strong camped in the mountains, it began to snow. In danger of becoming snowbound, they rose in the middle of the night, packed up, and found the snow-blanketed trail. Hours later, cold and wet, they arrived back at Dutch Flat and Strong’s store. Judah, unable to sleep, got out his notes and began making calculations.
Next morning Judah said, “Doctor, I shall make my survey over this, the Donner Pass, or Dutch Flat route, above every other.” He asked Strong for some paper, then sat down and drew up Articles of Association for what would become the Central Pacific Railroad. Pushing the papers across the table to Strong, Judah said, “Sign up for what [how much stock] you want.”
Crazy Judah
Theodore Judah had been passionate about trains since boyhood. As a young man, the idea of building a railroad across the country gripped him. He spoke on the subject with such fervor that some thought him mad. “Crazy Judah,” they called him.
But Judah was no crackpot. As chief engineer, he’d laid tracks through the Niagara River gorge in New York. He’d also built the Sacramento Valley Railroad. California’s first line, it connected Sacramento to Folsom, 22 miles away in the Sierra foothills. Laying track through the high mountains, he thought, would be only slightly more difficult.
No businessman would invest money in such a mammoth project on Judah’s hunch. He needed to conduct a proper survey, and that would cost money. When he approached wealthy merchants in San Francisco, financial capital of the West, they scoffed at him. In response to their questions about costs, Judah had only educated guesses.
Judah next met with businessmen in Sacramento. This time he didn’t try to pitch a transcontinental railroad, something no one in the world had ever built. Instead he focused on the benefits that merchants would reap from a road over the Sierra, linking Sacramento to Virginia City. Silver had recently been discovered in Virginia City. It was known as the Comstock Lode.
“You are businessmen,” Judah reminded them, “merchants with goods to sell to the Nevada miners. You will have control of business that will make your fortune in trade. If nothing more, you can own a wagon road, if not a railroad.”
Almost everyone in 1861 thought it impossible to lay track over the Sierra. But four Sacramento merchants could at least see the value of a wagon road over those mountains. Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford agreed to pay for a preliminary survey of possible Sierra routes.
Central Pacific
On June 28, 1861, Theodore Judah and the four Sacramento merchants—the Big Four, as they’d be known—formed the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California. Charles Crocker later explained their motivation: “We none of us knew anything about railroad building, but at the same time were enterprising men, and anxious to have a road built and have it come to Sacramento.”
Judah’s completed surveys confirmed the superiority of the Donner Pass route. It was time to pitch the idea to the federal government. He and his wife Anna traveled to Washington D.C., with charts, graphs, and maps. Judah was given an office in the Capitol building, where he unfurled a 60-foot-wide map of the proposed route across the mountains.
For weeks he cornered congressmen and chattered excitedly about his ideas. This is where the bridges and tunnels will go, he’d say. Here are the curves, grades, water tanks, and depots. He raved about how he would bridge ravines, carve ledges out of sheer rock faces, and blast tunnels through granite mountains.
With the Civil War raging, Congress resisted starting such a costly project. It required a second trip to Washington for the Indefatigable Judah, but ultimately he found an ally in the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, a former railroad worker and lawyer.
During the winter of 1861-62, Judah worked tirelessly for legislation to aid his railroad. So did a group of eastern promoters who wanted to build west from the Missouri River. President Lincoln strongly supported their campaigns. He believed a transcontinental railroad would keep California on the Union side in the Civil War.
Railway Act of 1862
For years Congress had debated where in the East such a railroad would start. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas argued for Chicago as a terminus; Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton pushed for his home state; Secretary of War Jefferson Davis wanted a southern terminus. Due to sectional rivalries, no bill could be passed.
Then Lincoln was elected president, the South seceded from the Union, and no Southerners remained in Congress to oppose a northern route. Congress passed and Lincoln signed the Railway Act of 1862. For a time Judah was a happy man.
The bill gave two companies the job of laying track across the continent. Judah’s own Central Pacific (CP) would start in Sacramento and push eastward over the high mountains and out into the Nevada desert. The Union Pacific (UP) would start from the Missouri River (Omaha today), cross the Great Plains, and cut through the Rocky Mountains. No one knew where they’d meet.
Both companies would receive subsidies from the U.S. Treasury: $16,000 per mile of level track laid; $32,000 in the foothills; $48,000 in the steep mountains. Washington lobbyists soon got those rates doubled. Each company also received 6,400 acres of federal land for every mile of track laid. By the time the last rail was spiked, CP and UP land holdings exceeded the size of California.
Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford, CP president and newly elected governor of California, found a way to further soak the government. They persuaded an adaptable geologist, Josiah Whitney, to label the gently sloping Sacramento Valley “mountainous” a mere seven miles from Sacramento. A more accurate figure would be 25 miles. In this way the CP collected the highest rate for laying track having only a slight incline.
The Breakup
Judah had begun to mistrust the Big Four. He openly questioned both their honesty and their dedication to the project. They were about making money; he was about building an engineering marvel, a monument for posterity.
The merchants retaliated by weakening Judah’s authority. They criticized his survey lines and cancelled his contracts with iron makers in Pittsburgh. The partners came to agree on only one thing: one side had to buy out the other.
On the morning of January 8, 1863, in downtown Sacramento, Governor Leland Stanford threw the first shovelful of dirt for the CP. Thousands looked on, including dignitaries seated in a grandstand draped in bunting. Speechmakers predicted the coming of “a mighty tide of wealth such as mankind has never realized before.”
Everybody felt happy because after so many years of dreaming, scheming, talking, and toiling, they saw with their own eyes the actual commencement of a Pacific railroad.—Sacramento Union
Theodore Judah didn’t attend the ceremonies. Determined to buy out the Big Four, he and Anna had left for New York to find investors. From San Francisco they traveled south by ship to Panama, by train across the jungle-snarled isthmus, then north by ship to New York.
By the time Judah’s ship docked at Manhattan, he was delirious with yellow fever. Carried on a litter to a sickbed at the Metropolitan Hotel, the 37-year-old engineer died before the news reached him: The first rails of the Central Pacific had been spiked to their ties.
It was October 26, 1863, and the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were locked in a great race.
The Chinese
At first both companies recruited Irish immigrants. But too few were willing to be a soldier in the “anvil army,” especially out west. Not until the Civil War ended, in April 1865, did the UP fill out its workforce. Former slaves and war-weary soldiers hired on in droves.
Meanwhile, the CP found a different solution to its labor problem. In spring 1865, Charles Crocker hired a construction boss named Harvey Strobridge, a tough, blustery, no-nonsense man. At first Strobridge, too, relied mostly on Irish workers to fill out his grading and track-laying crews. But he had trouble keeping dependable men. Many worked just long enough to bum a free ride to the railhead, then set out for Virginia City to prospect for silver.
Crocker’s plans called for a workforce of 10,000 men. But as the CP began laying track into the mountains, the company had only 600 workers it could count on. California was still sparsely populated, and most men preferred working closer to a town or mining for gold or silver. The CP plastered recruiting posters all over northern California: “Wanted! 5000 men for good pay.” Only 200 applied for the job.
Desperate, Crocker urged Strobridge to try some Chinese workers. Strobridge resisted. “I will not boss Chinese,” he groused. They were too small, too frail, too inexperienced. Indeed, most Chinese men were tiny—often under 5 feet 4 inches and 120 pounds.
“No, they can do it,” Crocker insisted. “They built the Great Wall of China.”
Strobridge agreed to try 50 Chinese workers for a month. They arrived from China wearing baggy blue cotton pants, basket hats, and blue blouses. The Irish workers made fun of their pigtails, strange outfits and eating habits. But they worked hard and Strobridge hired 50 more Chinese.
Charles Crocker crossed the Pacific to China to recruit workers in Kwangtung province. For decades that area had suffered from famine, war, flooding, and economic depression. To many denizens of Kwangtung, working on a railroad gang was a step up in life. Thousands of Chinese immigrants, ages 13 to 60, arrived in California to work on the railroad. Soon 80 percent of the company’s workforce was Chinese.
As Boss Strobridge discovered, the Chinese were indeed hard working and reliable. Six days a week, up to 12 hours a day, they chopped down trees, blasted out cuts, and filled in cavernous holes to level the grade. They also missed fewer days due to illness than white workers. They cooked their own food and boiled water for tea. Because they didn’t drink straight from the river, they escaped the dysentery that ravaged other camps.
Journalist Charles Nordhoff wrote of the Chinese:
They do not drink or fight or strike . . . and it is always said of them that they are very cleanly in their habits. It is the custom among them, after they have had their suppers every evening, to bathe with the help of small tubs. I doubt if the white laborers do as much.
In the mountains the Chinese did dangerous work that few whites would tackle, at least not for the dollar a day the railroad was paying. Better to work on the docks for four dollars a day or try to strike it rich in the gold or silver fields.
The Chinese helped the CP blast 15 high-altitude tunnels through solid Sierra granite. At a place called Cape Horn, they faced their greatest challenge: carve a roadbed out of a giant cliff. To accomplish this, reed-thin Chinese men were lowered over cliffs in wicker baskets they’d woven themselves. Hanging by ropes thousands of feet above the American River, they gouged, hammered, drilled, and blasted holes in some of the hardest rock in North America.
When a hole was about a foot deep, they filled it with black powder, attached a fuse, lit it, and shouted to their mates the Chinese equivalent of “Up!” The explosions went off right below them and some were killed.
A reporter described the explosions shattering the preternatural mountain silence above Donner Lake:
. . . immense volumes of fire and dense clouds of smoke from the mountainside, as if a mighty volcano was rending it to atoms. Huge masses of rock and debris were rent and heaved up in the commotion. Then came the thunders of explosion like a lightning stroke, reverberating along the hills and canyons, as if the whole artillery of Heaven was in play. Huge masses of rock rolled down the deep declivity, and pieces weighing 200 pounds were thrown a distance of a mile.
In spring 1867, the Chinese went on strike. Three thousand of them stopped work, demanding an eight-hour workday and the same rights as whites. One complaint: The company provided meals for white workers but not Chinese workers.
Some whites called the Chinese “Crocker’s pets,” but he showed them no favoritism. He claimed, without evidence, that the strike had been planned by the rival Union Pacific. In retaliation, he cut off the Chinese food supply. Then he threatened to import freed slaves to replace any Chinese who didn’t return to work. When a mob of “deputized” whites showed up brandishing weapons, the Chinese gave up the fight.
They got a small raise to $35 a month, but still worked a 12-hour day and received no free food.
Working on the Railroad: Central Pacific
The CP labored up and over the rugged High Sierra through the worst back-to-back winters in recorded history. In 1866 alone, 44 storms blasted their sites. In one four-day stretch, six feet of snow fell. “No one can face these storms when they are in earnest,” recalled engineer John Gilliss.
Near Donner Pass, winter snowpack (not snowfall) averaged 18 feet. Many workers did nothing but shovel snow. Crews dug a maze of tunnels beneath the snow to link their campsites and worksites. All winter long the Chinese labored in dingy snow caves beneath massive drifts. They worked by dim lamplight. Airshafts punched through snow roofs offered inadequate ventilation. For months they lived like moles.
Avalanches were a constant threat. “Snow slides carried away our camps,” one railroad official reported, “and we lost a good many men.”
Hundreds of Chinese perished each winter, most from the cold, some from untimely explosions and other accidents. Frozen, buried bodies sometimes went undiscovered until spring. Meanwhile, Crocker kept sending replacement workers to the railhead. In all, more than 1,200 Chinese are believed to have died working for the Central Pacific.
The Big Four finally accepted that, to keep trains running through the winter, they’d have to build snowsheds. In all, the CP constructed 37 miles of peak-roofed barns to protect the track. It added $20,000 per mile to their costs.
Working on the Railroad: Union Pacific
For UP railroad workers, laying track through 500 miles of Nebraska flatlands had its advantages. While the Central Pacific was floundering in the Sierra, the Union Pacific was setting down two to three miles of track a day.
On the other hand, the land was unendingly flat and monotonous. For UP workers, one day was much like any other. Let’s take a look . . .
The men stir at first light. Many have spent the night in railroad cars provided by the company. They sleep in berths four or five high. With bathing rare, the stench inside the cars could make your knees buckle. The men are used to it, but the fresh morning air is still welcome.
Some men are already at work feeding hay to horses and mules. Over at the portable blacksmith shop, a dozen smiths clangingly repair tools and shoe horses and mules. At the nearby harness shop, men repair collars, traces, and other leather equipment.
Gaze east and you see the rails, two metal ribbons stretching to the horizon. A single-file army of new telegraph poles runs alongside the track. The wire from the last pole is strung into a railroad car that serves as telegraph office. Look west and you see a graded roadbed marked by berms of newly piled earth.
Graders linger over dying campfires, nursing coffee, waiting for the signal to start work. As the lead team, their job is to clear a level roadbed for the track gang to follow. Working miles behind the track gang, another crew will ballast the roadbed.
The work signal sounds and the bustle begins. Trains arrive with supplies and materials for the day’s work. Foremen gallop back and forth on horseback, shouting orders. Men throw rails, ties, and other material off the cars, then the empty train is drawn back out of the way. Ties and rails—700 pounds each, requiring five men to lift—are then loaded onto flat cars and hauled by horses to where they’re needed.
The rail gang takes the rails from the flat cars and lays them on the ties. A man on each side distributes spikes, two for each tie; another hands out splice bars; a third distributes the bolts and nuts by which the rails are spliced together. Two more men follow, adjusting the track with crowbars. The ties are put in place and spiked by another gang, who also level the track, readying it for the ballasters.
Historian T.H. Watkins described the cacophony:
The donkey engines coming in and getting out, hauling in materials, the clatter and bustle and the work around you at all times, the clanging of the sledgehammers on the rails echoing in the wilderness that had never known anything like this, ever. The sounds of the locomotives belching smoke into a previously pristine sky. There had never been a sound like this . . . ever.
Next Topic: Transcontinental Railroad II
One of the most famous meetings in history occurred in 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah, when the Central Pacific and Union Pacific came together and the final spike was driven with great ceremony.
Video Resource: I can strongly recommend the documentary film entitled Transcontinental Railroad. Two hours long, it is part of the PBS American Experience series.
Ruminations
1) If Theodore Judah had lived long enough to buy out the Big Four, how differently might things have turned out for the railroad, the workers, and/or the public?
2) How do you explain the anti-Chinese feeling, both on the railroad and later when the Chinese settled in California?