Men Against Mountains

kicker

Oscar Lewis None

April 1st, 1938 May 28th, 2022

CHAPTERS 1-11

BY

OSSCAR LEWIS

MEN AGAINST MOUNTAINS

By Oscar Lewis

The California epic of one dreamer and four Sacramento shopkeepers who carved out a transcontinental railroad. This is the story of the great Central Pacific, the fight of brains and brawn which men waged against the Sierras until the last golden spike welded together the United States.

THANKS to its sunshine, its seacoast, and its scenarios, California contains more living writers than any other state in the Union. Some come seeking for health and retirement; others for warmth and relaxation; many for the script writing for which Hollywood pays so temptingly. This army of authors is gathered from the four corners of the earth; only a few are native-born, and only a very few are aware of the literary gold that still lies undiscovered in the California hills.

Oscar Lewis was born in San Francisco in 1893 and wants no liner place to live. His first short stories appeared in print while he was still attending high school in Berkeley; with this encouragement he canceled his resolve to go to the University of California and, in his own words, “set up business as an author.” During the next six years he published between 500 and 600 manuscripts, most of them in boys’ magazines. Fortunately for his growing mind, the war slowed down his assembly line. From June 1917 to May 1919 he served in the Ambulance Corps in the United States and France. Again in 1922-1923 he managed to finance a year in Europe, writing travel and political articles. But, save for these two distractions, California has held her own. Back in San Francisco, he became secretary of the Book Club of California, which publishes limited editions of books on California history and literature, fine printing, and the like. He has edited and written introductions to a dozen volumes, has contributed to the leading periodicals, and during the past decade has found time to write three books: Hearn and His Biographers (1930); The Origin of the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1931); A History of San Francisco (1932).

In 1933 Mr. Lewis set about gathering the materials for a book which in his own mind he called The Big Four, but which the Atlantic editors have rechristened Men against Mountains. Here is his account of what happened: “I had always thought the ’70s and ’80s a particularly colorful period in San Francisco’s history and had mapped out a novel to be laid on Nob Hill. As I read of the period, however, I grew fascinated by the careers of the HuntingtonStanford group, and the result was that I decided to try to do their biographies instead. So the Nob Hill story is still in the future.”

Now with each twelve months of the Atlantic

THREE GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR

MEN AGAINST MOUNTAINS

BY OSCAR LEWIS

I. JUDAH AND CROCKER

THEODORE DEHONE JUDAH died in 1863, at the age of thirty-seven years and eight months, and he was forgotten almost at once. He was never considered an entirely normal man and there were times when he was a trial to his pretty wife, who had been Anna Pierce, a belle of Greenfield, Massachusetts. Miss Pierce, daughter of a senior warden of the Greenfield Episcopal Church, had not been raised to be the wife of an eccentric man whose condition was complicated by a touch of genius.

During his lifetime the word ‘fanatic’ was not considered too strong to apply to him even by his friends. Men said: ‘Here comes Crazy Judah!’ But Crazy Judah was crazy only on the subject of a transcontinental railroad.

He was born on March 4, 1826, at Bridgeport, Connecticut. His father, an Episcopal minister, moved from Bridgeport to Troy, New York, where he presently died, and the boy Theodore gave up the expectation of a career in the navy — his brother Henry, later a brigadier general, was already at West Point. Theodore began the study of engineering at a local technical school. A railroad was being built from Troy to Schenectady, and Theodore stepped from the classroom into the practical business of construction. He continued to build railroads and to discuss railroads and to dream railroads as long as he lived.

When he was twenty-two, he lived in a cottage he had built for his bride at the edge of the Niagara River, ‘between the falls and Suspension Bridge . . . with a beautiful view of both the falls and the whirlpool rapids below.’ He was then planning and building the Niagara Gorge Railroad, one of the engineering marvels of the ’40s. Earlier, he had helped build bridges in Vermont, surveyed railroads in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and overseen the construction of a section of the Erie Canal. A few years later, in 1854, when he was at Buffalo building part of the present Erie system, an urgent telegram summoned him to New York.

In his absence his wife, who had moved twenty times in half a dozen years, wondered where the next jump would take them. On the afternoon of the third day a telegram informed her: ‘Be home to-night; we sail for California April second.’

‘You can imagine my consternation,’ she wrote.

Judah was twenty-eight — studious, industrious, resourceful, opinionated, humorless, and extraordinarily competent. The New York message took him to the office of Governor Horatio Seymour, where he was introduced to C. L. Wilson, president of an unbuilt railroad that was expected some day to operate between Sacramento and a placer-mining district in the Sierra foothills. Wilson had come east to engage a chief engineer.

For once Judah was not enthusiastic. California was not unknown to him; a brother, Charles, had been practising law in San Francisco’s new Montgomery Block since 1850. His letters home told of the uncertainty and harshness of life on the far coast. Besides, the Atlantic states just then were a hive of railroadbuilding activity. This hard-working young man was already known in his profession, and progressively more important works were being thrust upon him. Nonetheless, the Westerner talked so well that two nights later Judah was pacing the parlor of his home in Buffalo, trying to awaken a spark of enthusiasm in his hesitant wife. ‘Anna, I’m going to California to be the pioneer railroad engineer of the Pacific Coast! ’

To her it seemed a journey full of unknown dangers, with a raw and probably barbarous land at its end, and three weeks were far too little time to shop and pack and say good-bye. Judah ignored these details. Once he had told her that she always wore the right pair of gaiters; she must continue to deserve the compliment.

They were deposited at last in San Francisco, with its brilliant sunshine and cold winds, alien and teeming and expensive. At Sacramento, Judah found that he was no longer practising a familiar profession in a country where railroads were already a commonplace. The screech of a locomotive was yet to be heard west of the Rockies. Not a length of rail had been laid. From Monterey to Shasta the Iron Horse meant excitement quite as much as transportation. In 1854, Californians believed in the economic value of railroads with a faith that had been entirely unshaken by experience. Railroad building was fast becoming a business in the East; here it remained sheer romance. Oil lamps burned late each evening in the upstairs office in the Hastings Building while new friends hung on the words of this intense, argumentative Easterner.

All discussions swung round to the most exciting possibility of all, to the railroad that would span the continent. Here was a project young Judah found completely fascinating. He was a man bewitched and hypnotized, dazzled by the magnitude of the conception. Even before he had left the East, the possibility of spanning the continent with bands of railroad iron had been insistently present in his thoughts; it had remained close to the surface during the years while he was gaining experience and testing his capabilities on minor projects. ‘He had always read, talked and studied the problem,’ wrote Anna Judah years later. He had been ready to argue the feasibility of a Pacific railroad with anyone who would listen. During these early years his calm wife had borne the brunt of his monologues. One prophecy was repeated so often that thirty years later it remained in her memory: ‘It will be built, and I’m going to have something to do with it.’

Not love of pioneering but the hope of gain had drawn many of his listeners from their normal settings. Mountain solitudes, raw mining camps, and valley towns formed an alien and unfriendly environment, and home was still the farm or store or office stool beyond the Mississippi. These were the ones who climbed the stairs at Second and J streets, nightly crowding the office of the Sacramento Valley Railroad to hear young Judah holding forth the promise of fast, easy, cheap communication with home.

II

There was little new about his promises. Others had been discussing a railroad to the Pacific before Judah was born. Since the discovery of gold, pledges to support the project had become stock planks in all political platforms from Maine to Sacramento. ‘No candidate for Congress,’ wrote California’s veteran journalist ‘Old Block’ in 1869, ‘could be popular unless he endorsed the Pacific Railroad.’ In 1852 Congress authorized the Secretary of War to conduct surveys to locate ‘the most economical and practical route for a railroad to the Pacific from the Mississippi.5 Resulting official reports were embodied in seven quarto volumes, as handsomely made as any ever to issue from the Government Printing Office.

‘The Government,’ wrote John C. Burch, a California Congressman and friend of Judah, ‘had expended hundreds of thousands of dollars in explorations, and elaborate reports thereof had been made and published in immense volumes, containing beautiful and expensive engravings showing the most picturesque and wonderful scenery in the world on the route of the exploration; highly colored pictures of the topography, accompanied by exact representations of the animals, birds, fishes, reptiles, shrubs and flowers found on the route . . . yet all this did not demonstrate the practicability of a route, nor show the surveys, elevations, profiles, grades or estimates of the cost of constructing the road over the route finally adopted.5

These handsome but useless volumes were not yet published when Judah reached California. He arrived in midMay 1854, and on May 30 his report and preliminary survey for the proposed Sacramento Valley line were in the hands of his employers. His estimate of the business of the road — a matter difficult to compute in a country without railroads — had been arrived at by placing men on wagon roads paralleling the proposed route. Day and night for a week they kept count of the number of passengers on stages and estimated the tonnage of the freight-carrying wagon trains. Judah considered the prospects uncommonly good: ‘With such a road and such a business, it is difficult to conceive of a more profitable undertaking.5 Events proved that any number of more profitable undertakings might have been conceived, but this engineer was an optimist born.

Soon the optimist formed a friendship with the editor of the Sacramento Union, then the great journal of the Coast. Through its columns he was able to pursue his obsession before vastly larger audiences. Each step in the progress of the twenty-one-mile road was religiously recorded in the pages of the Union. By the middle of February 1855, a hundred men were grading the roadbed, and the clipper ship Wingèd Racer was completing a five months’ run to the Golden Gate with the first cargo of iron rails ever to round the Horn. Two weeks later the Union contained this item: ‘On yesterday was exhibited to us by Mr. Judah a handsome ring, manufactured from gold found in the direct line of the railroad now in construction between this city and Negro Bar.5 Inside its band was a legend: ‘Sacramento Valley Railroad, March 4, 1855. First gold ever taken from earth in making Railroad bank.5 March 4 was Judah’s birthday. He was twenty-nine; he had eight years to live.

Five months later officials of the new line — Judah, Morse, Carroll, and Robinson — bent in unison and lifted a handcar on to the newly laid track. The car was pushed a hundred yards before they descended, first to travel on a Pacific Coast railroad. A few days later, crowds of loafers congregated on the Sacramento levee while winches strained to lift a fifteen-ton locomotive from the deck of a river boat. On August 19 a delegation of San Franciscans, crowded on two tiny flatcars and half-suffocated by clouds of dust from the unballasted roadbed, were drawn to the head of construction fifteen miles away. The next year, on Washington’s Birthday, an excursion and grand ball celebrated the completion of the road.

This seemed the auspicious dawn of railroad building on the Coast. The line to Folsom cut a day from the long haul between Sacramento and the mines. Passenger stages and freight trains shifted their western termini. Another of California’s mushroom towns miraculously appeared at the railhead. Within a few weeks passengers arriving by train from Sacramento confronted a battalion of twenty-one stages drawn up on the muddy main street, each soon to careen off on as many routes, some bound for villages in the neighboring foothills, others to follow fantastic roads into the mountain canyons, and still others, the aristocrats of the assemblage, to pass over the distant crest of the Sierra on the long ordeal of the Overland Trail.

But hard times, long in eclipse, returned. Receipts from the placer mines fell off, and the population of the canyon towns diminished alarmingly. The Sacramento Valley Railroad became merely a feeble strip of iron that meandered eastward from Sacramento.

But Judah’s mind visualized a larger picture. Every length of rail projected became in his secret hope a unit in the road that was to link the oceans. He was hired to run a preliminary line for a railroad someone hoped to build from Sacramento to Benicia, a growing village on the upper bay. He began his report — and was presently harping on his major enthusiasm: ‘There is still another light in which your Road may be viewed.5 Readers knew what was coming. It is in connection with the great Pacific Railroad. . . .’ A little later, inevitably: ‘Your Road will be a grand avenue of approach to the metropolis of the Pacific.5

A few months later he was engaged to explore the passes of the Sierra to locate a feasible route for a new wagon road to the growing silver towns of Nevada. Again it was Pacific Railroad and not the job at hand that held his attention during the summer in the mountains. He returned fired with enthusiasm for what he conceived to be a practical passage for the iron rails, and his obliging friend of the Union published glowing descriptions of the Dutch Flat route. His employers, who did not share his railroad obsession, looked elsewhere for a man to locate their wagon road. Judah was unconcerned. Of what consequence were wagon roads?

Of course, it was never a question of convincing Californians of the desirability of a railroad to the East. Judah’s problem was to persuade them that the thing was possible, to crystallize a demand for a start. To this task he set himself with such singleness of purpose as to arouse perfectly sincere doubts of his sanity. But those who called the enthusiast ‘Crazy Judah’ overlooked the fact that he was also a gifted and experienced engineer.

Tireless harping on his single theme slowly strengthened his position and widened his following. After four years talk began to be accompanied by action.

III

The scene shifted to San Francisco. An even hundred delegates met in the town’s largest hall on September 20 for the Pacific Railroad Convention of 1859.

Judah, a delegate from Sacramento, was tirelessly active, presenting resolutions, arguing routes, lining up support of this and opposition to that, writing long, heated letters to the press. The convention sifted ten years of discussion into a definite statement of what the Coast would do toward the construction of a railroad to the East, and what it expected in the way of help from the Federal Government. The first necessity was to get its recommendations before Congress. On October 11, Judah was entrusted with the task. He waited nine impatient days before the Sonora sailed.

While the ship was still in the bay, he was introduced to a fellow passenger, also Washington bound: Congressmanelect John C. Burch. Recalling the meeting, Burch later wrote: ‘Our introduction was immediately followed by a statement to me in detail of the objects and purposes of his mission.5 One can believe it; detailed statements of his objects and purposes were Judah’s stock in trade. ‘I have always had to pit my brains and will against other men’s money,’ he once told his patient wife. Of course he won the embryo Congressman over to his views. The two became, in the latter’s words, ‘immediate and intimate friends.’

Like others, Burch found the engineer a singularly well-posted madman. ‘On the various provisions of a proper bill to invite the introduction of capital into the work,’ stated Burch, ‘and, in short, on every conceivable point he was armed with arguments, facts and figures, and so thoroughly that all questions of political economy involved were of easy solution to his mind.’

The voluble engineer became a familiar figure on Washington streets and in committee rooms. Here the story was new, and he repeated it to members of the House and Senate, editors and newspaper correspondents, cabinet members and heads of departments, even to seventy-year-old James Buchanan in the White House. ‘His knowledge of his subject was so thorough,’ continued Burch, ‘his manners so gentle and insinuating, his conversation on the subject so entertaining, that few resisted his appeals.’

One of those who lent a willing ear to Judah’s eloquence was John A. Logan, Congressman from Illinois and chairman of the House committee on contingent expenses. Through Logan’s influence he was granted the use of a room in the Capitol. There Judah established the Pacific Railroad Museum, drawing on the archives of the various departments for maps, surveys, reports, to explain, illustrate, and dramatize the necessity for a transcontinental railroad.

As dispenser of information the engineer proved a success. But attempts to get a Pacific Railroad bill before Congress were blocked, for that body had a larger problem on its hands. Like everything unrelated to slavery, his bill was shoved ahead to the next session. Regretfully Judah wrote a report to the San Francisco convention and appended his expense account: —

For printing bill and circular in New York $20.00

“ “ “ “ “ Washington 20.00

$40.00

Failure at Washington dimmed his enthusiasm only temporarily. On the return west his conversation centred on the mountain survey. In the hot stateroom his wife listened. Nearly thirty years later she wrote: ‘Oh how we used to talk it all over and over on the steamer en route to California in July.’ The boat docked at San Francisco and Judah set off at once on the trail of fresh facts. A friend accompanied him. ‘No one knew what they were doing,’ wrote Mrs. Judah. ‘The “engineer” was in the mountains.’

The engineer and his companion stayed in the high Sierras so long that winter surprised them and they had to fight their way down snowy canyons to the lowlands. Back at the foothill town of Dutch Flat, Judah’s enthusiasm soared to new heights: he had found a feasible route over the mountains. On the counter of Dr. Strong’s drug store he triumphantly checked over his field notes and profiles. Then he spread out a fresh sheet of paper and wrote the Articles of Association of the Central Pacific Railroad of California. At the bottom of the sheet he and Strong signed for more stock than they could afford. Next day the paper was circulated among the solvent citizens of Dutch Flat.

California law required that capital stock in the amount of $1000 for each mile of railroad must be subscribed before the company could be incorporated. Distance from Sacramento to the state line was estimated at 115 miles. In three days Dutch Flat and a few neighboring villages had pledged $46,500. Judah set off to raise the balance in Sacramento and San Francisco. A week later Strong received a letter from San Francisco. ‘I have struck a lucky streak, and shall fill up the list without further trouble. I have got one of the richest concerns in California into it.’

A meeting of capitalists was arranged. Judah’s wife waited in their hotel room. ‘On his return from the meeting his words to me were these: “Anna, if you want to see your friends in the morning you must pack your bag and trot around to see them, for I am going up to Sacramento on the boat to-morrow afternoon. Remember what I say to you to-night, so you can tell me sometime: not two years will go over the heads of these gentlemen . . . but they will give up all they hope to have from their present enterprises to have what they put away to-night!’” It was the prophecy of an angry and disappointed man, yet it proved true in every detail.

The next boat carried the pair up the river to Sacramento. He started his campaign over again: more conferences, finally a meeting in the St. Charles Hotel on K Street, poorly attended; a second meeting with fewer still, this time in a room above a hardware store.

It was not a promising setting in which to launch the greatest engineering enterprise ever projected in the West. In the room were Dr. Strong, the Dutch Flat druggist; a surveyor named Leete; James Bailey, a Sacramento jeweler; two railroad promoters, brothers named Robinson; Lucius A. Booth; and Cornelius Cole, who became a United States Senator. After half a century he would look back and write a time-fogged account of the meeting.

Four others were present. One was a wholesale grocer with a liking for politics — Leland Stanford. Another was Charles Crocker, who dealt in dry goods. The other two were the hosts of the evening, proprietors of the hardware store downstairs. One was a tall, frail man of nearly fifty, Mark Hopkins; the other, broader, solidly built, and ten years younger, was Collis P. Huntington. A druggist, a jeweler, a lawyer, the owner of a dry-goods store, two hardware merchants: this hardly seemed promising timber to carry out the vast scheme Judah had envisioned. Nor did the four storekeepers seem likely founders of dynasties of wealth so impressive that a lifetime later their names would continue to command deference throughout the West.

Judah accomplished that evening what he had failed to do in San Francisco. He was now dealing, not with metropolitan capitalists, but with a group of shopkeepers in a town of moderate size. Sacramento had been his headquarters for nearly six years. Prudently he clipped the wings of his plan. What he proposed was no fantastic scheme for a railroad across the continent. Deliberately he reduced his conception to easy comprehension of the men whose money he needed.

Judah eliminated from his plan all but the local features. He told them what they as merchants most wanted to know: how to sell more goods, expand their businesses, and stifle competition. ‘Help me,’ he asked, ‘to run my survey over the mountains. With this we can get government support for the company — and you can control the company. If you get control of the traffic to the Nevada mines, you, and you alone, will control that market. Why, you can have a wagon road if not a railroad.’

IV

Control of trade with the new towns beyond the Sierra was a possibility his listeners found pleasant to contemplate. Nevada’s decade of reckless buying was already under way. Discovery of the silver bonanzas had sent the mining fever to heights unknown since the early ’50s. This time the horde passed the Sierra, penetrating thousands of waterless canyons from Tahoe to the edge of Salt Lake. Reports of startling discoveries seeped back daily to California.

A tremendous volume of freight, moving at extremely high rates, presently began to leave Sacramento and crawl along snake-like roads over the lofty hump of the Sierra. The mines proved shockingly rich; dividends of leading companies soon reached a million a month. Equipment and supplies were ordered recklessly at prices that taxed credulity, and were paid for promptly, in bright, newly minted silver.

Prospect of gaining control of this market received close attention from Judah’s group of merchants. Would his listeners subscribe for enough additional stock to allow the company to incorporate? Several of the men who were present later put on paper accounts of what had happened — for this gathering above the hardware store at 54 K Street presently became historic. ‘I think everyone present,’ wrote Cornelius Cole, ‘. . . agreed to takestock in the concern. Several subscribed for fifty shares each, but no one for more than that. I took fifteen shares . . . and subsequently acquired ten more.’ This is inaccurate in one detail; not everyone present agreed to take shares. Nevertheless, the minimum required was reached that night, and the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California became a reality soon after.

C. P. Huntington recorded his version. He told of Judah’s appeal for subscriptions and of the response of the others. He added: ‘I did not give anything. When the meeting was about to break up, one or two said to me: “Huntington, you are the man to give to this enterprise.”’ But, as always, Huntington had plans of his own. ‘I told Mr. Judah as I left: “If you want to come to my office some evening, I will talk to you about this railroad.”’

Judah was at his office the following evening. Judah talked and Huntington weighed the possibilities. A subscription for a few shares of stock, on which only a 10 per cent deposit was required, could always be dropped if the government failed to be liberal in subsidies. The engineer knew the ropes at Washington — he seemed confident that adequate help would be forthcoming. Huntington knew how to look ahead. If the road should be built, it would be unpleasant to have it controlled by his competitors.

He decided to go in — cautiously. ‘I told him I would furnish six men that would pay for a thorough instrumental survey across the mountains ... I did not expect to do it myself altogether.’ The six were himself, his partner Hopkins, Stanford, James Bailey, Charles Crocker, and Lucius Booth, all Sacramento merchants with goods to sell beyond the mountains. They subscribed for only 800 of the 85,000 shares, but when the company was incorporated their interests were protected. Stanford became president, Huntington vice president, Bailey secretary, and Hopkins treasurer. The remaining two became members of the board of directors.

Judah, for the moment, was content. He directed another jubilant monologue at his wife: ‘If you want to see the first work done on the Pacific Railroad, look out of your bedroom window; I am going to work there this afternoon, and I am going to have these men pay for it.’ Her reply was characteristic of the wives of enthusiasts: ‘It’s about time somebody else helped.’

Work commenced that afternoon. Judah and a few helpers ran their lines down the muddy street under the eyes of skeptical spectators. By early summer the survey had crossed the foothills to the base of the mountains.

To the railroad engineer of the early ’60s the Sierra Nevada offered an unprecedented problem. The western slope of the mountains is rugged in the extreme; the rise from base to summit, a matter of seven thousand feet, is made in less than twenty miles. In his preliminary report, the optimist did not minimize the problems presented by the towering barrier of the Sierra. He listed the chief obstacles: abrupt rise, deep canyons, difficulty of running cuts and tunnels through miles of solid granite on the upper ridges, winter snowfalls that sometimes reached thirty feet. This initial survey came to be recognized as a technical accomplishment of high order. With minor changes, the road was built along that route, which remains to this day the most practical crossing of the Sierra Nevada.

It was necessary for Judah to draw a rosy picture. From his ‘Summary of the Prominent Features of the Line,’ a few typical sentences are quoted: ‘It crosses no deep river canyons or gorges. The longest tunnel will not exceed 1350 feet. . . . It commands, and will perform, the entire business of Nevada Territory, Washoe, and the silver mineral region. It will also command the business of the newly discovered Humboldt mineral district, Pyramid Lake, Esmeralda, and Mono mineral districts. Reduces the time of passenger transit, to and from the Washoe (centre of the greatest mines) to 81/2 hours.’ Citizens of the mining region would save a million dollars a year on their freight bills; low-grade ore heaped uselessly about three thousand tunnel heads could profitably be shipped to Europe for reduction. The list ended with the major theme: ‘The line over the mountains,’ he wrote, ‘completes the first Western link of the Pacific Railroad, overcoming its greatest difficulties.’

Copies of this and of subsequent reports may be found in many collections of Western railroad material, the pamphlets inscribed ‘Respects of T. D. Judah,’ in the engineer’s slanting hand. Examination reveals persistent optimism. The staking out of a mining claim anywhere near the projected railroad became in his mind a city of thousands, its inhabitants eager to do business with the road. When the company came into possession of large timberlands, his nimble pencil came into play: —

The fact cannot be controverted that your Company possesses . . . timberland which will, by the construction of your road through it, become . . . largely enhanced in value; and if we allow that 300,000 acres, or two-thirds of this land, contains only ten trees per acre, from which can be cut six logs twelve feet long per tree, averaging twenty-four inches square, this gives 3400 feet board measure per tree, and the total quantity amounts to ten thousand million feet of lumber, which delivered at Sacramento at, say, $15 per thousand, amounts to one hundred and fifty millions of dollars. . . .

Again: —

Allowing 500,000 acres ... to yield fifty cords per acre (a very low estimate) and it amounts to twenty-five million cords of wood, which, if delivered at Sacramento at $6 per cord, would amount to 150 millions of dollars, and pay the road about 100 millions of dollars freight. . . .

Such fantasies were helpful in keeping up the courage of the stockholders, but in 1860 the main obstacle had still to be overcome. Six years of unremitting work had impaired Judah’s health and wrecked his finances. But a beginning had been made, and he was content.

Not one man in fifty believed that the road controlled by the Sacramento group would ever lay rails over the mountains. Too many projects had been begun and forgotten in a few months. This costly line over the mountains could be financed only with government help, and that seemed remote.

Appeals to the national government for aid in constructing a transcontinental railroad had been made to Congress for over a decade. No action had been taken, and none was likely to be taken, for the Pacific Railroad had become inseparably a part of the slavery question. A northern route won the antagonism of every Congressman and Senator from south of the Potomac; mention of a southern line caused Northerners to unite in opposition. In the beginning of the ’60s there seemed no possibility of breaking the deadlock.

To attempt this feat Judah sailed again for Washington. His wife as usual ‘had the right gaiters on’ and went along with him. They parted at New York, she returning to her family at Greenfield while the engineer went on to Washington.

The temper of Congress had changed. On April 12, guns had blazed at Sumter, and location of a route for the Pacific Railroad ceased to be a sectional question. Judah reached the capital three months after Bull Run, and when Washington had at length realized that it had more than a ninety-day war on its hands. For the first time a railroad to the Pacific Coast could be debated without becoming involved with slavery.

Judah and his associates recognized that events gave them a matchless opportunity. What had been the rashest of gambles was transformed into a conservative enterprise. Arguments were overhauled, strategy simplified. The railroad, it was explained, would help hold California and Nevada Territory in the Union, and California and Nevada were producing in volume two war necessities: gold and silver.

Judah had taken passage from San Francisco on the same boat with Aaron Sargent, newly elected California Congressman. Sargent agreed to sponsor the Pacific Railroad bill in the House. During a debate on an unrelated matter, the new member mildly astonished the House by obtaining the floor and delivering a lengthy speech on the railroad bill. The chairman disposed of the interruption by appointing a subcommittee to consider the matter, and the House resumed its regular business. A similar committee had already been appointed by the Senate.

Judah, no longer an amateur in Washington politics, had been pulling wires to such advantage that he was appointed secretary of the Senate committee. Sargent then made him clerk of the House subcommittee, and he presently consolidated his position by becoming clerk of the main House committee on railroads. This gave him a voice in all committee hearings, as well as the privilege of the floor in the House. Documents and records of all three committees were in his keeping. For a man whose one desire was passage of a bill which he had helped write, it is hard to picture a more satisfactory arrangement. Whatever may be said for the ethics of such appointments, the bill would never have come to a vote that session if Judah had remained on the outside.

Debate was prolonged and opposition strong in both the House and the Senate. It was not until midsummer of 1862 that the bill was eventually passed and, on July 1, received President Lincoln’s signature.

A message sped west over the recently strung wires of the Pacific Telegraph: —

We have drawn the elephant. Now let us see if we can harness him up.

V

What was this elephant Judah had drawn? The bill designated two companies to build and operate a railroad between Sacramento and the Missouri River. In federal aid it granted a strip of land for right-of-way and ten alternate sections per mile of public domain on both sides of the line. Further, it provided for a government loan to the companies, in the form of thirty-year bonds at 6 per cent interest, in amounts ranging from $16,000 to $48,000 per mile, depending on the terrain.

The elephant was a full-grown, adult beast, even a giant. A gambler’s chance became overnight a sure thing, a legitimate enterprise of limitless possibilities.

Judah resigned from his Congressional committees, closed the museum, and caught the first steamer. In Sacramento again, his wife observed that the engineer’s standing with substantial citizens seemed higher than it had been a few months before. Crazy Judah, sponsor of a fantastic scheme, passed from mind. He had become chief engineer of the Central Pacific Railroad of California, which was already gathering unto itself enormous prestige. Acquaintances no longer turned down convenient alleys at his approach. It became unnecessary for his wife to warn him against wasting his thunder on small-town capitalists. The story of how he had got himself appointed to the railroad committees in Washington — shrewdness of a type then particularly admired — enhanced his popularity by demonstrating that the dreamer had a practical side. Citizens on the Coast read with respect his latest reports.

Before the year was out, the Charles Crocker Company received a contract to grade the first thirty-two miles of roadbed. On January 8, 1863 a throng, no longer skeptical, followed lines of flagdraped carriages through Sacramento’s streets to the levee. Crocker, red-faced and jovial, called the crowd to order. Leland Stanford, Governor and president of the company, delivered an address in which he predicted that his listeners would presently observe passing through Sacramento ‘the busy denizens of two hemispheres, in their constant travel over the great highway of nations.’ After six more speeches, Stanford lifted a shovelful of damp earth and tossed it into the bed of a flag-draped wagon. The crowd cheered. The band played its loudest. Crocker called for nine rousing cheers, and added that a pile driver was already working near by on the foundations of the American River bridge.

Judah made no speech. He had been talking for eight years. As he well knew, seven speeches and a shovelful of earth do not build a transcontinental railroad. But if he looked forward to devoting himself unhampered to construction, he was soon disillusioned.

By the terms of the Railroad Act, government bonds were not available until after the first forty miles had been completed. To raise capital for this initial unit, Huntington went east to sell stock, and Stanford induced the state and a number of counties and cities to make substantial subscriptions. With financial prospects brightening, Judah prepared to spend money judiciously.

This failed to work, for he and the Sacramento group regarded these first forty miles of road from different points of view. The engineer saw them as the western end of the longest and most important railroad ever built. Huntington and his three associates considered them merely a hurdle to be surmounted before government subsidy became available. Judah wished to build rapidly but well; the others also wanted speed, but they wished to shave costs in every possible way. The engineer saw the traffic of America and the Orient passing over the line for generations. The four speculators were looking only toward the moment when rails would be laid far enough into the foothills to enable them to underbid competition for the freight and passenger business with Nevada Territory.

Here was another skirmish in the traditional battle between builder and speculator; between men whose aim was to create and those whose purpose was to make as large a profit as possible as quickly as possible. In California circumstances had conspired to sharpen the contest. Business on the Coast was speculative to a degree unknown in older communities. Prices changed so rapidly that a few days, even a few hours, often meant the difference between a large profit and a heavy loss. Quick turnover for quick profit stood as the cardinal rule of business. No local business man was interested in a conservative, long-term investment. But Judah looked to the future, not the immediate present. With luck, he argued, the road would be opened to through traffic in five years. The Sacramento group smiled. To wait five years, or one year, before profits would begin to flow violated common sense.

From the beginning others on the Coast suspected the intentions of the Sacramento four. Nothing in their records encouraged the hope that they might be seriously embarking on a semi-public enterprise. Shrewdness and well-developed trading sense were the qualities that had characterized them in the past; the claim that they had abruptly become men of constructive imagination aroused skepticism. In San Francisco the contention that the four were actually planning to build the western half of the great Pacific Railroad was not taken seriously. There must be some catch in it.

The conviction grew that Huntington and his partners were planning a roadbed over the mountains for other purposes than those announced. Predictions were made that rails would never be laid beyond Dutch Flat; that the famous route over the Sierra would remain a mere wagon road, by which the four would control California-Nevada traffic. Judah’s difficulties with the directors lent point to the theory, notably their opposition to extending the survey beyond the California line, a matter that needed early attention if the road was to be finished within the time specified by Congress. Suspicion flared into scandal. Many newspapers, originally favorable to the project, became hostile. Those who had subscribed for stock began to ask if they had been tricked. Public confidence which Judah had been building for years slipped rapidly away. In the minds of thousands the Central Pacific became ‘the Dutch Flat Swindle.’ The engineer shared with other officials the resentment of a disappointed public.

The situation did not promote confidence within the company. The four merchants were by now in virtual control; Marsh and Strong, two of the original directors, had retired. But Judah held on, waging counterwarfare.

As the man mainly responsible for the company’s existence, and its only trained engineer, Judah insisted that his be the deciding voice in all construction matters. This the four refused to concede. Since they were investing their money in the speculation they argued that their control must extend to every aspect of the work. For a time Stanford gave the engineer tentative support. But when Huntington returned to the Coast, Stanford shifted, and Judah wrote to Dr. Strong that the four were again opposing him as a unit.

I had a blowout about two weeks ago and freed my mind, so much so that I looked for instant decapitation. I called things by their right name and invited war; but counsel of peace prevailed and my head is still on; my hands are tied, however. We have no meetings of the board nowadays; except the regular monthly meeting, which, however, was not had this month; but there have been any quantity of private conferences to which I have not been invited.

The four tried to bring the rebel to terms by demanding payment in cash for the initial 10 per cent deposit on Judah’s stock. The engineer contended it had previously been agreed that his organizing services would be counted as payment. The group disregarded his recommendations, made decisions affecting construction without consulting him, and indicated that he was to have no further voice in the management.

‘I cannot tell you,’ Judah wrote Dr. Strong in the letter quoted above, ‘all that is going on . . . suffice it to say that I have had a pretty hard row to hoe.’ He was forced to give way, but he gave way slowly, and managed to deliver some telling blows. The resourceful four had already hit on the moneymaking device that was soon to make them multimillionaires. The plan was simple: control of the company gave them power to grant contracts for construction. Rather than let profits from construction go to other contractors, they organized a construction company of their own, independent of the railroad. As directors of the Central Pacific they awarded contracts to themselves as railroad builders, on terms assuring large profits. When the contract for the first section of the road was awarded to a newly formed company nominally headed by Charles Crocker, Judah fought the move to such good effect that he was able to inform Dr. Strong: ‘I have had a big row and fight on the contract question, and although I had to fight alone, carried my point and prevented a certain gentleman from becoming a further contractor on the Central Pacific Railroad at present.’

On another occasion Judah was able to put a temporary check on the group’s growing talent for reaping extra profits. By the terms of the federal act the subsidy was to be increased from $16,000 per mile in the valley to $32,000 in the foothills. As a commentator expressed it at the time, the four undertook the Herculean task of ‘moving the foothills down into the middle of the valley.’ Judah was asked to join others in stating that the foothills began many miles distant from the spot where in his opinion they actually did begin. His refusal ended the possibility of further friendly relations with the Sacramento financiers.

Judah went. The exact terms under which he withdrew are not known, but it appears that he was offered, and accepted, $100,000 for his share, and received options to purchase the interests of the other four for the same amount each. With his options, the engineer started for New York, certain he could find men who would take them up. There are indications that he had intended approaching the Vanderbilt group then planning to increase its interests on the Pacific Coast. Years later Judah’s widow wrote: ‘ He had secured the right and had the power to buy out the men opposed to him and the true interests of the Pacific Railroad at that time. Everything was arranged for a meeting in New York City on his arrival. Gentlemen from New York and Boston were ready to take their places.’

Before the steamer left its San Francisco dock, Judah wrote a final letter to Strong: —

I have a feeling of relief in being away from the scenes of contention and strife which it has been my lot to experience for the past year, and to know that the responsibilities of events, so far as regards the Pacific Railroad, do not rest on my shoulders. If the parties who now manage hold the same opinion three months hence that they do now, there will be a radical change in the management of the Pacific Railroad, and it will pass into the hands of men of experience and capital. If they do not, they may hold the reins for a while, but they will rue the day that they ever embarked in the Pacific Railroad.

If they treat me well they may expect a similar treatment at my hands. If not, I am able to play my hand.

If I succeed in inducing the parties I expect to see to return with me to California, I shall likely return the latter part of December.

The St. Louis sailed in early October, 1863. Judah’s last word to Sacramento was a prediction of radical change in the management of the company. At Panama he encountered adversaries more inexorable than the four he had left behind. Yellow fever, contracted at the Isthmus, struck him down. His wife watched over him during the eight delirious days. His case was hopeless when he was carried from the steamer at New York. He lived a week longer, to die on November 2, 1863, four months before his thirty-eighth birthday.

The engineer’s body was shipped to Greenfield for burial. Anna Judah lived on quietly in her native Massachusetts town. On the day in 1869 when the road was completed, which chanced to be her wedding anniversary, she denied herself to callers, determined to have no part in a celebration in which praise was heaped on the Sacramento four and few recalled to whom credit for the road’s inception was due. But she remained moderate in her judgment of her husband’s expartners. In later years she could be aroused to something approaching resentment only when she read statements that Judah had resigned from the enterprise. She wished it understood that the engineer had died in the belief that he was to return and push the line through to completion.

There is no record, however, that she ever reproached the partners for their failure to perpetuate his memory, even to the extent of naming a crossroads station after him. But even her generosity had limits. The millions reaped from the enterprise presently gave the wives of the four partners great social prestige. Mrs. Judah once reminded a Sacramento acquaintance that she enjoyed none of the perquisites of a ‘Railroad Queen’ — that she was merely the widow of the man who had made the ‘Railroad Kings’ possible.

In the dead man’s place, the four appointed a chief engineer less critical of their methods. The directors passed a resolution of sympathy for the widow. For many years this remained the corporation’s only mark of recognition of Judah’s services. When at length a new station was erected at Sacramento, a bust of the engineer was set up in the plaza before the structure, with funds raised by Southern Pacific employees. The Judah bust was unveiled more than sixty years after its subject’s death.

VI

In exasperation Huntington once remarked that Stanford’s share in building the railroad consisted in turning the first shovelful of earth and driving the last spike. Stanford, on the other hand, was convinced that his political influence and personal popularity were responsible for the success of the enterprise. Uncle Mark Hopkins, close-mouthed and cautious, seldom stated his opinions, but he regarded himself as the balance wheel that enabled the machine to function. Two of the four, Huntington and Stanford, definitely claimed credit for creating the railroad, and Hopkins in one or two oblique references indicated that the honor belonged to him. ‘Charley’ Crocker never bothered to argue the point. He merely stated: ‘I built the Central Pacific’ — and let it go at that.

He normally weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds. Like most large men he had periods of extreme activity, and other periods when he refused to move at all. Crocker’s spells of lethargy were not frequent, but they were sometimes inconveniently prolonged. Years after the event, one of Superintendent Strobridge’s riding bosses recalled an incident in the epic race up the Humboldt Valley, when the Central Pacific construction crews, five thousand strong, were straining to wrest as many miles as possible from the Union Pacific. Cocky and noisy, Crocker had been storming up and down the line for weeks, bellowing, in his own words, ‘like a bull,’ his large face caked with sweat and alkali dust, his sorrel mare covered with lather. Then he vanished. Foremen, waiting for orders, found him in his car at the railhead, his Chinese servant waving a palm-leaf over his master. Crocker refused to get up, refused to issue orders, approve requisitions, or sign dispatches. Toward the middle of the next afternoon he reappeared, active, loud, and profane as ever.

Though boastful, stubborn, tactless, vain, he was commendably lacking in the quality then described as low cunning. At a banquet celebrating the completion, in 1876, of the Southorn Pacific’s branch to Los Angeles, he slouched in his chair while his obsequious shadow, Dave Colton, told two hundred guests that ‘no man living or dead had superintended the construction of so many miles of railroad on the face of the earth as Charley Crocker.’ Crocker rose ponderously to say that all his life he had been a doer, not a talker. Among the railroad’s officials, he continued, were some whose talents definitely ran to talking — whereupon he introduced Stanford. The latter stood up, glared indignantly at Crocker, and made one of the worst speeches of his career.

Modesty, like diplomacy, was never Crocker’s outstanding characteristic, but few accused him of giving himself airs. Men with requests they would never have taken to Huntington or Stanford buttonholed him on the street or in the lobby or bar of the Palace Hotel. He complained that he had to listen to more cranks than any other man in California.

By temperament he was unfitted for confining work. Sitting behind a desk was a torture to which he consistently refused to submit. Those who wished to find him knew the futility of looking in his office at Fourth and Townsend streets. ‘I ’m at my desk twelve hours every day of the week,’Huntington used to admonish his partners on trips out from the East. Crocker listened blandly, and did nothing. There were periods when he did not put in twelve hours a month. ‘His feet,’ wrote a San Francisco editor, ‘are more often on his desk than under it.’ Questioned later on financial or administrative details, Crocker had a stock reply: ‘I knew nothing about that. I was building the road.’

After the Central Pacific was completed, the prospect of an administrative job so depressed him that he insisted on selling out. After a few months of wandering over Europe he was back in San Francisco, willing to return to harness. He resumed his title of first vice president, put on weight, and spent the next fifteen years in a more than moderately successful attempt to avoid becoming a slave to his job. Much of his time was spent, wandering about the Coast, inspecting property — coal and gold mines, cattle ranches, irrigation projects. Often he was to be found at the construction railhead.

But there was nothing of the poseur about Charley. Although he constructed thousands of miles of railroad, he admitted that he knew nothing about engineering. ‘ I could not have measured a cut any more than I could have flown.’ Showing a friend through the picture gallery in his redwood mansion on Nob Hill, he remarked: ‘ I don’t know much about art.’ Among American millionaires of the ’80s, frankness could go no further. In his later years he, like Stanford, was quite willing to supply newspaper advice to those who wished to become multimillionaires. But whereas Stanford sprinkled such interviews with references to the solid virtues, — industry, sobriety, thrift, piety, — Crocker’s approach was more realistic. ‘One man works hard all his life and ends up a pauper. Another man, no smarter, makes twenty million dollars. Luck has a hell of a lot to do with it.’

Luck had a lot to do with Crocker’s success, but not everything. Except when he chose to indulge his weakness for inactivity, he enjoyed hard physical labor. Work had been drilled into him from early boyhood. ‘I never had a nursery period,’he once announced with pride. ‘It was my habit to work day and night.’ Crocker was born in Troy, New York, on September 16, 1822. He had earned and saved since he was ten. He quit school at twelve, went two hundred dollars in debt to purchase the agency for a New York newspaper in Troy, and with his earnings supported his mother and sister. His father, having failed in the liquor business in Troy, had gone out to Indiana with his remaining four sons and settled on a block of virgin woodland. Young Crocker sold his newspaper agency, pocketed a hundred-dollar profit on the transaction, and took his dependents west.

On the Marshall County farm the family endured the hardships common to life on the agricultural frontier a century ago. Charles, fourteen and big for his age, helped clear land and hired out to neighbors during the harvest season. Possibly the memory of the Troy profits dampened enthusiasm for splitting oak logs and digging out tree stumps, for his father grew convinced that the youth was not heading for success as a farmer. When he was seventeen the elder man expressed this conviction so forcibly that Charles demanded: ‘Father, do you want me to leave home?’

‘Yes and no,’ said Isaac Crocker. ‘Yes, because you are no use here. No, because I am afraid you would starve among strangers.’

Young Crocker chose to leave — and he did not starve. Later, in his selfdramatizing way, he declared: ‘All I had in the world was a pair of woolen socks, a cotton shirt, and a linen dickey, tied up in a cotton handkerchief.’ He helped on a neighbor’s farm until spring, then worked for eleven dollars a month and board in a crossroads sawmill. True to tradition, he would return later and marry his employer’s daughter, Mary Denning, and take her to California to share his improbable millions.

Crocker found a deposit of iron ore on an Indiana hillside and set up a crude furnace. In 1849 he willingly gave it up to join a group of the neighborhood young men to hunt gold in the foothills of California.

In later life Crocker looked on his crossing of the plains as a high point. In his memoirs, dictated in the early '80s to Hubert H. Bancroft, he returned constantly to that period, always with mild wonder at the way he had conducted himself. On that journey he first realized that if one boldly assumed leadership others were willing to accept the rôle of subordinates. The discovery delighted him. ‘They would all gather around me and want to know what to do. . . . I grew up as a sort of leader and was always inclined to lead. . . . I had always been the one to swim a river and carry a rope across.’

The main body of his company left the home base first, carrying only such supplies as were needed to take the party to Fort Kearney, where the real crossing would begin. Charles and a few others gathered at Quincy, Illinois, with the bulk of the freight; this was to be shipped down the river to St. Louis, then on one of the Missouri steamers to Council Bluffs. At St. Louis they learned that because of insufficient, water the Missouri River boats were operating only as far as St. Joe. Another steamer, the Tuscumbia, tied up at the St. Louis levee. Crocker, in his new rôle of leader, went aboard and found the captain, decorated with the emblem of a fraternal order. ‘As I was considerable of an Odd Fellow in those times I went up to him and gave him the grip and soon was on good terms with him.’

The captain agreed to attempt the passage provided Crocker could supply fifteen deck passengers and two hundred and fifty tons of freight for that point. All went well until the vessel passed St. Joe. Then Crocker’s brother Odd Fellow ordered passengers and freight landed.

‘I of course was a prominent man among the passengers and they all looked up to me,’Crocker recalled. The captain’s argument that there was not enough water in the river to go higher failed to convince his passengers, who insisted that the steamer go on. Their firearms were prominently displayed, and in the end the Tuscumbia threaded her way past the sandy bars of the upper river to Council Bluffs. Recounting the exploit, Crocker did not fail to point the moral: ‘This incident shows my determination not to allow anything to stand in my way when I have made up my mind to do anything.’

VII

The party reached California in March 1850. Crocker failed to support himself as a prospector. Here luck enters. Instead of returning to blacksmithing, he opened, in partnership with a brother, a store in an Eldorado County camp. Prospering moderately, the owners started a branch in a neighboring town; then, in 1852, another at Sacramento. In the fall of that year Charles made a hurried trip east and married the daughter of the Indiana sawmill owner. They reached Sacramento by ship a few days after the Crocker store and its contents had vanished in flames. Crocker, however, had brought new stock with him. He and his brothers raised enough capital to rebuild, with fireproof materials. In a few weeks their doors were open.

Sacramento was the supply centre for scores of active mining communities, and the Crocker store shared the general prosperity. By 1860 the Sacramento establishment, dealing mainly in dry goods and with a growing wholesale department, was a substantial business house. Young Charles had no reason to regret that he had chosen to put himself behind a dry-goods counter. The picture of the former blacksmith measuring out yards of calico for the pioneer ladies of Sacramento was ironically evoked in later years, but that change made later triumphs possible.

Meantime lessons learned on the trip west were not forgotten. In 1856 he joined the new Republican Party, and unexpectedly found himself elected an alderman. Another member was Mark Hopkins, who, with his partner Huntington, did a thriving business in shovels and axes and kegs of nails. Leland Stanford, of Stanford Brothers, wholesale grocers, was also active in the new party. Stanford became a candidate for state treasurer in the election of 1857, and Crocker ran on the same ticket for the assembly. Both wore defeated, but these political alliances first drew the four storekeepers together in a common desire to see John C. Frémont elected president. With the exception of Huntington, whose dislike for politics dated from the cradle, all became prominent in the counsels of the new party.

Espousal of the abolitionist cause brought no local popularity, for state politics were still firmly in the control of the Southern Democrats. ‘A convention of Negro Worshippers assembled yesterday in this city,’ began a newspaper account of the Republicans’ first state convention at Sacramento in 1856, and such phrases as ‘dangerous fanaticism’ and ‘spectacle of political degradation’ were sprinkled through the text. Yet, by climbing early on the Republican bandwagon, the four gained an advantage that later proved invaluable.

‘Freedom, Frémont, and the Railroad,’ was the new party’s slogan in California in 1856. Six years later, Stanford was elected Governor and the four political amateurs were in control of the company that hoped to build the western half of the railroad. When ground was broken on the morning of January 8, 1863, Crocker supervised Stanford’s turning of the symbolical shovelful of earth, leading cheers for the success of the venture, and turning upon the crowd to shout dramatically, ‘It is going right on, gentlemen, I assure you!’

The dry-goods store had been sold. Crocker resigned from the board of directors of the new company with a contract to build the first eighteen miles. He knew nothing of engineering or of railroad construction; but he had found a job exactly to his liking. Here was excitement, continuous uproar. It was almost like another trip across the plains; again he roared orders and kept things moving. During the next six years he never slept in his Sacramento bed more than three consecutive nights. His home was one end of a battered day coach that shuttled back and forth over the line so continuously that he could awake in the middle of the night and tell by the car’s vibration and sway exactly where he was.

On the damp January morning when the project was inaugurated, pile drivers were already pounding bridge supports into the American River. After forty-six years of discussion the Pacific Railroad was under way. While Judah’s transit men were completing the survey, Crocker had been assembling labor and equipment, establishing road camps and commissary. Huntington had gone to New York, where he was bringing his talents to bear on manufacturers of iron rails and spikes, purchasing locomotives and rolling stock, driving hard bargains with shipowners to transport his supplies thirteen thousand miles round the Horn.

Through spring and summer of 1863 the construction gang crept eastward from Sacramento. Crocker learned as he went. The lesson proved expensive. Long before the easy eighteen miles to Junction (now Roseville) were finished, his cash was gone and weekly payrolls were being met out of the Central Pacific treasury. This, however, was a mere bookkeeping detail, for Stanford, Huntington, and Hopkins, as silent partners in Crocker and Company, shared its profits. For the building of this first section, Crocker and Company received $425,000 — $275,000 in cash and the rest in Central Pacific bonds. It was the partners’ first taste of easy money.

By this time Judah was dead. One of his helpers, S. S. Montague, became chief engineer. Crocker’s superintendent was J. H. Strobridge, a slave driver who enforced authority with ham-like fists. Both Montague and Strobridge remained long with the Central Pacific, and later the Southern Pacific, which the partners organized in 1865. With Strobridge, Crocker became intimate, supporting his methods whenever they conflicted with those of the StanfordHopkins group. In later life Crocker was to quote with approval Strobridge’s opinion that ‘the men were as near brutes as they can get.'

By the ’60s, labor on the West Coast had attained a dignity that might have been mistaken for hauteur. Nevada’s mines had drawn off surplus man power. Entering a field already raked by harassed employers, Crocker and Company had meagre pickings. Their agents harangued skeptical groups in San Francisco and other Coast towns, but the men collected and forwarded to the railhead proved — when they arrived at all — of a quality inciting Irish riding bosses to new heights of profanity. Agents who collected pick-and-shovel men later learned that these had used their passes as an inexpensive means of making the first stage toward the current boom town beyond the Sierra. Such duplicity hastened the decision to use Chinese — a decision that was not to enhance the popularity of the railroad or its owners on the Coast. From the beginning the road had but a limited popular following. Because of this the new company found itself in a variety of difficulties.

Somehow the line was completed to Newcastle. Twenty-ton locomotives sent out from the East were assembled at Sacramento and put to work hauling over the thirty-one-mile railroad toylike trains piled high with freight. Funds grew scarcer. The partners borrowed on their personal credit and would have borrowed more had not Huntington objected. ’If We can’t pay a thousand men, we’ll hire only five hundred — if we can’t pay five hundred we’ll hire ten.’ Stanford later told of a two-week period when there was not a dollar of cash in the treasury. As the last of the construction crews was withdrawn from the woods beyond Newcastle, public confidence dropped to nothing. Even the road’s supporters grew convinced that the line would lose itself in a Sierra canyon.

The partners had trouble getting credit to operate their prosperous Sacramento stores; their connection with the railroad made them poor business risks. The gloom of the company’s promoters during this period reached even Crocker. He later reported that he would have been glad to pocket, the loss of everything he had put into it, ‘take a clean shirt, and get out.’ Huntington was warned that he would ‘bury his fortune in the snow of the Sierras.’

These difficulties were later magnified in Congress and before investigating committees to justify ultimate enormous profits, on the theory that great risks justify great rewards. By June 1863, above $200,000 had been paid in on stock subscriptions; the state and various California counties had bought stock to the amount of $1,500,000 and agreed to pay interest on a like amount of the company’s bonds. Even San Francisco, although regretting its early generosity in voting a stock subscription, finally made the company an outright gift of $400,000.

These amounts, plus the original federal subsidy, represented major feats in money raising. But the promoters were already on the trail of bigger game. At Washington, Huntington, in coöperation with Union Pacific promoters, urged on Congress the necessity of greater liberality. An amendment to the Act of 1862 received Lincoln’s signature on July 2, 1864. It doubled the land grants, made the government bonds a second mortgage on the railroad, permitting the issuing of first-mortgage company bonds in equal amount, increased federal subsidies in the mountain region, and allowed these to be issued before the line was completed. The time limit was extended; four years were allowed to reach the state line. Public lands outside the grants might be drawn on for materials needed in construction and operation.

Huntington called this ‘an extraordinarily generous act.’ Meantime the group matured another plan to increase the government’s bounty. At intervals since 1862, wartime business was put aside while Congress considered the color of the soil on the east and west banks of Arcade Creek, a tiny stream seven miles from Sacramento. Half a million dollars in subsidy bonds hinged on the answer. If Congress could be convinced that the reddish soil of the east bank was characteristic of mountains, and the darker soil three feet away was that of the valley, then it might he argued that there the valley ended and the mountains began. For miles beyond Arcade Creek the red soil was as level as a floor. Geologists were ready to testify that soil, not contours, determined the point where the valley left off and mountains began. If the government accepted this theory, then the federal treasury was obliged to pay an additional $32,000 for every mile of road east of Arcade Creek for 150 miles, the subsidy now being $16,000 per mile on level sections and $48,000 in the mountains. The government, in January 1864, announced that the Sierra Nevadas officially began at Arcade Creek. A roar of amazement shook California. Sacramento’s four shopkeepers began to command a grudging respect. Any group who could move the base of the Sierra Nevadas twenty-five miles westward into the centre of the valley and net a half-million dollars by the exploit would bear watching.

VIII

Eighteen months had been consumed building the thirty-one-mile road to Newcastle, yet the real test was still ahead. With ample financing assured and profits no longer theoretical, attention swung again to the almost forgotten matter of building the road.

Early in January 1865, Crocker’s agents rescoured Sacramento, Stockton, and San Francisco for laborers. Foothills north of Clipper Gap, quiet for months, again resounded to axes, rumble of black-powder blasts, and shouts of teamsters. In two months Crocker, again sole contractor, had rails laid to Illinoistown, eleven miles beyond and five hundred feet above Clipper Gap. By late spring the Central Pacific operated fifty-six miles. Passengers were carried at a flat rate of ten cents a mile, freight at fifteen cents per ton per mile. In June gross earnings topped a thousand dollars a day.

Not money but labor was henceforth Crocker’s problem. Of the thousands sent into the hills during 1863-1864, an average of only two in five reported on the job. Of these all but a few quit when they had earned stage fare to Virginia City. Everyone who applied, old or young, was hired. In 1865 Robert Gifford, aged twelve, walked four miles from Dutch Flat to Gold Run, ambitious to help build this railroad. A heavy, florid man looked down on him from the height of a horse’s back and told him to report to one of the gang foremen and to say that Mr. Crocker had sent him. Young Gifford worked three months, leading a team of horses that pulled a dumpcart, at seventy-five cents a day and board. But even children were scarce in the foothills. From the company’s new San Francisco office Stanford and Judge E. B. Crocker (brother of Charles and head of the Central Pacific’s legal department) petitioned the War Department to send out five thousand Rebel prisoners to work, under guard of Union soldiers. The end of the war killed that scheme. A plan to import thousands of Mexican peons never got beyond the discussion stage.

Another possibility remained — the lowly Chinese. There were already thousands of them on the Coast, reworking the abandoned placers in the gold country, operating laundries and cheap restaurants, crowded into the wretched warrens of a score of ‘Chinatowns.’ Stanford and E. B. Crocker suggested they be tried. Strobridge dismissed the idea as preposterous. The weight of the average adult Chinese was less than a hundred and ten pounds; why attempt to build a railroad with rice-eating weaklings?

Crocker, for once, failed to share Strobridge’s opinion. His servant, Ah Ling, was a marvel of endurance; in the placer towns Crocker had observed Chinese at their gravel pits long before white men were out of bed. He confronted the skeptical Strobridge with an unanswerable argument: had n’t the ancestors of these weaklings built the Great Wall of China? And did n’t that construction job compare favorably even with this railroad to Nevada Territory? A threatened strike proved the deciding point. Strobridge dubiously agreed to experiment. Fifty Chinese were herded on freight cars and hauled to ‘end of track.’ ’They tranquilly established camp, cooked rice and dried cuttlefish, and went to sleep. By sunrise they were at work with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. At the end of their first twelve hours Crocker viewed the result with gratified astonishment. Those who had been expecting the weaklings to fall from exhaustion permanently revised their opinion of the Oriental’s endurance.

Chinatowns of the state were searched for every able-bodied male who could be tempted by forty dollars a month. Within six months two thousand blueclad Orientals were swarming over the line. White labor resented the affront. To offset antagonism railroad spokesmen referred to the Chinese as ‘the Asiatic contingent of the Grand Army of Civilization.’ Stanford defended their use:—

‘Without them it would be impossible to complete the line in time . . . they soon become as efficient as white laborers. . . . More prudent and economical, they are content with less wages. . . . No system similar to slavery prevails. . . . Their wages, paid in coin at the end of each month, are divided among them by their agents . . . in proportion to the labor done by each. . . . These agents are generally American or Chinese merchants, who furnish them with supplies of food, the value of which they deduct monthly.’

By the end of 1865 Stanford hoped that the force might be increased to fifteen thousand. No such supply was available in California. A San Francisco firm, of which another of the Crocker brothers, Clark W., was a partner, contracted to bring in from China as many as might be needed. Boats from Canton were presently tying up at San Francisco piers, their rails swarming with yellow faces, while labor leaders threatened reprisals. At the camps in the hills, however, opposition failed to materialize. Advent of the Chinese relieved whites of piek-andshovel work; many became gang foremen, teamsters, powdermen, or stoneworkers. The Chinese lived in their own camps and knew their place. Superiority of the Caucasian was undiminished, his dignity enhanced.

By midsummer of 1865, trains were running, three a day each way, to Illinoistown, soon renamed Colfax in honor of a visit from Grant’s Vice President. The job entered its difficult phase. In April 2000 men and 300 wagons and carts constituted Crocker’s force. Six months later it had been increased to 6000, mostly Chinese, and 600 teams. Rapid headway was being made at last. That summer the Sacramento Union pronounced this ‘the largest construction enterprise in the world, not excepting the Suez Canal.’ Crocker, more confident than ever of his leadership, proclaimed: ‘The work goes bravely on.’

In later years dozens remembered his large figure on horseback as he wove back and forth over the line, roaring orders; in his own words, ‘stopping along wherever there was anything going amiss and raising Old Nick with the boys.’ He later told of lying sleepless all night in his car at the railhead, planning ways to speed the job. ‘Everyone was afraid of me,’ he recalled with pride. ‘I was just looking for someone to find fault with all the time.’

Once a month his appearance among the construction crews was greeted with pleasure. His big sorrel mare then labored under an additional burden, leather saddlebags bulging with coins. The big boss — ‘Cholly Clocker’ to the Orientals — rode into the midst of a group, produced a paper, and called off the names of the men. As each stepped forward he dipped into the saddlebags — gold on one side, silver on the other — and dropped coins into the lifted palm. It was a chore he insisted on doing himself. Riding up the noisy canyon with a hundred and fifty pounds of gold and silver in his saddlebags appealed to his sense of the dramatic; its distribution periodically confirmed a pleasant sense of power.

Beyond Secrettown the climb to the snow-covered crest began in earnest; grade stakes veered upward along the slanting side of the American River canyon, while the stream dropped far below. Surveying parties ran scores of experimental lines ahead, making minor changes in Judah’s survey, to lessen construction costs or reduce grades and curvature.

Throughout the summer of 1866, ‘Crocker’s pets’ swarmed over the upper canyon, pecking at broken rock, trooping beneath basket hats to pour wheelbarrowloads of débris down the canyonside, threading precarious paths with kegs of black powder suspended from bamboo poles, refreshing themselves with sips of tea from whiskey kegs abandoned by their white confreres. The Chinese became adept at drilling and placing blasts. Consumption of black powder rose to five hundred kegs a day.

Tracklayers followed the graders, and locomotives pushed flatcars loaded with construction iron, lumber, explosives, food, drink, and more men to the railhead. Cape Horn, a granite buttress, proved the worst obstacle that year — a thousand-foot vertical cliff that offered no foothold. Chinese, lowered from above on ropes, chipped away with hammer and chisel to form a precarious ledge, laboriously deepened to a shelf wide enough to permit passage of cars. When trains crept along this ledge, passengers gazed down into thin air.

Cape Horn was passed in May 1866. Dutch Flat was reached in July. That summer Crocker, Stanford, and Hopkins, hoping to convince skeptical Coast financiers that they were building no mere feeder for a wagon road, celebrated the opening of the track to Alta. Ten carloads of citizens from Sacramento and the Bay ate a luncheon ‘worthy of Delmonico’s’ with choice of three beverages: lemonade for the ladies, ice water for teetotalers, and a concoction named ‘Pacific Railroad punch’ for all the rest.

In November the company’s timetables in California newspapers were again revised. Cisco, ninety-four miles from Sacramento and nearly six thousand feet high, became the new terminus. Two trains were operated each way; running time was five and a half hours, and the passenger fare was $9.40. Twenty-eight miles of track were built during 1866, at a cost of slightly less than eight million dollars.

Cisco lay fourteen miles from the summit and eleven hundred feet below. To build this section Crocker, Strobridge, and the engineers had to overcome difficulties entirely new to railroad builders. One was the extreme hardness of the granite of the upper ridges. Heavy blasts spurted back through the drill holes, leaving rock undamaged. Points of picks and chisels flattened against its flinty surface. A Swedish chemist, one Swansen, manufactured on the spot a temperamental new substance called nitroglycerin. Accidents were frequent; cause of premature blasts could only be guessed at, for explosions usually obliterated both evidence and witnesses. Strobridge himself was a casualty, losing an eye.

Summit Tunnel, a quarter-mile bore through the backbone of the mountain, emphasized the inadequacy of rockdrilling equipment then in use. The work was tackled from both ends; also a shaft was chipped out from above so that work could proceed outward from the middle. On four fronts Chinese crowded shoulder to shoulder and, working in twelve-hour shifts, chipped and hacked at the steel-like rock faces — to advance eight inches a day.

At San Francisco, Stanford and Hopkins and E. B. Crocker compared this snail-like progress with news of the Union Pacific, then hitting its stride across the prairies of eastern Nebraska. They foresaw their rival building to the California line. Crocker and Strobridge read impatient messages from headquarters and returned brusque answers inviting their critics to suggest means of doing better. An inventor appeared at the San Francisco office with a newfangled steam drill. Stanford, always fascinated by machinery, was impressed. No flaws in a mechanized civilization were ever visible to his eyes. Inventor and invention were dispatched to the summit.

Crocker’s reply was contemptuous. Strobridge’s views on how to bore tunnels did not include steam-driven drills. Stanford and Judge Crocker insisted that the device be given a trial; Crocker replied that to connect the drill would require stopping his hoisting engine, interfering with removal of loose rock from the centre section. Stanford bought another hoisting engine and sent it up to the mountains; Strobridge, backed by Crocker, refused to install it. ‘There does not appear a will that they should succeed, and usually where there is no will there is no way,’ Stanford wrote sadly to Hopkins. Crocker’s brother, E. B., complained: ‘It puts me out of all patience to see how that drilling machine matter was mismanaged. . . . There can’t be a thing done unless it suits Stro. Whenever a man gets Charles’ confidence, he swears by him and all he says or does is right.’

The months lost enabled the Union Pacific to build hundreds of miles it would not otherwise have accomplished, and the Western company wasted two million dollars hauling men and supplies around the uncompleted bore. Summit Tunnel was finally holed through in September 1867, after a year’s grueling work— the last major tunnel to be cut by hand. Within a year or two, powerdriven drills were in common use.

IX

When a locomotive nosed through the east portal, it marked the end of the first phase. After five years the line was still where its enemies predicted it would end — ‘lost in the clouds of the Sierra.’ Another year was to pass before tracks would flatten out on the Nevada plateau.

Prospect of building in desert heat could hardly be distasteful, for the workmen had already had more than their share of sub-zero weather. The winter of 1864-1865 had been abnormally mild, but then financial matters and not construction had occupied the partners, and no benefit was gained. The next winter was different. It was as severe as any on record. October brought deep snow, and the next five months saw almost continuous storm. Under an icy mass fifteen feet thick, work slowed down to a walk. Crocker, wrapped in furs like an Eskimo, patrolled the line continually; the work must go bravely on. Nearly half the force of nine thousand were needed to keep the line clear. The partners in California were newly alarmed. In December, Stanford and Hopkins stood shivering on a snowbank above Cisco while five locomotives strained futilely to drive a snowplough through thirty-foot drifts. They returned convinced that Crocker’s reports of his troubles were not imaginary.

By now the mileage race with the Union Pacific was on in earnest. Snowbound thousands continued the struggle from November to May. Chinese shoveled continuously, but drifts formed faster than they and steam ploughs could remove them. The section above Cisco had to be closed.

Before winter was half over, work in the open became impossible. Thousands of half-frozen Chinese were shipped back to lower levels. Only in the tunnels and deep cuts could construction go on. Food, powder, fuel, and all construction materials were laboriously packed in from Cisco. By January tunnels were dug beneath forty-foot drifts, and three thousand workmen passed from work to living quarters in dim passages under the snow. Avalanches grew frequent, their approach heralded only by a brief, thunderous roar. A second later a work crew, a bunkhouse, sometimes an entire camp, would go hurtling down miles of frozen canyons. Months afterward groups were found with shovels or picks still clutched in their frozen hands.

Those sent ahead to clear the roadway down the east slope found conditions little easier. In the heavily wooded Truckee River canyon, clearing the frozen ground for grading proved a huge task. Sugar pines eight feet and more in diameter were felled, their trunks cut in sections and rolled out of the way, their stumps blown skyward in abrupt fountains of flying wood and frozen earth. To supply this outpost army, equipment, material, and provisions had to be hauled on sleds over the summit to Donner Lake. Three locomotives, enough iron for forty miles of road, and forty cars were freighted over the ridge. Distance from Cisco to Truckee was only twenty-eight miles, but expenditure in effort and dollars was enormous.

Months later, as spring thaws reduced the mountains of snow, Crocker and Strobridge moved their crews back to the summit and began chipping through solid ice to the abandoned cuts and fills. Cisco again became a way station. The assault was resumed. Throughout 1867 twelve thousand workmen crowded the forty-mile front from the summit to the eastern base of the mountains, grading the roadbed down the steep slopes of Truckee Canyon. Tunnel No. 9 and adjacent cuts through solid granite proved tediously slow. Before that seven-mile gap could be shut, winter again closed in.

The construction record for 1867 — a scant forty miles, twenty-five of which were still unconnected with the main line — was not encouraging. That year the rival road built six times as many miles as the Central; its officials planned to reach Ogden, five hundred miles beyond its railhead, by the end of 1868. Faced with loss of hundreds of miles of easy construction across Nevada and Utah, — where government subsidy was twice the cost of building, — the partners could do little to remedy the situation. Reluctantly the upper line was again abandoned; Cisco once more became the terminus, and the slow process of sledding over the summit had to be resumed.

This news confirmed still-active doubts of the company’s critics on the Coast. Hostile newspapers printed letters in which engineers proved conclusively that the line must remain closed for five months each year. One writer, borrowing a phrase from a book just coming into popularity, called the line the ‘Alice in Wonderland Trail.’ Another predicted that in the end the great transcontinental railroad might prove useful to carry excursionists to the high Sierra on summer vacations.

Because no other means of keeping the tracks open could be devised, construction of a long series of snowsheds was begun, to cost $2,000,000. During the next two years a dozen sawmills and two hundred carpenters were continually busy putting up the heavily timbered galleries that eventually covered thirtyseven of the upper forty miles of the road.

During the winter of 1867-1868, work was pushed on the unclosed gap above Donner Lake, while rails were laid down the eastern slope and graders pushed into the sage-covered desert. Until the gap could be closed all hope of successfully competing for mileage with the Union Pacific was futile. At the first, hint of warm weather, thousands of coolies were moved back. The bosses, from Crocker down, drove them unmercifully. The thick crust engaged the picks and wheelbarrows of six thousand Chinese for weeks before the frozen roadbed was exposed and tracklaying could begin. June of 1868 was well advanced when tracks at last were continuous from Sacramento to the state line. Immediately freight trains packed with supplies and materials started rolling down the eastern mountainside.

To bring the road from Sacramento to the state line, money had been spent lavishly. Strobridge later estimated that with less speed the cost could have been reduced 70 per cent. He had in mind, of course, the waste involved in winter construction on the blizzard-swept mountaintop, and the expense of building in advance of the continuous line. With the upper thirty miles frozen solid from November to March, every cubic foot of earth had to be chipped or blasted loose by workmen occupying dim trenches between ice cliffs thirty feet high. In spring thaws the newly laid tracks buckled and three quarters of the work had to be done over.

Twenty years later company auditors fixed the cost of this California section at $23,000,000, but that was when the owners were trying to minimize profits. The figure was reached by listing at face value bonds that had sold at fifty cents on the dollar and less. In gold, the total was slightly above $14,000,000. Judah’s estimate, in 1861, had been $12,500,000, a by no means reckless forecast. He had not foreseen thirtyseven miles of snowsheds, nor counted on a five-year war that skyrocketed costs.

In the early ’60s, manufacturing on the Coast had hardly begun. Everything needed in railroad building, except lumber and masonry, had to be purchased in Eastern markets. It was specified that rails and spikes and rolling stock must be of American manufacture — and, with every mill in the East jammed with wartime orders, prices rose alarmingly. Standard twenty-pound iron rails that had sold in Pennsylvania mill towns at $55 per ton, in 1861, reached a peak of $262 before the war ended. The thrifty Huntington endured the anguish of having to refuse British contracts that would have placed rails on the Sacramento levee for a third less than he was paying at the American mills.

Materials bought in the ruinous Eastern market had to be shipped across the Isthmus or round the Horn, and from 1862 to 1865 rates followed sharply ascending curves. Later, when their own lines were charging ‘all the traffic will bear,’the partners liked to remind shippers that they had not always been on this pleasant side of the fence. Insurance rates advanced fourfold, as Rebel warships harried the sea lanes off Virginia and farther south.

Buying for the company, Huntington needed all his shrewdness in dealing with mill owners whose files bulged with army contracts. Only the fact that the railroad was regarded as a war measure enabled him to place certain orders. Until material was at sea, he could not be certain that the War Department would not take it over. A number of times locomotives, rails, and cars ready to be shipped to the Coast, and urgently needed there, were diverted to battlelines.

There remained the problem of getting material to California. Available ships were few; freight rates were whatever owners or agents chose to ask. In 1862 the horizon brightened momentarily when Huntington outwitted a shipping agent by chartering fifty ships at half the prevailing rate. But this was an incident. Freightage around the Horn averaged $17.50 a ton; via the Isthmus it was three times as much. In 1863 Crocker needed a new locomotive in a hurry. It was disassembled and loaded on a steamer at Philadelphia, transported to Panama, loaded on flatcars and sent over the twenty-mile Panama Railroad, reshipped on a Pacific steamer, deposited on a lighter in San Francisco Bay, hoisted to the deck of a river boat for transportation to Sacramento, deposited on the levee, and trucked to the company’s shops, where it was reassembled. The freight bill was $8100, more than 80 per cent of its initial cost.

Collapse of the Rebellion failed to bring the anticipated drop in prices. In '66, on thirty-eight locomotives, the price averaged $11,000. Forty-foot passenger coaches cost $3500, flatcars $600, handcars $150, powder $5.00 a keg. All prices were in gold; if payment was made in greenbacks, bills mounted as much as 60 per cent. When construction crews advanced into the unproductive Humboldt, new items of expense were added. Hay and oats brought fantastic prices. Ties were presently costing the partners as much as $8.00 each, delivered.

By then, however, cost was lightly regarded. The plains of Nevada and Utah Territory lay before the construction army; less than a thousand miles beyond, crews of the rival company were pushing westward. The Union Pacific building crew under the management of General Grenville M. Dodge, the ranks swelled by hundreds of disbanded soldiers, had for months been setting mileage records over the prairies of Nebraska and southern Wyoming, while the Central forces, struggling with the Sierra tunnels, had been advancing by inches.

X

In April 1868, the Overland Telegraph carried a message from Vice President Durant of the Union Pacific to Stanford at Sacramento. Union Pacific had reached Sherman’s Summit, Wyoming, 8200 feet above sea level. Stanford wired back: ‘We cheerfully yield you the palm of superior elevation; 7242 feet has been quite sufficient to satisfy our highest ambition.’ The ambition of the Central Pacific group had been curtailed in another direction; they no longer planned to build so many miles of road as their rival. To extend their lines to Salt Lake and far enough beyond to control traffic with the Mormon capital was all they hoped for. Even this was no longer certain. To realize it would require that they should build faster than railroads had ever been built before.

Stakes were high. Now that the mountains were behind, Crocker’s native optimism reasserted itself. ‘Give me the material I need,’he announced, ‘and I can build a mile a day of completed railroad.’ His partners took him at his word. Huntington bought with increasing prodigality; at one time thirty ships were carrying rails around the Horn. The winter of 1867-1868 arrived before the snowsheds were completed. Despite the efforts of six snowploughs and 2500 men, there was one discouraging two-week period when the road was closed.

The railhead reached Reno and advanced eastward, with surveying crews working far in advance, seeking a route with fewest cuts and fills, least amount of grading. Years later E. H. Harriman spent millions realigning this Nevada section, eliminating scores of its snakelike curves and shortening it by dozens of miles. Mileage and speed, not economy of operation, were the goals; every mile built meant a profit of twice its cost.

Through the hot summer of 1868, six thousand men worked with ordered efficiency. Crocker’s coolies, now expert with pick and wheelbarrow and horsedrawn scrapers, tirelessly leveled the nondescript roadbed, undeterred by sizzling heat and alkali dust. Behind them other crews rushed culverts to completion, while still others embedded the widely spaced ties, working at top speed to keep ahead of gangs of Irish tracklayers.

This perambulating army, living in long strings of boxcars that weekly moved to new sidings, advanced rapidly across central Nevada’s waterless plains. Crocker boasted that he was directing the mightiest army ever enlisted in a work of civilization. His partners, no longer critical, sent him messages of congratulation and urged him to try harder. The winter of 1868-1869, though it washed out miles of earthen fills to the rear, was welcomed with joy by the sweltering crews on construction. December 31 saw an advance for the year of 362 miles, only three short of Crocker’s promise of a mile a day.

But the Union Pacific’s five thousand boasted that one Hibernian could outwork three Chinese. The race went on with control of traffic with Brigham Young’s prosperous colony as the prize. During the fall and winter Stanford lived at Salt Lake and cultivated the goodwill of the Prophet by offering him lucrative contracts to grade long sections of Central Pacific roadbed. The two men (their physical resemblance was close enough to cause occasional mild embarrassment to the Central Pacific’s monogamous president) became close friends. There was some disapproval when word reached the Coast that they addressed one another as Leland and Brigham.

As the year 1868 ended, rival railheads were so near that the point of joining became an issue. Both sent surveyors far beyond the other’s rails: the Union Pacific almost to the California line, the Central hundreds of miles east of Ogden. Building continued until the graded lines paralleled each other for miles. Chinese and Irish crews regarded one another with mutual distaste. By accident or design, boulders occasionally rolled down from the Central’s line, higher on the hillside, while startled Irishmen dropped their picks and scurried out of their paths. The Union’s powdermen sometimes laid blasts rather far to the right of their line, and a thousand graders looked on innocently as Chinese and scrapers, horses and wheelbarrows and picks, fountained upward. The Orientals regathered their forces, buried the dead, and continued placidly about their business until another blast brought another temporary pause. This sport ended when a section of the Union’s line mysteriously shot skyward and it became the Irishmen’s turn to take time out for gravedigging.

Meanwhile the precise point of joining the rails was being fought out at Washington, with Huntington on hand. He had a formidable rival in General Dodge, for Grant then occupied the White House and Dodge was a close friend and fellow campaigner. On April 10, 1869, Congress designated Promontory Point, six miles west of Ogden, as the meeting place.

Once this had been settled, the necessity for haste vanished. Tension relaxed; the Central’s force was cut down, and rival officials found time to exchange visits. Toward the end of April, Dodge spent two days in the camp of the Westerners. The docile industry of Crocker’s veteran coolies aroused his frank envy; his own gangs of ex-soldiers had for months been distinguishing themselves by other qualities. He made one pleasant discovery. ‘The Californians,’he wrote, ‘have plenty of strawberries.’

The visiting engineer was on hand the day Crocker’s crews accomplished their widely heralded feat of laying ten miles of track in a day. Dodge was not particularly impressed. ‘They took a week preparing for it,’ he commented, ‘and embedded all their ties beforehand.’

XI

The raw April of 1869 ended; the seven-year job drew toward its close. Central’s rails reached Promontory first, a day ahead of Union’s, for an uncompleted rock fill held up the rival tracklayers. On May 2, General Dodge wrote his wife: ‘There will not be much of a time here — no demonstration; but in the east and further west I expect they will celebrate.’

The prediction proved incorrect. Back at the Central’s head office at Sacramento plans for a celebration had been under way for weeks. On May 7 the first of several special trains arrived, its occupants expecting to witness an immediate wedding of the rails. Instead they found the little village forlorn in a driving rain, its street a mudhole, bunting limp across the façades of its wooden shacks.

A hundred feet from the Central’s railhead the end of the Union’s tracks could be seen. Of the Eastern party and the trainloads of celebrants rumored to have left Omaha two days earlier nothing was visible. Stanford and his guests stared moodily at the landscape, then climbed gingerly down to file messages of inquiry with telegraph operators of both lines, housed in tents.

The storm was general throughout the Rockies. Union’s headquarters at Ogden reported floods and washouts on its line east of the town. Nothing was said of a further complication; money was lacking to pay many of the Union’s workmen, and Vice President Durant had to cope with still another strike. Word reached Promontory that the Eastern party would not arrive until Monday.

Back on the Coast, plans had been made for elaborate celebrations on Saturday. Stanford wired news of the delay, but the West considered Saturday the proper day for celebrating, and the message was ignored. Thus while San Francisco, Sacramento, and a dozen lesser towns commemorated the event with bands and fireworks and illuminated parades, time dragged in the car of the Central Pacific’s president. Some of the party relieved boredom by a visit to the nearest Union Pacific construction camp. There Jack Casement loaded them into a battered coach for a tour of flooded Weber Canyon. They returned to Stanford’s car, damp and hungry, late Saturday evening. The downpour continued. That night the car was drawn back thirty miles to a siding at Monument Point, and the next morning its windows framed the same landscape from a new point of view that included the gray surface of Salt Lake.

Stanford’s car had not been moved back from the end of the track solely to provide his guests with a view of Salt Lake. Two days of fraternizing among the officials had not meant that the rivalry was at an end. Both continued to jockey for advantages until the rails were joined. Rival officials recognized that the company building a siding at Promontory would have an advantage in the future control of the settlement. The Central Pacific’s plans were laid in secret. A hundred miles back, a work train had been made up, loaded with men and materials; the storm delayed execution of the coup. Sunday night the rain ceased and the sky cleared. Central’s train moved from the rear, timed to reach Promontory at daybreak. It arrived on schedule — and was greeted by derisive shouts from Casement’s Irish tracklayers. They had been working all night; the Union Pacific siding was completed.

It was the last skirmish before the lines were joined. Monday, May 10, was clear and cold. During the night Promontory’s liquid street had turned to ice. The spot was live thousand feet high, and the wind had a penetrating quality that kept unacclimated visitors shuttling between the town’s five saloons and the glowing stoves of the cars. As morning advanced, crews set to work closing the remaining yards of the gap. It had been planned that two special trains should arrive at the same moment, from east and west, as an impressive prelude to the joining of the rails. Instead, battered construction trains rolled in from both directions, loaded with graders and tracklayers and teamsters, intent on seeing the show.

Throughout the morning other groups filtered in from near-by construction camps on foot or on the broad backs of draft horses. Stanford’s party again made the thirty-mile trip from Monument and was pushed to the siding to make room for another flag-decorated special from the Coast. This bore other company officials, including spare Mark Hopkins, his shoulders hunched against the wind. The two remaining partners were absent. Huntington was in New York, and Crocker, who always delighted in celebrations, had unaccountably remained behind at Sacramento.

Midmorning passed with no sign of the Union Pacific’s special. The crowd faced the cold wind and gathered in shivering groups while work crews completed the final few feet of track, leaving one rail on the side nearest the lake to be placed later. Delay succeeded delay. Noon passed — one o’clock, two. Telegraph instruments on tables beside the track chattered impatient inquiries from east and west. What was wrong? The wind died down; the weather grew uncomfortably warm. A hungry, impatient crowd intruded on the cleared space. The audience was near the end of its patience. It was a lamentably late curtain.

At last the screech of a Union Pacific locomotive was heard; the crowd set up an ironical cheer. A group of Central Pacific officials, led by Stanford and Hopkins, descended from their car and tramped through the mud to greet the arriving dignitaries. Spectators surged forward, staring at Durant’s shining Pullman, and cheered again as formal greetings were exchanged. The celebration took on an unplanned military aspect, for the train carried several companies of the 21st Infantry, and the regimental band, bound from Fort Douglas to San Francisco’s Presidio. The soldiers were put to work opening a lane through the crowd for the cameramen, there to preserve the historic event.

Perhaps five hundred persons were present: Irish and Chinese laborers, teamsters, cooks, engineers, train crews, officials, guests, and parties of excursionists from California and Salt Lake City. The latter, to the disappointment of the Californians, did not include Brigham Young. A number of women were among the excursion parties, including the wives of two Central Pacific officials: Mrs. Strobridge and Mrs. Ryan. A group of Promontory strumpets were also on hand, their presence unrecorded in official dispatches.

The belated wedding got under way. Ceremonial spikes, ties, and the final rail were carried forward by a picked squad of Chinese, denim pantaloons and jackets newly scrubbed, pigtails neatly braided. While necks craned, a laurel tie was embedded, the rail put in place, the telegraph operators reporting each step over wires kept open throughout the nation. A Massachusetts pastor offered an invocation so comprehensive that the telegrapher tapped out: ‘We have got done praying; the spike is about to be presented.'

Several spikes were presented, each with a speech. One was of Comstock silver; another was an alloy of gold, silver, and iron, symbolical of Arizona Territory’s varied mineral resources; gold and silver spikes from Idaho and Montana followed; then two of gold from California and a silver sledgehammer for their driving. The spikes, except the final one of gold, were placed in holes provided for them, hammered home by inexpert laps of officials and distinguished guests. Nearly an hour was so consumed. At last the final spike was inserted, a telegraph line was attached to it and another to the hammer, so that the sound of the blows might be carried throughout, the nation — to such devices were the ingenious driven in a radioless age. The nation waited while Stanford raised his hammer for the historic stroke. The silver hammer missed the spike, but the telegrapher, prepared for the contingency, simulated the blow with his key.

At once a magnetic ball dropped from its pole above the Capitol dome at Washington, San Francisco’s dozens of fire bells began tolling, salvos of cannon boomed, and factory whistles screeched in scores of cities from coast to coast. In a country town north of San Francisco a boy under six was-lifted on his father’s shoulder and stared over heads at a sheet of paper newly pasted on a newspaper office door; he was told that all these men were cheering because soon everyone would be rich. In another town on the opposite rim of the continent neighbors spoke with sympathy of poor Mrs. Judah, who sat alone in her brother’s house, refusing to see friends.

At Promontory, while the crowd shouted and locomotive whistles responded to taut cords, Amos Bouscher elbowed his way to the side of a San Francisco jeweler who was busily collecting five dollars from all who wished watch charms made from the historic golden spike. Sixty years later Bouscher still held his tattered receipt and a growing belief that the stranger must have been an impostor.

Vice President Durant completed the driving of the spike. The 21st Infantry band played America. Two engines moved cautiously over the new-laid rail, touched cowcatchers, and their engineers were given the first drinks from the foaming neck of a champagne bottle. In San Francisco, Bret Harte inquired in the pages of his Overland Monthly: —

What was it the engines said,
Pilots touching — head to head. . . .

Officials and a few guests retired to Durant’s shining car to frame a message to President Grant, while workmen, prudently detailed to the task in advance, drew out the silver and gold spikes, removed the laurel tie. Souvenir hunters, undiscouraged, proceeded to cut chips from the substituted tie, even to hack bits off the iron rail. In the ensuing months both rail and tie had several times to be replaced.

By then the afternoon was nearly gone; officials hurried to a late luncheon in Stanford’s car, and hoi polloi sought the food and drink promised them by the two companies. They received both in abundance. By nine o’clock the celebration had reached a stage where a grand ball, a banquet, and a torchlight procession were in simultaneous progress. Two weeks later Central Pacific auditors O. K.’d bills totaling $2200 ‘on account of celebration upon completion of the railroad.’

On the gray morning of May 11, the specials started on their return trips east and west; before nightfall transcontinental trains were moving cautiously over the new rails under the eyes of Promontory’s diminished population.

(To be continued)