Some editors and reporters disagreed. A Utah reporter declared: “The rivalry between the two Companies has already been a benefit to the public in the increased amount of road built in a comparatively short space of time to what it would have been if no competition had existed; and if it causes the completion of the entire road in a year’s time less than was first calculated upon, so much the better.”7
The New York Tribune was of the opinion that the government was saving money on the railroads, not giving it away. In an 1868 editorial, the Tribune calculated that, whereas the government was accustomed to paying as much as 40 or 50 cents per ton per mile to haul supplies to troops in frontier outposts, the UP had reduced that rate to less than 10 cents per ton per mile. That meant that, though the cost of government supplies in 1867 was $699,698, it would have cost $2,625,536 had the supplies been transported by wagons. The government had saved nearly $2 million in one year alone, and that in a year when the track had only reached the Nebraska-Wyoming border. Meanwhile, the value of its public lands alongside or near the railroad had gone up far more than what the government would have received for all its lands had there been no railroad. The Tribune reflected the optimism of the vast majority. “We shall look for a great stream of travel over the Pacific Railroad next year,” the paper declared, “and its completion will give a wonderful impetus to mining, settlement and industry throughout the new Territories, as well as on the Pacific coast.”8
MOST of the men who built the UP had participated in winning the war. They and a vast majority of their fellow countrymen in the North were well aware that during the conflict a great deal had been learned about how to build and maintain a railroad. They understood that the lessons were now being applied to the transcontinental railroad. Those lessons—or principles, as Dodge called them—had, in his words, “taught the American people that there was no problem in finance or relating to the development of the country so great that its people did not feel able to grasp and master it.”9
No problem. Not mountains, not deserts, not Indians, not finances or swindlers, not distance, not high interest rates or a scarcity of labor, not politicians whether venal or stupid, not even a civil war or its aftermath. Americans were a people such as the world had never before known. No one before them, no matter where or how they lived, had had such optimism or determination. It was thanks to those two qualities that the Americans set out to build what had never before been done.
GENERAL Dodge was one who had helped bring about victory in the Civil War. He was also instrumental in getting the Pacific Railroad Bill of 1862 and its amendments in 1864 through the Congress. He had then become the chief engineer of the UP, and as such he was going into 1868 full of hopes, plans, and ambitions. Dodge said he wished to build the way to the Salt Lake, almost five hundred miles from the end of track on the last day of 1867, and then endeavor to meet the CP at Humboldt Wells, which was 219 miles west of Ogden, and to do that in the spring of 1869. Maybe—perhaps—who knew?—the UP track layers could meet the CP at the California state line.10
That was hubris. But for the most part, Dodge had prepared the UP for 1868. To the west, he had surveyed across Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, right up to the California state line. To the east, the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad had reached Council Bluffs, Iowa, and with a temporary bridge over the Missouri River supplies could be gotten to Omaha at a much faster rate than ever before. Dodge and his subordinates had piled up an immense amount of rails (sixteen hundred carloads of track iron from the Chicago and Northwestern alone), spikes, fishplates, ties, and other supplies in Omaha, and had shipped enough to Cheyenne to keep the Casements and their men busy for a long time. And they in turn had plenty of men. Further, the railroad, in reaching the Black Hills, was now close to ample supplies of good timber for bridges and ties, which could be floated down mountain streams to the work itself, thus providing great relief to the strain on transportation from Omaha.
Ahead of the UP through Wyoming, there was relatively easy going. Even better news for the directors, who were as always concerned about money, was that, for the next 150 miles from Cheyenne onward, the company would be receiving $48,000 in government bonds for each mile of track laid and accepted. From there on it would be $32,000 per mile. From Omaha to Cheyenne, they had received only $16,000 in bonds per mile.
Greatly encouraged by all this welcome news, the directors told Dodge “to build as much road as possible in 1868.” He and the men working for him and thousands working for them set out to do just that.11 In January 1868, Dodge wrote his construction superintendent, Sam Reed, “You must do more hard work in 1868.”12
DODGE’S plans, like those of the CP, rested on a clause in the law (put into it in 1866) that allowed each company to grade three hundred miles in advance of a continuous line of track and collect part of the government bonds for each twenty-mile segment graded. If Dodge could lay track to within one hundred miles of Ogden, then the UP could send its grading crews as far west as Humboldt Wells.
The CP, for its part, if it could get track into Ogden, could advance three hundred miles eastward, well into Wyoming. Its problem was that the gap between the end of track at Donner Lake was still several hundred miles short of Humboldt Wells, which is what gave Dodge the thought that the UP might make it to the California state line before the CP got east of it.
Huntington had his own plans. In April 1868, he drew a red line across a map of a preliminary survey and sent it to Secretary of the Interior Browning. The line ran north of the Salt Lake, across the Promontory Mountains to Ogden, then eastward into the Wasatch Range and up a northern fork of Echo Creek. The map was fraudulent, but Huntington backed it up with a letter that lied about where the CP had its end of track. If Browning would approve, CP grading crews could occupy the ground in and east of the Wasatch. It helped that one of Huntington’s lobbyists was Thomas Ewing, Jr., a former associate of Browning. It also helped that Browning had an intense hatred of the UP, or at least of Doc Durant, which he regarded as one and the same. On May 15, he approved Huntington’s line as far east as Monument Point, Utah, but withheld his decision to Promontory and beyond.
Possession of Utah was at stake. “It is an important matter,” Huntington told Stanford. “We should be bold and take and hold possession of the line to Echo.” Oakes Ames, meanwhile, stressed the UP’s need “to build 3 miles a day until next Dec. or Jany and get to Salt Lake before the Central.” Whether the UP could do that was to be seen. The CP crowd relied on the divided counsels of Durant, Dodge, the Ames brothers, and other officials of the UP. “Ha! Ha!” E. B. Crocker told Huntington. “What a time the Union Pacific folks have. That is a trouble we do not have [because] we are all united.”13
President Johnson’s Cabinet reached no firm decision on how far the grading could go. The Congress stayed aloof from the controversy. The railroads went ahead surveying as far as they could and making grade as fast as possible. Soon enough they were making grade beside each other in Utah, the CP going east and the UP going west, on parallel roads.
Push is the word for this season,” Sam Reed proclaimed at the start of 1868, and, like most of the leaders in the field for the UP, he pushed himself hardest of all. His telegram copy book, in the UP Archives in Omaha, shows just how hard. The copies cover all types of work and consist in large part of the kind of telephone conversations a twenty-first-century businessman would have with his superiors and subordinates. What follows is a tiny selection.
January 28, Reed to J. Lathrop at the end of track: “If you want anything from Omaha you will have to send it here to be approved.” Same day, Reed to G. W. Frost in Omaha: “Send for Dale Creek bridge four sets blocks for one inch line and one coil of seven-eighths line, two clamps that will span thirty inches to clamp timber for bolting Congdon will explain, three one and one quarter inch augers.”
Same day, Reed to M. F. Hurd at the end of track: “Put the station house on the north side of main track west of turntable track.” Same day
, to Lathrop: “I have ordered ten dozen shovels and six dozen picks and handles for Carmichael.” Same day, again to Lathrop: “Is there any dirt cars at the station. Mulloy picked up some Sunday if there send one with ox for dumping to Miller and Co.” Same day, to Hurd: “On section 288 estimated 4000 yards earth instead of 6500 as you telegraphed look into it.”
Same day, to Frost in Omaha: “Send my bridge timber in preference to iron. Eighteen to twenty cars of Iron intended here daily must be cars enough to load timber in Chicago if there is any instead of sending it forward.” Same to same, also January 28: “Have you paid Bent and CO for 50 tons of hay furnished me some time since.”14
Here is another sample, all telegrams dated March 13, 1868. Reed to H. Bissell at Dale Creek: “Send a man over and count the boxes of bolts that have been received at the Bridge soon as possible and give me the answer.” Also to Bissell: “Has Butterfield put on another gang of raisers. How is he getting along raising the bridge.” To Frost in Omaha: “There was received here yesterday a lot of three inch plank. I have not ordered lumber of that description.” To Lathrop: “How many boxes of Dale Creek Bridge bolts have you received since February 1st and are there any at your place.” To H. M. Hoxie in Omaha: “Are there any boxes of Dale Creek Bridge bolts at Omaha. If so send them forward. 109 boxes have passed Chicago. 83 received here.” To Lathrop: “Were the bolts shipped by team from your place or sent to end of track and shipped from there. We are short at bridge, not all received.”
On it went. To Lathrop again, also March 13: “In Reynolds and Dowling bill for supplies, I find 300 pounds whole pepper. Does he want that amount.” To Bissell at Dale Creek: “There is a man in Omaha that represents that he is hiring men for Hall. Send a man to Hall’s Camp and find out if he wants the men.” Again to Bissell: “There has been sent from Carmichael to Dale Creek 109 boxes of bolts and washers if not received let me know immediately.” To Lathrop: “How much hay received from Casement since January 1st to March 1st. How much from McDonald. How much wood used in Casement’s boarding car and sent to them at Cheyenne since January 1st.” To Bissell: “Have you received the 109 boxes or only the 86 boxes of bolts and washers.” To Lathrop, same day: “Bissell reports only 86 boxes bolts and washers received at the bridge. Where are the balance.” To W. Snyder, Omaha: “Michael Haley is authorized to hire men for Hall. Send good rail road men only men wanted.” Also on March 13, Reed sent a thousand-word telegram to H. C. Crane, the UP’s secretary in New York.15
REED was “talking” to men in New York, Chicago, Omaha, and at the end of track. That the telegraph would keep up with the end of track was a requirement of the Pacific Railroad Act, and in any event absolutely necessary to the building of the road. There was a regular work gang for the telegraph. The poles were brought to the front on the material trains and distributed by wagons. One gang fastened the cross-arms to the top of the poles while another group, under a foreman, dug the holes. A third gang erected them. A wire was brought forward in a wagon and unwound from a reel as the wagon moved ahead. A wire gang raised the wire and fastened it to the insulators.
There was an intense rivalry between the telegraph gangs and the track gangs. Sometimes the telegraph workers were delayed by a lack of poles, but when that happened they connected the wires to a temporary telegraph set. That way, communication between Cheyenne, Omaha, Chicago, and points east and the end of track was never lost.16 Or, rather, almost never: the buffalo had a way of using the poles as scratching posts and would sometimes knock them down.
Besides the buffalo, Reed’s problems included liquor. On March 28, he sent a wire to Secretary Crane: “As soon as a party of men commence at work a lot of tents are put up on the vicinity and whiskey furnished to the men.” As a result, robbery and murder were commonplace. “Whiskey ranches interfere materially with our men. Two men were shot Thursday night. Can something be done through Congress to stop the indiscriminate sale of whiskey in the vicinity of our work.”
MORE examples of how the telegraph was used by the men making the line, the following all from April 9. Reed to L. Carmichael at Dale Creek: “I have written you this morning to put on night gang on cut west of bridge. Keep as many men on them as can be worked night and day.” To Reynolds and Dowling at Dale Creek: “Put night gang on first cut west of bridge. Keep as many men on as can be worked night and day there are plenty of carts you can have if you want more to surface road bed.” To M. Hurd in Cheyenne: “Can you let us have an engine and 2 empty box cars for an hour or two.” To Furst & Bradley in Chicago: “Send me one hundred more scrapers.” To G. W. Frost in Omaha: “Send on No. 3 tonight for immediate use 6 relays, 6 sounders, 6 keys, 6 switches, 2 coils insulated copper wire 6 clip boards.” To Hurd: “Have you the level notes from Sta 1500 west. Want to start engineering party out with Creighton Saturday.”
To M. F. Seymour at Dale Creek: “Have 9 boxes bolts from Pittsburgh will send them up to Summit tomorrow noon will send to Snyder for 500 extra.” To W. Snyder in Omaha: “Please send me on express train as soon as you can have them made 5003/4 inch bolts 223/4 inches long answer.” To A. L. Thompson: “There are three cooking stoves at Mulloy shanties near Summit. You can have one. You will have to take down some of your shanties at Dale Creek for what lumber you want.” To J. E. Boyd in Omaha, with a copy to Gustavus Ames in Omaha: “When will you have a force on your work west of Little Laramie.” And, finally, the last one of the day, to G. W. Frost in Omaha: “Pay bill just received. You have charged for shovels $20 per dozen. I can buy them in Cheyenne for less.”17
Just before going to sleep that night, Reed wrote his wife, “I have too much for any mortal man to do.”18 So did nearly every man working for the UP, although it would be difficult to imagine anyone working more hours or harder than Reed. Still, he kept his optimism. On March 18, he had sent a telegram to his rival, Charlie Crocker. “My men have stuck stakes in the Humboldt Mts. We’ll meet you there.”
Crocker laughed at the audacity. “He won’t find his stakes when he arrives,” he told a reporter. “I’ll have trains running that far by the end of this year.”19
Reed was living in Cheyenne, as were the Casements and the workers. Dubbed the “Magic City of the Plains,” the town had grown from nothing, when Dodge platted and staked it out in July 1867, to a town of a few thousand that was selling lots at a record pace. Frame buildings were replacing tents. Leigh Freeman, the son of a UP employee, had been a telegrapher at Fort Kearney when he founded a newspaper, the Frontier Index (later in Cheyenne). In 1866, he moved his printing press (and thus the newspaper) by wagon to North Platte. He continued to follow the railroad westward, setting up in the Hell on Wheels towns and providing the UP’s workers with news and entertainment.20
THROUGH the winter of 1867–68 and indeed up to and even beyond the beginning of spring, the storms had kept most of the crews from working. On February 28, 1868, for example, Reed sent a telegram to Secretary Crane saying he had “just returned from the mountains [Sherman Pass] where I have been storm bound since last Monday. The storm has been more severe than any other this season. All the cuts were full of snow and it will take ten days to two weeks to clear them.”21
By the beginning of April, the worst seemed to be over, and the frost was leaving the ground. The Casement brothers and their men were eager, or, in the typically American phrase, “raring to go.” By April 5, the track-laying crews had covered ten miles and had nearly reached Sherman Summit at 8,242 feet of altitude, the highest point of any railroad anywhere. Or, as Reed put it in an April 7 telegram from Cheyenne to Secretary Crane in Omaha, “Track laid over highest railroad summit on the Continent. S. B. Reed.” Graders meanwhile had started down the west slope toward Dale Creek, four miles beyond Sherman and thirty-five miles west of Cheyenne.
AT Dale Creek, the engineers and the crews had to build a bridge over the creek. To support the effort, Dale City had come into existence. In December 1867, the Frontier Index had noted its presence: “We are informed
that this is a right pert place, just now; contains about forty buildings, with a population of about six or seven hundred railroaders, tie men, teamsters, wood choppers, etc., and a good prospect of a steady increase for some months to come.” The workers were there to make grade, dig the cuts, and otherwise prepare for the coming of the bridge trusses, most of all to build masonry foundations for the big trestle. In March 1868, a post office came to Dale City.22
The bridge would be 126 feet above the streambed and seven hundred feet long, making it by far the highest bridge of the UP, ever. To stand at the site today, or to look at its photograph by Andrew Russell, is to be filled with astonishment. How could they possibly even imagine such a thing, much less do it? A bridge, built entirely of wood, 126 feet above the creek bed and seven hundred feet long? Sufficiently strong to carry a locomotive, a tender, a string of passenger or freight cars, while swaying in the Wyoming mountain winds? With a mile of cut on the west side and nearly as much on the east, through solid rock? Daunting at best, quite probably to most engineers impossible. Yet the UP did it, in what was one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century.
All this to get the tracks over Dale Creek. Engineer Hezekiah Bissell called it “a big bridge for a small brook that one could easily step over.” When the track got near Sherman Summit, the Cheyenne Daily Leader said the next day that “a vast and varied amount of freight and passengers went to the end of track today. There were five car loads of iron and spikes, twenty-five dirt scrapers, twenty quarters of fresh beef, patent plows, men’s boots, gunnies of ham, cases of pepper-sauce, sacks of grain, bales of clothing and working men with Winchester rifles, carpet bags, blankets and every other conceivable article of tools, food and wearing apparel.”23 Meanwhile, the grading crews were moving on west.