Accidents were so common they hardly got reported. The Chicago Tribune gave one paragraph to an incident in which a construction train in eastern Nebraska, near Fremont, ran over a cow. The accident threw several cars off the track. Five men were killed, twelve wounded (and two of them died the following day). “Several ladies were badly mangled.”
Another report, dated July 15, 1868, dateline Laramie City, said that a westbound freight train that had just passed over the Dale Creek Bridge ran into a car carrying gravel. The car had become detached from an eastbound train and ran down the grade toward Laramie “at such fearful velocity that it demolished the rear car of the freight train, which contained a number of persons.” One man was killed, another seriously injured, and others were cut or bruised.42
After the track got up to and beyond the second crossing of the North Platte, a boiler malfunction, sometimes even an explosion, became commonplace. This was because, throughout the Wyoming desert, from Rawlins to Green River, the water was an alkaline concoction that destroyed the boilers faster than they could be replaced. It looked like water but, according to Morris Mills, when heat was applied to it “it became a law unto itself and defying the ingenuity of man it would shoot out through the smoke stack like a miniature geyser.” Engines headed east rolled into Cheyenne looking as if they had been whitewashed. Eventually the UP learned how to apply a chemical process to the water to make it behave.43
THE region west of Rawlins was an “awful place,” according to Jack Casement. It consisted of “alkali dust knee deep and certainly the meanest place I have ever been in.” Surveyor James Evans said, “It is not a country where people are disposed to linger.”44 But the railroad, and those who worked on it and those who worked on them, had to get across it.
On June 21, 1868, Arthur Ferguson recorded in his diary, “Large numbers of wagon teams, men and women, the latter principally prostitutes, are now crossing the [North Platte] river, bound as far west as Green River, which they say is quite a town.”45
The sharpers, the cooks, the bartenders, the musicians, the girls, and the women were leaving Benton for the next end of track to boast a city, or at least a railroad establishment. Leaving Benton was no problem. A Cheyenne, Wyoming, reporter described the place as reminding him of “the camps of the Bedouin Arabs, [because it] is of tents, and of almost a transitory nature as the elements of a soap bubble.” Novelist J. H. Beadle was there in the summer of 1868 and, tramping through the alkali in his black suit, he said he came to resemble “a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel.” He found “not a green tree, shrub or patch of grass. The red hills were scorched as bare as if blasted by lightning.”
Samuel Bowles, the travel writer from Massachusetts, described Benton as “by day disgusting, by night dangerous, almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of lowest vice; averaging a murder a day; gambling, drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce.” He thought the inhabitants a “congregation of scum.”46
A month or so later, they were all gone. There was not a single house or tent, only the rubble of a few chimneys and the sole surviving institution, the cemetery. This was because, as Ferguson noted, Hell on Wheels was on the move. Like the UP Railroad, Green River was the next stop.
THERE was money to be made out of the railroad. Among the many who knew that basic fact were Doc Durant and his fellow stockholders in the Crédit Mobilier. Dodge might want to build a first-class railroad, one that would last. Durant was for that, in his own way, but meanwhile he wanted to make money, not from any dividends the UP might pay from profits earned down the line, but from the construction phase. So he and his fellow trustees began handing out the Crédit Mobilier profits to none other than themselves, as UP stock- and bondholders. On January 4, 1868, the dividend was 80 percent of their CM stock, paid in UP first-mortgage bonds, and 100 percent in UP stock. Then, in June, they made three distributions to CM stockholders who also held UP shares. The first distribution amounted to 40 percent in stock of the UP, amounting to $1.5 million in face value or $450,000 at the current price of $30 per share, plus 60 percent in cash, or $2.25 million. The second was 75 percent in UP bonds, worth $2,812,500. The third was a cash allotment of 30 percent, or $1,125,000.
A man holding a hundred shares of Crédit Mobilier stock, which had cost him $10,000, received in 1868 alone $9,000 in cash, $7,500 in UP bonds then selling at par, and forty shares of UP stock worth about $1,600 in cash, or a total of $18,100. Added to the earlier dividend, he received $28,200 for his $10,000 investment, or 280 percent in one year.47
No one could accuse Doc of thinking small. Indeed he was thinking of much more than money. Though money was nice to have, and his lever for power, he also wanted every American to know his name and his accomplishments. At forty-eight years of age, he had time to make that happen, but he knew that just making money would never get him there. He wanted a place in history. Not from politics: he was contemptuous of politicians, a feeling common to the men of the Gilded Age. Durant wanted what such contemporaries as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt had, or something like what Collis Huntington or Leland Stanford would have. Doc wanted, above all else, to be remembered as the Man Who Built the Union Pacific Railroad.
Doc’s competition for that title was Grenville Dodge. Durant knew that Dodge had a sizable lead on him, one that perhaps could not be overcome. Dodge was the one who told Lincoln where the railroad should run, the one who had pushed Lincoln on the 1862 Pacific Railroad Bill and the 1864 revision, the one who had brought Grant and Sherman into play. Durant knew—better than anyone else, since he was the person who had insisted on bringing Dodge into the company as chief engineer—that Dodge had been indispensable. He knew in addition that Dodge was the one who had found the route out of Omaha, the route up Lodgepole Creek to Cheyenne, the route to Sherman Summit and beyond to Laramie, and then to Green River and beyond. Plus which, all the employees, from the Casement brothers, Evans, Reed, and so on down to the lowliest Irish laborer, reported to Dodge. Back in New York, or even in Boston, people might think of it as Durant’s railroad, but not west of the Mississippi.
Yet, even if Doc couldn’t compete with Dodge on the ground, he could send in the “interfering engineer,” Silas Seymour, to fight for him. From the beginning, that had been Seymour’s role, to work for Durant by second-guessing Dodge. From Omaha westward, Seymour had questioned Dodge’s route and often tried to change it, primarily to add more miles, so that the UP would collect more government bonds and land grants. In most cases, Dodge was able to overrule Seymour.
On April 23, 1868, Dodge met with Doc and the UP’s Dillon and Seymour at Cheyenne. They had what Dodge called “a very plain talk.” Doc assured Dodge that “he had no desire to interfere with the work or delay it, but only wanted to help.” For his part, Dodge vowed that “nobody could go over his work superficially and change it.”
Less than two weeks later, Durant, from Fort Sanders, issued his “General Order No. 1” (a nice way for Doc, who had never been in the military, to steal a military phrase from one of the heroes of the Civil War). He took advantage of the multitude of duties that descended on Dodge, who was not only a member of Congress but also chief engineer, surveyor, the man in charge of selling the land grants, and more, duties that involved him in much travel. So Durant declared, “In order to prevent unnecessary delay in the work during the absence of the Chief Engineer from the line of the road, the consulting engineer [Seymour] is hereby invested with full power to perform all the duties pertaining to the office of acting Chief engineer and his [Seymour’s] orders will be obeyed accordingly by everyone connected with the engineer department. Any orders heretofore given by the chief engineer conflicting with orders that may be given by the consulting engineer are hereby rescinded.”48
Seymour had told Durant that Dodge’s line from Green River to the Salt Lake was all wrong, that he had laid out a new one and it was much better, and longer. That was one
of the causes of General Order No. 1. But more important was Durant’s desire to be the man who built the railroad.
This, and other disputes between the vice-president and the chief engineer, came to a head. On July 26, the Republican nominee for the presidency, General Ulysses S. Grant, along with Generals Sherman and Sheridan and others, including Durant, was going to be in Fort Sanders. Dodge had been in Salt Lake City when he received word that he too was expected. He took a chartered stagecoach to the UP’s end of track, then a train to Laramie, arriving on July 25. Grant was there as part of a campaign tour whose purpose was to shake the hands of as many Union veterans as possible. Sherman, who was with him, wrote his brother the senator, “Of course Grant will be elected. I have just traveled with him for two weeks, and the curiosity to see him exhausted his and my patience.”49
Dodge took Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and the other generals to the end of track, then at Benton, 124 miles beyond Fort Sanders and Laramie. In his own words, he “took great pains on this trip to post them thoroughly about everything connected with the Union Pacific.” What an opportunity for a reporter! Or, come to that, for a tape recorder! But neither was there. Still, one can imagine General Dodge, the top railroad man in the Union Army, the man on whom Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, not to mention Lincoln had relied to keep the trains running or to lay new track for them, telling his confederates about the progress and prospects for the longest railroad in the world. And one can imagine how hard the generals listened, the questions they asked, and how impressed they were.
At one point Dodge declared that he was ready to quit his job if Durant, Seymour, or anyone else changed his final location. Grant heard him, thought for a moment, then exacted a personal promise from Dodge that he would not resign until the railroad was finished.50
The men rode the train back to Fort Sanders. July 26 was a baking-hot day. At the Officers’ Club at the fort, a big log bungalow, the generals met with Durant and Seymour. Durant took the floor. He was bold enough to attack Dodge, telling Grant and the others that Dodge had selected extravagant routes, wasted precious time and money on useless surveys, ignored the sound judgment of Silas Seymour, was about to bypass Salt Lake City, had neglected his congressional duties, and more.
Grant turned to Dodge. “What will you do about it?” he asked.
“Just this,” Dodge answered. “If Durant, or anybody connected with the Union Pacific, or anybody connected with the government, changes my lines, I’ll quit the road.”
There was a tense, but momentary, hush. Then Grant spoke. “The Government expects this railroad to be finished,” he declared, speaking as if his election was assured. Then he turned to Dodge. “The Government expects you to remain with the road as its Chief Engineer until it is completed,” he said.
Doc Durant took it all in. He pulled at his goatee, then managed to mumble, “I withdraw my objections. Of course we all want Dodge to stay with the road.”51
Three days later, after traveling from Fort Sanders to Omaha on the UP, Dodge entertained Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan in his house in Council Bluffs. They talked about the war, and the coming election, and of course about Durant and the UP. Dodge managed to get in some digs against the CP.
The showdown at Fort Sanders has gone into the history books as decisive, but Dodge was not yet clear of Durant. The vice-president fired off from New York a series of telegrams to the men in the field. He wanted more speed. To Reed: “Work day and night. . . . Increase track-laying to 4 miles a day.” To Evans: “Notify Casement that 16,000 feet of track per day won’t do.” To Casement: “What prevents your doing 5 miles per day.”
On August 8, Dodge wrote Ames, president of the UP, that Seymour was still in command on the line while Durant controlled company headquarters in New York. He charged that Durant’s orders were “to skin and skip everything for the purpose of getting track down, & your temporary Bridges will now hardly stand to get trains over them.”52 Meanwhile, Seymour was trying to ruin “the finest location that was ever made” with his excessive grades and curvature. And he warned, “Somebody will have to answer for the swindle. I doubt whether a mile of Road will be accepted, with such a location.”53
DESPITE all the harassment, the Casement brothers and the men under them continued to move west. The undulating double row of glistening rails stretched on, on, on. Every twenty miles or so the Casements laid a side track. One of their workers said, “There we sorted material for the front and our engine went back to bring up material needed at the front. Then it would go back to the end of track and throw off iron, ties, spikes and bridge timbers on both sides of the track.” The side tracks were filled with supply trains bearing hundreds of tons of iron and thousands of ties.
The last terminal base, by late summer well past Rawlins, was brimming with riotous life, grotesque with makeshift shacks and portable buildings. There too was the Casements’ takedown warehouse with dining room. Toward the end of track, the construction trains waited their turn, among the dining cars, the bunk cars, the combined kitchen, stores car, and office car, each eighty feet long. Among them there was, sometimes, the Lincoln Car, for Durant or other notables.
At the end of track, Casement directed the work of a thousand and more men. The track layers were the elite of the force, experts in their job, selected by the Casements for their physical strength, endurance, coordination, and ability to learn. The supply teams, three or four hundred of them, plodded back and forth along the grade, covered with desert dust, red with pulverized granite, white with soda and alkali, blue with Irish dudeens. The line of wagons toiling on, bearing ties, hay, and other supplies up the interminable grade, stretched out. On the grade, ahead of the track layers, tiny antlike figures delving, plowing, scaling, cursing as they finished the grade. Scattered throughout there were three hundred or more African Americans, former slaves. The Salt Lake Daily Reporter noted that, out in the Wyoming desert, “as the successive gangs of graders advance in this direction they close together until it seems as if every inch of ground was covered with men, and that there would be no room for any more.”54
Everyone worked fast, at top speed, partly because that was what Dodge, Durant, and the Casements wanted, partly to stay ahead of the track layers or the telegraph men or to keep up with the crews making the bridges, or to satisfy an eager public and to realize the full utility of the road once finished, or just to get the hell out of that infernal desert, or most of all to beat their rivals on the CP. But, no matter how fast they went, they did their best. By 1868, for example, there were almost no cottonwood ties, and the crews were rapidly replacing existing ones.
By the end of the summer of 1868, the New York Tribune asserted that the railroad project was, and would continue to be for years to come, “the great absorbing fact of the West.”55
For sure it drew the reporters. Durant put out a call for them to come see for themselves, and that summer they did so, in a party headed by Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun. They dubbed themselves the Rocky Mountain Press Club. It was a rousing success, and led to two months of good stories as well as increased sales of UP stocks and bonds. A few weeks after their tour, Schuyler Colfax, Grant’s running mate, toured the road. After him came a band of professors from Yale. They were all impressed, although Jack Casement complained that the visitors were “a great nuisance to the work.” But his men laid four miles of track in one day, which mightily impressed the professors. They, like everyone else in America—or, indeed, the world—had never seen anything like it.56
In August 1868, the track was thirty miles past the bridge over the North Platte River, almost seven hundred miles from Omaha. On September 21, the end of track was just outside Green River.II In a few days, the town had become another Hell on Wheels. A month later, it had been left behind. From July 21 to October 20, seventy-eight working days excluding Sundays, the Casement crews had laid 181 miles of track, an average of 2.3 miles per day. They often did three miles, sometimes five, and once (October 26, 1868) se
t a record of almost eight miles in one day, for which they got triple pay. They did all this in altitude as high as most mountains, in scorching sun or freezing nights, with ill-tasting water. Durant was so pleased he wired the news of eight miles in one day to Oliver Ames, declaring that the feat “has the ring of work in it” and was “the achievement of the year.”57
A reporter for the Western Railroad Gazette told how it was done through a “barren alkali desert, with nothing but distant mountains to invite the eye or cheer the hope.” He wrote that, in the process of laying track, “there is no limit to its speed except the ability of the road to bring up the ties and rails. For the track laying a picked force of about four hundred men are employed.” The ties were carried ahead a mile or two from the supply train by horse-drawn wagons and laid by a special team. The rails were brought forward “to the very edge. Two are dropped to their places, the car pulled by a trained horse over them, and two more dropped, and so on, while the moment they fall men adjust them exactly, others follow with spikes and rivets and others still with shovels and bars to level and straighten the whole work.” When the car was empty it was tipped off the track and sent back for another load while a fresh one came to the front. And so it went, without pause.58
More good news followed. Secretary Browning had appointed a three-man Special Commission to look at the charges of scandal and defects in construction, charges that were widespread and widely believed. But on November 23, the commission, composed of Brigadier General Gouverneur K. Warren, Jacob Blickensderfer, and James Barnes, reported that the line had been “well constructed.” The members unanimously agreed that Dodge had picked “the most favorable passes on the continent” along with “favorable alignment unsurpassed by any other railway line.” Further, “so few mistakes were made and so few defects exist” as to be “a matter of surprise.” Overall, “the country had reason to congratulate itself that this great work of national importance is so rapidly approaching completion under such favorable auspices.”59