The first use of codes by businessmen to prevent detection of their doings known to this author was by the CP and the UP. It was inaugurated in 1868, just as the race between the two corporations was headed toward a climax. The purpose was to baffle any wiretapper. A reasonable fear, since all a spy had to do to find out what the opposition was up to was to tap into the telegraph line. (The UP, apparently, couldn’t keep a secret; one of its engineers, F. C. Hodges, wrote to CP engineer Butler Ives telling all he knew about the UP’s plans and progress. Ives sent the information on to the Big Four.)
The CP’s code consisted of symbolic words. “Yelp” was Brigham Young’s code name. “Riddle” stood for William Ralston, of the Bank of California. Mark Hopkins had one key to the code, now at Stanford University in his handwriting. He was the only one of the Big Four who habitually used the code. He didn’t bother with it on some occasions, as in his one-word reply in 1868 to a Huntington inquiry, “No.” He evidently felt that was sufficiently cryptic.39
The Big Four, especially Huntington and Hopkins, used codes to hide important numbers, like profits, costs, and the like, most of all totals. This may have been to hide the figures from the UP, but there is also a strong possibility that another purpose was to fool government regulators and inspectors. And it worked.
MILANDO Pratt was a Mormon farmer near Ogden who had lost his crops to grasshoppers (“Great clouds of grasshoppers flew over these inter-mountain valleys and would darken the sun like a misty fog, and when night overtook them they would alight upon the ground and devour the crops whenever within their reach”) and thus became a subcontractor for Benson, Farr & West. He helped make the grade to the west of Monument Point, but he still wasn’t free of grasshoppers. “Those pestilential things were no respecters of places when night overtook them,” he remembered, “for they would settle down upon the waters of the Great Salt Lake which pickled them in its briny waters by the hundreds of thousands of tons and then cast their carcases ashore until a great wall of these inanimate pests was formed for miles along the lake’s shore.” They put forth a “great stench” when the sun hit them the next morning “and cast the aroma of this slowly melting putrid wall upon the windward breezes to be wafted earthward toward our suffering camp.”
Until the grasshoppers came to die, Pratt and his fellows had been taking their bath in the lake each night, “in its refreshing soothing waters.” They quit doing that when the pests came, and began using kerchiefs dipped in camphor solution, which was kept on hand in the camp to battle gnats and mosquitoes. But they soon found they missed the bath so much they decided to bring into action “our railroad implements of warfare and force a gateway through the dormant remains of our insufferable common enemy.” Using horses and scrapers, they forced a way to the lake through the barrier of putrid grasshoppers so that they could again enjoy “the freedom that this great inland salt sea afforded.”
There being no grass around the lake, and with hay selling for $75 per ton, Pratt had to send the horses into the hills with night herders to graze. Such was the life of a Mormon grader.40
For engineer James Maxwell, the grasshoppers posed a special problem. First he lost a black Newfoundland dog, who could not be seen through the swarm of grasshoppers from fifty yards away. Next his train was stopped by grasshoppers. “This seems like a big story,” he admitted, “but it is true and easily explained.” The grasshoppers were so numerous they “covered the rails,” so when he was headed up a grade, his driving wheels slipped on them. And if that seemed unbelievable, consider this: “The chickens seemed to think that they had a bonanza, but very soon they didn’t care for any more grasshoppers, and crawled into the tents or wagons, anywhere at all to get shelter.” A cow nearby who was pestered by the grasshoppers “would run away, whenever an opportunity was offered.”41
WORSE than the grasshoppers was Doc Durant. Always eager to enter into a contract that would be good for the UP, he was also always slow, or unwilling, or unable to pay. Not even Brigham Young could get what he had earned. Here is a sampling of the telegrams Young sent Reed in the last half of 1868. July 31: “Men who have completed or nearly completed their jobs are anxious for their pay. When will you be here.” August 5: “When will you be in this City. Answer immediately.” September 22: “The men are exceedingly anxious to get their pay for day work performed last June and since.”42 None of the messages got any reply.
By October, Young warned Durant that the men were so angry many of them were walking off the job. The Cheyenne Daily Leader sneered that the workers were deserting because some of them were “weak in the faith,” but mainly, the newspaper said, they would stay at their posts, because “Brother Brigham holds the whip as well as the reins, and whither he would drive they go.”43
Whatever kept them at work, Young’s pleas left Doc unmoved. The UP had, Young declared, paid only a third to a half of the value of the work done. Many subcontractors had borrowed money at 2 percent a month to pay their workers, and Young himself had put out $46,860 of his own money, but neither expedient was enough. He told Durant, “I need money very badly to carry on the work and do not know how to get along without it. Two or three hundred thousand is needed.” He got $100,000.44 Durant put that money to Young’s credit in an account in New York, but Young informed him that he had already drawn checks for nearly that amount and he was still $130,000 in arrears. “I have expended all my available funds in forwarding the work,” he wrote Durant, “and if I had the means to continue would not now ask for any assistance. These explanations must be my apology for troubling you in the matter.”45
Young did all he could to pay the men out of his own pocket, but it wasn’t enough, and the problem continued into 1869 and beyond. It should not be thought that only Young and the Mormons had to beg, badger, plead, threaten to sue, and otherwise try to force Durant to pay up. Joseph Nounan and another Gentile contractor, J. M. Orr, had to wait and beg and plead for what they had earned, and been promised, as well.
AT the beginning of 1869, Young praised Durant for his “energy and go-ahead-ivness.”46 By then the UP had tracks into Utah and almost down to Salt Lake Valley. That could not have been done without Durant and Dodge and many, many others, but neither could it have been done without the Mormons.
They worked without letup. For sure they wanted their money, but even more they wanted the railroad. The energy they put out could not be measured, but how they did it and what they did were observed. On December 15, 1868, an unsigned reporter for the Deseret News had described what he saw along the line. “All the ground not graded east of Echo is covered with men,” he wrote, “who are working night and day. At night huge piles of sage brush make fires by which the work is prosecuted. The frozen ground is drilled, kegs of powder are emptied in the holes, and a long section of frozen earth is blown up almost simultaneously.”
He went on: “The road up Weber canyon is crowded with teams hauling ties, which are deposited about a mile below the mouth of Echo.” Here they were taken up by other teams and distributed on the grade up the canyon. The pile driver was at work for the culverts and bridges. There was a cut in the making that was ninety feet deep and five hundred feet long, on which men were working day and night. “Deep drills are being driven, into each of which a few kegs of powder are put, and huge masses of rock are thrown out and loosened for the crowbar to detach.”
As for the tunnels, “But a faint idea can be conveyed. Sleepless energy is unceasingly occupied drilling, blasting, rending the foundations of the earth, and cutting a passage through rock harder than granite.” The reporter compared the blasts coming from the tunnel facing to “the loud reports of heavy artillery; and the old mountains reverberate from base to summit, ringing back with thundering echoes, as if in anger.”
THERE were many teenagers among the Mormon workers. One of them was Bill Smoot, who was fifteen years old and worked at the head of Echo Canyon for nine months in 1868. “Boys at my age in those stirring times did a man’s work,”
he wrote over fifty years later. “We were hardened by the open life we lived and were brought up to work and did, that we might keep body and soul together. There were no drones. Each has his assigned work.” For himself, he wrote, “I caught the railroad fever, even though I had never even seen a picture of a railroad or a train of cars.” He had a team of horses, and with them he hauled ties. In the course of his stint, he earned $1,600, which was “a greater sum than my father had earned in cash money during his previous twenty-two years residence in Utah.”
Smoot lived in a camp not far from another UP camp that held five hundred men, mainly Irish. “They were good workers,” he recalled, “and a jolly bunch of men, but often got the worse from drinking bad whiskey and when they laid off work for a good old Irish wake, they sure let everybody know it for many miles around.”47
The UP and CP graders were working almost right next to each other north of the lake, according to the December 12 issue of the Salt Lake Daily Reporter, “in a seemingly fraternal embrace.” But “the frozen ground in the mornings makes work difficult, and unless plowing is done in the afternoon for the scrapers to work at during the next day, progress is tedious and damage to the plows considerable.” Although foremen were talking about giving up the work while the ground was so hard-frozen, their bosses were after them to keep going: the line from Ogden to Promontory Summit could be reached in twenty days if the weather remained favorable. But of course it would not, could not. Men working north and west of Ogden told the newspaperman that nothing could be done until spring, because “they cannot open the ground, it is so hard frozen already.” The reporter concluded, “Notwithstanding the herculean efforts made by both companies, work may have to be suspended on a large portion yet to be done. The elements are obstacles which even railroad enterprise and energy sometimes cannot overcome.” The time had come to call it quits for 1868.
* * *
I. The hope was realized. In the first summer of regular service, more visitors stopped at Salt Lake City during the travel months than at any time since its founding.
Chapter Fourteen
THE CENTRAL PACIFIC GOES THROUGH NEVADA
1868
CHARLES Crocker promised his partners in the CP that he would build a mile per day in 1868. They hoped so. But Collis Huntington thought Crocker could aim higher. On January 1, he wrote to E. B. Crocker, “I think you do not know the importance of extending the Central Pacific east of the [Salt] Lake to the Wasatch Mts.” If he were in charge of construction instead of purchasing materials and raising money, Huntington said, “I would build the cheapest road that I could and have it accepted by the [government] Comm[ission] so it moves ahead fast.”
Three weeks later, Huntington told Charlie Crocker to build as fast as he could. “When a cheap road will pass the Commission, make it cheap.” He wanted Crocker to “run on the maximum grade instead of finishing making deep cuts and fills, and where you can make time in construction by using wood instead of stone for culverts and pilings, use wood.” If the road washed out, Huntington advised, fix it later.
E. B. Crocker told Huntington a day later, on January 22, that he had heard the UP had set a goal for itself of four hundred miles in 1868. The CP intended to do as much, but “there are four essentials: 1st money, 2nd labor, 3rd ties, 4th iron and rolling stock. The 2nd and 3rd we got here, and the 1st and 4th depend on you.” The iron that was supposed to be coming wasn’t “coming on fast enough,” Crocker complained. “What you ship after June 1st will not reach the terminus of the track in 1968. We need you to send more iron, fast.”1
Huntington’s letters and telegrams to the other members of the Big Four, and theirs to him, would fill volumes. He wanted them to make track faster, to get farther east, to defeat the UP at whatever cost. He would sell bonds or borrow to get the necessary money, he would buy the material and ship it to California. They wanted him to be reasonable, but meanwhile to speed up the shipments of material and to sell more bonds and bring in more money. What follows is a small sample of the exchange, from January 1868.
Huntington to E. B. Crocker, January 3: “You have been hurrying me up to sell bonds but it turns out that I am selling them faster now than you can print them. I want 3 million in the next 3 months.”
Charlie Crocker to Huntington, same date: “Everything was done that could be done with the labor we could get and we used every exertion to procure more labor the whole season [of 1867]. Therefore I console myself & say well done. I am confident that the same number of men and horses never accomplished more work than was accomplished on the CP in the year.”
Huntington to E. B. Crocker, January 5:
You write that you don’t think that there are enough fish plates for all the iron as though that was a new idea to you. I wrote you early last summer asking about fish plates and you wrote back that you would not need them before 1868.
You wrote me some months ago that Charlie would write soon with an order for the number and kind of locomotives we’ll want for 1868 and I have not seen it. Next week I will finish buying 24 locomotives: 12 with 8 wheels, 5 ft. drivers and 16x24 cylinders; and 12 with 10 wheels, 4 ft drivers and 18x24 cylinders, and I hope to have all of them on the way by the first of May.
Huntington to Mark Hopkins, January 6: “I have just received a dispatch from Crocker which reads ‘send immediately 300 flat cars, we are going for 300 miles in ’68; must have rolling stock.’ I hope you will make the 300 into 400 miles.”
E. B. Crocker to Huntington, January 8: “I met with one of the officers just in from China. He says that right after Chinese New Years (which is Feb. 5) every steamer which leaves China monthly will have from 800 to 1,000 men and he intends to send them all on to our work. Thousands more will come by sail, so we should have enough.”
Huntington to E. B. Crocker, January 13: “And then if we could find first the man (which would be very difficult) to go over and to live on the UP Road, and work amongst their men and send them over to our road. The right man could do that now. He should be found out. By all that I can learn they have a man that can lay more track in a day than any other man in the United States.”
Leland Stanford to Huntington, January 16: “We will increase the workforce beyond what it has ever been. Every one now seems to be fully up to a resolute determination. I think we can build 300 to 350 miles this year.”
E. B. Crocker to Huntington, January 22: “$705,000 in sales of bonds is splendid. We will have to start a printing mill to keep you supplied. If you think we do not understand and appreciate the importance of reaching Salt Lake first, you are mistaken. We do, so send the iron.”
Mark Hopkins to Huntington, January 27: “We don’t expect to make a road of the character we have been building through the mountains, but the cheapest possible one. We will build as fast as possible to be acceptable to the commissioners. And we already know the commissioners will readily accept as poor a road as we can wish to offer.”
Huntington to E. B. Crocker, January 29: “I sold 2 million of our first mort. Bonds today and got the price up to 98 per cent and interest. I expect to go to par in the next weeks. [Completing the tunnel through the summit did wonders for the value of the CP bonds.] The UP is at 90 per cent.”
E. B. Crocker to Huntington, January 31: “As far as paying for men to come here, that will not work. They leave as soon as they get here and chuckle at the thought of having swindled us. No, the Chinese are our men. They cost only about 1/2 and we have plenty of men here for foreman and to do the skilled work. You say the UP have a man who will lay more track than any other man in the U.S. Perhaps so, but we will see next summer. You send the iron along fast and in time.”
Huntington to E. B. Crocker, February 3: “I am satisfied that almost anything can be done that we really make up our minds to do and that we can build to Weber Canyon this year if we make up our minds to do it.”2
ALL the iron and other material Huntington was buying and shipping to California came at tremendous expense.
Strobridge estimated that the railroad line would have cost 70 percent less than it did had economy been a consideration, but the line was built “without regard to any outlay that would hasten its completion.”3
Almost twenty years later, Lewis Clement wrote to Leland Stanford on the subject of the cost of building the line, a letter that Stanford submitted to the U.S. Pacific Railway Commission, which was investigating the finances of the UP and the CP. Clement said that in 1863 iron rails cost $41.75 per ton. But Congress had required both railroads to buy American-made rails only, and by 1866 the cost was up to $76.87 and by 1868 to $91.70 per ton at the rolling mill. The rails had to come around Cape Horn or via the Isthmus of Panama to get to San Francisco, then were lightered (taken by smaller ships) to Sacramento, then taken by rail (and, until 1868, by wagon or sled over the summit after Cisco) to the end of track. Cape Horn was cheaper than the Isthmus but it took longer, so in 1868 all the rails came through Panama. It cost $51.97 per ton to ship the rails through the Isthmus, which put the cost of rail delivered to San Francisco at $143.07 per ton, with more expenses to come to get the rails to the end of track.
In 1865, Clement wrote, two engines cost $70,752 at the factory, then almost $16,000 more to ship. “But their power was absolutely necessary to supply materials needed for construction; without those engines there would be delay.”
In 1868, the costs remained high, or were up. Building the snowsheds was one factor, but there were many others. It cost money, for example, to ship the men and materials around the break in the track just east of the summit. In Nevada, “everything was expensive.” Barley and oats for the horses and mules was $280 per ton, hay $120. “Water was scarce after leaving the Truckee and Humboldt Rivers” and had to be hauled for steam and general use. “There was not a tree that would make a board on over 500 miles of the route, no satisfactory quality of building stone. The country afforded nothing. The maximum haul for ties was 600 miles and of rails and other material 740 miles.”4