At a stockholders’ meeting in mid-July 1863, the crisis came to a head. Huntington proposed adding to the board, while Judah and Strong, along with their friends Bailey and Booth, resisted. By the end of the meeting, the board’s two new members were Asa Philip Stanford and Dr. John Morse, the former Leland Stanford’s brother and the latter Huntington’s friend.
Judah wanted to mortgage, at 2 percent interest per month, the equipment that Huntington had bought in the East. Huntington argued that such a course would create a crushing interest load for the CP and impair the credit standing he had relied upon with Ames and other eastern men who had loaned the company money. Better to assess the stockholders for additional money to pay up on their stocks more rapidly than originally intended. The directors agreed. Hopkins began demanding that the directors pay for their stock in full, something the others in the Big Four began to do, even as they bought out other shareholders at sharply discounted prices. Hopkins asked Judah to pay at least 10 percent on the stock he had been given in lieu of salary. Judah protested that this was a tax on money already paid him, but he managed—just barely—to do it. Then he returned to the mountains, determined to turn the tables on the “shopkeepers.”26
Judah felt that the Big Four were outright cheating—especially in the matter of where the Sierra Nevada began, and on the Dutch Flat wagon road—and were guilty of misusing the public trust and public monies.
Huntington’s next actions deepened his anger. The day after the shake-up of the board, Huntington later recorded, there was “a good deal of hubbub.”27 He overruled Judah on some engineering decisions and, when Judah objected, said bluntly, if Judah and other objectors didn’t like it why not buy out the Big Four? This degenerated into a shouting match. Huntington said, in a snide manner, that Judah could have all the stock of all the members of the Big Four at $100,000 each if he could raise the money.
As Huntington well knew, Judah and Bailey did not have the money to take that option. But the two men were determined that the Big Four had to go. They went into San Francisco to see if banker Charles McLaughlin, who owned the Western Pacific Railroad, might be willing to buy out the Big Four. But although he was interested, when McLaughlin heard that Huntington was willing to sell he sent Bailey a telegram: “If old Huntington is going to sell out, I am not going in.” Bailey, discouraged, sold out himself, which left Judah standing alone.28
There were some obvious lessons here. First, how hard it was going to be to raise money for a railroad that so far didn’t run anywhere. Second, Huntington’s reputation was as high on the West Coast as on the East. Third, neither Huntington nor any other member of the Big Four had the slightest intention of selling out unless he had to do so, and even then wouldn’t unless someone had a gun at his head. But for Judah the only lesson was that he could not raise the needed funds in San Francisco and it was necessary to go to New York if he wished to persist.
Huntington insisted that, since Judah and his friends could not come up with the money to buy out the Big Four, they must sell.29 Judah apparently did, at least to the extent of trading in his five hundred shares of the CP for $100,000 in the CP’s railroad bonds. He also may have sold his share of the franchise of the Nevada Central Railroad to Charles Crocker for $10,000 cash. And Bailey, who did sell out, was replaced on the board by a friend of Mark Hopkins.30
Judah was still the chief engineer, drawing a salary that was now up to $10,000 a year, although not necessarily paid in cash. At this time he also received $25,000 from the board, though in stock, not bonds.
But Anna later wrote, “Oh, some of those days were terrible to us! He felt they [the Big Four] were ungrateful to their trust and to him.”31 Judah made contact with money men in the East, most of all Cornelius Vanderbilt, who may have told Judah he was ready to buy out the Big Four but before he did so he wanted more details about the railroad. Probably using the $10,000 he had received from Crocker for Nevada Central Railroad stock, Judah bought tickets for Anna and himself to New York.
DESPITE the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the summer of 1863 went badly for the Union. There was no follow-up in Virginia against Lee’s army. Out west there was better news: on July 9, the Union forces captured Port Hudson, Louisiana, and thus opened the Mississippi River. But less than a week later, a four-day draft riot took place in New York City, marked by burning, looting, and other outrages. Irish immigrant laborers, lowest paid of all, attacked African Americans and lynched several of them. Regular-army troops were sent from Gettysburg to the city to put down the rioters. There were other antiblack riots in other Northern cities, notably Detroit. At the end of the summer, the Confederates won a major victory in the two-day Battle of Chickamauga, Tennessee, and drove the Union forces back into Chattanooga, where a siege began. The Union had expected victory after Gettysburg. That did not happen. The war still had a long way to go, and many Northerners were beginning to wonder if victory was worth the price in men’s lives.
Nevertheless, in California the fight going on was over who would own the Central Pacific Railroad. Determined to bring about a change, on October 3, 1863, Judah and Anna set off on the steamer St. Louis. Unknown to the couple, a few days later, while sailing south, they passed the Herald of the Morning, which was coming north after leaving New York months ago, carrying the CP’s first hundred tons of rail, the first locomotive, and other assorted hardware. Three more of the CP’s cargoes were not far behind, carrying three more locomotives. The first came onto the Sacramento levee four days later, with the others soon after. The four locomotives were named the Governor Stanford, the Pacific, the C. P. Huntington, and the T. D. Judah, weighing (respectively) twenty-five tons, thirty tons, nineteen tons, and nineteen tons. Judah knew none of this, but he had arranged to meet Vanderbilt in New York and was confident he could have his way.
Napoleon, asked what qualities he looked for in his generals, replied, “Luck. Give me generals who are lucky.”
Judah, up to now, had been lucky enough to cross the Isthmus several times without suffering a single day of sickness. But on this trip, he was caught in a rainstorm and got soaked in helping the women and children on board the steamer. Anna wrote, “I feared for him and remonstrated, for I knew he was doing too much—but he replied, ‘Why I must, even as I would have some one do for you—it is only humanity.’ That night he had a terrible headache and from that time grew worse and worse.”
He apparently had contracted yellow fever. Anna sat by his bed “night and day to care for him—but it was terrible.”
One night he roused himself and said, “Anna, what cannot I do in New York now? I have always had to set my brains and will too much against other men’s money—now, what I cannot do!” He also managed to write a letter, with a shaking hand, to Dr. Strong. He said he had 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 as regards the Pacific Railroad do not rest on my shoulders.” But if he were successful in the East, “there will be a radical change in the management of the railroad and it will pass into the hands of men of experience and capital,” unlike the corrupt and incompetent men then in charge. If he failed, he warned, the Big Four would “rue the day they ever embarked on the Pacific Railroad.
“If they treat me well,” he went on, referring to the Big Four, “they may expect similar treatment at my hands. If not, I am able to play my hand.” He expected to return from New York with Vanderbilt and others in his party.32
On October 26, 1863, the same day Charlie Crocker saw the first of the CP rails spiked to the ties, the Judahs arrived in New York. Anna managed to get her husband transported to a hotel on Wall Street. There the surgeon of the steamer left them alone. She kept Judah awake by dipping her finger in the brandy bottle and having him take it that way. A doctor at the hotel cared for him, but, as Anna wrote, “we will pass over that terrible week.” The doctor said that Judah was an overworked
man and that such men fell victim to the fever. In a week he was dead. Anna put up a monument for him that contains his name, dates—March 4, 1826–November 2, 1863—and the words “He rests from his labors.”33 She buried him in a quiet country cemetery outside Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Specifically what Judah had hoped to accomplish in New York is not clear. He wanted to persuade Vanderbilt and others to buy out the Big Four. Why he wanted them to do so is plain enough, but how he thought they could manage the building of the biggest railroad in the country from a continent away is not. He hoped to bring Vanderbilt, his baggage bulging with money, to California with him to buy out the Big Four while he became the chief of construction as well as the chief engineer. With Montague and Clement working for him, he had two of the finest engineering assistants in the country, and he was certain he could do it.
But there is no indication that Vanderbilt was prepared to plunge into a California-to-Nevada railroad, much less move to the West Coast.
Luck. Had Judah lived, the history of the country might have been different. Speculation can go in all directions. There might have been no Big Four, or any of their legacies. The railroad from Sacramento over the Sierra Nevada out to the Salt Lake would have been built, but by whom, when, where, and with what name is pure guesswork.
It is impossible to say what Judah might have become, what he might have done. What we do know is that he had a fierce determination; that he could dream the biggest dreams; that he was a superb engineer with the keenest eye for terrain; that he knew his profession as well as anyone; that he could pick able assistants (Montague and Clement stand out); that he had married exceedingly well; that he could be amazingly convincing with his wife, with businessmen like the Big Four, with politicians either in California or in Congress, with the President of the United States, with other engineers, and with the public; that he was honest and trustworthy; and more.
But we also know that, although he could convince the Big Four and others to put their money and talent into the building of the Pacific railroad, he could not manage them. With those four he could never achieve harmony. Judah knew how stresses and strains worked on bridges, curved tracks, anything mechanical, but not how they worked on human beings. The Big Four wanted to build the railroad fast, at the greatest possible profit to themselves. He wanted to build it well. They got it done their way and he was squeezed out.
ON October 26, 1863, Charlie Crocker’s men spiked the first rails to their ties. There was no ceremony, because of Huntington’s telegram: “If you want to jubilate over driving the first spike,” he wrote, “go ahead and do it. I don’t. Those mountains over there look too ugly. We may fail, and if we do, I want to have as few people know it as we can. . . . Anybody can drive the first spike, but there are many months of labor and unrest between the first and last spike.”34 Nevertheless, the Sacramento Union noted the occasion and commented, “Nothing looks to the public as much like making a railroad as the work of laying down the iron on the road bed.”35
By November 10, the first CP locomotive to arrive in California, named the Governor Stanford, made the first run ever for the Central Pacific.36 The engine cost $13,688. It was more than ten feet tall and fifty feet long, with four driving wheels of four and a half feet in diameter. The driving rods and pistons were of wrought iron. The bell, made of brass, was painted maroon, green, red, orange, and yellow. Gold initials, “C.P.R.R.,” were on the red tender. Locomotive and tender, with a full load of wood and water, weighed forty-six tons, making the Governor Stanford the biggest man-made thing in California. A twelve-pound cannon fired to mark the occasion.
It wasn’t much of an occasion. The crowd was there—hangers-on mainly—to participate by climbing aboard the freight cars or cheering the train, but it went only as far as Twenty-first Street, where the tracks ended.37 At least the war was going better for the Union: on November 25, General Grant’s army won the Battle of Chattanooga and drove the Confederates back into Georgia.
The CP’s acting chief engineer, meanwhile, appointed by the directors, was Samuel S. Montague. His first job was to survey the route as far as the Big Bend of the Truckee River, more than forty miles east of the California-Nevada line. Montague and a small team of surveyors completed this job in December 1863. Despite this achievement, Montague remained “acting” until March 1868. (He then stayed with the CP as chief engineer until 1883.)38
ROLLING stock arrived in Sacramento on a haphazard basis. Ships that brought the cut lumber for the car bodies did not have the iron frames and wheels for the cars. Tools were not delivered. Platform cars, used to deliver rails and ties to the end of track, came in ahead of passenger cars. By February 1864, however, enough had arrived for Stanford and Hopkins to show off Crocker’s achievement. They took a party of thirty prominent men, including politicians, to see what had been accomplished. The rails by then reached to Junction (today’s Roseville), sixteen miles out from Sacramento. There the passengers took horse-drawn carriages to seven miles beyond Newcastle.
They saw the graders at work and were filled with admiration for men who could perform such a demanding task. Engineers might do the surveys while Crocker oversaw the whole and bossed it, but it was the men who did the work—bending, digging, shoveling, throwing the dirt up on the embankment, bringing in the ballast by the cartload, and dumping it—who impressed people. Back behind Newcastle, where the track was being laid, it was the men who picked up the ties from the horse-drawn wagons, dropped them on the grade, lined them up. Others dropped the rails and made certain they were the requisite spread apart (four feet eight and a half inches), spiked them in with their heavy sledgehammers—three blows to a spike—and connected the ends with a fishplate. This was work fit to break a man’s back, and they did it for $3 or so per day, plus board.
Many of the men were Irish immigrants who had just arrived in America. Crocker signed them up through agents in New York and Boston and had them shipped west at a terrific expense, plus time. There was some drunkenness, strikes, and slowdowns. Crocker petitioned the War Department for five thousand Confederate prisoners of war, without luck. He tried for newly freed African Americans, again with no luck. He tried for immigrants from Mexico. Same result. Some nineteen hundred out of a two-thousand-man crew he hired that summer fled for the Nevada mines almost as soon as they arrived at the end of track and had been fed a warm meal. They drove Acting Chief Engineer Samuel Montague nearly mad.39
GRADING work, as Lynn Farrar, a Southern Pacific historian described it, uses pick-and-shovel work most efficiently when low cuts or fills—one and a half to two feet—are required. Fills are made by what is called “casting”—i.e., shoveling. If there are over three feet of material, it can be double-casted—that is, it requires two “throws” to get the material into place for the grade. In most cases earth was plowed by heavy steel plows drawn by up to twelve oxen (it is more efficient to use an earth scraper, but the CP never used one). For distances greater than five hundred feet it was economical to “waste and borrow”—that is, dispose of cut material by “wasting” it and then “borrow” material for an adjacent fill. The location surveyors always tried to find a line that would “balance” the grading between cuts and fills so that there would be a minimal amount of moving of material.40
For seven miles beyond Newcastle, the cuts and fills were said by the Sacramento Union to be as great as any found in the nation. In the thirty-one miles from Sacramento to Newcastle, the grade of the roadbed rose steadily until, after Rocklin, it reached 105 feet to the mile, then grew to nearly 116 feet per mile (the steepest allowed by the Congress, and steeper than any other ascent in the Sierra Nevada). As the Union put it, “The labor of ascending the mountains is fairly begun.”41
Bloomer Cut, just beyond Newcastle, would take months to complete. It was a sixty-three-foot-deep cut that ran eight hundred feet long, composed of naturally cemented gravel that had to be moved out one wheelbarrow at a time. The workingmen used black powder to loosen up
the gravel at Bloomer. As much as five hundred kegs of blasting power a day in early 1864—more than most major battles in the ongoing Civil War—at a cost of $5 to $6 per keg.42 Every foot of the way through this cut had to be blasted with gunpowder, with the rock so hard that it was sometimes impossible to drill into it for a sufficient depth for blasting purposes. Shot after shot would blow out as if fired from a cannon.
After the blast the men used picks and shovels to fill their wheelbarrows or one-horse carts and to move the gravel out. The wedge they cut had almost vertical walls. This was the first of the obstacles to be overcome by the CP’s workforce before it would meet with the UP’s rails coming west, wherever that might be. How many sore, blistered, bleeding hands the Bloomer Cut required was not recorded, or how many damaged backs or crushed knees.
The men’s boss on the spot was James Harvey Strobridge. He was thirty-seven years old, out of Ireland, over six feet in height, agile, energetic. He could curse with the men and lose his temper at any moment. He had worked on railroads in the East, then come to California, where he had worked for Crocker before being promoted. Crocker later recalled, “I used to quarrel with Strobridge when I first went in. Said I, ‘Don’t talk so to the men. They are human creatures. Don’t talk so roughly to them.’ Said he, ‘You have got to do it, and you will come to it. You cannot talk to them as though you were talking to gentlemen, because they are not gentlemen. They are about as near brutes as they can get.’ I found out that it was true.”43 More bad news. Strobridge lost the sight of his right eye at Bloomer Cut, when black powder was delayed and ended up exploding in his face.44
The Sacramento Union didn’t write about such things. It was always upbeat. This was because it wanted the railroad built. Furthermore, the Big Four had decided on a policy that would later be widely adopted by twentieth-century corporations, which was to do everything possible to attract favorable mention from the media. In this case little or no money changed hands. But the editor of the Union did accept $2,000 worth of CP stock in 1863 and another $1,600 worth in 1864. His reporter in Washington got another ten shares. These bribes, called “gifts,” were charged to the CP’s construction account. Given the CP’s many enemies and the terrible things being said about it, the directors judged that the favorable publicity was worth it.