Augustus Ward Loomis, a Christian minister who came to observe them, noted that the Chinese set an example for their white co-workers in diligence, steadiness, and clean living. In an article for the Overland Monthly he wrote, “They are ready to begin work the moment they hear the signal, and labor steadily and honestly until admonished that the working hours are ended.” Loomis approved of their habits: “Not having acquired a taste for whiskey, they have few fights, and no ‘blue Mondays.’ ”39 They did smoke opium on Sundays, their day off, but they did not “stupefy themselves with it. You do not see them intoxicated, rolling in the gutters like swine.”
They took daily sponge baths in warm water, washed their clothes, and otherwise kept themselves clean and healthy. According to contemporary B. S. Brooks, who wrote a pamphlet about the Chinese, the white worker “has a sort of hydrophobia which induces him to avoid the contact of water.” In contrast, “the Chinaman is accustomed to daily ablutions of his entire person.”40
The Chinese were ideal workers. Cheap. Did as they were told. Made a quick study and after something was shown or explained to them did it skillfully. Few if any strikes. The same for complaints. They did what no one else was willing or able to do.
THERE was other good news beyond the Chinese willingness to work and their capability at it. When winter set in at the Summit Tunnel facings, Montague had put them to other work. He continued to get reports from survey teams he had sent as far east as the Truckee River and on into Nevada. From those reports he learned that the location engineers could shave several miles off Judah’s original line and, even better, eliminate two tunnels and perhaps a third.
Grading above Colfax and tunneling at the summit meant that the CP was into the battle with the Sierra Nevada in earnest. Stanford wrote to President Andrew Johnson, “The grading between Newcastle and Colfax was very difficult and expensive, increasing as the line was pushed up the mountain slope. The cuttings have been deeper, the embankments higher, and more rock work encountered, as the line has progressed eastward. . . . We have encountered and are now laboring upon the most difficult and expensive portion of the line entrusted to us. This, too, at the very commencement of our efforts.”41
In general, the men of the CP, including the Chinese, worked like the Irish and other white men working for the UP. The surveyors went first, followed by the engineers, who laid out the exact line. Then came the bridge gangs, so that when the gradings got to the bridge site they could continue. Then there were the men who dug the cuts or who dug and dumped the dirt to make the fills. Next came the track layers with their rails, spikes, fishplates, distance markers, sledgehammers, and ballast. After them the carpenters, who built the roundhouses, depots, and other buildings.
Unlike the UP, the CP was not concisely organized as a military force. Of course, in California it had no Indians to contend with, for they had nearly all been wiped out. But the military manner of organizing complex outfits fit the CP as much as it did the UP—squads, platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, divisions, with separate commanders and staffs for logistics, planning, intelligence, finance, personnel, and more.
The bosses on the spot, where the construction was going on, were Charles Crocker and James Strobridge. Crocker was described by his assistant chief engineer, Lewis Clement: “He was a business man in the full sense of the word—prompt, methodical, fearless and confident. He was decided and firm; yet not obstinate. When he was satisfied that he was in the wrong, he was always ready to concede it and apologize.” He kept his word, Clement said. But “he was very quick to act, and sometimes acted too quickly—he acted and then considered it afterwards.” He was the manager of construction, which was a job “no ordinary man could have done.” He wasn’t imposing, despite his bulk: he was less than six feet tall, with a fair complexion, and beardless. “I don’t suppose,” Clement said, “that there was a mile of road constructed that he didn’t go over the ground, either on horse-back or with a wagon; he always wanted to see what had been done and what was being done.” He was out in every kind of weather, “and it made no difference whether it was an American horse or a bucking Spanish pony.” Clement admitted that Crocker “was a large eater and a man of very strong prejudices.”42
When the job was completed, Crocker was the only one of the Big Four—indeed, the only Californian—who thought to praise and thank the Chinese for what they had done. The Chinese, meanwhile, were called “Crocker’s pets,” and he was known to them as “Mistuh Clockee.”
Strobridge had lost an eye to a black-powder explosion in Bloomer Cut, but the Chinese respected him without hesitation or stint. Those who had learned English called “Stro” the “One-Eyed Bossy Man.” He could see as well with one eye as most men could with two, and when, as happened occasionally, there was trouble among the Chinese workers, Strobridge could pick out the ringleaders with a glance. He confronted them, usually with an ax handle, and they gave way and he prevailed.43 One white foreman would sometimes spur on his Chinese work gang by clapping a hand over his right eye and striding about as Strobridge did, implying that Stro was about to appear. “Men generally earn their money when they work for me,” Strobridge said.
Strobridge appreciated what the Chinese did. After a few months with them, he said, “They learn quickly, do not fight, have no strikes that amount to anything, and are very cleanly in their habits. They will gamble and do quarrel among themselves most noisily—but harmlessly.” And Montague reported at the end of 1865, “The Chinese are faithful and industrious and under proper supervision soon become skillful in the performance of their duty. Many of them are becoming expert in drilling, blasting, and other departments of rock work.”
Leland Stanford, the governor of California who had won many voters by denouncing the Chinese immigrants, wrote to President Andrew Johnson, “As a class they are quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious, and economical.” And he asserted, “Without the Chinese it would have been impossible to complete the western portion of this great National highway.”44
And what did the Chinese think of their employers? For sure they wanted the jobs. Most if not all of them saved money while working for the CP, and those who went back to China with their savings used the money to live well. Others went to work for the multitude of railroads building new lines west of the Rocky Mountains after the CP was constructed. Many settled in California, where they raised families and became an important part of the population. Still, there is no solid answer to the question. For the most part, we just don’t know.
There are indications, of course, including how many went to work with the CP and stayed with it. The CP’s successor, the Southern Pacific, kept the workers on a regular pension. In 1915, the newsletter of the Southern Pacific carried a letter from a former worker then living in China, thanking the railroad for sending his pension check each month. Another indication came in November 1917. A half-year earlier, the United States had declared war on Germany. A Liberty Loan was sponsored by the government to raise money to fight the war. A group of about twenty San Francisco Chinese, who were the last of the original crew that helped build the CP, enrolled and purchased the bonds.45
BY the end of 1865, Crocker still needed money. The bill for the blasting powder alone was killing him, even though it was less expensive now that the war had ended and Crocker was able to obtain a great amount of government surplus. But the Big Four had borrowed all they could, or so it appeared. Then, on November 29, the government inspectors examined the track from mile 31 to mile 54, from Newcastle to Colfax, and pronounced it satisfactory. At $48,000 per mile, the government had to issue $1,104,000 in bonds to the CP to sell. That helped, considerably, but as always the CP had long since borrowed on that money, and anyway it was far short of what was needed.
Crocker, as head of the construction company, was being paid by the CP in cash, in bonds, and in stock, at the rate of $2 worth of stock for every $1 owed him. The actual value of the stock was about 10 cents per share. He had borrowed, or
so he later said, “all the money available, much of it from my personal friends. I owed William E. Dodge & company three and a quarter million dollars.” That wasn’t quite true: the company, not Crocker, had borrowed the money. The other Big Four, plus E. B. Crocker, were silent partners in the construction company.46
Crocker’s associates rallied to his side. They agreed to help pay his bills; although they were not legally his partners in Crocker & Company, they would stand or fall together. “Go on!” Stanford assured him. “We will stand by you.”47
By the end of 1865, the CP had fifty-four miles of working track, to Colfax. Less than twenty miles had been spiked that year. But those few miles had cost an astounding $6 million. Only $3,363,300 in stock had been subscribed (not all paid for), and only one block of government bonds had been received. Earnings were up, with net profits at $280,000, which was the best news. Most of the earnings came from freight. The company anticipated 1866 revenues of nearly $500,000 from freight and just over $200,000 from passengers, plus income from the sale of timber. But whatever the anticipations, the sober truth was that the Western branch of the transcontinental railroad had scarcely penetrated the Sierra Nevada.
* * *
I. The steep sides of this rocky cut stand today just as the builders left them. The cementlike rock that dulled drills and broke picks and resisted blasting powder shows no signs of disintegration. The line now runs through two tunnels to the north.
II. The white men called the Chinese the “Celestials” because they came from the Celestial Kingdom.
III. It is not true, however, despite persistent myth in California, that most Chinese came to the United States to work for the CP. In fact, in 1866 and 1867 more Chinese left the state than entered.
Chapter Eight
THE UNION PACIFIC ACROSS NEBRASKA
1866
THE Union Pacific and the Central Pacific were the first big business in America. Except for the invention of the telegraph, which gave their officials a means of almost instant communication—quite limited because of the cost per word—the railroads had to invent everything: how to recruit, how to sell stocks and bonds, how to lobby the politicians, how to compete, what to build and what to buy, how to order and store necessary items that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Only the government and armies had organized on such a scale. Where the railroads went, they created stopping points complete with water tanks, repair facilities, boarding terminals, unloading equipment, eating places, hotels. From these grew farms, villages, cities.
Omaha was the first to benefit. In 1865, it doubled in size to fifteen thousand inhabitants, and grew even more in 1866 and each year that followed. During the summer and fall of 1865, small mountains of materials piled up in Omaha. Five of the UP’s seven steamships had the exclusive task of hauling ties, iron wheels and rails, rolling stock, and machinery; the others brought more workers and additional supplies. When weather prevented the graders and trackers from working on their main job, they found employment in Omaha, where a great cluster of shops was located, one of which was capable of building nine flatcars at a time. There was employment for everyone willing to work, making bricks, or making UP buildings out of bricks, at the Burnettizers, on the flatcars, as teamsters, and more.
The flood of workers meant a severe housing shortage and a growing number of gamblers and prostitutes. The hotel rooms and dining rooms were crude. One UP employee characterized the town’s population as “the closest thing to the Foreign Legion you could find.” Jack Casement wrote his wife that there were no good boardinghouses in Omaha and that the hotel in which he was staying was “cram full and kept very poorly. The meals were nothing that a white man wanted.” He promised her that he was looking for a house to rent for the two of them.1
West of Omaha, settlement was growing, thanks most of all to the prospect of transportation, but also to a reassessment of the Great Plains. Previously, most Americans had accepted as fact that everything west of the Missouri River was the Great American Desert. But in 1866, the well-known Massachusetts editor Samuel Bowles brought out a book based on his 1865 trip entitled Across the Continent. The Plains, he said, were “not worthless, by any means.” Indeed, they were the nation’s pasture, capable of growing grass that fattened livestock. In time, he said, the railroad would carry eastward beef and leather, mutton and wool, and more. “Let us, then, not despise the Plains, but turn their capacities to best account.”2
Moses Thatcher, a Mormon crossing Nebraska in June 1866, noted in his diary that “the country is one vast green ocean.” And it was more than the national pasture. “There are some fine farms recently located here,” he wrote. “The small grain such as wheat, oats, barley & corn are looking finely.” A well-known travel writer, Bayard Taylor, saw the countryside a month later and called it the most beautiful he had ever seen. He wrote that “Mr. Horace Greeley’s ‘vanishing scale of civilization’ has been pushed much further west since his overland trip in 1859.” Taylor said Nebraska constituted the largest unbroken area of excellent farming land in the world.3
A correspondent from the Cincinnati Gazette commented, “The soil is very rich, and the mind falters in its attempt to estimate the future of such a valley, or its immense capacities.” He went on to say, “The grain fields of Europe are mere garden patches beside the green oceans which roll across the Great Plains.”4
IN January 1865, the three government commissioners came to examine the track already laid. Accompanied by Durant and other officials of the UP, plus the governor of Nebraska and others, on what the Omaha Weekly Herald called “one of the loveliest winter mornings that ever dawned on the word,” in cars pulled by the General Sherman, they rode to the end of track (at Fremont). The Herald reported that the return trip was made at an average speed of thirty-five miles per hour. The commissioners accepted on behalf of the government the first forty miles of track, and on the return to Omaha, they wired the secretary of the interior that they had found the road “in superior condition.” President Andrew Johnson accepted the report the same day, and on January 27 the government issued the bonds, each carrying 6 percent annual interest, payable twice a year.
According to the Herald, the commissioners were astonished at Durant’s “personal omnipresence in every department of the work, his vigilant and untiring watchfulness of all details, and the energy and effective push which he had imparted to the Colossal enterprise.”5 The Herald’s praise for Durant was wondrous to behold. In March, the newspaper called him “the Great Manager, who is to railroads what Napoleon was to war.”6
Perhaps, but Napoleon’s reputation rested on more than forty miles of track. Durant needed to prove the comparison apt. To do that, he first of all needed to establish a solid organization, one with forceful, trustworthy, and capable men to run the company in its many operations, men far better than the ones he had already hired. At the beginning of 1866, he set out to do that. To begin with, he let go his brother Frank, along with Herbert Hoxie and Joseph Henry. He pulled Samuel Reed off his surveying job and put him in charge of construction. Durant gave Reed, forty-seven years old at the time, the title of “superintendent of construction and operations.” Reed was a quiet, likable, methodical man who was a conscientious worker, skilled in his methods. He would supervise all grading, track laying, bridging, and tunneling—a tough, demanding position for which he was perfectly suited.
In February 1866, Durant put the Casement brothers in charge of track laying. John (“Jack”) Stephen Casement, thirty-seven years old, although only five feet four inches tall, had earned an impressive reputation as a track layer in Ohio. He had risen to brigadier general in the war as a division commander. Stocky, muscular, fearless, “General Jack” could handle anything, and if he couldn’t his brother could. Only five feet tall (“five feet nothing,” according to one wag), Dan Casement was also a veteran. According to a diary kept by one of his UP workers, Dan may have been short and stocky, but “once he lifted a 30 foot rail off the ground wi
thout any trouble. It weighed about 600 pounds.”7 Between them the brothers had formed the firm of J.S. & D.T. Casement, which Durant hired and put in charge of laying the track. It was an inspired choice.
Durant made other adjustments, but by far his best choice, the one that made the UP possible, was to stick to his determination to lure General Grenville Dodge away from the army. At the end of February 1866, having failed to get Dodge to sign on with the UP, Durant sent him a telegram suggesting that Dodge might want to take the field as a surveyor. Dodge declined, but in his telegram of reply (dated March 2) he did offer Durant some advice, based on what he had heard about the disorganization and demoralization in Omaha.
“Let me impress upon you the importance of commencing the years work by placing at Omaha a chief in whom you have confidence,” he opened, “who in all things you will support and who you can hold responsible that your orders are carried out—and who all connected with the road will know they must obey.” He insisted that the heads of divisions would be “divided interested independent commands.” Dodge insisted that each of the chiefs of a division must be “jealous of his power and rights” and that everything be done to promote “harmony, energy, economy or celerity.”8
Late in April, Durant went to St. Joseph to meet with Dodge and offer him the post of chief engineer of the UP. The general refused to accept unless he received absolute control. He told Doc that his military experience had convinced him that a divided command would never work. As chief engineer he would “obey orders and insist on everyone under me doing the same.” Durant agreed.