Undaunted Courage

  “This winter only pack mules can transport the stage passengers to Virginia City [Nevada]. Crocker’s camp supplies and much of his forage for his work animals are packed in at a cost of one cent per pound,” he added. February 24 (following a long discussion of water resources): “We need the right to take water for construction and operation. Without this grant from Congress we are entirely at the mercy of a set of water speculators—real water sharks—known as ditch companies. They go ahead of the RR and buy up all the water to make us, the farmers and the miners or anyone else pay them hugely for it. We have already paid $60,000 in construction costs to go over, along, and around these ditches.”

  There is a great deal about money, and when the government will turn over bonds, and what price Huntington is getting for the bonds in hand, and what he is paying for rails, locomotives, cars, and other supplies. And a great deal on various dealings of the Big Four with regard to West Coast railroads. Plus personnel problems and hopes.

  Hopkins again on May 5: “Our cuts weakened the support of the natural hillside formation, so at Tunnel hill, just above Secret Town, where the original intention was to make a tunnel, the material was too soft to tunnel without being lined by expensive masonry, so it was decided to make an open cut in the spur, which is near 100 ft thick. The cut was nearly done when in March it broke back several hundred feet and slowly continued to slide—imperceptible to the eye, yet continually moving. All the space that 500 men could make during the day with their carts and wheelbarrows would be filled the next morning.” And so on, as he recounted the perils of building a track in the mountains.

  On July 9, Hopkins said that Crocker was suffering from a powder shortage because the powder company “can’t make it fast enough.” Then, turning to the good news: “It is a great consolation to know that you whipped out the UP at Washington [by getting Congress to approve the amendment]. They thought to Lord it over us, and get well paid. They must be in a bad fix if they have mortgaged a road up to within 150 miles of our state line. Send me a copy of the UP’s first mortgage. I will perhaps get some new ideas for the next mortgage we make.”

  There were other problems. On July16, 1866, Hopkins wrote to Huntington: “The ship Hornet burned at sea. Even using the invoices/schedules/and letters, it can not be determined what RR material went down with her. Our invoices show only 1182 bars of iron, 100 kegs spikes and 65 ball chains. But the bills you sent in have many other things listed, but for which we have no bill of lading.”

  On July 21, Hopkins said that he was satisfied that each of the Big Four was doing what he ought to be doing—Stanford with the politicians, Crocker running construction, Huntington making loans and buying all equipment and supplies, and he himself in charge of finance. He felt he was useful “here, while I am sure no one of us could do so well as yourself there [New York, Boston, and Washington]. Until we can hear a locomotive whistle scream on the other side of the summit, so as to feel ourselves well out of the woods, I don’t intend to ask or suggest any change.”

  Huntington agreed. “If it had not been for you and I,” he wrote back, “my opinion is that the Central Pacific would have gone to the Devil before this.” Huntington confessed, “I have gone to sleep at night in New York when I had a million and a half dollars to be paid by three o’clock on the following day, without knowing where the money was coming from, and slept soundly. I never worried.” He practiced more rigorously than man of any previous age the self-denial of conventional pleasures today in return for wealth and power tomorrow. CP lawyer Alfred Cohen later said, “I have seen Mr. Huntington trudging about from office to office trying to get people to lend him money. . . . They were put to terrible straits to get money to get over the mountains.”

  The correspondence wasn’t all business. “Mrs. Hopkins will probably go east this spring, as the advanced age of her father and his feeble health induces her to change her promise never to make the voyage without me.”6

  THE winter of 1865–66 was the wettest in years. On the lower slopes, below Colfax, the rains were heavy enough for the Sacramento Union to complain that the railroad’s “embankments are so miserably built that they give way under the soaking rains of this climate, and long delays are occasioned.”7 The soil was thick, spongy, a mucky trap for vehicles. Crocker got hundreds of mules to carry food, powder, tools, and their own forage to the camps beyond the end of track. A stagecoach setting out from Dutch Flat for Virginia City got so mired in mud near Gold Run that it was stuck for six weeks. Heavy landslides spread mud and boulders across the completed track, often blocking the road. The snows higher up hampered work on the tunnels. There were five feet of snow on New Year’s Day, 1866.

  From then until March, as often happens in California, the skies were clear and calm. But in March, the storms came again, bringing sleet and snow which lasted until the end of May. Indeed, from May 20 until June 1, the weather was almost one constant snowstorm. Strobridge later said, “The winter made the roads on the clay soils of the foothills nearly impassable for vehicles. The building of the railroad was prosecuted with energy but at a much greater cost than would have been the case in the dry season. . . . All work between Colfax and Dutch Flat was done during this winter in the mud.”8

  Crocker and Strobridge stayed with it. By the spring of 1866, they had hired and put to work the largest number of employees in America. The CP had over ten thousand men working on the railroad, eight thousand of them Chinese. Some one thousand of these labored for Arthur Brown, who had charge of the company’s trestling, timbering, and bridging. He had his men felling trees, shaping timbers, and driving piles for bridges. The track-laying foreman, Henry H. Minkler, had his men spiking in rails in early May up and around Cape Horn.9

  Charlie Crocker rode up and down the line with a leather saddlebag holding gold and silver coin to pay the men. “Why, I went up and down the road like a man bull,” he told an interviewer. He was inspecting, criticizing, or roaring with anger. Once he told Stro, “Rule them with an iron hand.” That was after he saw a group of white men talking excitedly in a group. “There is something breeding there,” he told Strobridge.

  “They’re getting up a strike,” Stro replied. After Crocker had paid off the other men, Strobridge said, “There, they are coming. Now get ready.”

  When the men got close enough to hear, Crocker said, “Strobridge, I think you had better reduce wages on this cut. We are paying a little more than we ought to. Reduce them about 25 cents a day.”

  Hearing this, the men stopped and talked. Finally, one of their leaders stepped forward and said to Crocker, “We thought, sir, that we ought to have our wages raised a little on this tunnel. The tunnel is very wet, and the cut is wet.” Crocker replied that he had just been talking to Stro about lowering their wages.

  “We thought we ought to get an advance,” said the worker, “but you ought not to reduce it, certainly.” Crocker asked Stro what he thought.

  “I wouldn’t make a fuss over it. We had better let them go on at the same figure.”

  “All right,” said Crocker, and that was that.10

  STROBRIDGE lived in a manner that all the others, even Crocker, envied. His wife, Hanna Maria Strobridge, and their six adopted children were with him, living in a standard passenger car pulled by the headquarters locomotive, which stayed right behind the end of track. Strobridge had it made over into a three-bedroom house on wheels. Mrs. Strobridge had an awning fitted to her front porch, and when the train was halted she hung houseplants and a caged canary around her entrance. People wiped their feet before entering. She was the only woman on the CP line, and Stro was the only man with a family life.11

  WORK on the Summit Tunnel went slowly at best. Montague decided it would be worth the cost to sink a shaft from the top so that the Chinese could work on four facings at once—the ones at each end, and two others going in opposite directions from the middle. The shaft would be eight by twelve feet wide, and seventy-three feet deep.

  By hand, the C
hinese began to cut it through, haul the debris (mainly granite chunks) up from the bottom, and lower the timbers into place to shore it up. The bosses decided some mechanical aid might speed things up. An old locomotive, the Sacramento (one of the first locomotives in California), was cannibalized and sent to the top of the digging, to serve as a hoisting engine. Minus its cab, wheels, and turning shafts, the Sacramento was loaded by a winch onto a reinforced freight car and hauled to the end of track, near Colfax. There a mule skinner named Missouri Bill took over. His job was to drag the twelve-ton engine, now called the Blue Goose, to the summit, fifty miles away as the crow flies, seventy-five miles on the mountain trails. The wagon the Blue Goose traveled on, specially designed, had wooden wheels two feet wide. Ten yokes of oxen pulled it, spurred on by Missouri Bill’s profanity and whip. When the oxen encountered a team of horses pulling wagons, the horses kicked, bucked, and otherwise created havoc. Bill sent one man ahead to blindfold approaching horses.

  Going downslope, Bill put blocks under the wide wheels; heavy logging chains were attached to the largest trees nearby and, with a few feet of slack, attached to the wagon. Bill then knocked out the blocks, and the wagon and the Blue Goose slid a yard or so. Then the process was repeated. He used the chains to climb, too. This went on for six weeks, until the summit was finally reached. After the engine was set up in a building fifty feet square that had been built for it, and placed on a bed of huge timbers at the top of the tunnel shaft, it began to haul up the granite and lower the timber. Work went faster, as much as a foot a day. But it wasn’t until December 19 that the bottom was reached and the Chinese could get started drilling and blasting.

  Crocker then decided that he wanted more experienced men for the tunneling. He sent an emissary to Virginia City, Nevada, to persuade some of the best Cornish miners to come to his site, with the lure of higher wages. They came, but instead of giving them exclusive charge of excavating the tunnel, Crocker faced them in one direction and Chinese workers in the other. “The Chinese, without fail, always outmeasured the Cornish miners,” he recalled. “That is to say, they would cut more rock in a week than the Cornish miners did. And there it was hard work, steady pounding on the rock, bone-labor.” The Cornishmen quit. “They swore they would not work with Chinamen anyhow,” said Crocker. After that, “the Chinamen had possession of the whole work.”12

  In the mid–twentieth century, a Hollywood firm tried to duplicate Missouri Bill’s feat of hauling a dismantled locomotive to the summit, using a smaller engine. The engine was moved up the mountain for a total distance of five hundred yards. The firm gave up the task as impossible.13

  AT the tunnels, especially Summit Tunnel, the Chinese were using great amounts of black powder, up to five hundred kegs a day. Despite the end of the Civil War, the price had gone steadily up, from $2.50 per keg to $15 a keg. This was a seller’s market, for real. As Stanford explained, the CP spent its money with the greatest of economy “except in the matter of speed, and then we never hesitated to make a sacrifice.”14

  Crocker and Strobridge decided to experiment with nitroglycerin, which was brand-new (and spelled as two words). Said to be an extraordinary explosive, it had been invented in Italy in 1847, then refined in the 1860s by demolitions engineer Alfred Nobel in Sweden. It was five times more powerful by bulk than black powder, and thirteen times more destructive. The Railroad Record in August 1866 said that “its storing and transport involve no danger.”

  Would that it were so. There were terrible accidents, ignored for the most part by the CP but nevertheless more than enough to force most companies to swear off it. The Dutch Flat Enquirer, a booster of the explosive—“the work of blasting has been greatly facilitated,” it reported that spring—said that in one explosion in New York City “nobody is to blame, it is perfectly safe and harmless and simply blew up from maltreatment and in self-defense.”15

  The CP found that, when they got to drilling holes of fifteen to eighteen inches into the granite, poured in the liquid nitroglycerin, capped the hole with a plug, and fired it with a percussion cap, the nitroglycerin did a far better job than powder. The work progressed at nearly double the speed, and the granite was broken into far smaller pieces. But the accidents proved too much. In one, after a number of charges had been set off simultaneously, a Chinese worker hit a charge of nitro that hadn’t exploded with his pick. It exploded and killed him and the others working near that spot.

  Strobridge declared, “Bury that stuff.” Crocker said to get it out of there. And even though Nobel perfected dynamite in 1866, it was never tested or used by the CP. In 1867, the CP ignored the dangers and did make and use its own nitroglycerin, but except at Summit Tunnel did not make a practice of it.16

  According to Henry Root, Strobridge spent most of his time that fall near or at the Summit Tunnel—No. 6, as it was called. He had assistants who traveled over the work and were known as “riding bosses.” Root said, “More powder was used by the rock foremen than was economical, but time was the essential of all operations, so there was a good reason.” Thus did the CP imbue even their modest assistants with the spirit of the enterprise—nail it down! “In the vicinity of Cisco,” Root wrote, “the rock was so hard that it seemed impossible to drill into it a sufficient depth for blasting purposes. Shot after shot would blow out as if fired from a cannon.”17 Clement told Stanford, “Perseverance alone conquered.”18

  The CP would not wait for the Summit Tunnel to be cut and tracks laid through it. The company would push on beyond the Sierra Nevada by outflanking the Donner Pass. Partly this was to keep the enormous workforce employed, but mainly it was to get into Nevada and head east before the UP could get to the Salt Lake and head west. The Big Four had not set up the race in order to lose it.

  The CP sent three exploring parties prodding through Nevada to look for routes for the railroad between the Big Bend of the Truckee River, some thirty miles east of today’s Reno, and the Salt Lake Valley, five hundred miles beyond. The leaders were survey engineers Butler Ives, William Epler, and S. M. Buck. The direct route, straight east, had a series of mountain ranges, including the Clan Alpine, the Desatoya, the Shoshone, the Towabe, the Toquima, the Monitor, the White Pine, the Shell Creek, and the Snake—all in Nevada—and the Needle, the Wah Wah, the Confusion, and others in Utah. Still, it had to be explored.

  East of Reno, according to one observer, “desolation began to assume its most repulsive form. Miles on miles of black, igneous rock and volcanic detritus. Outcrops of lava, interspersed with volcanic grit,” were the main features. Another traveler said that the country was “so destitute of vegetable and animal life, as not to rise to the rank even of a howling wilderness.” There was no water. The desert was filled with the bones of thousands of animals who had not made it to California.19 The second route, to the north of the Humboldt River, was just as bad.

  Samuel Bowles, who had just crossed the continent, declared that “the Humboldt route would be more easily built” than going across central Nevada. “It goes through a naturally better country as to wood, water, and fertility of soil. It is generally conceded to be the true natural roadway across the Continent. The emigration has always taken it.”20 He had it right. Even today the Humboldt is, as it was for Charlie Crocker and his group in 1850, a narrow but wonderful oasis. The grass is green and high, the ducks, geese, herons and eagles, the grazing horses and cattle, are numerous. So are the deer. The water is clear and plentiful until the river gets to the Sinks, where the grass grows in great meadows but the river sinks into the earth.

  Butler Ives led the exploration of the Humboldt Valley for the CP. When he got to the Humboldt Wells, where the river rises in northeastern Utah out of the East Humboldt Range at the northern edge of the Ruby Mountains, he tried two approaches to Salt Lake City. One angled southeastward across the Great American Desert and around the bottom of Salt Lake to the city. No good. Then he returned to the wells and set off in a northeasterly direction, across the top edge of the desert,
across the Promontory Mountains, around the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, across Bear River, and then southward along the western base of the Wasatch Range to Weber Canyon. That was the way to go.21

  IN the meantime, Crocker was having shacks for laborers and warehouses for materials constructed along the Truckee River, twenty miles east and considerably below the Donner Summit. He would send gangs of workers there when the snows fell on the Sierra, to make grade and lay track while waiting for the Summit Tunnel to be completed. He began with a thousand men; another thousand soon followed. They started to make grade back toward Donner Pass.

  The editor of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise was delighted to learn of Crocker’s plans. “What a joyful day it will be,” he declared, “when the shrill whistle of the locomotive shall be heard as the train of cars from across the mountains shall go rattling down the Truckee. And that day is not two years distant.”22 Freight trains from Sacramento were pulled up the Sierra in a steady procession. “A 116-foot grade, with a dozen heavily loaded freight cars, is no sardine,” said the Dutch Flat Enquirer, “but they manage to do it somehow.” At Colfax, later at Dutch Flat, eventually at Cisco, the cars were unloaded and the supplies put onto wagons, to go up and over the Sierra Nevada, then down to Nevada.23

  On November 5, the CP laid its track to Emigrant Gap, eight miles west of Cisco, twenty-one miles west of the summit, and five thousand feet above sea level. It was now only two thousand feet or so below the summit. It expected to reach Cisco in ten days.

  That November, the stage-line owner Ben Holladay arrived in Alta, after riding the train from New York to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, then proceeding in a special horse-drawn coach. He brought with him the chilling news that the UP was on the march. It was coming on. In October, it had laid sixty-five miles of track. The editor of the Sacramento Union was not impressed. “The building of one mile of road anywhere between Newcastle and Cisco involves more labor and expense than the construction of 20 miles on the level prairie,” he wrote.