Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Read online

  A land communication between the mother country and the colonies was critical—but until the coming of the railroad, the distances separating the United States east of the Missouri from its Western colonies precluded any significant connection save by sea. That meant going around the continent of South America or making a hazardous trip over the Isthmus at Panama. If the United States was to be what Jefferson had dreamed of, an empire of liberty stretching from sea to shining sea, it was imperative that a transcontinental railroad be built as soon as possible.

  But where? As noted, up until Lincoln’s inauguration, the slave states blocked the free states and vice versa. This was so even though, after 1848 and the discovery of gold on a branch of the American River about forty miles west of present-day Sacramento, everyone agreed on the need. Indeed, it sometimes seemed as if everyone were going to California. Adventurers came from all parts of the United States and all over the world, from China and Australia, from Europe, from everywhere. By the end of 1849, the population of California was swelling, with more coming. How they got there, with no railroad, is a long story.

  CHARLES Crocker said later, “I built the Central Pacific.”1 Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Theodore Judah, and Mark Hopkins could say the same or something near it. For sure, Crocker had lots of help, and people to point the way—but he was the one who could claim without blushing that he built it.

  Born in Troy, New York, on September 16, 1822, Crocker commenced selling apples and oranges at nine years of age, then carrying newspapers. “I was always apt at trade, when a boy I would swap knives and could always get ahead. I was a natural leader in everything.” He moved to Vermont to make a living, but “I was too fast for that country. Everything there was quiet and staid. You didn’t dare laugh all day Sunday until sundown came.” He struggled with poverty, working sixteen hours a day for $11 a month. He never went to any school beyond eighth grade. In his twenties, he was certain he could do whatever was required at any job or trade. He was about five feet ten or eleven inches tall, with smooth clear skin, blue eyes, a high forehead, and a tremendous appetite. He was, in many ways, a typical American.2

  In 1849, he got gold fever and gathered together his two brothers and four other young men. He purchased four horses and two wagons and his party made its way to South Bend, Indiana, where the members spent the winter working to make some money. In the spring they took off for St. Louis. At Quincy, Illinois, on the bank of the Mississippi, Crocker learned that the Missouri River was still frozen up, so he used the enforced wait to lay in a supply of corn, which he had the young men shell. Then he took the corn down to St. Louis, with instructions for the others to make their way overland with the horses and wagons through Iowa to the Missouri River. In St. Louis he purchased more goods, and set off on the first steamer that ascended the river that spring.

  Near Council Bluffs, Crocker reunited with his men. They were all appalled at the price of supplies and food—flour was $25 a barrel and scarce at that. They were offered $3 a bushel for their shelled corn but turned it down. Crocker insisted on staying on the east bank for ten days, to let the horses fatten up on the grass and to wait for the grass on the west bank to grow high enough to pasture the horses. Finally, on May 14, they rafted the river and “the next day started on our trip leaving civilization behind us.”3

  Crocker’s foresight was rewarded. Thanks to the shelled corn in one of the wagons, the party could travel faster than those who depended on grass alone. When they got to the Platte River, the road was lined with teams, so much so that they were always in view. Crocker’s party made about thirty miles a day, in part thanks to his leadership. “They would all gather around me and want to know what to do,” he later said.4 Once, when one of his horses strayed away, he went looking and found the horse. The men who were supposed to be looking after the animal were sitting on the banks of the river playing cards. Crocker brought them to the camp, called for all the cards, burned them, and gave a blistering lecture: “We are going across the plains. We don’t know where we are going. We don’t know what is before us. If we don’t reserve all our power we might not get to California. It won’t do to play cards. We must have our wits about us, watch our horses, and keep everything in ship-shape.”5

  The Crocker party was going up the Platte River on its northern bank. The Platte, as everyone who traveled it then or now knows, runs a mile wide and an inch deep, with innumerable sandbars and willow stands, and a constant shifting of channels. It was and is immensely picturesque and tremendously irritating to those who had to cross it. Crocker did not. He was on the Great Plains of North America, which stretched out forever under an infinity of bright-blue sky, except when a storm hit, cutting the vision down to nothing. The Plains were flat or gently rolling.

  Robert Louis Stevenson described Nebraska: “We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression—on the Plains…. I spied in vain for something new. It was a world almost without a feature, an empty sky, an empty earth, front and back…. The green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven…. Innumerable wild sunflowers bloomed in a continuous flower-bed [and] grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution … in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line of the horizon.”6

  On May 25, Crocker’s party were camping beside the Platte River, eating supper in a tent. A powerful wind came up, blew down the tent, and scattered the meal. The men’s hats followed along with their plates and pots, all gone. A typical day on the Great Plains. On June 2, the party passed Fort Laramie in Nebraska Territory, on the North Platte branch of the river, where they had someone shoe their horses (they were entering rocky ground) at 25 cents per shoe. There too they met the legendary mountain man and guide Kit Carson, who had brought on a drove of mules from Taos, New Mexico, to sell to California-bound parties.

  On June 9, the party crossed the North Platte on the Mormon Ferry, paying $4 for each wagon and 25 cents for horses. The ferrymen told Crocker that twenty-five hundred teams had already crossed.7 Following them, Crocker drove across a barren, sandy, alkali country twenty-eight miles without water to the Sweetwater River, flowing east out of South Pass in the Wind River Range of the Rockies.

  On June 15, Crocker stood on the summit of the Rockies at South Pass, seven thousand feet above the sea. Although he was on the Continental Divide, it was “on a plane so level we could not tell by the eye which way it sloped.” The party found and drank at Pacific Spring, the first water they had encountered that flowed west. By June 18, they had covered another seventy-five miles across inhospitable land to make it to Green River. There the men camped to wait their turn for the ferry, paying $7 for each wagon. Because no grass grew around there—it was all grazed away—they drove the horses two miles down the river, to a meadow, for the night. By this time Crocker had in his company about twenty horses and ten men. He would put two men out on guard duty with the horses. On this night it was Crocker’s and C. B. DeLamater’s turn. Since they were the first party there, they selected the choicest spot and picketed the horses.

  Another party, with about fifty horses and mules and half a dozen men, came up and grumbled about Crocker’s taking the best ground. Toward sunset, Crocker and DeLamater drove their horses down to the river to drink; on returning, they found the new party had staked their horses and mules in the choice spot.

  “That ground is ours,” said Crocker. He drove their animals off and staked out his horses. The newcomers were very abusive and threatened to pull Crocker’s stakes.

  “You do, if you dare,” Crocker said, as he pulled a pistol and proclaimed his right to the good spot. After some shouting and threats, the newcomers backed down. This was but one of a number of instances when Crocker had to use his pistol to uphold his rights, something he was proud of: he later told an interviewer that “a man who is well assured of his own position and shows bold front, need not fear anybody.”8 And D
eLamater said of him, “Charley would look at another man’s pistol and break out in one of his hearty laughs…. He was always cool and self-possessed in the presence of difficulties—courageous in maintaining his own rights, never intentionally encroaching upon the rights of others.”9

  Many adventures ensued as these young men crossed one of the most demanding, arduous, and exhausting landforms in the world. Crocker and his men would make frequent excursions to examine the picturesque features. DeLamater kept a diary: June 28, “Heavy hail storm. Hail as large as musket balls.” July 4, “Camp in Thousand Spring Valley—were awakened this morning by our guard firing a Salute in honor of the day. They burst one gun trying to make a big noise.”

  On July 6, the party came to the Humboldt River, in the process passing the grave of a man killed less than a week earlier by an Indian. DeLamater wrote that, whereas “our hardships had been comparatively light this far,” as soon as they struck the Humboldt the hardships were “thick and fast.” The river—called the “Humbug” by the travelers—was overflowing because of melting mountain snow, so Crocker took them up to the bluffs and across sagebrush and alkali flats to get some grass, camping during the day and traveling at night, all the way to the “sink of the Humboldt.” There “the river spreads out in meadows and sinks into the earth,” DeLamater wrote, but “we fared better than thousands of others. I never saw so much suffering in all my life. We gave medicine here, a little food there, but had to pass on with the crowd, striving to reach the goal, or our fate might be as theirs—sickness—a lonely death—and a shallow nameless grave.”10

  At the sink of the river there were splendid meadows and grass in abundance, so Crocker paused for a few days to recuperate. Then, leaving behind everything superfluous, including one of the two wagons and ten of the twenty horses, with all but one of the men walking, the party set out. They had waited until sunset to cross the thirty miles or so of alkali flats to reach the Carson River. “A dreary tedious journey,” DeLamater called it. Four hours after sunrise, the party reached “the sweet cool water of the Carson and its brooks and grassy meadows. It was like Paradise.” The hardships everyone had suffered since leaving the Missouri were instantly forgotten. “The future was before us with its golden crown.”

  Traders from California had crossed the Sierra Nevada to bring flour, bacon, and other provisions for the Easterners—at $1.50 per pound. “But each days travel brought us nearer to California and provisions were cheaper.” In a few days the party crossed the summit of the Sierra Nevada. On August 7, they were in Placerville, California.11

  It had taken Crocker and his team—young men, all in good condition, with some money and supplies plus horses and wagons—almost half a year to cross the plains and mountains. They had pushed themselves as hard as they ever had, getting more out of themselves than they had thought possible, and seen more dead, dying, and ill men than they had ever laid eyes on before. Thousands of others had gone before, or at about the same time, or shortly after Crocker, all headed for the gold in the hills. Virtually every one of them swore, “Never again.”

  COLLIS Huntington was born on October 21, 1821, in Litchfield Hills, Connecticut, fifteen miles west of Hartford, the sixth of nine children. He did manual labor and attended school for about four months each winter. He did well in arithmetic, history, and geography, but was defeated by grammar and spelling.12 At age fourteen he was an apprentice on a farm for a year at $7 a month and keep. Then he got a job with a storekeeper, whom he impressed by memorizing both the wholesale and retail cost of every item in the cluttered stock and then calculating, without pencil or paper, the profit that could be expected from each piece. At age sixteen he went to New York City, where he bought a stock of clocks, watch parts, silverware, costume jewelry, and other items, then set off to Indiana as a Yankee peddler. When he was twenty-one, he drifted to Oneonta, in central New York. There he went to work for his older brother Solon, who had built a store. He did so well that when he was twenty-three years old he went into a partnership with Solon, contributing in cash the considerable sum of $1,318. That was on September 4, 1844; two weeks later, Collis went to Cornwall, Connecticut, to marry Elizabeth Stoddard, whom he had been courting.13

  For the next four years, he went to New York City to make purchases for the Oneonta store. As in the past, he did well. In the 1890s, Huntington told an interviewer, “From the time I was a child until the present I can hardly remember a time when I was not doing something.”14 There were other young men, in New York State and elsewhere in America, getting ahead in the 1840s, a great age for just-beginning businessmen. But few did as well or moved as fast as Huntington, who seized the main chance before others even knew it was there. His looks, his self-assurance, and his bulk all helped; he weighed two hundred pounds and had a great round head and penetrating eyes. Strong as an ox, he claimed he never got sick.* He made it a habit to take charge of any enterprise in which he was involved.

  Doing well in Oneonta with his brother, however, was not enough. Late in 1848, Huntington embraced the rumors of gold for the taking in California. He persuaded five other young men in town to come with him on a trip by sea to California. They joined many others. In the month of January 1849, eight thousand gold seekers sailed for California in ninety ships, to go around South America’s Cape Horn and then north along the coast.

  Huntington, however, decided to take his chances on the shortcut across Panama. This was a bold, risky decision. After his steamer made its way from New York City to the Colombia shore, his plan was that he and his party would hire natives with canoes to take them up the Chagres River to its headwaters, then travel by mule down to Panama City to await a boat going to San Francisco. The drawbacks were the expense, the possibility of missing boats going north, and, more serious, the danger of contracting tropical fever.

  Huntington was twenty-seven (a little older than Crocker), and he was leaving with no illusions about striking it rich on a gold-bearing stream. His companions and thousands of others headed toward California were looking for an easy fortune, but Huntington headed west in his already developed capacity as a trader. He brought with him to New York and had loaded on his steamer a stock of merchandise, including a number of casks of whiskey, which he intended to sell to the argonauts. He had no interest in the “mining and trading companies” forming at the New York docks. His interest was in starting a store, with his brother Solon sending on the goods from New York.15

  On March 14, 1849, Huntington and his mates bought steerage tickets for $80 each on the Crescent City. It left the next day—about the same time that Crocker started west—with around 350 argonauts on board. Twenty-four-year-old Jessie Benton Frémont—daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who was a leading advocate of the Pacific railroad—was on the ship, on her way to California to meet her explorer husband, John Charles Frémont. He had just completed his fourth expedition through the Western reaches of the continent, this one in search of a usable railroad route to the Pacific.

  Huntington was a long way from California and from building a railroad. On the first days out of New York, his concern was with the health of his mates and fellow passengers. Except for him, they were all seasick, vomiting nearly every morning and night and always full of queasiness. They had gone around the tip of Florida and past Cuba before the sea settled down. On March 23, after eight days at sea, the Crescent City hove to a mile or so off the mouth of the Chagres River. Huntington went ashore in a native canoe, along with some others, to discover that Chagres was a miserable place. He managed to hire natives to get 260 people to Panama City. It took three days to get the passengers and baggage to Gorgona, the headwaters of the river—a miserable trip. The passengers had to sleep for a few hours each night on a mud bank or slumped in the canoes. The natives had only poles to push the canoes along, and they had to be on the way at dawn in order to utilize every moment of daylight.

  At Gorgona the Americans faced a twenty-mile trail over the low mountains, a tra
il full of potholes and fallen trees. By the end of March, the rainy season had begun and mud was everywhere. It took two days to cover the twenty miles. At the end of the trip, all were appalled by Panama City. It rained continually. Mud, mildew, and fungus oozed everywhere. Sanitation in the tent city was lacking or completely absent. Unwashed raw fruit caused epidemics of dysentery. Malaria and cholera were common, as were threats of smallpox. Vice, depravity, and selfishness thrived.16

  Huntington and his companions had hoped to catch the Oregon as it steamed north on its maiden voyage, but they missed it and had to wait for another ship. The argonauts settled down to wait, meanwhile fighting with each other. Not Huntington. He went into business, selling his medicines (badly needed) and getting other stuff to sell. On his way from Gorgona, he had noticed ranches with food and other provisions—such as primitive cloth, rush mats, and the like—for sale. The business thrived. His buying and selling required frequent trips through the fever-laden jungle. Huntington estimated that he made the crossing at least twenty times. “It was only twenty-four miles,” he recalled. “I walked it.” What was for other men sheer agony was for Collis Huntington a challenge.

  Once he varied his routine. There was a decrepit schooner on a little river. “I went down and bought her,” he recalled, “and filled her up with jerked beef, potatoes, rice, sugar and syrup in great bags and brought everything up to Panama and sold them.” Stuck on the beach at Panama City for nearly two months, Huntington managed to make $3,000.17