Judah (1826-63), son of an Episcopal clergyman in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was a civil engineer with a genius for building railroads. In 1854, Colonel Charles Wilson, president of California’s Sacramento Valley Railroad, commissioned Judah to survey a right-of-way from Sacramento to the gold-mining town of Folsom. Judah reported to Wilson that this stretch of track could serve as something far more significant than a link to Folsom. The track was ideally suited to be the Pacific end of a transcontinental railroad. Wilson and other backers were excited, but then the gold petered out at Folsom, and the rail line went no farther.
Judah did not stop. He lobbied Washington, even as he continued searching for a viable pass across the Sierra Mountains. A frontier pharmacist, Daniel “Doc” Strong, pointed out a likely route, and right then and there, he and Judah quickly concluded an agreement to incorporate a Pacific railroad association. All that was lacking now was money. Lots of money. Judah (lid not stop. He found seven backers, including four whose fortunes were destined to be made by the railroad: Collis P. Huntington and Mark Hopkins, partners in a hardware store; Leland Stanford, wholesale grocer; and Charles Crocker, dry goods merchant. Returning to Washington, D.C., Judah successfully lobbied for passage of the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, authorizing the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads to begin construction of a transcontinental railroad. The Central Pacific would build from the West Coast eastward, and the Union Pacific would build westward from Omaha, Nebraska.
With the North and South torn apart by war, President Lincoln and Congress were anxious to bind the nation together East and West. The Railway Act granted huge tracts of land to the railroad, along with massive construction loans, and, at the behest of Abraham Lincoln, multimillionaire congressman Oakes Ames and his brother Oliver created a corporation to build the railroad and another corporation to finance construction. The latter was named Credit Mobilier, after the company that had successfully financed the French railway system 10 years earlier. The Ames brothers made investors an offer they couldn’t refuse: Credit Mobilier, run by the directors (principal investors) of the Union Pacific, was paid by the Union Pacific to build the Union Pacific. The directors made a profit on the railroad as well as on the cost of building it. The scheme was an open door to fraud, and construction bills were routinely padded.
In the end, scandal and greed could take nothing away from the heroism and wonder of what it meant actually to build a transcontinental railroad—especially in an age when earth was moved and iron rails laid not by machines, but by human muscle.
Under the leadership of Grenville Mellon Dodge and another ex-army general, John Stephen Casement, the Union Pacific began laying prodigious lengths of track—266 miles in 1866 alone. The tracks were set into place mostly by unskilled Irish immigrants, who received, in addition to their pay, room and board. On the Central Pacific, the bulk of the work force was Chinese, who were paid about the same rate but had to furnish their own tent accommodations and their own food.
Laying and spiking 500-pound rail sections was difficult enough, but these men—some 25,000 in all— faced other perils as well. They encountered harsh weather on the prairies and in the mountains, including summer floods, winter blizzards, and the ever-present danger of avalanche; attack from Sioux and Cheyenne, as the rails penetrated Indian hunting grounds in western Nebraska and southeastern Wyoming; and unceasing pressure from bosses, who had little love for Irish immigrants and even less for Chinese “coolies.” Taskmasters drove the laborers relentlessly, heedless of life and limb, for the Central Pacific and Union Pacific, though they would be joined, were actually in fierce competition. The volume of their government land grants were directly proportional to the amount of track laid. In fact, in the absence of an officially predetermined meeting point for the converging tracks, survey parties laid out some 200 miles of overlapping, parallel, entirely redundant right-of-way. After roustabout parties passed each other-blasting away at hard rocks and almost at one another-U.S. Secretary of the Interior Orville H. Browning intervened and named Promontory Summit, 56 miles west of Ogden, Utah, as the meeting point. (Many histories of the West confuse Promontory Summit with nearby Promontory Point.)
Golden Spike at Promontory
The ceremonial union of the two lines at Promontory Summit was set for May 8, 1869. Leland Stanford of the Central Pacific almost failed to arrive because of a train wreck. Thomas C. Durant of the Union Pacific was kidnapped en route by tie cutters his company had not paid for months. Durant telegraphed for money and was released, delaying the ceremony by two days.
On May 10, 1869, workers and executives alike were prepared to savor their finest moment. The event did not go quite as planned. Chinese laborers, acutely aware of how Caucasians felt about them, were lowering the last rail into place when a photographer hollered, “Shoot!” The laborers dropped the quarter-ton rail and ran.
Leland Stanford himself stepped up to join the last eastbound and westbound rails. He poised himself to drive home a commemorative Golden Spike, wired to the telegraph, so that each blow would be transmitted across the nation. Stanford raised the heavy sledge, brought it on down—and clean missed. Laborers assisted him, and the deed was done. From sea to shining sea, the United States was bound by bands of iron.
The Least You Need to Know
The Homestead Act of 1862 filled in the space between the Mississippi and the Pacific and brought to the West an unprecedented degree of family-based, community-based settlement.
Technology, in the form of the transcontinental railroad, did more than politics to bind East and West into a single nation.
Stats
By the end of the 19th century, some 600,000 farmers had received clear title under the Homestead Act to approximately 80 million acres of formerly public land.
Word for the Day
Plain homesteaders who built sod houses were called
Stats
In 1855 alone, Russell, Majors & Waddell carried 2.5 million pounds of freight across the plains in 500 wagons organized into 20 separate trains. Seventeen hundred men were employed as wagon masters, drivers, stock tenders, and so on, while 7,500 oxen furnished the pull.
Main Event
