Chapter 2
The same year—1869—that produced the climax of the Erie War and the weaving and unraveling of the gold conspiracy also witnessed a landmark accomplishment of American capitalism: the completion of the country’s first transcontinental railroad. Participants and observers feted the Pacific railroad as a giant step in the march of technology. And so it was. Yet the techniques employed by the builders of the road were at least as important as the technology. Some of the techniques reflected improvements in the craft of construction: clever solutions devised by foremen and crews to deal with the unaccustomed challenges of distance, terrain, and weather in the West. But the really vital techniques involved the manner in which the Pacific railroad was financed—in particular, the way in which the capitalists commanding the road recruited the institutions of government to share the risk and costs of construction.
The dream of a Pacific railroad was almost as old as railroads in America. In 1832 a committee of citizens in Dunkirk, New York, agitated for the inclusion of their town on the route of a proposed railroad from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, on grounds that such a road “would be a strong and powerful link in a Railway to the valley of the Mississippi, and finally to the Pacific Ocean.” Only a few weeks later a territorial newspaper in Michigan avowed a desire on behalf of all forward-thinking Americans “to unite our Eastern and Western shores firmly together … to unite New-York and the Oregon by a railway by which the traveller leaving the city of New-York shall, at the moderate pace of ten miles an hour, place himself in a port right on the shores of the Pacific.”1
Serious consideration of a railroad to the Pacific awaited actual possession by the United States of Pacific frontage. Acquisition of title to Oregon in 1846 afforded the prospect of a seaport on the Columbia, linked to the East by rail. The annexation of California in 1848, at the end of the war with Mexico, shifted the attention of the transcontinentalists south to San Francisco and its incomparable bay. But it was the gold rush of 1849 and after that made a rail line to the Pacific appear both necessary and possible. The necessity was more than obvious to the hundreds of thousands of emigrants who walked from the Missouri to the gold fields and didn’t want to have to walk back. The possibility reflected the likelihood that California, suddenly teeming with people, would generate enough traffic to pay for a Pacific railroad.
Yet even if it did, the payback would require decades, given the tremendous cost of construction across many hundreds of miles of desert and mountains uninhabited by potential customers. (Indigenous peoples didn’t count, except as a likely expense.) In the East, rail lines traversed districts blanketed by farms and villages; the whole length of a line produced business for a road. In the West, a transcontinental line would have to support itself by the terminus-to-terminus, end-to-end traffic.
It would, that is, unless the government could be persuaded to share the cost. Government participation in “internal improvements” had a long history in America, but it had often been controversial. Counties built roads and bridges, and states pitched in, but when the roads crossed state lines and advocates argued for federal funding, strict constructionists demurred. Andrew Jackson’s first veto was of a bill to fund the Maysville road to Kentucky. Old Hickory objected not to the road, merely to the federal funding. Jackson’s opponents coalesced in the Whig party, which advocated internal improvements till it split over slavery. At that point a Pacific railroad became a pet project for elements of both the Democrats and the newly forming Republicans. Democrat Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois guessed that a Pacific road was coming, and he determined that its eastern anchor be Chicago, where he had friends and property. But the region west of the Missouri and east of the Sierra Nevada had yet to be organized politically, and investors required at least that modicum of protection before they’d sink their money in something as risky as a long-haul rail line. Douglas solved the organizational problem by guiding the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress. He conceded that his bill would “raise a hell of a storm,” in that it required addressing the explosive topic of slavery in the territories, but he thought the benefit—to the country, to his party, to himself—worth the turbulence. In the event, the Douglas measure raised far more than a storm, triggering a guerrilla war in “bleeding Kansas.”2
Among the Republicans, support for a Pacific railroad fitted a general belief that government could benefit the American people by helping American business. The railroad won a place on the Republican platform in 1856, when the presidential nominee was John C. Frémont, who had personally reconnoitered potential railroad routes, and again in 1860, when the party put forward railroad attorney Abraham Lincoln. Southern secession after Lincoln’s victory gave the Republicans a new reason for sponsoring a railroad to California. Despite having entered the Union as a free state in 1850, California was predominantly Democratic and strongly sympathetic to the South; upon Southern secession, many Californians spoke of leaving the Union themselves—if not to join the Confederacy, at least to adopt a stance of pro-Confederate independence. Lincoln opposed secession of any sort, but the thought of losing California’s gold made him even less likely to tolerate a western split. He had no troops to spare to hold California in the Union, but he had something more effective: the promise of a railroad. Californians’ brave talk of self-sufficiency suddenly ceased when they heard the Republican offer; all they could think of was getting back home—to the civilized parts of the United States—in days rather than weeks or months.3
Converting the Republican promise of a Pacific railroad into legislation to fund construction required the concerted efforts of small armies of lobbyists, who spent more time fighting one another than persuading skeptics. The California crowd was led by Leland Stanford, an unlikely railroad mogul and a hardly more probable entrepreneur. A New Yorker by birth, Stanford was practicing law in Wisconsin when the discovery of gold in California lured his several brothers west. Leland resisted the temptation, preferring the steady income of the bar to the potentially larger but far less certain payoff of the mines. And when the brothers wrote home that mining wasn’t all they had hoped, he congratulated himself on his conservatism and looked forward to a career in the law. But then his law office burned down, claiming his books and his records. The same fire destroyed the businesses of his best clients, leaving Stanford to wonder whether he could reconstitute his practice and to revise his estimates of the risks and rewards of life. By now his brothers had given up on mining, in favor of the dry-goods trade. They were doing a brisk business, they explained, and could use another partner. Leland would be most welcome.4
He decided to take the chance, arriving in San Francisco via Nicaragua in the summer of 1852. He opened a branch of the brothers’ business at Cold Springs, not far from Coloma, the site of the original 1848 gold discovery. Stanford’s store did well till the gold ran out at Cold Springs and his customers decamped for newer, richer claims. He followed them to Michigan Bluff, where he made more money and some friends who elected him justice of the peace. His courtroom was the local saloon; verdicts were delivered over shots of whiskey. He might have remained at Michigan Bluff, but he missed his wife, who had refused to come west to live in a raucous, rowdy mining camp. She held out till he promised to move to less boisterous Sacramento, where he built a general merchandise emporium.
In Sacramento he also joined the Republican party. For national Republicans opposition to slavery was the primary issue and a Pacific railroad a secondary concern. For California Republicans the issues were reversed. Slavery was distant, while a railroad was immediate, or would be if the federal government cooperated. A railroad would benefit all Californians but especially California’s capitalists. Shipments from the East would be cheaper and more reliable; in a broader sense a railroad would spur the growth of California’s population and hence of California’s business activity.
The California Republicans were a lonely bunch at first. “In Sacramento, where I resided, the party at its inception was extremely limited in numbers,” Cornelius Cole remembered. “No record, I venture to say, can be found of a political organization starting out with fewer adherents. There were C. P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Edwin B. and Charles Crocker, all personal as well as political friends of mine. There were not for some time, besides these, as many as could be counted on one’s fingers.” The hardy band endured the taunts of their neighbors. “The convention of nigger worshippers assembled yesterday in this city,” the Sacramento State Journal declared during a meeting of the Republicans. And it survived a disastrous attempt by Stanford in 1859 to win the governorship of the state (he received but 10 percent of the vote). Yet after Lincoln won the presidency the following year, and after Southern secession made the Republicans the dominant party in Congress, the California Republicans prepared to claim the reward for their years in the wilderness.5
By this time three of Stanford’s fellow Republicans from Sacramento were also his partners in a railroad venture. Charles Crocker was a blacksmith turned merchant; Collis Huntington was a former peddler who had settled down in hardware; Mark Hopkins was Huntington’s associate. As the possibility that the federal government might actually build a Pacific railroad came into view, the four organized the Central Pacific Railway Company. In 1861 Stanford traveled to Washington to represent the company—and California Republicans—to the Lincoln administration. Theodore Judah, a railroad visionary long dismissed as a crank, followed Stanford to Washington to work on Congress.
Judah’s methods comported with the practice of the times. One of his suitcases bulged with shares of the Central Pacific; his instructions from Stanford and the others were to employ the shares in whatever manner they might be of use. How thoroughly Judah spread the wealth became a matter of dispute. Stanford recalled that he and his partners had given Judah $100,000 in stock to take east. “I think, however, that he brought most of it back,” Stanford added vaguely.6
While Judah was doing his part for Stanford and the Californians, other agents were busy on behalf of other hopefuls. The Pacific railroad would be built from both ends toward the middle; the eastern counterpart to Stanford’s Central Pacific turned out to be a group calling itself the Union Pacific and headed by Thomas Durant, a former ophthalmologist lately linked to the Mississippi & Missouri Railroad. Durant’s backers included Senator James Harlan of Iowa, a close friend of Lincoln (whose old employer, the Rock Island line, had spawned the Mississippi & Missouri).
Securing a majority for the Pacific railroad wasn’t easy. Judah described a “determined and bitter warfare” in Congress. “Pamphlets were written and laid on the desks of members and Senators, absurd statements with regard to bribery, fraud, etc., were freely circulated, and every effort made to poison the minds of members against the bill.” To counteract the poison, Judah and the other supporters of the railroad made a simple, straightforward argument: that without federal funding the road simply wouldn’t be built. Private capital markets couldn’t attract investors willing to hazard such large sums (tens of millions of dollars, at least) on such a distant payoff (at least a decade away). Complementing this bottom-line negativity was patriotic positivism: a Pacific railroad was necessary to the security of the Union and would redound to the benefit of the nation as a whole. It was a sound investment in the nation’s future and therefore deserved national support. If the defenders of states’ rights hadn’t silenced themselves by seceding, the new anti-Jacksonians might have added that federal funding of the Pacific railroad didn’t overly intrude on state prerogatives, as the great majority of the track mileage would be built on federal land.7
Eventually the arguments—and the bribes, which were even more lavish on the part of the Durant group than on that of Stanford—carried Congress. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 authorized the construction of a single line from the Missouri River to California. Stanford’s Central Pacific would build east, Durant’s Union Pacific west. The federal government would subsidize the project with loans and grants of land. The loans were thirty-year first-mortgage bonds at 6 percent interest, in amounts that varied according to the difficulty of construction. For each easy mile at the eastern and western ends of the road, the companies would receive bonds worth $16,000. For construction on the High Plains, the Union Pacific would receive $32,000 per mile. For crossing the Sierra Nevada, the Central Pacific would get $48,000 per mile. The Union Pacific would receive the same for the steep pitches in the Rocky Mountains. In addition to the bonds, the companies would receive ten square miles (6,400 acres) of land for each mile of road constructed. The land would lie in alternating sections along the right of way.
The act represented a huge investment by the federal government in the future of the West—but also in the future of the two railroad companies. If all went well, the American taxpayers would get their bond money back, with interest, at the end of the thirty-year period. If things went poorly—and because nothing on this scale had ever been attempted in America, there was no way of knowing whether it would go well or poorly—the taxpayers would be left holding worthless notes.
The land grants were less risky, if only because the land in question was currently worth next to nothing. Only after the railroad made it accessible would it command any price. Over the long term, the land would prove the most valuable part of the subsidy. But the American people would share the bounty, as the lands along the right of way but not allocated to the railroads increased in value. And the opening up of the West would provide a boon to the nation as a whole.
YET EVEN WITH the government subsidies, private investors were reluctant to get on board. The subsidies wouldn’t begin until the companies had demonstrated their competence and good faith by constructing forty miles of track. This required raising large amounts of private capital, which was scarce amid the boom brought on by the war. A more serious constraint was the condition in the 1862 law that gave the government first lien on the assets of the companies. Investors considered the Pacific railroad a risky venture, and many didn’t want to stand in line behind Washington in the event of default.
Construction commenced, but the reluctance of the private sector to join the project kept the pace to a crawl. Stanford and his partners in the Central Pacific borrowed all they could against their own credit but still fell short. Charles Crocker crossed the Sierra to Nevada Territory and importuned the silver barons of the Comstock. “They wanted to know what I expected the road would earn,” Crocker recalled. “I said I did not know, though it would earn good interest on the money invested, especially to those who went in at bed rock. ‘Well,’ they said, ‘do you think it will make 2 per cent a month?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I do not.’ ‘Well,’ they answered, ‘we can get 2 per cent a month for our money here,’ and they would not think of going into a speculation that would not promise that at once.”8
Crocker remembered those early months as downright harrowing. “I would have been glad, when we had thirty miles of road built, to have got a clean shirt and absolution from my debts. I owed everybody that would trust me, and would have been glad for them to forgive my debts and take everything I had, even the furniture of my family, and have gone into the world and started anew.”9
So the principals returned to the public sector. Stanford, who, without diminishing his participation in the Central Pacific, had been elected governor of California on a wave of pro-Union, pro-railroad sentiment, browbeat the state legislature into putting up $15 million to get the road started. He also engineered local referendums in favor of smaller issues from counties that stood to benefit from the project. Various reports indicated that his brother Philip distributed gold coins to voters as either a sign of the prosperity to come or a token of current appreciation.10
In the East, the agents of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific returned to Congress, where Representative Thaddeus Stevens provided invaluable assistance. Stevens’s family and state (Pennsylvania) were both in steel, the industry that benefited most directly from railroad construction, and with other Republicans he believed that what was good for business was good for the country. Moreover, Stevens considered the Pacific railroad essential to national cohesiveness, to prevent a Western version of what the South was currently attempting. As chairman at once of the Ways and Means Committee and the Select Railroad Committee, Stevens was well placed to shepherd friendly new legislation through the House.
His right-hand man on the railroad committee was Oakes Ames, a founding member of the Republican party in Massachusetts, who had made a fortune selling shovels to miners in California and Nevada—winning him the nickname “King of Spades”—and who expected to sell more of the earth-movers to the gangs building the Pacific railroad. Ames had lately diversified into steel, intending to profit from the rails as well as the roadbed.
Stevens and Ames consulted fellow committeeman and Stanford ally Cornelius Cole of California, as well as Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific and Collis Huntington of the Central Pacific, who had taken up residence in Washington to plead their respective companies’ cases. Together the capitalists and the congressmen crafted an amendment to the 1862 railroad act that was everything the corporations wanted. It doubled the land grants to the railroads, expedited the delivery of government loans, and, of greatest immediate significance, transferred first-lien rights from the government to the private investors. Now American taxpayers shouldered the largest risk.
Not every Republican rolled over for the railwaymen. Elihu Washburne was an Illinois lawyer, the chairman of the House Commerce Committee, and a lonely guardian of the public purse. “I am a friend to the Pacific railroad,” Washburne declared. “That friendship has been proved by my official action in this House for the last ten years. I want to see that magnificent enterprise completed at the earliest moment, and anything the Government can properly do in this time of war to urge forward the object, I am in favor of. But because I am in favor of it, I am not going blindly for any projects that may be thrust forward by interested parties, projects that will take the means of the Government and not secure the end desired.” Washburne contended that the railroads ought to stick to the original law, which they had essentially written. “Capitalists and others made their estimates and declared that the work could be successfully accomplished under that act. It embraced all the provisions asked for.” But now they complained that it didn’t give them enough. Amid the war, the capitalists were asserting national necessity. “I have no faith in the noisy patriotism of shoddy contractors,” Washburne said, “and none in the men who in these times of trial and tribulation through which the country is passing are scheming and plotting to fill their own pockets while the nation is verging toward bankruptcy. The sublime and unselfish patriotism of our people, who stand like a wall of adamant behind the Government in its support, a people suffering, bleeding, dying for their country, is in magnificent contrast to the flaunting counterfeit everywhere to be seen.”11
But a large majority of the House preferred the words of Hiram Price of Iowa, a former bank president and future railroad chief executive. “We want this road, stretching from the granite hills of New England to the golden sands of California,” Price said. “When completed it will far outshine in importance and grandeur the famed Appian Way. It will be the greatest and most useful work done by man. It is needed, and these amendments are necessary for its success.” Thaddeus Stevens guided the bill through the House and dominated the joint committee that reconciled the House measure with its Senate counterpart. At the beginning of July 1864 the bill gained the approval of Congress and shortly that of the president.12
THE NEW DISPENSATION signally eased the task of Stanford and the other railwaymen in drawing capital to their project. With the government now bearing most of the risk, and with the rewards promising to be even larger than before, capitalists found the railroad to be a most attractive investment. Charles Crocker would come out of the bargain with his furniture, a clean shirt, and considerably more.
Yet the liberality of Congress didn’t prevent the railwaymen from manipulating the system. The original law allowed greater compensation to the railroads for track laid in the mountains, but it didn’t specify where the mountains began. Stanford remembered a statement by a geologist to the effect that the Rocky Mountains could be thought of as rising out of the Mississippi River; he now supposed that something similar might be said of the Sierra Nevada vis-à-vis the Sacramento River. He commissioned a team of geologists—who, as employees of the state of California, answered to him as governor—to survey the route from Sacramento east. When they determined that the Sierra Nevada did indeed start very far down in what laymen considered the Sacramento Valley, Stanford applied to receive the mountain rate for some rather level roadbed. The federal Interior Department initially challenged Stanford’s innovative geology, but the governor dispatched one of California’s Republican delegation in Congress, Representative Aaron Sargent, to speak with the president. Lincoln didn’t know much geology, yet he did know politics, and with a chancy election approaching he preferred to keep his allies happy. “Here you see,” Sargent reported after the successful meeting, “my pertinacity and Abraham’s faith moved mountains.”13
ONCE THE PROBLEMS of funding were solved, the principal challenge of the Pacific railroad was finding the workers to construct it. Neither Stanford and his partners in the Central Pacific nor their counterparts on the Union Pacific had any good idea when the building began of the manpower required to complete the road; as in the case of financing, they made up policy as they went. Each commenced construction with the workers at hand but quickly discovered the need to supplement the locals with large numbers of laborers imported specifically for the railroad’s purpose. Before they knew it, Stanford and his partners were the agents of a demographic and cultural transformation in the American West that revealed the breadth and power of the capitalist revolution of which it was a part.
The transformation had begun more than a decade earlier when, in response to the discovery of gold, Chinese started emigrating to California. The news of the gold discovery reached China, straight across the Pacific, before it reached New York or Boston, which were twice as far away, as the ship sailed, around South America. The Chinese had often been reluctant to emigrate, constrained by both filial duties, including the responsibility to tend the shrines of ancestors, and political edicts, which discouraged or forbade emigration. In the latter category was a law established in the early years of the Qing dynasty, when the new rulers feared the return of exiles from the old regime, and still on the books in the nineteenth century (and indeed until 1910), declaring that “all officers of government, soldiers, and private citizens who clandestinely proceed to sea to trade, or who remove to foreign lands for the purpose of cultivating and inhabiting the same, shall be punished according to the law against communicating with rebels and enemies, and consequently suffer death by being beheaded.” In the nineteenth century the law wasn’t always enforced, but even the off chance of decapitation gave pause to would-be emigrants.14
What this meant in practice was that only the truly determined left China. As it happened, determination levels rose dramatically during the nineteenth century. Population pressure accounted for some of the rise. China’s population grew by half between the late eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, with even larger gains occurring in the southeastern province of Guangdong. Simultaneously China came under assault from European imperialists. The First Opium War of 1839–42 forced China open to British merchants (including those selling opium) and burdened China with a large reparations bill. The merchants flooded the Guangdong region with foreign goods, while the reparations drained silver from the same area, throwing its economy into turmoil and displacing many thousands of merchants, artisans, and workers. The turmoil spread and magnified a few years later with the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion, an enormous civil conflict that killed tens of millions of people and devastated a region as large as Western Europe.15
Under the circumstances, many Chinese, especially in Guangdong, sought an occasion to relocate. The discovery of gold in California provided just the occasion. Gum Saan—“Gold Mountain,” as California was called—became the object of the dreams of thousands of Chinese. Ship brokers and others who hoped to profit from a trans-Pacific traffic spread the news. “Americans are very rich people,” explained one pamphlet printed in Cantonese and circulated about Guangdong.
They want the Chinese to come and will make him welcome. There will be big pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description. You can write your friends or send them money at any time, and we will be responsible for the safe delivery. It is a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers. All alike: big man no larger than little man. There are a great many Chinese there now, and it will not be a strange country. The Chinese god is there now, and the agents of this house. Never fear, and you will be lucky. Come to Hong Kong, or to the sign of this house in Canton, and we will instruct you. Money is in great plenty and to spare in America. Such as wish to have wages and labor guaranteed can obtain the security by application at this office.16
Chinese responded by the tens of thousands to this sort of appeal. By 1851 some 25,000 Chinese had journeyed to California, and the number continued to rise. The emigration took various forms. Those with ready cash paid the forty or fifty dollars for passage east (via sailing ship till the late 1860s, when steamship service commenced); the rest traveled on someone else’s money. The latter group included the credit-ticket emigrants, who borrowed the price of the ticket and repaid it from their American earnings. It also included contract laborers, who signed contracts in China committing them to fixed periods of labor in America. The contract laborers were the contemporary equivalent of the indentured servants of the American colonial and early national era. Though the practice had fallen out of favor in the American East, it represented an obvious solution to the problem of providing transport to people who couldn’t pay up front.
The Chinese weren’t uniformly welcomed in America. Native-born American miners demanded to know what right these foreigners had to gold dug from ground liberated from Mexico at the cost of American blood and treasure during the recent war. The California legislature passed a tax on foreign miners, designed to discourage the Chinese (and other foreigners) from entering the mining business. The law was controversial and not entirely successful. Yee Ah Tye, an emigrant from Hong Kong, the British colony at the edge of Guangdong, went into mining and succeeded so well as to hire scores of men to work in his operations along the Feather River. Though Yee avoided (or ignored) the worst of the animus against the Chinese, many of his countrymen weren’t so lucky. (Nearly all the Chinese were men. As late as 1900, census takers discovered that just 5 percent of the 90,000 Chinese in the United States were women.) Chinese workers were widely distrusted as being willing to work for wages below what native-born Americans considered acceptable, and they were resented on this score. And in an age permeated by racism and ethnocentricity, they often seemed peculiarly exotic. Mark Twain described their predicament as it looked from Nevada:
Of course there was a large Chinese population in Virginia [City]. It is the case with every town and city on the Pacific coast. They are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find something to do. He is a great convenience to everybody—even to the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins, suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies, and death for their murders.… As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered.17
Twain’s was a sympathetic view. Horace Greeley, the reforming editor of the New York Tribune, described the Chinese immigrants as “uncivilized, unclean and filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations.” Robert Louis Stevenson, visiting from Britain, found Greeley’s attitude to be far more common than Twain’s. “The Chinese are considered stupid because they are imperfectly acquainted with English,” Stevenson wrote after a journey to California. “They are held to be base because their dexterity and frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian.” This competitive element was the crucial point, Stevenson judged, even if the Americans didn’t always admit it. “The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of money. They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle for the Caucasians to repeat and even to believe.”18
Despite the discrimination, the Chinese held on. Some went home (as most, indeed, had planned to do), but others replaced them. And as the California economy developed beyond gold mining, they moved into other sectors. They became farmers and fisherman, houseboys and hostlers, truck farmers and nurserymen, carpenters and bricklayers. They broke into railroad construction on lines built within California during the late 1850s and early 1860s. And when the Central Pacific began advertising for workers, they prepared to push east.
THE CHINESE CONTRACT laborers—“coolies,” in American parlance, derived from the Urdu and Tamil of South Asia, where expatriate Chinese had long worked for the British—were particularly suited to the construction work on the railroads. The Central Pacific required thousands of workers, the cheaper and more vulnerable the better. Chinese labor contractors were well positioned to deliver what the company required. The Chinese workers, once they signed their indentures, couldn’t effectively complain of low wages or difficult conditions, which were issues between the contractors and the foremen hired by Stanford and his partners. The only recourse for dissatisfied workers was flight—abandonment of the labor contract and escape into the Chinese population in California and the neighboring states. This was a drastic step, in that fugitives from labor contracts, especially when Chinese, couldn’t expect much sympathy from the courts if their contractors caught them and delivered their own form of exemplary justice. Yet it happened often enough (and among other nationalities as well) that the same corporate-friendly Congress that liberalized the compensation to the railroad companies wrote a law authorizing the federal government to enforce labor contracts concluded on foreign soil. Fugitives from the construction gangs who had signed such contracts henceforth had to deal not only with the contractors but with federal marshals.19
Beyond its other attractions to employers, the contract-labor system was ideally attuned to the requirements of strikebreaking. For all their industriousness, the Chinese weren’t the first labor choice of Stanford and his associates. As a Republican candidate for governor in a largely Democratic state, Stanford had taken pains to show that while he opposed slavery, he didn’t much care for people of color. “I am in favor of free white American citizens,” he declared on the stump. “I prefer white citizens to any other class or race.” Upon his election as governor, Stanford explicitly included Chinese in his nonpreferred category. “To my mind it is clear that their settlement among us is to be discouraged by every legitimate means. Large numbers are already here, and unless we do something early to check their immigration, the question which of the two tides of immigration meeting upon the shores of the Pacific”—the Euro-American and the Asian—“shall be turned back, will be forced upon our consideration when far more difficult than now of disposal.”20
But Stanford knew the difference between politics and business, even if he didn’t always honor it. The fact that California was the most cosmopolitan state in the Union (as a result of the gold rush) simply made white voters more susceptible to racist and xenophobic arguments, which Stanford wasn’t above employing. But when some of the Irish workers the Central Pacific had imported from the East to commence the construction began complaining about pay and working conditions, Charles Crocker told his foreman to try Chinese. The foreman was skeptical. “I was very much prejudiced against Chinese labor,” he admitted afterward. “I did not believe we could make a success of it.” Yet the Chinese came cheap and easily. The foreman negotiated a deal with a labor contractor who delivered Chinese workers at $26 a month, compared with $30 a month plus board for white workers. The Chinese were initially assigned only the most unskilled jobs: moving dirt, hauling rocks. But as they proved their value there, they were tested on more-demanding tasks. When Irish stonemasons went out on strike, Crocker demanded that the Chinese be used as strikebreakers. His foreman complained that he couldn’t make masons out of the Chinese, causing Crocker to retort, “Didn’t they build the Chinese Wall?”21
Before long there were no jobs the Chinese weren’t doing. The most difficult stretch of the road east of Sacramento rounded a cliff a thousand feet above the American River. Called Cape Horn from its steepness and inherent danger, the cliff confronted the engineers with a daunting task: to carve the roadbed from the wall of solid stone. While they were puzzling how to tackle the job, a Chinese crew chief pointed out that his people had experience of this sort of thing along the Yangtze River at home. The engineers told him to put that experience to use.
With reeds brought up from the Sacramento delta, the Chinese wove baskets large enough to hold a man. They ran ropes through eyelets at the tops of the baskets to hoists anchored at the crest of the Cape Horn cliff. By now the Chinese crews were facile in the use of black powder (a Chinese invention, some of them pointed out), and the best of the blasters were lowered in the baskets to the line of the roadbed, where they drilled holes in the rock, tamped in the powder, lit the fuses, and signaled to be pulled out of the way before the charges ignited. In time the work assumed a regular tempo, till hundreds of barrels of black powder were going up in flame, concussion, and smoke. The canyon echoed with the roar of the blasts, followed by the rumble of the freed rock as it disappeared into the depths of the gorge.22
Long before this stretch of the road was finished, Stanford and his partners had become convinced of the value of the Chinese. “Without them it would be impossible to go on with the work,” Mark Hopkins declared.23
The appreciation of the Central Pacific partners for their Chinese employees had limits, though. As the work progressed, the efficiency of the Chinese crews became apparent to other employers in the West, especially operators of mines, who began to bid up the price of Chinese labor. “We have proved their value as laborers,” Crocker’s brother Edwin, the chief attorney for the Central Pacific, explained. “And everybody is trying Chinese, and now we can’t get them.” The Chinese railroad crews demanded a raise, to $40 per month, and a reduction in hours, from eleven per day to ten. Till their terms were met, they wouldn’t work.
The Central partners determined not to give in. “If they are successful in this demand, then they control and their demands will be increased,” Hopkins warned the others. Edwin Crocker put the danger differently. “The truth is,” he said, “they are getting smart.”
The partners were smart, too, and cunning. By now the war had ended, leaving millions of former slaves free and looking for employment. A black man in California named Yates suggested to Stanford that the Central Pacific apply to the Freedmen’s Bureau for help in transporting willing black workers from the South to California. Stanford shared the proposal with his associates, who thought it brilliant. “A Negro labor force would tend to keep the Chinese steady, as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet,” Hopkins asserted. As things developed, the idea never materialized. But the possibility that it might softened the demands of the Chinese even as it stiffened the resolve of Stanford and the others to resist their demands.
What broke the Chinese strike was a tactic more direct: the threat of starvation. Charles Crocker ordered the provisioners to the Chinese camps to stop supplying them with food. “They really began to suffer,” Edwin Crocker recalled. “None of us went near them for a week—did not want to exhibit anxiety. Then Charles went up, and they gathered around him, and he told them that he would not be dictated to, that he made the rules for them and not they for him.” The hungriest of the strikers agreed to return to work, but others vowed violence against the waverers. “Charley told them that he would protect them, and his men would shoot down any man that attempted to do the laborers any injury. He had the sheriff and posse come up to see that there was no fighting.”
The show of force, combined with the empty bellies of the workers, terminated the strike. To prevent a recurrence, the Central associates brought in new gangs. “There is a rush of Chinamen on the work,” Edwin Crocker wrote two weeks later. “Most of the fresh arrivals from China go straight up to the work. It is all life and animation on the line.”24
THE PROBLEMS CONFRONTING the Union Pacific were different in kind from those facing the Central, but not in degree. Where the workers of the Central battled mountains and forests, those of the Union Pacific contended chiefly with distance. From Omaha the route stretched west across the Nebraska prairie, rising slowly onto the High Plains till it reached the Rockies in southeastern Wyoming. The construction crews were a city on wheels, supplied by the single track they left behind as they inched toward the setting sun. Nearly everything had to be imported: food, often water, fuel, even most of the building materials. When the California crews of the Central Pacific needed stone for footings or bridgework, they simply borrowed some of that which they had already subtracted from the Sierra batholith; the Nebraska crews of the Union had to cart stone from hundreds of miles away. For the ties beneath the rails, the Central crews sawed the giant trees that had blocked their way; the Union ties grew in forests far distant from the line.
Labor at times was equally scarce. When the construction commenced, large numbers of the able-bodied males in the states east of the Missouri were off to war. Those who hadn’t enlisted were in great demand with civilian employers and hence were in no hurry to head to the hardship assignment of railroad construction on the frontier. Thomas Durant and his superintendent of construction, Grenville Dodge, struggled to fill the ranks of their workforce. At one point they considered enlisting Indians who had been taken prisoner in the frontier fighting that accompanied the Civil War. Ultimately they turned to labor contractors who applied the same techniques in Ireland that the Chinese contractors employed in China. Yet perhaps because the Irish spoke the language of the American majority, because they encountered less pervasive hostility on the part of native-born Americans, or because they had a better chance of escaping their contracts and disappearing into the local population, they tended to be more rambunctious than the Chinese. “What a happy time we have been having here for the last four weeks,” one of Dodge’s lieutenants reported ironically during one difficult stretch. “With drunken Irishmen after their pay, I can assure you it is enough to make men crazy.”25
The end of the war eased the labor problems of the Union Pacific, but other problems remained. The largesse of the federal government guaranteed the future of the road, but employees and contractors had to be paid in the present, and funds often fell short. “We must have five hundred thousand dollars to pay contractor’s men immediately or road cannot run,” a payroll officer telegraphed headquarters at a crucial moment. The funds eventually arrived, but barely in time to prevent a mutiny among the men.26
Under other circumstances the kink in the cash flow would simply have slowed the project; delays have been a part of construction since the Pyramids. But the legislation authorizing the railroad gave the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific strong incentives to lay track as quickly as possible. The compensation structure, of payments keyed to mileage completed, compelled the two lines to compete with each other. Every mile one company built represented so many thousands of dollars and sections of land precluded to the other. The construction became a great race, with the Central crews tearing east and the Union crews west. The competition provided the country an entertaining diversion in the years after the war, but it was hard on the nerves of the company executives, on the account balances of suppliers unable to collect their due, and on the backs of the workers driven to labor long days for months on end.
ONE PROBLEM WAS peculiar to the Union Pacific. By the middle of the nineteenth century relations between the Indian tribes living within the boundaries of the United States and the American government had reached a kind of equilibrium. Andrew Jackson and his immediate successors had driven all but a scattered remnant of the Eastern tribes across the Mississippi River to Arkansas and what would become Oklahoma, where they struggled to make a living on parcels of land far smaller and more limited in resources than their former homes. The tribes of the West, especially those of the Plains and the mountains, remained comparatively undisturbed. To be sure, diseases inadvertently introduced by traders and other travelers to the Indian country had caused devastating losses of population. But these were partially offset by the advantages of contact with the Euro-Americans, especially the acquisition of trade goods and horses. Metal knives and cooking utensils facilitated daily chores, while firearms extended the range of hunters. Horses wrought a revolution in the culture of such tribes as the Comanche and the Sioux, making them true nomads and their warriors a formidable light cavalry. The Comanches became the scourge of the southern Plains, while the Sioux grew dominant on the northern Plains.27
White Americans certainly knew about the Plains tribes. The Comanches were the reason the Mexican government had invited American settlers into Texas; unable to hold Texas against Comanche forces invading from the northwest, the Mexicans intended the Americans to be a buffer. In the event, the Americans made off with Texas, but not before coming to know and respect the Comanches (whom they wouldn’t subdue for many years). A decade later American emigrants on the Oregon Trail encountered the Sioux, Pawnee, and other northern tribes. Historian Francis Parkman became sufficiently fascinated by the Sioux to abandon his books and spend a summer among the tribe, whom he described in The Oregon Trail, an account that soon became a classic. Many more Americans met the Plains tribes during the gold rush. The Indians haunted the dreams of most of the gold seekers but rarely bothered them in daylight. The emigrants greatly outnumbered the Indians, and as long as they stuck together they experienced few difficulties. From the Indians’ perspective, the emigrants were less a threat than an opportunity. They didn’t covet the Indians’ land, lusting for faraway gold instead, and en route they made good customers. They needed meat, horses, and other items the Indians were happy to supply on a sellers’ market.
The railroad was a different matter. The Indians didn’t take long to realize that the iron road was a permanent presence. Already it brought small armies of construction workers and the accoutrements of civilization their presence required. Towns sprang up along the line, and soldiers guarded the towns and camps. The Indians knew from experience and hearsay that wherever the railroad went, white settlers followed. Farmers fanned out from the rail lines, plowing and fencing land the Indians had used for hunting. Already white hunters were killing the buffalo, on which the Indians depended for physical and cultural sustenance.
Anticipating these events, the Indians struck at the tip of the spear, the Union Pacific crews. In the spring of 1867 parties of Sioux and Cheyenne conducted a series of attacks against surveyors, engineers, and construction gangs. Sometimes they spared the workers, satisfying themselves with stealing or destroying their equipment and, in the case of survey markers, spoiling their work. Other attacks were more deadly. One war party surprised an engineering crew, killing a surveyor and one of the soldiers escorting the crew. Another war band ambushed a train that had reached the current end of the line; three men were killed. A party of Cheyennes tore up a section of track and killed members of the crew of the locomotive that derailed as a result. When a trainload of investors, government officials, and other distinguished individuals came out from Washington to inspect the work, a hundred Indians attacked the train and its military escort. The dignitaries escaped bodily harm, but a shudder of insecurity rippled back up the line to the national capital.
The Indian offensive threatened to stop the construction quite literally in its track. “We’ve got to clean the damn Indians out or give up building the Union Pacific Railroad,” Grenville Dodge declared. “The government may take its choice!” Thomas Durant told Ulysses Grant at the War Department: “Unless some relief can be afforded by your department immediately, I beg leave to assure you that the entire work will be suspended.”28
The Indian problem was larger than the Union Pacific, though Dodge and Durant had difficulty seeing it so. And its solution took longer than they wanted to allow. But the War Department did find sufficient forces to get the construction crews past the most dangerous zones, and the locus of the heaviest fighting shifted elsewhere.
THE CENTRAL PACIFIC confronted no comparable problems with Indians, largely because the hordes of gold seekers had driven the California Indians to the edge of extinction a decade before. But the inanimate troubles it encountered almost made Stanford and the others wish for enemies of flesh and blood. The granite of the Sierra gave way to the black powder of the Chinese sappers only slowly; pressed to accelerate the excavation, the Central’s engineers turned to nitroglycerin. This liquid explosive was far more potent than powder, but because it was new—having been invented in Italy just two decades earlier, and employed in large-scale construction only now—it posed peculiar challenges. It was supposed to require a detonator but occasionally ignited on its own, leaving advocates of its use to their imaginations in explaining what went wrong. A spontaneous explosion in New York City prompted one pro-nitro observer to declare, evidently with a straight face, “It is perfectly safe and harmless and simply blew up from maltreatment and in self-defense.” The Central tried nitro once but gave it up after a worker killed himself and some others by accidentally striking a charge of the stuff with his sledgehammer.
Yet in early 1867, when the construction had slowed to less than a crawl deep in the granite heart of the Sierra, in what would be the longest tunnel on the route, the Central tried it again. James Strobridge brought in a Scotsman named James Howden, a chemist familiar with nitro. Howden pointed out that the liquid was eight times as powerful as powder and had the additional benefit of producing less smoke, so workers could begin clearing the rubble from explosions sooner. He trained the crews in its use, and soon it became a regular part of their arsenal. Accidents still happened, to be sure. “Many an honest John went to China feet first,” one of Strobridge’s engineers observed afterward. But the improvement in performance seemed worth the risk, at least to the directors. “Charles”—Crocker—“has just come from the tunnel and he thinks some of them are making three feet per day,” Mark Hopkins reported. “Hurrah for nitroglycerine!”29
From the stony bowels of the earth, the Central crews emerged to the icy slopes of the Sierra. As numerous travelers, including the ill-fated Donner party, discovered over the years, the western slopes of California’s highest range catch snow in quantities almost unimaginable to easterners. Drifts of twenty, forty, sixty feet weren’t uncommon, and as warm days of approaching spring alternated with still-freezing nights, the drifts compacted to solid walls of glacial ice. Stanford later recalled a spot where sixty-three feet of snow had become eighteen feet of ice, which required pickax and blasting powder to remove.
At first Strobridge and the others thought they could beat the problem if they removed the snow before the melt-freeze cycle set in. But the drifts themselves overwhelmed the men and their machinery. On one occasion a snowplow driven by five locomotives ground to an impotent halt under hundreds of tons of the fluff. The only solution seemed to be to catch the snow before it hit the ground. The crews tested snow sheds: sloped roofs erected during the summer to keep the grade and track clear. Adjustments were required to ensure that the roofs didn’t collapse under the weight of the snow, but in the end they solved the problem (and remain a feature of rail travel in the Sierra to this day).30
IN THE SPRING of 1868 the Union Pacific crews crossed the Rockies in southwestern Wyoming. Durant couldn’t resist boasting to Stanford of the rapid progress the Union was making. “We send you greeting from the highest summit our line crosses between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, 8200 feet above tidewater,” Durant said. “Have commenced laying iron on the down grade westward.” The Central’s nitro men had finished work on their summit tunnel a few months before, and though his company’s total mileage fell far short of the Union’s, Stanford refused to be provoked. “Though you may approach the union of the two roads faster than ourselves, you cannot exceed us in earnestness of desire for that event,” he said. “We cheerfully yield you the palm of superior elevation; 7042 feet has been quite sufficient to satisfy our highest ambition. May your descent be easy and rapid.”31
Stanford was playing with words when he said the Sierra summit satisfied his “highest” ambition. He had no intention of letting Durant and the Union claim any more mileage than they deserved. By far the most difficult part of the Central route was now behind it, while the Union was just reaching the most technical portion of its route, between the Continental Divide and the valley of the Great Salt Lake. As the crews of the Central flew across the desert of northern Nevada and Utah, those of the Union blasted their way through the Wasatch Range. Each company enlisted Mormons to supplement its regular workforce; each spurred its crews to work as rapidly as they could. Such concerns for quality as had initially influenced corporate decisions now fell by the wayside. “Run up and down on the maximum grade instead of making deep cut and fills,” Collis Huntington advised, “and when you can make any time in the construction by using wood instead of stone for culverts &c., use wood.… If we should have now and then a piece of road washed out for the want of a culvert, we could put one in hereafter.” Mark Hopkins agreed; the overriding objective, he said, was “to build road as fast as possible of a character acceptable to the commissioners.” Not that the commissioners—the federal agents supposedly protecting the stake of taxpayers in the project—were expected to be any obstacle, for the same favors and promises that had brought Congress aboard in the first place were now being lavished on them. “We know the commissioners will readily accept as poor a road as we can wish to offer for acceptance,” Hopkins frankly remarked.32
During the late winter of 1869 the two roads raced around the northern edge of the Great Salt Lake; in April the competing crews climbed Promontory Point from opposite sides. They finally met in early May. An elaborate ceremony was scheduled to mark the meeting of East and West, the defeat of geography by the forces of American enterprise, but a problem developed when crews of the Union Pacific, impatient at the tardiness of the company in paying wages, seized the ceremonial train carrying the Union directors to Utah and held them hostage. Later evidence suggested a scam: that Union director Durant put the workers up to the kidnapping in order to ensure payment to a construction subsidiary in which he had a major interest. “Durant is so strange a man that I am prepared to believe any sort of rascality that may be charged against him,” an associate remarked.33
In fact, a great deal more rascality would soon be charged against Durant and his partners, but in the flush of success such minor sins were overlooked. Bret Harte commemorated the completion with a poem entitled “Opening of the Pacific Railroad”:
What was it the Engines said,
Pilots touching, head to head
Facing on the single track
Half a world behind each back?
Walt Whitman weighed in with “Passage to India”:
I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier;
I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte, carrying freight and passengers;
I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,
I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world.
Other responses were more prosaic but not less significant. A wire connected the symbolic golden spike to a telegraph line that ran to Washington, New York, and other parts of the East, as well as to San Francisco. The electric echo of the hammer blows of Stanford and Durant was followed by messages from the news correspondents present. “The last rail is laid!” the reporter for the Associated Press wrote. “The last spike is driven! The Pacific Railroad is completed! The point of junction is 1086 miles west of the Missouri River and 690 miles east of Sacramento City.” The news set church bells ringing in Boston and New York, and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. Washington fired cannons; Chicago held a parade. San Francisco, which had jumped the gun with a party two days earlier, celebrated again, firing hundreds of cannon salutes from Fort Point on the Golden Gate and otherwise feting its deliverance from the tyranny of distance. William Sherman, whose first trip to California, during the Mexican War, had taken 196 days, wrote congratulations to the organizers of the epic project and to the “thousands of brave fellows who have fought this glorious national problem in spite of deserts, storms, Indians, and the doubts of the incredulous” and said he hoped to travel to California again soon, and much faster.34