Two weeks later, Montague was able to send a telegram from Alta: “Track will be laid tonight within 4,500 feet of Cisco depot. Ties will be distributed tonight and track laid tomorrow. Can run passengers to Cisco Thursday [November 29]. Snow at Crystal Lake this morning 8 inches deep and 12 inches at Cisco. Temp. 28.”24
The tunneling went on, up and down the line. Lewis Clement declared, “No matter what the cost, the remaining tunnels would be bored in the Winter.”25
On November 24, 1866, the first trains arrived at Cisco Station. They were loaded with ties, rails, chairs, fishplates, and measuring rods. It took three engines to pull the freight up the mountain. Strobridge had wagons and carts to meet the train, with hundreds of Chinese aboard. All night they loaded rails and the rest onto the wagons and carts. They also pulled two locomotives off the tracks and put them atop skid sleds. (These were logs split down the middle and rounded at the ends. They were greased with fat on the bottom to help them slide.)
At dawn, the procession toward the summit began. Carts went first, followed by the wagon train. At the rear, hundreds of Chinese tugged at ropes alongside mule teams and horse teams to skid the locomotives over the summit. And then the snow came.
The workers on the CP, from the bosses down, believed that there was more rain and snow in the winter of 1865–66 than had ever before been seen in California. This winter of 1866–67 was much worse. The snow came early and stayed late. There were forty-four separate storms. Some deposited ten feet of snow, some deposited more. At the summit the pack averaged eighteen feet on the level.I Strobridge put hundreds of the Chinese to work doing nothing but shoveling the snow away to keep open a cart trail to the tunnel opening. If it had not been for the race with the UP, the CP would have closed down that winter, but the fear of losing all Utah and Nevada to their rival drove them on.
The Chinese laborers dug snow tunnels from fifty to five hundred feet long to get to the granite tunnels. Some were large enough for a team of horses to walk through. Alternatively, a temporary railbed was placed on top of the snow and material was lowered from the surface by steam hoist, sometimes as much as forty feet. The waste was hauled out the same way.26 Windows were dug out of the snow walls, to dump refuse and let in a bit of light. Also chimneys and air shafts. But for the most part the Chinese worked, ate, drank their tea, gambled, smoked opium, and slept in the remarkable labyrinth they were building under the snow.
This was cruel work, dangerous and claustrophobic. Still, they pressed on, drilling the holes in the granite, placing the black powder and then the fuse, lighting the fuse, getting out of the way, then going back in to clear out the broken granite. At four facings. They made six to twelve inches a day, at each end and toward the two ends from the middle.27
There were accidents of all kinds, mainly from blasting powder. Sometimes the heavy explosions started avalanches, and entire camps of workmen would be buried alive. Near the Summit Tunnel an avalanche carried away some twenty Chinese, whose bodies were found after the spring thaw. The CP eventually sent their bodies to their homeland for burial. How many died we don’t know. The historian Thomas W. Chinn has written that, without doubt, the “loss of life was heavy.”28 On Christmas Day, 1866, the Dutch Flat Enquirer reported that “a gang of Chinamen were covered up by a snow slide and four or five died before they could be exhumed. The snow fell to such a depth that one whole camp of Chinamen was covered up during the night and parties were digging them out when our informant left.”29
J. O. Wilder, a young surveyor,II wrote, “There was one large snowslide at Camp 4, where there were two gangs of Chinese for Tunnels 11 and 12, also a gang of culvert men. The slide took it all, and one of the culvert men was not found until the following spring. At our camp the snow was so deep we had to shovel it from the roof and make steps to get to the top. We were snowed in, and our provisions got down to corn meal and tea. Had it lasted one week longer we would have been compelled to eat horse meat, for there were two hundred or more men in my camp. . . . The cuts were filled by landslides, which had to be removed by gangs of Chinese. A Push Plow loaded with pig-iron to hold it to the rails, with three engines behind, would back up and take a run at the snow and keep going until it got stuck, and then back up and take another run.”30
The plow was a monster—ten feet wide, eleven feet high, and thirty feet long. It was square and sheer in the rear; in the front it looked like a big wooden wedge laid on its side, with iron plates reinforcing the forward edge that slanted down almost to the rails. Just back from the forward edge, a sharp iron prow rose like a ship breasting a wave. The idea was that the wedge should scoop up drifts like a spade and the prow would part them, tossing snow up onto both sides of the track. Sometimes it worked.
AND still it rains,” reported the Sacramento Union in late December. “The roads become sloughs, through which stage horses stagger, or in which they break down altogether. . . . The rain washes and the swollen streams sap the high embankments over which the locomotive has ascended to the region of snow.”31
The editor of the Union wrote that, “within five hours ride of Sacramento, where roses still bloom and the air is balmy, snow has fallen to a depth of three feet on a level, and the sleigh-bells are making music along white highways. . . . The locomotive makes this concentration of the seasons—this transition from Spring flowers to Wintry delights—on the same day. . . . Each puffing engine is armed with a snow plow. And this suggests the beginning of that battle of the railroad men with the white storms of the Sierra.”32 The next day Cisco reported the worst storm in ten years. Strobridge’s prediction was that the railroad, now shut off, would be back in operation in ten days.
On December 22, Charlie Crocker’s brother E.B. wrote Huntington about the “terrible storm that has given our RR a severe trial. We do not know the exact extent of the damage as Charlie and Montague are up on the road and have not reported. Those deep cuts and fills are sliding in and settling.” He could not get particulars, because the telegraph above Colfax had been down for nearly a week. Still, “on the whole it has not been as bad as we expected for we had great fears about a good many of the banks and cuts standing a heavy storm.” The snow, E.B. said, “is the least of our troubles and we no longer fear it. Since the storm I have greater confidence than ever in successfully working our road in the winter.”33
ON the last day of the year, the CP was able to announce that it was “in daily operation from Sacramento to Cisco.” That was ninety-two miles, within twelve miles of the summit and 5,911 feet above sea level—the highest altitude yet reached by a railroad in the United States, or anywhere else. Some ten thousand men had been engaged in construction on the track. Much of the masonry and heavy rock excavation had been done beyond Cisco. Twelve tunnels were being constructed, night and day, by three shifts of men, a total of eight thousand, mostly Chinese, at work. Except for the Summit Tunnel, they would be completed by the spring of 1867—and the Summit Tunnel by September.
A large force of laborers was at work in the Truckee Canyon. The graders were almost three hundred miles beyond the end of track. Grain for the horses and food for the men, plus supplies, had to be hauled by teams pulling wagons over the desert for that great distance. Water for men and animals was hauled forty miles. A. P. Partridge, a white man working for the CP, recalled that the snows came early that year and drove as many as three thousand Chinese out of the mountains and down to Truckee, “where they filled up all the buildings and sheds. An old barn collapsed and killed four Chinese. A good many were frozen to death.”34
Still, the CP expected that by the end of 1867 the end of track would be beyond the California-Nevada border, and that it would be building at a mile per day once it got into Nevada. The railroad was well into its assault on the Sierra Nevada and on its way east.35
* * *
I. More snow falls there than anyplace in the United States south of Alaska.
II. He worked for the CP-Southern Pacific railroads for fifty-four years
, finally retiring in 1920.
Chapter Ten
THE UNION PACIFIC TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS
1867
WEATHER dominates everything. No matter if it is D-Day at Normandy, or the launching of a rocket into space, or an outdoor wedding, or the building of a transcontinental railroad, everything depends on the weather. The winter of 1866–67 was terribly severe in California, so, even though there were tunnels to dig, which the Central Pacific could pretty much do whatever the conditions outside, the weather stopped the forward progress of the railroad.
The winter from the Sierra Nevada all the way to the Atlantic was one of the worst in the whole of the nineteenth century. In the Rocky Mountains, it was severe beyond any living memory. In western Nebraska, there were “fantastic drifts” and the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero. In New York City, the East River froze solid. In Chicago, the firemen had to give up, because the water froze in their hose lines. In Omaha, the Missouri River froze over. The weather stopped the Union Pacific in its tracks.
The Casement brothers wanted to go to work in February, but that month and nearly all of March were far too cold with too much snow, so they sat and waited at North Platte. The Missouri was still frozen as late as March 25. Samuel Reed wrote home on March 27 that he had just received a telegram from Grand Island: “We are out of luck in this country, wind blowing and snow drifting worse than ever, half men either blind or frozen, looks bad.” Reed wrote further, “There is an immense quantity of snow on the plains and in the mountains. I expect very high water and we may lose some bridges.”1
Reed’s telegrams to Durant are a nearly constant weather report. February 22: “Heaviest storm of the season. Road blocked.” March 21: “Severe snow storm strong wind road blocked badly.” March 23: “Six inches snow since last evening with strong north west wind road badly blocked still snowing.”
Then, in early April, came the rains. They destroyed twenty miles of the road east of Grand Island and damaged far more. Reed to Durant, April 9: “Flood whole length of line immense damage to road. Track at Loup fork repaired track washed away near Fremont, North Bend, Shell Creek, Lone Tree, Grand Island, Wood River and Willow Island.”2 General Jack Casement put his crews to work repairing track that he had already counted on. “We are all in a heap, generally,” he wrote.3
How big a heap was Arthur Ferguson’s concern. The young surveyor reported to work on April 15, 1867. The railroad was not running and he was stuck in Omaha. A week later, he was still there. “Water in the river still rising,” he wrote in his diary. “Track in places entirely out of sight—a good prospect of the depot grounds being drowned out.” A day later, “Water has risen four inches since last night. The bottom now presents a vast sea of rushing waters.” On April 24, he finally got out of town but was delayed at the Elkhorn River, where there was damage to the bridge. He and his party had to be ferried across the river, to a new engine that was waiting for them. “Road at places in very bad condition.”
The train was pulling baled hay in its cars. The morning of April 25, one of them caught fire from a spark from the engine. “It was a grand sight to see an engine rushing madly across the plains, followed by a car wrapped in flames and streaming sparks and fire in its path.” Then two other cars caught fire, “and we had to run with these burning cars some ten or twelve miles. Arrived at North Platte about 1 p.m.” On April 26, Ferguson got to the end of track on the “first through train from Omaha.”
The previous day, Reed had written his wife that no grading or track laying had yet been done. “Before the break, there was a prospect of rushing ahead more rapidly than last year. It gives me to blues to think that our road, which was in such good shape, should be at this season of the year so badly cut up.”
On May 1, Ferguson finally set off in a wagon to do his job, but “until nearly dark we were stuck in mud holes and had to unload and reload.” Finally, he got so badly stuck that he sent his man back to fetch more livestock to help pull him out. “I felt very lonesome. Alone with a loaded wagon, which was deeply imbedded in the mud—the dark and gloomy shades of night fast gathering and with the vast expanse of prairie, I felt truly desolated. There is an indescribable something, a feeling unspeakable, an utter desolation which creeps over a man on these vast plains.”
There was more. In a couple of days he got started on his work, mainly running levels for the graders. Among his diary entries for May are May 15: “About half-past one it commenced snowing and continued to snow hard for several hours. News was brought to camp this evening that the Indians made a descent on the ranches east of us yesterday and ran off with the stock.” May 17: “The weather is quite cold. I put on my greatcoat, draw my feet up to the fire, and read ‘Pickwick.’ About 2 p.m. the party returned, the weather being too inclement. While I now write, Clark is sitting by the stove with his greatcoat on. It has commenced to drizzle. The wind blows very hard and very cold, though we are very comfortable in our tent, with the exception of a few places where it leaks.”
May 22: “The Indians have killed four men. When the men go to work, even if they are in full sight of the camp, they go well armed. I counted ten guns, most of them breech-loading. Something like the times of 1776.” May 23: “Last night were startled by the howling of wolves. . . . There is reported to be a camp of 700 Sioux lodges on the North Platte. Indians are reported to have been seen in the bluffs today.” May 25: “A party of Indians dashed into the camp below us and ran off three head of stock, and then they came charging towards our tents but turned off into the bluffs in plain view of camp. The Indians were pursued and the stock retaken, with one head in addition, which was captured from the savages.”4
E. C. Lockwood was a lad in his teens working as a paymaster for the Casement brothers out on the line. One day he saw seventeen Sioux Indians under the leadership of Spotted Tail ride up to the tracks. Jack Casement received them cordially and showed them the process of track laying. At one point he took them through one of the cars with U.S. Army rifles stacked horizontally on one of the walls. Lockwood found it “interesting to see the expressions on their faces.” But then the impression turned; Casement had Lockwood put up a shovel sixty feet or so away, then challenged the Indians to show what they could do with their bows and arrows. Lockwood later wrote, “Sixteen of the Indians put their arrows through the hole in the handle, while the seventeenth hit the handle at the hole, knocking the shovel over. He felt quite disgraced.”
Next came a race between the Indians on their ponies and the locomotive. Spotted Tail got into the cab of the engine along with Casement and Lockwood, while the warriors lined up four abreast for the word to go. “Away they went. At first the Indians outdistanced the locomotive, which so pleased them that they gave their Indian war whoop. But presently the engine gathered speed, then overhauled them. The engineer as he passed opened his whistle, which so startled them that all, as if by word of command, swung to the offside of their ponies. Of course this ended the race.”5
DESPITE the weather and the Indians, Dodge had big plans for the railroad in 1867. So did Durant. In April, from Omaha, he telegraphed to Nebraska Senator John Thayer, “I will pledge myself to complete two miles a day for the first one hundred working days after the frost is out of the ground.” By April 20, the Casements were at work preparing for and laying new track. Their workforce was as big as and more complex than that of the CP.6
Dodge expected to push the end of track as far as Fort Sanders, Dakota Territory,I on the Laramie River, between the Black Hills and the Medicine Bows, west of the mountains and 288 miles beyond the North Platte River. The track would surmount the summit of the Black Hills at an altitude of 8,242 feet (the CP’s highest point was twelve hundred feet or so lower). Then down the mountains’ western slope, across Dale Creek, and a descent to the Laramie Plains.
When Dodge outlined his plan to Sherman, the general expressed wonderment: “It is almost a miracle to grasp your purpose to finish to Fort Sanders this year,
but you have done so much that I mistrust my own judgment and accept yours.” He also told Dodge that, after the railroad had gotten across Nebraska and into Wyoming, Indians such as the Sioux and Cheyennes “must die or submit to our dictation.”7
“I hope you will have troops to give us ample protection,” Dodge wrote back. “We are going to be short of labor, and any lack of military protection, when Indians are at war, would render it almost impossible to keep men on the line.” Dodge knew the problems Grant and Sherman had, what with demobilization and reconstruction in the South and demands from all over the Western United States for protection, but “what you and I know is going to be hard to make a lot of Irishmen believe. They want to see occasionally a soldier to give them confidence.” Sherman wrote back, “I give you all that I possibly can.”8
One of Sherman’s handicaps was the slackness in enlistment. He had a demand for soldiers everywhere, but few were signing up. The army tried to get the newly freed slaves to join, but Sherman said they were slow to do so, which “limits our ability to respond.” Still, he signed off, “So far as interest in your section is concerned, you may rest easy that both Grant and I feel deeply concerned in the safety of your great national enterprise.”9
IN mid-April, the Casements had started their armies west. The numbers—from 3,500 graders working as far as 200 miles in advance of the end of track, to 450 track men, 350 men of the train force, 100 surveyors, several thousand tie cutters and lumberjacks, and as many as 1,000 shop men—approached 10,000. In addition, L. B. Boomer, owner of the Chicago Howe Truss Bridge Company, with well over 1,000 working for him, was supplying the UP with prefabricated sections for bridges. These were made of 12-inch-by-12-inch-by-16-foot lumber, sent out from Chicago, according to specifications sent to the bridge company by the UP engineers.10