IT had been Judah’s original plan to bridge the deeper ravines and gaps between Newcastle (below Auburn) and Illinoistown with timber structures, but with the Chinese there to fill and push the carts, wherever possible earthen embankments (“fills”) were used. In a five-mile stretch from Auburn to Newcastle, the only wooden structures were the Newcastle trestle (86 feet high and 528 feet long), a trestle near Auburn at 30 feet high and 416 feet long, and a few others.
But even the Chinese didn’t solve every problem. The embankments were often impractical. Soil covering the ridge was only a foot or so deep, so scraping up enough dirt to make heaps fifty to a hundred feet high and several hundred feet long was impossible. Therefore, the engineers decided, early in 1865, to build trestles. When the railroad was finished, earth could be hauled in by train and the trestles replaced by fills.
In historian Wesley Griswold’s phrase, the trestles stood like “transfixed centipedes, straddling the gaps in the ridge with their massive multiple pairs of legs from immense pines, planted at 16-foot intervals, their feet braced in masonry.”22 The trestles, whose support timbers were called “bents” by the engineers, came originally from hundreds of thousands of feet of lumber cut in coastal forests of the Northwest, brought to the site by schooner and flatcar.
But after Newcastle was reached, CP lumbermen started hacking away at huge trees closer at hand, giant red firs and others. The bridges that were built out of sturdy timber and laced together and steadied by rows of horizontal beams looked like many-legged structures. Their spindly appearance scared hell out of the passengers, who gazed down as much as a hundred feet (at Deep Gulch, for example). Still the bridges managed to stand the weight of a locomotive and cars. “The boom of the powder blast is continually heard,” the Auburn Stars and Stripes reported. “Frowning embankments rise as if by magic. High trestle bridges spring up in a week.”23
HUNTINGTON had meanwhile filed a work-route map with the secretary of the interior covering the entire area from the California-Nevada border to the Great Salt Lake. He simply ignored the clause in the Pacific Railroad Bill that limited the CP to 150 miles east of the border. With that map, Huntington got the race between the UP and the CP started.24
On June 10, the rails reached Clipper Gap, about halfway between Auburn and Illinoistown. Toward the end of that summer, the railhead became Illinoistown, fifty-four miles from Sacramento. The elevation was 2,242 feet. From there to the summit was about fifty miles. The grade climbed almost forty-eight hundred feet, to 7,042. The grade went up the dividing ridge between the North Fork of the American River, which lay to the south, and Bear River, which was to the north.
This was the toughest. The hardest. The most expensive. The fifty miles that would be the most time-consuming. It took a full year to reach Dutch Flat from Illinoistown, sixty-seven miles from Sacramento. After that the difficulties increased, including more blasting, cutting, and filling, another precipitous gorge to be bridged, massive pinewood stands to be cleared, numerous tight curves to be plotted.
The engineers contemplated drilling fifteen tunnels through the granite—five on the west slope, one at the summit, and nine on the east. The longest, at 1,659 feet or 553 yards (or 113 yards beyond a quarter-mile), twenty-six feet wide and twenty feet high, would bore through the summit itself (No. 6). More than five hundred kegs of black powder would be consumed each day. Hundreds of gullies and ravines had to be filled, and at least eight long trestles built, with spans from thirty-eight to sixty feet high and from 350 to 500 feet long. Huntington had thirty vessels at sea simultaneously, bringing supplies and locomotives to California.
The task facing the CP was not only improbable, it was unique in engineering annals. The grading alone would exceed $100,000 per mile. Tens of thousands of tons of granite would have to be chipped and blasted from the mountains. Smaller chunks of it could be used for ballast on the track; big pieces could be sold to construction firms in California.
Strobridge divided his work crews into five parts. The largest, some five thousand men and six hundred teams of horses, were sent ahead of Illinoistown to work on Cape Horn. Another thousand men were detailed to clearing the right-of-way. Smaller teams of three to four hundred men each were put to work boring entrances for the first three tunnels.
One of the most feared stretches ran three miles along the precipitous gorge of the North Fork of the American River, nicknamed “Cape Horn.” The slope was at an angle of seventy-five degrees, and the river was twelve hundred to twenty-two hundred feet below the line of the railroad. There were no trails, not even a goat path. The grade would not be bored through a tunnel but, rather, built on the side of the mountain, which required blasting and rock cuts on the sheer cliffs. The mountain needed to be sculpted, because the roadbed would be curved around the mountain. The curves that hugged the monolith were either up grade or, sometimes, down. Men had to be lowered in a bos’n’s chair from above to place the black powder, fix and light the fuses, and yell to a man above to haul them up. With regard to Cape Horn and the tunnels, Van Nostrand’s Engineering Magazine said in 1870, “Good engineers considered the undertaking preposterous.”25
One day in the summer of 1865, a Chinese foreman went to Strobridge, nodded, and waited for permission to speak. When it was granted, he said that men of China were skilled at work like this. Their ancestors had built fortresses in the Yangtze gorges. Would he permit Chinese crews to work on Cape Horn? If so, could reeds be sent up from San Francisco to weave into baskets?
Strobridge would try anything. The reeds came on. At night the Chinese wove baskets similar to the ones their ancestors had used. The baskets were round, waist-high, four eyelets at the top, painted with symbols. Ropes ran from the eyelets to a central cable. The Chinese went to work—they needed little or no instruction in handling black powder, which was a Chinese invention—with a hauling crew at the precipice top.
Hundreds of barrels of black powder were ignited daily to form a ledge on which a roadbed could be laid. Some of the men were lost in accidents, but we don’t know how many: the CP did not keep a record of Chinese casualties.26
The Chinese workingmen, hanging in their baskets, had to bore the holes with their small hand-drills, then tamp in the explosives, set and light the fuse, and holler to be pulled out of the way. They used a huge amount of powder that was shipped to them from Sacramento. Crocker had a “spark-proof” car built to transport it, with iron sides, a door lined with India rubber, and a tin roof which could not catch fire from sparks and could be blown off in the event of an explosion. The CP made it in the railroad’s workshops at E and Sixth Streets in Sacramento. This car alone was allowed to haul explosives to the work sites, and it never had an accident.27
The Chinese made the roadbed and laid the track around Cape Horn. Though this took until the spring of 1866, it was not as time-consuming or difficult as had been feared. Still, it remains one of the best known of all the labors on the Central Pacific, mainly because, unlike the work in the tunnel, it makes for a spectacular diorama. As well it should. Hanging from those baskets, drilling holes in the cliff, placing the fuses, and getting hauled up was a spectacular piece of work. The white laborers couldn’t do it. The Chinese could, if not as a matter of course, then quickly and—at least they made it look this way—easily. Young Lewis Clement did the surveying and then took charge of overseeing the railroad engineering at Cape Horn.
What Clement planned and the Chinese made became one of the grandest sights to be seen along the entire Central Pacific line. Trains would halt there so tourists could get out of their cars to gasp and gape at the gorge and the grade.28
DANGEROUS as the Cape Horn work was, clearing the roadbed was worse. The Chinese who did it had the task of making an avenue a hundred feet wide on either side of the roadbed, mainly to provide room for the graders and to prevent tall trees from crashing down on the track. At least twenty-five feet on each side of the grade had to be cleared and leveled. Not only trees and stumps,
but rocks, other obstructions, and vegetation of all types had to be removed. Past Illinoistown, the growth included some of the world’s largest trees, hundreds of feet high.
One three-hundred-man gang spent a full ten workdays clearing a single mile of right-of-way. The trees were shipped to sawmills to be fashioned into ties and trestling. Then the stumps had to be blasted from the soil. Ten barrels of black powder were needed to free each one. In any one week, the crews used as much explosives as did Generals Lee and McClellan at Antietam. Every time the powder charge was exploded, chunks of rock and tree flew through the air. They were like missiles fired by nature at the army invading it.29 (In World War II, the GIs in their foxholes got wounded more often by splinters flying through the air during a German barrage than by the shrapnel itself.) When a congressional investigator expressed incredulity at the amount of black powder used for any one stump, Clement told him, “These are not Yankee forests, but forests with trees four, six, and eight feet in diameter.” They were often 150 feet tall.30
THE first two groups, other than CP workers, to get a glimpse of what was being accomplished were George Gray and his assistants, and Schuyler Colfax accompanied by three journalists and some others.
Gray went because he had been invited by the Big Four to make an inspection of the completed line and the grading beyond the end of track. He had a reputation as one of the best railroad engineers in the country, and had previously been the first chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad. A favorable review by him would have a big effect on the potential bond- and stockholders; an unfavorable one was too painful to contemplate.
Gray, with a wagon load of instruments and a team of assistants, set to his inspection in late June. He was impressed and more. He found the CP’s line to be of “first quality throughout,” from the seating of its bridges and the quality of its brickwork to the spacing of its ties and the construction of its depots, and had no reservations whatsoever. He sent his report to the President, the secretary of the interior, the CP headquarters, the Railroad Record and other publications.
The CP was so delighted that, in late July 1865, it published Gray’s report as a pamphlet. Among other things, he wrote: “From the examination I have made, having traveled the distance on horseback or on foot, I feel confident that the railroad can be constructed over the Sierra Nevada . . . within two years. . . . It is quite a remarkable feature of your route that so elevated a mountain range can be surmounted with such comparatively light grades and curves.” In short order, the CP made Gray its consulting engineer.31
The other party, led by Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and a future vice-president of the United States, left Omaha in July for a tour to the Pacific. Colfax went to the end of track of the UP, which was less than halfway to the Elkhorn River, then took stages to Denver. His party included Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican; William Bross, editor of the Chicago Tribune and lieutenant governor of Illinois; and Albert D. Richardson, one of the most distinguished correspondents of the Civil War, from the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley’s newspaper. From Denver the party went on a posh new Concord coach loaned by its owner, Ben Holladay, himself. It reached California in late summer.
Stanford invited the Speaker and his party to travel with him to the CP’s end of track, then at mile 50 (just short of Illinoistown). Off they went, with plenty of wines, brandies, and good food. Stops were made to inspect tracks, trestling, and culverts, and to view the Chinese workers. Stanford made a grand gesture when the train got to the end of track: he renamed Illinoistown as “Colfax.”
The reporters were enthusiastic, especially Richardson. He wrote of the Chinese, “They were a great army laying siege to Nature in her strongest citadel. The rugged mountains looked like stupendous ant-hills. They swarmed with Celestials,II shoveling, wheeling, carting, drilling and blasting rocks and earth, while their dull, moony eyes stared out from under immense basket-hats, like umbrellas.”32
From Colfax, the party moved up the line of the graders by horseback. They rounded the spectacular point of Cape Horn. At Gold Run, sixty-three miles east of Sacramento, the Speaker and reporters got into a six-horse coach and set out for the summit, still forty or so miles away. Richardson saw “an endless sweep of dense forest and grand mountains, among graceful tamaracks, gigantic pines and pyramidal firs.” At the summit, reached shortly after sunset, “the wild, gloomy grandeur is far more impressive than by day. It is boundless mountain piled on mountain—unbroken granite, bare, verdure less, cold and gray.”
After a night at Donner Lake, the travelers climbed up to the summit to talk with the surveyors. That night, they stayed together in a guest house. Richardson wrote about the company officials who were working on the details of the route over the summit: “The candles lighted up a curious picture. The carpet was covered with maps, profiles and diagrams, held down at the edges by candlesticks. On their knees were president, directors and surveyors, creeping from one map to another, and earnestly discussing the plans of their magnificent enterprise. Outside the night wind moaned and shrieked, as if the Mountain Spirit resented this invasion of his ancient domain.”33
THAT fall of 1865, the CP went to work on the tunnels. Six of the thirteen that it would have to blast out before getting to the east slope were clustered in a stretch of two miles at the top of the long climb to the summit. The biggest, No. 6, right at the summit and within a few hundred feet of Donner Pass, was, as noted, 1,659 feet long and as much as 124 feet beneath the surface. The facings—where the blasting began—were 150 feet from the summit.
Clement planned it. In mid-October, when the end of track and supply base were at Colfax, Chief Engineer Montague started the Chinese working in shifts—eight hours per day, three shifts through the twenty-four hours—at each end of the formidable summit. There was only room for gangs of three men. One would hold the rock drill against the granite, while the other two would swing eighteen-pound sledgehammers to hit the back end of the drill.
Of all the backbreaking labor that went into the building of the CP and the UP, of all the dangers inherent in the work, this was the worst. The drills lost their edge to the granite and had to be replaced frequently. The CP soon learned to order its drills in hundred-ton lots. The man holding the drill had to be steady or he would get hit by the sledgehammer. The man swinging the hammer had to have muscles like steel. When a hole was at last big enough for the black powder, the crew would fill it, set a fuse, yell as loud as they could while running out of the range of the blast, and hope. Sometimes the fuse worked, sometimes it didn’t.
Often the workers had put in too much powder and most of it blew toward them—harmlessly as far as the granite was concerned, but at great danger to the Chinamen. Clement’s assistant, Henry Root, explained that “more powder was used by the rock foreman than was economical,” for the simple reason that the workers were told that time, not money, was of the essence. At Summit Tunnel alone, three hundred kegs of blasting powder a day went up, costing $53,000 to $67,000 per month.34
Progress was incredibly slow. With men working round the clock, between six and twelve inches per twenty-four hours was normal.35 Crocker gave orders to establish permanent work camps on each side of the summit, to facilitate the round-the-clock drilling, blasting, scraping, shoveling, and hauling by the Chinese. He figured there was no night or day within a tunnel. The men worked in groups of twenty or so, because only a handful could work at any one time.36
BY the middle of the summer of 1865, cargoes of Chinese laborers signed up by Koopmanschap had begun arriving in San Francisco.III They were shipped forward by riverboat to Sacramento, then to the end of track by train, then by foot to work on the grading. Strobridge’s workforce soon doubled and continued to grow. The CP had to learn how to put them to useful work, no difficult problem, and to house and feed them, which required some imagination, principally from the Chinese.
The CP used tents for housing as l
ong as the weather remained warm. The Chinese men, more than half teen-aged and from farm families, were accustomed to spending their days outdoors and sharing crowded quarters at night. One visitor to the CP construction sites wrote, “In a little tent, ten by twelve feet, a half dozen or more Chinamen find abundant accommodations for eating and sleeping.” Tents went up at the facings of each tunnel and at or near the site of grading, putting in sidings, or other work. As noted, the Chinese were divided into gangs of twelve to twenty men, each with a headman and a cook.
They ate healthy, well-cooked, and tasty food, unlike the white workers. The CP provided the Americans with boiled beef and potatoes, beans, bread and butter, and coffee. If they wanted to spend their own money, the company kept stores that offered dried fish and salted codfish, peaches, cherries, raisins, apples, tomatoes, eggs, beets, turnips, pickles, and more.37 The Chinese paid for all their food. They demanded and got an astonishing variety—oysters, cuttlefish, finned fish, abalone meat, Oriental fruits, and scores of vegetables, including bamboo sprouts, seaweed, and mushrooms. Each of these foods came dried, purchased from one of the Chinese merchants in San Francisco. Further, the Chinese ate rice, salted cabbage, vermicelli, bacon, and sweet crackers. Very occasionally they had fresh meat, pork being a prime favorite, along with chicken.38
The food helped keep the Chinamen healthy. The water they drank was even more important. The Americans drank from the streams and lakes, and many of them got diarrhea, dysentery, and other illnesses. The Chinese drank only tepid tea. The water had been boiled first and was brought to them by youngsters who carried two pails on a sturdy pole across their shoulders.