During the spring of 1866, Jack Casement offered each man a pound of fresh tobacco for every day he laid a mile or more of track. Bissell, who was there, noted, “This was done.” Dan Casement went out in the early summer to offer time-and-a-half pay to ensure that the UP reached the hundredth meridian before any other line. He also offered double wages for two-mile workdays. Henry Morton Stanley, the reporter who found Livingston in Africa and who was reporting for two American papers, was impressed by the results: the workers, he said, “display an astonishing amount of enthusiasm” for their jobs.22
THE snakily undulating double row of glistening rails stretched on to the west. Side tracks were filled with supply trains bearing hundreds of tons of iron and thousands of ties, fishplates, and more. The end of track, the last terminal base, was brimming with riotous life. There the Casement brothers had a huge takedown and then put-up-again warehouse. There were the boarding cars, the dining cars, the combined kitchen, stores, and office car. There were dusty lines of wagons bearing ties, hay, rails. A construction train would run up, men quickly unloaded its material, and the train started back, to bring on another load.
The wagons, drawn by horses, plied between the track layers and their supplies. Here was where all the work paid off. One wagon took about forty rails, along with the proper proportion of spikes and chairs, along the rails already laid. The horse started off at a full gallop for the end of track, running between the rails. A couple of feet from the end of the rails already down, metal checks were placed under the wheels, stopping the wagon at once. On each side of the wagon there were rollers to facilitate running off the iron rails. Parties of five men stood on either side. Two men seized the end of a rail with their tongs and started forward with it, while the other men took hold with their tongs until it was clear of the car. They all came forward at a run. The chairs had, meantime, been set under the last rails placed. At the command “Down!” they dropped the rail in its place.
Every thirty seconds there came that brave “Down,” “Down,” from either side of the track. The chief spiker was ready; the gauger stooped and measured; the sledges rang. Two rails every thirty seconds, one on each side. Four rails to a minute. These were the pendulum beats.23
As the rails went down, they were gauged by a measuring rod exactly four feet eight and a half inches, as Lincoln had designated in 1863. Ere the rail’s clang in falling had ceased to reverberate, the wagon moved forward on the new track and another pair of rails was drawn out. When the wagon was empty, it was tipped over on the side of the track to allow the next loaded wagon to pass it. Then it was tipped back again and sent down the track for another load, the horse straining at a full gallop.
The lead horse, always, was Blind Tom, a noble, venerable, full-blooded horse who pulled the front wagon. His name came from his condition—he couldn’t see. The workers pronounced him “perfect” in his role. No one claimed less sagacity for Blind Tom than that for any of the humans around him. When his wagon slipped and got stuck in a gap between the joints, he tugged with herculean force to drag it through. He became something of a celebrity from being mentioned in so many newspaper accounts of the construction.
Behind the wagon there was a man dropping spikes, while another settled the ties well under the ends of the rails. There was no ballast for the ties other than sand, which was added later. For now, they were simply put on the grade. The attitude was, as with the cottonwood ties, that it could be fixed later, when trains would be going down grade from the mountains where the material—gravel or hardwood ties—could be sent, to where it could replace the sand or cottonwood. It would be much cheaper, and would get the road built all the faster.
There were thirty men driving in the spikes, on the outside and on the inside, with three strokes of the sledgehammer per spike, ten spikes to a rail, four hundred rails to a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San Francisco.I Twenty-one million times those sledgehammers had to be swung. This was the beginning of what would be called assembly-line work. The pace was as rapid as a man could walk. Such a pace was attained because each man had a certain thing to do, and that only. He was accustomed to doing it and had not to wait on the action of anyone else.
In 1866, there were some one thousand men working at or near the end of track, out of a total force of eight thousand. There were four locomotives with ten cars each running between the track head and the last siding. It took forty cars to bring on the rails, ties, bridging, fastening, fuel, and supplies for the men and animals. Everything had to be transported from the Missouri River.
Ahead of the four construction trains came a locomotive pulling a general-repair car that held a blacksmith shop, cables, rope, winches, barrels, boxes, switch stands, iron rods, and more. Then the feed store and saddler’s shop, then a carpenter shop, then a sleeping car or two, then a sitting and dining room for foremen, then a long dining room, then a car that contained a kitchen in front and a counting room and telegraph office in the rear, then a store car, then six cars that were all sleepers.
Two locomotives powered the work train. The crew included two foremen, two engineers, two conductors, a financial manager, a storekeeper, a physician, a civil engineer and seven assistants, a draftsman, a telegrapher, the chief steward and sixteen assistants, and the workers. The physician had broken bones and mashed fingers to repair, and sometimes Indian arrows to extract.24
All the cars were hauling material. There were tie layers, who needed seventy-five teams of horses and wagons to haul the ties forward along the side of the track. Then the track layers, the gaugers, the spikers. Keeping up with everything were the herd of cattle, along with a butcher and helper to kill daily for consumption, and herders to care for the cattle. There was a baker and helper to bake the bread, and more.
It was the very embodiment of system. Henry Morton Stanley was in Nebraska to write about the Indian uprisings and massacres for a St. Louis and a New York newspaper. After a breakfast with Casement, Stanley watched the men laying track. He noted: “All this work is executed with great rapidity and with mechanical regularity. Captain D. B. Clayton, superintendent of laying the track, showed your reporter a specimen of what could be done. He gave his men the order, and in the space of exactly five minutes, as timed by the watch, they laid down the rails and spiked them, for the distance of seven hundred feet. There were fifty rails laid down, one on each side of the track. At that rate sixteen miles and a half of track could be laid down in one day.”25
THEIR slang was expressive. An engineer was a “hogger.” The fireman was the “tallow-pot.” When the engineer wanted the brakes set, he whistled a signal called the “whistle down brakes.” Setting the handbrakes was a “tie-down.” A drifting railroad worker was a “boomer.” A “bumper” was a retaining post at the end of a spur track. A “car toad” was a car repairer. “Cushions” were passenger coaches, of which the workers saw few to none. To “dance the carpet” was to appear before an official for discipline. A “fly light” was a man at work who had missed a meal. A “drone cage” was a private car, also seldom seen by the workers. A man asleep on the job was a “hay.” And so on. A phrase universally known was “gandy dancer,” for a track laborer.
It took an immense force to support the end of track, just as it took an immense force to support the front line in a battle. Twenty miles back of the end of track stood construction trains, loaded with ties and rails and all other things needed for the work. It was like the grand reserve of an army. Ten to twelve miles ahead of it were other trains of like character—the second line.26 One reporter wrote, “Sherman, with his victorious legions, sweeping from Atlanta to Savanah, was a spectacle less glorious than this army of men, marching on foot from Omaha to Sacramento.”27
On May 11, as the Casement-led force was getting under way, the Omaha Weekly Herald put it exactly. “The question of time is of such moment that minutes and seconds even are estimated when interruptions occur in the work of track-laying. The great machine must move in every part;
every wheel must be in constant motion; so many rails must be put down and so much done every minute of every working hour of every working day, or loss accrues.”28 No minutes, or even seconds, were wasted on the UP. On August 2, the Omaha Weekly Herald reported that the previous day the government commissioners had accepted thirty-five miles of the track after being “surprised almost beyond measure at the rapidity with which the work is being pushed forward—thirty-eight miles having been built in twenty-eight days and in one instance 2 miles in one day.”
On their ride, the commissioners uttered expressions of wonder “at the extent and amazing fertility of this Valley of the Platte.” One called it “the finest Valley in the world.” Their train, meanwhile, sped forward at a speed of thirty-five miles per hour, “not spilling a drop of water from the well-filled goblets, so smooth is the track.” The commissioners arrived at the end of track toward the end of the day, when the men were seated in the dining car having their meal. Together with the kitchen and sleeping cars, and the construction supplies and cars, the total constituted “almost a city in itself.” On the return trip to Omaha, the train made the last thirty-two miles in thirty-seven minutes.29
At this time Dodge and Reed made a trip over the road, then continued on to see how the graders were doing. Their biggest worry was crossing the North Platte at the Nebraska city (now named North Platte) at the junction of the North and South Platte Rivers. Reed sent a telegraph to Durant on August 4: “General Dodge was with me at crossing of North Platte and decides that pile bridges will be suitable for crossing that stream. Can reach there before January with track. Shall I close contract or wait until I can send you plan.” Why he had to have Durant’s approval for something Dodge had already decided on doing isn’t clear.
On September 17, Reed wired that he had on hand two hundred thousand ties, which had reduced the price to 60 cents per tie. “If the grading can be done and iron delivered we can lay the track to Julesburgh before spring. Did you send spikes? Fish joints? Or is all the iron to be laid with chairs! The above has been written on the supposition that the men employed on the work are not molested by the Indians. We lost 98 mules 50 miles west of end of track. The men are very timid and on the first appearance of Indians would all leave the work. Sherman promised protection if there were troops in the country to be spared.”30
At the end of August, the commissioners wired President Johnson that they had inspected an additional forty-five miles of the UP and accepted them. Their telegram concluded, “The cars now run two hundred and five miles west of Omaha; or fifteen miles beyond Kearney.”31
THE men were really hopping for the Casement brothers. On September 21, the Omaha Weekly Herald was able to announce that the UP had printed a timetable. It was now running twice a day from Omaha to Kearney, a distance of two hundred miles. The passenger train, with first-class coaches and newly completed freight cars, left Omaha at 1 P.M. and 7 P.M. and arrived at Kearney at 5:10 A.M. and 11:10 A.M. Turned around, the trains got back to Omaha at 2 P.M. and 8 P.M. At Kearney, coaches met the train and moved passengers and freight to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and California.32 The Rocky Mountain News had reported a few months earlier that all horse-drawn coaches had been withdrawn from Omaha.33
General Sherman went for the ride. He was impressed beyond measure. He wrote to Grant that he hoped the line would be complete to Julesburg, Colorado, by April 1867. “This will be a great achievement,” he ventured, “but perfectly possible when we see what has been done.” He confessed that he was puzzled about what to do with Fort Kearney: because of the railroad, it was of no further military use.34
Sherman’s puzzlement illustrated one of the main purposes of building the UP. The army was spending millions of dollars in building forts on the Plains and across the Rocky Mountains, and in getting the soldiers to them and supplying them. But it was critical that it be able to do so, because, with the end of the war and the rapidly increased immigration to the United States, families were moving out onto the Plains at a fast pace. The hostility of the Plains Indians required the army to get out there to protect the immigrants. But stationing companies and even regiments at frontier posts did little good, since the troops could never mount up and go out to catch marauding Indians in time—the Indians would have long since departed the scene of their outrage. With the railroad, and its ability to move troops faster and safer from one place to another, the army needed fewer men and fewer forts, which made it much cheaper to maintain. Thus did the government get an immediate payoff from its investment in the UP. Sherman had anticipated this, which was one of the reasons he and Grant were great friends of the railroad.
Early in 1866, Sherman wrote to the editor of the Omaha Weekly Herald. “You know how outspoken I have been in the matter of befriending the Great Pacific Railroad,” he opened, “as also on all subjects calculated to develop the vast natural resources of the Northwest.” Then he pointed out, “You can hardly create a more lively interest than already prevails in the whole civilized world on the subject of a Pacific Railroad.”35
How right the general was can be seen in the coverage given the railroads, from newspapers in Sacramento, San Francisco, Omaha, Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake, New York, and elsewhere. The public was fascinated by the construction of the transcontinental railroad. In part this was due to the magnitude of the undertaking, in part to its usefulness, not only to the military and the settlers but to all Americans. Everywhere people agreed that the coming of the railroad meant a new day was at hand.
Another factor: the Civil War was over, and the great corps of reporters and editors that had come of age during the conflict suddenly had little of national significance to write about, except for national politics. This meant that sophisticated reporters and editors, who were savvy about what people wanted to read, were at loose ends. Many of them decided that the railroad was the news to cover. As each month went by, more and more of them started doing so. In a short time it became the big story.
AS of October 6, 1866, the end of track had reached the hundredth meridian, 247 miles west of Omaha. Doc Durant decided that this was the big story of 1866. He invited scads of people for his grand excursion, to ride west on the “sumptuous Directors’ car” which he had purchased from the Pullman Palace Sleeping Car Company, built to his exacting and extravagant specifications. There were other Pullman cars in the train, called by one newspaper “the most sumptuous and resplendent, not only in America but all over the world.” Then there was the “Lincoln Car,” which had been built for President Lincoln but used only for his funeral, which Durant had purchased with the UP’s money, along with five coaches and a freight train bearing food, liquor, tents, and other articles.
The guests included Senators Benjamin Wade, J. W. Patterson, J. M. Thayer, F. W. Tipton, and John Sherman, twelve representatives, and others, along with Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, Mr. and Mrs. George Francis Train, Mr. and Mrs. Silas Seymour, George Pullman, John Duff, and many others. Reporters from every daily in the United States were invited, and many came.
In Omaha they got to see a part of what the UP had constructed, including a roundhouse capable of sheltering twenty locomotives at once (there were already twenty-three locomotives on the line; one hundred were expected in 1867), a blacksmith shop with twelve forges, a two-story machine shop, extensive car shops turning out nine cars per week, and more.
The first night was spent at Columbus, where some went to see Casement’s men laying track on a siding while others visited a prairie-dog colony or went hunting for buffalo and antelope. In the evening, Dodge had a huge bonfire lit in the center of a great circle of tents. A grand feast of game was accompanied by champagne (the breakfast and lunch on the dining cars had been meals to write home about too). A party of Pawnees, recruited by the same Dodge who had expressed his belief that there were no friendly Indians, gave the party a scare that night when they raced through the camp, wearing war paint. After Dodge had reassured the shrieking ladies and the tim
id gentlemen that these were friendly Pawnees, the crowd gathered to watch a few war dances and a mock battle complete with fake scalping. It all lasted until 2 A.M.
While on this trip, Dodge was elected to Congress by the people of Council Bluffs and its district. Later he figured himself to be the only man “elected to Congress who forgot the day of election.” He never campaigned for the office and hardly ever went to Washington to serve.
At 132 miles west of Omaha was the last farm to be found until Salt Lake City. At the one hundredth meridian, the train turned around and started back toward Omaha. Durant was ecstatic and resolved to have excursions whenever the UP had something to celebrate. Dodge, at first wary, began to get into the spirit of the thing as he slowly realized how much good it was doing for the company. On the last night, he treated the guests to the spectacle of a staged prairie fire set at a safe distance. He also conducted what amounted to a continuous press conference. He answered all reporters’ questions. He later confessed that he had sprinkled his remarks with “a great deal of romance” of the sort reporters dote on. Despite the cost, which was huge, he decided that, “from a sight-seeing point of view, it may be considered as very successful.”36
As Maury Klein puts it, “The selling of the West had begun in earnest,” even though, at what is today Cozad, Nebraska, the tourists were not very far west. But as Klein says, “Even at this early stage the market value of self-parody had been discovered.”37
SHORTLY after the excursion, the UP announced that it would convert one of its construction trains to a passenger car so that the line could run out to Lone Tree Station, forty-one miles west of Columbus. Soon after that, the line ran daily service to Grand Island. By late August, it was “Open to Kearney,” near the military post of Fort Kearney. The service was sometimes irregular and the passage sometimes problematical, but it was a start.