Wall Street History

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Wall Street History

07/01/2005

The Transcontinental Railroad, Part III

Whenever I fly I try to get a window seat, the better to daydream
as I stare down at the world below. And one of the best views is
in flying over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, then down the valley
towards San Francisco. I often think of the first pioneers and
how difficult it would have been traversing them (or the Rockies,
for that matter).

But think of the transcontinental railroad and how difficult it was
to build it over the mountains back in the 1860s. What a
remarkable feat. And for a good sense of just how tough it was, I
turn to author David Haward Bain and his book “Empire
Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad.” [1999,
Viking Penguin]

As I noted in the earlier pieces, the project didn’t really get off
the ground until the end of the Civil War in 1865. You’ll recall
the Union Pacific was heading west from Omaha, while the
Central Pacific headed east from Sacramento. You should also
know from your geography that just about 25 miles out of
Sacramento the terrain begins to rise significantly and 75 out
(following present-day Route 80 roughly the route of the
railroad), you are smack dab at the peak of the Sierras.

So with this in mind, following are some excerpts from Bain’s
book on the conditions faced.

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“ ‘The winter of 1865-66 was a very wet winter,’ said one
foreman, ‘it was terribly muddy. It was impossible to haul goods
to the amount required for our use, and we were obliged to pack
it over the mountain trails, and we had to pack bales of hay,
even, a distance of 25 miles on animals, and pretty nearly all of
our supplies for four or five months were furnished in that way.’”

By October 1865, the snow was falling thick in the Sierras. But
in Sacramento, balmy by comparison, the owners of the Central
Pacific couldn’t understand reports telling of how difficult the
job had become. Co-founder Charles Crocker, on the scene in
the mountains, recalled. “I would say, ‘Here is this snow in the
way,’ and I would ask, ‘Who will pay for removing it?’ And
they would say, ‘We will pay for it.’ Of course I was not going to
pay for it. I was not going to get any pay except for the removal
of the rock. I know there was a 60-foot ravine that we cleared of
snow and pitched it over and over and over before we could get
to the rock. The engineers would not allow the track to go on
snow or ice.”

California Governor, and fellow co-founder of CP, Leland
Stanford went to see it and became a believer.

“ ‘(The snow was) somewhere from 30 to 40 feet deep, as near as
we could measure. The snow would fall sometimes five to six
feet in the night; I believe in one case that nine feet fell in a
single night. It obstructed all the roads, and made it almost
impossible to get over the mountains.’ To do so they used not
only horses but ox teams, ‘moving constantly trying to keep the
road clear and the snow packed so that when the storm was over
we could pass along with our material and could transport our
iron.’ They ‘oftentimes had long tunnels under the snow to reach
the mouth of the tunnel in the rock where we were doing our
work.’ Thus, for weeks at a time, the workers lived a
troglodyte’s existence, entirely underground, as the tunnel work
continued; not only were crews going at the Summit Tunnel from
both ends but the work expanded to run three shifts per day.”

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“On the Sierra slope in the late weeks of fall (of 1866) the
Central Pacific had unveiled its answer to the mountain
snowstorms, a gargantuan snowplow. An assemblage of iron
over wood, looking awkwardly like a big black ship perched on a
railway car, the plow was 11 feet high, 10 feet wide, and 30 feet
long. Engineers swore it would scoop up drifts with its forward
end, a wedge which hung down to track level, and fling the snow
with its superstructure to either side of the track by as much as 60
feet. Wherever there was track they were confident they could
clear it .

“The snowplow did not have to wait very long. There was no
snow at the summit on October 30, when the tracks were laid to
Emigrant Gap, but it began falling in earnest in November
(Nonetheless) in the last week of November, despite the snows,
(manager) Strobridge’s tracklayers spiked their way into Cisco,
some ninety-two miles from Sacramento and exactly 5,911 feet
above sea level.”

The Sacramento Union commented on the fact that work had to
be stopped for the winter, however, just twelve miles from the
summit. “It is expected that during the year 1867 the road will
be completed and in operation to the eastern line of the state,
from which point the work of construction toward Salt Lake is
comparatively light and can be prosecuted at all seasons of the
year at the rate, it is believed, of a mile a day, and to reach Salt
Lake City of the 1st of January, 1870.”

Wrote Charles Crocker, “The snow has been no trouble at all so
far. It is the least of our troubles - & we no longer fear it.”
Wishful thinking, as events proved.

By late December 1866 / early January 1867, the Sierras were
one continuous snowstorm. Crocker wrote, “Snow 3 or 4 days
then rain one or two days then snow 2 days then Sunshine one or
two days – then Storm in about same proportion & so on during
the two months.” Both ends of the Summit Tunnel were
completely snowed over, “‘but they have tunneled under the
snow, so that they haul out the rock through both rock & snow
tunnels - & it works first rate.’”

It proved to be a winter for the record books. Engineer John R.
Gilliss “recorded no fewer than forty-four storms .The worst
began on the afternoon of February 18, continuing for four days
and depositing six feet of snow on the mountains. For five days
nothing fell, though heavy winds piled drifts so high that the
snow tunnel to the eastern end of the Summit Tunnel had to be
lengthened by fifty feet.”

“Then for five days it snowed again, ‘making,’ said Gilliss, ‘ten
feet snow and thirteen days storm.’ Nonetheless, the engineer
thought the storms were ‘grand.’ He was living in quarters in the
narrow east end of Donner Pass, which concentrated the summit
winds to alarming speeds. ‘About thirty feet from our windows
was a large warehouse,’ he recalled.

‘This was often hidden completely by the furious torrent of
almost solid snow that swept through the gorge .No one can
face these storms when they are in earnest. Three of our party
came through the pass one evening, walking with the storm –
two got in safely. After waiting a while, just as we were starting
out to look up the third, he came in exhausted. In a short,
straight path between two walls of rock, he had lost his way and
thought his last hour had come.’

“Avalanches were commonplace one slide killed ‘fifteen or
twenty Chinamen’ – Gilliss could not be bothered to get the body
count right. But he clearly recalled one episode near the close of
a storm around the same time, in which an avalanche crushed
and buried a large log house with a plank roof. Sixteen men
were inside – A Chinese work gang and their subcontracting
supervisors, three Scots brothers .

“ ‘Towards evening,’ Gilliss said, ‘a man coming up the road
missed the house and alarmed the camp, so that by six o’clock
the men were dug out. The bulk of the slide had passed over and
piled itself up beyond the house, so that it was only covered
fifteen feet deep. Only three were killed; the bunks were close to
the log walls and kept the rest from being crushed. The snow
packed around the men so closely that only two could move
about; they had almost dug their way out; over the heads of the
rest little holes had been melted in the snow by their breath.
Most of them were conscious, and, strange to say, the time had
passed rapidly with them, although about fourteen hours under
the snow.’

“This alarmed the other workers, whose main camp was
overshadowed by a cliff wreathed in heavy snow, a veritable
iceberg against the winter sky which could descend at any
moment. The next day someone climbed to the top – ‘to reach
the overhanging snow required courage and determination,’
Engineer Lewis Clement remembered, ‘and the call for
volunteers for this daring undertaking was always answered’ and
he planted a powder keg behind the accumulation and set it off.
‘A white column shot up a hundred feet,’ wrote Gilliss, ‘and then
the whole hill-side below was in motion; it came down a frozen
cascade, covered with glittering snow-dust for spray. It was a
rare sight, for snow-slides are so rapid and noiseless that
comparatively few are seen.’ Seeing the snow level rising, being
within a wind’s whistle of Donner Pass, easily and poignantly
reminded the engineer of the earlier tragedy twenty years gone.”

More weather tales next time, plus perhaps a bit on Donner Pass.

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And just a note about the issuance of land grants to both the
Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, as spelled out last
time. Historian Stephen Ambrose had the following comment in
his book “Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the
Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-69,” as adapted in the October
2000 issue of American Heritage.

“The land grants are much misunderstood The grants are
denounced, lambasted, derided. In one of the most influential
textbooks ever published, ‘The Growth of the American
Republic,’ [ed. I have used this source widely over the years]
Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, who were
two of the most distinguished historians of their day, if not of the
whole twentieth century, wrote: ‘The lands granted to both the
Union Pacific and the Central Pacific yielded enough to have
covered all legitimate costs of building these roads.’ A colleague
of theirs, also distinguished, Fred A. Shannon, wrote, ‘The half
billion dollars in land alone to the land grant railroads was worth
more than the railroads were when they were built.’

“It was the land grants and the bonds the government passed out
that caused the greatest outrage, at the time and later. Still,
although the concern of the investigators was justified – it was,
after all, the people’s money that had been taken – there is
another side.

“The land grants never brought in enough to pay the bills of
building either railroad, or even to come close. In California,
from Sacramento to the Sierra Nevada range, and in Nebraska,
the railroads were able to sell their strips of land at a good price,
$2.50 per acre or more. But in most of Wyoming, Utah, and
Nevada, the companies could never sell the land. Unless it had
minerals on it, it was virtually worthless, even to cattlemen, who
needed far more acres for a workable ranch. So too the vast
amount of land the government still owns in the West.

“The total value of lands distributed to the railroads was
estimated by the Interior Department’s auditor as of November 1,
1880, at $391,804,610. The total investment in railroads in the
United States in that year was $4,653,609,000. In addition, the
government got to sell the alternate sections it held on to in
California and Nebraska for big sums. Those lands would have
been worth nearly nothing, or in many cases absolutely nothing,
if it had not been for the building of the railroads. As the
historian Robert Henry points out, the land grants did ‘what had
never been done before – provided transportation ahead of
settlement.’”

Wall Street History returns July 8.

Brian Trumbore

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