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The railroad to the Pacific may have been of the greatest importance, but riding on an 1867 train imposed a terrible price on passengers. Back east, and not infrequently in the West as well, at least according to Harper’s Weekly, the railroads used “abominable old-fashioned, low-roofed cars and there are still passengers who ignominiously submit to this and to every other kind of railroad tyranny.” The cars were subject to a constant “jerking and thumping.” Sometimes during this ordeal, “a brakeman thrusts his head into the car, shouts something, slams the door, and leaves the excited passenger to the wildest conjecture.” In addition there was the “misery of summer railway travel, including the heat, the glare, the dust, the cinders and the rattle, plus the flies.”37
Through the summer, the Indians continued to dispute the road. Ferguson noted on July 8, “In the past 48 hours, they have made dashes on both sides of us. Everything indicates lively times on the Lodge Pole line as regards Indians.” July 9: “Last night about midnight, three Indians rode up within gunshot of our tent.” August 5: “I have cleaned my carbine out today and got my ammunition, 74 rounds, in readiness.” A climax came on August 11: “The report has reached us that the Indians have thrown a train of cars off the track and after killed all on board except the conductor, piled ties around the engine and cars and destroyed them by fire. It is also reported that the Indians have carried off two white women.”38
That wasn’t rumor. On August 7, a party of forty or so Cheyennes led by Chief Pawnee Killer went after the railroad. Operating near Plum Creek, in central Nebraska, they cut the telegraph, then removed the spikes and bent the rails and waited for the next train to derail itself—just as the Confederates and Yankees had done to each other’s trains during the war. When the train hit the damaged rail, over the engine went. The engineer, fireman, two brakemen, and three telegraph repairers were killed. Behind that train came another freight train. It crashed into the wreck and was overturned. The conductor ran back down the track and stopped a third train, which backed up to the Plum Creek station. The Cheyennes meanwhile burned the trains and cars; they killed and scalped seven or eight people and threw their bodies into the flames.39
A relief train carrying workers armed with carbines went back to the scene before dawn. As the train approached, the engineer and others saw that the Indians had found some barrels of whiskey, got drunk, and set the wreck on fire. A Chicago Tribune reporter noted that the fire “lit the prairie for a considerable distance around. The dark forms of the savages were plainly seen dancing triumphantly around the scene of their atrocious work, while their fierce yells were borne savagely back to the train.” It was horrifying. The Tribune wrote: “The railroad men in Omaha, fresh from Cheyenne, filled with alarming rumors … have an infallible remedy for the Indian troubles. That remedy is extermination. These men, most of them tender and gentle with the weak of their own race, speak with indifference of the ‘wiping out’ of thousands of papooses and squaws.”40
It wasn’t just the ordinary railroad workers who felt that way. So did their leaders. “We’ve got to clean the damn Indians out,” Dodge declared, “or give up building the Union Pacific Railroad. The government may take its choice.” For his part, Sherman wrote at this time, “The more we can kill this year the less will have to be killed the next year, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.”41
AFTER going over the pass (called Sherman Pass by Dodge, a name it retains), examining Dale Creek, and laying out Laramie, Dodge and his group pushed on west, looking for water flowing toward the Pacific as a sign that they had passed the Continental Divide. After crossing the North Platte River (which flows out of the Medicine Bow Mountains nearly straight north as far as today’s Casper before it turns east), they set out to the west, “endeavoring to find running water.”
They were now in the Great Basin. The streams running into it sank, and one of Dodge’s party said the dry creek beds looked to him like the “shallow graves of deceased rivers.” (This area is today called the Red Desert. Here was where the Sioux had caught and killed Browne.) There Dodge discovered and helped a party of UP surveyors who had been without water for nearly a week. They were headed straight east, by compass, looking for water, and were in Dodge’s words “in deplorable condition.”
Dodge discovered a spring in a draw. General Rawlins, grateful for the drink, pronounced it the “most acceptable of anything he had had on this march.” He drank again and said that, if some spot was ever named for him, he hoped it would be a spring of water.
Dodge instantly replied, “We will name this Rawlins Springs.” And so it is to this day.II Dodge told his wife that Rawlins was “one of the purest, highest minded men I ever saw. That he must die with that dread consumption seems too bad.”42
THOMAS Hubbard was a surveyor helping make a line across Wyoming. His diary entries, although short, are vivid descriptions of the land. August 5, 1867: “The country over which we passed was a barren desert of alkali composition. There was not a spear of grass or a drop of water in the whole distance.” August 6: “Run about ten miles and quit work at six P.M. The country through which we run was if possible more barren than yesterday. There is no water within ten miles of our line. We have to haul our water in barrels. The team started tonight to get a fresh supply. The weather suffocatingly hot.” August 7: “The team returned with casks filled with water. But it was so full of all kinds of poison that we could not use it. It was as red as blood and filled with all kinds of vermin. The horses and mules as dry as they are would not drink it. We were compelled to return twenty miles to our old camp to get water.”43
Dodge went on to the Wasatch Range, then Salt Lake City, where he conferred with Brigham Young. In the Wasatch he had found Weber Canyon and marked it down as the place to get through the mountains and on to Salt Lake Valley. The geologist with him found immense coal deposits at a place Dodge called Carbon.
Dodge further discovered that he could follow any one of a number of streams into the Snake River Valley in southern Idaho. Thus “the entire feasibility of a railroad from several points on our line to Snake River Valley, and thence to Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington Territory, was fully demonstrated.” That was the line he wanted to build. “It would be by far the best line from the Atlantic to the Pacific, would avoid the high elevation of the Wasatch and Sierra Nevadas, with their heavy grades and troublesome snows, and no doubt ere long it will become the great through route.”44 He did eventually build along that line. The UP called it the “Oregon Short Line.” But in 1867, he was stuck with the Weber Canyon, around the Salt Lake, to meet up with the CP coming from the Sierra across Utah. That was the route dictated by Congress, and that was the route that was going to be.
DODGE found something else in Weber Canyon. There were CP surveyors there doing preliminary work for their railroad. It appeared that Huntington and his partners thought the CP would reach the Salt Lake first and take over the Mormon business, then extend to the Green River (which Dodge had just crossed). For his part, Dodge wanted the UP to get as far as Humboldt Wells. He had thought the CP had hoped to get as far as Ogden, on the east side of the Salt Lake forty miles or so north of Salt Lake City, but now he learned it was planning to go farther east than Ogden. The race was well under way.
Best of all for the UP, what Dodge found between Laramie and Utah was an open prairie of comparatively low elevation (about seven thousand feet). In two months his party had covered fourteen hundred miles on horseback. He had laid out a preliminary line for the surveyors from Julesburg to the Salt Lake, and in the process made the first map of the Great Basin and southern Wyoming. It was a country in which the UP could sink artesian wells to a great depth and keep the water tanks full by using windmills. “The work of building the road there was unexpectedly light,” Dodge later wrote, “and it almost seems that nature made this great opening in the Rocky Mountains expressly for the passage of a transcontinental railway.”45
The Sioux and Cheyennes thought the Basin and the Great Plains to the east had been made for them. They continued their raids, although nothing quite so big as the Plum Creek affair.
President Johnson appointed a Peace Commission, with Sherman on it. The commission went from tribe to tribe to parlay with the chiefs and sign treaties. A big conference was held in September at North Platte, with the railroad as the main subject. Pawnee Killer and others were there, and Sherman made a speech. He told the Indians, “This railroad will be built, and if you are damaged [by it] we must pay you in full, and if your young men will interfere the Great Father, who, out of love for you, withheld his soldiers, will let loose his young men, and you will be swept away.” That was blunt enough. So was what followed: “We will build iron roads, and you cannot stop the locomotive any more than you can stop the sun or the moon, and you must submit, and do the best you can.”
Pawnee Killer, who had stopped two locomotives, stomped out of the council in a rage. He swore to end the railroad building. Sherman was as determined as the Cheyenne chief. “Whether right or wrong,” he wrote his brother the senator, “those Roads will be built, and everybody knows that Congress, after granting the charters, and fixing the Routes, cannot now back out and surrender the country to a few bands of roving Indians.”46
THE Casements and their men were almost at Nebraska’s western border, near mile 440. The company’s rolling stock had grown to fifty-three locomotives, eleven hundred freight cars, ten passenger cars, five baggage cars, and sixty handcars, plus one paymaster’s car, one cooking car, twenty-five caboose cars, twenty-five coal cars, one officers’ car, and one president’s car (the old Lincoln Car). The UP had 350 mechanics and carpenters working in Omaha and North Platte who could turn out twenty cars a week and do all the railroad’s mechanical repairs.”47
All this cost money. The UP had it. Commencing in July 1867, the promoters found a ready market for UP bonds. The Casement brothers and their workers, after all, had laid 260 miles of track in eight months and were surging forward. No such railroading had ever been dreamed of. Further, when the UP got to the mountains, not very far distant that summer, the government loan of bonds would rise to $48,000 per mile. In addition, the UP announced at the end of August that its earnings during the three preceding months alone had been nearly three-quarters of a million dollars; deducting expenses of a quarter-million dollars, the net operating profit was almost a half-million. The UP’s own bonds, equal in numbers and price to those loaned by the government, sold well.48
Also encouraging was that the Ames brothers and their Boston allies held 52 percent of the Crédit Mobilier stock, and had used their control to oust Durant from every office in the company. And Henry V. Poor, editor of the American Railroad Journal, had just written, “There is nothing connected with the Union Pacific that is not wonderful.” In an editorial, he added, “The Union Pacific bonds are the safest and best investment at the same price in the country. Their security is absolute.”49 Durant did hold on to his UP stock and his office there, but he and the Ames brothers remained at loggerheads, with Durant looking to milk the government through the construction charges while they wanted to build a railroad that would return profits of its own.
Bond sales continued to be solid. In October, $672,000 were sold; in November, it was $700,000; in December, $2,450,000, or a total for the three months of $3,822,000. The U.S. government had accepted 240 miles of track at $16,000 per mile, to a total of $8,160,000 in loaned government bonds, and the price per mile was about to go up. The UP earned $3,465,000 for the year 1867, with operating expenses, including taxes, at $1,404,000, making $2,061,000 in net earnings.
The profit went to the Crédit Mobilier, whose trustees on December 12, 1867, declared the firm’s first dividend: each holder of ten shares (at $1,000 per share par value) got $600 of the first mortgage bonds and six shares of UP stock, for a total cash payment of 76 percent on the investment. A handsome payoff, with more to come. Oakes Ames started to get congressmen to buy Crédit Mobilier stock. His motive, he later said, was: “We wanted capital and influence. Influence not in legislation alone, but on credit, good, wide, and a general favorable feeling.” He placed the stock with nine U.S. representatives and two U.S. senators, amounting in all to 160 shares for $16,000. Not much, considering the amounts the company was working with, but enough to threaten to set off the biggest scandal of the nineteenth century.50
AT the beginning of November, the Casements and their men had reached within a few miles of Cheyenne. The town had already held an election on August 10 and set up a city government. On September 19, Cheyenne’s first newspaper, the Daily Leader, had been printed. By October 12, the end of track was at Dead Pine Bluffs (now Pine Bluffs), within thirty-five miles of Cheyenne. By October 29, it was within seventeen miles, and the anticipatory tension mounted. The UP was nearly five hundred miles from Omaha.
Jack Casement, like Grenville Dodge, had hoped for more. He wanted to get over Sherman Pass and beyond Dale Creek down to Laramie, but it wasn’t to be. The biggest holdup was ties. Indians had chased tie cutters out of the canyons on the North Platte, so Reed had to buy ties from the Missouri River Valley and have them—inferior cottonwoods—shipped west by train.
Some directors boasted that the UP would finish by 1870 and a man could go from New York to San Francisco in a week. Horace Greeley’s newspaper commented, “It is hard to realise that so great a distance may be accomplished in so short a time.”51 But to the men on the spot, that 1870 promise sounded more like boast than fact. The supply line was longer and growing, thus the flow of material was tricky to coordinate and time. Dodge was hoping to pile in supplies at Cheyenne during the winter to prevent supply problems in the spring, but no one knew what the winter would be like.
On November 16, 1867, the lead article in the Chicago Tribune read: “Dated Cheyenne 11/14/67; Yesterday, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, track-laying on the UP was completed to the city of Cheyenne, and in a few moments the whistle of the locomotive was heard above the noise of the hammers and the rattle of wagons all over the bustling city.” The entire population “rushed wildly to the railroad track,” where there was a banner, “Honor to whom honor is due; Old Casement we honor you.” Jack Casement made a speech. “Before nightfall Cheyenne was left half a mile in the rear. Cheyenne is now connected by rail with Chicago and the rest of mankind.”52
Shortly thereafter, Casement went into winter camp, with Cheyenne as the end of track. Julesburg began moving its tents. Dodge quickly decided that Cheyenne was an even worse Hell on Wheels. He called it “possibly the greatest gambling place ever established on the plains and it was full of desperate characters.”53 But he had his own report to the directors of the UP for 1867 to work on, and cleaning up the town could come later. Much of his work was centered on the exploring he did west of the Black Hills and east of the Salt Lake, where he was the first to make maps, and for which he has never received the credit due him.
Nor has Dodge or his men received credit for what they did to improve the UP in the face of the storms and floods of the winter of 1866–67. But Dodge knew what had been accomplished. In his report he wrote, “The track has been raised, new bridges constructed, larger waterways built, and the old structures enlarged, as shown [necessary] by the floods of this year, the highest and most extensive ever known in the country, and it can now be safely said that a repetition of these floods will not materially injure the road or delay the running of trains.”54
A large part of his report was on the valley of the Snake River and how easily the UP could turn it to advantage, but when Dodge was writing, in 1867, most Americans would have been glad to have one line crossing the country, and few of them dared to think of any others. Not Dodge. And he never hesitated to point out why. “The Pacific slope to-day has less than 1,000,000 inhabitants,” he wrote, “and they are yielding $50,000,000 to $60,000,000 of bullion yearly, with grain plus immense yields of wool, hides, wines, timber, and everything that can be produced in that delightful climate and fertile soil.” He further stated that “the best vegetable productions of the Mississippi and Missouri valleys are dwarfed in comparison with those of California. The wheat crop of California and Oregon for 1867 was 25,000,000 bushels, and far exceeded in value the gold product of both States.” Just think, he concluded, what the product of those states would be when the railroad was completed. Why, they would need two, three, four railroads. “No man to-day can even estimate it.” Finally, he concluded: “Without the Union Pacific railroad the country west of the Missouri river would be a burden to the government, and almost an uninhabitable waste; with it, it will soon be an empire, and one of our principal elements of power and strength.”55
Dodge had never been a man to brag or exaggerate or try to sell something through inflated words. Here, to the men of his time, he appeared to come close, or actually to go over the line. To readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, he appears modest. The reality far outstripped his prediction.
The same issue of the Chicago paper that announced the arrival of the first train to Cheyenne also noted that Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Miss Susan B. Anthony had come by train to Omaha, where they gave lectures “in favor of woman suffrage.”56
In politics, economics, culture, where and how people lived, America was changing.
*
I. When the track got beyond Laramie, Congress removed Wyoming from Dakota Territory and gave it a territorial status of its own. At the beginning of 1867, Wyoming had fewer than a thousand white inhabitants; by early 1868, thanks to the railroad, it was estimated to have forty thousand white people. The original idea was to name the territory “Lincoln.”
