One hundred and twenty-six miles in sixty days. That was doing better—— “But we’re a bit soft still,” Pat apologized.
The supply base was named Benton. It proved to be the “roaringest” town yet—a seething town of red dust, of North Platte, Julesburg, Cheyenne and Laramie gamblers and saloon keepers, and of night turned into day. The river was three miles away, east, and water for the town people had to be hauled by wagons, price ten cents a bucket; but many of the inhabitants cared little for water.
Benton grew in a twinkling to 5,000 citizens; take-down business blocks were put together and set up in a day; it was said that two boys with screw-drivers could set up an imitation “brown-stone front” house (which arrived all boxed and numbered), in three hours. One gambler outfit ran the Big Tent—a canvas building 100 feet long and forty feet wide, and floored for dancing. But in three months Benton was less than Julesburg; there was not even a station.
For the rails had again sprinted. They passed right through the ravine of Rawlins Spring, dipped down into the Red Desert at the place where George and the rest of the Bates party had been rescued, and following the Percy Browne survey they never stopped for water or anything. The construction-train brought the water from behind, in tanks, until wells were drilled; wagons carried it forward to the grading gangs. Much of the water was rank with alkali and soda; it made the men ill, and foamed and encrusted in the engine boilers; but the Red Desert had no terrors for the U. P. gangs.
Long before, the reconnoitering surveyors, led by the division chief, had picked out the landmarks of hills and streams, as guides for the location surveyors. The location surveyors pressed after, with their maps and charts, to drive the stakes—at four, eight, twelve miles a day. Eating the stakes, 100 miles at a mouthful, the grading gangs, 8,000 and 10,000 strong, tried to keep fifty miles ahead of end o’ track. In their rear, ten and twenty miles ahead of end o’ track, the bridge crews and culvert crews plied hammer and saw. Behind them, and four or five miles ahead of end o’ track, the tie-layers and ballasters tugged and tamped. And end o’ track pursued with 500 other men and fifty teams.
In a perfect cloud the freight and supply wagons toiled back and forth beside the grade. They formed a line of alkali dust 150 miles long, stirred up by the hoofs of 5,000 horses and mules. And east of end o’ track were the puffing boarding-train and the busy construction-train, while Jimmie Muldoon and his little brother dashed down and back, fetching the loads of rails.
The Red Desert never had seen the like. In fact, the whole United States was getting excited. Every night the news was flashed by telegraph to New York: “The Union Pacific today laid two (or three, or five) miles of track,” and it was published in large headlines across the first pages of the New York papers.
General Casement lived constantly at the front; his brother Dan Casement worked day and night moving the supplies out of the warehouses. General Dodge made trip after trip from Omaha and by stage and horse across the mountains, even clear to Humboldt Wells of Nevada. Mr. Silas Seymour, the New York consulting engineer, was out; so were Mr. Hoxie and Mr. Snyder, who had charge of the operating of the road, from Omaha. And in mid-summer there had come a very distinguished party indeed, who inspected from Fort Sanders to end o’ track.
These were General U. S. Grant, himself, the chief of the Army; General Sherman, General Phil Sheridan, half a dozen other famous ’way-up army officers, Mr. Thomas C. Durant, of New York, the vice-president of the Union Pacific company and the man who raised the funds; and Mr. Sidney Dillon, again—the chairman of the board of directors.
They rode in a special Pullman car, and the track-layer gang eased up long enough to cheer them as they tumbled out and gazed about.