The long controversy between the War and Interior departments over the management of the tribes entered upon a new stage with the inauguration of Grant in 1869. One of the earliest measures of his administration was a bill erecting a board of civilian Indian commissioners to advise the Indian Department and promote the civilization of the tribes. A generous grant of two millions accompanied the act. More care was used in the appointment of agents than had hitherto been taken, and the immediate results seemed good when the Commissioner wrote his annual report in December, 1869. But the worst of the troubles with the Indians of the plains was over, so that without special effort peace could now have been the result.
[CHAPTER XIX]
THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS
Twenty years before the great tribes of the plains made their last stand in front of the invading white man overland travel had begun; ten years before, Congress, under the inspiration of the prophetic Whitney and the leadership of more practical men, had provided for a survey of railroad routes along the trails; on the eve of the struggle the earliest continental railway had received its charter; and the struggle had temporarily ceased while Congress, in 1867, sent out its Peace Commission to prepare an open way. That the tribes must yield was as inevitable as it was that their yielding must be ungracious and destructive to them. Too weak to compel their enemy to respect their rights, and uncertain what their rights were, they were too low in intelligence to realize that the more they struggled, the worse would be their suffering. So they struggled on, during the years in which the iron band was put across the continent. Its completion and their subjection came in 1869.
After years of tedious debate the earliest of the Pacific railways was chartered in 1862. The withdrawal of southern claims had made possible an agreement upon a route, while the spirit of nationality engendered by the Civil War gave to the project its final impetus. Under the management of the Central Pacific of California, the Union Pacific, and two or three border railways, provision was made for a road from the Iowa border to California. Land grants and bond subsidies were for two years dangled before the capitalists of America in the vain attempt to entice them to construct it. Only after these were increased in 1864 did active organization begin, while at the end of 1865 but forty miles of the Union Pacific had been built.
Building a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean was easily the greatest engineering feat that America had undertaken. In their day the Cumberland Road, and the Erie Canal, and the Pennsylvania Portage Railway had ranked among the American wonders, but none of these had been accompanied by the difficult problems that bristled along the eighteen hundred miles of track that must be laid across plain and desert, through hostile Indian country and over mountains. Worse yet, the road could hope for little aid from the country through which it ran. Except for the small colonies at Carson, Salt Lake, and Denver, the last of which it missed by a hundred miles, its course lay through unsettled wilderness for nearly the whole distance. Like the trusses of a cantilever, its advancing ends projected themselves across the continent, relying, up to the moment of joining, upon the firm anchorage of the termini in the settled lands of Iowa and California. Equally trying, though different in variety, were the difficulties attendant upon construction at either end.
The impetus which Judah had given to the Central Pacific had started the western end of the system two years ahead of the eastern, but had not produced great results at first. It was hard work building east into the Sierra Nevadas, climbing the gullies, bridging, tunnelling, filling, inch by inch, to keep the grade down and the curvature out. Twenty miles a year only were completed in 1863, 1864, and 1865, thirty in 1866, and forty-six in 1867—one hundred and thirty-six miles during the first five years of work. Nature had done her best to impede the progress of the road by thrusting mountains and valleys across its route. But she had covered the mountains with timber and filled them with stone, so that materials of construction were easily accessible along all of the costliest part of the line. Bridges and trestles could be built anywhere with local material. The labor problem vexed the Central Pacific managers at the start. It was a scanty and inefficient supply of workmen that existed in California when construction began. Like all new countries, California possessed more work than workmen. Economic independence was to be had almost for the asking. Free land and fertile soil made it unnecessary for men to work for hire. The slight results of the first five years were due as much to lack of labor as to refractory roadway or political opposition. But by 1865 the employment of Chinese laborers began. Coolies imported by the thousand and ably directed by Charles Crocker, who was the most active constructor, brought a new rapidity into construction. "I used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull," Crocker dictated to Bancroft's stenographer, "stopping along wherever there was anything amiss, and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not up to time." With roadbed once graded new troubles began. California could manufacture no iron. Rolling stock and rails had to be imported from Europe or the East, and came to San Francisco after the costly sea voyage, via Panama or the Horn. But the men directing the Central Pacific—Stanford, Crocker, Huntington, and the rest—rose to the difficulties, and once they had passed the mountains, fairly romped across the Nevada desert in the race for subsidies.
The eastern end started nearer to a base of supplies than did the California terminus, yet until 1867 no railroad from the East reached Council Bluffs, where the President had determined that the Union Pacific should begin. There had been railway connection to the Missouri River at St. Joseph since 1859, and various lines were hurrying across Iowa in the sixties, but for more than two years of construction the Union Pacific had to get rolling stock and iron from the Missouri steamers or the laborious prairie schooners. Until its railway connection was established its difficulty in this respect was only less great than that of the Central Pacific. The compensation of the Union Pacific came, however, in its roadbed. Following the old Platte trail, flat and smooth as the best highways, its construction gangs could do the light grading as rapidly as the finished single track could deliver the rails at its growing end. But for the needful culverts and trestles there was little material at hand. The willows and Cottonwood lining the river would not do. The Central Pacific could cut its wood as it needed it, often within sight of its track. The Union Pacific had to haul much of its wood and stone, like its iron, from its eastern terminus.
The labor problem of the Union Pacific was intimately connected with the solution of its Indian problem. The Central Pacific had almost no trouble with the decadent tribes through whom it ran, but the Union Pacific was built during the very years when the great plains were most disturbed and hostile forays were most frequent. Its employees contained large elements of the newly arrived Irish and of the recently discharged veterans of the Civil War. General Dodge, who was its chief engineer, has described not only the military guards who "stacked their arms on the dump and were ready at a moment's warning to fall in and fight," but the military capacity of the construction gangs themselves. The "track train could arm a thousand men at a word," and from chief constructor down to chief spiker "could be commanded by experienced officers of every rank, from general to a captain. They had served five years at the front, and over half of the men had shouldered a musket in many battles. An illustration of this came to me after our track had passed Plum Creek, 200 miles west of the Missouri River. The Indians had captured a freight train and were in possession of it and its crews." Dodge came to the rescue in his car, "a travelling arsenal," with twenty-odd men, most of whom were strangers to him; yet "when I called upon them to fall in, to go forward and retake the train, every man on the train went into line, and by his position showed that he was a soldier.... I gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, and at the command they went forward as steadily and in as good order as we had seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire."