The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

By an act passed in July, 1866, Congress did much to accelerate the construction of the road. Heretofore the junction point had been in the Nevada Desert, a hundred and fifty miles east of the California line. It was now provided that each road might build until it met the other. Since the mountain section, with the highest accompanying subsidies, was at hand, each of the companies was spurred on by its desire to get as much land and as many bonds as possible. The race which began in the autumn of 1866 ended only with the completion of the track in 1869. A mile a day had seemed like quick work at the start; seven or eight a day were laid before the end.

The English traveller, Bell, who published his New Tracks in North America in 1869, found somewhere an enthusiastic quotation admirably descriptive of the process. "Track-laying on the Union Pacific is a science," it read, "and we pundits of the Far East stood upon that embankment, only about a thousand miles this side of sunset, and backed westward before that hurrying corps of sturdy operatives with mingled feelings of amusement, curiosity, and profound respect. On they came. A light car, drawn by a single horse, gallops up to the front with its load of rails. Two men seize the end of a rail and start forward, the rest of the gang taking hold by twos until it is clear of the car. They come forward at a run. At the word of command, the rail is dropped in its place, right side up, with care, while the same process goes on at the other side of the car. Less than thirty seconds to a rail for each gang, and so four rails go down to the minute! Quick work, you say, but the fellows on the U. P. are tremendously in earnest. The moment the car is empty it is tipped over on the side of the track to let the next loaded car pass it, and then it is tipped back again; and it is a sight to see it go flying back for another load, propelled by a horse at full gallop at the end of 60 or 80 feet of rope, ridden by a young Jehu, who drives furiously. Close behind the first gang come the gaugers, spikers, and bolters, and a lively time they make of it. It is a grand Anvil Chorus that these sturdy sledges are playing across the plains. It is in a triple time, three strokes to a spike. There are ten spikes to a rail, four hundred rails to a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San Francisco. That's the sum, what is the quotient? Twenty-one million times are those sledges to be swung—twenty-one million times are they to come down with their sharp punctuation, before the great work of modern America is complete!"

Handling, housing, and feeding the thousands of laborers who built the road was no mean problem. Ten years earlier the builders of the Illinois Central had complained because their road from Galena and Chicago to Cairo ran generally through an uninhabited country upon which they could not live as they went along. Much more the continental railways, building rapidly away from the settlements, were forced to carry their dwellings with them. Their commissariat was as important as their general offices.

An acquaintance of Bell told of standing where Cheyenne now is and seeing a long freight train arrive "laden with frame houses, boards, furniture, palings, old tents, and all the rubbish" of a mushroom city. "The guard jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on the platform, called out with a flourish, 'Gentlemen, here's Julesburg.'" The head of the serpentine track, sometimes indeed "crookeder than the horn that was blown around the walls of Jericho," was the terminal town; its tongue was the stretch of track thrust a few miles in advance of the head; repeatedly as the tongue darted out the head followed, leaving across the plains a series of scars, marking the spots where it had rested for a time. Every few weeks the town was packed upon a freight train and moved fifty or sixty miles to the new end of the track. Its vagrant population followed it. It was at Julesburg early in 1867; at Cheyenne in the end of the year; at Laramie City the following spring. Always it was the most disreputably picturesque spot on the anatomy of the railroad.

In the fall of 1868 "Hell on Wheels," as Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, appropriately designated the terminal town, was at Benton, Wyoming, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from Omaha and near the military reservation at Fort Steele. In the very midst of the gray desert, with sand ankle-deep in its streets, the town stood dusty white—"a new arrival with black clothes looked like nothing so much as a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel." A less promising location could hardly have been found, yet within two weeks there had sprung up a city of three thousand people with ordinances and government suited to its size, and facilities for vice ample for all. The needs of the road accounted for it: to the east the road was operating for passengers and freight; to the west it was yet constructing track. Here was the end of rail travel and the beginning of the stage routes to the coast and the mines. Two years earlier the similar point had been at Fort Kearney, Nebraska.

The city of tents and shacks contained, according to the count of John H. Beadle, a peripatetic journalist, twenty-three saloons and five dance houses. It had all the worst details of the mining camp. Gambling and rowdyism were the order of day and night. Its great institution was the "'Big Tent,' sometimes, with equal truth but less politeness, called the 'Gamblers' Tent.'" This resort was a hundred feet long by forty wide, well floored, and given over to drinking, dancing, and gambling. The sumptuous bar provided refreshment much desired in a dry alkali country; all the games known to the professional gambler were in full blast; women, often fair and well-dressed, were there to gather in what the bartender and faro-dealer missed. Whence came these people, and how they learned their trade, was a mystery to Bowles. "Hell would appear to have been raked to furnish them," he said, "and to it they must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its highest seats and most diabolical service."

Behind the terminal town real estate disappointments, like beads, were strung along the cord of rails. In advance of the construction gangs land companies would commonly survey town sites in preparation for a boom. Brisk speculation in corner lots was a form of gambling in which real money was often lost and honest hopes were regularly shattered. Each town had its advocates who believed it was to be the great emporium of the West. Yet generally, as the railroad moved on, the town relapsed into a condition of deserted prairie, with only the street lines and débris to remind it of its past. Omaha, though Beadle thought in 1868 that no other "place in America had been so well lied about," and Council Bluffs retained a share of greatness because of their strategic position at the commencement of the main line. Tied together in 1872 by the great iron bridge of the Union Pacific, their relations were as harmonious as those of the cats of Kilkenny, as they quarrelled over the claims of each to be the real terminus. But the future of both was assured when the eastern roads began to run in to get connections with the West. Cheyenne, too, remained a city of some consequence because the Denver Pacific branched off at this point to serve the Pike's Peak region. But the names of most of the other one-time terminal towns were writ in sand.

The progress of construction of the road after 1866 was rapid enough. At the end of 1865, though the Central Pacific had started two years before the Union Pacific, it had completed only sixty miles of track, to the latter's forty. During 1866 the Central Pacific built thirty laborious miles over the mountains, and in 1867, forty-six miles, while in the same two years the Union Pacific built five hundred. In 1868, the western road, now past its worst troubles, added more than 360 to its mileage; the Union Pacific, unchecked by the continental divide, making a new record of 425. By May 10, 1869, the line was done, 1776 miles from Omaha to Sacramento. For the last sixteen months of the continental race the two roads together had built more than two and a half miles for every working day. Never before had construction been systematized so highly or the rewards for speed been so great.

Whether regarded as an economic achievement or a national work, the building of the road deserved the attention it received; yet it was scarcely finished before the scandal-monger was at work. Beadle had written a chapter full of "floridly complimentary notices" of the men who had made possible the feat, but before he went to press their reputations were blasted, and he thought it safest "to mention no names." "Never praise a man," he declared in disgust, "or name your children after him, till he is dead." Before the end of Grant's first administration the Crédit Mobilier scandal proved that men, high in the national government, had speculated in the project whose success depended on their votes. That many of them had been guilty of indiscretion, was perfectly clear, but they had done only what many of their greatest predecessors had done. Their real fault was made more prominent by their misfortune in being caught by an aroused national conscience which suddenly awoke to heed a call that it had ever disregarded in the past.

The junction point for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had been variously fixed by the acts of 1862 and 1864. In 1866 it was left open to fortune or enterprise, and had not Congress intervened in 1869 it might never have existed. In their rush for the land grants the two rivals hurried on their surveys to the vicinity of Great Salt Lake, where their advancing ends began to overlap, and continued parallel for scores of miles. Congress, noticing their indisposition to agree upon a junction, intervened in the spring of 1869, ordering the two to bring their race to an end at Promontory Point, a few miles northwest of Ogden on the shore of the lake. Here in May, 1869, the junction was celebrated in due form.