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NARRATOR: The first transcontinental railroad
has been called the engineering marvel of the 19th century
and a flat-out swindle.
( engine chugging )
It opened new economies in the American West
while consuming vast quantities of its natural resources.
It birthed one way of life on the Great Plains
and destroyed another.
In making the road, a young nation
would display its capacity for boldness, ingenuity
and industry.
It would also reveal its capacity for greed, graft,
and mindless violence.
New heroes of business and industry
such as hardware dealer Collis P. Huntington
and construction boss Jack Casement
would make names for themselves,
as would the engaging
but rapacious scoundrel
MAN: These were bigger-than-life kinds of adventures
that were going on out West.
Here was in essence the railroad
representing civilization moving into the wilderness.
MAN: It was just the feat that boggled the imagination,
that from Omaha and the Missouri River
they could build all the way
to Sacramento on the Sacramento River
with nothing in between these two early settlements.
T
was the technological manifestation
of Manifest Destiny.
This was how we were going to make this all one country.
NARRATOR: Even before construction began,
the transcontinental railroad had precious freight to bear--
the hopes and dreams of an entire nation.
It hauled the promise of new wealth to the filthy rich,
the landless poor, and everybody in between.
As the road was built, Huntington, Casement and Durant
would be joined by congressmen, engineers, prostitutes, laborers
and Main Street merchants in a desperate race for the loot.
( whistle blowing )
And the stakes were not merely personal.
With
omplete,
America could take its place as the first nation of the world
in commerce, in government,
in intellectual and moral supremacy.
NARRATOR: The man who would fire America's first transcontinental railroad,
Theodore Judah, was born in 1826 to a nation on the rise.
The United States was a young republic
but already possessed of big ideas for itself.
And as early as the 1830s,
while Judah was still a schoolboy,
pamphleteers began to champion one entirely new idea--
a railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The earliest railroad projectors were zealous as missionaries
and about as practical.
None of these men had even seen the far West,
yet they insisted this railroad
would be the main commercial road between Europe and Asia.
"The whole commerce of the vast world," one exclaimed,
"will be tumbled into our lap.
Few Americans bought into these dreamy projections.
"A land," said one United States senator,
"which no American citizen should be compelled to inhabit
unless as a punishment for crime."
MAN: There's so much land, so much space, air,
that the clouds, everything,
it's... it's... almost magnified.
The Rocky Mountains to the West, they're awesome.
Rivers when they're flooding, awesome.
A tornado, awesome.
So these things are much greater than a human being.
The country was empty, essentially.
Miles and miles of sage brush between anything they recognized
in the Missouri River Valley
until they got into the mountains of the West.
It was basically a big blank slate.
NARRATOR: There were a few lonely military and trading posts out West,
the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City
and about 350,000 Indians-- some friendly, many not.
And as discovery of gold in California
began to draw travelers across that land,
those who made the nearly 2,000-mile trip
found out how malicious the interior West could be.
MAN: It was five months of sheer misery
and there were many people who died along the way,
whether by the hands of Indians or from dysentery or cholera,
accidents, starvation, lack of water.
HUFFMAN: The 40-mile desert got its name
during the overland immigration to California
during the gold rush.
It was the distance
from the last good water of the Humboldt River
as it evaporated and trickled into the sand
before they finally got to the Truckee River.
40 miles without water
in a world that's... that's powered by animals
is a long distance.
WOMAN:
As th
culty,
they might
to lighten
And so they might have tossed aside things like cookstoves,
rocking chairs, furniture,
almost any type of household goods.
And certainly all along those trails there are graves
where people had to bury their loved ones
and move on without them.
BAIN: There was a danger of the bodies being dug up by wolves
and other predators,
so usually people would be buried right on the trail itself
and then the constant tapping down
of all of those covered wagons going past
would just harden the earth and make it impossible
for the grave to be desecrated.
So most of the graves were not marked
and the
knowing
how many thousands of people died along that route.
NARRATOR: As gold-rich veins of ore were cracked open in California,
the U.S. Army began to worry
about protecting this valuable but far-flung state
and safeguarding both the people
and precious goods flowing east and west.
A railroad could do it with all sorts of side benefits.
Railroads in the East
were already generating enormous revenues for owners
an
wns
Many in Congress recognized
that there was potential in a railroad to the western sea
and agreed to fund surveys of possible routes
or what was known as the Pacific Railroad.
HUFFMAN: They had personal stakes in the matter--
very realistic stakes.
The co
tive
on behalf of specific geographical points
to be starting points for the railroad
were for the most part invested in those communities.
Stephen Douglas owned property in the site of Chicago.
He also owned area in Duluth.
Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, was very interested
that the railroad would go through Missouri
and head off toward the Rockies that way.
Stephen Douglas would not cooperate
unless the railroad went through Illinois.
The Southern politicians, people like Jefferson Davis,
wanted it to start in Georgia and move across.
There was just no way
that they could come to any kind of decision.
NARRATOR: Though Congress appeared to be hopelessly deadlocked,
the idea of a coast-to-coast railroad
had captured the imagination of engineers all over America
and none more than Theodore Judah.
Judah was a practically trained civil engineer,
on east
t age 13
before heading west in 1854
to build the first railroad in California.
HUFFMAN: His wife years later said
that Theodore Judah took the job that took him to California
because he wanted to have something to do
with the Pacific Railroad.
I suspect every civil engineer in the United States at the time
wanted to have something to do with the Pacific Railroad.
He really had what his wife liked to call
the Pacific Railroad bug.
And there were some people in Sacramento
who called him Crazy Judah
because he was such a monomaniac about the railroad.
NARRATOR: Theodore Judah had passable engineering skills,
but a genius for friendly persuasion.
He c
ize
with driving wheels 14 feet in diameter
pulling freight and passengers across the plains
at a hundred miles an hour.
Judah also understood that before investors came onboard,
they wanted to know what it would really cost
to build the road through prairie, desert and mountains,
to grade and bridge and tunnel
and to lay nearly 2,000 miles of iron rail.
But Judah simply didn't have the money
to conduct the sort of survey
that would answer those questions.
So he went to Congress to try to get a few happy incentives
for potential investors.
When Theodore Judah arrived in Washington in the fall of 1859,
talk of slavery and secession
was crowding out all other business
in the nation's capital.
Still, he pressed his case.
Even without a proper survey,
Judah insisted a railroad could race across the plains,
scale the Rockies and push easily through the Great Basin.
The biggest obstacle was the Sierra Nevada Mountains
and he'd yet to find a way through.
In h
s,
Judah's railroad would skirt the range to the North.
HUFFMAN: In 1860 he's still thinking in terms of a railroad
coming around the northern part of the state.
And u
time,
he had never been in the Sierra Nevada looking for railroads.
But in July of 1860, California is a different world
than it was when he left the previous October.
Everybody is trying to get to Virginia City, Nevada.
The Comstock was discovered in late 1859.
California had basically been in a depression for five years,
the gold rush had been over
and suddenly there's silver just across the mountains,
an
om ity.
And people are beginning to think
they could build a railroad to Virginia City.
There's suddenly financial incentive
to build directly into the Sierra.
I
0,
a local storekeeper named Daniel Strong
invited Judah to have a look at a place
where he thought a railroad could cross the Sierras.
If it worked, Strong knew,
it was the straightest line to the Comstock Lode,
and his little town of Dutch Flat would prosper.
It was a difficult, two-day ride to the summit,
but on top, when Judah looked east
out along an immigrant trail largely abandoned
after the Donner Party's ugly demise
the engineer understood immediately what he saw.
HUFFMAN: So many places in the Sierra Nevada there's a double summit.
You come across the mountains and you drop down into a valley
such as the valley where Lake Tahoe is
and then on the other side
you've got another mountain ridge that you have to cross.
And at Donner you've only got one summit.
You come up the American River, you go down the Truckee River.
And by being on the ridge above the river,
you have a nice continuous plane that you use as a ramp.
He knew that this was going to be a shortcut to Virginia City,
this was going to make money.
NARRATOR: Judah and Strong drew up articles of incorporation
for the Central Pacific Railroad Company
and started looking for investors.
At a meeting in Sacramento,
Judah managed to entice
one very important Main Street businessman.
Collis P. Huntington was a hardware wholesaler
known for his willingness to bury competition
and for his shrewd business sense.
When Huntington said
he was considering Judah's railroad proposition,
other Sacramento merchants followed:
Huntington's business partner Mark Hopkins,
dry-goods merchant Charles Crocker
and his brother, the attorney E.B. Crocker
and Leland Stanford, a wholesale grocer and would-be governor.
Taken together, the five were worth less than $150,000.
T
and fiercely protective of their solid credit ratings.
and their revenues falling, this new project offered some hope.
Even if the Sacramento merchants
failed to get a railroad through the Sierras,
they could at least use Judah's engineering
for a wagon road to Virginia City.
HUFFMAN: Huntington was very practical.
And he wanted to know, "What's the return?"
Hopkins didn't want any part of it.
He was saying, "What are we doing
"getting involved in this railroad
"if we've already got a good thing going
with this hardware business?"
And so all they did initially
was give Judah enough money to do a survey.
in
1,
Judah went back to Washington, D.C.,
this time with maps and with profile.
NARRATOR: In an office in the capitol building,
Judah unfurled a 60-foot long map
and smaller profiles
of his proposed line across the Sierras.
When representatives and senators wandered in,
the 35-year-old engineer
was always there to explain his plan.
It would take just over $12 million
to build the line across California,
he'd tell his visitors.
He'd show them where the bridges and tunnels would go,
the
s.
BAIN: Looking at a map was one thing.
But what Judah would have to face in reality
was the 7,000-foot-high Sierras with the terrible weather,
the 30-foot snow drifts,
the mud slides, the deep rock cuts that had to be done,
the tunnels that had to be dug.
It was going to be a tremendous amount of work
to actually get this dream across the mountains.
NARRATOR In the Sierras,
Judah's plan called for bridging rivers and ravines,
carving 20-foot-wide shelves out of sheer mountain faces
mo
g--
through solid granite.
And there was not a manufacturer on the Pacific coast
who could provide them locomotives or railroad cars,
let alone drills, spikes, and rails.
Many in Congress shied
at starting such a difficult and costly project
as the Civil War raged.
But President Abraham Lincoln,
who had long championed a Pacific railroad,
was lobbying hard for the project.
MAN: Lincoln had a problem:
the Federal Union was falling apart.
He was fighting a costly and bloody civil war
to put the Union together.
And here we had three Pacific states--
Oreg
--
three Pacific states that were a continent away.
It was essential for the conduct of the Civil War
to have California money.
California had a fairly strong secessionist movement.
There was no way of guaranteeing
that California would remain in the Union.
That
ential
to
er.
NARRATOR: On July 1, 1862, President Lincoln signed a bill
that gave Judah's own Central Pacific
the right to build from Sacramento east
and chartered a second company, the Union Pacific,
to build from the Missouri River west.
The legislation did not specify a meeting point
for the two roads, but it did grant the railroad builders
6,400 acres of land for every mile of track laid,
and as much as $48,000 in government bonds
for each mile completed.
There were strings, of course,
and enough of them to hang both companies.
The government would withhold nearly 20% of the bonds
until the entire line was in working order,
and it would not release a single dime to either company
until it had built 40 miles of working railroad.
If the road was not completed
between the Missouri and Sacramento Rivers
within a dozen years,
all railroad company assets would be forfeited.
HUFFMAN: When Theodore Judah returned
with a franchise to build a Pacific railroad,
I think his partners-- and at that time
they were all equal partners in this corporation--
I think they were a little bit surprised,
and realized that it was time
that they had to put up or shut up.
NARRATOR On the morning of January 8, 1863,
with Judah notably absent,
the Central Pacific
be
e.
In downtown Sacramento, where the railroad grade began,
thousands of people watched California's new governor,
Leland Stanford, throw the first shovelful of dirt.
From the bunting-fronted grandstand,
dignitaries heralded the coming of "A mighty tide of wealth
such as mankind has never realized before."
When the party broke up, the C.P. partners
found themselves alone.
Few others were willing to invest in such a dicey project.
When they began issuing contracts
to local construction firms, it proved a mess.
They discovered that the contractors were bidding
against each other for the fairly limited labor market.
And they weren't getting the job done.
And so it seemed to them
that a better way to do it was to--
for one of them to go out and just have one contract
and supervise and coordinate all of the construction effort.
And for whatever reason,
Charles Crocker was the man that became the contractor initially.
And Theodore Judah was uncomfortable with that.
BAIN: He just did not trust Crocker.
He didn't trust the idea.
He was afraid that these men
were going to try to bleed the railroad dry.
that they were really serious about doing it.
GAMST: Judah didn't have a good working relationship after the start
with the big four.
And they really took the reins
after they could see there was feasible civil engineering ways
of going through the mountains, and that's what they did.
They left Judah by the wayside.
NARRATOR: Even as their crews were grading along Judah's line,
the Sacramento shopkeepers
were slow in paying their chief engineer.
They canceled contracts
Judah had made with iron makers in the East,
even questioned his lines of survey.
HUFFMAN: In the summer of 1863 there's a showdown,
and they basically tell Judah,
"Either you buy us out or we'll buy you out."
But there was absolutely no way
they were going to go down the same path together
from that point on.
Officially Judah was still carried
r
of the
ailroad,
but Judah sailed east,
for the East Coast in the fall of 1863.
He had seen grade built.
He had seen a bridge built at Sacramento.
He had not seen any rail laid.
He had not seen any locomotives.
He had not seen any part of the railroad.
Judah is heading to New York.
We know that he's looking for partners there
to help him buy out these guys in California
that he's not getting along with.
Judah was really convinced
that he could find some backers in the East.
He may have even had them lined up.
So he and his wife got on the boat
and headed down to Panama, crossed Panama,
got on another boat heading for New York.
And we will never know who those secret partners might have been,
because Judah contracted either typhoid or yellow fever
along the way.
NARRATOR: When Judah's ship docked in Manhattan,
the 37-year-old engineer
was carried off the boat on a litter
and deposited in a sickbed in the Metropolitan Hotel.
On October 26, 1863,
while Judah lay a continent away,
the first rails of the Central Pacific
were spiked to their ties.
Before the news of the event reached him,
Theodore Judah was dead.
The 1862 Railroad Act
did not specify a starting point in the East.
Railroads had already been built out past the Mississippi River,
would be somewhere along the Missouri.
Con
ee.
The burden of decision, like so many other burdens,
fell on the stooped shoulders of President Abraham Lincoln.
In November of 1863,
two days before he gave the Gettysburg Address,
Lincoln puzzled over the maps and financial affidavits
provided him by the Union Pacific company.
Lincoln knew the 450 miles
across Nebraska's Platte River Valley
offered a cheap and easy start.
He also knew he had political favors to repay,
so he chose, as the eastern terminus, Council Bluffs, Iowa.
MAN: He was nominated in 1860 on the third ballot.
Seward had been leading on the first ballot,
and his managers made all kinds of deals
and the bulk of the Iowa delegates
at
an
switched over to Lincoln.
And he really owed them something
after the 1860 election
and this was kind of a payoff to Iowa.
NARRATOR: This was happy news for Thomas Clark Durant.
The vice president
of the new Union Pacific Railroad Company
was heavily invested
in real estate just across the river in Omaha, Nebraska.
That real estate would be much more valuable
if the railroad west began there.
So the real terminus, as far as Durant was concerned,
would be Omaha.
Thomas C. Durant had begun his professional career
as a doctor of ophthalmology,
but found the world of business a more invigorating occupation
for a man of his thrusting personality.
He was a restless, energetic man
who loved making money and knew how to do it.
In fact, throughout his life
Durant showed a remarkable integrity of purpose.
The Civil War, he discovered,
was a ***-up way to cash in
Durant comes across to me as a scoundrel.
He's like someone that would bet on the other team.
He would manipulate the market against his own company
just for his own personal fortune.
HIRSHSON: He was a tremendous stock manipulator.
In one episode, he made five million dollars in one week
pushing the stock of one railroad down
and the stock of another railroad up
and then going back into the original stock.
Durant had seen railroads being built
across Michigan and into Illinois.
He knew that there was a lot of money to be made,
but usually it was along the side.
His whole life with the Union Pacific,
he really, I don't think, cared
whether it actually got finished.
He just wanted to make as much money
along the side as he could,
and the people who worked
NARRATOR: Durant's earlier railroad projects
were small potatoes compared to the Union Pacific.
This new road was the biggest single
government-funded construction project ever,
and the
nt
He managed-- illegally--
to get control of $2.2 million worth of shares
in the Union Pacific,
installed his own straw man as president,
and took charge of the company.
In 1864, in hopes of getting extra government aid,
the doctor distributed $435,000 in cash
and a quarter-million dollars in bonds among legislators,
their proxies, friends and relatives.
"If you think it safe,"
Congressman Lorenzo De Medici Sweat wrote to Durant,
"please let me into some purchase of stock, will you?
"I will give my personal attention
to your interests here."
The honorable Sweat and his colleagues
passed a revised railroad bill in the summer of 1864.
The new act doubled the land grants,
permitted the U.P. and the C.P. to borrow money
in advance of the line built,
and ceded to the railroad companies
all coal, iron, and precious minerals
found on the granted lands.
With these new enticements in place,
Durant set up a separate corporation:
a top-secret entity called Credit Mobilier.
Only a few of Durant's special friends
were offered stock in the new company.
The C
almost
a revolutionary business practice at the time.
It was the idea of a railroad company
being able to borrow money
on the land that they didn't even own yet,
but would if they actually built the railroad.
That was the first principal.
The second principal, though,
was the real center of energy for it,
and that was the notion of limited liability.
Up until then anybody investing in a company,
if the company got into trouble, that person would be liable
for not only what they had in the company,
but their own personal fortunes,
their own houses, their own property.
But with this new idea, if a company got into trouble
the investor would only lose his investment.
And this was a kind of an insulation
that had never been practiced in business before.
The Credit Mobilier was really formed
by the directors of the Union Pacific to do the construction.
Now, originally Durant gave the contract
to an associate named Herbert Hoxie.
What Hoxie did was
hold the contract for a short period of time,
sell it to Durant for $10,000.
So the Credit Mobilier would build the road
and then charge the Union Pacific.
In effect,
Durant was paying himself for building the railroad.
The Hoxie contract called
for building the railroad up the Platte Valley
at $50,000 per mile.
Peter Dey was the chief engineer
and he made the statement that anybody who charged $50,000
for a railroad down the Platte Valley
was nothing but a thief.
NARRATOR: The contract was worth $12.5 million
for building the first 247 miles of the Union Pacific Railroad.
Peter Dey figured it would cost half that.
T
But the doctor knew nobody was really watching.
Congressional oversight was virtually nonexistent.
So Durant's next move was the boldest yet.
They were being paid by the mile,
so why not make the line longer?
So what he did was he took a perfectly good railroad survey
and he lengthened it with this tremendous oxbow-shaped route
that went out in a different direction from Omaha
an
on
dol
ket
in the bargain.
NARRATOR: Peter Dey resigned in protest,
More than two years after Congress
had chartered the company,
the Union Pacific was little more than a paper railroad.
When the Civil War came to an end in March of 1865,
the U.P. had not spiked a single length of track.
When the railroad's great champion, Abraham Lincoln,
was assassinated a month later,
the company still had not laid any iron.
And on Independence Day, 1865, still nothing.
Many in Congress were wondering if they should simply cut losses
and withdraw support from the Union Pacific Railroad.
Thomas C. Durant had good instincts for self-preservation
and he understood it was now in his interest
to start building a railroad.
Suddenly he cared about nothing else.
He j
ble ms out
to the poor people who were working for him out on the line
saying, "Hurry up, hurry up, we are far behind our time."
"What are you doing wrong?
"I can replace you very easily.
"I want more work out of you.
"I will not accept no for an answer
and I will not accept failure."
NARRATOR: Day after day, Durant wired his crew bosses in Nebraska:
"Do you or do you not want more men to lay 60 miles this fall?
"If so, what kind?
"If men are not fed well and made comfortable,
"they will not stay.
"See to this.
What is the matter that you can't lay track faster?"
NARRATOR: For the Central Pacific,
the earliest work nearest Sacramento
had proved the least difficult.
By the spring of 1865,
the company had received more than $2 million
worth of federal and state bonds for track built,
and had revenues in both passenger and freight service
for the 31 miles between Sacramento and Newcastle.
Collis Huntington had moved to New York
where he could arrange for shipments of iron
and raise East Coast money.
Charlie Crocker had found a construction boss--
the profane, hard-driving James Harvey Strobridge--
who could run the mostly Irish immigrant crews.
But Strobridge had constant problems finding dependable men
to fill grading and track laying crews.
California still had a small population
and most laborers preferred work nearer the comfort of town
or out in the gold fields.
BAIN: They put out handbills all over northern California
advertising they needed 5,000 workers immediately
for good pay.
They advertised for 5,000 and 200 showed up
and they were absolutely desperate.
They finally had the money--
money was burning a hole in their pockets--
and
do?
Charlie Crocker suggested to their labor boss,
James Harvey Strobridge,
"Let's try some of the Chinese from down in the Valley
a
."
And Strobridge didn't like this idea.
He said, "They can't be good workers.
"They're too weak, they're too insubstantial."
WOMAN: Strobridge did not feel
that the Chinese were physically able to do
the kind of heavy labor that was required,
especially in the Sierra Nevadas--
the rocks, the granite,
you know, the moving of this massive material.
And Charles Crocker said, "No, no, they can do it.
They built the Great Wall-- they can do it."
BAIN: Crocker persuaded him to try 50, and the 50 worked out.
So they tried another 50, and those 50 worked out.
So then they hired another 100,
and slowly but surely, the labor force built up.
They especially recruited the Chinese.
They sent out circulars saying,
you know, "Good jobs on the railroad," and it attracted us.
We needed the money.
NARRATOR: In the Kwangtung province of China,
decades of flood, famine, war and depression
had left much of the population without a decent living.
Many men left home for railroad jobs in America
to support their families.
Others left simply to make a new life in a new land.
CHIN:
t
y.
They saw it as a country-- just a country for anybody.
And the Chinese wanted a piece.
They were willing to work for it,
but they wanted a piece for themselves,
a piece for their families.
BAIN: They were certainly harder workers and more conscientious--
they didn't get drunk every night and have fights.
But one of the most interesting things
that I think kept them going was just the question of diet.
( sizzling )
If you went to the Irish camps,
you would find them eating boiled beef and boiled beans
and drinking boiled coffee.
And if you went over to the Chinese,
you'd begin to smell the fertile aromas of garlic and cuttlefish
and stir-fried pork.
When they drank, they didn't drink from ditches,
they drank boiled tea.
And they also didn't come down with dysentery
the way the Irish workers did, because of this boiled tea.
CHUNG: It was at least better than working in China
where there was very little food,
and famine and starvation going on.
A Sunday meal for the railroad workers
was an elaborate banquet in their eyes.
They would have imported foods from China
that they were familiar with: oysters, dried meats.
an
.
This was really a magnificent meal.
NARRATOR: By the turn of 1866,
the Central Pacific had 6,000 Chinese immigrants
on the payroll, from ages 13 to 60.
As much as 80% of the C.P. workforce was Chinese.
For $30 a month, less board,
the men worked six days a week, ten to 12 hours a day,
chopping down trees, blasting out cuts
or shoveling in huge fills to even the grade.
At the imposing Cape Horn, rising above the town of Colfax,
they had to make a ledge where track could be run
1,300 feet above the valley floor.
BAIN: The only way to get the railroad line across was to start slow,
to carve out a narrow shelf just wide enough for a man to walk.
Then over time it could be enlarged
until they could get entire crews out
to chisel away the cliff face.
CHIN: They had to cut very hard rock.
It had to be cut by hand.
Tediously cut by hand.
It's hard, back-breaking, dangerous work.
BAIN: They lowered them by ropes,
probably looping them around trees a couple of times
up on the top.
And they would drill in a foot into this cliff face
and then they would fill it with black power
and attach a fuse and light it,
and then scramble up those ropes as quickly as they could.
NARRATOR: By mid-summer 1866,
track-laying crews were pushing out beyond Colfax,
55 miles east of Sacramento,
laying 350 iron rails, 2,500 wooden ties,
and 10,000 spikes every mile-- and that was the easy labor.
Grading remained the balkiest work.
Up to 500 kegs of black powder a day
were spent blasting through cuts.
Deep ravines had to be bridged by wooden trestles or dirt fill.
As the crews pushed farther up
the western slope of the Sierra Nevada,
shale, sandstone and cemented gravel
began to give way to granite, and the big question loomed:
could those mountains be bested?
Thomas C. Durant was still in a swivet.
The Union Pacific had completed
only 40 miles of railroad in 1865,
and they were the easiest 40 on the line.
But as the company geared up for the 1866 work season,
the
or.
Tens of thousands of Civil War veterans had landed out of work,
roaming the country, anxious to get as far as possible
from the scenes of horror they'd witnessed.
Durant hired as his new chief engineer
General Grenville M. Dodge.
Dodge had been a commander for the Union Army
in Tennessee and Georgia, and then on the Great Plains.
He was a confidante
of the two most important military men in the country--
Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman--
and he had already proved a useful agent to Durant.
As a Union officer,
Dodge had provided the doctor classified intelligence
to aid his contraband cotton operation.
HIRSHSON: Dodge was probably as good a chief engineer--
that is, surveyor, locating routes--
he wa
r Dey,
but he was nowhere near as honest.
He was imbued
with this overwhelming desire to make money.
NARRATOR: The other man Durant sought that winter
was a former Union Army cavalry officer named Jack Casement.
Jack and his brother Dan
had a reputation in railroad construction.
On the
Erie,
C
id
three miles of track in a single day.
But when Durant pushed him to take the track-laying contract,
Jack said he'd have to check with Mrs. Casement.
He lived in a democratic household, he said,
and generally his wife outvoted him.
In fact, Frances "Frank" Casement was in a fragile state.
Work and war had kept her husband
away from their Painesville, Ohio, home
nearly five of their seven years of marriage.
A
the Casement's four-year-old son Charlie
had died of scarlet fever.
But like Dodge, Jack Casement was a man in a hurry,
convinced misfortune could be outrun
and fortune could be run down.
Casement spent the winter in Omaha
overseeing construction of boxcars specially outfitted
to serve as dormitories-on-wheels
for his track-laying crews,
waiting for the spring thaw so supplies and iron
could be shipped up the Missouri River to U.P. warehouses,
and trying mightily
to hold to the temperance pledge he'd given his wife
who remained home in Ohio.
FEMALE READER: "My dear husband,
"when I go to bed here all alone,
"I think so much about Charlie,
"and I see his little pale face while he lay sick,
"then his little body as he lay in his coffin,
"and then that little mound of earth.
"I have never missed Charlie so much since he died
as I have since you left me..."
MALE READER: "My dear wife,
"I'm first rate, but impatient
"to have the ice go out of the river.
"It is mighty lonesome here and I am impatient to get to work.
"I want to see the thing start before I leave here.
"Just as soon as I get a bar laid,
"I mean to travel home for my true love.
than
ides."
FEMALE READER: "My dear husband,
"How many lonesome Sundays I have had in the past five years
"and I suppose I must expect more if I live.
"This cold weather does not look much
"like opening up the river, does it?
"I am trying to be patient, but it is rather hard.
Good night, dearest."
MALE READER: "My dear wife,
"The river is beginning to rise.
"I've been working with a few men
"grading and putting in a side track.
"We will commence track laying next Monday.
God bless you and keep you happy-- Jack."
NARRATOR: The flat Nebraska prairie presented little difficulty
for U.P. crews.
The real obstacles were the people
who saw themselves as the stewards of the land:
the northern and southern Cheyenne Indians,
the Sioux and the Arapaho.
Skilled on horseback and with bow and arrow or rifle,
these tribes moved by season
from field of plenty to field of plenty,
from hunting ground to hunting ground,
sustained by the seemingly inexhaustible supply of buffalo.
FIXICO: The buffalo is a great symbol
and great being to the Plains people,
because it's really their staff of life
and even more than that.
They figured out how to use the buffalo 52 different ways
for food, supplies,
war hunting implements, things like that.
And so the hooves, for example, are boiled to use as glue.
The hump back is--
that part of the buffalo is
rdy
and so it's used for making shields.
The hides-- making a teepee, for example.
Took about 12 to 14 hides to do that.
NARRATOR: For many Plains Indian tribes,
the buffalo was the center of the natural world.
Following the path of this animal,
they learned to respect the potency of nature
in its power to give and to take away.
So when white settlers began streaming across the plains
toward gold in California and then nearby Colorado,
Indians regarded them as a new force of nature,
and an increasingly dangerous one.
These travelers spread smallpox and typhoid,
ran off buffalo herds, decimated the Indians' foraging fields
and fouled their water sources.
By the time Pacific Railroad construction began,
starvation and disease had wracked the Cheyenne, the Sioux
and the Arapaho.
FIXICO: The white intruders were changing the land.
The game was becoming more difficult to find.
Elk and buffalo, antelope
was becoming more difficult to pursue
because the people on the wagon trains, they also needed food.
And obviously you had warriors who were,
especially young warriors, who were very upset by this.
NARRATOR: Though many of the Plains Indians
remained on friendly terms with the Anglo-American travelers,
the more militant tribes treated them
as they would any other rival:
they robbed and looted wagon trains,
raided settlements and ranches, stole horses, mules and cattle.
On occasion they killed, scalped and mutilated their victims.
Peace was fragile.
Settlers rarely tried to distinguish
and u
ans.
U.S. militia units didn't always recognize a white flag.
GAMST:
Governor Evans of Colorado territory in 1864
abrogates the treaties with the Plains Indians.
And then he encourages Colorado militias,
vigilante-type militias,
to go attack and raid the Indian camps.
And in 1864,
the camp of Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle was raided,
and about 140 men, women and children of the Cheyenne
were badly butchered by these vigilante militias.
They were clubbed, stabbed, shot.
Accounts of the time talk about Indian women
trying to crawl away from the carnage
and being chased down and killed.
NARRATOR: Immediate and bloody reprisals
followed the butchery at Sand Creek.
An army of a thousand northern Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux
stalked up the Platte Valley,
murdering soldiers and civilians,
menacing stage lines and wagon trains,
ire
and destroying the town of Julesburg, Colorado,
which sat astride the proposed U.P. line.
But by then, Indian leaders understood
dramatics would not slow
the steady press of westward migration.
Pawnee warriors read the signs
and joined up with the U.S. Cavalry
to help protect western settlers from other warring parties.
The more visionary Cheyenne and Sioux leaders, like Red Cloud,
concentrated their efforts north in the Powder River region,
the only good buffalo hunting left to them.
Farther south, near the Union Pacific line,
their
mply
BAIN: The winter of 1865 and 1866 had been a very brutal one.
It had been colder than usual
and the Indian tribes had suffered terribly from famine.
They had scheduled peace talks for June.
And the tribal leaders were inclined to wait to see
what the whites were going to bring to the peace table.
But they just absolutely could not control
the younger hotheads
who as soon as they could get out onto the plains,
were going out and rustling horses and livestock
NARRATOR: Small parties of Union Pacific surveyors
were harassed and shot at, a few men were even killed.
And their boss, Grenville Dodge, was apoplectic,
sending pleas for help to his old army mate,
General William Tecumseh Sherman.
So the commander of the U.S. Army's western district
headed out to assess the problem for himself.
HIRSHSON: They met very few Indians at all.
When they did meet a few Indians,
they were very, very friendly.
When they got to Colorado City, a delegation came and asked them
about protection against the Indians.
And Sherman's answer was,
"There's no Indian menace around here.
"All you want is the Army stationed here
so it'll make Colorado City prosperous."
He came to the conclusion in 1866
that the Indian menace was vastly overrated.
NARRATOR: By the summer of 1866,
the Casement crews were a juggernaut.
In July they built past the hundred-mile mark,
by fall, past the hundredth meridian.
Jack Casement's men made as much as three miles in a day,
fixing into place 300 tons of iron rail in 12 hours' time,
moving down the tracks
in the 85-foot-long rolling dormitories Casement had built.
BAIN: Casement knew how to manage men.
He knew how to get a ten- or 11-hour day
He was very efficient and tough about moving forward.
MAN: Up!
GAMST: The model of organization,
the marshaling of material logistically, etc.,
was done along military lines.
A lot of the construction workers were
Confederate and Union soldiers used to taking orders
and the discipline that this kind of work required.
BAIN: Plus you had thousands of poor Irish
who had just come over after the potato famine.
They'd filled up the teeming cities of the East
and slowly been pushed westward.
It was a rough life.
The days were long, the work was hard,
th
led,
there was always the threat
that there was an Indian band over the next hillside.
GAMST: Well, if you're a laborer there, there wasn't too much good news.
They had simple, simple foods:
boiled beans, the equivalent of hardtack.
The water often had Giardia in it-- it caused dysentery.
They lived in tents, and the outfit cars
with their berths four- or five-high that you slept in.
They had very little opportunity
for baths or bathing,
So the stench both within the cars and outside of the cars
had to be tremendous.
You got your two or so dollars a day
and your inadequate meals, such as they were,
and then you could look forward
to the pleasures of "Hell On Wheels."
NARRATOR: Hell On Wheels was a town made to carry.
As the railroad workers moved down the prairie,
the entire town could be packed onto flatbed cars or wagons
and hauled to the next felicitous spot,
reconstituted and renamed.
BOWERS: End-of-tracks towns sprang up very quickly
as t
.
Many of the buildings were tents,
maybe four posts in the ground with a canvas top for a cover.
Many of the gambling halls and the saloons
would operate 24 hours a day.
And one of the things that settlers mentioned frequently
in their letters and journals was the annoyance from the noise
of these gambling halls,
the saloons, people shouting in the night.
It was very noisy, very crowded and very rough.
Most of the women coming along in that point
were entrepreneurs.
They were prostitutes
who were here primarily for the same reason
that the men were following this westward press of empire,
which was to make quick money, and lots of it.
And so they would locate themselves
wherever there was a fluid population of men
with money to spend.
READER: "It cost a man
abo
ur
"to trip the light fantastic with those soiled doves,
"and if he had anything left, they would drug him
"before kicking him into the street.
"Immediately in front of Bull's Big Tent occurred
"the first *** I ever witnessed.
"In ten minutes after that shot was fired,
"the excitement had subsided.
"The street was clear, the games were in full blast,
"and the cry of 'Promenade to the bar!'
was
nt."
W.O. Owen.
BOWERS: Bull's Big Tent was a full-service establishment.
They had almost every kind of gambling game
that anyone could desire to play.
And in the back there were cubicles
that were partitioned with canvas
for the women to transact business with their customers.
And t
ed
in the rear of Bull's Big Tent, and specialized in the treatment
of sexually transmitted diseases.
So actually you could go to the big tent,
you could spend an afternoon or evening's diversion,
catch things that you really did not want to have,
and hopefully have them taken care of
before you headed back out on the railroad.
NARRATOR: As winter brought work to a halt in 1866,
many into
led forts
of the newest end of track town: North Platte, Nebraska.
Jack Casement had much to celebrate:
26
66,
and back home in Ohio, his wife had given birth to a son.
But not even that happy news could pull Casement
from his pursuit of money.
General Jack decided to stay on in North Platte,
to make a little extra on side bets.
That winter he built a boarding house,
a gen his fre
n on ileges,
and a cattle ranch so he could take a contract
to provide beef to his own U.P. work gangs.
FEMALE READER: "Dear Jack,
"be careful of your health.
"And for the sake of our little boy more than for your own sake,
beware of the tempter in the form of strong drink."
MALE READER: "My dear wife,
"Here it is almost Christmas and I am still here,
"and if I get home on New Year's now I shall feel thankful.
"There's so much to do.
"We want 200 or 300 cows for next summer,
"are building a large ice house,
"have built a good slaughterhouse
"and blacksmith shop, wash house and corral.
"So you see we are getting quite a ranch.
"Darling, be as patient as you can.
You don't want to see me more than I do you."
FEMALE READER: "My dear husband,
"If you don't come home and stay with us some this winter,
"than you did of your first-- your wife, Frank."
NARRATOR
was
me,
With the North and South reunited,
the
ally n
to the joining of East and West.
The railroad line was crawling
with correspondents and photographers.
A new and exotic dateline, "End of Tracks,"
festooned newspapers across the country.
Telegraph wires strung alongside the tracks
carried news of the iron road, its daily progress
and the future it promised.
"Great indeed will be the vitality of the republic
"when the warm blood from its heart pulsates
"to the remote extremities.
"This magic key will unlock
"a world-encircling tide of travel, commerce
and Christian civilization."
All that stood in the way of this new bounty
was the road's completion.
But that would prove more difficult than anyone imagined.
NARRATOR: In the fall of 1866,
as the Central Pacific completed its track to Cisco,
92 miles east of Sacramento,
Chinese work gangs were hurried to Donner Summit,
where seven separate tunnels had to be dug.
The most difficult was number six, the summit tunnel.
November snows were already beginning
to blanket the mountains.
44 snowstorms hit the summit that season.
But inside the man-made caves, work continued around the clock,
in three eight-hour shifts at four separate headings:
and two in the center,
where the men had to be lowered by ropes 100 feet
down an eight-by-12-foot man-made shaft.
Even with 12 to 15 men drilling at each face
and hundreds of barrels of black powder expended daily,
the Central Pacific partners figured it would take 15 months
to break through the tunnel.
The summit tunnel was 1,659 feet long,
and it's through some of the hardest rock in North America.
And remember that we're working
with hand drills and black blasting powder.
It's not very efficient.
It takes a lot of human effort
and a lot of money to pay for that blasting powder.
HUFFMAN: The Central Pacific is building a foot a day
through these tunnels,
and it's just agonizing for them.
They recognize that the Pacific Railroad
is going to generate revenue from Omaha to San Francisco,
and their portion of that revenue is going to be based
on how many miles of track was the track that they built.
They want to get as far east as possible.
Those mountains are slowing them down.
Meanwhile, the Union Pacific has finally gotten organized.
They've hired this guy Casement.
He was bragging that he could build
five miles of track a day.
NARRATOR: In his office in New York,
Collis P. Huntington was reading breathless newspaper accounts
of Casement's rapid advance
ad.
If the C.P. crews remained stuck in the tunnels too long,
Huntington figured,
the Union Pacific would build right by them
and all the way into San Francisco.
F
rk
w
.
The C.P. partners would be ruined beyond repair.
The Central Pacific's best hope was a dangerous gamble:
liquid nitroglycerin.
Nitro was the most powerful explosive ever made,
and the least stable.
In 1867, transportation of liquid nitro
was illegal in the state of California,
and for good reason.
Accidental explosions had all but disintegrated
a Panama steamer
and blown up half a block in downtown San Francisco.
Body parts were found atop buildings
hundreds of feet from the blast site.
But when a British chemist named James Howden told E.B. Crocker
he could mix the compound on site at the tunnels,
the C.P. partner shipped him straightaway to the summit.
CHIN: Nitro is, is...
it's... a very temperamental compound.
It tends to blow up on its own.
And the Chinese had to handle it delicately.
BAIN: They had a surprisingly good safety record with this
a tha
ork