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Touc les autrss exemplaires originaux sont film6s en commenpant par la premidre page qui comports une empreinte d'impression ou d'illustration et en terminant par la dernidre page qui comporte une telle empreinte. Uri des ^.ymboles suivants apparaftra sur la derni^re image de cheque microfiche, selon le cas: le symbole -^ signifie "A SUIVRE", le symbole V signifie "FIN ". Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., peuvent dtre film6s 6 des taux de reduction diffdrents. lorsque le document est trop grand pour dtre reproduit en un seul cliche, il est film6 6 partir de Tangle sup6rieur gauche, de gauche 6 droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images nicessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la mithode. 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 M^ THE STORY OF THE IVEST SERIES EDITED BY RIPLEY HiTCHCOCK THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD I . i!i|ip(rpi|ii!|p«i)^ip(f:ili(^™ mrwmmmmsm ^De Siorv of m Hint Seriei Edited by Ripley Hitchcock. Each, illustnited, lamo, cloth, $1.50. tM Story of tiK RailrMd. By Cy Warman, author of "The Express Messenger," etc. This book pictures tibe building of the earlier transcontinental lines across the true West. It tells the story of the engineer who found the way and who was the pioneer of permanent civilizatioQ among the In- dians and buffialo of the plains and in the mountains. Historically, the Look is valuable because it gives a comprehensive sketch o'' a great subject in a brief compass, and, furthermcre, the stxanee and picturesque phases of life which are depicted are full of immediate interest. An actual war, now fo.-gotten, for the possession of a cafion in/DoloraJo, is vividly described by the author, who has shared in the work of the rail- road men, and who made a special journey through the West to gather fresh material for this valuable and entertaining book. ClK Story of tDe £owDoy. By E. Hough. Illustrated by William L. Wells and C. M. Russell. "Nothing fresher or finer has been written in many a day. ... An admirable y/ork."—C/iicag'c Evening Post. *' An unusually vivid and interesting picture of Western life." — New York Herald. ClK Story of tbe mine. Illustrated by the Great Comstodc Lode of Nevada. By Charles Howard Shinn. "The author has written a book not alone full of information, but re- plete with the true romance of the .American mine."— 7V/w York Times. Cbe Story of tDe Tndiaii. By George Bird Grinnell, author of '♦ Pawnee Hero Stories," " Blackfoot Lodge Tales," etc. " In every way worthy of an author who as an authority upon the Western Indians is second to none. A book full of color, abounding in observation, and remarkable in sustained interest ; it is at the same time characterized by a grace of style which is rarely to be looked for in such a work, and which adds not a little to the charm of it" — London Daily C\roHu:le. IN PREPARATION. The Story of the Trapper. By Gilbirt Pakker. The Story of the Soldier. The Story of the Rxplorcr. By Ripley Hitchcock, D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK. "WWi* .H^," The Engineer. (Running the line with a transit on the Plains.) y THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD BY CY WARMAN AUTHOR OF TALES OF AN ENGINEER, THE EXPRESS MESSENGER SNOW ON THE HEADLIGHT, THE WHITE MAIL, * PAPER-TALK, ETC. ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1898 V £. I* COFTRieHT, 1808, By D. APPLBTON AND COMPANY. TO THE L'ATHFINDER, Whose back above the Desert bent, Who set the stakes to mark the Trail- The Trackman, and the President, And all the Children of the Rail. Cy Waeman. " When I think how the railroad has been pushed through this un- watered wildemeaa and haunt of savage tribes; how, at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu cities full of gold and lust and death sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside stationii in the desert ; how in these uncouth places jtigiailed pirates worked side by stds with border ruffians and broken ruen from Europe, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarreling, ana mtirdering like woL -:s ; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard in this last fastness the scream cf the ^Bad Medicine Wagon^ charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, cu if this railway were the one typical achievement of the cge in which we live ; as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered the busiest, the most ex- tended, and the most varying subject for an enduring literary work. If it he romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this f ^^—Robebt Louis Stevenson, in Across the Plains, vi EDITOR'S PEEFACE. The Story of the Railroad, like other volumes in the Story of the West scries, is, in its essence, the story of a man. As to the man—that is, the :;ypical fi/5'ure to be chosen as the personified genius of trans- continental railroad building in the empire .vest of the Missouii— thfire may ;ery well be a variety of opinions. The firet white men to traverse the future pathv.ays of Western railroads were Spaniards, whose suggestive roles wer- those of a fugitive and a soldier seeking gold. Long after them came the true explorers, Lewis and Clarke, Pike, and others whose story is to be told in another volume of this series. In the earlier years of the republic there were statesmen, like Gallatin, who dreamed of a transcon- tinental highway, and later private citizens, like Whit- ney, who were pioneers in a movement which devel- oped slowly but logically, with its accompaniments of congressional oratory and long-sitting committees, and of explorations, reconnaissances, surveys, and bulky re- ports, and the various military, political, and commer- Vll • •• Vlll THE STORY OP THE RAILHOAD. cial arguments which were accentuated by our civil war. All this represented a growing recognition of the inevitable, a recognition in which politicians were frequently outstripped by private citizens, some from the West, then so-called, with an actual knowl- edge of the Western country, and some from the East, led on by the chances for new investments. The man of the West and the Eastern financier with his European connections co-operated more close- ly than the usual railroad history indicates. The canvas is crowded with figures — ^the explorer, scout, trapper, hunter, soldier, the propagandist, politician, lobbyist, banker, promoter, and European capitalist; but these were not the men who did the work, although through them the work became posiiible. The Story of the Eailrcad, as Mr. Warman has sketched it in his graphic pages, is not a history of proselyting, of finance qr of politics, or of the scientific side of construction. Very naturally, these topics and other essential phases of this great subjact are touched upon, but in large part this book is the story of the strange life which began with and accompanied the building of a trans- continental highway. Armies of men under thousands of officers shared this liie, and vanished when their work was done, leaving the ashes of their camp fires aT\d unnumbered nameless graves. Surveyors, en- gineers, puperintendents, foremen, bosses, track layers, shovellers on the r'ump, and their companions of ra^^k EDITOR'S PREFACE. IX Iiigh and low, all toiled together to clear a way across the buffalo preserves of the Indians and through the , secret places of the mountains. It was a series of titanic labours, man pitted against Nature in the in- stant shock of contest, and it is here, I think, that we find the typical figure in the engineer who sought out the way and built vhe road. It was the engineer who traced the route, making his painful progress across the wild plains, sometimes guarded by soldiers, sometimes trusting to Providence and his " gun." It was the engineer whj climbed over the ice of mountain streams, who was let down from crags by ropes, who crawled along trails known only to the mountain sheep, and, daring storms, starvation, and the venge- ance of the red men, penetrated the mountain fast- nesses rarely entered even by his predecessors, the trappers, hunters, and scouts of the heroic age of the West. His mission was a practical one, but none the less romantic. The level and chain, the six-shooter and the frying pan, maj be less picturesque than hel- ix^-pit, sword, and lance, but they may stand for an infinitely finer heroism. Only McAndrew's " damned ijjits " for whom the poetry and romaiif^ of the sea have vanished with the passing of white sails could fail to see the romance of transcontinental pathfind- ing, the heroic aspect of the men who led the way. Some of these engineers sacrificed their lives to duty as simply and nobly as anv s'^ldiers behind their coun- m THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. try's flag. They were the soldiers of civilization, open- ing a way that peace might follow. Some of them passed from reconnaissances and preliminary surveys to the work of construction, ruling armies of men in wild camps which were constantly moving onward. They were responsible for the expenditure of fortunes. Their followers knew little other law than their word, and there were times, as in the early history of the Union Pacific, when no authority seemed to avail against the recklessness of life at the head of the rails. The engineer in charge was the local court of last re- sort for all questions, from construction in its manifold details and the incessant troubles with contractors to complaints of the commissariat. There were higher officers behind him, but he was the chief executive on the spot, the general commanding in the field. Some of these engineers have remained as high officials of transcontinental lines, and others sacrificed themselves to the large tasks of construction, or have passed else- where. Whatever their fate, their mission was a great one, an historical epic which Americans should pre- serve,. Indirectly, therefore, since the field is a vast one, we may read in this volume the story of the engineer. If the title suggests a special railroad, the difficul- ties inseparable from such a choice will be evident, even if the plan of this series admitted of the categori- cal history of one branch of a subject rather than the presentation of the type, the genius of the general EDITOR'S PREFACE. ai theme. The Union Pacific, naturally the first thought, is linked at the outset with politics, the Credit Mobilier, and continuing financial complications, and the general theme is perhaps somewhat hackneyed. The checkered career of the Northern Pacific has been described in detail by Mr. E. V. Smalley, and the Southern Pacific has lacked many of the phases which have added interest to other roads — for ex- ample, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa F6. The picturesqueness and freshness of the Santa Fe's story have induced Mr. Warman to make this in a sense the typical railroad of his book. Since, however, he is presenting pictures of life rather than detailed records, he has drawn his illustrations of the life of railroad builders from tie inner history of several of the earlier transcontinental lines of the West. The result is a general view of characteristic phases of this life which has a completeness, from the standpoint of human in- terest, not realized before, and impossible of realization either in the orthodox railroad histories or in fugitive anecdotes of construction-camp life. That is not a life to be described by hearsay or at arm's length, and the vividness of Mr. Warman's descriptions shows him to have been a part of that which he records in his book. The figures, dates, names, and dry facts, which might readily be multiplied to so appalling an extent in a de- tailed history of such great enterprises, Mr. Warman, as far as possible, has happily put aside in favour of a THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. personal interest, which will give to his readers an appreciati9n of this phase of our Western history that statistics and bare records can never yield. He has taken account of the vast tasks of organization and general direction in the East as in the West, but his book is dedicated first of all to those " Whose backs above the desert bent, Who set the stakes to mark the trail." The Story of the Railroad might be traced back to the primeval convulsions which rent openings in mountain walls, and the early workings of the water courses which cut pathways for the engineers. With- out hyperbole, however, we can see in the trails of elk and other animals suggestions and even paths which pointed the way for the rails. The mountain lore of animals and the red men was inherited by the early trappers, hunters, and fur traders of the heroic age of the West — men like Chouteau, Sublette, and scores of others. Many of them preceded the better-known figures of scouts like Kit Carson in a life as adven- turous and fearless as that of the Norsemen, but their sagas have rarely touched poet or historian. It was the curious wisdom of ancients of the mountains like Jim Bridger that helped to solve many a dubious question in the building of the earlier transcontinental lines. They acted their part in aiding to map out laiiroad routes. They had acted a similar part before in pilot- ing emigrant wagons, or accompanying the caravans of EDITOR'S PREFACE. xm the Santa Fe trail, or in furnishing counsel as to the route of the Pony Express. But this time their hands were turned against themselves, for the railroad to which they gave of their quaint wisdom meant the passing of scout, trapper, and wild hunter as surely as' the passing of the buffalo. Yet, as I have said, these shaggy heroes of other days were not the first of the white men to precede the locomotive. Nearly four hundred years ago the piteous figure of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca staggered across the plains of Texas, and his desperate course possibly anticipated in a gen- eral way the route of the Southern Pacific. A few years later Coronado, marching northward from Mex- ico to Cibola, and eastward in search of Quivira, tra- versed a portion of the future pathway of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. Both the fugitive colonial offi- cer and the soldier represented the first fruits of that wonderful search for a western passage to the Indies which sought an opening from the northern ice of Labrador to the Straits of Magellan, and effected among other results the discovery of Columbus. The thought which spurred Columbus, Amerigo Ves- pucci, Cabot, Frobisher, and Magellan reappears in our own early discussions of a transcontinental high- way as a means of opening up trade with the Orient. It is curious to find this argument reiterated in the earlier discussions of the subject, to the neglect of the enlarging possibilities of our own West, but there are XIV THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. those who will urge that the future may justify the argument. The Spanish lust for gold discovered a Western empire, and the last fragments of that empire are now wrested from incompetent hands by the people of the land which literally blocked the way of the ear- lier treasure seekers, and now turns its own face to- ward the Orient. In the eternal chase of the golden fleece the Spanish explorers and conquistadores have found worthier successors, and the earlier dreams of transcontinental railroads as highways to the Orient seem to promise a larger measure of realization. On what may be termed the picturesque side of history the suggestiveness of the theme is obvious. A word is called for regarding the illustrations of Mr. Warman's book. It would have been easy to mul- tiply pictures of scenery and of deserving features of mountain construction. Some of these have been se- lected with a view not merely to their pictorial effective- ness, but rather to their value as suggestions of prob- lems offered in the life of the engineer. Of this life and the character of construction camps photography furnishes little, and Mr. Clinedinst has therefore made a very careful review of a theme which was not new to him, and his use of the material which he has collected has placed before us certain personal phases of the theme with a directness and vividness which comport most happily with Mr. Warman's brilliant work. R. M. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. This book is the fourth volume of The Story of the West series, and consequently the roads whose history is chronicled in its pages are, with a single exception, Western lines — with the understanding that there is no West east of the Missouri River. The one exception is the Canadian Pacific, the last and longest of the through lines across the continent, connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific; but the eastern section of the Canadian Pacific was small indeed when the road was being built. Since the completion of the pioneer roads, a num- ber of extensive systems of railroad have penetrated what a half century ago was the uninhabited and apparently uninhabitable West. To tell the story, in- teresting though it might be, of all or any one of them in detail, would be to take the reader over the same scenes, showing the same pictures again, only softened and subdued by the civilizing influence of the locomo- tives of the pioneer roads. A number of these newer, shorter lines, linked XT xvi THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. together by close traffic arrangements, make through lines across the continent, which are as swift and safe and sure, as comfortable and convenient for the trav- eller as a through line under one management; for travellers are no longer expected to change cars in a civilized country. Of these comparatively new lines I have endeav- oured to make brief mention in the closing chapter of this book. Lack of space prevents the publication of the names of the directors, presidents, ex-presidents, pas- senger agents, and others who have helped in the making of this story. To each and all of them, how- ever, the author is deeply indebted. * Cy Wabman. CONTEKTS. CHAPTEB Editoe's peepacb . Author's peeface . Introduction . I.— The origin op the idea IT.— Early exploeations and surveys III. — The building op the eoad . IV.— The tombs op the teail makers v.— The meeting op the eails VI.— A BEUSH with the Sioux VIL-Thb Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fi VIII.— The sbee op the Santa Fi. IX.— Life in a qeadino camp X—Peopling the great American Desert XI.— The road reaches the Rockies . XII.— The invasion op New Mexico . XIII.— The Grand CaSon war XIV.— Incidents op the early days XV.— The Denver and Rio Grande XVI.— The Northern Pacific XVII.— The Canadian Pacific . XVIII.^ROAD MAKING IN MeXICO XIX.— The opening of Oklahoma . * xvn PAOB . Vii • XT 1 7 . 18 . 81 . 46 63 66 75 83 93 103 119 126 135 158 171 179 197 213 332 xviii THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. CHAPTER ^^« — The railroad enoineer >'.,,, 231 XXI.— At the front .,.,,, . 241 XXII.— The railroad and the people ... . , 254 XXIII.— The beginnings of the express business . . 261 XXIV. — The West to-day . . . , . ^ o?! LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Thk Engineer At the Head of the Rails Deivino the Last Spike . CaSon op the Rio Las Animas Holding the CaSTon , View of Marshall Pass . The Royal Gorge, Colorado "S "-Trestle on Cceur d'Alene Branch Viaduct Construction A Phase of Bridge Construction In the Mountains • • • The Rush for Dinner .... Monument to Oakes Ames at Sherman, Wyoming Map-Some Early Transcontinental Routes . Transcontinental Railroads, 1898 xix Frontispiece rACINO PAQB 82 63 80 142 171 177 181 193 210 281 243 260 19 272 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD INTRODUCTION. THE PASSING OF THE WEST. AT MOENINO. The West awoke, breakfasted, and went about the day's work or the day's pleasure. Up to that time the bountiful earth had supplied all the wants of all its creatures, and there was no reason to fear for the future. All the men were red men: wild nomadic men who gave no thought to the morrow. They had found the earth well stocked with the necessaries of life and had helped themselves from day to day with no' per- ceptible diminution of the supply. Wild fowl filled the air, wild animals the earth, and all the rivers were full of fish. There was plenty, and the people were content. Walled in on the west by the Rocky Mountains, cut off from the east by a mighty river, the nomads' empire swept down from the Brit- ish possessions to the Gulf of Mexico. All up and down the great plains, from north to south, from 2 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. south to north, rolled billows of buffalo, the apparently inexhaustible commissariat of the red man, as irresist- ible as the gulf streams of the ocean. Presently a white man stood on the bluffs above the Big Water, shaded his eyes, and looked away to the west. Soon another joined him, and the two looked long and intently upon the wild, glorious scene be- yond. Now the late comer looked back and beckoned, and when they had been Joined by other adventurous spirits, they let themselves silently into the river and swam across. The red men saw chem coming, and, remembering the stories of the conquest of the East, strove to beat them off. Some were killed, some crossed safely, while others, having been pushed into the water, swam back for re-enforcements. Meanwhile another band of white men had crossed farther down, and were trafficking with the dark men of the southwest. The white men were a jolly lot, for the most paii;, who preferred traffic to war. They made friends and drunkards of many of the red men, and while a great many were killed off, they grew in number and beg n building houses as though they intended to stay. INTRODUCTION. & AT NOON. The West was agitated. Everywhere the natives were rallying to drive the intruders away. Still they came. Across the Big Water they were rowing, wading, < and swimming. The buffalo, feeding upon the great plains, put up their heads and stared. If the nomads tried to escape to the north they met and fought with the fur catchers from Canada. Cow- boys, with deadly short guns, were riding from the south, while hundreds of scouts, miners, and moun- taineers, with far-reaching rifles, w-ere sliding down the slope of the Rooky Mountains. In a little while the battle that had begun on the banks oi the Missouri was raging to the Rockies. If a white man fell, two came to take his place. If a red man fell, his place was empty, but they fought on dog- gedly. Presently other white men came on horseback, hun- dreds of them, all dressed alike. The white chiefs wore good clothes, and swords with hilts of gold. They brought their blankets and stayed, and then came wagons with guns in whose mouths a papoose could hide his head. The red men lost heart. To add to the confusion, they fought among them- selves. Many joined the white men, drank, dressed up, swore awkwardly, and killed their kin. 4 THE STOEY OP THE RAILROAD. As the afternoon wore away men began to build houses. Two men with a chain and four guns measured the desert, planted stakes, and put "paper- talk '' on them. Others followed, graded a road, threw down wooden cross-ties and iron rails. The wild kine of the prairie put down their heads and ran. In the wake of the trail makers came other thou- sands of whites. They quarrelled among themselves about the location of cities yet unboin, county seats, and so on, and fell to killing one another as the red men did. Still they came. Like clouds of grasshoppers they flooded the West, planted trees, and built towns along the Iron Way. AT NIGHT. The sun was sinking behind a cloud. Here and there upon the plains knots of men were still fighting. Many of the newcomers had left off the killing of men and turned to the buffalo. Some were killing for meat, some for robes, others took only tho tongues, while thousands killed for the sake of the slaughter. More thoughtful men were putting up tents for the night, for tney were aweary and in need of rest. The fighting was desultory now. Men busy about their new homes stumbled over the warm bodies of neighbours lately slain. Women, coming up from the river with pails of water, were waylaid and scalped. INTRODUCTION. 6 Children were snatched from the dooryards and car- ried away into captivity by the desperate red men who had lost the fight. Presently it grew quiet. The setting sun burst through the clouds and bathed the earth in molten gold. In the twilight men buried the dead. The bones of the buffalo lay in white heaps along the new trail. In the gathering gloaming groups of men sat round the camp fires and tallied it all over. Even those who had taken part in the great drama were amazed, so swift and awful had been the work. The plains had grown so suddenly silent that it frightened them. They hearkened, and heard only the soft sighing of the wind in the wild grass. " This place is dead," said an old scout, and folding his blankets he strode away in search of the West. Already the fur catchers were going back to the wild streams that thread the northern forests. The cowboys had long since taken the trail to Texas. Suddenly the stillness was broken by the wild scream of an iron horse along the Iron Trail. The few remaining red men threw themselves trembling, upon the trembling earth as the great black steed, with heart of fire and breath of flame, roared by. The white men watched it tip over the crest of the continent, and the Wes* of yesterday was gone for- ever. 6 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. The moon looked down upon the conquerors. They had cast their arms aside and were sleeping peacefully, for across the plains that day had been traced in blood — " TPANQUILITY." CHAPTEE I. THE ORIGIN OF THE IDEA. The first report presented to the Congress of the United States on the construction of a railroad to the Pacific was made in 1846 by the Hon. Sidney Breese, Chairman of the Committee on Pacific Lands. This was the first result of the labours of Asa Whitney, a New York merchant, who had become an enthusiast on the subject of a Pacific railroad. Be- tween 1830 and 1835, while in China, Mr. Whitney read of the wonderful experiments in railroad building in England, and began at once to reflect upon the enor- mous changes the new mvention made possible. It would be an easy matter to cross the American con- tinent and connect Europe with the Orient by way of the Pacific. As the dream grew upon him, he began to gather statistics concerning the trade of China, Japan, and India. He seems to have devoted months, if not years, to this work, coming to America full of figures and faith in his great scheme. He proposed to build a road from Lake Superior to Puget Sound in consideration of a grant of land from the Gove^ment along the whole line. Whitney began his public work in America upon the great project in 1841. After four years of work and worry he 7 8 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. secured a hearing before Congress. Seven more years, and then, in 1853, Congress, with more or less reluc- tance, made an appropriation for the first preliminary survey. For twenty years or more Whitney clung to his idea with the faith of an enthusiast, and then, at last, help came. But it came too late and too slowly for him. He had fretted the best part of his life away. His private fortune had been sacrificed. Men had begun to re- gard him with pity, so thoroughly had he lost himself in the pursuit of his dream. His plan was not feasible, but he gave his enthusiasm, his fortune, if not his life, to the work — and passed on. Almost without being missed, he disappeared from the scene, the first martyr to the great enterprise. The work begun by Whitney was taken up by others. Mr. E. V. Smalley declares that as early as 1834 Dr. Samuel Boncraft Barlow advocated the construc- tion of a railroad from New York to the mouth of the Columbia Eiver, with money secured by direct appro- priation from the Treasury of the United States. Upon this claim General W. T. Sherman, in his summary of transcontinental railroads constructed up to 1883, com- ments as follows: " But in presenting this claim to priority, is it not possible that the fact has been overlooked that Dr. Barlow's paper in the Intelligence, of Westfield, Mass., was called forth by a series of articles upon the same subject published in the Emigrant, of Washte- naw County, Michigan Territory? And is not, there- fore, that unknown writer of these articles really en- THE ORIGIN OP THE IDEA. 9 titled to whatever credit attaches to priority of sug- gestion?" General Sherman says, in the summary referred to, that it would now be impossible to ascertain who was the first to suggest the construction of a railroad to connect the eastern portion of our country with the Pacific coast, and adds that the idea probably occurred in some form to several persons. It is a fact, however, that long before any man had known the luxury of travelling by rail the question of connecting the At- lantic with the Pacific by means of a " steam carriage " was being agitated in this country. The first railroad was built by the Eomans. The track was of cut stone. The steam engine was invented by James Watt, in 1773. Probably the first locomotive was invented by Richard Trevethick. It was tried and failed in Lon- don in 1804. George Stephenson opened the Killing- worth, a colliery railroad, in 1814. The Stockton and Darlington, in England, twelve miles in length, was the first railroad to carry pas- sengers. It was opened for freight on September 27, 1825, and for passenger traffic in October of the same year. Peter Cooper experimented with a little engine of his own on the Baltimore and Ohio in 1829, and claimed that on the trial trip he ran away from a gray horse attached to another car. The modern railroad was created by the Stephen- sons, father and son, when they built the Rocket, the first locomotive with a " blower," in 1830. 10 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. Tlie first locomotive run over an American railroad was driven by Horatio Allen in 1831. As early as 1819 Robert Mills proposed, in his book on the internal improvements of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, to connect the two oceans by a steam road " from the head navigable waters of the noble rivers disemboguing into each ocean." With the lessons learned from the years that fol- lowed the agitation of the question by Mr. Whitney and others we are able to see now what bitter disap- pointment was in store for the enthusiast who pinned his faith to the traffic of the Orient. We know now that the revenue derived from the Asiatic trade — in fact, from all through business — would not do much more than supply the tallow required to cool the pins that were heated by the sands of the desert through which the road was to run. Veritable dreamers were the early friends of the Pacific Railroad. Themselves farther from the pay streak than the Atlantic was from the Pacific, they were ever scolding Congress for its tardiness, and capital for its timidity. During all the preliminarj' work the great aim of the road was to reach India, China, and Japan. Benton, Clark, and others in Congress were -ever pointing to the East by way of the West, and crying in the drowsy ears of the nodding Speaker that " yonder lay the road to the Orient." It was not until the dis- coveries of gold in California that Congressman Sar- gent, of that State, began to hint guardedly that the West itself was worth going after. To be sure, nobody took him seriously. He was merely tooting his own THE ORIGIN OP THE IDEA. 11 horn, men said, and they continued to talk Asia, to talk against the scheme, or not to talk at all. Nobody dreamed of the possibilities of the wild West. No prophet attempted to foretell the story of the vast empire that would awaken with the first magnetic toucn of the steel-shod feet of the iron horse,* No man would have believed, at the close of the war of the rebellion, that within a quarter of a century fifteen million people would be living in the territory between the Missouri and the Pacific Ocean. A man who would have predicted in 1861 what Mr. Sidney Dillon stated as a fact just thirty years later, would have been without honour in any country — namely, that the railroads would change not only the climate of the West, but the character of the soil as well; that the farmer would plant trees, and that these treec would check the bitter winds, and also cause an increased rainfall; that the furrowed fields, which formerly offered to the sky but one uniform, smooth, and iron-hard sur- face, would create a rainfall by their evaporation, and invite it by their contrast of temperature; that, in short, with the advent of the railroad upon the Western plateaus the climate would become milder, the cold less destructive, and the rainfall greater. Beaching across the great American desert for the trade of the Orient, the dreamers never dreamed that * " If it had been proposed before the war that the United States should lend its credit and issue its bonds to build a rail- road two thousand miles long across a vast, barren plain only known to the red man, uninhabited, without one dollar of busi- ness to sustain it, the proposition alone would have virtually bankrupted the nation.'' — General Dodge. 12 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. these vast reaches of land, then considered uninhabit- able, would soon be occupied by a rapidly increasing population, and that, when the road was built, ninety- five cents of every dollar earned would come from local, and only five cents from through traffic. • CHAPTER II. EAKLY EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS. Until a few years ago it was generally conceded that a young engineer in the employ of the Mississippi and Missouri River Railroad was the pioneer in survey- ing the Pacific roads. This was in 1853. When the war broke out this young man boxed his outfit and entered the service of Uncle Sam. When the war was over he asked to be relieved, and this is the answer that came to him: " Headquaetees Militaey Division ok the Mississippi, St. Louis, May i, W6«. " Major-General Dodge. " Dear General: I have your letter of April 27th, and I readily consent to what you ask. I think General Pope should be at Leavenworth before you leave, and I expected he would be at Leavenworth by May Ist, but he is not yet come. As soon as he reaches Leavenworth, or St. Louis even, I consent to your going to Omaha to begin what, I trust, will be the real beginning of the great road. I start to-morrow for Riley, whence I will cross over to Kearney by land, and thence come into Omaha, where I hope to meet you. I will send your let- ter this morning to Pope's office, and indorse my re- quest that a telegraph message be sent to General Pope 3 13 ..-' 14 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. to the effect that he is wanted at Leavenworth. Hop- ing to meet you soon, I am, " Yours truly, W. T. Sherman, M. 0." (( And 80 it happened that the outfit that was boxed by young Dodge in 1861 was unpacked by General Dodge in 1866. So thoroughly had he become int<^r- ested in the great project of a road across what was then called the American Desert, that the moment the trouble was over at the South, he resigned his position to resume his work where he had left off. In a paper read before the Society of the Army of the Tennessee at its twenty-first annual reunion, at To- ledo, Ohio, on September 15, 1888, General Dodge mod- estly discli limed the credit of having been the first to ex- plore che West in the interest of a transcontinental rail- road. Upon that occasion he declared it to be his be- lief that Lieutenants Warner and Williamson were sent into the Sierra Nevada Mountains at the sugges- tion of General W. T. Sherman (who was chairman of the meeting then being addressed by General Dodge), adding tliat "that was the first exploring party ever sent irio che field for the special purpose of ascertain- ing the feasibility of constructing a railroad on a por- tion of the line of one of the transcontinental routes, and that the exploration preceded, at least for years, the act of Congress making appropriations for ex- ploration and surveys for a railroad route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean." In the first volume of his Memoirs, on page 79, General Sherman says: " Shortly after returning from EARLY EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS. 15 Monterey I was sent by General Smith up to Sacra- mento City to instruct Lieutenants Warner and Wil- liamson, of the engineers, to push their surveys to the fcJiorra Nevada Mountains, for the purpose of ascertain- ing the possibility of passing that range by a railroad, a subject that then elicited universal interest. It was generally assumed that such a road could not be made along any of the immigrant routes then in use, and Warner's orders were to look farther north up tlie Feather River, or some of its tributaries. Warner was engaged in this survey during the summer and fall of 1849, and explored to the very end of Goose Lake, the source of Feather River." It will be seen here that General Sherman, with characteristic modesty, takes no credit for having or- dered or even suggested this work, but the many evi- dences of his friendship for the Pacific railroad enter- prises bear out the suggestion of General Dodge that he was the moving spirit in the work. When Lieutenant Warner, the real pioneer explorer of the Pacific roads, had reached Feather River, after many skirmishes with the Indians, his outfit was surrounded by i-he savages^ and after a brief resistance and a stubborn stand he fell — ^the second martyr to this great enterprise. Going back to the Missouri River, we find young Dodge and a small corps of assistants crossing from Iowa to Nebraska on a raft in 1853. This was a private survey ordered by Heni-y Farnum and T. C. Durant, the contractors and builders of the Missis- sippi and Missouri, now the Chicago and Rock Island Pacific Railroad. Peter A. Dey was the chief under whose instructions Dodge crossed the Missouri. 16 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. It is an interesting fact that the company order- ing this exploration of the plains had no idea or intention of building a road there. What it wanted to find was the most feasible termini, or rather the most probable starting point for the Pacific Rail- road when it should be built, in order that they might end their own road opposite that point on the Iowa side. When young Dodge arrived at Omaha the Indians surrounded his wagons and took what they wanted, calling the white man " squaws," and showing in true Indian fashion their contempt for these adventurous young men. By being patient and liberal. Dodge man- aged to escape with his scalp. To show that he was not afraid, he slept the first night in the tepee of an Omaha Indian — whistling through a graveyard, as it were. Dodge soon acquired the careless habit of riding far in advance of his outfit. He had been on the plains but a few days when he found himself alone on the banks of the Elkhom Eiver. It was noon. " Being tired," he tells us, " I hid my rifle, saddle, and blanket, strolled out to a secluded spot in the woods with my pony, and lay down to sleep. I awoke, and found my pony gone. I looked out upon the valley and saw a native running off with him. I was twenty-five miles from my party, and was terrified. It was my first experience, for I was very young. Wha^ possessed me I do not know, but I grabbed my rifle and started for the Indian, hallooing at the top of my voice. The pony held back, and the Indian, seeing me gaining upon him, let the horse go, jumped into the Elkhom, and put that river between us. The Indian was a Pawnee. He served under me in EARLY EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS. 17 1865, and said to me that I had made so much noise that he had Ijeen a ' heap scared/ " Upon this occasion Dodge extended his surveys to and up the Platte Valley, to ascertain whether any road built on this central — or then northern — line would, from the formation of the country, follow the Platte and its tributaries over the plains, and thus overcome the Kocky MoLUtains. Subsequently, under the pa- tronage of Mr. j^arnum, he extended the examination westward to the eastern base of the Eocky Mountains and beyond, examining the practical passes from the Sangre de Christo to the South Pass, and made maps of the country, developing them as thoroughly as could be done without making purely instrumental surveys. Ml'. I'arnum and his associates had conceived the idea of working up a scheme west of Iowa that would in- duce investors to aid them in carrying their project across Iowa to the Missouri Kiver, which was still far away from the end of their track. The practicability of the route, the singular formation of the country be- tween Long's Peak to the south and Laramie Peak and the Sweetwater and Wind Eiver ranges to the north, demonstrated to Dodge that the road must eventually be built through this region. The young engineer re- ported these facts to Farnum, and through the latter's efforts and those of his friends the prospect of the Pacific Kailroad began to take shape. Having con- cluded his preliminary survey, young Dodge returned to Council Bluffs, thoroughly convinced that the road he represented ought to end there, and that the Pa- cific Road, if ever built, would begin at Omaha, oppo- site the Bluffs. 18 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAT. General Dodge relates that after dinner, while sit- ting on the stoop of the Pacific House, a tall man came and sat beside him. He appeared to be very much in- terested in the work that the young man had been doing, and in a little while was drawing from the en- gineer the secrets that were intended for his employers. The sweet, homely face and kindly manner of the man were irresistible. He seemed to have no special inter- est in any of the railroads that were then reaching out toward that vast unknown region called the West, but he was interested in the general devei >pp' ' and up- building of the country, and deeply in sympathy with all the human race. His interest could not have been broader or deeper if he had owned the whole country. In fact, the impression left upon the mind of young Dodge was that he had been engaged in a confidential conversation with Uncle Sam. Finally, when the tall man got up and moved away, he carried with him a story that had cost the engineer months of hard work. In thirty minutes he had ex- plored the plains from the Missouri Eiver to ^he Rockies. He had learned the secrets of the deseri - i'^ could tell you the names and the height of half a di ,i .j peaks and passes in the far-off hills. The engineei knew that he knew these things, and yet he was not alarmed. He felt sure that a man with so sad, so kind a face, would be wholly incapable of taking advantage of information so obtained to the detriment of one who had trusted him. Later, when the war had demonstrated the road to be a military necessity, and the Government came to the rescue with grants of land, surveys were extended ^ Lon. Weat 107 from Green Lon. West 30 from Washingi 107 from Gi-eenwich 102 97 92 |#^^ CheyennT I ^<^ ^Colorado Sps. 40 .1^—1-^ 36 30 SO from Washington San Antonio o 15 1 EARLY EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS. 40 36 SO through the country previously explored, its resources developed, and its capabilities for the building of a railroad to the Pacific fully demonstrated. Within a strip two hundred miles wide, reaching from the Mis- souri River to the California State line, along the forty- second parallel of latitude, fifteen thousand miles of instrumental lines were run, and over twenty-five thou- sand miles of reconnoissances made. Countless other lines were run by the Government engineer. These ex- plorations and surveys covered the entire West like the stripes on Old Glory, and included every possible and many impossible routes between the Isthmus of Panama and Canada. The explorers gave no thought to the value of a line as a means of opening up and developing the West. True, the gold excitement in California in 1849, the possibility of transporting a few thousand fever-heated fortune seekers, and the admission of Cali- fornia as a State, caused men to take a second look in that direction, but the real objective point was still China and Japan. In the seven years ending in 1860 Congress spent a vast amount of money in exploring the West, and when the work had been completed, or, rather, when it stopped, the result was rounded up, profusely illus- trated, published, and distributed to the people free, and in that way nxen began to know the West. These surveys made by the Government now became the basis for all future explorations of all the trans- continental lines, save of the Union Pacific, then known as the forty-second parallel route, and the Santa Fe, which followed the old Santa Fe trail. The country- through which the Union Pacific 20 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. passed was the scene of more work than any other part of the West. This line was largely developed by private enterprise, and, in addition, the Government spent a great deal of time and money upon it. It was always General Dodge's favourite route, and whenever he could steal a day he would gallop over it, or a part of it, until hi knew it all. General Dodge always contended, how- ever, that the present route was not, from an engineer- ing point of view, the true line to the Pacific. The true line, he declared, was up the Platte and Sweetwater to the South Pass, and then down the Snake E'.ver (where the Oregon Short Line was built later) to the Columbia River, thence down that noble stream to tide water at Portland. But from a commercial point of view the Salt Lake line is the better. It is also claimed by the friends of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific that they constitute the most practicable line across the continent — the shortest, quickest, of lightest curvature, and lowest grades and summits. The maximum grade over the Black Hills is eighty feet to the mile. In two or three years of constant pounding away at these hills the explorers failed to find a pass that would let them over without crowding the limit allowed by Congress, because the mountains were so steep and high. One of the finest natural approaches that ever propped a range was right there all the time, but not where engineers had been in the habit of looking for a pass. In one of his speeches General Sherman has publicly declared the discovery of that pass a stroke of genius,* but Gen- ♦ " I was particularly interested in that part of General Dodge's paper wherein he described his discovery of the way to cross the Black Hills beyond Cheyenne (there was no Cheyenne then). He EARLY EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS. 21 eral Dodge, who discovered it, says that it was purely accidental, and he tells an interesting story of how it happened. In the spring of 1863, while at Corinth, Miss., he was ordered by General Grant to go to Washington to see the President of the United States. " When I received the summons," he writes, " it alarmed me. I had armed, without authority, a lot of negroes and organized them into a company to guard the Corinth Contraband camp. It had been pretty severely criti- cised in the army, and I thought this act of mine had partly to do with my call to Washington." Upon reaching the capital General Dodge called upon the President, but to his surprise Mr. Lincoln said nothing about the negroes at Corinth. He talked about the struggle at the South, t t condition of the army in general, and finally asked his visitor if he recalled a conversation that had taken place six or seven years previously upon the stoop of the Pacific House at Council Bluffs, Iowa, when General Dodge was not a general, and before Mr. Lincoln had been much thought of as the President of the United States. The general assured the President that he remembered the conversation very distinctly, and that it was the only was limited by law to 116 [General Dodge informed the writer that the limit was really 216] feet grade to the mile. Instead of following the valley of Lodge Pole Creek, as all previous en- gineers had done, he chose the upper or anticlinal line, instead of the lower or synclinal line. This was a stroke of genius, by which he surmounted the Rocky Mountains at a grade of eighty feet to the mile, whereas by any other route then known he would have been forced to a grade of 200 feet, or to adopt short Curves through Laramie Pass.'* 22 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. time in his life that he had given up his employers* secrets to an outsider. The President smiled quietly, and said: " Well, you know, under the law, it is my business to fix the eastern terminus of the Pacifc Boad, and that is one of the things I wart to talk about with you." General Dodge told Mr. Lincoln that in his ca- pacity as an engineer in the service of the Mississippi and Missouri Hailroad he had selected Council Bluffy. It is probable that Mr. Lincoln knew this, for he ^eems always to have known in advance what was the thing to do in all circumstances. As a matter of fact, for nearly a decade all roads reaching toward the West and desiring a connection with the Pacific Eailroud that was to be had been funnelling in toward Councdl Bluffs. And so the President very naturally fixed the terminus of the Pacific road at Council Bluffs. When that had been done, he told his visitor plainly that the Pacific Kailroad had become a military necessity, that he was very anxious to have the road commenced and built, and that it was upon that matter mainly that he desired to consult the general. In discussing the means of building the road. General Dodge urged that no private combination should be relied upon, but that it must be done by the Government. General Sherman had always been of that opinion. In a letter dated January 6, 1859, addressed to the Hon. John Sherman, M. C, and made public through the National Intelligencer, he said: " It is the work of giants, and Uncle Sam is the only giant I know who can, or should, grapple with the subject." The President said frankly that the Government had EARLY EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS. 23 its hands full. Private enterprise must do the work, and all the Government could do was to aid. What he wished to know of his visitor was, what was required from the Government to assure its commencement and completion. When the matter had been discussed at length, it was decided that General Dodge should go to New York and consult there with the people who had the ques- tion before them. One of the results of this visit to New York was the framing of the bill of 1864, which was duly passed, and under which were built the Union and Central Pacific roads, constituting one continuous line from the Missouri to the Pacific. During the years from 1853 to 1860 the political condition of the country made it impossible to induce capital to undertake the building of a railroad across two thousand miles of desert. The agitation of the slavery question occupied the attention of Congress to the exclusion of everything else, and out of the sectional jealousies engendered by that controversy arose differ- ences as to the route to be adopted. The South wanted a southern route, the North a northern one, and there seemed to be no way of reaching a compromise. The South was then in control of the Government, and could prevent the location of the line at the North, while northern and eastern capital could not be en- listed for a southern route indorsed by Jefferson Davis, who was then Secretary of War. The political tide turned, however, in 1860, and politics, which had so retarded the work, now helped to push the road for- ward. The charter of 1862 was rushed through Con- gress, and it seemed as if the road was about to be 24 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. built. China and Japan were forgotten in the excite- ment, the ruling thought in the public mind being the necessity of strengthening the Union by bringing the West into quick and easy communication with the East, at any cost. The Pacific coast and the new States of California and ogon were in conttant danger. It required twenty-four days of travel, partly through a foreign country, to reach the far West. The coast was almost entirely undefended, and recent events had shown to the Government the possibility of war with England. Semmes, the Confederate admiral, had added to the confusion by the destruction of nearly one hundred whaling vessels in the Pacific Ocean. "^ citizens in the far West were greatly excited «,.xu were con- stantly urging Congress to action. President Lin- coln was labouring day and night with capitalists and Congressmen in the interest of the road that he considered of such vast importance co the Union. Friends of the enterprise furnished figures to show that the Government was paying seven million dol- lars annually for the transportation of mails, troops, munitions, and supplies between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean. General Sherman, in the letter to his brother already referred to, had roughly estimated the cost of the road at two hundred million dollars, but experts now declared that it could be constructed for half that amount. So that simply to do its own work the Gov- ernment, had there been no constitutional hindrance, could well afford to issue its six per cents for the amount, build the road, and save one million dollars EARLY EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS. 25 annually on its own transportation. There was no dearth of excuses for the construction of the road, for when the enthusiast failed there was always the Orient to fall back upon. The charter of 1862 was believed by Congress to contain sufficient inducements in this land grant and subsidy loan to enlist the capital required to begin the enterprise. But no man of business had any idea that the full amount would be subscribed or paid in; there were not many who believed that the scheme was prac- ticable. To the surprise of Congress, capital held aloof from 80 unpron 4ng a venture. Naturally the President, and others interested, looked to the lines of railroad then being extended across Iowa, but still a long dis- tance from the Missouri River, to take hold of the Union Pacific charter and under it extend the line across the plains. The franchise was vastly more valuable to either the Rock Island or the Northwestern than to any one else. Both could extend the road with the advantage of a railroad behind them, whereas a new company would have to carry all material and supplies from St. Louis to Omaha by water. Both these roads, however, after carefully considering the whole subject, declared that they saw no money in a railroad across the desert. In 1864, about a year after his first conference with President Lincoln, General Dodge, either at the re- quest or by command of the commander in chief. General Grant, visited Washington again. Upon this occasion he found it extremely difficult to hold the President to the subject of the Pacific Railroad. When 26 THE STORY CF THE RAILROAD. they had fought Virginia and Georgia over ag&in, and discussed the fall of Atlanta,, 'the general tried to lead his host back tc the prairies of the West, but it was impossible to hold him. " While the President referred to the Pacific Road, its progress, and the result of my former visit,"' writes General Dodge, " he gave it very little thought, appar- ently. His great desire seemed to be to get encourage- ment respecting the situation around Richmond, which just then was very dark. People were criticising Grant's strategy, and telling how to take Richmond. I think the advice and pressure on President Lin- coln were almost too much for him, for during my entire visit, which lasted several hours, he confined himself, after reading a chapter out of a humorous book (I believe called the Gospel of Peace), to Grant and the situation at Richmond." Shortly after this General Dodge was assigned to another department and transferred from the South to the West. This pleased him, for his heart was there. In all the years, through all the excitement and anxiety at the front, he could not forget the plains and the rail- road that he had often constructed in his mind and on paper. In the winter of 1864-'65 the Indians were at war, and held all the oveiland routes. General Grant asked General Dodgfc if a campaign against them could be made in the winter. He answered. Yes, and the country from the Missouri to California was placed under his command, perhaps at the suggestion of General Sher- man, for they w^^e both enthusiastic friends of the rail- road, and did more to push it through, perhaps, than EARLY EXPLORATTONS AND SURVEYS. 27 any other two men in the country, surely in the army. At all events. Dodge was back in the desert in charge of the Indian campaigns of 1865-66. He was now in a position to explore anew all the vast region over which he had toiled in the '50's, and to look into the resource'^ of the country. He seems to have been one of the first men to comprehend the possibilities of the country, and to predict a future for the road and the West.* In these two years he travelled every mile of moun- tains and plains north and south, east and west, be- tween the Arkansas and the Yellowstone, and from the Missouri River to the Salt Lake Basin. In all the movements of the troops and scouting parties he had careful reports of the country made — its resources and topography. As often as the depredations of the In- dians made a move necessary he made a new map of that part of his empire. When the fight was finished he would begin to look the place over. " He was for- ever prowling, like a man who has lost something," said one of his subordinates. It was on one of these exploring trips that he stum- bled upon the pass over the Black Hills and won the title of " genius." The troops were returning from the Powder River campaign, and the general, as was his wont, was examining all the approaches and passes from Fort Fetterman, south, over the secondary range of mountains known as the Black Hills. These moun- * " Its future is fraught with great good. It will develop a waste ; will bind together the two extremes of the nation as one ; will stimulate intercourse and trade, and bring harmony, pros- perity, and wealth to the two coasts."— Chief-Enqineee Dodge to the Directors. 28 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. tains had given the exploring engineers more trouble than all the other ranges in the Rockies, on account of their short slopes and great height. When the army had reached the trail on Lodge Pole Creek, the general took half a dozen mounted men and a scout and went up the stream to the summit of Cheyenne Pass. Turn- ing south along the crest of the mountains, they kept on far above, but nearly abreast of the troops and trains that were dragging lazily along the base of the hills on the old St. Vrain and Laramie trail. While crossing the little valley of a tributary of Crow Creek they came upon a band of hostile In- dians. The Indians saw the white men at the same time, and, being in a majority, set out at a good jog to get between them and the troops. Of course they had been watching the train all day, but had had no idea that the commanding offcer with only half a dozen men would be rash enough to come up into the hills and throw himself into their arms. General Dodge was well aware that it would be much easier to " stand them off " in sight of his soldiers than " cached " away there in the hills. So, hastily instructing his men, li^ set out to gain the top of a high ridge that seemed to him to point down to the part of the trail over which the troops must be passing about that time. After gaining the coveted ridge, however, he saw to his dis- may that the troops were yet a long way off. It had been just about noon when they had found the In- dians, and the general calculated thnt if he and his men were not detained by the band, and if there were no breaks in the ridge, they could get down to the trail before night. In a little while the ground over which EARLY EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS. 29 they were making their way became so steep and rough that they were obliged to dismount and lead their horses. They tried in every way to signal the troops, but in vain. The Indians were riding hard to head them off, the ground grew rougher at every step, the sun was sinking in the west, and the hearts and hopes of the little band of explorers were not half as high as the foothills. Finally they eluded the savages and got between them and the train, but the enemy gave chase. They were within rifle shot, but still the general and his little company hurried on down the long ridge. The In- dians threatened to charge, but the general refused to stop and give battle, the result of which would surely be the loss of eight white men. The Indians, through some oversight on the part of the Government, were not so well armer^ as the soldiers, so, when the latter faced about, levelling their many-voiced Winches^^ers, the braves naturally hesitated. They had heard the bark of these death hounds before, and knew that many of their number would be made to bite the dust before they could 'subdue the blue-coated Pathfinders. As often as a moment's time could be stolen by one of Dodge's men, a signal fire was kindled, but it was not until the sun had gone down behind the hills that the signals of distress were seen and the troopers came to the rescue. In going back to the train the general and his com- panions kept along the ridge that had saved them, and, to the commander's delight, it led them down to the plain without a break. "WWPPP 80 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. " Well/' he said to his guide, " we have not only saved our scalps, but we have found the crossing of the Black Hills," and he named it Sherman Pass. Along that ridge the line was located, between the Lone Tree and the Crow Creek; and there run the overland trains to-day, carrying the fast mail between Chicago and San Francisco. CHAPTER III. THE BUILDING OF THE ROAD. When we read now of the vast sums that were made out of the building of the Pacific roads, we wonder that men of means were so slow to see the possibilities of the enterprise. The very franchise went begging for years. The capitalists of the country utterly lacked confidence. There was no dearth of men to agitate the question and to keep the matter before Congress and the country, but there was no money offered for the building of two thousand miles of railroad that would have to be guarded to keep the Indians from tearing up the track and making bonfires of the fiag stations along the line. Scores of men — some prompted by purely patriotic motives, and others by a desire to do big things and make money — ^had wasted their own time and fortunes and finally fretted their lives away in a vain effort to secure the necessary capital to begin the construction of the road. All that was ever accomplished under the charter of 1862 was merely the effect of an organi- zation. In 1864, Congress, having been convinced that nothing could be done without more help from the Government, amended the original charter, doubled the land grant, and enlarged the inducements to capitalists; 81 82 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. but the Government, with all its prestige and influ- ence, was unable, even with the liberal land grant and a subsidiary loan of from sixteen thousand dollars to forty-eight thousand dollars for each mile of road, to bring out the money for the great project. After months of hard work enough money was col- lected to buy a flag and a few firecrackers, and then, with the blare of trumpets and the roll of drums, ground was broken at Omaha. Flags fluttered over the flap- ping tents and mud huts of the two squat settlements t^at are cities now at either end of the big bridge that spans the Missouri. There the people of the two towns, drunk with excitement, saw the rails creeping out to- ward the Occident; but the money owners of the world saw only the smoke arising from the huts and tents, and beyond that — " th6 desert." The President was perplexed. To the worry of the war was added the anxiety caused by the coldness of the capitalists. From the far West came the cry of an isolated people. The dread of the Oregorians, in the event of a general disintegration, of bein^ gobbled up by the British, and the fear of the Californians of the invaders from Texas caused the Administration much anxiety. The Government now agreed that the Union Paciflc Company should borrow money from private people, giving a first mortgage on the road and land — ^the Gov- ernment's claim becoming a secondary lien — and still capital refused to come forward. One great draw- back was the limitation of the charter. Durant and Bushnell, who had been instrumental in securing it and effecting an organization, had tried hard to raise i At the head of the rails. THE BXnLDINQ OP THE ROAD, the money required to make a beginning, and failed, resourceful though they were. At this moment some one hit upon the happy device of a construction company. In the language of the late Sidney Dillon, "this is not the place to treat of the operations of the Credit Mobilier," but that is what the construction company was called. What we have to do with now is the ultimate result. The end was good, whatever may be said of the means. The first money received from the Credit Mobilier enabled the company to commence constructive work. A little grading was done in the autumn of 1864, but owing to changes insisted upon by the Government in- spectors, work was not begun in earnest until the spring of the following year. Everything was done at enormous cost. No rail- road reached the Missouri at Omaha at that time. All materials, machinery, locomotives, men, and cars had to be brought up by boat from St. Louis. The wages demanded by the men (often in advance of the day's work) were vastly in excess of those paid for similar service where it was not necessary to flag with fire- arms. Men would not go out upon the wild prairies and tamp tie« merely for the excitement. There was no coal or wood, or fuel of any sort, save the chips that passed for fuel on the plains. The men making the road found no ties on the treeless desert. For mile after mile they found no stone for rockwork. In short, they found absolutely nothing; only the right of way and the west wind sighing over the dry, wide waste of a waveless sea. The cost of transporting a locomotive — the labour and freight — ^was enormously high. If one 84 THE STORY OP THE JRAILROAD. were to lay a line of one dollar bills along the tow- path, end to end, it would not cover the cost of the first ties put under the track. Like the locomotives, rails, and cars, they had to be shipped by boat, and for a long distance cost the company two dollars and a half apiece. Those who have criticised the construction com- pany have always argued that material and supplies were made dear by it to increase the profits upon the job — ^that the money paid out by the directors of the Union Pacific Company was received by the same men as directors of the Credit Mobilier, or construction company. But it will be readily seen that, situated as they were, the cost of building the road was necessarily very great. The first of these costly rails was laid in July, 1865. By the end of that year forty miles of road had been put down, which, being accepted by the Govern- ment, brought the company six hundred and forty thousand dollars in Government bonds — being sixteen thousand dollars a mile — as a subsidy loan. The land grant was not available to meet current expenses. Up to that time there had been no demand for the land- grant bonds and first mortgages. These could only be used as collateral for loans negotiated by the construc- tion company. , The men building the road soon became aware that the Government, which had helped so much, was going to hinder as well, because of its ponderous machinery and an enormous amount of what is generally called red tape. Every mile of road that received a subsidy had to be approved by the Government three different n Hi THE BUILDING OP THE ROAD. 35 times through its selected officers and alleged experts before a dollar could be paid or an acre of land cer- tified. First, the preliminary survey, showing the general route of the line, had to be passed upon and accepted, in compliance with the law, and to the satisfaction of the President. Again, as each section of fifty or one hundred miles was finally located, the trail staked out upon which the road was actually to be built, and from which there could be no deviation, it had to be filed with the Secretary of the Interior, and to receive his approval and the Government's great seal. With this important paper in his pocket the chief engineer could begin work. Finally, when a section of forty or more miles had been built and equipped as required by law, the United States Government would send out three expert com- missioners, whose business it was to examine again the line, the work, the material, the method of construc- tion, and then pass upon the whole. Not infrequently this last lot of experts would dis- agree \yith the others and disapprove of what had alrearly been approved. Once or twice they ordered it all done over again. The company or contractor had no authority to swerve to the right or to the left of a line once located; but an expert, who might be only a plain, ignorant politician, could condemn or approve, and there was no appeal. It might be that the Government expert saw the West for the first, last, and only time when on his official tour of inspection. He could know nothing of the dangers to be encountered from snowdrifts or washouts, and the result was that 36 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. after the road had been built a great deal of it had to be changed in order to overcome these serious obstacles. Other experts, who sat in Washington and fixed a standard for grades, roadbed, cuts, fills, bridges, ties, rails, spikes, and joints, had never seen, mayhap, the dark river that washed the edge of the West. For three long winters engineers living in tents and dugouts watched every summit, slope, and valley along the entire fifteen hundred miles of road, to learn from the currents where the snow would drift deep and where the ground would be blown bare. In summer they watched the washouts that came when the hills were deluged by what, in the West, they call cloud- bursts. These were the only experts competent to say whether a draw should be bridged or filled, and only after years of residence in the hills. And who was better fitted to say where the line should lie than the engineer in charge of the work? He had me': ured it all through months of weary toil; he knew almost every mountain and vale in the Rockies, swell and swale of the plains, and yet a political ex- pert had power to run a blue pencil through his work. It was not long, however, before the experts saw that the engineers knew their business, and that the Presi- dent and Board of Directors were as anxious to have a good road as was the Government, and so made but few changes. Upon a line located with great care, patience, and skill, a cheap road may be put down and afterward brought to a high standard of excellence. This, in fact, is the usual method in America. Our roads have always been in a great hurry to get somewhere, just as our ex- THE BUILDING OP THE ROAD. 37 press trains are. On the other hand, one can never build a good road upon a badly located line, and for this well-known reason a great deal more depends upon the locating engineer than is generally supposed by the average reader. Think of what the discovery of Sherman Pass meant to the Union Pacific Company in thirty years, even if we take only the passenger trains into consideration. It meant one locomotive for each train, instead of two. A locomotive such as would be required as a helper on a hill costs about ten thousand dollars, and it costs half that amount annually to oper- ate it. Four passenger trains a day each way would take four engines, forty thousand dollars, first cost, and twenty thousand dollars a year for the thirty years that the road has been running, or a total of six hun- dred and forty thousand dollars. It is very much to the credit of the men who had the building of the Union Pacific in hand that they insisted at all times upon making a good road. There is plenty of evidence that this was the policy of both President Ames of the railroad company, and Presi- dent Dillon of the construction company. When some of those interested wanted to make a quick, cheap surface road, taking advantage of the maximum grade authorized by law, the board invariably stood by the lines of the engineers, as offering the greatest commer- cial value.* ♦ " The instructions given me by Oliver Ames and Sidney Dillon, one at the head of the railroad company, and the other at the head of the construction company, were invariably to ob- tain the best line the country afforded, regardless of expense. Oakes Ames once wrote me, when it seemed almost impossible 1 88 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. II I m From the first to the last mile the Union Pacific was a well-laid and a splendidly constructed road, and that is one of the reasons why it has prospered, in spite of its political encumbrances, and of the equally em- barrassing fact that men were sometimes sent out from the East to help in running the road who did not know a semaphore from a switchback.* to raise money to meet our expenditures : ' Go ahead ; the work shall not stop, even if it takes the shovel shop.' " — Dodge, Chief Engineer. * A prominent Union Pacific official, in yellow gloves and blue glasses, once asked a brakeman why the coach in which he was riding was uncomfortably cold. The brakeman replied that the heater was in the rear instead of the front end of the car. That afternoon a sharp letter went to the superintendent of mo- tive power and machinery, ordering the cold coach in the shops, in order that the heating apparatus might be taken out and put in the front end. The mechanical superintendent wrote, ex- plaining that there was no front or rear end to a day coach ; that all depended upon the direction in which the car was moving ; that the heater had been all right going out that morning, but that this was a branch line, with no table or " Y " at the other end ; but there is no evidence that the new official ever under- stood the letter. Another importation was being shown over the road oy the late " Tom " Potter, then general manager. Out on the plains there were a great many " Y 's." At one point they backed in on a spur to allow a long train to pass. " I say," said the tender- foot, looking about, " there's only one leg to this • Y '." "Oh, damn it I" said Potter, "this is no 'Y'; this is a spur, and you must not talk that way before the trainmen, or they'll insist upon tying you under the bridge till you get used to the cars." This same official once wrote a letter, it is said, to the road master, reproving him for his wanton waste of steel. He had watched a yard engine for an hour going up and down the 111 'I THE BUILDING OF THE ROAD. 39 With competent, entlmsiastic, determined men at the front, and equally energetic officials behind the enterprise, the fact that a first-class road rvas the result is no great surprise. The wonder is that it was done so rapidly, and yet so well. . The little money that came to the constructioi coi :- pany in Government bonds upon the completion of the first forty miles o-f track helped it out considerably, but did not wholly relieve the pecuniary embarrassiucnt which seems constantly to have beset it until the desert had been railed. In 18G6 the company put down two hundred and sixty more miles of track, but Wc.s still struggling for money. In the following year it laid two hundred and forty miles, reaching the summit of the Eocky Moun- tains, making five hundred and forty miles of rails west of the Missouri River. The cost of building over the mountains was so much less than had beon expected that the construction company found itself with a sur- plus for the first time in its existence, Without waiting to see what the harvest was to be beyond the range, the company foolishly distributed the surplus in dividends. Now, the fact that the builders had reached the dividend point caused a vast amount of criticism without and strife within, so that yards, and there were rails mth bent ends, spiked down among the switches, that were never touched by the wheels of the pass- ing engine. He ordered these rails taken up, straightened out, and used in building side tracks. The road master did not answer the letter. He called per- sonally and^ explained to the thoughtful official that the rails referred to were guard rails, put there for the protection of the lives of employees and the property of the company. 40 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. the company was not as happy as it had been in the days of its poverty. Even after it had reached and passed the dividend point it seems still to have been hard pushed at times for money, and if it had not been for the men of means behind the enterprise, fearless and willing to risk their own fortunes and reputations in the work, the road could not have been built when it was.* By the time the road reached the Kr cky Mountains the work, so big and bold, had attracted the attention of the nation. All the leading newspapers of the country sent special correspondents, and at the end of the da^s work the result in miles of track laid went out over the wires to an appreciative public. Men who had made reputations as war corrisspond- ents at the South sharpened their pencils and went West, for here, too, was war. It took a vast army of men to complete the road in five years, and it took an- other army to protect the workers and supply them with food. Being fresh from the army himself. General Dodge, the chief engineer, was able to secure valuable aid from the Government troops, without which it would have be^n almost impossible to make the road. *' Even the jommis' ary was open to us," says Gen- eral Dodge. " Their troops guarded us, we recon- noitred, surveyed, located, and built inside their picket line. We marched to work to the tap of the drum, with ♦ " Nothing but the faith and pluck of the Ameses, fortified with their extensive credit, and the active financial aid of men like John I. Blair and other capitalists, carried the thing through." — Sidney Dillon, in Scribner's Magazine. THE BUILDING OF THE ROAD. 41 our men armed. They stacked their arms on the dump, and were ready at a minute's notice to fall in and fight for their territory." The majority of the men employed in the building of the Union Pacific had been soldiers at the South. They were accustomed to camp life, and were readily lined up, day or night, when the awful cry, " The Sioux! the Sioux! " was heard. Nearly all the officials had a well-earned military title. After the chief en- gineer came General "Jack" Casement, in charge of the track train, who with his brother " Dan " is said to have been able to form and arm a regiment of a thousand men at a word, and from general to captain it could be commanded by experienced officers. One day, when the end of the track was two hun- dred miles out on the plains. General Dodge was com- ing down from the frorxt in his private car, which he always referred to as his " travelling arsenal," and was flagged ai- a place called Plumb Creek. The operator, breathing heavily, told him that a band of bad Indians ha T held up a freight train with supplies for the front, a little way down the road, and that the train crew, in a fortified car, was making a last stand. In another car upon the special there were about twenty men, some taking a " lay-off "; a few had been discharged and were going to the rear. The men were nearly all strangers to the chief engineer, though all, of course, knew him. The general, upon receiving the news, made it known to the men that a train crew was in immediate danger, and the men came close, eager for details. Of course there was no lack of arms and ammuni- 42 THE STOEY OP THE RAILROAD. tion, and while the general warmed them up for the work ahead, the operator brought message after mes- sage from the station near the hold-up, following the fight. The excitement grew, the men pressed closely aboiut the general. The operator, bareheaded and pale, brought out the last message verbally. "The train's on fire! " he cried. Turning to the little band of men — many of whom a moment ago had been cursing the chief engineer, the construction company, the railroad company, or any other company that interfered with adman's thirst — the general requested those willing to go forward and rescue the men on the burning train to form in line. Without a moment's hesitation — ^without so much as a glance at each other — every man within the sound of his voice fell in. " All aboard! " cried the general, and away they went. Never had such running been seen on that new track. Away down the plains the smoke of the burning train was plainly visible, and the driver of the locomotive drove for all there was in the ma- chine. He knew that his brothers of the rail were in deadly danger there, and he pulled the throttle wide, regardless of results. In a little while the train began to slow down, and finally stopped not far from the fire. The Sioux, bent on blood and plunder, did not notice its coming until the men were out and in line of battle. I^ow the general ordered them forward. " At the com- mand," he caid afterward, "they went forward as steadily and in as good order as we hud seen the old sol- diers climb the face of Kenesaw und(jr fire." After a brisk battle, in which the crew of the burn- ing train fought desperately, the Indians were driven I i THE BUILDING OP THE ROAD. 48 from the field, carrying their wounded away with them. Depredations of this sort soon convinced General Sherman, the commander of the army, that the Sioux were not all dead, and that this railroad, in which he had shown a deep, patriotic interest for many years, could not be built without the aid of the Government troops, and plenty of them. But he had not always held this opinion. Ten years earlier, writing to his brother, then a member of Congress, he had said: "No particular danger need be apprehended from Indians. They will no doubt pilfer and rob, and may occasionally attack and kill stragglers; but the grading of the road will require strong parties capable of de- fending themselves; and the supplies for the road and maintenance of the workmen will be carried in large trains of wagons, such as went last year to Salt Lake, none of which were molested by Indians. So large a number of workmen distributed along the line will in- troduce enough whisky to kill off all the Indians within three hundred miles of the road." The stories of Indian fights along the Union Pa- cific alone would make a big book. Some of the men who passed through these wild times on the plains have never been able to shake off the memory of those dread- ful days. There were days, weeks, months together, when no man could say with any degree of certainty that he would still wear his scalp on the morrow. The benighted native saw in the coming of the pale-face, with his horse of iron on a trail of steel, the end of all that was dear to the heart of the Indian, He saw in the wanton slaughter of the wild cattle of the plains the 44 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. destruction of his chief article of food and clothing. He saw in the change that had come over the dusky daughter of the desert some of the awful effects of civilization, and began to guard against it. Old tradi- tions were being forgotten, old customs ignored. With knitted brow the red man marked the squaw in the annual round-up of the unfaithful. She showed no shame when pointed out by the man she had known, but shrugged her naked shoulders and allowed them to guess the rest.* These and other things made the Indian desperate, and he took awful vengeance on the white man. Not many years ago the writer was sick in a rail- road hospital in the West. Over against the other wall lay the travelling engineer of the road, with a broken leg. This man had been the driver of a construction engine laying tracks across the plains. He had seen things that would make many a man gray. I had known him some years, but had never heard him tell any of his experiences; but now, when the fever was high, his troubled mind would go ba(,k and he would live it all over again. At first his wild talk was allowed to pass as the mad ravings of a fevered brain, but when he began to give * " In times gone by the Sioux had a very peculiar ceremony. All the males who had arrived at the age of puberty were formed in two lines, about four feet apart, facing inward. All the females of and above the same age were required to pass in single file between the ranks. Any man in the ranks who had within the year been intimate with any woman was obliged by his honour and his religion to put his hand upon her as she passed." — Richard Ievinq Dodge, Plains of the Great Wtst. m j&^- THE BUILDING OP THE ROAD. 45 graphic details of well-known incidents the writer questioned him, when the fever was oif, and learned that these things were real. He had lived, seen, and suffered them, and he told many stories that have since gone into print on both sides of the Atlantic* He told, long into the night, when the great ward was as silent as the grave, how the camp hunters would ride away at dawn, and never come back. How the Sioux would hang upon the horizon for days, and then disappear, only to return in the dark of the moon, or when they were least expected. It was gruesome to hear him recite the story of the conductor who rode out after a herd of buffalo, and who was afterward found, half buried under the Chalk Bluffs, with an arrow driven down at the side of his neck until the poi- soned point touched his heart. These were not dreams. They were awful realities, that would come back when the brain was troubled; and there are scores of others who have gone through it all, and who rave, no doubt, when the fever is on, as Lieutenant Murie, crazed in battle, raves in a madhouse. ♦ See the author's Wakalona, A Locomotive as a War Chariot, The Express Messenger; The Engineer's Story, Paper-Talk. CHAPTER IV. THE TOMBS OF THS TRAIL MAKERS. All up and down the steel trails that cross the con- tinent from East to West are the unmarked tombs of the trail makers. From Omaha to San Francisco, from Kansas City to Denver, from the Missouri River to the Mojave Desert and beyond, if you plough the right of way of these iron trails your share will grate constantly upon the bones of the pathfinder. Many a man who left his home and friends in the East to s'^ek his fortune in the far West went out with the workmen in the morning and was brought back to camp a corpse when the day was done. Perhaps the forem.an had neglected to get his address, or had got his initials wrong, or, it may be, the man had given another name to avoid the disgrace of being advertised as a common labourer in the "list of the dead." In this way, and many others, men fell in the great fight and were lost. Sometimes the camp hunters would see a band of buffalo feeding away out on the plains, and, taking advantage of the wind, would go after it. Now the Indians had been watching this herd, knowing that the hunters would ride after the game. They knew, too, that the white men would come up against the wind, 46 THE TOMBS OP THE TRAIL MAKERS. 47 and so, standing by, far out of scent, they waited for the race. The moment the bisons put down their heads and started, the Indians, taking a swale, swept down to flank them. On came the wild cattle, and riding among them were the hilarious hunters, striking death to the helpless beasts that were fleeing for life. The horses of the hunters had already made a mile or two, or three, and were beginning to show signs of fetigue. The horses of the Indians were fresh, and in a little while the red men were riding close to the hunters. Hiding in the cloud of dust that the chase kicks up, the Indians work up to the rearmost rider, who reels, pitches forward, and falls upon the body of the great beast that he has killed a moment ago. The thunderous roar of hoofs, the sound of split feet cracking like a forest fire, the whistling breath and low bellowing of the buffalo, make a din in which it is easy to hide the bark of an extra rifle; and so the work of slaughter goes on. After the first man has fallen the Indians press on to the second. The hunter shifts his position, and the bullet aimed at him whis- tles past his ear. Surely, one would think, that will warn him. But no; he gallops on without even glanc- ing back. He has often heard the cry of a bullet that has glanced from the horn of a bull. The next shot strikes home, and the second hunter goes down in the dust. Well up in the herd a couple of young men are riding furiously. They are not "camp hunters." They are the sons of wealthy men in the East, and are liere with the trail makers, spending their vacation. They are mounted upon the best horses that money can 48 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. buy, and the regular hunters have purposely allowed the visitors to take the lead. Hard ride the Indiana, but their cayuses are beginning to fag. Already they are within rifle reach, but they want to be sure, for it is hard to hit a running man when you are also run- ning. If you look long and intently at the back of a man's head when he is at a theatre or at church he will look round. No matter how deeply he may be interested, he will turn for a moment and look you in the eye. So when the panting Sioux have galloped behind one of the young men for some time the young p^ian glances over his shoUi r. Urging his horse to the side of his companion, he shouts, " Indians! " shows his white face, and his friend understands. " The hunters? '' he asks. " Gone," says the man who has glanced back, and as he reins his horse for camp his companion follows. There is no show for the white men but to ride for life, and they urge their horses to the top of their speed. On come the Indians, firing at the fugicives. Slowly the space between the pursued and the pursuers widens, until the bullets fall short and peck the dust behind the heels of the splendid horses. The Indians are the first to note this, and have reined in their cayuses long before the two "tenderfeet" drive their spent steeds into camp. The SPouts ride out, and when they come to the first dead hunter an officer dismount?. A glance at the hunter's head shows the trade-mark of the Sioux. The captain swears, and swings himself into the saddle again. Bringing his glasses rip, he sweeps the sea of THE TOMBS OP THE TRAIL MAKERS. 49 sagebnish and sand hills, but there are no Sioux in eight. After scouting around for a few hours the soldiers return, pick up the dead, and ride back to camp. The next day the hunters are " cached," a week later the " end of the track " is moved, and in a month the coyotes are romping over the forgotten graves. Below a little mound near Monument, in western Kansas, thirty-six trail makers have been sleeping in one great grave for a score and a half of years. They were workmen engaged in grading and building the Kansas Pacific Railroad. As familiarity breeds contempt, so had the constant sight of Indians made the men here employed carelesvS of the dangers that constantly surrounded them. The scouts had seen no Indians for days, and so had relaxed their vigilance. The construction train would run to the front, fling off a few carfuls of material, whistle, and back away for another load. No doubt the walk- ing boss felt nervous when left alone with the un- armed labourers, with a stretch of a mile or more of billowed plain between him and the camp; but as the hours wore away he forgot his helpless plight. The wide plain lies sleeping in the summer's sun. The silence of the desert is broken only by the chuck, chuck of shovels and the low murmur of the wind. Far to the south the camp hunters arc chasing a band of buffalo. Now and then the black herd lifts above a swell, and then, dropping into a sag, is lost to view. Along the horizon in the wake of the flying band a gray cloud of dust hangs, hiding, like a veil of charity, m 10 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. the agonies of the hurt beusts. As the dust cloud blows away a wounded bull stunbles to its feet, and, standing wide-legged, like a drunken man, tries to get its bear- ings. Blood is gushing from its nostrils and from its ears. Its throat is on fire, but the desert is dry. It shakes its head violently, and wheels about ready to charge the foe, but the desert is empty. Turning again, it gazes down the hoof-torn trail and watches the melt- ing herd, curving slowly to the east, as a great ship turns in an open sea. The hunters are holding it close to camp. The wounded bull seems to see the danger of this and tries to follow, but its legs refuse to obey, its knees tremble, its chin comes to the dust. Kneeling so, it sees a red pool forming where its nose touches, and a moment later sinks slowly to the earth. Meanwhile the walking boss watches the far-off herd, rising and falling. From swell to swale, from swale to swell, they come and go, until the ammuni- tion and the horses are exhausted. Pulling rein, the hunters ride slowly back to the end of the track. They have not the faintest idea of how many beeves have been killed — a half dozen or a half hundred; the skinners will tell. Slowly from the camp a string of wagons is lining out to pick up the meat. Now the work train comes down with another load of material, unloads it and backs away again, leaving a barrel of fresh water for the thirsty labourers. Out in the sagebrush a gray wolf is limping away in the direction of the great slaughter fields, where friendly squaws and squaw men are already hulking the dead. If the wolf had known, it might have saved itself the THE TOMBS OP THE TBAIL MAKERS. 51 long walk, for hereabout are other butchers, ready for their work. Silently, cautiously, from every little sand hill, from behind low bunches of sage — from the very earth — peeps a feathered head. What a golden opportunity! The unarmed workmen have even cast their picks and shovels aside, and are standing in the semicircle about the barrel, drinking or Avaiting for a chance to drink. Noiselessly now, but as one man, the savages stand up, and at a sign from their chief rush upon the de- fenceless workmen. They even omit the fiendish yell that usually goes with a massacre of this sort, and are actually upoTi the labourers before the latter have time even to cry for help. With barely time to curve their arms above their defenceless heads, the unfortunate workmen are beaten to earth and scalped, and when the work train comes up with another load the labourers have gone the way of the buffalo. Having done their bloody work, the Indians hasten to their horses, left in a swale close by, and by the time the scouts have been notified and are ready to follow they are far away. CHAPTEE V. THE MEETING OF THE RAILS. While the Union Pacific was building west from the Missouri Eiver, tii ' Central Pacific was building east from the Golden Gate. The law that authorized the building of the Pacific roads directed the com- panies to join their rails wherever they met between the river and the coast. Very probably the Union Pacific at one time would have welcomed the straight stack on the Central's construction engine at the west- ern limits of Nebraska. It i? equally probable that the California company would have been content to end its track at the dump of the Comstock, but by the time the Union Pacific had reached the crest of the Eockies, and the Central had dropped a few rail lengths across the summit of the Sierras, things began to brighten up. They were learning the art of road making. To use a common, homely, but expressive railroad phrase, " they were getting on to their job." The chief engineer, in his last and final report to the Board of Directors, wrote: " Each day taught us lessons by which we profited for the next, and advances and improvements in the art of railway construction were marked by the progress of the v/ork." In making the surveys and building the road many THE MEETING OP THE RAILS, 53 of the most skilful tind promising men engaged in the work were killed. Hundreds, if not thousands, of horses and mules were stampeded or stolen by the In- dians, but there was no cessation in the work; and now, as the two companies rushed the grade, one down the western slope of the Rockies, the other down the eastern slope of the Sierras, a great race began. The Union people were anxious to build as far west as possible, while the Ce al would go as far east of Salt Lake as the rails co' I i be pushed, for there was a profit in the road in the Salt Lake Basin, and both companies were anxious to win the subsidy. The subsidy differed as the roads encountered natural obstacles. In the open country between the Missouri River and the foothills of the Rocky Moun- tains it was at the rate of sixteen thousand dollars per mile. In crossing the Rocky Moiiiteins and the Sierras on the California side it increased to forty-eight thou- sand dollars per mile. Between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras, where the country, although not as difficult as the plains, offered many disadvantages, the subsidy was authorized at thirty-two thousand dollars per mile. It will readily be seen that the matter of fixing the base of a mountain was of great importance to the construction company. It \\ is left with Mr. Blickens- derfer, who was appointed by the Government, to say where the plains left off and the Rocky Mountains be- gan, and his decision seems to have been satisfactory to all concerned, though there is no evidence that he had been "fixed" by the Credit Mobilier. This is probably an oversight on the part of those who have ' I u 7HB STORY OP THE RAILROAD. been busy for the past quarter of a century looking for spots on the corporation that built the Union Pacific. The base of the Sierras had been located near Sac- ramento, where the drift of the mountains reached the plain. This, as a matter of fact, was long before the heavy mountain grade wab encountered, and there was not a little protesting. The original railroad est madt it the duty of the President to fix the base of the several mountain langes, and here, in determining finally where the valley should stop and the mountain begin, " Congressman (afterward Senator) Sargent, of California, claims to have imposed upon the most thor- oughly honest Presideiii the United States ever had by laying before him a map that had been drawn to fit the case. Chief-Engiie^r Judah, following the smoke of the Supreme Court, fixed the foothills at Barmore's. In determining the limits of an old Mexican land grant " bounded on the east by the foothills," the court had made its mrrk at Barmore's, thirty-one miles from Sacramento. The contestant of the grant wanted the foothills to begin far up in the range, while the railroad company wanted them to run as far as might be down into the valley, and that is why Mr. Judah followed the court, wh^'ch was supposed to be correct. At any rate, the decision suited him and the interests he represented. It was to prevent the company from profiting by this decision that the Hon. Mr. Sargent sought Mr. Lincoln, but Mr. Lincoln was busy in the early '60's. Finally, however, the day came when the thing had to be set- tled, and the President and the senator settled it by THE MEETING OP THE RAILS. 65 simply removing the mountains from Barmore's to Ar- cade, a distance of twenty-four miles.* Besides competing for the fixing of the final meet- ing point, the two companies building this the first transcontinental line competed for the good will and influence of the Mormon Church, a central power that would be of great benefit to the roads. Reconnaissances made by the Union Pacific between 1862 and the end of 1864 had convinced it that the road, dropping down from the Wasatch Mountains to the Humboldt Valley, must go north of the Great Salt Lake. But that was not what these modern children of Zicn wanted. Brigham Young called a conference of all his followers, which at that time meant practically all the people of Utah, and refused to accept the de- cision. He prohibited his people from contracting or working for the Union Pacific, bringing all the influ- ence of the Church to bear in favour of the Central Pacific line. The Union Pacific soon saw that here was a difficult business to handle. Salt Lake City was the only commercial capital between the Missouri River and Sacramento. It was the key to the commerce of the great basin controlled by this sagacious Latter- Day prophet and his followers. The Central Pacific Company began the location, ♦ Mr. Sargent gave the following account of the affair to his friends : Mr. Lincoln was engaged with a map when the senator substituted another, and demonstrated by it and the statement of some geologists that the black soil of the valley and the red soil of the hiils united at Arcade. The President rehed on the statement given him, and decided accordingly. " Here," said the senator, " you see how my pertinacity and Abraham's faith removed mountains." 56 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. or rather the examination, of its line by th^e lake long after the line of the Union Pacific had been filed with the Secretary of the Interior, and now the latter com- pany waited nervously for the decision of the Central Company's engineers. When the report was finally made it was stronger, if possible, in favour of the north- ern route than the report of the Union Pacific en- gineers had been. This caused the Church to face around again, and back it flew to the arms of its first love. Now the dirt began to fly. The graders were far in advance of the track layers, and as the Central selected almost the same route fol^' i by the Union Pacific west of Ogden, the advan^. xorces soon met and passed each other. Instead of stopping when the graders met, both companies kept right on, and here lay parallel across the sage-covered desert two lines of railroad without a rail. This foolish business was pushed until, by the time the track layers met — when by law a junction had to be made — the two roads overlapped each other for a distance of nearly two hundred miles. The rails finally met at Promontory, Utah, eleven hun- dred and eighty-six miles west of the river, six hundred and thirty-eight miles east of Sacramento. The entire line was completed seven years before the limit of time allowed by Congress. The driving of the last spike in the Pacific Road is one of the few really great events — events that stand out like a white milepost on a burnt prairie — ^in the history of this groat eountry.* ' ^ypi^_^^0ji^ * -'It is not too much to say thai il.e prtimg v»f 1* ? Pacific Road, viewed simply in its rela^r/^a to tl ■;■ {..c-^ ( f j^: : luletion, mf THE MEETING OP THE RAILS. fit Between the 1st of January, 18G8, and the 10th of May, 1869, the Union Pacific had put down five hundred and fifty-five miles of main-line track. The world had never seen railroad building on so grand a scale. A moving city of one, two, and even three-story houses moved with the advancing track layers, and the wire ticked off the result each day at the set of sun. The people were becoming interested in the great work, but even while the last rail was being put in place those most interested in the future of the road — ^those who had risked their reputations, fortunes, and even their lives in the work — were still looking toward the Orient for traffic and for the final success of the scheme. But with all their blindness, the people all over the country began to grow enthusiastic as the twin threads of steel were about to be joined away out there in the Utah desert, bridging the continent. Nearer and nearer came the engine from the East to "the engine of the West. Idle workmen, crowded out by the closing of the gap, leaned upon their shovels; the tired trail makers sat down to gaze in silence upon the closing scene in the great drama which they had followed for five long years.. The toilsome task of the pathfinders was finished. They were not all there at the end. Some had fallen away back on the plains, others west of the Sierras, development of resources, and actual advance of civilization, was an event to be ranked in far-reaching results with the landing of the Pilgrims, or perhaps the voyage of Columbus. In less than twenty-five years it has accomplished results which have influenced the whole world more than what happened in the century following the landing of the Pilgrims." — Sidney Dillon. 58 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. and those present peered into each others faces, as if still doubting that the thing was done.* Looking back over the steel trail, they knew that, long as it was, there were not mileposts enough along the line to mark the graves of the pathfinders and other pioneers who had fallen in the great fight for this new empire of the people. More than one man here had grown gray in the five years that he had stood in the snow and sun of the mountains and plains. The deep furrows upon their faces were battle scars. Not many people were present at Promontory that day Tlio demonstration when ground was broken at Omaha, five years earlier, had been much more impos- ing, but the people of the whole country were to take part in the celebration, f * Among the men who made the Union Pacific were General Granville M. Dodge, and Messrs. Dey, Reed, Hurd, Blickensderfer, Harris, McCartney, Eddy, House, Hudnut, Maxwell, Brown, Appleton, Clark, Hoxie, Snyder, and the Casements. On the Central were Messrs. Judah, Strawbridge, Montague, Clements, Ives, Gray, Towne, and others. Many of the men who took part here met as often as five times in making connections that completed the several transcontinental lines : at the joining of the Texas with the Southern Pacific, at Sierra Blanca, in coupling the Santa Fe to the Atlantic and Pacific, in driving the last spike in the Canadian Pacific at Craigellachie, and in con- necting New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico with Denver, in 1888. f " In New York, Trinity Church was thrown open at midday, an address was delivered by Rev. Dr. Vinton, and a large crowd united ' to tender thanks to God for the completion of the greatest work ever undertaken by man.' In Philadelphia bells were rung and cannon fired. At Chicago agreat impromptu demonstration took place, in which all citizeiis joined. At Buffalo a large crowd ■t' 'i w^ "ippiiiiiiiiPiinp wp THE MEETING OP THE RAILS. 59 Arrangements for this purpose were made at very short notice. Through the hearty co-operation of the telegraph companies, all their principal offices were connected with Promontory, in order that the blow of the hammer driving the last spike might be communicated by the click of the instrument at the same moment to every station reached by the wires. A small excursion party, headed by Governor Stanford, of California, came up from the coast; but from the East, aside from the army of road makers, contractors, and engineers, there were only two or three people, among them the Rev. Dr. Todd, of Pitts- field. As the pilots of the two construction engines came close together the five or six hundred people present sent up cheer after cheer. There wim'. cheers for everybody — from the President of the United States to the Chinaman by whose artistic touch the grade was leveled for the last tie. Brief remarks were now made by Governor Stanford for the Central, and by General Dodge for the Union Pacific, and at twelve o'clock, noon, the two superintendents of construction, Mr. S. B. Reed and Mr. S. W. Strawbrilge, brought forward the last tie. It was of Califomja laurel, highly pol- ished, bearing a silver plate, upon which was in- scribed : gathered to hear the telegraph signals, fang the Star-Spangled Banner, and listened to speeches from distinguished citizens; and *t every important point t ^ announcement of the comple- tion of the work was receiv .( with unbounded joy." — Sidney JtStxoN, in Scribner's Ma ,azine. 60 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. " The Last Tie Laid in the Completion of the Pacific Railboads, May 10, 1869." The names of the officers and directors of both com- panies were also engraved on the plate.* * The original incorporators of the Union Pacific Railroad Company were as follows : Walter S. Burgess, William P. Blodgett, Benjamin H. Cheever, Charles Fosdiek Fletcher, all of Rhode Island. Augustus Brewster, Henry P. Haven, Cornelius S. Bushnell, Henry Hammond, of Connecticut. Isaac Sherman, Dean Richmond, Royal Phelps, William H. Ptrry, Henry A. Paddock, Lewis J. Stancliff, Charles A. Secor, Samuel R. Campbell, Alfred E. Tilton, John Anderson, Azariah Boody, John L. Kennedy, H, Carver, Joseph Field, Benjamin F. Camp, Orville W. Childs, Alexander J. Bergen, Ben Holli- day, D. N. Barney, S. DeWitt Bloodgood, William H. Grant, Thomas W. Olcott, Samuel B. Ruggles, James B. Wilson, of New York. Ephraim Marsh, Charles M. Barker, of New Jersey. John Edgar Thompson, Benjamin Haywood, Joseph H. Scranton, Joseph Harrison, Qeorgo W. Cass, John U. Bryant, Daniel J. Morell, Thomas M Howe, William F. Johnson, Robert Finney, John A. Green, E. R. Myre, Charles F. Wells, Jr., of Pennsylvania. Nutth L. Wilson, Aiiuiaa Stone, William H. Clement, 8. S. fi'Hommedieu, John Brough, William Dennison, Jacob Blickens- ilerfer, of Ohio, Wllllttiii M. MnPherson, R. W. Wells, Willard P. Hall, Arm- strong Heatty, John Corby, iif MiFsouri. 8. J. HonHJoy, f'wiflr JJqmhuQ, Li. P. Iluxilhgion, T. D. Judah, (fftnies Bailey, James T. IfyMii, Cliiiilea llosmer, (^havles Marsh, D. 0. Mills, Samuel Bell, Louis Moliftue, George W. Mowe, Charles McLaughlin, Timothy Dame, John P. Robinson, uf Cali- fornia. 'mmmmmmmimif •■■■■ipiHipqpiPiWPHnPilP^ THE MEETING OP THE RAILS. 61 In many parts of this and other countries men in the multitude heard with mingled joy and sor- John Atchison and John D. Winter^, of Nevada. John D. Campbell, B. N. Rice, Charles A. Trowbridge, Ran- som Gardiner, Charles W. Penney, Charles T. Gorham, William McConnell, of Michigan. William F. Coolbaugh, Lucius H. Langworthy, Hugh T. Reid, Hoyt Sherman, Lyman Cook, Samuel R. Curtis, Lewis A. Thomtis, Piatt Smith, of Iowa. William B. Ogden, Charles G. Hammond, Henry Farnum, Amos C. Babcock, W. Seldon Gale, Nehemiah Bushnell, Lorenzo Bull, of Illinois. William H. Swift, Samuel T. Dana, John Bertram, Franklin S. Stevens, Edward R. Tinker, of Massachusetts. Franklin Gorin, Laban J. Bradford, John T. Lewis, of Ken- tucky. James Dunning, John M. Wood, Edwin Noyes, Joseph Eaton, of Maine. Henry H. Baxter, George W. Collamer, Henry Keyes, Thomas H. Canfleld, of Vermont. William S. Ladd, A. M. Berry, Benjamin F. Harding, of Oregon. William Bunn, Jr., John ratlin, Levi Sterling, John Thomp- son Klihu J». Phillips, Walter D. Mclndoe, T. B. Stoddard, E. H. Brodlieail, A. II. Virgin, of Wisconsin, Charles Paine, Thomas A. Morris, David 0. Bran ham, Samuel Tlanna, Joseph Votaw, Jesse L. Williams, Isaac C. Elston, of Indiana. Thomas Swan, Chauncey Brooks, Kil ward Wilkins, of Maryland. J'rancls tl, \l Ciirnull, David UlakeU«y, A. D. Seward, Henry A. Swift, D wight Woodbury, John McKusick, John R. Jones, of Minnesota. Joseph A. Gilmore, Charles W. Woodman, of New Hampshire. W H. (Irlmon, ,1 (' HMmo, ())m\(»r Thomas, John Kerr, Wer- tor U. Davis, Luther C. Clialliss, .fo^itih Miller, of Kansas City. Gilbert C. Monell, Ai/jUfnstus Kountz, T. M. Marquette, Wil- liam H Tayltti Alvin Saunders, of Nebraska. John EvauH, uf Colorado. 6 £ 62 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. row the story that the wirea were teUing. A few men had made fortunes out of the building of the road, many had failed. Not a few came out of the en- terprise poorer than they entered upon it. Some had come to deep grief and lasting disgrace. All had been abused, some vilified — " libelled/' their friends affirm, " bankrupted, and driven to the grave " — but they had biiilded for posterity better than they knew. * \\ lien everything was in readiness at the two ^nds of the track, the telegraph instruments ticked " Hats off," and tJie nation bared its head. After prayer had been offered by the Eev. Dr. Todd, whom Providence seems to have sent out, the wire said, " We have got done praying." " We under- stand," was the answer; " all are ready in the East." Now the four spikes, two of silver and two of gold, the products of Montana, Nevada, California, and Idaho, were produced, and passed to (irovernor Stan- ford, who stood on the north, and Dr. Durant, who stood on the south side of the track, and who put them in place. " All ready," went over the wire, and in- stantly the silver hammer came down, the stroke of the magnet touched the bell, and told to a waiting world the story of the completion of the Pacific Railroad, f ♦ Among these men were the Ameses, Atkins, "Baker, Brooks, Crocker, Dillon, Duff, Durant, Dix, Hopkins, Huntington, Stan- ford, and others. t " Washington, May 11, 1869. *' General G. M. Dodge : In common with millions, I sat yes- terday and heard the mystic taps of the telegraphic battery an- nounce the nailing of the last spike in the great Pacific Road. Indeed, am I its friend! Yea. Yet am I to be a part of it. for as early as 1854 I was vice-president of the effort begun in San t i a. ;:; VJ Hi — e tc o = "3 's^ a ^, ^%^.. iMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) ,priated; and he held THE GRAND CA5J0N WAR. 145 further that this appropriation was accomplished on the night of April 19, 1878 — that is to say, he dated the actual occupancy of the Denver and Rio Grande Company from the night of April 19, 1878, and stated that evidence of the* Atchison Company's activity in that direction was found in the fact that on the morn- ing of the 20th — as early as four o'clock — some of its employees, nine or ten in number, in charge of an assistant engineer, swam the Arkansas River and took possession of the canon for the Santa Fe. He further decided that the surveys of the Rio Grande Company, made in 1871 and 1872, although very defective and not equivalent to an actual location, were quite as complete and extended as the survey which the Caiion City Company had made in 1877.* A dissenting opinion was filed by Chief-Justice Waite, in which he declared that the Atchison Company had made the first permanent location through the canon with a view to actual construction. Shortly after this decision had been announced by Judge Harlan, one of the Santa Fe attorneys wrote to him and called his attention to the fact that the evi- dence failed entirely to support his view of the events that transpired on the night of April 19th and the morning of April 20th. Justice Harlan wrote him in reply to the effect that the important considerations in his mind were the grant to the Denver and Rio Grande Company in 1872, the early surveys that Company had made, and the period of financial depression that i i * The opinion of Judge Harlan is found in 99 U. S. Reports, p. 463. 146 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. hrd delayed the construction for the years intervening between that time and 1878. The peculiar features of this litigation are, that when the case was decided in the Supreme Court of the United States the Santa Fe people were in control of the Denver and Rio Grande Company, and held prac- tically all its capital stock, and that the Supreme Court in its opinion left the matter to be determined in supplemental proceedings whether the trade made with the Eio Grande Company, by which the Santa F^ acquired control of it, was intended to put an end to the litigation over the canon. In the negotiations between General Palmer and President Nickerson nothing had been said in express terms about this. Each seems to have carefully avoided touching on the subject, and in all the papers by which the Atchison Company acquired the stock of the Eio Grande Com- pany and a lease of the road, etc., there was not a word which threw any light on the question of the dis- continuance of the litigation over the canon. The Rio Grande was at last victorious, but the road was still in the hands of the enemy, and would remain there for thirty years unless the Supreme Court would set aside the lease. The matter of cancelling the lease now came br^'ore the courts. This was urged by the Rio Grande, backed by the best legal talent that money could serine. Meanwhile the two armies in the mountains weio being increased and the forts enlarged. In the midst of all the excitement, Attorney-General Wright ndded to the confusion by entering suit to enjoin the Santa F4 Coiipany from operating railroads in Colorado. Th« THE GRAND CASfON WAR. 147 hearing was had before Judge Bowen, aftenvard senator from Colorado, across the Sangre de Christo, in the little town of Alamosa. Willard Teller, for the Santa Fe, promptly applied for a change of venue, alleging, in language that could not be misunderstood, that the judge was prejudiced against his clients, and that he could not hope to get justice in such a court. It was not to be supposed that a man who played poker, as Judge Bowen did, would lie down at Mr, Teller's first fire. He led off with a spirited rejoinder to the attorney's attack, and ended by issuing a writ enjoin- ing the Santa Fe and all its officers, agents, and em- ployees from operating the Rio Grande road or any part thereof, and from exercising in any manner cor- porate rights in the State of Colorado. In short, he turned the road over to the owner*. Mr. Teller commanded the conductor of one of the trains then lying at the terminus of the track to " hitch up" and take him to Denver with all possible speed. The employees had, of cmrse, watched all the lawful and unlawful ton tests as closely as the higher officers, and were ready to take sides with their former em- ployers; and so the conductor, who had heard Judge Bowen's derision, refused to leave before schedule time. This conductor secured a copy of the writ, and, fear- ing a holrl-up en route, placed it in his boot and pulled out for J Denver. At Falmer J^ake, when within fifty-two miles of jjenver, thin enterprising conductor gave additional evidence of his loyalty to MeHsrs. Dodge and Palmer by slipping out »nd disabling the locomotive. He re- moved one of the main rods (they were not so heavy I. ! 148 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. then as they are now) and threw it into the lake. He must have done more, for that, unless he had " seen " the engineer, would not prevent the engine, still hav- ing one side connected, from taking the train in. After crippling the engine, the conductor boarded a push-car (hand car without handles), stood up, spread out his rain coat to make a sail, and was pushed by the west wind down the long slope into Denver, while Attorney Teller* sat in the delayed train at the summit and swore. It would seem that the Eio Grande was not content with all the advantage it held in the courts, but was still increasing its armed force in the Grand Canon, where J. R. Deremer, one of the engineers, blocked the trail with a force of fifty men. " By what authority," demanded the Santa Fe men, looking into the fifty rifles, " do you hold this pass? " " By the authority of the Supreme Court and the fifty men behind me,'^ was Deremer's reply. The action of the regular olflcers and employees of the two roads was prompted by a sense of loyalty to their respective employers, l^ut the common lierd which took service did so simply for the pay of five dollars a day, and had no higher interest in the contest. Some- times the camps of the opposing armies were close to- gether; sometimes the officers and men met, mingled and mixed toddy \ifu]rr the saiiH! cedar. If President Strong ol the Santa Fe had realized file BmonHtium nf the fiihmtwn, or, it were better to say, if |j > a 11 a CHAPTEE XV. THE DENVER AND RIO GRANDE. After the war with the Santa Fe, which left the Kio Grande in possession of the Grand Canon of the Arkansas, the latter company rushed its rails into Leadville. The twelve miles of track that the Santa F6 had chiseled from the granite walls of the wild gorge gave the narrow gauge possession of the only possible pass to the Carbonate Camp in Lake County, to Aspen beyond Tennessee Pass, and ultimately on down the Grand River to Salt Lake and the Pacific. The great controversy between the rival roads was ended in the complete " lay down " of the big line in 1879. In the following y3ar the Denver and Rio Grande reached the booming silver camp, where what is now the main line ended for about ten years. In the dawn of the '80s all Colorado was smelting silver, and at that time silver was worth smelting. Just where the road entered the Grand Canon of the Arkansas a little mountain stream poured its limpid waters into the river from the opposite shore. Up this narrow, crooked gorge, called Grape Creek Caiion, probably because there were no grapes in it, the pathfinders of the narrow gauge chopped and 171 -i1! 172 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. picked their way until they reached the high open plain of Wet Mountain Valley. Thirty miles from the main line, in Custer County, lay Silver Cliff, where thirty thousand men, women, and outlaws had assem- hled to carve out a fortune. It was to reach this booming camp that the company now began the con- struction of a branch line through Grape Creek Canon. It finished it in a little over a year, in time to carry away the corpse of the dead camp.* Beyond the Sangre de Christo, on the Pacific side of the range, Gunnison was thriving like a bit of scan- dal, building smelters, shipping silver, and developing a burying ground on the banks of the Gunnison River. Passenger rates on the Rio Grande were six cents a mile in the valleys and ten in the mountains, with freight rates in proportion. Thesie conditions made great the temptation to the management tg try to reach every booming camp in Colorado at the earliest possible moment, and the re- sult was that the millions of money used in construct- ing new mileage, together with the millions poured in from Europe and the Eastern States of America for the development of mines, and still other millions taken from the hills, gave Colorado an exciting boom, and made it easy to secure money to build roads, the cost of which would tie them with silver and rail'them with gold. While the branch was being built to Silver Cliff, other engineers, leaving the Leadville line at Salida, ♦ For the story of the undoing of this camp and railroad, see my story, The Express Messenger. — C. W. THB DENVER AND RIO GRANDE. 178 fifty miles above the mouth of the canon, toiled up to the summit of the Rockies, reaching the crest of the continent at Marshall Pass — ten thousand feet above the sea — and dropped a line to Gunnison. Besides the silver mines of the Gunnison country they found hero the only anthracite coal in Colorado, and immense beds of coking coal. In a little while the boom fretted itself out, the new liotcl was closed, the fires died in the big smelter, and finally the public educator, hiding the elusive pea between the two half shells of a walnut, folded his blankets and went away. Meanwhile the restless pathfinders, from the tops of the wild walls, were sounding the depths of the Black Caiion of the Gunnison for a path to the Pacific. Below Sapinero the walls of the caiion came so close together that the trail makers were obliged to turn back and find a way to the bottom of the gorge beyond the narrows. A long rope was fiyed to a cedar, and a man started down. The rope parted ten feet from the top of the wall, and the daring engineer was dashed to death at the bottom of the canon, Another rope was brought, another man went over, another, and another, and after burying their comrade in a quiet place they pushed on and planted a flag on the point of Currecanti Needle. . They then turned into, a side caiion, 'where the Cimarron empties into the Gun- nison, up the Cimarron, over Cerro Summit and down into the adobe, sage-covered desert lands in the valley of the Uncompahgre, the Gunnison, and the Grand. These same adobe deserts are dotted to-day with bits of green meadowland, wide fields of waving grain, and orchards drooping with the finest fruit that can be 13 174 THE STORY OP THE EAILBOAD. f(3und anywhere on the continent. The rails that ran tlirough the narrow, wild canons were placed but three feet apart, and all that portion of track •shown on the company's maps west of Salida is still known as the narrow-gauge system of the Denver and Kio Qrando. Across the blazing Utah desert the locating en- gineers i)lantcd a row of stakes, and in time tlie loco- motive, begrimed with dust and alkali, dragging a huge water car behind it, crossed over to the shores of the Great Salt Lake. The intention of the projectors of the narrow-gauge system, as the name indicates, was to build a road from Denver to the Rio Grande River, and possibly down to southern California by way of Santa Fe; but when Leadville and Aspen, and other silver camps, began to attract people by thousands and tens of thousands, the company did what was best for the road and for the State. Being a three-feet gauge, the road could go where a goat could find a footing. The locomotives were heavy for the gauge, but with very low wheels. The boilers lay so low that the links, when the lever was well down, would almost touch the ties. The grade on the original main line was two hundred and seven- teen feet to the mile. A branch line to the Calumet mines has a grad 2 of four hundred and eight. A heavy locomotive, can haul three empty cars — a load and a half — up the hill, and hold seven loads down, some- times. The Denver and Rio Grande, before the main line- was widened out, was the most pretentious, most im- portant, best equipped, and, so far as we know, the most extensive and successful narrow-gauge system of THE DENVER AND RIO GRANDE. 175 railroad in the world. Nowhere have we ever seen such perfect little palaces as were to be found on this three- foot road. The only thing that approaches it in neat- ness aiid completeness is a little thirty-inch road that runs along the Suez Canal, from Port Said to Ismail ia. The evolution of the motive power of the Rio Grande is an interesting study. The first locomotives weighed twelve tons — less than weighs the empty tank of one of the mountain moguls that scream along that line to-dav. The mail cars had four wheels, and when one of them got off the rail the mail agent got out, and then the trainmen put their backs to the car and " jacked it up " on the rail again. The first coal cars had four wheels, a diimp in the bottom, and held about as much as an ordinary farm wagon. A young man named Sample came out from Bald- win's to set up the first engine. When the work had been finished he remained at Denver, repairing air pumps and " tinkering" about." By-and-bye he became foreman of the round-house, and finally master me- chanic. He had begun in the big shops at Philadel- phia at a dollar and a half a week; now he gave the firm orders for five, ten, or, twenty locomotives at a time. For a quarter of a century he remained at the head of the motive power department, and tlitn they promoted him. When Mr. Jeffrey became president he took the old master mechanic uptown, put him in a fine office in a big building, and gave him the salary, title, and responsibility of general superintendent of the system; but it did not make the old worker happier than he had been there at the shops, with the sound of the \rr-^ 176 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. morning, noon, and evening whistle calling him to and from his work, just as it had called him at Philadel- phia in the days when his monthly stipend reached the sum of six dollars. At first the ties used on the Kio Grande were all pine, but the very hard mountain pine. These little locomotives — four wheals connected^— could curve on the brim of a broad sombrero, and it was not an un- common thing for the locating engineers to run round a big bowlder rather than blast it away. They would not shy off for a tree unless it happened to be a very large one. In the mad rush to reach a booming camp, no attention was paid to banks. Often in the early spring the two sides of a through cut would ooze down over the track and cover it with mud. It was two or three years before the sides of the cuts got the proper pitch and became safe. General W. J. Palmer was the ruling genius in the building of the Denver and Kic Grande, and was its president when the narrow gauge ciossed the Utah desert. The money that made the Utah line seems to have been Palmer money. Shortly after the comple- tion of the road to Salt Lake the Eio Grande Company began to feel that it would like to lose the general, and his general manager, Colonel D. C. Dodge. Messrs. Palmer and Dodge were not in a hurry to get out. They had won the big battle that gave to the company the right of way through the "^cyal Gorge, and felt that they were at home. The climax came one night, when a new manager was temporarily in- stalled at Denver during the absence of General-Man^ t V: :' The Royal Gorge, Colorado. (Denver and Rio Grande Railroad.) / :^/'^ THE DENVER AND RIO GRANDE. 177 ager Dodge. The colonel's car was at the rear end of a regular train, and when it came to the foot of the mountain the pin was pulled, and his car allowed to drop in on a shur. Very naturally the general man- ager was indignant. He raved at the dispatcher, and was ahout to wire an order dismissing that blameless official, when he was reminded of the fact that he also was at that n^oment out of a job. After much delay and a lot of wiring, the car was coupbd on again and allowed to proceed to Denver, but that was the end of the reign of Messrs. Palmer and Dodge on the Rio Grande. But these indefeasible fighters did not go out of business. They pulled the pin on the Western section at the State line, called it the " Rio Grande Western," and took possession. It looked at the moment like a poor piece of property, stretching for the most part away across a desert with a range of mountains and the Utah Valley at the other end, but these far-seeing road makers saw the value of the franchise. Whatever of rolling stock happened to be at the west end v/as seized and held by the Rio Grande West- ern, and the same was done by the parent road. The new manager for the old company now began to get men loyal to his line to go over to the west end and purloin locomotives. When an engineer got near the State line, he would have his fireman pull the pin between him and his train and run over into Colorado. This business went on until both companies grew weary, for it was demoralizing to tu8 service and in- terfered with the exchange of traffic which was neces- sary to both roads. "■p 178 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. In time matters were adjusted, the superintendent of motive power for the Rio Grande was made consult- ing superintendent on the western, and in a few years nearly all the operating department, from the general superintendent down, as Wv-11 as the general passenger agent, were men who had been with the old company. When the Colorado Midland built across the moun- tains the already prosperous Rio Grande Western widened its gauge, bought new, heavy locomotives, and began to boom with the business that came to it from the rival roads in the Rockies and from the Central Pacific at Ogden, with an ever-increasing local freight business originating in the mines, fields, and orchards of Utah, while the passenger department could live on half-rate tickets alone, so prolific were the families that flourished at the hearths of the faithful. Messrs. Dodge and Palmer are still at the head of the road, which, like the 0. R. & N., has always been a good road for its owners, its employees, and the sec- tion of the country through which it runs. If we except the New York Central and the Penn- sylvania, the Denver and Rio Grande is probably the best advertised road in the world. One reason for this is because it has always had a versatile and enthusiastic passenger agent, but mainly because God has scattered along its line miles and miles of almost matchless scen- ery, so that every lover of Nature who crosses the con- tinent by this route becomes at once a travelling agent for the Colorado road. CHAPTER XVI. THE NORTHERN PACIFIC. Because it traversed a country that promised some- • thing for man to feed on, the northern route was the one most widely discussed at the beginning of the talk of a transcontinental railroad. It missed the high mountains of the middle West and the deserts farther south. Then, too, in the very early days, before we found out that we were in a great hurry, it was the cheapest route, for by it we were to sail round to the lakes of the Northwest, or paddle up the Missouri, take a train, or some sort of "steam carriage," to the head waters of the Columbia, and fall with the current into the Pacific— trolling for salmon on the way 'down. Had it not been for the war with Mexico in 1846, winch drew attentipn to the Southwest, the gold dis- coveries in California in 1849, which drew attention to the Golden Gate route, the efforts of Jefferson Davis and other influential men of the South in the interest of a southern roufe— in short, if there had been no other way, the Northern Pacific might have been the first, instead of the third, transcontinental railroad in America. The Pike's Peak excitement in 1859 was another 179 180 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. star by which the pioneer piloted his bull team across the plains, opening a new trail from Omaha to the Pacific, midway between the famed old Santa Fe trail and the proposed path of the Northern Pacific Eail- road. In spite of the prophecies of the seers of the Senate, House of Representatives, and the financial world, the middle and far West continued to grow in importance and to give, from year to year, promise of a great future. The Mormons had watered the adobe deserts of Utah, and they had blossomed into broad vales of fruit and flowers. This desert land, so dreaded by early voyagers, that lay glistening in the sun three hundred days in each year, arched over by a sky as fine and fair, as clear and blue as burnished steel, wanted only to be watered to become the garden spot of the world. But nobody knew this in the early days. The un- inhabitable West was looked upon as a thing to be crossed, conquered, and overcome. The plains and des- erts were useless, the great Rockies important only as ballast to keep the world right "side up. The chief aim of the transcontinental railroad, as already stated, was to reach the Pacific Ocean and the Orient. The pos- sibility of the vast and growing empire that Hes between the Missouri River and the Pacific coast to-day was put aside, as the ignorant miners of Nevada put aside the " blue stuff " that polluted their pans and clogged their sluices on the Comstock, thereby daily throwing for- tunes in the dump. Nature guards her secrets well, but Time will tell. After all these centuries Africa and Alaska are giving up their gold. It might have taken even a longer time to have I 7D THE NORTHERN PACIFIC. 5S i a; •fl ISl demonstrated the riches and resources of the "West if the civil war had not made the completion of a railroad to the Pacific a political and military necessity. When, in 1853, Congress authorized the War De- partment to make explorations to ascertain the most practicable route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, the details, including the route or routes to be surveyed, were all left to Jeffer- son Davis, Secretary of War. Very naturally Mr. Davis favoured a southern route, but it is to his credit that he did not allow his prejudice to interfere with his duty to the whole country in the matter. He set five sepa- rate expeditions to work at once on each of the five routes that had been advocated. These were then known as the 32d, 35th, 38th, 42d, and 48th parallel routes, along which were subse- quently built respectively the Texas Southern Pacific, the Santa F^, the Kansas Pacific, the Union Central Pacific, and the Northern Pacific railroads. Isaac I. Stevens, who had seen service in Mexico, and was then Governor of Washington Territory, and Captain George B. McClellan, of the United States Army, were placed in charge of the survey along the extreme northern route. Associated with these leaders were a number of young men who won fame in after years. Captain McClellan was afterward commander in chief of the Army of the Potomac, and was once the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States. Captain Stevens perished on a Virginia battle- field. Stevens worked west from St. Paul, McClellan east- ward from the Sound. 182 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. These things were done in the days when the West was a howling wilderness from the river to the coast. Each of the outfits was armed, clothed, and equipped in true military fashion, and fixed for a long and dan- gerous voyage. Every mile of territory between St. Paul and the Pacific was held by the Indians, who, painted, feathered, and full of fight, crossed the path of the trail makers daily, threatening the engineers and often engaging them in bloody battle. Governor Stevens, from the Mississippi, and Cap- tain McClellan, from the Columbia, fought their way up to the low crest of the continent where a base of supplies had been established. Governor Stevens came out of the work an enthu- siastic advocate of the northern route. In fact, nearly every one of the five men sent out as chief of the several surveys seems to have found a way to the Pacific, but the time had not yet arrived for the great work of building the roads^ or any one of them. The reports of these expeditions, which were submitted to Con- gress by the Secretary of "War in 1855, filled, with maps and illustrations, thirteen huge volumes. Secre- tary Davis, as had been predicted, and as was perfectly natural under the circumstances, favoured the 32d parallel route, and argued, when submitting his report, that the road should not leave the MissilSsippi farther north than Vicksburg. But finally, when the time came for fixing the starting point for the Pacific railroad, it was fixed by a man politically as far from Mr. Davis as the north pole is from the south pole. When President Lincoln, at the conclusion of his first interview in Washington THB NORTHERN PACIFIC. 183 with General Dodge, put his long forefinger on Oma- ha, that settled the question, so far as the first Pacific road was concerned. In this way the northern scheme was put aside for the time, though never abandoned by the men who had been pushing the enterprise. After the completion of the first transcontinental road the California capital- ists, who had made money out of the 'building of the Central Pacific, built the Southern Pacific, which gave the northern route still another setback. Asa Whitney, who had been its early and strongest advocate, who was at one time within a few votes of winning from Congress a strip of land sixty miles wide, running from the Mississippi to the ocean, including a title to the Columbia River and sixty miles of sea- coast, went out peddling milk. Three or four Senators of the United States had it in their power to say whether this apparently unselfish man should be the emperor of seventy-seven million acres of land or of a milk wagon, and they gave him the wagon. We say that he was unselfish because he agreed to build a rail- Toad through the middle of his farm, all the v ay from St; Paul to Puget Sound, without any financial aid from the Government. If he had lived a quarter of a century later he might have been a Gould or a Hunt- ington. When the control of the Government passed from the South to the North, the friends of the northern route took courage, but the Government was not going to extremes. The friends of what is now the Union Pacific were close to Mr. Lincoln, who seems to have favoured that survey, just as Thomas Jefferson had ?r 184 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. favoured the northern scheme, and as Jefferson Davis favoured a southern route, and the result was that the Government gave its aid to the 452d parallel line, over which the Union and Central Pacific roads were after- ward built. On July 2, 1864, after the Union Pacific had se- cured the necessary legislation to insure the construc- tion of a line from Omaha, President Lincoln signed the bill creating the Northern Pacific Railroad Com- pany. At the head of this enterprise was a man named Perham, who had been before Congress for some time with what he called " The People's Pacific Railroad Company." This was a New England organization, which had been squeezed out of the 42d parallel scheme, and had transferred its faith, effects, and affections suddenly to the northern route. This com- piny was to receive no subsidy in Government bonds. Tiie land grant was to be twenty sections to the mile of track in Minnesota, and forty sections in the territories. Perham had persuaded himself that a million peo- ple stood ready to buy each one share of stock at one hundred dollars a share. Out of this insane notion grew an embarrassing provision in the charter, which r;revented the company from issuing mortgage bonds except by the consent of the Congress of the United States. The act of incorporation named one hundred and thirty-five persons as commissioners to organize the Northern Pacific Railroad Company. In September, 1864, thirty-three of these commissioners, nearly all New Englanders, met at Boston and elected Josiah Perham as president. The officers of the board of THE NORTHEIiN PACIPIO. 185 commissioners were directed to open books for sub- scription to the capital stock. It was necessary that twenty thousand shares of stock should be subscribed for before a board of directors could be chosen to elect permanent officers to take the active management of the business from the commissioners appoii'^; by Congress. Now came John Hancock, who purchased one share, for which he is supposed to have deposited ten dollars with Mr. Increase S.Whittington, treasurer of the board. Two Perhams subscribed for one share each, while Josiah, the president, took ten. John A. Bass bought one share, and S. C. Fessenden four thou- pand. In all, twenty thousand and seventy-five siiarcb were subscribed for, and in December, 18G4, a board of directors was elected. Josiah Perham now became the first president of the Northern Pacific Kailroad Com- pany, and Mr. Whittington chief of the treasury de- partment. Six years later, when the original sub- scribers were called upon to pay the remaining ninety per cent on their stock, they refused, whereupon the new board confiscated the whoL of the original sub- scription. At the end of 1865, Perham, having exhausted his means .and mental and physical strength, went to the wall, like Asa Whitney. He succeeded, however, in interesting a number of Boston capitalists, notably Benjamin P. Cheney, of the Vermont Central Rail- road, and proprietor of Cheney's Express. These en- terprising New Englanders, having paid off the debts incurred by Perham, appealed to Congress for aid in building the road. 186 THE STOEY OF THE RAILROAD. Two winters were now wasted in Washington in an effort to secure the help of the Government. The "down East" company was not popular in the West. The fact that the New England organization favoured a consolidation or combination with a Canadian line was also worked hard by those opposed to the northern route and in favour of the Union Pacific, and also by a great many public men who were opposed to granting land to any company. Senator Sherman was a bitter opponent of the northern route, though his brother. General Sherman, was one of the earnest workers for a road to the Pacific. Early in 1867 the president of the Northern Pa- cific Company conceived the idea of forming a rail- road syndicate composed chiefly of railroad men. Through the efforts of his friend, Mr. Thomas H. Canfield, gf Burlington, Vt., he succeeded 'in get- ting the signatures of the following influential men to an agreement to take the Northern Pacific franchise, debts, and other disadvantages, and to try to push it to a practical beginning, if not to completion. The first big man to sign what was afterward known as the Original Interest Agreement was Presidi..nt William B. Ogden, of the Chicago and Northwestern Eailroad. Later they obtained the signatures of the presidents of the Erie, the Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago, and of Vice-President Fargo, of the New York Central. Other signers of the Original Interest Agreement were A. H. and D. N. Barney, and B. P. Cheney. The new syndicate employed an eminent engineer, Mr. Edwiii F. Johnson, and began surveying a line. THE NORTHERN PACIFIC. 187 lobbying at Washington, and printing pamphlets. In' a Utcle while they had gone into their private purses for a quarter of a million dollars. Despite all revbrses, the holders of the franchise still clung to the belief that it was valuable. True, the Government gave no financial aid, but the land grant was double the amount per mile given to the Union and 'to the Central Com- pany, and the land much moie valuable. At all events, it was so regarded at that time. In 1869, just after the completion of- the Union Pacific, the banking firm of Jay Cooke and Company was jasked to take the financial agency of the northern road. Before giving aii answer, the big banking house sent experts of its own to explore, the country through which the proposed road was to run. One outfit went round to the mouth of the Columbia, wKile another, accomp'anied by President Smith, explored from Lake Superior to the Eed River of the North. The Pacific coast party was chased from the Yellowstone by In- di?ns, while the members of the eastern end of tne ex- pedition, together with their military escort, were forced to fly for their lives from Fort Stevenson to the settlements in Minnesota, pursued by a big band of savages. The expert engineer of the banking house put the cost of the road and the necessary equipment at $85,277,000, an average of $42,638 per mile. The re- ' port was on the whole very encouraging to the banking house, and it became the financial agent of the com- pany. The main terms of the Jay Cooke contract are set down in Mr. E. V. Smalley's History of the Northern Pacific Railroad as follows: 188 THE STORY OF THE Rj»ILROAD. " They provided for an issue of bonds to the amount of one hundred million dollars, bearing interest at the rate of seven and three tenths per cent in gold. "The banking firm credited the railroad with eighty-eight cents an the dollar for the bonds it sold, and as it disposed of them at par its margin was a very liberal one. But the contract gave it two hundred dollars of the stock of the company for every thousand dollars of bonds sold, which would have amounted, for the completed road, to about twenty million dollars, pnd one half of the remainder of i, one hundred mil- lion dollars of stock authorized by the charter. " The twelve original proprietary interests which owned the stock were increased to twenty-four, and twelve of them assigned to Jay Cooke and Company. A considerable amount of thj stock was given by the banking house to subscribers to the bonds, but in all cases an irrevocable power of attorney was taken, so that the firm, having purchased a thirteenth interest, 'controlled the manngement of the company's affairs. Other specifications in the contract made 'he, firm the sole financial agent of the road, and the c * i^positary of its funds; provided for the conversion ■ i* he six hundred thousand dollars of stock outstandirg into bonds at fifty cents on the doUar, created a land com- paii}! to manage the town sites, and bound the firri to raise five million dollars within thirty days, with which the company was immediately to commence building the road." A pool was formed in Philadelphia to furnish the five million dollars that had to be paid In at once for the beginning of construction work The members of THE NORTHERN PACIFIC. 189 the pool took the bonds at par and received the twelve proprietary interests at fifty dollars each. One of this little deal the banking house made considerably more than a million dollars. By the time the road reached Red Kiver each of the twelve proprietary shares had earned a little over a half million dollars' worth of stock. A company had been formed to speculate in real estate along the line — destroying old and building up new camps, planting county seats and settling waste places, one half the profits of which went to the bank. The Congress of the United States, which had stood firm against the combined pull and push of the powerful railroad syndicate, went down at the first fire from the great gold-clad cruiser. Jay Cooke and Com- pany. To be sure, the truly virtuous men of both houses made a strong fight, but they were outgunned by the opposing fleet. The joint resolution upon which the fight was made was introduced in 1870, authorizing the issue of bonds secured by the land grant as well as the railroad property, including even the filing of the mortgage in the office of the Secretary of the In- terior. It practically enlarged thr area of the land grant to thirty miles in the States and fifty miles in the territories on each side of the line. Yet, with all the advantage enjoyed by the banking house in the way of gifts of interest, commissions, and the absolute control of the financial end of the enter- prise. Jay Cooke and Company found it hard to raise the money. A deal had been made, and nearly carried out, by which a syndicate of European bankers was to take fifty million dollars' worth of the bonds, but at 190 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. I 111 I that moment Napoleon III began to make trouble for himself on the Rhine, and the deal fell through. By liberal advertising in almost ever} available space Jay Cooke and Company succeeded in r^iisiing a considerable amount of money by the sale of bonds (the interest upon which was payable in gold) in the United States. Thousandrt of names were written upon the big books in the great banking house, many of them the names of comparatively poor people. The Cookes now used for advertising purposes the speeches of con- gressmen who had opposed the land grant upon the ground that the land was rich, fertile, and extremely valuable. Actual construction work on the Northern Pacific was begun in the summer of 1870, at Thompson's Junc- tion on the Lake Superior and Mississippi Kailroad, also controlled by Jay Cooke and Company. Within the following twenty-four months more than thirty million dollars were received from the sale of bonds, and it seemed that nothing could break the big bank that was back of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The house had already made an enviable reputation and much money by placing the Government''* war loans, and now thousands were eager to trust their savings to it. Early m 1873 the company took the completed por- tion of the road as far west as Red River from the con- tractors and opened it for traffic. The Lake Superior and Mississippi was leased, and a controlling interest bought in the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, op- erating nearly all the steamboat lines on Puget Sound, the Columbia, Snake, and Willamette rivers, making THE NORTHERN PACIFIC. 191 connection with the ocean steamers to San Francisco. The Northern Pacific Company by this latter purchase came also into possession of the portage railroad at The Dalles and Cascades on the Columbia, which gave it control of nearly all the transportation facili- ties then existing in Oregon and Washington Terri- tories. Despite the liberal flow of money into the bank at the East, the rapidity with which it was spent at the West found the company embarrassed as early as August, 1872. President Smith, who seems to have given the road its first real start, now resigned. The house of Jay Cooke and Company went to the wall in the panic of 1873, and in 1875 a receiver was ap- pointed for the Northern Pacific Railroad Company. Jay C/Ooke and Company had advanced to the rail- road company a million and a half dollars to push con- struction, while the directors of the road had borrowed on their own individual credit vast sums of money to hurry on to the Pacific, and now it all had to stop. In 1875 General George W. Cass, who wa* presi- dent of tne company, was appointed receiver. The winding up of the business of the bankrupt road by Judge Nathaniel Shipman, the shutting oil of lawyers who were anxious for delay, and the shutting out of the financial undertakers, who are always waiting about to receive the remains of a dead enterprise, was a big piece of work justly and ably performed by the court. The bonds bought from Jay Cooke and Company were converted into preferred stock, the thirty-three million dollars of debt wiped out, and the original bond- holders left in possession of five hundred and seventy- 192 THE STORY OF THE RAIJiROAD. li i ill I five miles of road and ten million acres of land free of encuirbrance. Mr. C. B. Wright, who became president of the Northern Pacific when General Cass was appointed receiver, was succeeded by Mr. Frederick Billings in 1879. Mr. Billings was able to raise money, and the work of completing the road was recommenced. He succeeded in interesting Messrs. Drexel, Morgan and Company and Messrs. Winslow, Lanier and Company, and through these big firms secured the funds for the completion of the road in 1883, just about a half cen- tury from the time when the subject of a Pacific rail- road had begun to be agitated in the press, and thirty years after the first survey had been made. In the general shaking up of 1873 the Northern Pacific lost the footing it had gained by purchasing a controlling interest in the steamboat business on the Columbia. In this way the back door was left open, and a new man slipped in, who was destined to mix things for Mr. Billings and others who had come into possession of the then unfinished railroad. This unknown man was Mr. Henry Villard, a Ger- man-born journalist, who developed into one of the great promoters of the day. In the interest of a syn- dicate of New York capitalists, Mr. Villard came up through the mouth of the Columbia for the first time in 1874. Later he represented the bondholders o' the Kansas Pacific, also suffering from the short crops of 1873. In 1876 he v/as appointed one of the receivers of the Kansas Pacific, and afterward removed by the same court. Some of Mr. Villard's friends have com- plained that Jay Gould wanted to run everything in ree the ted in the He md ■ny, the en- ail- rty ern ing the ten, nix nto rer- the yn- up ime th'i i of rers the )m- : in e THE NORTHERN PACIFIC. 193 his own way in the reorganization of the Kansas road, and that he violated every agreement made with the original owners. As to Mr. Gould's desire to run things, it might be put down as an interesting bit of history that Mr. Villard showed as much ambition in that direction as did he, and almost as much ability. Finding an open door, he came into the territory of the Northern Pacific and looked about. It wanted but a glance for a man with such a nose for business to see the possibilities of the Columbia Eiver and of Oregon. He secured an option on the controlling in- terest of the navigation companies, the right of way for a railroad up the Columbia Valley, and other valu- able franchises. He knew that the original intention of the Union Pacific Company had been to drop a line from Wyoming across laho into the Pacific at Portland, Ore., and now he proposed to find the money for half the road if the Union Pacific would find the other half, which would give them, with their Central Pacific connection at Ogden, two legs of a "Y," with one foot on San Francisco and the other on Portland. The Union Pacific spent a few days in investigating the matter; then it declined the offer, and spent a few years in regretting it. Mr. Villard did not despair. He sought help else- where, secured it, and in 1879 incorporated the Ore- gon Eailway and Navigation Company. The work of constructing a railroad on the south bank of the beau- tiful Columbia began the same year. This was going to be a good road to own so long as it had no rival, but the Northern Pacific was liable to build down the north bank of the Columbia, and Mr. Villard set about ft r 194 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. to prevent the construction of that line. He intro- duced himself to the Northern Pacific and asked for a traffic arrangement. Having induced the Northern Pacific to use the Oregon Hailwjiy and Navigation Company's track to Portland, he eadeavoured to se- cure an agreement to use it for all time, and a promise that the Northern Pacific would not build down the Columbia. That was good business. There is no valid rea- son for building two roads where the^e is a living for but one, but the Northern Pacific would not agree. Now Mr. Villard began to develop into a promoter. It was in 1880, when money was piled up ready to be risked. He did not tell even his closest friends what was in his mind. To his business acquaintances in the East he sent an invitation to join him in a new company he was about to form. They were invited to make up a pot of eight million dollars and ask no questions. There was a certain amount of mystery about the transaction. Almost every one who received this in- vitation to come in on the ground floor felt that he had been let into a great secret, subscribed and asked for more without knowing exactly what he was about. The next day Mr. Villard ha3 the money. Then he called a meeting, explained his scheme, asked for twelve million dollars more, and got them. When everything had been arranged, the young organizer nipped enough Northern Pacific stock to put his company in control of the road. Before this Mr. Villard, with a limited amount of modesty, had asked for a seat with the Northern Fa- THE NORTHERN PACIFIC. 195 cific directors, but had failed to get it. Now he strolled in, smiling, and rested his hand on the back of Mr. Billings's chair. " Keep your seat, keep your seat," he said, as that gentleman started to rise. " Don't get up on my account. This is all done in the interest of the Northern Pacific llailroad Company, and not for the benefit of the Oregon line." Now, as a matter of fact, Mr. Billings was really anxious to give up the presidency of the road, and without more ado he got out of the chair. It had all come about so swiftly and suddenly that the general himself was surprised. He was not ready to assume the active management of the property, and it was arranged that Mr. A. H. Barney should take the presi- dency for a year, when Mr. Villard, to whom had been refused a seat on the board, took his place at the head of the table. If Jay Gould ever rounded up a railroad, corralled a company, or roped and marked a maverick for his own more neatly or completely, his historians have failed to record the incident. The striking difference between Mr. Gould and some of his opponents was that the former never squealed when he happened to come out second best. The ultimate aim and ambition of all the magnates was the same."** Later the Oregon line became an independent road, or rather a system of roads. A few years ago it was being operated as a part of the vast Union Pacific system, but was lost in the break-up of 1893, just as * It is not within the province of this book to trace the financial vicissitudes of the Northern Pacific within the last fifteen years. THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. the Northern Paciiic Company lost it twenty years be- fore. To-day it is being operated as an independent line. It was from the start, has remained, and is now one of the very best pieces of railroad property in all the West. Millions of m(!n and women know the beautiful river that runs from Albany into the Atlantic Ocean. The writer has seen it from the engine of the Em- pire State express at a mile a minute, when the oak leaves, turning with the touch of Time, were all aflame with the fire of a dying day. And yet, watching from the window of a car as it winds along the banks of the noblest river of the Pacific slope, in the shadows of wild, native woods, hea^ the splash and feeling the spray of foaming falls, one is apt to say that the hills of the Hudson are the banks of a sleepy canal compared to the wild grandeur of the beautiful Co- lumbia. m CHAPTER XVII. THE CANADIAN PACIFIC. Before the Canadian Pacific Railway, or back of it, there was the beginning, in 18G7, of the Dominion of Canada, created by the confederation of the several provinces under a general government. Before that there wer^ Indians, and back of the Indians the mountains, lakes, and forest; but back of everything was the Hud- son Bay Company. That institution seems always to have been here. A half hundred years ago its trappers were found on nearly every river that ran between the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. The early pathfinders crossing the plains took tips from these men, and the first overland caravans were often piloted along the old Santa Fe trail by the fur-catchers from Canada. Having been here always, the Hudson Bay Company claimed the earth by right of discovery, or, at least, all of it that lay between the Rocky Mountains and the watershed of Lake Superior. Now, the Canadian Government, being ambitious, wanted a dominion washed by the waters of the Pacific as well as by the Atlantic, but before it could hope to have absolute empire "over all the vast region that reached from ocean to ocean it must do away with the Hudson Bay Company, which had a government of its own. The company was disposed of by a cash pay- 197 I 198 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. ment of a million and a half dollars, the retention of its occupied posts, and five per cent of all lands lying between the Eed Kiver Valley on the east and the Rocky Mountains on the west, and extending as far north as the great Saskatchewan. This purchase car- ried the Dominion of Canada to a line marked by the summit of the Rocky Mountains, between the forty- ninth and the fifty-fourth parallel, thence on the one hundred and twentieth meridian to the sixtieth paral- lel, which lines form the eastern boundary of the Pa- cific province, British Columbia, north of which the Dominion was extended westward to the one hundred and forty-first r meridian west of Greenwich, which is the eastern boundary of Alaska in that latitude. This was one of tlie largest real -estate transactions on record. In 1871 British Columbia entered the union, thus extending the Dominion of Canada to the Pacific Ocean. The principal conditi'^n of this union was that the Dominion should within ten years connect by rail the seaboard of British Columbia with the rail- road svstem of Canada, construction to commence at the Pacific coast in 1873. Surveys were immediately commenced and prosecuted for years, but the work of construction was not begun until 1875, and then not at the Pacific coast, but at the Lake Superior end. Work at the coast was not commenced until 1879. Some of the delay 's accounted for by the fact that the records of the first three years' survey were destroyed by fire in Ottawa early in 1874.* * These facts and figures are taken from a paper read by Mr. Thomas C. Keefer, President Am. Soc. C. E., at Milwaukee, in 1888. ill III THE CANADIAN PACIFIC. 199 The Parliament of Canada had decided in 1872 that the road should be constructed and operated by a private corporation subsidized by the Government, and a contract was made in that year with the late Sir Hugh Allan for its construction within ten years, and its operation for a similar period on the basis of a subsidy of thirty million dollars cash and fifty million acres of land. Sir Hugh controlled a transatlantic steamship line, and desired the railroad for inland connection. This excited powerful antagonism, and his project was so discredited in the money market that he failed to form his company. The Government also was defeated on a question arising out of this contract, and retired. The new Government was bound to carry out the agreement with British Co- lumbia, but, not feeling responsible for its details, did not regard time as the essence of the contract, and considered it an impossible one in that respect, especially after Sir Hugh Allan's failure. It was de- termined, therefore, in 1874, to proceed with it as a public work, and construction was commenced be- tween Lake Superior and the prairie region in the following year. The Government of 1874 was de- feated in 1878, its opponents returning to power. They, after continuing the construction as a pub- lic work until 1880, reverted to their original policy of construction by a private company. The terms of the contract with this private (the present) com- pany were: 1. Twenty-five million dollars cash and twenty- five million acres of selected land in the fertile belt, in addition to the right of way for track and rtations. 200 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. shops, docks, and wharves on or through public prop- erty. 2. Free import of all steel rails and fastenings, fence and bridge material in wood or iron for origi- nal construction, and telegraph wire and instruments for first equipment. 3. The Government sections under contract — about seven hundred miles — to be completed, with stations and water service, but without rolling stock, and handed over to the company on the completion of that contract as a free gift. This seven hundred miles of road had cost the Government thirty million dollars. 4. Perpetual exemption from taxation by the Fed- eral Government. 5. No line to be chartered south of the Canadian Pacific for a period of twenty years, except for a direc- tion southwest or west of south. The company bound itself to build two thousand miles of road and to operate the transcontinental line for a period of ten years. The road when completed was to be as good as the Union Pacific was found to be in 1873, four years after the last spike was driven.* * " "When the Canadian Pacific was about to be built, the Dominion Government, some time in 1873 or 1874, examined the Union Pacific Railroad carefully, and, in making its contract for the building of the Canadian Pacific, used the Union Pacific as its standard ; and there occurs a clause in their contract which provides that the Canadian Pacific, when conpleted, shall be equal in all its parts (in roadbed, structures, alignments, and equipment) to the Union Pacific as found in the year 1874 ; and that Government is now (1888) making a settlement with rts con- THE CANADIAN PACIFIC. 201 The capital stock of the Canadian Pacific Company was fixed at one hundred million dollars. Here, as in the building of other transcontinental lines, great cal- culations were made and vast sums of money expected from the sale of lands, but these could not be sold for the simple reason that the Government was giving away land that was just as good. By the autumn of 1883 sixty-five million dollars of the capital stock had been sold and all the money expended in construction. Rival interests now assailed the road, aided by the Government's political opponents, creating such dis- trust that the remainder of the capital stock could not be sold at all. About this time the Northern Pacific was in trouble, creating a bad state of affairs in the money market, and altogether the Canadian Pacific Company was in a bad way. Early in 1884 the com- pany was obliged to apply to the Dominion Govern- mcTit for a loan of $32,500,000. This made a total loan of $29,880,000, to secure which the Government took a lien upon the entire property of the company. In consideration of this loan, the company agreed to complete the transcontinental line by May 1, 1886, five years ahead of time. The road was now being built at the rate of nearly five hundred miles a year. Parts of it were comparative- ly cheap, others extremely expensive. There is one mile of the Canadian Pacific, along the eastern shore of Lake Superior, where the rock work was very heavy, that is said to have cost the company nearly three tractors, and claiming that the Canadian Pacific has not yet been brought to that standard." — General Dodge, Chief Engineer Union Pacific Railroad. I 202 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. quarters of a million dollars before the naked track was ready for a train to pass. And so, with this rapid, expensive road making, the company was soon in finan- cial difficulties again. Again it was forced to turn to the Government, which seems to have stood loyally by the road, no matter what political fa'^tioii was man- aging the public finances.* It took a vast amount of capital, as well as of cour- age, to carry a main line of railroad from Montreal to the Pacific through a country that was for the most part not settled at all. It was like building over the American Desert. No man could say what the road would cost in the first place, and what the cost of keeping it open would be, or give a reasonable guess as to its earning capacity. The engineers had been able to make out that there would be a lot of heavy rock work along the lake region, "muskege" ?n the moorlands, " gumbo " on the slopes, and snow on the mountains. The passes, compared with other passes in the Eockies, were surprisingly low, but in the North- west even a low mountain can make trouble. The Rocky Mountains dip down as they go north, terminating as a distinct range near the fifty-second parallel, where they are cut short by the Peace River, * " The Canadian Pacific Railway is the work of Caiiada ex- clusively. The road was undertaken by Canada as a political and commercial one, to fulfil che compact with British Columbia, and unite together all the provinces of the Confederacy, but chiefly in order to develop the vast estate purchased from the Hudson Bay Company. It has been carried out by her people without any assistance from the Imperial Qoyernment — not even the endorsement of Canadian securities to obtain a low rate of' interest." — Thomas C. Ebefeb, Chief Engineer. THE CANADIAN PACIFIC. 203 a a, it >e e n which heads in behind them, draining the table-land between the Coast Range and the Rockies. The Denver and Rio Grande and the Colorado Midland cross the continental divide ten thousand feet or more above the sea. The Union Pacific crosses at a little over eight thousand feet, the Northern Pacific at a still lower altitude, while the Canadian Pacific, the farthest north of all the transcontinental lines, reaches the crest of the continent only five thousand two hundred and ninety-six feet above tide water. Between the in- ternational boundary and Peace Rivei ten passes were explored by the Canadian Pacific engineers, all lower- ing northward, from seven thousand to two thousand feet. The range, which is sixty miles wide at the forty-ninth parallel, narrows to forty miles before it reaches Peace River, where it practically pinches out. The three mainland ranges crossed by the Canadian Pacific are the Coast Range, the Gold Range, and the Rockies (whose rivers run down to the Arctic Ocean and Hudson Bay on the north and east, and into the Pacific on the west), extending from the eastern slope of the Rockies to the end of the track at Vancouver, a distance of five hundred and twenty-two miles. In Colorado the timber line is reached at about eleven thousand feet, while in the Canadian Rockies nothing grows over seven thousand feet above tide water. At six thousand feet snow falls in every month of the year in the Northwest, while in Colorado, Utah, or Nevada delightful valleys lay six and eight thousand feet above the ocean, bathed in almost perpetual sun- shine in summer and a great part of the time in winter, with no snow between May and October. That is why «M 204 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. the ranges in the North were so much dreaded before the road was built. It took years of tireless watching and " sleeping out " on the part of the engineers to sohe the snow problem. They had to get acquainted with the country and the avalanche and learn to handle it, and at the same time to take care of what they call the "flurry" — the local hurricane produced by the passing of a snowslide. Trees standing one hundred yards clear of the path of an avalanche have teen clipped off short fifty feet above the ground. Others even farther away have had their trunks packed full of fine snow, so hard that a cat could not scratch it. If a slide struck a crag and shied off, the " flurry " kept straight aheaJ over the obstruction, sweeping everything before it for hundreds of yards. A big avalanche — one travelling rapidly — accompanied by a good " flurry " is said to be about the wildest thing ever seen in the hills. To steer the avalanche away from the openings between sheds, the engineers built " A " splits — triangular pens filled with stone or dirt — above the gap, which caused tl slide to part and pass on either side and over the tops of the snowsheds, which in a slide country are very substantially built. It is an interesting fact, however, that there were ten years ago nearly ten times as many miles of snow- sheds on the Central Pacific, which crosses the conti- nental divide near the forty-second parallel, as there were on the Canadian Pacific* Probably no other ■* ** There are said to be six miles of staunchly built snow- sheds on the Canadian Pacific, and sixty miles on the Centrnl Pacific Railway." — Thomas Cuetis Clarke, The American Rail- way. THE CANADIAN PACIFIC. 205 railroad in the world has a more substantial and com- plete shed system than has been here worked out by that eminent American manager, Sir William Van Horn, and his assistants, superintendents, and en- gineers.* While the climatic conditions were more or less against the builders of the Canadian Pacific, the In- dians were not. Either they had a better breed of Indian up North or a better way of handling him. At all events, they seem to have made little or no trouble for the trail makers. Only when fired by a dash of the blood of the paleface or an overdose of fire-water did her Majesty's red children make trouble. Infinite pains must have been taken by the en- gineers who located the line of the Canadian Pacific. The road runs from Montreal to Lake Superior with a maximum grade in either direction of one per cent and a minimum curvature of six degrees. In but one place — going west from Lake Superior — does the grade exceed one per cent until the Eocky Mountains are reached. All the gradients on the main line that ex- ceed one per cent are encountered on a stretch of one hundred and thirty-four miles between Bow Eiver in the Eockies and Illecillewalt, on the western slope of the Selkirk Mountains. Instead of following the Columbia Eiver round a long, horseshoe bend, the road climbed over the Selkirks, saving nearly a hun- dred miles, the short cut being less than one third the distance travelled by the river. The pass over the * Sir William Van Horn, formerly General Manager, and now President of the Canadian Pacific, is an American by birth. He began as a timekeeper on the Illinois Central. 15 I 206 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. Selkirks, which is only forty-three hundred feet above the Pacific, was discovered after months of hard work by ^.lajor Albert B. Rogers, one of the most persistent and skilful of American engineers. It is said to be one of the few passes on this continent where the locomo- tive has blazed the trail for the Indian, the scout, and the prospector. The last spike in the Canadian Pacific was driven in 1885, but no attempt was made to work the trans- continental line during the following winter. The track-laying had been rushed to complete the line, and now the winter shot down and closed it. Engineers, provided with meteorological instruments, snowyhoes, and dog-trains, stayed in the country to get acquainted with the " flurry " and the slide. During the sum- mer of 1886 snowsheds were built, with troughs at the tops, through which ran water from adjacent springs, to be used in case of fire, and with " splits " to protect the open breathing spaces between the sheds, for long sheds are dangerous; they hold the smoke from the locomotives, darkening the interior, aiid hiding the signals of trainmen, as well as making it difficult to hear the whistle of the engine. There is no more dangerous place for train and enginemen on the rail than in a long snowshed on a steep grade. It is on the slope of the Selkirks that the " gumbo " is found. This h a sandy loam quicksand, which oozes out of the sides of the cuts and covers the track. The oozing was finally stopped by driving a double row of piles on either side of the track and filling the space between them with coarse gravel or broken rock. On leaving the Columbia, the line crosses the Gold THE CANADIAN PACIFIC. 207 Eange through the Eagle Pass, a remarkably favour- able one, the summit being only eighteen hundred feet above tide, although in a range with many snow- capped mountains. From the western side of the Gold Eange the line follows the shores of lakes and rivers, which discharge into the Pacific Ocean upon Canadian soil. In crossing the dry zone, or bunch-grass grazing plateau of British Columbia, there is heavy work and tunnellirg along the rock-bound shores of the lakes; but it is when the line descends the Thompson and Eraser Rivers, where these cut through the Coast Range, that the heaviest consecutive hundred miles on the whole route are encountered. This section, built by the Government, cost about ten million dol- lars, or eighty thousand dollars per mile, without roll- ing stock or stations. Another serious and unexpected difficulty with which the management of the new transcontinental line had to deal, after the road was opened, was the ** creeping track." West of Winnipeg, where the road- bed is highly elastic, the track creeps with the move- ment of a passing train. At the bottom of a boggy sag, called a "muskeg" by the Indians, there is a small bridge, and from this bridge the track used to Cicep east and west. The difficulty was finally over- come by putting in twelve-foot ties and forty-inch angle bars, with a slot in alternate sides of the rails at every tie to hold them in position. The following de- scription of the action of the "creeping track" is given by Mr. Whyte, superintendent of the division: " The track would yield about six inches to every passing train. With a heavy consolidation engine, 208 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. hauling thirty-five cars, this track crept twenty-six inches in the direction in which the train was moving. The rails creep for about three quarters of a mile east and about half a mile west of a small bridge at the foot of a grade in both directions. They creep with every train, and in warm weather will often run twelve inches under an ordinary train. Track bolts break almost daily, and repairs are to the extent of a box of bolts per month. Cinder ballast keeps the track in line and surface fairly well, but does not in the least prevent the creeping of the rails. Lining and surfacing are necessary at least once a week. On ac- count of the flanges on the angle plates, spikes must be left out of a tie on each side of these plates, other- wise the creeping rails would carry the ties with them and throw the track out of gauge. Three trains run- ning in the same direction are often sufficient to open all joints on one side and close them on the other side of the bridge between. The whole muskeg, when a train is passing, shows a series of short waves five to six inches deep, rising and falling with the passing load, and the rails can be seen moving with the mov- ing train." Before the Leslies had perfected their rotary snow excavator, tlie danger of having trains snow-bound was a source of constant dread and uneasiness to the railroad officials. Marshall Pass, on the Eio Grande, was once blocked for eight days in the days of the pilot plough. The passenger trains were held at the foot of the hill on either side of the range, but in one or two cases enginemen who got separated from the main force actually suffered for want of food. An en- THE CANADIAN PACIFIC. 209 gineer and fireman undertook to fall down the two- hundred-and-seventeen-foot grade, but got stuck four miles from the summit. Here they remained until they began to eat the tallow out of the tallow pot, for the storm that was raging there, eight or ten thou^^nd feet above the sea, made it impossible for eHher to venture out. On the eighth day a successful attempt was made to open the roud, and the starved crew was rescued. As late as 1890, in the latter part of May, the Union Pacific Company had a snow coi^cest on Alpine Pass to settle for all time the question a& to the best snow machine to be used on the mountains of its sys- tem. The contest, which lasted three days and cost the company something over ten thousand dollars, was an exciting one, but it was worth the money, r id settled the snowplough question not only for the Union Pacific, but for nearly the whole snow country.* In order to reduce the danger of snow blockades to a minimum, and to enable the passenger department to give assurance to prospective passengers of the ab- solute safety of the journey, Mr. Van Horn, then the general manager of the company, caused a number of " caches " to be made in the mountains, just as the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, explorers and hunters, had done in the earlier days. For hundreds of miles no supplies could be procured except by trains, and, in view of detentions, each through train from Montreal, in addition to the dining-car supplies, car- * A full account of this contest, under the title of A Novel Battle, will be found in Tales of an Engineer. 210 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. ried in the baggage car an emergency box of pro- visions, to be used exclusively for passengers, and only in case of jaecessity. Besides this, at nine points on the Selkirks and Kagle Pat's, where detention by snow- slides was possible, provision magazines were estab- lished in safe positions, at intervals of al)out ten or twelve miles, so that no train could be caught more than six miles from food. These provisions were taken away in the spring and replaced by fresh supplies in the autumn. Coal and oil supplies for the passenger cars were similarly " cached," and emergency fuel for the locomotives, bridge and track material held loaded on cars, to shorten the detention of trains. The Canadian Northwest, however, first opened and prepared for settlement by the building of the Canadian Pacific Eailway, is not all avalanche, " flur- ry," and glacier. The valley of the Red River of the North is one of the finest wheat fields in the world. The r itinental line runs through neaily four hundred miles of wheat land that is better than all the gold lands of the far Northwest. One hears and reads a great deal about the fifty millions of gold that the Klondike promises to give up this year, but nothing is said of the one hundred million bushels of wheat that are now being wimpled by the warm " chinook " and bathed in the sun of an eighteen-hour day.* * " Another climatic feature peculiar to all high latitudes, which accounts for the ripening of grain and vegetables in the Peace River region and north of the sixtieth parallel, is the greater length of the day and the greater amount of sunshine, the sun rising on June 21st at 3.12 a. m., and setting at 8.50 p. M. — Dr. Dawson, Canadian Geological Survey. I c .2 3 "2 t ? en k. O 5 U PC tc a V. S a V t o 51 THE CANADIAN PACIFIC. 211 The explorations and surveys for the railroad had made known the character of the country it was to traverse. In the wilderness east, north, and west of Lake Superior forests of pine and other timber and mineral deposits of incalculable value were iov\d and millions of acres of agricultural land as w ? The vast prairie district between Winnipeg" and iLb i*;icky Mountains proved to be wonderfully rich in agricul- tural resources. Toward the mountains great coal fields were discovered, and British Columbia beyond was known to contain almost every element of traffic and wealth. Finally, the forces working toward each other met at Craigellachie, in Eagle Pass, in the Gold or Colum- bia Kange of mountainis, and there, on a wet morning, the 7th of !N'ovember, 1885, the last rail was laid in the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The close of 1885 found the company, not yet five years old, in possession of no less than four thou and three hundred and fifteen miles of railroad, including the longest continuous line in the world, extending from Quebec and Montreal all the way across the continent to the Pacific Ocean, a distance of over three thousand miles, and by the midsummer of 1886 all this vast sys- tem was fully equipped and fairly working throughout. Villages and towns, and even cities, followed close upon the heels of the line builders; the forests were cleared away, and the soil of the prairies was turned over, mines were opened, and even before the last rail was in place the completed bccrions were carrying a large and profitable traffic. The following years were marked by an enormous development of this traffic. - ' \ i \ ^ -■. ■ :: 212 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. by the addition of many lines of railroad to the company's system, and by the establishment of the magnificent steamship service to Japan and China. But the future of Canada and of the Canadian Pa- cific depends not upon the traffic of the Orient nor ^n the gold of the Klondike, but upon the settlement and development of the great Northwest; and by-and-bye men will not say that Canada made the railroad, but that the railroad made Canada. CHAPTER XVIII. ROAD MAKING IN MEXICO. Just as great wars have developed great generals, so has the railroad brought out some remarkable men! There are great road makers who make roads all their lives and die in the graders' camp. Others, more versa- tile, build roads and then run them, and in time be- come great managers, for it is well for the president to know what is between the ties. The home of the road maker is always at the front. The whistle of the work engine echoes in a wilderness. Twenty-five or thirty years ago a boy began push- ing a truck, for fifty certs a day, on the Vermont Cen^ tral Railroad. He kept the truck oiled and was pro- moted, but slowly, and he went to California via Pana- ma. He worked all the way from California to Ala- bama, and in 1871 was station master at Mobile. Ten years later he was general superintendent, resigned, and went to Mexico to build the line of the Santa Fe' system known as the Sonora Railway, and there is where this story should begin. • The Mexican Government, for reasons which were not published, refused to allow the road to be built from El Paso to tide water, but compelled the con- tractors to begin at Gua>mas, halfway up the Gulf 213 Ji '¥ 214 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. of California, and build back. Everything had to be brought around Cape Horn by sailing vessels. The ships carrying material to the track makers made one round trip per year. In order to be sure of a small working force, the builder of this sea-fed railroad took two hundred negroes overland, and employed at once all the Indians and Mexicans who could be persuaded to work. Not all the negroes had char- acters. Many of them had two names and a razor, and when they distributed themselves among the na- tives on the night that followed pay day thought- ful men slept in storm cellars. Idle Mexicans, jealous of the Americans, created or incited riot at every opportunity. The Indians were Indians, and, as a whole, the graders of the Sonora would rank with the hardest working force ever collected on the con- tinent. The man who undertook the construction of the Sonora Railway in the face of the most serious com- plications was Daniel Bullard Eobinson, whose first promotion came as a result of his care for a push- truck down in Vermont. Mr. Eobinson had with him one of the most heroic as well as most popular en- gineers ever employed in the West. His name was Morley. He was the hero of that famous morning ride from Pueblo to Canon City, in the fight for the Royal Gorge. His name is on the sign-board above the siacion halfway up the eastern slope to Raton Pass. All the men who fought under, over, or side by side with Morley in the great battle that ended with the opening of the West speak ^v^ell of him. Ex-President Strong, of the Santa F^, speaks of him as an affec- ROAD MAKING IN MEXICO. 215 tionate father speaks of a dutiful son who has lately passed away. Not long ago the writer asked Mr. Kobinson about the famous pathfinder. His face showed instantly the interest he felt in the subject. " Morley's head was on my shoulder when he was shot/' said the president of the 'Frisco line, watching the " desert " that he had helped to conquer slip away from his private car. " We were travelling overland in a wagon," he went on. " We used to make hundreds of miles in that way, and, of course, in that wild country, where a great majority of the inhabitants were opposed to new things, we had to look out for ourselves. There were Indians always to be guarded against, lawless Mexi- cans and bandits of almost every shade and colour, so for protection we had our rifles within reach at all times. We had been travelling and working almost constantly day and night, and were completely worn out. I had leaned my head on Morley's shoulder and taken a nap. When I awoke I complained about a rifle that rested between the two men on the front seat. The butt of the gun was against the dashboard, the muzzle pointed at my head. Well, nobody paid any attention to my protest. Morley said that he would go to bed, and, leaning his head upon my shoulder, was soon sound asleep. One of the men moved, the rifle was discharged, and the bullet went crashing through the sleeper's head." Here Mr. Eobinson fished a little brass cylinder from his vest pocket. " This," he said, " is the shell that held the cartridge that killed Morley sixteen years ago." I 216 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. The wound was not instantly fatal. Morley got out of the wagon and walked round in front of the team; then gazirg about like a man looking for a place to He down, he said, addressing his companions, " Boys, this is hard," and that was the end of a man who wanted only the opportunity to become one of the nation's heroes. It was with a heavy heart that his chief and friend pushed the great work in Mexico to completion after Morley's death. He had begun this work in 1881, and in 1883 went to Paso del Norte to take charge of the construction of the Mexican Central from that point to Fresnillo, Mexico, a stretch of seven hundred and fifty miles. It was here that Mr. Eobinson beat the world's record in road making. From one end, with only the stakes set to begin with, he built five hundred and twenty-five miles of track here in three hundred and sixty-five days, which, with possibly one exception, has never been equalled in any part of America, and certainly nowhere except in America would men be in such a hurry.* Before the entire line was completed, how- ever, this Napoleon of the construction camp was called to the capital to take charge of the construc- tion of the line that was being built from that end. He was to build north four hundred and fifty miles to meet the builders (the work he had just left) coming south seven hundred and fifty miles from El Paso. Here, as in Sonora, the constructor was at a great dis- advantage. Everything had to be brought in via Vera * The Manitoba system was extended in 1887 through Dakota and Montana, 545 miles, between April 2 and October 19. — Thomas C. Clarke, The American Railway , ROAD MAKING IN MEXICO. 217 Cruz, just as the material for the Sonora line was brought from New Ijrk and Europe to Guaymas, in the Gulf of California. This included everything used in the construction of the road, as well as the equip- ment needed for the work. Cars and locomotives had to be brought in sections, shipped to the City of Mexico over the Mexican Railway, aad then set up. Mr. Eobinson found the greatest difficulty in teach- ing the natives how to use the plough and scraper, the standard tools of the American road makers. They could make a hot tamale in an ice wagon, catch a run- ning horse by the left hind foot without ever missing it, but they could not fill a scraper or hold a plough. They could not so much as pilot a mule to water along a beaten trail. A man can build a railroad with red ants if he has enough of them and can keep them at it. Nobody knew this better than Robinson, and when his hopes and patience failed he piled the ploughs and scrapers in a heap, turned the mules out on the cacti, and set his ants to work. They were of all colours — red, black, and a few white, but mostly yellow. The natives were all right. Round and round, up and down, to and fro they went, slowly, to be sure, but surely, and the grade began to grow. Each man carried a basket or bucket, filled it, climbed the dump, and emptied it at the point indicated by the dumping boss. The Mexicans came in great numbers now to seek work, and they were all employed. As the days went by the line grew longer, and in a little while new lines had to be formed in new places. At the end of a week hundreds of grademakers were piling up the gi-ade. In less than a 218 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. month the line was literally alive with these human ants. Red ants, fleece-clad, from the mountains,* naked ants from the Terre Coliente, and black ants from Sonora, where the road was finished, found the work and swelled the army. It was Robinson's way never to be beaten. He had undertaken to build four hundred and fifty miles of road, and to meet the south-bound builders at that distance from the capital, and he meant to do it. "How many men have we now?" he asked one day, looking at the squirming mass of humanity that covered the right of way for a mile or more. " Fourteen thousand," said the boss of the bosses. Robinson gave a low whistle, but kept on hiring men. The average wages paid to this bucket brigade was th:rty-one cents a day. To be sure, this half-civilized band would not take cheques; they had to have their pay every Saturday night in the coin of the country, which was silver. The biggest piece of silver in use then was one dollar. '' We were obliged to pay this army every Saturday night," said Mr. Robinson, "and it took from five to ten large wagons to carry the silver from the north of the work to the various working camps. Of course, these pay-wagons were closely guarded by Americans, and it seems wonderful to relate now that not a single dollar was lost or stolen during our entire period of construction. I do not think that this would have been the case had the same conditions existed in the United States." ROAD MAKING IN MEXICO. 219 This was probably owing as much to lack of enter- prise as to the " honesty " of the outlaws of that repub- lic. The transportation facilities were not sufficient to tempt an enterprising train robber. Notwithstanding all the disadvantages under which the south end was constructed, Robinson's army of ants reached the pass of the north in time to connect with the rails that were reaching from Texas toward the capital of Mexico. Upon the completion of this second line built by him in Mexico, the general management of the Atlan- tic and Pacific Railroad was offered to Mr. Robin- son, and accepted by him. A year later he was again at the old work, but this time with burros and blasters in the Rocky Mountains. Mr. J. J. Hagerman, of Colorado Springs, a man of great business capacity, commanding an unlimited amount of capital, had persuaded English investors to join him in building the Colorado Midland Railway — a foolish piece of road making, the casual observer would say, for it began at a summer resort and ended at a flag station. This was the first standard gauge line to cross the Rockies amid the eternal snows, and naturally the re- sourcefal Robinson was asked to take the job, and he accepted it. There was some wonderful engineering here, some expensive bridging and tunnelling. Hager- man Tunnel, which pierces the range near timber line, is twenty-six hundred feet long, and cost the tunnel company two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The locomotives used were of necessity heavy to climb the heavy grades. The new grades gave way at times, - ■t k k 220 THE STORY OP THE BAILROAD. making funerals frequent among the enginemen for the first year or so. The Colorado Midland and the Denver and Rio Grande, which was then building its standard line via Leadville, ran together at Glenwood Springs on the Pacific slope. Tlie canon was narrow there. There was scarcely room for two, so the two roads combined and built what was called the Rio Grande Junction Railroad from that point to Grand Junction, where both connected with the Rio Grande Western for Salt Lake and the Pacific coast. The Denver and Rio Grande managed to control the con p^ ruction, and, as it was then handling all the transmo atain traffic through Colorado, it was in no hurry to complete the new line and divide business with an unwelcome competitor. The work dragged. The Midland people protested, but there seemed to be no help for it. Material intended .for the joint road, but still the property of the narrow gauge, would dis- appear at the moment when the contractors were ready to put it in place. A large shipment of steel foi* the new line was lost. After weeks of "tracing," it was finally located on the Denver division of the Rio Grande, where Superintendent Deuel had spiked it down for the new heavy equipment of the road, which was about to widen out to a standard gauge. In time, however, the standard gauge was com- pleted; the Rio Grande Western had already been widened, and the Colorado Midland began to figure in transcontinental business, exchanging at Colorado Springs with the Chicago, Rock Island and Paf Ific, and at Grand Junction with the Rio Grande Western. ROAD MAKING IN MEXICO. 221 A few years later the new road, wluch must have been built to sell, was absorbed by the Santa h\i. In the general shaking i p during the panicky days of the '90s the Santa Fe lost it, and just now Judge Philips, of the United States Court of Appeals, is writing an opinion in the suit brought by the tunnel company to compel the Midland Company to use its hole in the ground at Hagerman Pass, which the reorganization company has refused iu do. After completing the Colorado Midland, Mr. Rob- inson became president of the San Antonio and Arkan- sas Pass Railroad. Two years later he went to the Santa Fe as vice-president of that great system. In 1896 he became president of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad, with headquarters at St. Louis, where he now resides, still in the prime of life. I'he doors of his office and his private car are unlocked when he is there. He is extremely modest and gener- ous, but a Napoleon in the managen^ent of men. Look- ing at the man to-day, one woul^ never guess that he had spent the best years of his life in the rough and riot of the uncurried West. Pick up a pebble at the mouth of a mountain stream and note its perfect polish. That comes from count- less knocks and tumbles in the turbulent rill that has carried it along, and finally landed it on the shore of the broad, calin river. 16 CHAPTER XIX. THE OPENING OF OKLAHOMA. If all the other hooms that have passed over the West could be collected and concentrated into one big boom, it would look like the opening of Oklahoma. Hundreds of gifted writers have attempted to paint a pen-picture of that wild time and have failed, and here will be another failure. Oklahoma was opene'd for settlement on April 22, 1889. This territory was about ninety miles long from north to south and sixty miles wide from east to west, extending from the north bank of the South Canadian Eiver northward to a point about five miles south of the present town of Perry. The history of the many attempts made to place this land on the market is re- markable. For a number of years Sidney Clark, Payne, and others had laboured to secure that end. During the winter of 1888-'89, when it became reasonably cer- tain that a date would soon be set for the opening, people began to gather from all over the United States, and when the date was named, about April 1st, they came with a rush. All winter long the United States Government kept a guard and tried to keep out in- truders, commonly called " sooners," but nearly all of the professional land grabbers made frequent trips and spied out the land pretty thoroughly before the 222 THE OPENING OP OKLAHOMA. 223 opening, so that they would know where to go for the best lands. A few days before the opening troops scoured the country and beat every bush to make a clean sweep, but, notwithstanding this, many men hid in the hollows and secure places, ready to grab the coveted claim at noon on the 2!2d. Very few attempts were made to enter from east or west. The Government refused to allow the people to remain on the Cherokee Strip, a body of land sixty-five miles wide, extending all along the Kansas line, so those from the north gathered mainly at Arkansas City, a few thousand at Hunnewell and Caldwell, and about five thousand at Purcell, on the south. Every good saddle horse commanded a high price. Racing stock sold for two or three hundred dollars a head. Most of the runs on horseback and by teams were made from the south, as no horse or team could traverse the Cherokee Strip as quickly as the train. Everybody entered from the north via the Santa F6 and Rock Island Railroads, except, of course, the " sooners." No conception could be formed of the number of people that were to be handled by train. Assistant- General-Superintendent Turner, of the Santa Fe, who was in charge of that territory, estimated that the com- pany would handle ten thousand people out of Arkan- sas City and two thousand out of Purcell. Thousands of gaunt-faced men haunted the yards day and night, trying in every way to buy information or bribe the railroad eniployees into smuggling them into " the first train." Unscrupulous confidence men, dressed like switchmen, sold " tips " to tenderfeet, and at one time 224 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. the detectives employed by the railroad coropary found a " Beauro of Information " running " wide open/' where inside intelligence was sold like liquor, pro- ducing equally bad results. Men, made drunk by think- ing upon a single subject, forgot that all men were. not for sale, and openly offered the railroad employees fifty, a hundred, and sometimes a thousand dollars for the faintest hint as to which train would be the first to leave. Newspaper correspondents were at first almost as eager for information, +hough noi, bidding quite so liberally. To quiet the reporters. Superintendent Turner gave each a card signed with his initials, and told them to keep still until they were ordered to get aboard. If their car appeared to be at the end of the last train, they were to say nothing. In short, they were to leave everything to the management, and they did. Seeing the greit temptation to which the men were being exposed, the railroad officials called the con- ductors and engineers together and made it plain to them that the well-known rules of running men " first in, first out," would be off for that day. They would all make a trip, and as nearly as possible in the proper order, but no man could say with any degree of cer- tainty whether he would be first out or last. All the trains would leave and all would arrive within the space of an hour or a little more, and as all employees would be expected to remain on duty at the end of the run, it could make no great difference how the men went out. After that the train and enginemen could say frankly that they knew nothing about the make- up of the trains. THE OPENING OP OKLAHOMA. 225 It is to the credit of the employees, in view of the great temptation, that no complaints were ever made that the men had sold information that was false, or that they had sold any information at all. As the hour drew near for the departure of the first train the scene was indescribable. Thousands upon thousands of men tipped their pale, anxious faces back and peered with wild, v»ide eyes at the driver of an er . le that came slowly into the yard. If the loco- mot" y touched a train or a car, instantly a thousand men were on board, with hundreds hanging on the steps and clinging to the windows. Hundreds of these " homesick " people had not slept for nights or stopped to eat a good meal for days. Presently a yard man would cut the engine off, and as it moved slowly awa}'-, parting the multitude with its pilot, the train would give up its humaa frdglit. After m'lch unnecessary switching, the trains were all made v^ and the engines began to be coupled on; but when a train appeared to be overloaded, the loco- motive would be detached, the switchman lectured for having coupled the wrong engine, and then the mob would fall off. When the officials had jockeyed in this way until no man could form any opinion as to which train would leave first, what appeared to be the last train pulled out with lot less than a thousand men and a few women on board. The ten trains were run from Arkansas City, the first one starting at nine o'clock, so as to reach the north line. of the Oklahoma country at twelve o'clock noon. It was followed by the nine other trains at in- tervals of ten minutes. Each train consisted of ten i it . IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) /. A ''S! &?. f/. ^M,^ .<5> t !!!l 1.0 gia la I.! f "^ il^ 12.2 M ilM 1.6 - 6" -•• ^m V) "^^ "?j ^-5. <$» %^' / '/ Photographic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAtN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (7U) 872-4503 J" m. \ v> '^ [v ' *^. Ls 234 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. need be — 's pledged to his employer. He takes himself seriously, never underestimating the importance of his Avork. You will see him on the banks of a swollen river that threatens the right of way, weaving stout willows into a great carpet, sinking it in the stream, risking his life, but saving the roadbed. If the current is too swift and deep to do this, he will make an immense seine of heavy woven wire, spread it along the margin of the ri\er, and wait patiently for the water to under- mine the net, which falls over the crumbling bank and stops the wash. The chief engineer knows more men who do not work for the company, and fewer who do, than any other general officer on the road. If he thinks he is right, he will fight or quit, but he hates to compro- mise. He dislikes to move a stake when it has been driven to stay. Once, when the presont chief en- gineer of one of the Western roads was locating a line in Missouri, he was asked to change the stakes, and refused. The proposed road at this point lay across a meadow, passed up by an old orchard, and from there gained the summit of a long, low ridge. The stretch across the meadow was a charming bit of roadway, giv- ing the future engine driver a long tangent and a good run for the hill. When the stai 3S had all been set a young, unshaved man came out and asked that the road be " moved over a piece." The engineer explained that it wov.ld be impossible, as that was the best point to pass over the ridge. The man in- sisted, and finally the engineer would not discuss the matter, explaining that the company would indemnify THE RAILROAD ENGINEER. 235 the owners of the property when the proper time came. The man went back into the house, got an old squirrel rifle, came out, and pulled up the stakes. The engineer started back to remonstrate, but at that mo- ment the young man's mottier saw what was about to take place, and hastened to meet the engineei". " Can't you move your road over a little piece, mister?'^ she asked. " I don't see why I should. If you feel aggrieved, the company will pay you what is right; my business is to locate the line," said the engineer, glancing an- grily up tlie slope where a lean young farmer sao nursing his rifle. " What does that blackguard mean by sitting there on a stump with a gun? " he went on. " Why, he ain't no blackguard — ^that's Nip. Name's Nippolian; we call him Nip." Well, I'll nip him if he gets funny." Oh, no, you won't. 1 wa'n't afraid o' that. Wliat come over me, as I see you startin' 'cross the meadow, was maybe you had a mother that dotes on you as I dote on Nip, an' how hard it would be for her to have you come home that away, an' her a-blamin' us, maybe." What way do. you expect me to go home? " Well, if you persist in drivin' them stakes there, you'll go home dead." *' Well," said the engineer, " I'll do anything in reason, but I won't be bluffed by that ruffian." " I keep a-tellin' you he ain't no ruffi'n — he's jist Nip, that's all. You see, we've been here purty nigh always — Nip was born here — an' when the grurillas come an' called paw out an' shot him, we hurried him « a (( i( 236 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. jist whar he fell, an' we've always kep' it as a sort of reservation, Nip an' me, an' he's determined you sha'n<'t disturb it, that's all." " Then you don't object to the railroad? " " Lord o' mercy, no! We want the road, but we don't want you to disturb paw's grave, that's all." " Come," said the engineer, " we'll go to see Nip." When they had come up to the stump the big en- gineer held out his hand. Nip took it, but kept his eyes on the stranger. " Here it is," said the woman, touching a low stone lightly with her foot. " I see," said the engineer; " we can miss that easily enough." He moved a mile of road. From that day forward until the road was finished, and long after, the widow's home was the stopping place for the engineer. The railroad engineer often succeeds where failure seems certain, and his work then remains as a monu- ment to his memory after he has passed away; but of the many daring schemes that fail the world knows nothing, or, if it ever hears, it soon forgets. One of the wildest, most romantic, and daring enterprises that have ever been undertaken in the West was the at- tempt to survey and build a railroad through the Grand Caiion of the Colorado. If all the wild gorges in the West were melted down and recast, they would fall short of making another Grand Canon. Its awful grandeur belittles everything else. The Colorado Eiver begins with the confluence of the Green and Grand in southeastern Utah, so deep down in the twisted hills that until a few years ago no THE RAILROAD ENGINEER. 237 man knew how or where the great stream originated. Explorers have attempted to ascend it from the Gulf since 1540, but soon find themselves at the foot of a foaming cataract, and turn back. Scores of men have gone in at the top of the canon, but were never heard of afterward. In 1869 Major Powell undertook the exploration of the canon wiih nine men and four boats. The In- dians, looking on, said that he would not come back. No Indian had ever gone through Cataract Canon and lived to lie about it, and thej'^ would not believe a white man capable of succeeding where the red man had failed. This expedition left the point where Green River station now stands, and started down the Green on May 24th. Their greatest difficulty in that small stream was to find sufficient water to float them, but almost immediately after passing the point where the Green is joined by the Grand the river became reck- less. Swirls and eddies and dips and falls were encoun- tered hourly, and it was not long before some of the crew began to curse the day that tempted them into this gorge of death. They would have deserted gladly, some of them, but the walls were already steep and high. At the first opening one of the party escaped to the mountain. After encountering the terrors of Cataract Canon, three more half-crazed men walked out into the desert. They never came back. They fell into the hands of some Indians who were full of the story of an outrage that had been perpetrated lately by white men, and who accused these wanderers of the crime. 17 I 238 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. The three explorers protested their innocencej and begged to be brought before the chief.. When the chief saw the men, he demanded to know how they hap- pened to be in the country. Now the white men told the truth, ^yhi^h is sometimes stranger than fiction. They said that they had come all the way from the Green water in a boat. " You lie! " cried the chief; " no man can do that," and the three explorers were massacred. On August 30th Major Powell, minus two boats and four men, landed at the mouth of the Virgin Kiver, nearly a thousand miles from the starting point. His description of his journey down the Colorado is an interesting bit of graphic history, and we who have had glimpses of the Colorcido are able to imagine that he came out with a grand collection of stirring sensa- tions and nerve-testing thrills. And this is the canon through which a party of Denver men proposed to sur- vey and build a railroad. If the rond is ever built, the tourists can have here, in a thousand miles of travel, more wild, grand, and awful scenery than can now be had from a car window in a journey round the world. Aside from its scenic value, the proposed road was to connect by a short line the Eocky Mountain region with the orange groves of the tropics. It was to pass through a caiion where the wild mingles with the weird, and where the grand touches the awful. It was to be built dong the foot of rocky walls whose sum- mits were kissed by the clouds. It was to wind and twist with a great river thrt is a raging, turbulent thing of swift rapids, foaming cataracts, treacherous eddies, and fatal falls. THE RAILROAD ENGINEER. 239 The first attempt to survey the canon made by these adventurous men was under the patronage of Frank Mason Brown, John C. Montgomery, and others. The party left Denver on May 23, 1889, headed by Mr. Brown, who had been chosen president of the company. The chief engineer who signed for this dangerous task was Eobert B. Stanton. Other mem- bers of the original party were Messrs. Heslop, Hans- borough, Richards, and MacDonell, with two negro servants. A few letters were received by the families and friends of the various members of the party, and finally a " good-bye " from Green River. Then they were off on their perilous trip. The next news received from the expedition was most hopeful, and stated that they had passed successfully about three hundred miles of the most dangerous part of the river, " which is one series of cataracts and rapids, walled on either side by canon walls at times rising to six thousand and seven thousand feet in height. The descent is so gTcat that at places for miles in length the water is lashed and churned to a foam of »creamy whiteness. Notwith- standing this, the journoy of throe hundred miles was made in safety, and with only the loss of two boats." From this point th.j, 241 242 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. tents. It had appeared in a night when the headquar- ters of the advancing railroad were fixed there for a few days. But the railroad had passed on, and Kezar was left to languish while a new terminal city made its boasts, only to be abandoned in turn. Presently the hills along the river grew higher and more precipitous, the mesas gave way to crumbling crags, and with a farewell shriek from the engine the train thundered out of sunshine into gloom. Frowning cliffs rose straight up from the track on one side, and on the other the gray river brawled along the foot of the opposing precipice. Mountains of reddish gray rock towered aloft on either hand, veined with white, and seamed v;ith fissures worn with the passage of ages. Here great boulders literally overhung the track, and again there were dark caves or fleecy cascades above, or tjie grim canon walls were almost exactly vertical from their giddy summits to the ribbon of steel and the river at their base. The Black Caiion of the Gun- nison is known to tourists in these days, but thoy can not know the difficulties of railroad building through a gorge only wide enough in places for the river. Here,, as in the Royal Gorge, the surveyors picked their way through on ice in the winter. Here, when the work of construction was begun, men, and even horses and wagons, were lowered down steep slopes by ropes, and workmen wielded drill and hammer hanging by ropes until they had blasted out a foothold. '* I stopped at the boarding train, which stood op- posite a rock tower a thousand feet in height. The sunlight fell upon its pinnacle, gilding a huge profile carved by Nature, but the canon depths were all in K B C ^ .5 £ c S c ^ 2 CO «• .£ I I •AT THE FRONT. 243 s C « c 266 THE STOttY OF THE RAILROAD. At the end of two years, having sunk seven million dollars and demoralized the business to some extent, the Merchants' Union failed, and was absorbed by the American Express, with William G. Fargo as president of the consolidated company. During the first five years that Wells, Fargo and Company did business in the West they carried fifty- eight million dollars' worth of gold dust into San Fran- cisco. No other express company in the world has suffered so much at the hands of road agents. They began business in the West when the West was wild. They ran, in the early days, not only an express busi- ness, but stages also, and an extensive banking busi- ness as well. It was at the door of Wells, Fargo and Company's stages that the picturesque but always polite bandits of Bret Harte used to doff their caps to timid passen- gers. Their stage roads ran over the shoulders of bleak and desolate mountains, in the shadows of frowning cliffs, and along the tunnels that had been chopped through the forests of California. Here that mild murderer, the road agent, whose only redeeming qual- ity was his politeness, who did not swear or smoke, in this life, did his devilish work. In fourteen years he had stopped four trains and three hundred and thirteen stages. Upon thirty-four occasions the stage faile'd to stop. During this period four drivers and two messengers — those fearless guards who set themselves on the front seat as a target for the outlaws — were killed. The robbers shot seven horses and stole fourteen from the teams. Despite the fact that the robbers always had the advantage, the TUE PONY EXPRESS. 967 brave guards succeeded during this time in killing six- teen, while the Vigilance Oomraittce hanged seven. The total amount taken in fourteen years was nearly a million dollars. Later, between 1875 and 1883, a single man, with a low, musical voice and a sawed-off shotgun, held up the stage of Wells, Fargo and Company twenty-eight times. . In view of the fact that the State and the express company had each a standing reward for road agents of three hundred dollars, with an additional two hundred dollars from the Government when the mail was molested, this was shrewd work. The prompt- ness with which all claims on this account have been met and settled has ever inspired and confirmed public confidence in the integrity and responsibility of the company. The writer would not give fulsoma praise to the express companies, yet it can be stated as a fact that ihey have been the most public-spirited of the great corporations of this country, and have managed their business and their employees with the least possible friction. Many of them (notably Wells, Fargo and Company) have made it a rule to collect and forward, free of charge, money donated to communities suffer- ing from contagious fever, flood, or fire. In 1866 the express companies of the United States erected an imposing monument at the grave of Harn- den, in Mount Auburn, at Boston. Of all the expresses, the most romantic and pic- turesque was the pony express, inaugurated by William H. Russell and B. F. Ficklin in 1860, absorbed later 2C8 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. by Wells, Furgo and Company, and abandoned in 1862, when the telegraph line was completed across the con- tinent. Although in existence but two years, the " pony *' left its footmarks on the plains. It established sta- tions which afterward became settlements, towns, and cities, and helped materially to determine the practi- cability of the central route for a railroad. It took tele- grams and letters from the locomotive at St. Joseph, Mo., and delivered them to the steamboat at Sacra- mento, which carried them to the Golden Gate. To secure suitable horses and men, and to establish sta- tions along the line, one man had gone overland, and another to San Francisco by sea, in the fall of 1859. Promptly at 4 P. m. on the 3d of April, 1860, a pony started from either end of the route. The Hannibal and St. .Joseph Railroad ran a special train to its ter- mini, ana the people of those outposts of civilization were wildly enthusiastic. Mr. RuFsell himself placed the first mochivas upon the saddle in a momentary hush, in which people plucked hairs from the tail of the pony, and when he bounded away toward the set- ting sur pretty girls threw kisses at the courier. Th-^ ?.ath that the pony was to take lay due west from hi). Joseph to Fort Kearney, up the Platte to Julesburg, thence by Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger to Salt Lake via Camp Floyd, Ruby Valley, the Hum- boldt, Carson City, Placerville, and Folsom to Sacra-- mento. Weekly trips were to be made, and on the 10th the second pony started west. On the 13th, promptly at 4 p. m., the first pony from the Pacific landed at St. Joseph, the mail and messages having rL THE PONY EXPRESS. 26S) crossed the two thousand miles of desert and plain in exactly ten days from San Francisco. SubsequerO^ the time was shortened to eight days. At first the stations were twenty-five miles apart, but the men rode ovc three divisions. Later there were but ten miles between stations. Now the pony was put to a smart gallop at the start, and finished with neck outstretched like a racer coming under t}_«3 wire. The light rider with his light load leaped from the pony as he braced his feet for the last stop, sprang upon a fresh horse that stood ready, prancing and pawing, with two men at the bit. In a little while forty fearless riders were racing eastward and forty westward at all hours of the day and night. Often when the rider reached the end of his run he would find the man who was to relieve him ill, wounded, or scalped, or perhaps he would find only the black ruins of the station, and would be com- pelled to push on. One rider is said to have ridden three hundred miles in this way. He had to be lifted from the saddle, and was unable to walk for some time. Th? leading newspapers of New York and San Francisco printed tissue editions and sent them by the pony express across the continent. The pony express was not a success financially, although the "pony , postage " on a letter that crossed the plains was five dollars; but it was picturesque and valuable to the pub- lic, and helped to blaze the way for the swifter, hardier steed of steel. Thousands of people saw these swift riders flying like winged shadows across the continent, and among them one man who could paint for posterity what he 19 270 THE STORY OP TEE RAILROAD. saw. That man was Mark Twain, and this is the closing paragraph of his picture: *^ We had had a consuming desire from the Legin- ning to see a pony rider, but somehow or other all had passed us, and all that met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now we were expecting one along every moment, and would see him in broad daylight. Presently the driver ex- claims, *Here he comes!' Every neck is stretched farther and every e;y e strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well, I should think so! In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falHng, rising and falling, sweeping toward us nearer and nearer, growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined to the ear; another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces and go winging away, like the belated fragment of a storm." CHAPTER XXIV. THE WEST TO-DAY. The West as it was in the beginning of this story is gone. That vast domain, miscalled the American Desert, is filled with homes, towns, and prosperous communities. The broad vales where the wild grass waved are green fields, meadows, orchards, and flower gardens. The dead, dry plains, that the pioneers found furrowed only by the deep, narrow trails made by the buffalo and the Indian, are crossed and checked and barred by bands of steel, and all along these nziv trails are thriving cities. The smoke of the machine shop, smelter, and factory drifts where less than a half cen- tury ago the signal fires of the savage burned to call the band to the slaughter of a lone settler or an emi- grant train. From a single mining camp in one small State situ- ated in the very heart of this " unwatered wilderness " they take a million dollars in gold every month; and yet all the mineral mined within its borders in twelve months would not equal in money value the annual products of the few fields, orchards, and gardens that have been planted in the plains and valleys of that stony little State. Ninety-five per cent of the revenue of the Pacific railroads, projected and built for the 271 272 THE STORY OF THE RAIT^ROAD. traffic of the Orient, comes from what is called local business. Following the smoke of the pioneer lines, dozens of systems of railroad have pushed their rails into this land, which at the close of the civil war was considered uninhabitable. The traveller bound for the Pacific coast has his pick and choice of a half dozen or more routes, which for speed and comfort can not be equalled under the sun save in America. It would be impossible in a single volume to give even a brief history of the many splendid systems of roads whose through cars, by close traffic arrangement, reach the Pacific coast States from Chicagc, tt! ^reat rail- road centre, without change. In addition to the roads already mentioned, the traveller can take the Manitoba or the Sunset route, or his choice of a number of splen- did roads between those extremes. Probably the most extensive and important of the newer roads whose rails reach out beyond the Missouri is the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy. The Burlington and Mis- souri River Railroad, a part of the powerful Burlington system, has done a great wo^-k in helping to people the "desert." It has almost an air line running . ;'m the capital of Nebraska to Billings, in Montana 'v a branch north to that famed mining camp, Dead^v.* 'f^ in Dakota. The Burlington has also a splendid through line from Chicago to Denvcf, and the heart of the Rockies. Along these rails rush the magnifi- cent trains that cover this one thousand miles in twenty-six hours; and side by side, neck and neck, are the Northwestern-Union Pacific trains, equally hand- some, doing the same thing in the same length of time. The Burlington connects with the Denver and Rio ^* ^ Lon. West 107 from Qreenwioli 5t 107 from Greenwich . 102 to from Washington THE WEST TO-DAY. 273 Grande at Denver, and by that line and the Rio Grande Western reaches Ogden, Utah, where connection is made with the Central Pacific for San Francisco. The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific is another of the important roads that has penetrated the plains. It takes through traffic via Colorado Springs, where it connects with the Colorado Midland, until lately a part of the Santa Fe system. The Wabash, Alton, the Illinois Central, and other roads carry people via St. Louis, and sometimes as far south as New Orleans, and then send them flying across to the coast by the Missouri Pacific, or down over the Iron Mountain, and the International and Great Northern, and Texas Pacific, or by the Southern Pa- cific's famous " Sunset Limited." Far to the north the Great Northern—" Jim Hill's road," as it is familiarly known among railroad men — takes traffic frcm any and all roads at St. Paul, and drives a paying business through what the early road projectors used to call "the frozen North." This is to-day one of the most prosperous roads in all the West. Thus it will be seen that the West is now able to support a number of roads. True, they are not all making money, but they are all helping to settle up and develop a section of country that was once con- sidered fit only for the home of the savage and a place for criminals to hide in. It is only by comparison that we can arrive at a full appreciation of what the railroad hus wrought in the West. When the Zion-bound pilgrims pulled their handcarts across the plains and over the Utah desert 274 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. there were no trails but those of the bullalo. The trap- pers and hunters followed the streams, while the In- dians may be said to have wandered aimlessly over the face of the earth. Following the handcarts of the Mormons came the ox teams of llussell, Majors and Company, taking supplies to the army in Utah. And it used to take them from twenty to thirty days to drag the wag- ons from the river to Fort Kearney, three hundred miles. A few years later the Overland ^lail Company transferred their post coaches from the southern to this the central route, and then the dust began to fly. The stage coaches soon overhauled the pilgrims and the stage driver, and station hands, one writer tells us, began to make trouble for the Mormons by marry- ing " off wheelers," " nigh leaders," and " swing girls " out of the handcart teams. After " roughing it " across the continent in one of these rock-a-bye wagons, Mark Twain wrote: " How the frantic animals did scamper! It was a fierce and furious gallop, and the gait never altered for a moment till we reeled off ten or twelve miles and swept up to the next collection of little station huts and stables. " At 4 p. M. we crossed a branch of the river, and at 5 p. M. we crossed the Platte itself and landed at Kearney, fifty-six hours from St. Joe, three hundred miles." Looking back at the bull team, that was simply flying. A few years later an enthusiast who crossed the THE WEST TO-DAY. 275 plains on one of the early " Golden Gate " express trains wrote the New York Times: " At 4 p. M. Sunday we rolled out of the station at Omaha and started on our long jaunt." Then fol- lowed a lengthy description of the ride, of the writer's first dinner " in one of Pullman's hotels on wheels," where they drank champagne at thirty miles an hour, " and never spilled a drop." " After dinner," the traveller tells us, " we repaired to our drawing-room car and intoned that grand old hymn. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Then to bed in luxurious coaches, where we slept the sleep of the just, and only awoke the next morning (Mon- day) at eight o'clock, to find ourselves at the cross- ing of the North Platte, fifteen hours and forty min- utes out from Omaha, three hundred mih'i" That must have made Ben IloUiday^ crack stage drivers wish they had never been. How do they do this three hundred miles of desert to-day? The reader can enter a sleeper coupled to the fast mail leaving Omaha at 6 p. m. and stand almost at the foot of Pike's Peak, at the other edge of the " desert," when the sun is coming out of the plains on the following morning. At midnight he will have crossed the Platte, making the oft-travelled "three hundred miles " in six hours. That beats the early express as badly as that train beat the stage, or as the stage beat the freighters. If you care to carry the comparison a few thousand years back of the bull team, it took Moses forty years tc put three hundred miles of desert behind him. Wonderful, indeed, are the changes that have taken 276 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. place out there within a third of a century. Far greater than any change in the character of the coun- try and the mode and comforts of travel is the change in the character of the people who inliahit the far West to-day. One may not paint a pretty picture of the West in the days of the stage coach and the pony express. Here and there you meet a cattleman, a miner, a mining engineer, or a missionary, but a majority of the people you passed on the trail were criminals. The division superintendent on the stage line might be a gentleman or an outlaw, or both, according to the re- quirements of the division. When the stage stopped at a station, an assassin brought out the fresh horses, while perhaps a road agent off duty led the tired team away. When you sat to dinner at the stage station, you were apt to find a desperado at the head of the table. A half-breed raised on the warpath admired your beautiful hair, or silently cursed you for being bald, while he poured coffee. A horse thief carried the dishes away and threw the crumbs into the face of a filthy Goshoot Indian, who, until the stage line was opened, had been hanging on the edge of the desert waiting, along with that four-legged outcast, the coyote, for something to die. These Indians were too indolent to band together. They had no tribe and no village. Too lazy. to carry a bow and arrow, they slunk, filthy as swine, by the trail, competing with the vulture for a living. Other Indians, more ambitious, would lie in wait for the Btage, which travelled day and night, and "rub the whites all out.'- And then there were always the white, or half white, savages — road agents and other assas- THE WEST TO-DAY. 211 sins. Highway robbery was practised apparently for pastime by some of these wolves. One division became so unsafe that the stage company was obliged to install a notorious outlaw in the otHce of division superin- tendent. He filled the position, and fitted into the community beautifully. Where there had been whole- sale horse stealing, stabbing in the dark, and shooting by day, he quieted the " hands " down, and when he was removed to reform another division he left behind him a reorganized force, tranquillity, and a graveyard. Ever? the Indians, whole tribes of them, dreaded and respected this man, and the stage started by him usu- ally went through on time. He was ever loyal to his employers, and if the outlaws, thieves, and murderers imposed upon or abused the few honest helpers em- ployed about the station, he shot them down as he would have shot wolves among the stock. He was a most useful man in his day, but the constant bathing in blood hardened him. He took to drink and to in- discriminate killing of people who did not deserve it, who were not even in the employ of the stage company. Finally he tore up a summons sent him by a Cali- fornia vigilance committee, and they arrested him. He was counted one of the bravest men that ever saw the West, being utterly indifferent to danger. He had sent dozens of men into the unknown — some of them the hardest that that hard country had produced — but when his time came, when they put the awful noose about his neck, and he stood at the open door of death, he wept and begged, and perished miserably. These unpleasant pictures are shown to bring the reader to a full appreciation of the condition of the 278 THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. country when our hero, the locating engineer, entered it. There was no legal restraint tliere, no coroner's jury to come nosing around asking awkward (ques- tions. It was not that the West was had, hut hecauso it was wild and wide, for many of the outlaws, like our superintendent, had heen reared in the States, within the sou? d of a church hell, and had gone to the wilderness to lose themselves. The })athfinders who first went out to find a way for the railroad, and many who followed them, found the West a veritahle hell, filled with wild heasts and wilder men. When the road makers followed with an army of workmen, many of them reckless, and some of them desperate, they built the temporary communities, full lust and gold, that were so graphically and power ^ de- scribed by Mr. Stevenson. When these heroic pioneers pushed on toward the Pacific they left an unbroken line of railroad behind them, reaching back to civiliza- tion, and a broken line of graves. The towns that sprang up along the line and the mining camps that were opened by the railroad were wicked places for a time. The men were all murdered who filled the first twenty-six graves at Virginia City, Nev., and the place was not reckoned uncommonly tough at the time. Many good men, as well as bad ones, went down in the fight for the West. It cost blood to conquer the country, but what is Cuba to this? What is all the kingdom of Spain, compared with the vast empire that was thrown open when the last spike was driven in the first Pacific railroad ? The bad Indian and the outlaw shrank from the glare of the headlight of that great civilizer, the loco- THE WEST TO-DAY. 279 motive. In a little while the had man was pushed aside or trampled upon hy the vast army of honest, fearless, fair-lighting young men, the flower of this fair land, the bravest, best blood of the civilized vvorld, who had come out to help develop the West that had been opened by the daring railroad engineer. Presently the lawyer came to this lawless land, the life insurance agent, the preacher, and the play- actor, and finally a man and his wife— Martria and "Martha's younkit"— and all the miners dfoppod their tools and went down to the camp at the bottom of the gulch to see the woman. Stubble-faced men gave small sacks of gold dust for the privilege of " kiss- in' the kid." By-and-bye, when the good red man got used to the whistle of the locomotive, he came into the camp that the white man had made, and learned to work in the shops and mines. The worthless Indian has perished — gone with the buffalo, the bad man, the stage coach, and the desert, for there is no desert now. Where a little while ago the sage and cactus grew, June roses bloom to-day. All this change has come about since the West was awakened by the first wild scream of the locomotive and the sun-dried plain was made to tremble under its whirling wheels. A thousand years of bull teams, handcarts, and pack trains could not have wrought what the railroad achieved here in a quarter of a century. The grand, glorious, and still growing West could not have been made but for the railroad, and the rail- road could only be built by the dauntless pioneers who 280 THE STORY OP THE RAILROAD. set their faces to the wilderness and held them there for five weary years, nor turned nor glanced back until the trail had been blazed and their tired feet felt the moist, cool sands of the Pacific. When the graders fol- lowed and the work was finished, two thousand miles of rails reached from the edge of civilization to the Golden Gate. Many were missmg when the roll was called. Some were sleeping in the broad prairies where the wild grass wave(J, some among the desert dunes, and others in the mountain passes. As I write this last page my countrymen are moistening two sides of the earth with their blood. These are heroes, and so were those pio- neers who perished fignting for that magnificent West, the pride and glory of America. THE END. O wmffiHmmfKm, fim i ip-u.mn!..ii!iipji)u