The Spike Wasn't Golden
Robert M. Utley, New York Times Book
Review, December 12, 1999
On May 10, 1869, a self-important and
somewhat boozy array of frock-coated dignitaries gathered with
several hundred rowdy laborers to drive the last spike in the Pacific
Railroad. The site was Promontory Summit, Utah (not Promontory Point,
30 miles to the south). The last spike was an ordinary iron spike
(not a ''golden'' spike, which would have been crushed by a
sledgehammer's blow). The Central Pacific's Leland Stanford and the
Union Pacific's Thomas C. Durant are both said to have swung at the
spike and missed, to the great delight of the crowd, but David Haward
Bain demolishes this oft-told tale. When the sledgehammers connected,
an attached telegraph wire sped the impulse east and west to set off
joyous celebration everywhere.
The last spike completed the union of Atlantic and Pacific by
rail. The ceremony crowned one of the most dramatic and significant
episodes in American history. Passengers and freight could now cross
the continent in days instead of months. Settlement, commerce,
industry, agriculture and other railroads spread north and south from
the twin bands of iron. The Indians' remaining years of freedom
dwindled to less than a decade. The United States became a nation not
only in cartographic fact but in social, political and economic fact
as well.
The building of the Pacific railroad is an epic story, often
recounted but never so thoroughly, authoritatively and engagingly as
in ''Empire Express.'' The story unfolds along two trajectories, each
with its own cast of well-etched characters, each a drama of
conflict, adventure, excitement and suspense. The one reverberates
through corporate boardrooms, federal and state offices, the
cloakrooms of Congress and the courts; the other in the towering
Sierra Nevada, the deserts of Utah and Nevada, the rugged canyons of
Utah's Wasatch and the Nebraska plains. The Central Pacific raced
east, the Union Pacific west, to the meeting that only at the last
moment turned out to be Promontory. Bain, the author of ''Sitting in
Darkness: Americans in the Philippines,'' traces both trajectories
with clarity and engaging narrative, and he is skilled in relating
each to the other, for each enormously influenced the other.
No novelist could have created a more vibrant set of characters
than those who built the Pacific railroad. The Central Pacific
boasted the California-based Big Four -- Leland Stanford, Collis P.
Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. Bain rightly expands
this to a Big Five by including the hitherto unappreciated role of
Crocker's brother Edwin. Charles bossed the construction gangs.
Hopkins kept the books. Huntington played the Washington and New York
scene, dispensing lavish sums in cash, stock and bonds to buy the
favor of the federal officials and members of Congress on whom
federal subsidies and land grants depended. Back home, Edwin Crocker
furnished the vital communications link between Huntington in the
east and the others in California. Lazy and comfort-loving, Stanford
did only what the others pushed him to do.
In contrast to the tight-knit but internally quarrelsome Big Five,
the Union Pacific suffered from a sprawling cast of openly warring
characters and factions. Many corporate moguls circulated in and out
of the railroad's ornate Manhattan headquarters. But the Darth Vader
of them all was Thomas C. Durant, unsurpassed master of chicanery,
avarice and manipulation of corporate power for personal enrichment.
In the field, Grenville Dodge, Jack and Dan Casement and Samuel Reed
pushed surveyors, graders and trackers across plains and mountains,
but not without the infuriating interference of Durant and his
toadies, whose changes of alignment produced more curves and
therefore more mileage and therefore more government subsidies.
Even by the loose standards of the 1860's, every ranking official
of both railroads could be labeled a crook, as most ultimately were.
Bain probes the financial, legal and political skulduggery in all its
complexity. He nimbly spins the kaleidoscope of stocks, bonds,
securities, first and second mortgages, slush funds and piles of
cash. He exposes the artifice of the Credit Mobilier and the Contract
and Finance Company, by which the railroad directors let padded
construction contracts to themselves. Bain's attempt to untangle the
tangle is sometimes bewildering but always fascinating.
Everyone, it seems, got rich, some fabulously rich, while the
companies plummeted into debt and finally bankruptcy. High government
officials in Washington profited, including the vice president and a
string of congressional committee chieftains who found themselves
badly embarrassed when the scandal poured forth three years after the
celebration at Promontory. Construction suffered, less so on the
Central Pacific than the Union Pacific, whose line from Omaha to
Promontory was so shoddily built that it had to be almost entirely
redone at once. Field supervisors and contractors also found ways to
plunder the company coffers. Even Grenville Dodge, who usually
emerges as the lone untarnished hero, gets caught with his hand in
the till -- not only the Union Pacific's till, but afterward in
Indian supply contracts and in building the Texas and Pacific
Railway.
More compelling and more readily understood than the corporate
swindling is the construction story, an epic matched by few in
American history. The Central Pacific's conquest of the California
Sierras was a marvel of engineering and labor. The visionary Theodore
Judah laid the engineering groundwork, but Samuel Montague and Lewis
Clement carried it over (and through) the great granite peaks, across
the Donner Pass and down the Truckee Canyon.
The true heroes of the summit crossing, however, were the
thousands of docile, obedient, hard-working Chinese laborers Crocker
imported from Canton. With primitive equipment, they shaped the
grades, raised the trestles, blasted the cuts and tunnels with black
powder, shoveled in the fills, laid and spiked the rails and built
mile after mile of sheds to guard the line from huge drifts of winter
snow and avalanches that could wipe out miles of track. They even
lowered themselves down cliffs in wicker baskets, woven on patterns
remembered from their homeland, and worked with a volatile new
compound called nitroglycerine, without which the great summit tunnel
could not have been completed for years. Their graves dotted
trackside in mountain and desert, memorials to a people destined for
brutal ethnic prejudice in their adopted land.
Pushing west from Omaha, Dodge and Casement, recently Union
generals, commanded their Irish workmen, recently Union soldiers, as
if still on the battlefield. They were muscular exemplars of labor,
but, in contrast to the Chinese, unruly and given to incapacitating
binges at the ''Hell on Wheels'' that leaped west from one end of the
track to the next. The Union Pacific faced no such daunting obstacle
as the Sierras but had its share of mountain work in the Laramie and
Wasatch ranges.
With both sides striving for the maximum in federal subsidies and
land grants (as well as markets), surveyors and graders worked far in
advance of the end of track. For miles in Utah and Nevada, surveyor
stakes and grades ran parallel until a point of union could be agreed
and ratified by Congress. Bleak, treeless Promontory Summit was at
last fixed, with the Central Pacific to take over the Union Pacific
work back down to Ogden, gateway to the Salt Lake Valley.
Today, at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, visitors may
view parallel grades, cuts, fills and trestle footings, fruits of the
great railroad race that finally ended at Promontory Summit.
Ironically, these impressive works, snaking side by side up the rocky
eastern face of the Promontory Mountains, were not the product of the
legendary Irish and Chinese laborers but of pious Mormons. The
church's president, Brigham Young, had arranged for Mormon bishops to
mobilize labor gangs and dip into the barrel from which everyone else
seemed to be imbibing so freely. Bankrupted by the frenzy of fraud,
neither company ever paid the Mormons.
''Empire Express'' is well researched, well written, refreshingly revisionist where the sources indicate, illustrated by well-chosen photographs and studded with beautiful topographical maps indispensable to the construction story. The book promises to endure as the standard history of the Pacific railroad.