Hartford Courant
Dave Drury
On May 10, 1869, at a dry, sage-brush-covered summit in northern
Utah, a festive crowed of dignitaries, workers and onlookers gathered
to witness the linkup of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific rail
lines. The nation's first transcontinental railroad, a dream that had
captivated empire builders for decades, had become a reality.
David Haward Bain's monumental history of the achievement, and how
it changed America forever, is exhaustively researched, even-handed
in judgment and lucidly written.
It is the quintessential American story. No mountain range, alkali
desert, disease or Indian tribe could stand up to the engine that
American capitalism, at its rawest and most vulgar, had set in
motion. It is a story of how the West was won, and what was lost in
the victory.
Bain's colorful cast of dreamers, doers and rogues features a
number of prominent figures with ties to Connecticut.
The story opens in the 1840s with the story of Asa Whitney, a
North Groton-born merchant who would lobby Congress with his vision
of a Pacific railroad. The following decade, a young engineer,
Bridgeport native Theodore Judah, would lay the route for a rail line
across the Sierras, then seek out investors. One of those he found,
Hartford-born Collis P. Huntington, decided to leave his Sacramento
hardware business and, with four "associates," created the Central
Pacific Railroad empire.
Huntington, who acted as Central's representative on the East
Coast, worked tirelessly to assure the flow of federal money needed
to keep the project moving. Huntington did what was necessary. "There
are more hungry men in Congress this session than I have ever known
before," he noted in 1868.
Still another Connecticut native, Cornelius Bushnell, was an
original director of the Union Pacific Railroad and a founding
director of Credit Mobilier of America, the construction company
whose name is forever linked to the railroad political scandal that
broke during the Grant presidency.
Cash and stock payoffs to federal inspectors and members of
Congress were part of the cost of doing business. In early 1873,
during Congressional hearings into allegations of bribery by Union
Pacific directors, Bain relates how Mark Twain regaled an audience
with an account of how natives of the Sandwich Islands do everything
in an "upsidedown" manner, such as electing incorruptible men to
Congress.
Bain vividly narrates the progress of the rails. Sioux, Cheyenne,
Arapaho and other tribes on the Plains wage war against an enemy that
will doom their way of life. Rail passengers along the newly laid
track blast away at antelope and buffalo from the cars. A caravan of
drunks, gamblers and prostitutes follow the crews, creating a
succession of "Hell on Wheels" settlements from Nebraska to Utah,
where murder and lynching are daily occurrences and, at some of the
locales, gravesites the only permanent structures left behind.
Along the Central Pacific line, thousands of Chinese laborers brave
fierce winters and accidental nitroglycerine explosions to construct
1,600-foot tunnels through the granite cliffs and bridge
breath-taking chasms. The "Celestials," as they were called, win the
grudging respect of their overseers. "We have track laying reduced to
one of the exact sciences & can beat the world at it," brags
construction boss Charles Crocker.
Bain's work will be the definitive account of the transcontinental railroad for many years.