Wall Street Journal, November 4, 1999
David Shribman
It was one small spike for man, one giant leap for mankind.
With two bands of musicians standing by, with two railroad engines
hyperventilating on the track, with hundreds of people gathered in
excited clutches at a Utah crossroads, the final spike was hammered
into the transcontinental railroad. A few moments later a message was
sent in Morse code to President Ulysses S. Grant: "We have the honor
to report that the last rail is laid, the last spike is driven, the
Pacific Railroad is finished." It was May 10, 1869--a century before
man's first visit to the moon.
This was the industrialization, immigration and imagination moment
of the age. For the first time the U.S., so recently rent by a civil
war that split the country north and south, was unified, banded by
twin belts of iron running east to west. It occurred, as David Haward
Bain writes, "at unimaginable cost and only barely foreseeable
benefit," but its symbolic value was unambiguous. The railroad tied
the country together.
Now, 13 decades later, Mr. Bain, who teaches at Middlebury College,
has crafted the definitive story of the heroism and heartbreak that
produced a railroad that crossed the mountains, desert and prairies
and that stands as a monument to American technology and vision. In
mass, detail and sweep, "Empire Express" is an accomplishment
befitting its subject. Like the railroad itself, it is a chronicle of
the American character.
The railroad was a feat of daring, engineering, construction--and
politics. And in some ways it was the politics that was the most
brutal, as the dreamers and draftsmen struggled over a thousand
questions: whether its route should be in the north or south; whether
its goal was to provide military mobility or to enhance the Union or
to spur economic development; how wide its gauge should be; how it
should be financed; how much lobbying, bribing and blackmailing the
system could bear. The story is a case study in compromise in all
spheres of human endeavor.
There were troubles aplenty. Northern financiers were preoccupied
with Civil War concerns. Iron prices spiked. Excessive heat and cold
bedeviled workers. Broken treaties stirred Indian's resentments.
Political winds shifted. National leadership changed. Labor shortages
endangered progress. The search for the timber for railroad ties,
laid by some work gangs at a rate of four a minute and averaging
about 2,500 a mile, imperiled the project. Swindlers and boardroom
battles slowed the work. Then it snowed.
Western winters are perilous things but even more so if you are
engaged in the biggest construction project of the century. Snowfalls
were so deep, often reaching the shoulders of workers, that even
sleighs could not pass. The heavy ox-drawn sleds that the road gangs
mobilized weren't always effective. "The oxen would flounder, and
[would] lay down, worn out, to be roused by the summary
process of twisting their tails," one diarist recalled. "I saw three
in one team so fortunate to have had theirs twisted clear off, none
left to be bothered with."
Throughout the process there were power struggles and financial
struggles, all rendered by Mr. Bain in great detail. As always in the
19th century, the big money, and the big jerks, were on the East
coast--in truth, much of this story occurred in the courthouses and
counting houses of the big cities--but the big drama, and the
bigger-than-life characters, were in the West.
Indeed, through these hundreds of pages stride unforgettable
characters, like Asa Whitney, a worldly importer of spices who was
the transcontinental railroad's most persistent and most disappointed
visionary; Theodore Dehone Judah, a New England engineer who dreamed
lustily of the potential of rail travel; Collis Huntington, with his
"fondness for making money and his fascination for politics"; and
Thomas Clark Durant, whom Mr. Bain calls "a smoke-filled-back-room
man" who would be known in folklore as the "first dictator of the
railroad world."
The idea of the transcontinental railroad was big, but the work
often was small--scores, hundreds, even thousands of small things.
Like conducting survey studies that allowed workers to save a half
mile of track of to cross ridges and ravines. or constructing
waist-high woven baskets, used to lower workers down a cliff to light
explosive fuses. Or carving a rock shelf to lay rail track. Or
building tunnels, including one beneath the Sierra summit that was
1,600 feet long. "Against the uncooperative granite," Mr. Bain
writes, "the average progress won with hand tools and black-powder
charges was only seven inches per day." Much of this work was done by
American laborers ad immigrants from Ireland and China, the latter
sometimes referred to as "the dregs of Asia."
This is, at base, the story of slow progress. But even at seven inches a day, the transcontinental railroad is really the story of big progress. It changed the landscape of the country, to be sure. But its real achievement is far greater than that. It altered the horizon of the nation.