Laying Down the Track

The only settlements between Omaha and Sacramento in 1862 were those of the Mormons in Utah, and Denver and a few mining-camps in Colorado and Nevada.

Continuing First North American Transcontinental Railroad Completed,
our selection from The Union Pacific Railway by John P. Davis published in 1894. The selection is presented in six easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in First North American Transcontinental Railroad Completed.

Time: May 10, 1869
Place: Promontory Summit, Utah

The military coloring of the work of building the Union Pacific is well described in the following quotation from a newspaper of the day:

One can see all along the line of the now completed road the evidences of ingenious self-protection and defense which our men had learned during the war. The same curious huts and underground dwellings, which were a common sight along our army lines then, may now be seen burrowed into the sides of the hills or built up with ready adaptability in sheltered spots. The whole organization of the force engaged in the construction of the road is, in fact, semi-military. The men who go ahead, locating the road, are the advance-guard. Following them is the second line, cutting through the gorges, grading the road, and building bridges. Then comes the main line of the army, placing the sleepers, laying the track, spiking down the rails, perfecting the alignment, ballasting, and dressing up and completing the road for immediate use. This army of workers has its base, to continue the figure, at Omaha, Chicago, and still farther east ward, from whose markets are collected the materials for con structing the road. Along the line of the completed road are construction-trains continually pushing forward to ‘the front’ with supplies. The company’s grounds and workshops at Omaha are the arsenal, where these purchases, amounting now to millions of dollars in value, are collected and held ready to be sent forward. The advanced limit of the rail is occupied by a train of long box cars, with hammocks swung under them, beds spread on top of them, bunks built within them, in which the sturdy, broad shouldered pioneers of the great iron highway sleep at night and take their meals. Close behind this train come loads of ties and rails and spikes, etc., which are being thundered off upon the roadside to be ready for the track-layers. The road is graded a hundred miles in advance. The ties are laid roughly in place, then adjusted, gauged, and levelled. Then the track is laid.

Track-laying on the Union Pacific is a science, and we, pundits of the Far East, stood upon that embankment, only about a thousand miles this side of sunset, and backed westward before that hurrying corps of sturdy operators with a mingled feeling of amusement, curiosity, and profound respect. On they came. A light car, drawn by a single horse, gallops up to the front with its load of rails. Two men seize the end of a rail and start forward, the rest of the gang taking hold by twos, until it is clear of the car. They come forward at a run. At the word of command the rail is dropped in its place, right side up with care, while the same process goes on at the other side of the car. Less than thirty seconds to a rail for each gang, and so four rails go down to the minute! Quick work, you say; but the fellows on the Union Pacific are tremendously in earnest. The moment the car is empty it is tipped over on the side of the track to let the next loaded car pass it, and then it is tipped back again, and it is a sight to see it go flying back for another load, propelled by a horse at full gallop at the end of sixty or eighty feet of rope, ridden by a young Jehu, who drives furiously. Close behind the first gang come the gaugers, spikers, and bolters, and a lively time they make of it. It is a grand ‘anvil chorus’ that those sturdy sledges are playing across the plains. It is in triple time, three strokes to the spike. There are ten spikes to a rail, four hundred rails to a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San Francisco. Twenty-one million times are those sledges to be swung, twenty one million times to come down with their sharp punctuation, before the great work of modern America is complete!”

The only settlements between Omaha and Sacramento in 1862 were those of the Mormons in Utah, and Denver and a few mining-camps in Colorado and Nevada. Colorado was given over to the Kansas Pacific, and Salt Lake City was left for a branch line; Ogden, a Mormon town of a few hundred inhabitants, was the only station between the termini of the Union Central Pacific. The necessities of the work of construction created new settlements and stations as it progressed, and as fast as the road was completed to each convenient point it was operated to it, while the work went on from the terminus-town as a headquarters or base of operations; thus, when the entire line was put in operation, July 15, 1869, such places as North Platte, Kearney, and Cheyenne had “got a start,” while other towns, being made the termini of branch lines, secured the additional impulse due in general to junction towns. Some of the “headquarters towns,” like Benton, enjoyed only a temporary, Jonah’s gourd existence, and nothing is now left to mark their former location. The life in them was rough and profligate in the extreme. An extract from the journal of a few days’ sojourn in Benton in August, 1868, is instructive:

Westward the grassy plain yields rapidly to a desert; at Medicine Bow we took final leave of the last trace of fertility and traversed a region of alkali-flats and red ridges for fifty miles. In the worst part of this desert, just west of the last crossing of the Platte, we found Benton, the great terminus-town, six hundred ninety-eight miles from Omaha. Far as [we] could see around the town, not a green tree, shrub, or spear of grass was to be seen; the red hills, scorched and bare as if blasted by the lightnings of an angry god, bounded the white basin on the north and east, while to the south and west spread the gray desert till it was interrupted by another range of red and yellow hills. All seemed sacred to the genius of drouth and desolation.

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