Life in the Construction Camps

The regular routine of business, dances, drunks, and fist fights met with a sudden interruption.

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

[An extract from the journal of a few days’ sojourn in Benton in August, 1868 – ED]

The whole basin looked as if it might originally have been filled with lye and sand, then dried to the consistence of hard soap, with glistening surface tormenting alike to eye and sense. Yet here had sprung up in two weeks, as if by the touch of Aladdin’s lamp, a city of three thousand people; there were regular squares arranged into five wards, a city government of mayor and aldermen, a daily paper, and a volume of ordinances for the public health. It was the end of the freight and passenger, and beginning of the construction, division; twice every day heavy trains arrived and departed, and stages left for Utah, Montana, and Idaho; all the goods formerly hauled across the plains came here by rail and were reshipped, and for ten hours daily the streets were thronged with motley crowds of railroad men, Mexicans, and Indians, gamblers, ‘cappers, and saloon-keepers, merchants, miners, and mule-whackers. The streets were eight inches deep in white dust as I entered the city of canvas tents and pole-houses; the suburbs appeared as banks of dirty white lime, and a new arrival with black clothes looked like nothing so much as a roach struggling through a flour-barrel. It was sunset, and the lively notes of the violin and guitar were calling the citizens to evening diversions. Twenty-three saloons paid license to the evanescent corporation, and five dance-houses amused our elegant leisure.

The regular routine of business, dances, drunks, and fist fights met with a sudden interruption. Sitting in a tent door, I noticed an altercation across the street, and saw a man draw a pistol and fire, and another stagger and catch hold of a post for support. The first was about to shoot again when he was struck from behind and the pistol wrenched from his hand. The wounded man was taken into a tent nearby and treated with the greatest kindness by the women but died the next day. It was universally admitted that there had been no provocation for the shooting, and the general voice was, ‘Hang him!” Next day there was a great rush and cry on the street and looking out I saw them dragging the murderer along toward the tent where the dead man lay. The entire population were out at once, plains men, miners, and women mingled in a wild throng, all insisting on immediate hanging. Pale as a sheet and hardly able to stand, the murderer, in the grasp of two stalwart vigilantes, was dragged through the excited crowd, and into the tent where the dead man lay, and forced to witness the laying out and depositing in the coffin. What was the object of this movement nobody knew, but the delay was fatal to the hanging-project. Benton had lately been decided to be in the military reservation of Fort Steele, and that day the general commanding thought fit to send a provost guard into the city. They arrived just in time, rescued the prisoner and took him to the guardhouse, whence, a week later, he escaped.

Transactions in real estate in all these towns were, of course, most uncertain; and everything that looked solid was a sham. Red-brick fronts, brownstone fronts, and stuccoed walls were found to have been made to order in Chicago and shipped in (pine) sections. Ready-made houses were finally sent out in lots, boxed, marked, and numbered; half a dozen men could erect a block in a day, and two boys with screw-drivers put up a ‘habit able dwelling’ in three hours. A very good gray-stone stucco front, with plain sides, twenty by forty feet, could be had for three hundred dollars; and if your business happened to desert you, or the town moved on, you only had to take your store to pieces, ship it on a platform-car to the next city, and set up again.

Ten months afterward I revisited the site. There was not a house or tent to be seen; a few rock-piles and half-destroyed chimneys barely sufficed to mark the ruins; the white dust had covered everything else, and desolation reigned supreme.”

It had been expected that the Central Pacific, chartered by the State of California, would build east to the Nevada boundary, and that the Union Pacific, chartered by the National Government, would build westward from Omaha through the Territories to a meeting at the California boundary. But the object of the Pacific-railroad charter was to secure a railway from the Missouri to the Pacific, by whomsoever constructed, and its terms (section 1o of the Act of 1862) had provided that “in case said first-named [Union Pacific] company shall complete their line to the eastern boundary of California before it is completed across said State by the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California, said first named company is hereby authorized to continue in constructing the same through California until said roads shall meet and connect, and the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California, after completing its road across said State, is authorized to continue the construction of said railroad and telegraph through the Territories of the United States to the Missouri River, including the branch lines specified, until said roads shall meet and connect.”

This was changed in the Act of 1864 (section 16) to a provision that the Central Pacific might “extend their line of road eastward one hundred fifty miles on the established route, so as to meet and connect with the line of the Union Pacific road.” Of which change Collis P. Huntington, of the Central Pacific, has said: “One hundred fifty miles’ should not have gone into the bill; but I said to Mr. Union Pacific, when I saw it, I would take that out as soon as I wanted it out. In 1866 I went to Washington. I got a large majority of them without the use of a dollar.” Accordingly the Act of 1866 renewed the original provision of the Act of 1862, and provided (section 2) that “the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California, with the con sent and approval of the Secretary of the Interior, are hereby authorized to locate, construct, and continue their road eastward in a continuous completed line, until they shall meet and connect with the Union Pacific Railroad.”

More information here and here, and below.

We want to take this site to the next level but we need money to do that. Please contribute directly by signing up at https://www.patreon.com/history