The First Tracks

The natural obstacles presented by the mountains and desert land, the absence of timber on the prairies, of water in the mountains, and of both in the alkali desert, had made the work exceptionally difficult and expensive.

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 inducements offered by the Act of 1862 were insufficient to attract to the Union Pacific individual capitalists desirous to display industrial heroism and save the nation but doubling the amount of the prizes by the amendments of 1864 had the desired effect, and a beginning was made by the completion of eleven miles of the Union Pacific by September 25, 1865, and of forty miles by the end of that year. On October 5, 1866, the mileage had increased to two hundred forty-seven. By January 1, 1867, the road was finished and operated to a point three hundred five miles west from Omaha. In 1867 two hundred forty miles were built. The year 1868 produced four hundred twenty-five miles; and the first four months of 1869 added the one hundred twenty-five miles necessary to complete the road to its junction with the Central Pacific at Promontory Point. Work on the Central Pacific had been begun at Sacramento more than a year before it was begun on the Union Pacific at Omaha; and by the time the first eleven miles of the latter had been completed, the former had attained a length of fifty-six miles, increased by January 1, 1867, to ninety-four miles. In 1867 forty six miles were built; in 1868 three hundred sixty-three miles were added; in 1869 the remaining one hundred eighty-six miles were covered, and Promontory Point was reached. The Union Pacific had built one thousand eighty-six miles from Omaha; the Central Pacific had built six hundred eighty-nine miles from Sacramento.

The natural obstacles presented by the mountains and desert land, the absence of timber on the prairies, of water in the mountains, and of both in the alkali desert, had made the work exceptionally difficult and expensive. The Central Pacific, though under the necessity of getting its iron, finished supplies, and machinery by sea, via Cape Horn or Panama, had the advantage of Chinese cooly labor and the unified management of its construction company; while the Union Pacific, having no railway connection until January, 1867, was subjected to the hardship of getting its supplies overland from the termini of the Iowa rail ways or by Missouri River boats, and had to depend on intractable Irish labor and the warring factions of the Crédit Mobilier. The Sierra Nevada furnished the Central Pacific all the timber needed for ties, trestlework, and snowsheds, but the Union Pacific had little or no timber along its line, except the unserviceable cottonwood of the Platte Valley, and many boats were kept busy for a hundred miles above and below Omaha on the Missouri River in furnishing ties and heavy timbers. Both roads were being built through a new, uninhabited, and unculti vated region, where were no foundries, machine-shops, or any other conveniences of a settled country. The large engine used in the Union Pacific Railway shops was dragged across the country to Omaha from Des Moines. Twenty-five thousand men, about equally divided between two companies, are said to have been employed during the closing months of the great work. Several thousand Chinamen had been imported to California for the express purpose of building the Central Pacific. On the Union Pacific, European emigrant labor, principally Irish, was employed. At the close of the Civil War many of the soldiers, laborers, teamsters, and camp-followers drifted west to gather the aftermath of the war in the work of railway construction.

The work was essentially military, and one is not surprised to find among the superintendents and managers a liberal sprinkling of military titles. The surveying-parties were always ac companied by a detachment of soldiery as a protection against interference by Indians. The construction-trains were amply supplied with rifles and other arms, and it was boasted that a gang of track-layers could be transmuted at any moment into a battalion of infantry. And assaults on the trains by the Indians were not infrequent. “There was nothing we could ask them [the United States army] for that they did not give, even when regulations did not authorize it, and it took a long stretch of authority to satisfy all our demands. The commissary department was open to us. Their troops guarded us, and we reconnoitered, surveyed, located, and built inside their picket line. We marched to work to the tap of the drum, with our men armed. They stacked their arms on the dump and were ready at a moment’s warning to fall in and fight for their territory. General Casement’s track-train could arm a thousand men at a word; and from him, as a head, down to his chief spiker, it could be commanded by experienced officers of every rank, from a general to a captain. They had served five years at the front, and more than half of the men had shouldered a musket in many battles.

An illustration of this came to me after our track had passed Plum Creek, two hundred miles west of the Missouri River. The Indians had captured a freight-train and were in possession of it and its crew. It so happened that I was coming down from the front with my car, which was a travelling arsenal. At Plum Creek station word came of this capture and stopped us. On my train were perhaps twenty men, some a portion of the crew, some who had been discharged and sought passage to the rear. Nearly all were strangers to me. The excitement of the capture and the reports coming by telegraph of the burning train brought all men to the platform; and when I called upon them to fall in to go forward and retake the train, every man on the train went into line, and by his position showed that he was a soldier. We ran down slowly until we came in sight of the train. I gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, and at the command they went forward as steadily and in as good order as we had seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire.”

Such is the testimony of General Grenville M. Dodge, chief engineer of the Union Pacific during its construction.

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