American Experiment (167 page)

Railroad issues continued to fuel the speculative market during this period, and “western” railroads in particular called forth all that was best and worst in the American entrepreneurial spirit—its daring, imagination, ability to get things actually done, along with its greed, lack of scruples, capacity to tarnish and corrupt everything it touched.

The extra-wide rails of the Erie, twisting and winding their way through the southern tier of New York, epitomized Americans’ bittersweet romance with the railroad. Built with an unusual six-foot gauge in order to hinder interchange of traffic with the rival Pennsylvania and Baltimore roads, the Erie swallowed millions of dollars from American and foreign investors—and from New York taxpayers—before reaching Dunkirk on Lake Erie, then Buffalo, and finally Chicago, on the eve of the Civil War. During the 1850s, following one of the Erie’s periodic money crises, Daniel Drew had taken control of the railroad’s finances. An old-time Hudson Valley cattle driver and horse trader, Drew combined sharp wits and a lack of scruples with a “sanctimonious devotion to Methodism.” “Shrewd, unscrupulous, and very illiterate,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., later described him—“a strange combination of superstition and faithlessness, of daring and
timidity.” Promptly living up to his reputation, Drew began to manipulate the Erie stock.

His competitive instincts had long before pitted Drew against an even more formidable figure, Cornelius Vanderbilt. As pleasure-loving and calculating as Drew was somber and bold, the “Commodore” had spent most of his sixty-odd years operating sailing ships, ferries, and steamboats on waterways ranging from New York Harbor and the Hudson to the Atlantic and Pacific routes to gold-feverish California. He first came into competition with Drew when the onetime horse trader ran “antimonopoly” boats against him on the Hudson and forced down the fares. The two men squared off again after Vanderbilt bought control of the Harlem Railroad in the late 1850s. In a famous “corner” in 1864, Drew “was outwitted,” according to Allan Nevins, “went short on large commitments as the stock rose in five months from 90 to 285, and lost a half million dollars, an episode which left him eager for revenge.”

Revenge was only a few years in coming, in what would be known as not merely another contest among capitalists but as the “Erie War.” Both sides had prepared for combat. Using every political and financial resource he could muster, Vanderbilt had won control of the Hudson River Railroad and the New York Central; now, if he succeeded in adding the Erie to his rail network, he would monopolize the profitable grain freight from the west. His primary weapon was a long-tested one—the kind of vast financial resources he had used to buy out other lines.

Now, however, he faced not only the small but commanding figure of Daniel Drew but two lieutenant-generalissimos—and a most remarkable pair at that. Through skill, guile, and knavery Jay Gould had worked his way up from a blacksmith’s forge and a country-store clerkship to the ownership of railroads and then of a Wall Street brokerage house. The other, James Fisk, onetime hotel waiter, circus ticket seller, traveling salesman, and dry-goods jobber, was a comic-opera figure in behavior and appearance—a plump, brassy, jovial voluptuary who wore the garish uniform of a purchased national guard colonelcy, sported diamond bosom pins and lavender gloves, and liked to parade around Manhattan in a four-in-hand flanked by footmen in livery. He had the “instincts of fourteen,” Henry Adams wrote. Fisk was not a buffoon, though, but rather a canny and unscrupulous showman who believed it was a duty of the rich to provide entertainment to the poor.

The trio had one key weapon—possession of the Erie itself. Vanderbilt struck first, buying tens of thousands of shares of Erie stock. He knew his foes could not match his resources with money. But they could with chicanery. The trio issued to themselves $10 million of convertible bonds,
changed them into stock, and dumped them on the market. After Vanderbilt replied with a New York contempt-of-court ruling against their issuing more watered stock, they made a retrograde movement across the Hudson to Newark, freed themselves from New York law, and then bribed the New Jersey legislature to legalize their stock issue. After this, Vanderbilt threw in his hand, and the Erie War ended tepidly in a division of the spoils.

Most of the railroad investing was conducted on a far higher plane than this, but often the issuance of rail securities reeked of collusion and fraud, with railroads despoiled and bankrupted in the process. The corruption of the railroads tainted the rest of the financial and political system. Soon it would be revealed that a group of railroad leaders had in effect bribed United States senators and representatives by giving them shares of stock, in a scandal that would come to be known as Crédit Mobilier.

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., observed all this; indeed, he wrote a searching and authoritative study, “A Chapter of Erie.” He did not hesitate to call Fisk a “damned rascal” and Gould a “moral monstrosity.” Yet Adams himself, as head of the Union Pacific, later was willing to pay $50,000 to a Kansas senator to gain his support of a Union Pacific funding bill. Feeling guilty, he blamed himself less for planning corruption than for ineptly failing to bring off the bribe. He justified his action as his duty to the stockholders; if he could not bribe the senator, he reflected, “it was questionable whether I had any right to retain my place as President.”

The great-grandson of John Adams had indeed fastened himself not to a star but to a locomotive engine.

It was a grand sight from the valley of Lake Donner, at eventide, a traveler reported, “to look up a thousand feet upon the overhanging cliffs where the workmen were discharging their glycerine blasts.” In the dusk, great fiery blasts shook the mountainsides amid dense clouds of smoke. “Huge masses of rock and debris were rent and heaved up in the commotion; then anon came the thunders of the explosion like a lightning stroke, reverberating along the hills and canyons, as if the whole artillery of heaven were at play.”

The time was 1868; the place, the east end of Summit Valley near Lake Donner; the occasion, the building of the Central Pacific Railroad east, through some of the most rugged mountainland in America, to meet the Union Pacific advancing west.

The men up on the cliffs earlier had brought the railroad across the Central Valley east from Sacramento, and were now blasting and digging
their way through the high Sierras. Above, men were lowered down the sheer sides of cliffs, where they drilled holes, lighted the fuses, and tried to move out fast, with the American River raging more than a thousand feet below. It was even worse in the valleys, especially during the appalling winter of 1866–67, when snow lay fifteen feet deep by Christmas and one hundred feet or more later. Workers, living in deeply buried shacks, tunneled through the snow as much as two hundred feet to reach the railroad bore they were cutting. At day’s end they dragged themselves back through their labyrinth of snow corridors to wash in powder kegs filled with hot water, dine on rice, dried fish, pork, pickled vegetables, and tea, and then perhaps to have a turn at fan-tan and a pipe of opium before throwing themselves down for sleep. But day after day, month after month, they pressed on, at best cutting through twenty-seven inches of granite in a whole day.

The men who were building the Central Pacific made up perhaps the most extraordinary work force in American history. They had fled from poverty, misery, and civil war in their homeland. They had traveled 8,000 miles to an American shore, but from the west, not the east. Their Taoist and Confucian beliefs were about as far from the Catholic faith and Puritan ethic of their fellow Californians as could be imagined. With their oriental appearance, costumes, language, and pigtails, they were the most harshly treated immigrant group in America. They were segregated both at work and at home, and thus formed one more caste in “classless” America.

The Chinese had not been wanted by either the railroad builders or the labor trades. They were considered too small for the heavy work, averaging hardly one hundred pounds, and were said to be addicted to gambling and opium; good enough to be laundrymen and farmhands … but railroad laborers? Moreover, the other workers—usually summed up as “the Irish” —hotly opposed the Chinese and their lower wages. But the “Irish,” many of whom were miners of old, were prone to quit after payday, especially on news of a gold strike in the hills. At first taken on as potential strikebreakers—another red flag to union men—the Chinese proved such willing workers that several thousand were hired, many of them brought over directly from China.

And so here in the mountain passes and later on the burning sands of Nevada the dream of a transcontinental railroad was being carried out by a strange partnership of Sacramento capitalists and pigtailed “Celestials,” as they were called. The dream was an old and grandiose one. A transcontinental railroad, it had been argued in the 1840s, would be a strategic as well as economic boon; it would place on the West Coast naval power that could dominate the Pacific and even the Chinese seas. Only the coming of
the Civil War had broken the long deadlock over a northern versus a southern railroad, and it was during the war that Congress had passed the legislation, Lincoln had signed it, and the Sacramento group had laid the first rails.

In charge of the enormous undertaking was a quartet of capitalists who would come to be known as the Big Four. The acknowledged, though not unchallenged, leader was the president of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford of Sacramento. A majestic figure with his burly frame, ramrod posture, and thick beard and hair, he had amassed a small fortune as a Placer County merchant and then served as Unionist governor of California before he reached forty. The CP’s hard-driving construction boss was another big, burly young man with chin whiskers, Charles Crocker; two of its key capital raisers were the hardware merchant Mark Hopkins and a partner of Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington. Missing by now was the man who most of all had dreamed the great dream, Theodore Judah, a brilliant leader in conceiving the transcontinental route, lobbying the railroad bill through Congress, and raising money. He had died of yellow fever after crossing Panama.

As the Chinese threaded the railway through the mountain passes and over trestle bridges, Stanford’s office in Sacramento became a kind of GHQ. The generalissimo recruited thousands of workers and horses and flung them into the battle, brought locomotives and other heavy weapons around the Horn and up the Sacramento River to the railhead, shipped quantities of food and other supplies to the front-line troops (but expected them to live off the land too), communicated with Crocker in code, fought the wretched weather, made visits to what he called “the Front.” He had to deal with local nabobs commanding their territory, most notably with the imperious Mormon leader, Brigham Young. And he had to deal with labor shortages, to the point where the partners considered importing blacks from the East or even Confederate war prisoners.

Crocker was field commander. Spurred by messages from Stanford to “double his energy” or “move forward to north pass,” he shuttled back and forth in his private car, or rode on his sorrel mare. “There was no need for sympathy for those men,” he later told the historian H. H. Bancroft. “Why I used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull, stopping along the way wherever there was anything amiss and raising old Nick.” When the Chinese workers finally lost patience and struck for a pay increase to $40 a month and an eight-hour day in the tunnels—“Eight hours a day good for white men, all the same good for Chinamen,” their circular explained—Crocker put it down in a week, “I stopped the provisions on them,” he said later, “stopped the butchers from butchering, and
used such coercive measures.” This was food the Chinese had already bought.

But the dread enemy was not strikers or slackers or Indians—it was the Union Pacific spearing its way west. Stanford and Crocker picked up rumors that the foe was stealing their supplies and even their men. Desperately they threw every reserve into the battle, hauling locomotives on sleighs and even on logs, working shifts of men through long days, goading their men to faster progress along the Nevada flats. When word arrived that the Union Pacific had laid 7.5 miles of track in a long, twenty-hour day, a Central Pacific crew put 10 miles down in thirteen hours. Seeking above all else the huge federal land grants, the two companies fought for exclusive rights-of-way and even graded 100 miles of parallel roadbed.

In the end, though, the two armies met peacefully at Promontory Point near Ogden, Utah. The CP’s “Jupiter,” wood-burning engine No. 6o, proudly stood, cowcatcher to cowcatcher, facing the UP’s coal-burner, No. 119. While the chief engineers of the rival roads shook hands, workers on the cowcatchers held out champagne bottles to each other. Stanford and his UP counterpart, Thomas C. Durant, used silver sledges to drive home the golden spikes. Both men missed the spike a few times, but no matter: America had its first transcontinental railroad.

The poet Bret Harte wondered what the engines said, head to head, each with half the world behind its back:

You brag of your East!
You
do? Why,
I
bring the East to
you!

All the Orient, all Cathay,

Find through me the shortest way; And the sun you follow here

Rises in my hemisphere.…

After the ceremony of the golden spikes, the men who had built the Union Pacific, mostly Irish, could just keep “headed west,” now traveling on the road their Chinese counterparts had built. The CP’s Chinese workers (who are hardly evident in a photograph of the ceremony) drifted off to mining camps or headed back to California, some of them perhaps riding on the rails they had hauled into place. Newcomers and locals alike, they—and later a mellow philosopher from Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson—could share in the glories of the trip: immense numbers of ducks settling in the northern shallows of the Great Salt Lake, purple mountains beyond, and snow-covered ranges in the distance. Emerson was fascinated by the constantly shifting tints and lights of this landscape.