TWHP

The Players:     Theodore Judah    Charles Crocker    Mark Hopkins    Collis Huntington    Leland Stanford   
The Transcontinental Railroad

The Train that Transformed the Nation




Perhaps never in history have so few triggered so much. One tiresome visionary and four small businessmen from Sacramento started building their railroad, and before they were all dead, their effort had changed America and connected the world from east to west to far east.

By the time of the Gold Rush, railroads had already started crawling out of their own narrow regions to link and combine with others, and the Eastern Seaboard showed the first hints of the great web that would bind the nation within 30 years. Meanwhile, it took six months or so to get from coast to coast, whether by ship around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, or by horse and wagon across the plains and mountains. The Transcontinental Railroad reduced the trip to six days, opening California to the rest of the country and providing the means of filling with towns and people the vast spaces between the Mississippi and the Sierras. It was the train to San Francisco that really united the nation and allowed it to grow and thrive.

It took no great vision to contrive the idea, the need and convenience obvious, and several unproductive surveys resulted in the decade following California statehood. The great distances across the plains and desert proved no great obstacles except in terms of logistics, but finding a route through the final mountains girding the state seemed insurmountable. Theodore Judah, a railroad engineering prodigy from Connecticut, found the way.

He headed to the West in 1854, determined to be the first railroad builder of the Pacific Coast. By 1856 he'd completed the first railroad west of the Missouri River, the Sacramento Valley Line, linking the new state capitol with Folsom, a town that served as gateway to the gold fields. But those looming mountains to the east plagued his imagination, and finding a viable route through the ragged peaks obsessed him.

The Pacific Railroad Convention of 1859 provided the first opportunity for Judah to promote his ideas, and he was chosen to go to Washington to lobby on behalf of the project. He worked incessantly from his office in the Capitol, collaring legislators whenever possible to explain the importance of such a railroad. He found many a sympathetic ear, but few listeners felt compelled to turn his enthusiasm into a government-driven reality. He returned to California convinced that he needed a consortium of private businessmen to move the project, as well as a genuine survey showing the way through the Sierras.

Judah returned to California and started looking for a route, finding one in July 1860 at Donner Pass. The Sierras are generally characterized by several rows of mountain ridges, demanding multiple climbs to transit the range; but Donner Pass provided the ideal opening, forcing only one ascent up and allowing a relatively gradual descent down, along the Truckee River. Wagon drivers had already been using the pass--known as the Dutch Flat Road--so the impossible had become less so.

The keystone to his route identified, Judah hunted for investors for the rest of the year, but found a cold reception in San Francisco. Regardless of the viability of his plan, the City had reservations based on its maritime trade. San Francisco was almost wholly a creation of the shipping industry, virtually everything entering and leaving the West passing through that port. Not only did the infrastructure of ships, docks and supply stores provide employment to thousands, it also provided business to hotels, bars and dives of myriad variety. The City's most prosperous merchants as often as not owned shares in ships--if not the ships themselves--and whatever benefits a visionary train might bestow, it also threatened to rock a very profitable boat.

Judah turned to Sacramento, and after a public meeting attended by Collis Huntington, found himself invited to meet the shopkeeper's friends for a private discussion. The merchants from Sacramento claimed a motivation for the train similar to the reasons San Franciscans resisted it: The inlanders resented being manipulated by the portside shippers. The handful of attendees pledged several thousand dollars for a formal survey, and Judah set to work. From April to July, 1861, he laid out his road, returning to Sacramento to create a 90-foot-long map showing the elevations involved; he left for Washington in October, possessing both a route and financial support. His lobbying effort paid off, and in April 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the bill authorizing a railroad connecting Omaha with Sacramento and promising federal support. Two companies would be chosen to build it, one from the west, the other from the east.

Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker formed the Central Pacific Railroad, giving Judah an equal share. Westward work began in September 1863.

Meanwhile, Thomas Durant formed the Union Pacific Railroad to take advantage of the federal subsidies, and started work eastward that December; three years later, little had been completed, but much graft and many kickbacks traded hands.

Before long, Judah became disillusioned with his partners; he had a vision to achieve, but they wanted to make money. Since the inception of their efforts, huge silver deposits were found just over the mountains from California on Sun Mountain in Nevada. Virginia City took root, along with countless smaller settlements, as the rush to claim silver mines became moblike in its proportions. The Sacramento businessmen intended to seize the opportunities afforded by this unexpected traffic, and they speculated about building a wagon toll road to take advantage of the situation. Additionally, they formed their own independent construction operations just so the Central Pacific--which they, of course, controlled--could hire their services at generous rates. Judah was incensed, and resolved to buy out his partners; he died in November, 1863, of a disease contracted in the tropics just as he arrived in New York to raise money.

Over the next several years, 10,000 Chinese immigrants hacked and blasted west through the Sierras on behalf of the Central Pacific, while 10,000 Irishmen, Germans and Czechs did the same for the Union Pacific, headed in the opposite direction. They met at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. The Transcontinetal Railroad had been completed, Theodore Judah's dream had been vindicated and America was joined from coast to coast.

It was a great disappointment, initially, and then an embarrassing scandal. The men of the Central Pacific--they would soon become known as the "Big Four"--discovered to their dismay that not that many people were interested in traveling west. The riches they'd long hoped for were replaced by grim reality and the demand for more work and effort. The Union Pacific, on the other hand, was discovered to have bribed many Washington legislators, and none too discreetly at that. The Credit Mobilier Scandal, as it was called, ruined reputations high and low. The gentlemen of the Central Pacific were spared the humiliations visited on their rival and partner; a convenient fire burned inconvenient records, the slate wiped clean.

And San Francisco suffered most of all. The shipping industry declined, since goods could be shipped directly east on the train, instead of west through the port, cutting out many middlemen. Industries that sprung up to serve the isolated regional market found themselves undercut by products made more cheaply at gigantic factories in the East; recession and bankruptcy displaced vague concepts about the universal benefits of the great linkage with the rest of the country.

But link the country it did. Though the railroads accrued almost dictatorial control over regions they served--California clients were forced to open their books for the Central Pacific's ultimate progeny, the Southern Pacific, so it could leech away any substantial profits--new territories and markets developed through their efforts to make ever more money. The Central Pacific/Southern Pacific settled the state's Central Valley with their schemes, as well as creating a tourist industry lauding the glories of the Southwest and the Pacific Coast. Produce from California was shipped to Chicago and beyond, cattle herds from Texas could get to market, and catalog outfits to the east like Sears and Montgomery Ward had the means to supply all the new customers on the coast and the new immigrants on the plains in between.

The blessings were certainly mixed, but the national impact was incalculable; the united states, finally, were genuinely united.

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