Nothing Like It in the World

The Men Who Built the Railway That United America

Stephen E. Ambrose

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781471104398
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE WORLD is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad – the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other labourers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks. The US government pitted two companies – the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads – against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West, or lugged across the country to the Plains. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle and sweat, comes vibrantly to life.

Chapter One
PICKING THE ROUTE 1830-1860

AUGUST 13, 1859, was a hot day in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The settlement was on the western boundary of the state, just across the Missouri River from the Nebraska village of Omaha. A politician from the neighboring state of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, went to Concert Hall to make a speech. It attracted a big crowd because of Lincoln’s prominence after the previous year’s Lincoln-Douglas debates and the keen interest in the following year’s presidential election. Lincoln was a full-time politician and a candidate for the Republican nomination for president. The local editor called Lincoln’s speech—never recorded—one that “set forth the true principles of the Republican party.”

In the audience was Grenville Mellen Dodge, a twenty-eight-year-old railroad engineer. The next day he joined a group of citizens who had gathered on the big porch of the Pacific House, a hotel, to hear Lincoln answer questions. When Lincoln had finished and the crowd dispersed, W.H.M. Pusey, with whom the speaker was staying, recognized young Dodge. He pointed out Dodge to Lincoln and said that the young engineer knew more about railroads than any “two men in the country.”

That snapped Lincoln’s head around. He studied Dodge intently for a moment and then said, “Let’s go meet.” He and Pusey strolled across the porch to a bench where Dodge was sitting. Pusey introduced them. Lincoln sat down beside Dodge, crossed his long legs, swung his foot for a moment, put his big hand on Dodge’s forearm, and went straight to the point: “Dodge, what’s the best route for a Pacific railroad to the West?”

Dodge instantly replied, “From this town out the Platte Valley.”

Lincoln thought that over for a moment or two, then asked, “Why do you think so?”

Dodge replied that the route of the forty-second parallel was the “most practical and economic” for building the railroad, which made Council Bluffs the “logical point of beginning.”

Why? Lincoln wanted to know.

“Because of the railroads building from Chicago to this point,” Dodge answered, and because of the uniform grade along the Platte Valley all the way to the Rocky Mountains.

Lincoln went on with his questions, until he had gathered from Dodge all the information Dodge had reaped privately doing surveys for the Rock Island Railroad Company on the best route to the West. Or, as Dodge later put it, “He shelled my woods completely and got all the information I’d collected.”1

THE transcontinental railroad had been talked about, promoted, encouraged, desired for three decades. This was true even though the railroads in their first decades of existence were rickety, ran on poorly laid tracks that gave a bone-crushing bump-bump-bump to the cars as they chugged along, and could only be stopped by a series of brakemen, one on top of each car. They had to turn a wheel connected to a device that put pressure on the wheels to slow and finally to stop. The cars were too hot in the summer, much too cold in the winter (unless one was at the end nearest the stove, which meant one was too hot). The seats were wooden benches set at ninety-degree angles that pained the back, the buttocks, and the knees. There was no food until the train stopped at a station, when one had fifteen or fewer minutes to buy something from a vendor. The boiler in the engine was fired by wood, which led to sparks, which sometimes—often—flew back into a car and set the whole thing on fire. Bridges could catch fire and burn. Accidents were common; sometimes they killed or wounded virtually all passengers. The locomotives put forth so much smoke that the downwind side of the tracks on the cars was less desirable and it generally was on the poorer side of town, thus the phrase “the wrong side of the tracks.”2

Nevertheless, people wanted a transcontinental railroad. This was because it was absolutely necessary to bind the country together. Further, it was possible, because train technology was improving daily. The locomotives were getting faster, safer, more powerful, as the cars became more comfortable. More than the steamboat, more than anything else, the railroads were the harbinger of the future, and the future was the Industrial Revolution.

IN 1889, Thomas Curtis Clarke opened his essay on “The Building of a Railway” with these words: “The world of today differs from that of Napoleon more than his world differed from that of Julius Caesar; and this change has chiefly been made by railways.”

That was true, and it had happened because of the American engineers, one of whom said, “Where a mule can go, I can make a locomotive go.”3 The poetry of engineering, which required both imagination to conceive and skill to execute, was nowhere more in evidence than in America, where it was the most needed. In England and Europe, after George Stephenson launched the first locomotive in 1829, little of significance in design change took place for the next thirty years. In America nearly everything did, because of the contempt for authority among American engineers, who invented new ways to deal with old problems regardless of precedent.

America was riper than anywhere else for the railroad. It gave Americans “the confidence to expand and take in land far in excess of what any European nation or ancient civilization had been able successfully to control,” as historian Sarah Gordon points out. The railroad promised Americans “that towns, cities, and industries could be put down anywhere as long as they were tied to the rest of the Union by rail.”4

Between 1830 and 1850, American engineers invented the swiveling truck. With it placed under the front end of a locomotive, the engine could run around curves of almost any radius. It was in use in 1831 on the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad. There was nothing like it in England. So too equalizing beams or levers, by means of which the weight of the engine was borne by three of the four driving-wheels, which kept the train on rough tracks. Or the four-wheeled swiveling trucks, one under each end of a car, which let the freight or passenger cars follow the locomotives around the sharpest curves. Another American invention was the switchback, making it possible for the locomotives to chug their way up steep inclines.

Something else distinguished the American railway from its English parent. In America it was common practice to get the road open for traffic in the cheapest manner possible, and in the least possible time. The attitude was, It can be fixed up and improved later, and paid for with the earnings.

The wooden bridge and wooden trestle were invented by Leonardo da Vinci in the sixteenth century and put to use for railways by American engineers beginning in 1840. The Howe truss, invented by an American, used bolts, washers, nuts, and rods so that the shrinkage of new timber could be taken up. It had its parts connected in such a way that they were able to bear the heavy, concentrated weight of locomotives without crushing. Had the Howe truss bridges not tended to decay or burn up, they would still be in use today.

The railways made America. Everyone knew that. But there was much left to do. Henry V. Poor, editor of the American Railroad Journal, wrote a year before the Lincoln-Dodge meeting, “In a railroad to the Pacific we have a great national work, transcending, in its magnitude, and in its results, anything yet attempted by man. By its execution, we are to accomplish our appropriate mission, and a greater one than any yet fulfilled by any nation.” The mission was, he summed up, to establish “our empire on the Pacific, where our civilization can take possession of the New Continent and confront the Old.”5

OBVIOUSLY Dodge wasn’t the only engineer who did surveying on the west side of the Missouri River. But he envisioned and convinced Lincoln that the transcontinental railroad should be on a road running almost straight out the forty-second parallel from Omaha, alongside the Platte Valley until it reached the Rocky Mountains and then over the mountains to meet the railroad coming east from California. With help from many others, Dodge and Lincoln inaugurated the greatest building project of the nineteenth century.

LINCOLN’S first query to Dodge—the best route for a Pacific railroad—was, next to slavery, the foremost question in his mind. He was one of the great railroad lawyers in the West. Born on February 12, 1809, to frontier parents, Lincoln had grown up poor. He educated himself and became a lawyer—a “self-made man,” in the words of his political hero, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky. At age twenty-three, he had entered politics as a candidate for the Illinois state legislature over an issue that would remain with him for the rest of his life, railroads. There was a plan in the legislature to build a railroad from the Illinois River to Springfield. In a campaign speech Lincoln declared that “no other improvement … can equal in utility the rail road.” It was a “never failing source of communication” that was not interrupted by freezing weather, or high or low water. He admitted that there was a “heart-stopping cost” to building a railroad, however.6

Lincoln lost the election, running eighth in a field of thirteen candidates. But his campaign speech was remarkable. The Rocket, built in Britain by George Stephenson, had undergone its first successful trial at Rainhill in 1829, only two years earlier. The first American train, The Best Friend of Charleston, made its initial run in 1830, the second, The Mohawk & Hudson, in 1831. But that year the twenty-two-year-old Lincoln, with less than a year of formal education, was contemplating a railroad in Illinois and was right on the mark about the advantages and disadvantages it would bring, even though, like most Americans and all those living west of the Appalachian Mountains, he had never seen one. He had read about trains in the Eastern newspapers, but his travels had been limited to horseback or buggy, raft or boat.

The American future was hitched to this new thing, to conquer the distance across the continent which was so vast. There were bountiful farm lands that were waiting for immigrants to turn the soil. But without railroads or rivers there was no way to move products of any size from the territories in the West to markets on the East Coast or in Europe. As early as 1830, William Redfield (eighteen years later elected the first president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), who maintained a lifelong interest in railroads, published a pamphlet in New York City proposing a railroad to cross the country to the Mississippi, with extensions going on to the Pacific.7

In 1832, the Ann Arbor Emigrant in Michigan called for a railroad from New York City to the Great Lakes, then over the Mississippi River and on to the Missouri River, then up the Platte, over the mountains, and on to Oregon. Lincoln and nearly every person in the United States wanted it done. The agitation grew over the nearly three decades between 1830 and Lincoln’s meeting with Dodge in Council Bluffs. The 1830 population was 12.8 million. By 1840, it was up to seventeen million. By 1850, it had grown to twenty-three million, putting the United States ahead of Great Britain. Then it jumped up to thirty-one million by 1860.8

Lincoln was a gifted pilot on Western rivers and eager to build canals—in 1836, when he was in the legislature, he cast the deciding vote for a bill to authorize the state to loan $500,000 to support the bonds of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. But even more, he wanted those railroads, which had so many advantages over canals, and he wanted the federal government to let the state use the sale of public lands to raise the money to promote railroads.

Lincoln was ahead of but still in touch with his fellow citizens. By 1835, “railroad fever” had swept America. It was inevitable in a country that was so big, with so many immigrants coming in, creating a desperate need for transportation. Despite the limitations of the first trains—their cost, their unproved capabilities, their dangers—everyone wanted one. Railroads were planned, financed, laid throughout the East and over the mountains. Even though the Panic of 1837 slowed building considerably, by 1840 nearly three thousand miles of track had been laid in the United States, already more than in all of Europe.

So many people and so much land. And the locomotive was improving year by year, along with the track and passenger and freight cars—trains were getting faster, safer, easier to build. By 1850, the lantern, cowcatcher, T-rail, brakes, skill of the engineers, and more improvements made a transcontinental railroad feasible. Pennsylvania, with enormous deposits of both coal and iron, had more rail manufactures than all of England.

AS one observer noted, “The key to the evolution of the American railway is the contempt for authority displayed by our engineers.”9 The engineers were there to build a transcontinental railroad, as they had built so many tracks, curves, and bridges by the beginning of 1850. The country owned so much land that paying for a railroad was no problem—just create a corporation and give it so much land for every mile of track it laid. Lincoln was a strong proponent; in 1847, just before beginning his only term in Congress, he wrote a letter to the IL Journal that supported the Alton and Sangamon Railroad and called it “a link in a great chain of rail road communication which shall unite Boston and New York with the Mississippi.” He also strongly urged the United States to give 2,595,000 acres of land adjacent to the proposed road to Illinois, to enable the state to grant that land to the IC.10

In a complicated case for the Alton and Sangamon, Lincoln won a decision before the Illinois Supreme Court that was later cited as precedent in twenty-five other cases throughout the United States.11 With seven hundred miles north and south through the state, with a branch to Chicago, the IC was the longest line in the world. The following year, 1852, he defended the yet-unfinished Illinois Central in a case involving the right of the state legislature to exempt the railroad company from county taxes. Not until January 1856 (the year the IC was completed) did the Illinois Supreme Court deliver a decision that accepted Lincoln’s argument that the railroad was exempt. Lincoln handed the IC a bill for $2,000. The railroad rejected it, claiming, “This is as much as Daniel Webster himself would have charged.” Lincoln submitted a revised bill for $5,000. When the corporation refused to pay, he brought suit and won.12

Lincoln was at the forefront of the burst of energy created by the combination of free...