During the summer before the railroad was finished, the editor of the
Springfield, Massachusetts, _Republican_, Samuel Bowles, visited the
West. He traveled over the Union Pacific from Omaha, which he noted had
become a boom town since he had visited it last in 1865. He describes
his ride along the same route followed by the Oregon Trail and the
Overland Stage.
The day’s ride grows monotonous. The road is as straight as an arrow.
Every dozen or fifteen miles is a station—two or three sheds, and a
waterspout and wood-pile; every one hundred miles or so a home or a
division depot, with shops, eating-house, “saloons” uncounted, a store
or two, a few cultivated acres, and the invariable half-a-dozen seedy,
staring loafers, that are a sort of fungi indigenous to American
railways. We yawn over the unchanging landscape and the unvarying
model of the stations, and lounge and read by day, and go to bed early
at night. But the clear, dry air charms; the half dozen soldiers
hurriedly marshalled into line at each station, as the train comes up,
suggest that the Indian question is not disposed of yet; we catch a
glimpse of antelopes in the distance; and we watch the holes of the
prairie dogs for their piquant little owners and their traditional
companions of owls and snakes—but never see the snakes.
The Plains proper and the first day’s ride end at Cheyenne, five
hundred and sixteen miles from Omaha. Here a branch road goes off
south a hundred miles to Denver, where it connects with the St. Louis
or Eastern Division of the Pacific road. Cheyenne is also a great
railroad work and supply shop, as becomes its location adjoining the
mountain and winter-exposed section of the road.
He continued on across Wyoming to the end of the line, which then was
crossing the high, arid tablelands near Rawlins. He saw the track laid
over the Continental Divide and marveled at the speed with which the job
was being accomplished. By the next May the construction crews had laid
another 250 miles of track to complete the work.
Within this desert of the mountains, the divide of the continent
occurs both on the old stage road and the new Railroad line; and here,
in the summer of 1868, we witnessed the building of the track over the
parting of the waters. The last rail on the Atlantic slope and the
first on the Pacific were laid in our presence; and Governor Bross
pinned them down with stalwart blows upon their spikes. As yet, still,
no mountains appear in the path of the track, and it winds easily
along through these rolling sand-hills, occasionally helped over a
deep dry gulch, and spanning a feeble or possible river. But the whole
section is mountainously high, from seven thousand to eight thousand
feet above the sea level.
We witnessed here the fabulous speed with which the Railroad was
built. Through the two or three hundred miles beyond were scattered
ten to fifteen thousand men in great gangs preparing the road bed;
plows, scrapers, shovels, picks and carts; and, among the rocks,
drills and powder were doing the grading as rapidly as men could stand
and move with their tools. Long trains brought up to the end of the
completed track loads of ties and rails; the former were transferred
to teams, sent one or two miles ahead, and put in place upon the
grade. Then rails and spikes were reloaded on platform cars, these
pushed up to the last previously laid rail, and with an automatic
movement and a celerity that were wonderful, practiced hands dropped
the fresh rails one after another on the ties exactly in line, huge
sledges sent the spikes home, the car rolled on, and the operation was
repeated; while every few minutes the long heavy train behind sent out
a puff from its locomotive, and caught up with its load of material
the advancing work. The only limit, inside of eight miles in
twenty-four hours, to the rapidity with which the track could thus be
laid, was the power of the road behind to bring forward the materials.
As the Railroad marched thus rapidly across the broad Continent of
plain and mountain, there was improvised a rough and temporary town at
its every public stopping-place. As this was changed every thirty or
forty days, these settlements were of the most perishable
materials—canvas tents, plain board shanties, and turf-hovels—pulled
down and sent forward for a new career, or deserted as worthless, at
every grand movement of the Railroad company. Only a small proportion
of their populations had aught to do with the road, or any legitimate
occupation. Most were the hangers-on around the disbursements of such
a gigantic work, catching the drippings from the feast in any and
every form that it was possible to reach them. Restaurant and saloon
keepers, gamblers, desperadoes of every grade, the vilest of men and
of women made up this “Hell on Wheels,” as it was most aptly termed.
When we were on the line, this congregation of scum and wickedness was
within the Desert section, and was called Benton. One to two thousand
men, and a dozen or two women were encamped on the alkali plain in
tents and board shanties; not a tree, not a shrub, not a blade of
grass was visible; the dust ankle deep as we walked through it, and so
fine and volatile that the slightest breeze loaded the air with it,
irritating every sense and poisoning half of them; a village of a few
variety stores and shops, and many restaurants and grog-shops; by day
disgusting, by night dangerous; almost everybody dirty, many filthy,
and with the marks of lowest vice; averaging a murder a day; gambling
and drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce,
the chief business and pastime of the hours—this was Benton. Like its
predecessors, it fairly festered in corruption, disorder and death,
and would have rotted, even in this dry air, had it outlasted a brief
sixty-day life. But in a few weeks its tents were struck, its shanties
razed, and with their dwellers moved on fifty or a hundred miles
farther to repeat their life for another brief day. Where these people
came from originally; where they went to when the road was finished,
and their occupation was over, were both puzzles too intricate for me.
Hell would appear to have been raked to furnish them; and to it they
must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its ...
most diabolical service.