THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE RAILROAD
ALARM OF CANAL-OWNERS AT THE SUCCESS OF RAILROADS--THE MAKING OF THE
BALTIMORE & OHIO--THE "TOM THUMB" ENGINE--DIFFICULTIES IN CROSSING THE
APPALACHIANS--EXTENSION TO PITTSBURGH--TROUBLES OF THE ERIE
RAILROAD--THIS ROAD THE FIRST TO USE THE TELEGRAPH--THE PRAIRIES BEGIN
TO BE CROSSED BY RAILWAYS--CHICAGO'S FIRST RAILROAD, THE GALENA &
CHICAGO UNION--ILLINOIS CENTRAL--ROCK ISLAND, THE FIRST TO SPAN THE
MISSISSIPPI--PROPOSALS TO RUN RAILROADS TO THE PACIFIC--THE CENTRAL
PACIFIC ORGANIZED--IT AND THE UNION PACIFIC MEET--OTHER PACIFIC ROADS.
All the railroad projects already related were timid projects in the
beginning, with hardly a thought of ultimate greatness. Yet there were
men, even in the earliest days of railroading, whose minds winged to great
enterprises, whose dreams were empire-wide. Of such men was the Baltimore
& Ohio born.
Baltimore, like Philadelphia, had greedily watched the success of the Erie
Canal upon its completion, and noted with alarm its possible effects upon
its own wharves. Philadelphia, with the wealth of the great State of
Pennsylvania behind, had sought to protect herself by the construction of
the long links of canal and railroad to Pittsburgh, of which you have
already read. But Baltimore had no great State to call to her support. She
must look to herself for strength. Out of her eminent necessity for
self-preservation came men of the strength and the fibre to meet the
emergency. Baltimore might have retreated from the situation, as some of
the New England towns had retreated from it, and become a somnolent
reminiscence of a prosperous Colonial seaport. She did nothing of the
sort. Instead she made herself the terminal and inspiration of a great
railroad, laid the foundations of a great and lasting growth.
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was born February 12, 1827. On the evening
of that day, a little group of citizens of the sturdy old Southern
metropolis gathered at the house of George Brown. Mr. Brown together with
Philip E. Thomas, a distinguished merchant and philanthropist of
Baltimore, had been making investigation into the possibilities of
railroads. The fact that the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which was already
well advanced in construction, would have its eastern terminus at the
Potomac River, near Washington, brought no comfort to the merchants of
Baltimore. Wonder not then, that the stern old traders of that city
assembled to consider "the best means of restoring to the city of
Baltimore that portion of the western trade which has lately been diverted
from it by the introduction of steam navigation and other causes." From
that February day to this the corporate title of the Baltimore & Ohio has
been unchanged, despite the career of the most extreme vicissitudes--long
years of shadows that were almost complete despair, other years that were
brilliant with success.
It was decided at the outset that the commercial supremacy of Baltimore
rested on her conquest of the Appalachian Mountains, of her reaching by an
easy artificial highway the almost limitless waterways of the West that
linked themselves with the navigable Ohio. But for the beginning it was
agreed that Cumberland, long an important point on the well-famed National
Highway, and even then a centre in the coal traffic, was a far enough
distant goal to be worthy of the most ambitious enterprise. Indeed a long
cutting through a hill in the first section of the road proved a serious
financial obstacle to the directors of the struggling railroad. But these
last were men who persevered. They started to lay their track for the
thirteen miles from Baltimore to Ellicott's Mills on July 4, 1828. That
occasion was honored by an old-time celebration in which the chief figure
was Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, who laid the first stone of the new
line. After his services were finished he said to a friend:
"I consider this among the most important things of my life, second only
to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to
that." Of that act President Hadley, of Yale, has written: "One man's life
formed the connecting link between the political revolution of the one
century and the industrial revolution of the other."
No sooner had actual construction begun on the new line, than the
directors found themselves beset by many difficulties. Their enterprise
was then so unusual, that they went blindly, stumbling ahead in the dark.
Even the construction of the track itself was experimental. It was first
planned to use wooden rails hewn from oak, and these were to be mounted
upon stone sleepers set in a rock ballast. The money spent in such track
was obviously wasted. All such construction had to be torn out before the
traffic was at all sizable, and replaced by iron rails and wooden
sleepers.
But the track was the least of the company's problems. It had gone ahead
to build a railroad with a very vague conception as to its permanent
motive-power. It was soon seen there, too, that horses were out of the
question for hauling the passengers and freight any considerable distance.
The Baltimore & Ohio Company gravely experimented at one time with a car
which was carried before the wind by means of mast and sail.
Sturdy old Peter Cooper, of New York, finally solved that motive-power
problem. He had been induced to buy three thousand acres of land in the
outskirts of Baltimore for speculation. Requests sent by his Baltimore
partners for remittances, for taxes and other charges, became so frequent
that he went to the Maryland city to investigate. One glance showed him
that the future of his investment rested upon the future of the
struggling little railroad which was trying to poke its nose west from
Baltimore. He came to the aid of its directors in their problem of
motive-power.
That problem consisted, for one thing, in the practical use of a
locomotive around curves of 400 feet radius. Cooper went back to New York,
bought an engine with a single cylinder, rigged it on a car--not larger
than a hand-car, geared it to the wheels of that car and solved the chief
problem of the B. & O. His little engine--the _Tom Thumb_--was a primitive
enough affair, but it pointed the way to these Baltimore merchants who
were pinning their entire faith to their railroad project.
* * * * *
Two years after the beginning of the work, "brigades" of horse-cars were
in regular service to Ellicott's Mills; by the first of December, 1831,
trains--steam-drawn--ran through to Frederick, Md.; five months later, to
a day, they had reached Point of Rocks on the Potomac, seventy miles from
Baltimore. At Point of Rocks the road was halted for a long time. The
power of the powerful Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which had been great enough
to keep State or national grants from struggling railroads, was raised to
defend its claim to a monopoly of the Potomac Valley, by right of
priority. This right was sustained in the courts, and the railroad held
back two years, until it could buy a compromise.
In 1835, a highly profitable branch was opened to Washington, while early
in the following year, trains were running through to Harpers Ferry, at
the mouth of the Shenandoah.
During that same Summer of 1835, definite steps were taken toward the
extension of the railroad to Pittsburgh, as well as Wheeling. But it was
three years later before the struggling company was ready to make a
surveying reconnaissance of these extensions of the road. All through that
time actual construction work was slowly but quite surely progressing
westward from Harpers Ferry, and on November 5, 1842, trains entered
Cumberland, the one-time objective point of the enterprise.
[Illustration: AN EARLY LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY WILLIAM NORRIS FOR THE
PHILADELPHIA & READING RAILROAD]
[Illustration: THE HISTORIC "JOHN BULL" OF THE CAMDEN & AMBOY
RAILROAD--AND ITS TRAIN]
[Illustration: A HEAVY-GRADE TYPE OF LOCOMOTIVE BUILT FOR THE BALTIMORE &
OHIO RAILROAD IN 1864. ITS FLARING STACK WAS TYPICAL OF THOSE YEARS]
But beyond Cumberland the road gradually left the comfortable valley of
the Potomac, and these early railroad builders found themselves confronted
with new difficulties. To build a railroad across the range of the
Appalachians, with the primitive methods and machinery of those days was
no simple task. For nine years the construction work dragged. In 1851 the
line had only been finished to Piedmont, twenty-nine miles west of
Cumberland, and its builders were well-nigh discouraged. Let us quote from
the ancient history of the B. & O., from which we derive these facts, in
an exact paragraph:
"In the Fall of 1851, the Board found themselves, almost without
warning, in the midst of a financial crisis, with a family of more
than 5,000 laborers and 1,200 horses to be provided for, while their
treasury was rapidly growing weaker. The commercial existence of the
city of Baltimore depended on the prompt and successful prosecution of
the unfinished road."
In October, 1852, it was found that there had been expended for
construction west of Cumberland, $7,217,732.51. But the road was going
ahead once more. Its Board had dug deep into their pockets and the
commercial crisis that hovered over Baltimore was passed. Two years later
the road entered Wheeling, and its corporate title was no longer a
misnomer.
A little later, a more direct line was built to Parkersburg, West
Virginia, and direct connection entered with the Ohio & Mississippi
Railroad, which reached St. Louis. The railroad was beginning to feel its
way out across the land.
War between North and South had been declared before the long delayed
extension to Pittsburgh was finished. In that time a real master-hand had
come to the Baltimore & Ohio. In its early days the names of Philip E.
Thomas, Peter Cooper, Ross Winans, and B. H. Latrobe were indissolubly
linked with this pioneer railroad; in its second era John W. Garrett gave
brilliancy to its administration. Even before, as well as throughout the
four trying years of the war, when the road's tracks were being repeatedly
torn up and its bridges burned, Mr. Garrett was laying down his masterly
policy of expansion. It was a discouraging beginning that confronted him.
The two expensive extensions to the Ohio River had been a severe drain on
the company's treasury, traffic was at low ebb, the great financial panic
of 1857 had been hard to surmount.
But Mr. Garrett was one of the first of American railroaders to see that a
trunk-line should start at the seaboard and end at Chicago or the
Mississippi. He pushed his line to Pittsburgh, to Cleveland, to Sandusky,
to Chicago. It began to reach new and growing traffic centres. The
Baltimore & Ohio entered upon an era of magnificent prosperity.
The first cloud upon that era came in the early seventies, when its
powerful rival, the Pennsylvania, secured control of the Philadelphia,
Wilmington & Baltimore, the B. & O.'s connecting link on its immensely
profitable through route from New York to Washington. Pennsylvania
interests tunnelled for long miles through the rocky foundations of
Baltimore, purchased an independent line to Washington--the Baltimore &
Potomac--and the B. & O. found itself deprived of its best congested
traffic district. For eleven years it was unable to retaliate, though not
a soul believed the Baltimore & Ohio to be other than a splendid,
conservative property. It owned its own sleeping-car company, its own
express company, its own telegraph company. The name of Garrett was behind
it. Logan G. McPherson says:
"When it was desired to obtain additional funds, bonds were always
issued instead of the capital stock being increased. Interest on bonds
has always to be met, whereas dividends on stocks can be passed. It
was announced, however, that the retention of the stock
capitalization at less than fifteen millions of dollars was an
evidence of conservatism, as the continuance of semi-annual dividends
of five per cent was thereby permitted."
John W. Garrett died in 1884, and was succeeded in the presidency by his
son Robert Garrett, who announced himself ready to continue a policy of
expansion. The younger Garrett sought to regain an entrance for his
traffic to New York. To that end he built a line into Philadelphia and
prepared to strike across the State of New Jersey. He failed in that end
by the failure of one of his confidential aides; the line that he had
counted on for entrance into the American metropolis was snapped up by his
greatest rival just as his own fingers were almost upon it. Later the B. &
O. was permitted a trackage entrance into Jersey City, but the terms of
that entrance were so stringent as to mean a practical surrender upon its
part.
If Baltimore & Ohio had won that battle, a different story might have been
chronicled. As it was, it stood a loser in a fearfully expensive fight;
the English investors in the property became investigators--of a sudden
the bottom dropped out of things. The stock went slipping down as only a
mob-chased stock in Wall Street can drop; the road that had been the pride
of Baltimore became, for the moment, her shame. It was shown, upon
investigation, that the road had long gone upon a slender standing:
millions of dollars that should actually have been charged to loss had
been charged against its capital and included in the surplus. Ten years
after Mr. Garrett's death the road found itself in even more bitter
straits. It was a laughing stock and a reproach among railroad men. Its
profitable side-properties--the sleeping-car company, the express company,
the telegraph company,--the first two of which should never be permitted
to go outside of the control of any really great railroad company--had
been sold, one after another, in attempts to save the day of reckoning.
Just before the Chicago Fair the road reached low-water mark. Its
passenger cars were weather-beaten and ravaged almost beyond hope of
paint-shops; it was sometimes necessary to hold outgoing trains in the
famous old Camden station at Baltimore, until the lamps and drinking
glasses could be secured from some incoming train. In that day of
low-water mark it was actually and seriously proposed to abandon the
passenger service of the road!
Out of that chaos came the B. & O. of to-day, a substantial and
well-managed railroad property. Mr. Garrett was the first of the
railroaders to construct a single property from the Atlantic seaboard to
the Mississippi; John F. Cowan, L. F. Loree, Oscar G. Murray, and Daniel
Willard have been his successors in the revamping of the B. & O.,
eliminating its costly grades, enlarging yard and terminal facilities, and
making the historic road a carrier of the first class.
* * * * *
The history of the Erie Railroad is hardly less dramatic than that of the
Baltimore & Ohio; its financial disasters were not owing to the errors
that come of crass stupidity. For the Erie did its good part in the making
of railroad law. Built and operated in the earliest railroad days as a
single enterprise through the southern tier of counties of New York State
from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, while the roads to the north that were
eventually to be welded by Commodore Vanderbilt into the great New York
Central were still quarrelling among themselves, it was wrecked time and
time again by unscrupulous schemes of high finance. It was made to wear
mill-stones in the shape of outrageous bonded indebtednesses that acted as
a fearful handicap for many years and prevented a remarkably well located
property from standing to-day as the peer of the Pennsylvania or of the
New York Central. The story of these outrages has been told and
retold--they are integral parts of the financial history of the country.
Suffice it to say here and now that the Erie has been operated with more
or less success by no less than four struggling corporations; that it has
never come closer to achieving success than under its present president,
F. D. Underwood; and that no one save those who have stood close to
Underwood has known or appreciated the heritage of handicap that was given
to him to shoulder. For it has been part of our railroad principle in this
country--a mighty sad part, too--that no matter how villainously stocks
and bonds may have been issued at any time--only to bring failure swiftly
and inevitably,--such bogus paper has always been protected in
reorganization. A railroad which becomes bankrupt cannot be abandoned.
That has been done only in rare cases. Even the Baltimore & Ohio, at the
end of its rope less than twenty years ago, was not permitted to abandon
its passenger service. It must pull itself up out of the difficulties,
and--in America at least--it must pull its trashy paper up too, in order
that no holder of such paper may be unprotected. The paper can no more be
abandoned than the right-of-way. The result is seen in railroads
staggering under vast and questionable capitalization (there is no
cleaning of the slate); but the sins of those that have gone before are
truly visited upon the third and the fourth generation, as well as upon
the poor humans who, under such burdens, are trying to operate a railroad
property.
From the beginning the story of Erie has been a story of difficulties. The
original scheme of building a New York railroad from Piermont-on-Hudson to
Dunkirk on Lake Erie--some 450 miles--seems in the face of the resources
of the State at that time and the engineering difficulties to be solved,
almost quixotic. But the road was built step by step, section by section,
until in May, 1851, a triumphal first train was operated over its entire
length. President Fillmore was the guest of honor on the train, but shared
attention with Daniel Webster on the trip. Webster, in order that he might
see the country, insisted on making the entire tedious journey in a
rocking-chair, which was lashed upon a flat-car. Another flat-car was
occupied by a railroad officer who was designated to receive the flags. C.
F. Carter, in his interesting sketch on the early days of the Erie,
writes:
"By a singular coincidence, the ladies at every one of the more than
sixty stations between Piermont and Dunkirk had conceived the idea
that it would be as original as it was appropriate to present a flag
wrought by their own fair hands to the railroad company when the first
train passed through to Lake Erie. As it would have consumed
altogether too much time to make a stop for each of these flag
presentations, the engineer merely slowed down at three-fourths of the
stations long enough to permit the man on the flat-car to scoop up the
banners in his arms, much like the hands on the old-fashioned Marsh
harvesters gathered up armfuls of grain for binding. At the end of the
journey the Erie Railroad had a collection of flags that would have
done credit to a victorious army."
Mr. Carter has also told how in that same eventful year 1851 the telegraph
came into use on the Erie, first of all railroads: A crude telegraph line,
built for commercial purposes, had been stretched along the eastern end of
the road. People did not think very much of the telegraph in those days.
It was only seven years old; and when a man wired another man he wrote his
message like a letter, beginning with "Dear sir" and ending with "Yours
truly." The railroads scorned its use. Their trains ran by hard and fast
train rules. Then, as now, north and east-bound trains held the
right-of-way over those south and west-bound, and the meeting places on
single-track lines were each carefully designated on the time-card. If a
train was waiting for another coming in an opposite direction, and the
train came not after an hour, the first train proceeded forward "under
flag." That meant that a man, walking with a flag in his hand preceded the
train to protect it. The locomotive and its train of cars necessarily
proceeded at snail's pace.
It was not so very long after that observation-car trip that Daniel
Webster took in the rocking-chair up to Dunkirk, before the Erie's
superintendent, Charles Minot, was taking a trip up over the east end of
the road. The train on which he was riding was due to meet a west-bound
express at Turner's. After waiting nearly an hour there, without seeing
the opposing train, Minot was seized with an inspiration. He telegraphed
up the line fourteen miles to Goshen to hold that west-bound train until
he should arrive there. He then ordered his train-crew to proceed. They
rebelled. Engineer Isaac Lewis had too much regard for his own precious
neck to break the time-card rules, even under the superintendent's orders.
So finally Minot took charge of the engine himself, while Lewis cautiously
seated himself in the last seat of the last car and awaited the worst.
It never came, of course. When they reached Goshen, the agent had received
the message, and was prepared to hold the west-bound train. But it had not
arrived, and Minot by repeating his method was enabled first to reach
Middletown and then Port Jervis before meeting the delayed train. By the
use of the telegraph he had saved his own train some three hours in
running time; and it was not long thereafter until the operation of trains
by telegraph order became standard on the Erie and all others of the early
railroads.
At the beginning, one of the promoters of the Erie announced his belief
that the road would eventually earn, by freight alone, "some two hundred
thousand dollars in a year," and his neighbors laughed at him for his
extravagant promise. Yet, in the first six months' operation of the road
the receipts--mostly from freight--were $1,755,285.
To tell the full story of Erie would require a sizable book. It has not
yet been told. It is a story of intrigue and deceit, of trickery and of
scheming; the story of Daniel Drew and Jim Fisk and Jay Gould; the
monumental tragedy of the wrecking of a great railroad property--a
property with possibilities that probably will never now be realized. The
present management of the road has labored valiantly and well. It has seen
the future of Erie as a great freighting road, has carefully laid its
lines for the full development of the property as a carrier of goods,
rather than of through passengers.
* * * * *
The history of the railroad divides itself sharply into epochs. In the
beginning, the different roads--such as Erie, Pennsylvania, Baltimore &
Ohio, and New York Central--were being pushed west over the Alleghany
Mountains to the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. There followed an era
where the railroads were reaching Chicago and St. Louis. That was the era
which saw the weird railroads of the Middle West, the strange
stock-watering companies that made the very names of Ohio, Michigan, and
Illinois financial bywords in the late forties and the early fifties. The
first railroad in Ohio was the old Mad River & Lake Erie, which was built
in 1835, from Sandusky, south about a hundred miles to Columbus, the State
capital. The pioneer engine on the road, the _Sandusky_, was the first
locomotive ever equipped with a whistle.
The first railroad of the prairies was the Northern Cross railroad--now a
part of the Wabash--extending from Merodosia on the Illinois River, to
Springfield. It was started in 1837, and late in the following fall a
locomotive built by Rogers, Grosvenor, and Ketchum of Paterson, N.
J.,--the founders of a famous locomotive works--was landed from a
packet-steamer at Merodosia. Then was the first puff of a locomotive heard
upon the prairies of the great West. A contemporary account says:
"The little locomotive had no whistle, no spark-arrester, no
cow-catcher, and the cab was open to the sky. Its speed was about six
miles an hour, and where the railroad and the highway lay parallel to
each other there was frequently a trial of speed between the
locomotive with its 'pleasure cars' and the stage-coaches. Sometimes
the stage-coaches came in ahead. Six inches of snow were sufficient to
blockade the trains drawn by this American engine."
In 1846 James M. Forbes was building the Michigan Central west from
Detroit, 145 miles to Kalamazoo. A little later it was extended to the
east shore of Lake Michigan, at New Buffalo; eventually it reached Chicago
with its own rails. While the Michigan Central was pushing its rails, its
chief competitor to the south, the Michigan Southern,--afterwards a part
of the Lake Shore, and eventually united with its traditional rival in the
extended New York Central system--was also pushing toward Chicago as a
goal. Both roads reached Chicago in 1852. But railroad building was slow
work. The country expanded too quickly after the golden promises of the
railroad promoters. Money came too easily; then there would come a fearful
financial time, and the reputable railroad enterprises would be halted
beside the "fly-by-night" schemes. As late as 1850, Ohio had only the
single trunk-line connecting Sandusky and Cincinnati; but the railroad to
Cleveland that was afterwards the main stem of the Big Four and the
trunk-line connection east to the Baltimore & Ohio, were nearing
completion.
* * * * *
Chicago's first railroad was the Galena & Chicago Union, and it was the
cornerstone of the great Chicago and Northwestern system, one of the
really great railroads of America. The Galena & Chicago Union was
incorporated in 1836, but not until eleven years later was work begun in
laying tracks, for a short ten-mile stretch from the Chicago River to Des
Plaines; and its first locomotive, the _Pioneer_, had been bought
second-hand from the Buffalo & Attica Railroad, away east in New York
State. The rails were second-hand, too, of the strap variety, which the
Western railroads were already discarding in favor of solid rails. But it
was a railroad, and it was with a deal of pride that John B. Turner, its
president, used to ascend to an observatory on the second floor of the old
Halsted Street depot to sight with a telescope the smoke of his morning
train coming across the prairie. The Chicago and Northwestern, itself, was
organized in 1859. For a time it was so desperately poor that it could not
pay the interest on its bonds, and there was a time when its officers had
to meet the pay-roll out of their own pockets; but it succeeded in
absorbing about six hundred miles of railroad at the beginning. In another
decade the Union Pacific Railroad, first uniting the Far West with the
populous Middle and Eastern States, was completed. The Chicago and
Northwestern formed one of the most direct links between the Lakes and the
eastern terminal of the Union Pacific at Council Bluffs. The business that
came to it because of that linking was the first strong impulse that led
to the ultimate greatness of the Northwestern.
The distinctive mid-Western road was and always has been the Illinois
Central. Originally incorporated in 1836, it was nearly twenty years later
when, through substantial aid from the State whose name it bears,
construction actually began. The first track was laid from Chicago to
Calumet to give an entrance to the Michigan Central in its heart-breaking
race to the Western metropolis against the Michigan Southern. The main
line through to Cairo was pushed forward rapidly, however, and was ready
for traffic at the end of 1855. A large number of Kentucky slaves promptly
showed their appreciation of the new railroad enterprise by using it to
effect their escape to the North.
* * * * *
Of course with the railroad pushing its way westward all the while (the
Rock Island in April, 1859, was the first to span the Mississippi with a
bridge), it was only a question of time when some adventurous soul should
seek to reach the Pacific coast. Indeed it was away back in 1832, while
there was still less than a hundred miles of track in the United States,
that Judge Dexter of Ann Arbor, Michigan, proposed a railroad through to
the Pacific Ocean, through thousands of miles of untrodden forest. Six
years later, a Welsh engineer, John Plumbe, held a convention at Dubuque,
Iowa, for the same purpose. The idea would not down. Hardly had Plumbe and
his convention disappeared from the public notice when Asa Whitney, a New
York merchant of considerable reputation, began to agitate the Pacific
railroad. Whitney was a good deal of a theorist and a dreamer; but he was
a shrewd publicity man, and he held widely attended meetings for the
propagation of his idea, in all the Eastern cities. Eventually, like Judge
Dexter and John Plumbe, he was doomed to disappointment. After Whitney had
died broken-hearted and bankrupt because of his devotion to an idea, came
Josiah Perham, of Boston. Josiah Perham was the Raymond & Whitcomb of the
fifties. He began by organizing excursions for New England folk to come to
Boston to see the Boston Museum and the panoramas, which were the gay
diversion of that day. In one year he brought two hundred thousand folk
into that sacred Massachusetts town, and he began to be rated as a rich
man. He absorbed the Pacific railroad idea and freely spent his money in
its propagation. He organized the People's Pacific Railroad,--and a part
of his scheme formed the foundation of the Northern Pacific. Perham, like
the others, spent his money and failed to see the fruition of his plan.
There seemed to be something ill-fated about that plan of a railroad to
the Pacific. Even the citizens of St. Louis, who had gathered on the
Fourth of July, 1851, to see soil broken for the first real
transcontinental railroad, found that it could only manage to reach Kansas
City by 1856. That particular railroad--the Missouri Pacific--through its
western connection, the Western Pacific, only succeeded in reaching the
coast within the past year.
When Theodore D. Judah brought himself to the seemingly hopeless task of
trying to build a Pacific railroad, he brought with him all the enthusiasm
of Asa Whitney, and with it the experience of a trained railroad engineer.
The thing was beginning to take shape. The men, like Whitney and Perham,
who had been before Congress at session after session, finally brought
that august body, even when the nation stood on the verge of civil war,
into making an appropriation for a survey for a scheme, which nine out of
ten men regarded as a mere visionary dream. Theodore D. Judah, filled with
enthusiasm for his mighty plan, went West that he might roughly plan the
location of the railroad. He went to San Francisco and he went to
Sacramento, where the little twenty-two-mile Sacramento Valley Railroad
had been running since 1856. The Californians listened to him with
interest, but they proffered him no financial aid. Then Judah went up into
the high passes of the Sierras, through which a railroad to the east would
certainly have to reach, to find a crossing for the line in which he
believed so earnestly. He found it--making a route that would save 148
miles and $13,500,000 over that proposed by the Government authorities.
When he went back to Sacramento, to the hardware store of his old friends,
Huntington & Hopkins, in K Street, it was with a rough profile of that
pass in his pocket. What Judah said to Collis P. Huntington and Mark
Hopkins has never been known, but certain it is that in a little time they
were sending for the three other capitalists of Sacramento--the Crocker
brothers, who had a dry-goods store down the street, and Leland Stanford,
a wholesale grocer. Out of the efforts of those six men the Central
Pacific Railroad was organized with a capital of $125,000. Work began on
the new line at Sacramento on the first day of 1863, while California
shook with laughter at the idea of a parcel of country store-keepers
building a railroad across the crest of the Sierras.
How they built their railroad successfully and amassed six really great
American fortunes is all history now. Sufficient is it that they turned a
deaf ear to the ridicule (the project was considered so visionary that
bankers dared not subscribe to the stock of the road for fear of injuring
their credit), found their route through the mountains just as Judah had
promised, brought their materials around the Horn, imported ten thousand
Chinese laborers, hurled thousands of tons of solid rock down among the
pines by a single charge of nitro-glycerine, bolted their snow-sheds to
the mountains, and filled up or bridged hundreds of chasms and valleys.
"Two thousand feet of granite barred the way upon the mountain-top where
eagles were at home. The Chinese wall was a toy beside it. It could
neither be surmounted nor doubled; and so they tunnelled what looks like a
bank swallow's hole from a thousand feet below. Powder enough was expended
in persuading the iron crags and cliffs to be a thoroughfare, to fight
half the battles of the Revolution."
While the Central Pacific was being built east from the coast, the Union
Pacific was pushing its rails west from the Missouri River to meet it. A
Federal subsidy was paid to each road for each mile of transcontinental
track it laid, and the result was the Credit Mobilier, the worst financial
blot upon the pages of American government transactions. Early in the
Spring of 1868 the companies were on equal terms in this great game of
subsidy getting. Each finally had ample funds and each was about 530 miles
away from the Great Salt Lake. So in 1868 a construction campaign began
that has never been approached in the history of railroad building.
Twenty-five thousand men, and 6,000 teams, together with whole brigades of
locomotives and work-trains, were engaged in the work; in a single day ten
miles of track was laid and that was a world-beating record. The result of
such speed was that the two railroads met, May 9, 1869. Leland Stanford,
who was ridiculed when he first turned earth for the Central Pacific at
Sacramento six years before, drove the last spike, and was for that moment
the central figure in an attention that was world-wide.
After the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific came the Southern Pacific,
and after them came Collis P. Huntington binding them into a tight single
railroad. But close on the heels of the Southern Pacific, and right into
its own territory, reached the Santa Fe, while to the north, first the
Northern Pacific and then the Great Northern was built from the lake
country straight to Puget Sound. On a November day in 1885 the last spike
was driven in the great transcontinental Canadian Pacific, the first and
so far the only railroad to lay its rails from the North Atlantic to the
Pacific. Within a year the Western Pacific--the westernmost of the chain
of Gould roads--has begun to run its through trains to the Golden Gate. As
this volume goes to press finishing touches are being placed upon the
Puget Sound extension of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, probably the
last transcontinental to be stretched across these United States for a
number of years to come. Far to the north, the Grand Trunk Pacific is
finding its way across the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, creating a
great city--Prince Rupert--at its western terminal. It should be ready for
its through traffic within the next three years.
* * * * *
This then, in brief, is the history of American railroading--an
eighty-year struggle from East to West. The railroad has passed through
many vicissitudes; days of wild-cat financing, and days when men refused
to invest their money under any inducements whatsoever. It has been
assailed by legislatures and by Congress; it has been scourged because of
the so-called "pooling agreements," and it has cut its own strong arms by
building foolish competing lines. But it has survived masterfully, while
the highroads have become grass-grown, and the once proud canals have
fallen into decay. Railroading is to-day in the full flush of successful
existence. Science has been brought to each of the infinite details of the
business; and for the first time the country sees practically every line,
large or small, honestly earning its way. The railroad receiver has all
but passed into history.