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Show Page 10 The Ogden Valley news Volume XXV Issue XII February 15, 2019 Book Review: Nothing Like it in The World By Forrest Brown As the state of Utah gets ready to celebrate the Sesquicentennial (150 years) of the completion of the U.S. transcontinental railroad May 10, 2019, a great book to read is Nothing Like It in the World by noted historian Stephen Ambrose. This book gives a detailed account of the extraordinary feat of engineering, foresight, and audacity that it took to construct the almost 2,000 miles (see map below) of track across part of the United States of America. Join me as we delve into this book, which contains a lot of detail and is of great historical significance and valuable insight. As the author notes, in the early to mideighteenth century, the transcontinental railroad had been talked about, promoted, encouraged, and desired by most Americans for three decades. The railroads in their first decades of existence were rickety, ran on poorly laid tracks that gave bone-crushing bumping to the cars as they chugged along. They could only be stopped by a series of brakemen, one stationed on the top of each car. They had to turn a wheel connected to a device that put pressure on the wheels to slow and finally stop each rail car. The cars were hot in the summer and cold in the winter. 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 flew back into a car and set the whole thing on fire. Bridges could catch fire and burn. Accidents were common and sometimes they killed or wounded many of the passengers. The locomotives created 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; hence, the phrase “the wrong side of the tracks.” Nevertheless, people wanted a transcontinental railroad. This was because it was absolutely necessary in order to bring the country together. In addition, train technology was improving almost daily. The locomotives were getting faster, safer, and more powerful, as the rail cars became more comfortable. More than the steamboat or anything else, the railroads were the forerunner of the future, and the future was the Industrial Revolution. Speaking about the birth of the Central Pacific Railroad (1860-1862), Mr. Ambrose writes: Building the railroad would be, according to William T. Sherman in in a letter to his brother John, a congressman from Ohio, “a work of giants. And Uncle Sam is the only giant I know who can grapple the subject.” Sherman was right. No railroad anywhere crossed a conti- nent. To build it would take real men, dedicated men, adventurous men, men of muscle and brain power, men without equal. They must be giants to build it without shovels, pile drivers, or power saws, without pipes with water running through them, without portable houses and hospitals, with no internal combustion-engine trucks or jeeps to move materials, or much anything else commonplace in the twentieth century to build a railroad. The line had nearly two thousand miles to cross, with great stretches of desert where there was no water, plus vast areas without trees for ties or bridges, stones for footings, or game for food. There were three major ranges, the Rockies, the Wasatch, and the Sierra Nevada. There the wind howled and the snow came down. Many things had to happen before the actual transcontinental railroad would be built. In the early 1860s, the nation was in the mist of a civil war, which basically divided the country. During this time, however, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Pacific Railroad Bill by a vote of 79 to 49 and thus the effort was in motion on May 6, 1862. A few years prior to this, in 1859, a young and upcoming politician from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln met with Greenville Dodge in Council Bluffs, Iowa and asked him, “Dodge, what’s the best route for a Pacific railroad to the west?” Greenville Dodge was a Civil War hero and had become the chief engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad. He was very instrumental in convincing President Lincoln to support the legislative bills in congress in 1862 and in 1864 that funded this massive, expensive project. Another prominent figure in the early stages of the railroad project was Theodore Judah. He had founded the Central Pacific Railroad Company and had discovered the way over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which prior to this was thought to be impassable. He spent enormous amounts of time surveying and studying ways to make the transcontinental railroad a possibility before one rail could be laid. He lobbied and eventually persuaded the U.S. Congress to fund the railroad with loans, bonds, and land grants so that this major undertaking could get off the ground. The Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad were the real movers and shakers who secured the financing and made the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad a reality. The Big Four included Collins P. Huntington (1821- 1900), Charles Crocker (1822-1888), Leland Stanford (1824-1893), and Mark Hopkins (1814-1878). Each was stern and determined, and they all took great risks as they invested lots of their own money into the future of the transcontinental line. Stanford was president of the Central Pacific Company that ran a fierce competition against the Union Pacific. Both companies had to compete for the same limited resources and government backing. Huntington borrowed money from investors in New York, Boston, and Washington D.C. and spent a lot of time lobbying the U.S. Congress for additional help. Crocker was in charge of the railroad construction and ran a tight ship. These four men stood out as the chief reasons that the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad was a success. Considering the many thousands of ablebody men who worked on the railroad, no group stood out as much as the Chinese. Their chief characteristic was how hard they worked. Some Chinese were brought over from China, but many were already living in California. They were glad to work and although they were physically small, their teamwork was so exemplary that they were able to accomplish feats that were unheard of in the eighteenth century. In 1858, more Chinese came to America in response to pamphlets that had been handed out by American businessmen. They toiled on the railroad without ceasing. They rarely spent their hard-earned money on the weekends, like many of the white men did. They were able to quickly learn the job and their numbers grew rapidly. By 1865 there were seven thousand Chinese men working on the railroad line with only two thousand white men doing the same. The Central Pacific organized the Chinese into gangs of twelve to twenty men. Each month they received around twenty dollars each for their wages. They moved the dirt and the rocks faster than any other group, and they did not complain like other groups of men did. They were also the best and most skilled at handling the kegs of black powder that were used to blast through numerous mountains of granite. The impact of the Chinese workers on the transcontinental was invaluable, as noted by the author: In the first few months of 1867, the Chinese worked for the Central Pacific in gangs, in eight-hour shifts or sometimes longer, around the clock. They lived in quarters dug in the snow, going to work surrounded by snow. They usually operated in teams of three at a time at the tunnel facing, with four teams working side by side. Of the men who held the drills, one reached as high as he could, another held it at waist level, another down at his toes. The fourth team worked from stepladders that allowed the men to reach the top. Two men pounded. The man with the drill was turning it constantly while holding it… in place. The men who were pounding did so with sledgehammers weighing from fourteen to eighteen pounds each. They swung, hit the drill at its far end, dropped the hammer, brought it up again behind them, and swung once more, alternately, at many times a minute. They could drill four inches or holes, one and three-quarters inches in diameter, in eight hours. And what did the Chinese think of their employers? For sure they wanted the jobs. Most if not all of them saved their money while working for the Central Pacific; and those who went back to China with their savings used the money well. Others went to work for the multitude of railroads building new lines west of the Rocky Mountains after the Central Pacific was constructed . . . . The Chinese labors dug snow tunnels from fifty to five hundred feet long to get to the granite tunnels. Some were large enough for a team of horses to walk through. As the railroad neared it completion in Utah and through the Rocky Mountains, another group of people that greatly affected the work was the Mormons and their leader Brigham Young. The Union Pacific contracted with Brigham Young to get the rail up and through Echo and Weber Canyons and westward towards the deserts of Nevada. On June 9, 1868, the Mormon work crews had broken ground and started grading the land at Devil’s Gate in Weber Canyon. Once they were through Devil’s Gate, they used five hundred men to complete the project. These men worked as hard as the Chinese had worked for the Central Pacific. Historian Clarence Reeder, in his dissertation on Utah railroads, wrote that the Mormon workers were, “a people working together in harmony under the guidance of their religious leaders to accomplish a temporal task which they treated as though it were divinely inspired.” The U.S. Transcontinental Railroad that was built across part of America from 1863 to 1869 was one of the greatest single achievements ever accomplished within the United States and perhaps in the world. Perhaps even more impressive is the time required to do so and with virtually no mechanization whatsoever. Crews from the Central Pacific and Union Pacific hacked out rights-of-way through empty wilderness in only six years! Altogether, the entire project brought forth nearly 2,000 miles of new railroad. Join the 150th celebration and read the book. |