Phil Roberts, New History of Wyoming
Chapter 3: Coming of Rails
Horses, oxen and other draft animals had been the transportation mainstays for eons. Then came railroads, transforming the society, culture, and economy of the United States. Earliest railroads operated in Britain, but in 1828, the first passenger railway began service in the eastern United States. With New York City prospering with the completion of the Erie Canal, Baltimore investors turned to the latest in technology to compete. In 1827, the Baltimore and Ohio company was chartered and, the following year, Baltimore businessmen, surveyors, and engineers set about building the B&O Railroad, laying the first commercial long-distance track and building the first passenger station. By 1840, railroad companies throughout the East had laid 3,328 miles of track, all of it east of the Mississippi River. By 1860, the trackage reached 28,000 miles.
As early as 1830, pamphleteers argued for a transcontinental railroad. Railroad travel was still a novelty. New York merchant Asa Whitney, having made and lost a fortune as an importer from Europe, took a long voyage to China in 1844. There, he became involved in the developing China trade, making a substantial fortune from shipping goods from Canton to Europe. Familiar with steam railroads and their increasing prevalence in America, he proposed building a transcontinental railroad. He argued that a coast-to-coast railroad would speed up the China trade, making it possible for American merchants to compete against Europeans for imports of Asian goods into Europe. In essence, the railroad would serve as a shipping short-cut for China goods bound for European customers.
It was in the time of “Manifest Destiny” and Whitney viewed his proposal as a means of making America the center of world commerce. He knew that private investors could never afford to take the risks and provide capital for such a project. Consequently, he asked his senator to introduce a bill in Congress seeking a 60-mile strip of land along which the railroad could be built, the excess lands sold off to finance the line’s construction. Congress tabled the measure, but for the next six years, Whitney continued to lobby for his plan. Tied up with debates over slavery and other sectional issues, Congress ignored Whitney’s proposals. In 1851, after Congress defeated his plan again, Whitney gave up, returning to private life. Defeated in his efforts to build a transcontinental railroad, he succeeded in getting such a proposal into the public discourse.
Five years later, a civil engineer named Theodore Judah headed the first construction of a railroad in California. During the building, Judah became more convinced that in order for California to remain prosperous, it needed to be connected to the rest of the nation by railroad. In 1859, he traveled by sailing ship to lobby Congress on his idea. When he returned later that year, he organized a company and set out to find a route over the Sierra Nevada mountains, a major obstacle to eastern travel from California. He enlisted investments from four Sacramento businessmen—Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford—who would later become known as the “Big Four” when they became primary shareholders in the Judah venture.
Prior to Judah’s lobbying visits, Congress had debated the potential for a transcontinental railroad, but politics intruded when it came to deciding where the route would run. It seemed that each member of Congress had a preferred route that would benefit his constituency. Consequently, in 1853, Congress decided to remove the location decision from “politics” by passing an act authorizing a series of Pacific Railway surveys. The surveys would be conducted by soldiers in the U. S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers and, once the reports came back, Congress could make the route decision based on the merits of the route and not on the “politics”
Surveys, conducted in 1853, served as training grounds for future Civil War officers. Isaac Stevens, George McClellan, and John Pope were among the officers conducting the surveys. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis assigned the soldiers to investigate five routes: the Northern route (Lake Superior-Puget Sound). under the direction of Isaac Stevens, recently appointed territorial governor of Washington; the 38th-39th parallel route (St. Louis-West Coast) headed by Capt. John Gunnison (who was killed by Indians in western Colorado in June 1853. the expedition taken over by Lt. Edward G. Beckwith who completed the survey by following the 41st parallel, roughly along the same path that Capt. H. H. Stansbury had used in 1849 across what is now southern Wyoming); 35th parallel route (Little Rock-Los Angeles), commanded by Lt. A. W. Whipple. and the 32nd parallel route (favored by Jefferson Davis) and explored from the west by Lt. John Parke and from the East by Capt. John Pope.
When the surveyors each reported back to Congress, each favored his own route. Further, the politicians continued to favor their regions. Jefferson Davis, formerly a senator from Mississippi (and later President of the Confederacy), wanted the southern route while Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri favored the route beginning in St. Louis. While Congress continued to consider proposals for a railroad coast-to-coast, nothing came of the plans. Congress and the rest of the nation were mired in sectional conflict that broke out as the Civil War following President Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860.
With none of the members from the seceding states of the South remaining in the Congress and after strong lobbying from Theodore Judah, both the House and Senate passed a Pacific Railway Act in 1862. (Ironically, the measure became the law the same week as the Homestead Act, another measure that had been tied up due to Southern opposition). The Civil War both made it possible to pass the act and to locate the general route of the transcontinental railroad.
The first Pacific Railway Act contained several elements that Asa Whitney would have recognized. First, the federal government would grant a right-of-way, 400 feet wide, along which the track would be laid. Further, the railroad would receive a huge land grant. The federal government would provide every odd-numbered section ten miles either side of the tracks. Initially, some members of Congress thought the railroad should be given a ten-mile strip straight across the country along the right-of-way, but critics pointed out that with such a choke-hold on a solid swath of land would give the railroads substantial power. If the federal government were to retain every even-numbered section, it would be able to monitor the railroad and make sure it was not impeding settlement or exercising monopoly powers. (The result of this decision remains with Wyoming residents today as a later section on land will describe).
Additionally, the act offered bonds to be issued by the federal government, repayable to the federal government within 30 years with the government holding the first mortgage on the railroad to guarantee repayment. No minerals were included in the first act—the federal government kept all minerals except for “earth, stone, timber and other materials for the construction” in the 400-foot right-of-way. The act provided for $16,000 in bonds to be granted by the federal government for every mile of railroad construction. Recognizing that construction over the Rocky Mountains would require substantial outlays, the act allowed for double and triple that amount for the foothills and mountainous areas, hence $48,000 per mile to build through the mountains.
Two groups were very interested in the terms of the first Pacific Railway Act. The first, the “Big Four” (Stanford, Huntington, Crocker, and Hopkins), wanted to build west from California to the east, following Judah’s plan and surveys. A second group, organized by speculator Thomas Durant, sought the federal charter to build from the east to the west. The act spelled out how this second group would be organized—as a federally-chartered entity known as the Union Pacific Railroad Company. Unlike the “Big Four’s” Central Pacific Railroad, the Union Pacific, by virtue of its federal charter, included five federally-appointed directors on its board. The act also allowed a third company, the Leavenworth, Pawnee and Western Railroad, to begin building to the west on the same terms as the other two companies.
While the land grants seemed generous, several aspects of the first Pacific Railway Act caused few investors to race to put money into the enterprises. One, the law stipulated that the federal government retain first mortgage on all construction once bonding was authorized. The enterprise promised to be enormously difficult and if any of the companies failed, the investors would be standing in line behind the federal government for return of their investment. Further, the companies had no rights to minerals except for the immediate construction materials.
Company officials tried valiantly to gain shareholders and to sell the expensive bonds, but the initial offerings did not encourage investment from prudent investors. Consequently, the companies returned to lobby Congress for better terms in 1864. The result was passage of the Pacific Railway Act of 1864. Actually, a series of amendments to the first act, the 1864 law made investment in the railroads much more attractive. First, except for “precious metals” such as gold and silver, the railroads would receive rights to all minerals (except gold and silver), not only along the 400-foot right-of-way but underlying the “checkerboard sections”—those odd-numbered sections of land ten miles each side of the track. Further, the act extended the land grant to 20 miles each side of the track and made the federal government be the second mortgage holder in event of default on the bonds.
Capt. Howard Stansbury’s expedition had pointed out the presence of coal in what is now western Wyoming in 1849. The new terms favored locating near these mineral lands—given that locomotives on the transcontinental line would be coal-fired.
The eastern beginning point for the railroad was determined by President Abraham Lincoln. A former trial lawyer. Lincoln had worked closely with railroad companies and made a considerable fortune as a result prior to his election. He favored a place that he had visited—Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the relatively new town of Omaha, Nebraska, across the Missouri River.
The entire history of the Union Pacific is beyond the scope of this brief account, but the railroad became the reason for the creation of Wyoming Territory. One key figure in the railroad was Grenville M. Dodge (1831-1916). Dodge served as a member of Congress from Iowa, a general in the Civil War, and most important for Wyoming, as chief engineer of the Union Pacific during the construction phase. Dodge is credited with locating the route across most of Wyoming (Samuel Reed was in charge of the establishing the route from Green River to Salt Lake City). His most celebrated achievement, by most accounts, was finding “the gangplank”—a natural “bridge” over the Laramie Mountains (then called “the Black Hills”) lying between Cheyenne and Laramie. Dodge also located and laid out the town of Cheyenne in July, 1867, and later determined the sites for Laramie and Rawlins as well as smaller towns across southern Wyoming.
Dodge, who wrote an account of his role in building the Union Pacific, worked closely with company officials, including Thomas Durant, the irascible company founder, and the Ames brothers. Heirs to a fortune made by selling shovels to miners and the Union Army during the Civil War, Oakes Ames (b. 1804) and his younger brother Oliver (b. 1807) were important investors in the Union Pacific. Further, Oliver Ames was Union Pacific Railroad president while his brother Oakes Ames served in the U. S. Congress, representing a district in Massachusetts.
The Ames brothers, Durant, and others were responsible for setting up a company they called Credit Mobilier that would handle the actual construction of the railroad. It was a separate company from the Union Pacific that would operate the rolling stock once the line was finished and contract with the builders for the job. Through various maneuvers, Credit Mobilier billed the UP for construction work, the UP would submit the bill to Congress to demonstrate they needed additional bonding funds, and Congress obligingly would authorize payment. The Ames’ were on all three corners—Oakes in Congress, Oliver as UP President, and both on the Credit Mobilier board. The founders gave or sold stock cheaply to members of Congress and other influential people.
The financial antics allowed for the Credit Mobilier investors to receive millions from cost overruns and improper billing. Cost overruns may have run as high as $60 million over the real costs of construction. In 1872, after the railroad was completed, the Credit Mobilier scandal rocked Congress and the financial community. Oakes Ames was censored and forced to retire from Congress while his brother also was disgraced. The two men died soon after the scandal, Oakes in 1873 and Oliver, four years later.
In the following decade, family and friends helped finance a memorial to the two brothers to recognize their role in building the first transcontinental railroad. They hired H. H. Richardson, the foremost architect of his day, and the result was the Ames Monument, a 60-foot pyramid built on the highest point of the railroad, on the summit between Cheyenne and Laramie.
Once the Civil War ended, railroad construction began in eastern Nebraska. Meanwhile, 500 miles to the west, survey crews led by Grenville Dodge, James Evans, and Samuel Reed, were weighing the options to cross the Rockies.
One route seemed obvious at first—the Oregon-California-Mormon Trail route through central Wyoming, over South Pass and southwest to Utah. Surveyors, however, thought there were greater benefits to the “Overland Trail” route—used by Ben Holladay’s stage line. The distance was shorter by more than 60 miles and, important to fueling a future railroad, the more southern route lay close to known coal beds. Further, federal bonds would triple in amount once the “mountainous area” was reached. That would happen some 200 miles closer at the “Black Hills” (Laramie Range) on the southern route than where they began along the Oregon-California Trail route, near South Pass.
Yet, for all of its value as the starting point for higher bonds, a critical obstacle for track layers remained—the “Black Hills” (Laramie Range) west of Cheyenne. Once Dodge discovered “the gangplank” and demonstrated how Dale Creek Canyon could be traversed by a trestle, the Overland Trail route gained the advantage. By the summer of 1867, the Union Pacific survey crews had staked out much of the line across Wyoming, ensuring that the ground was sufficiently level for locomotives unable to handle steep grades. Even four percent was excessive (four feet increase in every 100 feet raise in elevation, explaining why the route passed in a long loop to the north of Elk Mountain and the Snowy Range, a major deviation from the stagecoach line that followed more closely today’s Interstate 80 route in that area.
Surveyors came first, followed by “graders” who prepared a relatively level surface with gentle grades on which to lay the rails. Then came the track layers, followed by the locomotives and train operators. Some 5,000 men worked on the Union Pacific in the various capacities. Rarely were all located at the same point along the railroad line. Nonetheless, thousands more people congregated just ahead of the “end-of-tracks” in places that became known as “hell-on-wheels” towns. Seeking to take advantage of railroad builders’ thirsts for liquor, gambling, and women, business operators in these towns expected to make fast money at one location and then, when the tracks continued building west, move quickly to the next town up the line and set up business there.
On the Fourth of July, 1867, Grenville Dodge camped at the future site of Cheyenne. A few days later, he and his survey crew laid out what would become a division point on the railroad and Wyoming’s capital, some 500 rail miles from Omaha, the railroad’s eastern terminus. As a division point, the town, unlike most “hell-on-wheels” towns, would have some permanence. The town grew rapidly in less than two months. Nicknamed “the Magic City of the Plains” due to the phenomenal grown, Cheyenne already had a post office, a newspaper, several professional offices, numerous saloons and other gaming houses by the time the tracks were built through town in September, 1867.
West of Cheyenne, however, was one of the biggest challenges for the UP, the 8,242-foot summit of the mountains and, just west of it, Dale Creek Canyon. The gangplank solved problems with the steep grade on the eastern flank of the hills, but the canyon required more work. Track-laying crews waited in Cheyenne while Dale Creek Trestle was built during the winter of 1867-68. Some 700 feet long and 127 feet high, it was the highest railroad bridge in the world at the time. The trestle had to be built of wood, almost entirely imported by rail from the Midwest.
The pause did not affect surveyors laying out the route west, graders working on rights-of-way, or tie hacks supplying railroad ties from the forests west of Laramie, but the work delays for the track layers led to winter months in Cheyenne where boredom and excess leisure time led to fights, excessive drinking, gambling, gunplay and, eventually, to vigilante justice. Nonetheless, the several months of business activity helped cement Cheyenne’s permanence. By the time the bridge was completed in April 1868 and the track-laying crews had reached the new town of Laramie (just a mile to the north of Fort Sanders, founded five years earlier to garrison soldiers protecting the Overland stage route), Cheyenne merchants were putting up wooden and brick buildings to replace the tent-like “structures” universally preferred in the early months. Near Cheyenne, the army built Fort D. A. Russell (later renamed Fort Warren and today, Warren Air Force Base) as protection for the railroad. It was one of several such forts built, in essence, as another federal subsidy for the railroad—free protection for its workers.
Dodge located the town site for Laramie on the "Union Pacific checkerboard section" that was located roughly from the railroad tracks currently run through town, east to 15th Street and from present Spring Creek to Fremont Street. Other parts of Laramie were on the checkerboard sections retained by the federal government and later homesteaded or kept, until the end of the 19th century, as part of Fort Sanders Military Reservation (south near the present site of the Cavalryman) or the territorial prison (now the Wyoming Territorial Park).
Rails reached Laramie in early May 1868 and the first train pulled into the newly established town on May 9, 1868—just one year and a day before the entire line was completed across the continent. Just as in the case of Cheyenne and several other Wyoming towns, a newspaper was published at “Fort Sanders” and “Laramie” just as the town was formed. It was the Frontier Index, the third newspaper published in Wyoming (the telegrapher published a newspaper at Fort Bridger in 1863 known as the Daily Telegraph and an earlier “paper” was “published” by soldiers at Fort Laramie called “The Chugg Water Journal.”) Legh Freeman, the Frontier Index publisher, was a former “galvanized Yankee” who loaded his printing equipment onto the first train to an “end-of-tracks” town, set it up, and began publishing until the tracks moved further down the line. The Frontier Index came to an ignominiously end at Bear River City later the following year when Freeman wrote a scathing critique of vigilantism. He was run out of town, his “tent” destroyed and his press thrown in the nearby river.
Like many of the other towns established by the railroad, Laramie suffered initially from a lack of law and order. In fact, M. C. Brown, the first mayor of Laramie, resigned after three weeks, complaining that the town was “ungovernable.” Through a series of lynchings, vigilantes steadily retook control of the “lawless element” in the town, hanging four men and running much of the “unruly element” out of town.
Laramie’s lawlessness was not unique. Throughout the area, there was a total absence of territorial government. Just the previous year (1867), Congress separated what is now Wyoming from Dakota Territory. The new territory, however, existed only on the books. Because Congress established territory at the time President Andrew Johnson was being impeached, Congress did not wish him to appoint the territorial officers. Consequently, the positions remained vacant and the territorial was unorganized until after President U. S. Grant became President in the spring of 1869, two months before the railroad was completed across the west.
After laying rails over the summit, named “Sherman Hill” in honor of General William T. Sherman, the U. S. Army commander and friend of Grenville Dodge, the rest of the track-laying across southern Wyoming was relatively easy. The rest, too, for the railroad, was very profitable because they were being paid in “triple bonds” as though the mostly flat, treeless plains were “mountainous” the entire way to the Utah border.
Meanwhile, threats of Indian attacks lessened along the southern route, particularly after the federal government met with Lakota and other tribes and agreed to close down the Bozeman Trail in exchange for the Indians allowing railroad construction to the south. The Shoshones to the west signed the second “Fort Bridger Treaty” in 1868, through which the federal government seemed to be reasserting the tribes’ claims to vast stretches of what is now western Wyoming. The first treaty, the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1864, had granted even greater land area to the tribe.