December 13, 2023 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, climb aboard! Here’s Stephen Ambrose to tell us a story from his bestseller, Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
And we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians.
His bestseller's chronicle Our Nation's critical Battles and Achievements, from
(00:35):
his war works D Day and Band of Brothers to
Undaunted Courage, Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of
the American West. Stephen Ambrose passed in two thousand and two,
but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here
at Our American Stories, thanks to those who run his estate.
(00:55):
Here's Stephen Ambrose to tell us the story from his
bestseller Nothing Like It The World The men who built
the Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
My editor aused me, you said, when I completed my
last book. He said, you got to do the Pacific Railway.
How did they build it? And I said, oh, Alice,
I don't want to do that. These guys were Robert Barons.
They went on and stole the country blind, and then
they used all their ill gotten gains to get a
(01:27):
grip on American politics, which they held on to until
the first of the Populace, and then the progressive parties
were formed.
Speaker 4 (01:33):
And I don't want to deal with these robber barons.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
And she said, you do you? So I read for
six months and I learned that I had been badly wrong,
that far from being villains, these guys are heroes. And
I'm talking about the Big Four, I'm talking about doctor
Rint and I'm talking about all the others that were
at the top end, all of the men who built
the tracks. So that was how I got started. This
(02:00):
book opens with Abraham Lincoln, and somebody who asked me
about that a couple of days ago, I said, how
could you possibly open with Abraham Lincoln?
Speaker 4 (02:07):
I said, listen, I'm a writer.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
You got an opportunity to open your story with Abraham Lincoln.
But in his story, Lincoln was a railroad lawyer before
he went into full time politics. He was involved in
the biggest case of all with the Rock Island, when
they had built a bridge over the Mississippi River and
(02:31):
a steamboat crashed into one of the pilings and it
burned up, and the steamboat company sued the railroad. You
can't put those bridges over this river. Our steamboats are
going to run into them. Lincoln defended the Rock Island.
One thing to do is say it was the pilot's
fault he crashed into the piling. But second, he said,
the railroads have as much right to go east and
(02:52):
west as your steamships have to go north and south.
And that principle was accepted by the Illinois Supreme Court,
and that's what made railroading in America. Lincoln got written
into the eighteen sixty Republican platform support for the building
of a trans continental railroad, and that was done, and
(03:12):
he was the promoter of the eighteen sixty two bill,
and then he promoted the eighteen sixty four revision, which
gave even more subsidies to the railroad, because he wanted
to see that railroad building. He wanted it seem fast.
Lincoln was in consul Bluffs, Ale. It was eighteen fifty nine,
and the man he was staying with, his name was Pewsey,
pointed to a man down the way on the veranda
(03:34):
of the hotel and he said, that's Grenville Dodge. He
was twenty eight years old, Dodge was and Pusey said
to Lincoln, he knows more about railroads than any two
men in the country.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
And that snapped Lincoln's head around.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Let's go meet, he said, and you know those great
big long legs of hiszbi and striding down, he stuck
out that long arm and he said, Dodge, what's the
best route for the Pacific Railroad? And like that, Dodd said,
right here, mister President, straight out Omaha, right up the
plat u of Valley. Why do you think so, Lincoln asked,
and Dodge told him why he thought so. And from
(04:05):
that moment on, Lincoln was fully committed to what became
the first transcontinental railroad. Next to winning the Civil War
and abolishing slavery, building the first transcontinental railroad from Omaha,
Nebraska to Sacramento, California was the greatest achievement of the American.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
People in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Not until the completion of the Panama Canal in the
early twentieth century was it rivaled As an engineering feat.
The railroad took brains, muscle, and sweat in quantities and
scope never before put into a single project. It could
not have been done without a representative, democratic political system
(04:53):
without skill and ambitious engineers, without bosses and foreman who
had learned how to organize and lead men in the
Civil War, without free labor, without hard working laborers who
had learned how to take orders in the war, Without
those who came over to America, and the thousands from
China seeking a fortune, without laborers speaking many languages and
(05:18):
coming to America from every inhabited continent, Without the trees
and iron available in America, without capitalists willing to take
high risk for great profit, without men willing to challenge
all at every level in order to win all. Most
of all, it could not have been done without teamwork.
(05:41):
The United States was less than one hundred years old
when the Civil War was won, slavery abolished, and the
first transcontinental railroad built. Not until nearly twenty years later
that the Canadian Pacific spanned the Dominion. It was a
quarter of a century after the completion of the railroad.
The American row that the Russians got started in the
(06:02):
Trans Siberian Railway, and the Russians used more than two
hundred thousand Chinese to do it, as compared to the
American employment of ten thousand or so Chinese In addition,
the Russians had hundreds of thousands of convicts working on
the line as slave laborers.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Even at that It.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Was not until thirty two years after the American achievement
that the Russians finished, and they did it as a
government enterprise at a much higher cost, with a road
that was in every way inferior. The Americans did it first,
and they did it even though the United States was
the youngest of countries. It had proclaimed its independence in
(06:42):
seventeen seventy six, won its independence in seventeen eighty three,
bought the Louisiana Purchase, through which much of the Union
Pacific Grand in eighteen o three, added California and Nevada
and Utah to the Union in eighteen forty eight, through
which the Central Pacific Grand, and compled the linking of
the continent in eighteen sixty nine, thus ensuring an empire
(07:07):
of liberty running from the Sea to Shining Sea.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
And more of Stephen Ambrose's remarkable storytelling on the building
of the Transcontinental Railroad here on our American Stories. Folks,
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
(07:34):
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their
free and terrific online courses.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
And we continue here with our American stories in Steven
Ambrose telling the story of the men who built the
Transcontinental Railroad and his terrific book Nothing Like It in
the World. Go to Amazon dot com, and by the way,
while you're there, pick up all of Stephen Ambrose's books.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Read them with the family.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
There is no better storytelling about our great country than
Stephen Ambrose. Let's continue with the story.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
One of the most fared stretches ran three miles along
the precipitous guard to the north fork of the American River,
nicknamed Cape Horn. The slope was in an angle of
seventy five degrees, and the river was twelve hundred to
twenty two hundred feet below the line or the railroad.
There are no trails, not even a goat path. The
(09:00):
grade would not be bored through a tunnel, but rather
build on the side of the mountain, which required blasting
and rock cuts on the sheer cliffs the mountain needed
to be sculpted because the railroad.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
Would be curved around the mountain.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
The curves that hugged the monolith were either upgrade or
occasionally down.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
Men had to be lowered in a.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Bosun's chair from above to place the black powder. First
of all to drill a hole for it, then to
place the black powder, fixing light the fuses, and then
yelled on the man above to hoss up.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
With regard to cape.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Horn, Van Nostron's Engineering magazine, the premier magazine for engineers
of the day said in eighteen seventy good engineers consider
this undertaking preposterous. One day in the summer of eighteen
sixty five, a Chinese foreman went up to Strobridge, who
was the Norman for the Central Pacific. The Chinese nodded
(10:03):
and then waited for permission to speak. When it was granted,
he said that men of China are a skilled at
work like this. Our ancestors built fortresses in the Angsty gorges,
would you permit Chinese crews to work on Cape Horn.
If so, could reeds be sent up from San Francisco
so we can weave them into baskets. Strawbridge would try anything.
(10:29):
The reeds came on at night. The Chinese wove baskets
similar to the ones their ancestors had used. The baskets
were round waist high, four islets at the top painted
with cymbals. Ropes ran from the islets to a central cable.
The Chinese went to work. They needed little or no
(10:50):
instruction in handling black powder, which was a Chinese invention,
and they went to work with a hauling crew at
the top. Hundreds of barrels of black powder were ignited
daily to form a ledge on which a roadbed could
be laid. Some of the men were lost in accidents.
We don't know how many. The CP didn't keep a record.
(11:14):
The Chinese, working then hanging in their baskets, had to
bore the holes with their small hand drills, then tamp
in the explosives, set in light the fuse and hower
to be pulled out of the way. They used a
huge amount of power that was shipped to them from Sacramento.
The Chinese made the roadbed and laid the track around
(11:35):
Cape Horn. Though this took until the spring of eighteen
sixty six, a year, it was not as time consuming
or difficult as had been fared. Still, it remains one
of the best known of all the labors on the
Central Pacific, mainly because, unlike the work in the tunnel,
it makes for a spectacular diarrhum as well it should
(11:56):
hanging from those baskets. Drilling holes in the cliff, putting
in the powder, placing the fuse, and getting hauled up
was a.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
Spectacular piece of work. The White laborers couldn't do it.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
The Chinese could, if not, as a matter of course,
then quickly, and at least they made it look this
way easily. Young Lewis Clement of the surveying and then
took charge of overseeing the railroad engineering.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
At Cape Horn.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
What Clement planned and the Chinese made became one of
the grandest sites to be seen along the entire Central
Pacific line. Trains would halt there so tourists could get
out from their cars to gasp and gape at the
gorge and at the grade. In the fall of eighteen
sixty five, the CP went to work on its tunnels. Now,
(12:47):
you need to know that California has on its eastern
side the Sierra Nevada that is granted, and it goes
up very high, and you get more snow on the
Sierra Nevada than you do any place else in the
United States save only Alaska.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
And the tunnels had to.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Be drilled through this granite, and in the fall of
eighteen sixty five the CP went to work on these tunnels.
Six of the thirteen that would have to blast out
before getting to the east slope were clustered in a
small stretch.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
Of two miles at the top of the long climb.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
The biggest number six right at the summit, within a
few hundred feet of Donner Pass, with Donner Lake right
down below. It was one six hundred and fifty nine
feet long and as much as one hundred and twenty
four feet beneath the surface. Of all the backbreaking labor
that went into the building of the CP and the
(13:52):
up of all the dangers inherent in the work, this
was the worst.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
The drills lost.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Their edges to the ground it and had to be
replaced frequently. One Chinese worker would hold that drill up,
and then there were two men behind him with sledgehammers,
and the other guy off, and the other guy waff.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
And that went on for eight hours.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
And there was room for only one gang at a time,
three men to a gang. The drills lost their edge
to the granite and had to be replaced frequently. The
CP soon learned to order his drills in one hundred
ton lots. The man holding the drill had to be
steady or he would get hit by the sledgehammer. The
man swinging the hammer had to have muscles like steel.
(14:43):
When a hole was at last big enough for the
black powder to be packed in, the crew would fill it,
said a fuse, yell as loud as they could while
running out of the range of the blast.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
And they would hope.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Sometimes the fuse worked, sometimes it didn't.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Often the workers had put into too.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Much powder, and most of it blew toward them harmlessly
as far as the grantite was concerned, but a great
danger to the Chinese. Clement's assistant Henry Root explained that
more powder was used by the rock foreman than was economical,
for the simple reason that the workers were told at
(15:21):
time not money was of the essence. At Summit Tunnel alone,
three hundred kegs of blasting powder a day went up.
That's more than went up in a day in the
Civil War, progress was incredibly slow with men working round
the clock. This is twenty four hours a day, eight hours,
(15:43):
eight hours and eight hours between six and twelve inches
was a normal twenty four hour day. Of how much
they gained, Charlie Crocker, in charge, gave orders to establish
permanent work care on each side of the summit to
facilitate the round the clock drilling, blasting, scraping, shoveling and
(16:05):
hauling by the Chinese. Collie figured there was no night
or day within a tunnel.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
The men worked in groups of.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Twenty years sold because only a handful could work at
any one time.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
They ate healthy, well cooked, and tasty food. Unlike the white.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Workers on the Union Pacific. The Central Pacific provided, as
did the Union Pacific the Americans with boiled beef and potatoes.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
And that's all they wanted and some salt.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
The Chinese demanded and got an astonishing variety oysters, cuttlefish, finfish,
abalone meat, oriental fruits, and scores of vegetables, including bamboo, sprouts, seaweed,
and mushrooms. Each of these foods came dried purchased from
(16:58):
one of the Chinese merchants in San Francisco.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Further, the Chinese ate rice.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Solid cabbage, vermiculai, bacon, and sweet crackers. Very occasionally they
had fresh meat, park being a prime favored along the chicken.
That food helped keep the Chinese healthy. The water they
drank was even more important. The Americans drank from the
streams and lakes, and many of them got diarrhea, dysentery,
and other illnesses. The Chinese drank only tepid tea. The
(17:28):
water had been boiled first and was brought to them
by youngsters who carried two pails on a sturdy pole
across their shoulders, and they would dip in and drink
their tea.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
What remarkable storytelling, painting word pictures like no one else can.
When we come back more of this remarkable story, Stephen Ambrose,
nothing like it in the world.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
The men who.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Built the Transcontinental Railroad. This is our American stories, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories, and let's return to
Stephen Ambrose telling the story of the building of the
Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
According to contemporaries, the white worker had a hydrophobia, which
induced him to avoid any contact with the water. In contrast,
the Chinese are accustomed to daily.
Speaker 4 (18:32):
Evolutions of their entire person.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
The Chinese were ideal workers, cheap three dollars a day.
They did as they were told, made a quick study,
and after something was shown or explained to them, did
it skillfully. Few, if any strikes the same for complaints.
They did what no one else was willing or able
(18:55):
to do. When Charlie Crocker first proposed to Strawberry, let's
use China because they were getting white workers who would
sign up and then get a ride up to the
top of the Sierra Nevada and then dessert because they
just wanted to free ride out of the goldfields. The
Chinese and didn't do it that way. And Crocker said,
of Strawberry, let's try Chinese. And Strowberries said, you're crazy.
(19:17):
They're only that high and they only weigh one hundred
and ten pounds. They can't possibly do this work. And
Crocker said, they built the Great Wall of China, didn't they.
And Strawberry soon became one of their great advocates. Now
to the men who made the Union Pacific, who were
primarily Irishmen, although the myth has it it was exclusively
(19:38):
and it wasn't. There were German descendants, and there were Scandinavians,
and there were Italians, and they were Rusian descendants, and
there were quite a lot five hundred by my own
count African Americans newly freed slaves. The whole world worked
on the Union Pacific, but the Irishman made up maybe
fifty percent. Another factor here is they were almost all
(20:01):
of them veterans. They were eighteen or nineteen or twenty
or twenty one years old. They had been in the
Civil War, whether in the Confederate Army or the Union Army.
You look at pictures of them, very famous pictures, and
you're going to see a lot of gray coats and
a lot of bluecoats. And these were kids who the
war was over, and I ain't going to go back
(20:24):
to Indiana and plow. I'm not going to go back
to Ohio and get behind a horse and hold that
pow all day long, following behind it. I want something
more exciting in my life. I want something that is significant.
I want to be a part of something big. In addition,
they had caught that most American of all diseases, the
wander lust. They wanted to see new country, and they
(20:48):
signed on with the Union Pacific to go to work
to build something that they knew, and they did they
could bring their grandchildren to and say I helped build that.
And General Dodge, who he wasn't general anymore, he had
been in the Civil War, but he was superintendent and
(21:10):
head of construction and the chief engineer for the UN Pacific.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
He said it was the.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Best organized, best equipped, and best disciplined workforce I have
ever seen. And Dodge building a lot of railroads, and
they were being attacked by Indians pretty much constantly when
they were in Nebraska, and more occasionally, it was still
fairly often when they were in Wyoming. And the Indians
had a number of objections to the building. And the
(21:36):
first of all was going through their land. Nobody'd asked them,
and nobody had ever paid them. And the second they
knew it was bringing civilization. And that meant, first of all,
army post and that meant that they could no longer
outrun the army. That a regiment could get on a
train and go all the way out to Cheyenne, or
(21:57):
go on to Robins or wherever in Wyoming and disembark
from the train and boom.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
They could hit the Indians just like that, and the
Indians were aware of that.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
They're also aware that these settlements were going to come
and that spelled the doom for the Indian way of life.
And most of all, the Indians were aware buffalo would
not cross the track, so the laying of the track
across the Great Plains meant you were splitting the buffalo
herd in half.
Speaker 4 (22:26):
So they attacked.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Often, and sometimes with some effect, and sometimes with great effect,
because they would pry up the track in the middle
of the night and the locomotive would come through and
the engineer wouldn't see this in the dark and whoo
over a win, and then the Indians would attack and
they would take everything they could out of the cars,
(22:49):
and especially if they could find some whiskey, and that
became very notorious at Julesburg in Colorado. One of the
ways that the railroad got control all over that was
they learned to hang lanterns on the front of the locomotives,
and that provided a spotlight so you could at least
see it and see if the track had been torn
(23:09):
up or not. But Dodd had all of these young men,
ten thousand of them that were working for the Union Pacific.
They were all armed, and their foremen had all been.
Speaker 4 (23:21):
Officers in the Civil War.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
And they would see a hostile Indian force up on
the ridge getting ready to come down on them, and
like that, those guys would switch from being railway workers
to being soldiers, and they would grab their rifles and
they would line up and they would repel these in
and attacks. How hard they worked is in an astonishment
(23:44):
to us at the beginning of the twenty first century.
Except for some of the cooks and bakers, there was
not a fat man among them. Their hands were tough
enough for any job. One never sees gloves in the photographs.
The jobs included pickaxe handling, shoveling, wielding sledge hammers, picking
(24:06):
up iron rails, and using other equipment that required hands
like iron. Their waist were generally thin, but all those shoulders,
those arms, those legs. Nebraska can be hotter than hell,
colder than the south Pole.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
They kept on working.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
They didn't whine, they didn't complain, they didn't quit, They
just kept working. They had taken on a job that
is accurately described as backbreaking. It was an addition a
job that experts said could not be done in the
ten years it had been allotted.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
If ever. A day's routine was something like this.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
In the morning, the men were up at first light,
after their toilet and washing their faces and hands in
a ten base and they had a hearty breakfast and
then went to work. The noontime was caught and they
had an hour for a heavy dinner that included pictures
of steaming coffee, pans of beef, soup, platters heaped with
(25:09):
boiled beef potatoes, sometimes condensed milk diluted the water.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
The men were there to eat.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
There was a little conversation, they made a business of it.
Afterward they sat around their bunks, smoking, sewing on buttons,
or taking a little nap. Then back to work, with
the bosses cursing and exarting them to overcome their noontime
lassitude time was called again an hour before dark to
allow some rest.
Speaker 4 (25:39):
The evening meal was more leisurely, then to.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
The bunk houses for card games, the smoke, lots of talk,
railroad talk. It was said to consist entirely of whiskey women,
higher wages, shorter hours, sometimes the men protested about being cheated.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
When they did, they were shot. One a day or
more there was no law.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
And then a song such as poor Patty, he works
on the railroad, or the Great Pacific Railway for California.
Hale then to bed the whole to be repeated the
next day, and the next and the next.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
And what storytelling by the great Stephen Ambrose. And we
thank his estate for allowing us to use his voice
and to keep his work alive at a time when
fewer and fewer people know the story of this great country.
Hearing Stephen Ambrose tell these stories, well, it's more than
a breath of fresh air.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
It's life itself, it's sustenance.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
And by the way, this story of the Union Pacific
of the Irish. Fifty percent of the Irish dominated this
and these crews, and almost all were Vets.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
As he pointed out, they didn't want to go back
to the farm.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Ambrose pointed out after the war, and some fought for
the North and some have fought for the South. They
wanted to be a part of something big. They wanted
to see a new country built, and they also wanted
to be able to bring their grandchildren to the finished.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Product, and say I helped build that.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
When we come back more of this remarkable story, the
building of the Transcontinental Railroads and Stephen Ambrose here on
our American stories. And we continue here on our American stories.
(27:39):
Let's pick up where Steven Ambrose last left off.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
During the spring of eighteen sixty six, Jack Caseman, in
charge of one of the construction crews, offered each man
a pound of fresh tobacco for every day that they
laid more than two miles of track. This was done
the Casement went out in the early summer to offer
time and a half pay to ensure that the up
reached the hundredth meridian before any other line. He also
(28:06):
offered double wages for any four mile workdays. Henry Morton Stanley,
who was one of the many reporters who was out
there covering this. And Henry Morton Stanley is a reporter
who found doctor Livingstone, I presume, and he was reporting
for two American papers.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
He was impressed by the results.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
The workers, he said, display an astonishing amount of enthusiasm
for their jobs. The workers on the CPE from the
bosses down believed there was more rain in snow in
the winner of eighteen sixty five sixty six than had
ever before been seen in California. The winner of eighteen
(28:49):
sixty six sixty seven was much worse. The snow came
early and stayed late. There were forty four separate storms.
Some of them deposited ten feet of snow, some deposit more.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
At the summit, the.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Pack averaged eighteen feet on the level, more snow falls
on the Sierra Nevada than any place else in the
forty eight states. Only Alaska guess more snow than the
Sierra Nevada. Strawbridge put hundreds of the Chinese to work
doing nothing but shoveling the snow away to keep open
a cart trail to the tunnel opening. If it had
(29:24):
not been for the race with the up, the CP
would have closed down that winter, But the fear of
losing all Utah and Nevada to their arrival drove them on.
The Chinese laborers dug snow tunnels from fifty to five
hundred feet long to get to the granite tunnels. And
they lived in these igloos, is what they were. And
these Chinese, for sometimes as long as six months, never
(29:46):
once saw the sky. Some of these tunnels were large
enough for a team of horses to walk through. Windows
were dug out of the snow, walls to dump refuse
and and a little bit of light. Also a chimneys
and airshafts. But for the most part the Chinese worked ate,
drank their tea, gambled, smoked opium, which they did on Sundays.
(30:08):
They got Sundays off and they smoked opium. They didn't
get themselves intoxicated with it or act silly or anything
like that. They just wanted to relax on that day off,
so they smoked their opium and slept in the remarkable
labyrinth that they were building under the snow. This was
cruel work, dangerous and claustrophobic. Still, they pressed on drilling
(30:32):
the holes in the granite, placing the black powder and
then the fuse, lighting the fuse, getting out of the way,
then going back in to clear out the broken granite.
Of all the things done by the first trans continent Araio,
nothing exceeded the cuts in time and cost it made
for people traveling across the continent before the Mexican War,
(30:54):
during the gold rush that started in eighteen forty eight
through the eighteen fifties and until after the Civil War
entered in eighteen sixty five.
Speaker 4 (31:02):
It took a person half a year.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
And might cost well over one thousand dollars to go
from New York to San Francisco. They either went overland
in the covered wagons with the oxen drawing them, or
they sailed down to Panama, got across Panama a very
great peril, the fear of getting tropical diseases, and then
(31:28):
hoped to hell they could find a steamer going north
to take them up to California. Or they went all
the way around South America and came back up again.
And then it's months and big money. But less than
a week after the pounding of the Golden Spike, a
man or a woman could go from New York to
(31:49):
San Francisco in seven days. That included stops so fast
they used to say, you don't even have time to
take a bath. And the cost to go from New
York to San Francisco is listed In the summer of
eighteen sixty nine was one hundred and fifty dollars for
(32:10):
first class, seventy dollars for immigrant. By June eighteen seventy,
that was down to one hundred dollars for first class,
sixty five for immigrant class. This was at a time
when a common labor was making about one hundred dollars
a month, and first class been a pullman sleeping car.
The immigrants sat on a bench. Freight rates by train
(32:34):
were incredibly less than for ox or horse drawn wagons,
or for sailboats or steamers. Mail that once costs dollars
per ounce and took forever now costs pennies and got
from Chicago to California in a few days. The telegraph, meanwhile,
which was built beside the track, was stipulated in the
(32:55):
eighteen sixty two Pacentic Railway Act, and which did for
a minute and talk about the telegraph. We like to
think we live in the age of the greatest change ever.
My parents saw we lived through the biggest change. We
lived through the Depression, and then we went through the
Second World War, and we defeated Hitler, and we defeated Tojo,
and we were there when the atomic bomb came about,
and we went through the biggest change. And my grandparents
(33:18):
they felt we went through the biggest change. We were
there when Henry Ford brought out the automobile. We were
there when the right brothers flew for the first time. Obviously,
our generation, you know who went through the biggest change,
the generation that lived between eighteen fifty and eighteen seventy.
They won the Civil War, they had Boi slavery, and
they built the transcontin ho a railroad, and in the
(33:39):
building of that railroad they brought in the telegraph. We
think we are an instant communication today.
Speaker 4 (33:45):
The telegraph puts you an instant communication.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
You could get a message from Chicago to San Francisco,
or from Los Angeles to New York or wherever like that.
That's what made the National Stock Exchange possible, and so
much else in American business that came about because of
that telegraph. So the telegraph, meanwhile could move ideas, thoughts,
(34:09):
statistic any words or numbers. It could be put on
paper from one place to another, from Europe or England
or New York to San Francisco or anywhere else that
had a telegraph station instantly. The Pullman Company published a
weekly newspaper called The trans Continental for its passengers. On
(34:30):
May thirty, eighteen seventy, that's almost exactly one year after
the Golden Spike. The paper had this item. It was
a curing incident in our smoking car last evening when
one of our party, who had telegraphed to Boston to
learn if his wife was well received, after we had
run forty seven miles further west. This answer all well
(34:53):
at home, which fact was announced, and loud applause followed
from all in the car.
Speaker 4 (35:00):
Just imagine that.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
It's almost like a telephone. But nobody ever did that before,
And now you could find out how your wife was
when you're away the hell out past Salt Lake. Together,
the Transconell Railroad and the telegraph made modern America possible.
Things that could not be imagined before the Civil War
(35:25):
now became common. A nationwide stock market, a continent wide
economy in which people, agricultural products, call and minerals moved
wherever someone wanted to send them, and did so cheaply
and quickly. A continent wide culture in which mail and
popular magazines and books that used to cost dollars per
ounce and it taken seemingly forever to get from the
(35:47):
east to the West coast now costs pennies and.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
Got there in a few days.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
There's another factor here that I should have I should mention,
and that's time. The railroads changed so much. And one
of the things that they changed was time. Before the railroads,
nobody carried a watch around. Nobody cared what time it was.
And you want to know when it's high noon. You
look up in the sky and when the sun is
(36:14):
straight overhead, it's high noon. Now that's going to be
different in Chicago. Then it's going to come later when
you get out to Des Moines, and in des Moines
it's going to come earlier than it's going to come
in Omaha, and so on. But if you're going to
have it's only one track, remember that they laid. If
you're going to have trains going in both direction and
(36:35):
you don't have the same time in Cheyenne as you
do in Omaha.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
They're going to cry.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
And so that's where standard time came from. The railroads
demanded standard time, and the Congress put in a standard
time in eighteen seventy nine, and then we all suddenly
became obsessed with time, as we still are. Time's up,
time's wasting, the train is leaving the station, and saw it.
(37:06):
None of this might have happened if different choices had
been made by any of the foregoing groups and individuals.
But a choice made is made. It cannot be changed.
Things happened as they happened. It's possible to imagine all
kinds of different routes across the content are a better
way for the government to help private industry, or maybe
(37:27):
to have the government build and own it. But those
things didn't happen, and what did take place is grand.
Speaker 4 (37:38):
So we admire those who did.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
It for what they were and what they accomplished, and
how much each of us owes them.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
And what storytelling.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
And thanks again to the Stephen Ambrose Estate for allowing
us to use his voice. We're deeply appreciative, is I'm
sure you are. The listening ought so, by the way,
nothing like it in the world. The men who built
the Transcontinental Railroad is a terrific
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Read here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
And we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians.
His bestseller's chronicle Our Nation's critical Battles and Achievements, from
(00:35):
his war works D Day and Band of Brothers to
Undaunted Courage, Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of
the American West. Stephen Ambrose passed in two thousand and two,
but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here
at Our American Stories, thanks to those who run his estate.
(00:55):
Here's Stephen Ambrose to tell us the story from his
bestseller Nothing Like It The World The men who built
the Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
My editor aused me, you said, when I completed my
last book. He said, you got to do the Pacific Railway.
How did they build it? And I said, oh, Alice,
I don't want to do that. These guys were Robert Barons.
They went on and stole the country blind, and then
they used all their ill gotten gains to get a
(01:27):
grip on American politics, which they held on to until
the first of the Populace, and then the progressive parties
were formed.
Speaker 4 (01:33):
And I don't want to deal with these robber barons.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
And she said, you do you? So I read for
six months and I learned that I had been badly wrong,
that far from being villains, these guys are heroes. And
I'm talking about the Big Four, I'm talking about doctor
Rint and I'm talking about all the others that were
at the top end, all of the men who built
the tracks. So that was how I got started. This
(02:00):
book opens with Abraham Lincoln, and somebody who asked me
about that a couple of days ago, I said, how
could you possibly open with Abraham Lincoln?
Speaker 4 (02:07):
I said, listen, I'm a writer.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
You got an opportunity to open your story with Abraham Lincoln.
But in his story, Lincoln was a railroad lawyer before
he went into full time politics. He was involved in
the biggest case of all with the Rock Island, when
they had built a bridge over the Mississippi River and
(02:31):
a steamboat crashed into one of the pilings and it
burned up, and the steamboat company sued the railroad. You
can't put those bridges over this river. Our steamboats are
going to run into them. Lincoln defended the Rock Island.
One thing to do is say it was the pilot's
fault he crashed into the piling. But second, he said,
the railroads have as much right to go east and
(02:52):
west as your steamships have to go north and south.
And that principle was accepted by the Illinois Supreme Court,
and that's what made railroading in America. Lincoln got written
into the eighteen sixty Republican platform support for the building
of a trans continental railroad, and that was done, and
(03:12):
he was the promoter of the eighteen sixty two bill,
and then he promoted the eighteen sixty four revision, which
gave even more subsidies to the railroad, because he wanted
to see that railroad building. He wanted it seem fast.
Lincoln was in consul Bluffs, Ale. It was eighteen fifty nine,
and the man he was staying with, his name was Pewsey,
pointed to a man down the way on the veranda
(03:34):
of the hotel and he said, that's Grenville Dodge. He
was twenty eight years old, Dodge was and Pusey said
to Lincoln, he knows more about railroads than any two
men in the country.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
And that snapped Lincoln's head around.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Let's go meet, he said, and you know those great
big long legs of hiszbi and striding down, he stuck
out that long arm and he said, Dodge, what's the
best route for the Pacific Railroad? And like that, Dodd said,
right here, mister President, straight out Omaha, right up the
plat u of Valley. Why do you think so, Lincoln asked,
and Dodge told him why he thought so. And from
(04:05):
that moment on, Lincoln was fully committed to what became
the first transcontinental railroad. Next to winning the Civil War
and abolishing slavery, building the first transcontinental railroad from Omaha,
Nebraska to Sacramento, California was the greatest achievement of the American.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
People in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Not until the completion of the Panama Canal in the
early twentieth century was it rivaled As an engineering feat.
The railroad took brains, muscle, and sweat in quantities and
scope never before put into a single project. It could
not have been done without a representative, democratic political system
(04:53):
without skill and ambitious engineers, without bosses and foreman who
had learned how to organize and lead men in the
Civil War, without free labor, without hard working laborers who
had learned how to take orders in the war, Without
those who came over to America, and the thousands from
China seeking a fortune, without laborers speaking many languages and
(05:18):
coming to America from every inhabited continent, Without the trees
and iron available in America, without capitalists willing to take
high risk for great profit, without men willing to challenge
all at every level in order to win all. Most
of all, it could not have been done without teamwork.
(05:41):
The United States was less than one hundred years old
when the Civil War was won, slavery abolished, and the
first transcontinental railroad built. Not until nearly twenty years later
that the Canadian Pacific spanned the Dominion. It was a
quarter of a century after the completion of the railroad.
The American row that the Russians got started in the
(06:02):
Trans Siberian Railway, and the Russians used more than two
hundred thousand Chinese to do it, as compared to the
American employment of ten thousand or so Chinese In addition,
the Russians had hundreds of thousands of convicts working on
the line as slave laborers.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Even at that It.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Was not until thirty two years after the American achievement
that the Russians finished, and they did it as a
government enterprise at a much higher cost, with a road
that was in every way inferior. The Americans did it first,
and they did it even though the United States was
the youngest of countries. It had proclaimed its independence in
(06:42):
seventeen seventy six, won its independence in seventeen eighty three,
bought the Louisiana Purchase, through which much of the Union
Pacific Grand in eighteen o three, added California and Nevada
and Utah to the Union in eighteen forty eight, through
which the Central Pacific Grand, and compled the linking of
the continent in eighteen sixty nine, thus ensuring an empire
(07:07):
of liberty running from the Sea to Shining Sea.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
And more of Stephen Ambrose's remarkable storytelling on the building
of the Transcontinental Railroad here on our American Stories. Folks,
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
(07:34):
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their
free and terrific online courses.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
And we continue here with our American stories in Steven
Ambrose telling the story of the men who built the
Transcontinental Railroad and his terrific book Nothing Like It in
the World. Go to Amazon dot com, and by the way,
while you're there, pick up all of Stephen Ambrose's books.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Read them with the family.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
There is no better storytelling about our great country than
Stephen Ambrose. Let's continue with the story.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
One of the most fared stretches ran three miles along
the precipitous guard to the north fork of the American River,
nicknamed Cape Horn. The slope was in an angle of
seventy five degrees, and the river was twelve hundred to
twenty two hundred feet below the line or the railroad.
There are no trails, not even a goat path. The
(09:00):
grade would not be bored through a tunnel, but rather
build on the side of the mountain, which required blasting
and rock cuts on the sheer cliffs the mountain needed
to be sculpted because the railroad.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
Would be curved around the mountain.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
The curves that hugged the monolith were either upgrade or
occasionally down.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
Men had to be lowered in a.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Bosun's chair from above to place the black powder. First
of all to drill a hole for it, then to
place the black powder, fixing light the fuses, and then
yelled on the man above to hoss up.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
With regard to cape.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Horn, Van Nostron's Engineering magazine, the premier magazine for engineers
of the day said in eighteen seventy good engineers consider
this undertaking preposterous. One day in the summer of eighteen
sixty five, a Chinese foreman went up to Strobridge, who
was the Norman for the Central Pacific. The Chinese nodded
(10:03):
and then waited for permission to speak. When it was granted,
he said that men of China are a skilled at
work like this. Our ancestors built fortresses in the Angsty gorges,
would you permit Chinese crews to work on Cape Horn.
If so, could reeds be sent up from San Francisco
so we can weave them into baskets. Strawbridge would try anything.
(10:29):
The reeds came on at night. The Chinese wove baskets
similar to the ones their ancestors had used. The baskets
were round waist high, four islets at the top painted
with cymbals. Ropes ran from the islets to a central cable.
The Chinese went to work. They needed little or no
(10:50):
instruction in handling black powder, which was a Chinese invention,
and they went to work with a hauling crew at
the top. Hundreds of barrels of black powder were ignited
daily to form a ledge on which a roadbed could
be laid. Some of the men were lost in accidents.
We don't know how many. The CP didn't keep a record.
(11:14):
The Chinese, working then hanging in their baskets, had to
bore the holes with their small hand drills, then tamp
in the explosives, set in light the fuse and hower
to be pulled out of the way. They used a
huge amount of power that was shipped to them from Sacramento.
The Chinese made the roadbed and laid the track around
(11:35):
Cape Horn. Though this took until the spring of eighteen
sixty six, a year, it was not as time consuming
or difficult as had been fared. Still, it remains one
of the best known of all the labors on the
Central Pacific, mainly because, unlike the work in the tunnel,
it makes for a spectacular diarrhum as well it should
(11:56):
hanging from those baskets. Drilling holes in the cliff, putting
in the powder, placing the fuse, and getting hauled up
was a.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
Spectacular piece of work. The White laborers couldn't do it.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
The Chinese could, if not, as a matter of course,
then quickly, and at least they made it look this
way easily. Young Lewis Clement of the surveying and then
took charge of overseeing the railroad engineering.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
At Cape Horn.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
What Clement planned and the Chinese made became one of
the grandest sites to be seen along the entire Central
Pacific line. Trains would halt there so tourists could get
out from their cars to gasp and gape at the
gorge and at the grade. In the fall of eighteen
sixty five, the CP went to work on its tunnels. Now,
(12:47):
you need to know that California has on its eastern
side the Sierra Nevada that is granted, and it goes
up very high, and you get more snow on the
Sierra Nevada than you do any place else in the
United States save only Alaska.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
And the tunnels had to.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Be drilled through this granite, and in the fall of
eighteen sixty five the CP went to work on these tunnels.
Six of the thirteen that would have to blast out
before getting to the east slope were clustered in a
small stretch.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
Of two miles at the top of the long climb.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
The biggest number six right at the summit, within a
few hundred feet of Donner Pass, with Donner Lake right
down below. It was one six hundred and fifty nine
feet long and as much as one hundred and twenty
four feet beneath the surface. Of all the backbreaking labor
that went into the building of the CP and the
(13:52):
up of all the dangers inherent in the work, this
was the worst.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
The drills lost.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Their edges to the ground it and had to be
replaced frequently. One Chinese worker would hold that drill up,
and then there were two men behind him with sledgehammers,
and the other guy off, and the other guy waff.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
And that went on for eight hours.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
And there was room for only one gang at a time,
three men to a gang. The drills lost their edge
to the granite and had to be replaced frequently. The
CP soon learned to order his drills in one hundred
ton lots. The man holding the drill had to be
steady or he would get hit by the sledgehammer. The
man swinging the hammer had to have muscles like steel.
(14:43):
When a hole was at last big enough for the
black powder to be packed in, the crew would fill it,
said a fuse, yell as loud as they could while
running out of the range of the blast.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
And they would hope.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Sometimes the fuse worked, sometimes it didn't.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Often the workers had put into too.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Much powder, and most of it blew toward them harmlessly
as far as the grantite was concerned, but a great
danger to the Chinese. Clement's assistant Henry Root explained that
more powder was used by the rock foreman than was economical,
for the simple reason that the workers were told at
(15:21):
time not money was of the essence. At Summit Tunnel alone,
three hundred kegs of blasting powder a day went up.
That's more than went up in a day in the
Civil War, progress was incredibly slow with men working round
the clock. This is twenty four hours a day, eight hours,
(15:43):
eight hours and eight hours between six and twelve inches
was a normal twenty four hour day. Of how much
they gained, Charlie Crocker, in charge, gave orders to establish
permanent work care on each side of the summit to
facilitate the round the clock drilling, blasting, scraping, shoveling and
(16:05):
hauling by the Chinese. Collie figured there was no night
or day within a tunnel.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
The men worked in groups of.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Twenty years sold because only a handful could work at
any one time.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
They ate healthy, well cooked, and tasty food. Unlike the white.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Workers on the Union Pacific. The Central Pacific provided, as
did the Union Pacific the Americans with boiled beef and potatoes.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
And that's all they wanted and some salt.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
The Chinese demanded and got an astonishing variety oysters, cuttlefish, finfish,
abalone meat, oriental fruits, and scores of vegetables, including bamboo, sprouts, seaweed,
and mushrooms. Each of these foods came dried purchased from
(16:58):
one of the Chinese merchants in San Francisco.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Further, the Chinese ate rice.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Solid cabbage, vermiculai, bacon, and sweet crackers. Very occasionally they
had fresh meat, park being a prime favored along the chicken.
That food helped keep the Chinese healthy. The water they
drank was even more important. The Americans drank from the
streams and lakes, and many of them got diarrhea, dysentery,
and other illnesses. The Chinese drank only tepid tea. The
(17:28):
water had been boiled first and was brought to them
by youngsters who carried two pails on a sturdy pole
across their shoulders, and they would dip in and drink
their tea.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
What remarkable storytelling, painting word pictures like no one else can.
When we come back more of this remarkable story, Stephen Ambrose,
nothing like it in the world.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
The men who.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Built the Transcontinental Railroad. This is our American stories, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories, and let's return to
Stephen Ambrose telling the story of the building of the
Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
According to contemporaries, the white worker had a hydrophobia, which
induced him to avoid any contact with the water. In contrast,
the Chinese are accustomed to daily.
Speaker 4 (18:32):
Evolutions of their entire person.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
The Chinese were ideal workers, cheap three dollars a day.
They did as they were told, made a quick study,
and after something was shown or explained to them, did
it skillfully. Few, if any strikes the same for complaints.
They did what no one else was willing or able
(18:55):
to do. When Charlie Crocker first proposed to Strawberry, let's
use China because they were getting white workers who would
sign up and then get a ride up to the
top of the Sierra Nevada and then dessert because they
just wanted to free ride out of the goldfields. The
Chinese and didn't do it that way. And Crocker said,
of Strawberry, let's try Chinese. And Strowberries said, you're crazy.
(19:17):
They're only that high and they only weigh one hundred
and ten pounds. They can't possibly do this work. And
Crocker said, they built the Great Wall of China, didn't they.
And Strawberry soon became one of their great advocates. Now
to the men who made the Union Pacific, who were
primarily Irishmen, although the myth has it it was exclusively
(19:38):
and it wasn't. There were German descendants, and there were Scandinavians,
and there were Italians, and they were Rusian descendants, and
there were quite a lot five hundred by my own
count African Americans newly freed slaves. The whole world worked
on the Union Pacific, but the Irishman made up maybe
fifty percent. Another factor here is they were almost all
(20:01):
of them veterans. They were eighteen or nineteen or twenty
or twenty one years old. They had been in the
Civil War, whether in the Confederate Army or the Union Army.
You look at pictures of them, very famous pictures, and
you're going to see a lot of gray coats and
a lot of bluecoats. And these were kids who the
war was over, and I ain't going to go back
(20:24):
to Indiana and plow. I'm not going to go back
to Ohio and get behind a horse and hold that
pow all day long, following behind it. I want something
more exciting in my life. I want something that is significant.
I want to be a part of something big. In addition,
they had caught that most American of all diseases, the
wander lust. They wanted to see new country, and they
(20:48):
signed on with the Union Pacific to go to work
to build something that they knew, and they did they
could bring their grandchildren to and say I helped build that.
And General Dodge, who he wasn't general anymore, he had
been in the Civil War, but he was superintendent and
(21:10):
head of construction and the chief engineer for the UN Pacific.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
He said it was the.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Best organized, best equipped, and best disciplined workforce I have
ever seen. And Dodge building a lot of railroads, and
they were being attacked by Indians pretty much constantly when
they were in Nebraska, and more occasionally, it was still
fairly often when they were in Wyoming. And the Indians
had a number of objections to the building. And the
(21:36):
first of all was going through their land. Nobody'd asked them,
and nobody had ever paid them. And the second they
knew it was bringing civilization. And that meant, first of all,
army post and that meant that they could no longer
outrun the army. That a regiment could get on a
train and go all the way out to Cheyenne, or
(21:57):
go on to Robins or wherever in Wyoming and disembark
from the train and boom.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
They could hit the Indians just like that, and the
Indians were aware of that.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
They're also aware that these settlements were going to come
and that spelled the doom for the Indian way of life.
And most of all, the Indians were aware buffalo would
not cross the track, so the laying of the track
across the Great Plains meant you were splitting the buffalo
herd in half.
Speaker 4 (22:26):
So they attacked.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Often, and sometimes with some effect, and sometimes with great effect,
because they would pry up the track in the middle
of the night and the locomotive would come through and
the engineer wouldn't see this in the dark and whoo
over a win, and then the Indians would attack and
they would take everything they could out of the cars,
(22:49):
and especially if they could find some whiskey, and that
became very notorious at Julesburg in Colorado. One of the
ways that the railroad got control all over that was
they learned to hang lanterns on the front of the locomotives,
and that provided a spotlight so you could at least
see it and see if the track had been torn
(23:09):
up or not. But Dodd had all of these young men,
ten thousand of them that were working for the Union Pacific.
They were all armed, and their foremen had all been.
Speaker 4 (23:21):
Officers in the Civil War.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
And they would see a hostile Indian force up on
the ridge getting ready to come down on them, and
like that, those guys would switch from being railway workers
to being soldiers, and they would grab their rifles and
they would line up and they would repel these in
and attacks. How hard they worked is in an astonishment
(23:44):
to us at the beginning of the twenty first century.
Except for some of the cooks and bakers, there was
not a fat man among them. Their hands were tough
enough for any job. One never sees gloves in the photographs.
The jobs included pickaxe handling, shoveling, wielding sledge hammers, picking
(24:06):
up iron rails, and using other equipment that required hands
like iron. Their waist were generally thin, but all those shoulders,
those arms, those legs. Nebraska can be hotter than hell,
colder than the south Pole.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
They kept on working.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
They didn't whine, they didn't complain, they didn't quit, They
just kept working. They had taken on a job that
is accurately described as backbreaking. It was an addition a
job that experts said could not be done in the
ten years it had been allotted.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
If ever. A day's routine was something like this.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
In the morning, the men were up at first light,
after their toilet and washing their faces and hands in
a ten base and they had a hearty breakfast and
then went to work. The noontime was caught and they
had an hour for a heavy dinner that included pictures
of steaming coffee, pans of beef, soup, platters heaped with
(25:09):
boiled beef potatoes, sometimes condensed milk diluted the water.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
The men were there to eat.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
There was a little conversation, they made a business of it.
Afterward they sat around their bunks, smoking, sewing on buttons,
or taking a little nap. Then back to work, with
the bosses cursing and exarting them to overcome their noontime
lassitude time was called again an hour before dark to
allow some rest.
Speaker 4 (25:39):
The evening meal was more leisurely, then to.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
The bunk houses for card games, the smoke, lots of talk,
railroad talk. It was said to consist entirely of whiskey women,
higher wages, shorter hours, sometimes the men protested about being cheated.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
When they did, they were shot. One a day or
more there was no law.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
And then a song such as poor Patty, he works
on the railroad, or the Great Pacific Railway for California.
Hale then to bed the whole to be repeated the
next day, and the next and the next.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
And what storytelling by the great Stephen Ambrose. And we
thank his estate for allowing us to use his voice
and to keep his work alive at a time when
fewer and fewer people know the story of this great country.
Hearing Stephen Ambrose tell these stories, well, it's more than
a breath of fresh air.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
It's life itself, it's sustenance.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
And by the way, this story of the Union Pacific
of the Irish. Fifty percent of the Irish dominated this
and these crews, and almost all were Vets.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
As he pointed out, they didn't want to go back
to the farm.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Ambrose pointed out after the war, and some fought for
the North and some have fought for the South. They
wanted to be a part of something big. They wanted
to see a new country built, and they also wanted
to be able to bring their grandchildren to the finished.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Product, and say I helped build that.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
When we come back more of this remarkable story, the
building of the Transcontinental Railroads and Stephen Ambrose here on
our American stories. And we continue here on our American stories.
(27:39):
Let's pick up where Steven Ambrose last left off.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
During the spring of eighteen sixty six, Jack Caseman, in
charge of one of the construction crews, offered each man
a pound of fresh tobacco for every day that they
laid more than two miles of track. This was done
the Casement went out in the early summer to offer
time and a half pay to ensure that the up
reached the hundredth meridian before any other line. He also
(28:06):
offered double wages for any four mile workdays. Henry Morton Stanley,
who was one of the many reporters who was out
there covering this. And Henry Morton Stanley is a reporter
who found doctor Livingstone, I presume, and he was reporting
for two American papers.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
He was impressed by the results.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
The workers, he said, display an astonishing amount of enthusiasm
for their jobs. The workers on the CPE from the
bosses down believed there was more rain in snow in
the winner of eighteen sixty five sixty six than had
ever before been seen in California. The winner of eighteen
(28:49):
sixty six sixty seven was much worse. The snow came
early and stayed late. There were forty four separate storms.
Some of them deposited ten feet of snow, some deposit more.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
At the summit, the.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Pack averaged eighteen feet on the level, more snow falls
on the Sierra Nevada than any place else in the
forty eight states. Only Alaska guess more snow than the
Sierra Nevada. Strawbridge put hundreds of the Chinese to work
doing nothing but shoveling the snow away to keep open
a cart trail to the tunnel opening. If it had
(29:24):
not been for the race with the up, the CP
would have closed down that winter, But the fear of
losing all Utah and Nevada to their arrival drove them on.
The Chinese laborers dug snow tunnels from fifty to five
hundred feet long to get to the granite tunnels. And
they lived in these igloos, is what they were. And
these Chinese, for sometimes as long as six months, never
(29:46):
once saw the sky. Some of these tunnels were large
enough for a team of horses to walk through. Windows
were dug out of the snow, walls to dump refuse
and and a little bit of light. Also a chimneys
and airshafts. But for the most part the Chinese worked ate,
drank their tea, gambled, smoked opium, which they did on Sundays.
(30:08):
They got Sundays off and they smoked opium. They didn't
get themselves intoxicated with it or act silly or anything
like that. They just wanted to relax on that day off,
so they smoked their opium and slept in the remarkable
labyrinth that they were building under the snow. This was
cruel work, dangerous and claustrophobic. Still, they pressed on drilling
(30:32):
the holes in the granite, placing the black powder and
then the fuse, lighting the fuse, getting out of the way,
then going back in to clear out the broken granite.
Of all the things done by the first trans continent Araio,
nothing exceeded the cuts in time and cost it made
for people traveling across the continent before the Mexican War,
(30:54):
during the gold rush that started in eighteen forty eight
through the eighteen fifties and until after the Civil War
entered in eighteen sixty five.
Speaker 4 (31:02):
It took a person half a year.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
And might cost well over one thousand dollars to go
from New York to San Francisco. They either went overland
in the covered wagons with the oxen drawing them, or
they sailed down to Panama, got across Panama a very
great peril, the fear of getting tropical diseases, and then
(31:28):
hoped to hell they could find a steamer going north
to take them up to California. Or they went all
the way around South America and came back up again.
And then it's months and big money. But less than
a week after the pounding of the Golden Spike, a
man or a woman could go from New York to
(31:49):
San Francisco in seven days. That included stops so fast
they used to say, you don't even have time to
take a bath. And the cost to go from New
York to San Francisco is listed In the summer of
eighteen sixty nine was one hundred and fifty dollars for
(32:10):
first class, seventy dollars for immigrant. By June eighteen seventy,
that was down to one hundred dollars for first class,
sixty five for immigrant class. This was at a time
when a common labor was making about one hundred dollars
a month, and first class been a pullman sleeping car.
The immigrants sat on a bench. Freight rates by train
(32:34):
were incredibly less than for ox or horse drawn wagons,
or for sailboats or steamers. Mail that once costs dollars
per ounce and took forever now costs pennies and got
from Chicago to California in a few days. The telegraph, meanwhile,
which was built beside the track, was stipulated in the
(32:55):
eighteen sixty two Pacentic Railway Act, and which did for
a minute and talk about the telegraph. We like to
think we live in the age of the greatest change ever.
My parents saw we lived through the biggest change. We
lived through the Depression, and then we went through the
Second World War, and we defeated Hitler, and we defeated Tojo,
and we were there when the atomic bomb came about,
and we went through the biggest change. And my grandparents
(33:18):
they felt we went through the biggest change. We were
there when Henry Ford brought out the automobile. We were
there when the right brothers flew for the first time. Obviously,
our generation, you know who went through the biggest change,
the generation that lived between eighteen fifty and eighteen seventy.
They won the Civil War, they had Boi slavery, and
they built the transcontin ho a railroad, and in the
(33:39):
building of that railroad they brought in the telegraph. We
think we are an instant communication today.
Speaker 4 (33:45):
The telegraph puts you an instant communication.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
You could get a message from Chicago to San Francisco,
or from Los Angeles to New York or wherever like that.
That's what made the National Stock Exchange possible, and so
much else in American business that came about because of
that telegraph. So the telegraph, meanwhile could move ideas, thoughts,
(34:09):
statistic any words or numbers. It could be put on
paper from one place to another, from Europe or England
or New York to San Francisco or anywhere else that
had a telegraph station instantly. The Pullman Company published a
weekly newspaper called The trans Continental for its passengers. On
(34:30):
May thirty, eighteen seventy, that's almost exactly one year after
the Golden Spike. The paper had this item. It was
a curing incident in our smoking car last evening when
one of our party, who had telegraphed to Boston to
learn if his wife was well received, after we had
run forty seven miles further west. This answer all well
(34:53):
at home, which fact was announced, and loud applause followed
from all in the car.
Speaker 4 (35:00):
Just imagine that.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
It's almost like a telephone. But nobody ever did that before,
And now you could find out how your wife was
when you're away the hell out past Salt Lake. Together,
the Transconell Railroad and the telegraph made modern America possible.
Things that could not be imagined before the Civil War
(35:25):
now became common. A nationwide stock market, a continent wide
economy in which people, agricultural products, call and minerals moved
wherever someone wanted to send them, and did so cheaply
and quickly. A continent wide culture in which mail and
popular magazines and books that used to cost dollars per
ounce and it taken seemingly forever to get from the
(35:47):
east to the West coast now costs pennies and.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
Got there in a few days.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
There's another factor here that I should have I should mention,
and that's time. The railroads changed so much. And one
of the things that they changed was time. Before the railroads,
nobody carried a watch around. Nobody cared what time it was.
And you want to know when it's high noon. You
look up in the sky and when the sun is
(36:14):
straight overhead, it's high noon. Now that's going to be
different in Chicago. Then it's going to come later when
you get out to Des Moines, and in des Moines
it's going to come earlier than it's going to come
in Omaha, and so on. But if you're going to
have it's only one track, remember that they laid. If
you're going to have trains going in both direction and
(36:35):
you don't have the same time in Cheyenne as you
do in Omaha.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
They're going to cry.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
And so that's where standard time came from. The railroads
demanded standard time, and the Congress put in a standard
time in eighteen seventy nine, and then we all suddenly
became obsessed with time, as we still are. Time's up,
time's wasting, the train is leaving the station, and saw it.
(37:06):
None of this might have happened if different choices had
been made by any of the foregoing groups and individuals.
But a choice made is made. It cannot be changed.
Things happened as they happened. It's possible to imagine all
kinds of different routes across the content are a better
way for the government to help private industry, or maybe
(37:27):
to have the government build and own it. But those
things didn't happen, and what did take place is grand.
Speaker 4 (37:38):
So we admire those who did.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
It for what they were and what they accomplished, and
how much each of us owes them.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
And what storytelling.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
And thanks again to the Stephen Ambrose Estate for allowing
us to use his voice. We're deeply appreciative, is I'm
sure you are. The listening ought so, by the way,
nothing like it in the world. The men who built
the Transcontinental Railroad is a terrific
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Read here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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