May 14, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, climb aboard! The late, great historian Stephen Ambrose shares the epic story of how Americans laid 1,900 miles of track from Omaha to Sacramento to complete one of our nation’s greatest infrastructure achievements—the Transcontinental Railroad.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories.
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.
(00:31):
His Bestseller's chronicle Our Nation's critical Battles and Achievements. From
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 as estate.
(00:55):
Here's Stephen Ambrose to tell us the story from his
bestseller Nothing Like It in the World. The men who
built the Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
My editor ause 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. And I don't want to deal with these
robber barons, and.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
She said, you do you?
Speaker 2 (01:38):
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 track.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
So that was how I got started.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
This 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 3 (02:07):
I said, listen, I'm a writer.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
You can't put.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Those bridges over this river. Our steamboats are going to
run into them. Lincoln defended the Rock Island. I mean,
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
west as your steamships have to go north and south.
And that principle was accepted by the Illinois Supreme.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Court, and that's what made railroading in America.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Lincoln got written into the eighteen sixty Republican platform support
for the building of a trans continental railroad, and that
was done, and 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, Aile. It
(03:26):
was eighteen fifty nine, and the man he was staying with,
his name was Pusey, pointed to a man down the
way on the veranda 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 3 (03:43):
And that snapped Lincoln's head around. Let's go meet, he.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Said, And you know those great big long legs of
his ev 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 from right up the plat u
of Valley.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Why do you think so?
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Lincoln ask and Dodge told him why he thought so,
And from 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
(04:25):
of the American people in the nineteenth century. 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
(04:48):
been done without a representative, democratic political system. Without skill
and ambitious engineers, without bosses and foreman who had learned
how to organizing lead men in the Civil War, without
free labor, without hard working laborers who had learned how
(05:08):
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 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
(05:33):
order to win all. Most of all, it could not
have been done without teamwork. The United States was less
than one hundred years old when the Civil War was won,
slavery abolished, and the first transcontinental railroad built.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Not until nearly.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
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 road that the Russians got
started in the 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
(06:11):
Chinese in addition, the Russians had hundreds of thousands of
convicts working on the line as slave laborers. Even at
that It 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
(06:34):
did it first, and they did it even though the
United States was.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
The youngest of countries.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
It had proclaimed its independence in seventeen seventy six, won
its independence in seventeen eighty three, bought the Louisiana Purchase,
through which much of the Union Pacific rand in eighteen
o three, added California and Nevada and Utah to the
Union in eighteen forty eight, through which the Central Pacific
Grand and completed the linking of the continent in eighteen
(07:02):
sixty nine, thus ensuring an empire of liberty running from
sea to Shining Sea.
Speaker 1 (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. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
(07:58):
to learn more. 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
(08:22):
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. Read them with the family. There
is no better storytelling about our great country than Stephen Ambrose.
Let's continue with the story.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Feet below the line of the railroad.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
There are no trails, not even a goat path. The
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 would be curved around
the mountain. The curves that hugged the monolith were either
(09:19):
upgrade or occasionally down.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Men had to be lowered in a.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Boston's chair from above to place the black powder.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
First of all to drill a hole for it.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Then to place the black powder, fixing light the fuses,
and then yelled on the man above to hoss up.
With regard to cape 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
(09:54):
the summer of eighteen sixty five, a Chinese foreman went
up to Strowbridge, who was the for the Central Pacific.
The Chinese nodded and then waited for permission to speak.
When it was granted, he said that men of China
are skilled at work like this. Our ancestors built fortresses
in the Angsty garges. Would you permit Chinese crews to
(10:18):
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. 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
(10:39):
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 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
(11:02):
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. The Chinese, working then
hanging in their baskets, had to bore the holes with
their small hand drills, then tamp in the explosives, set
(11:22):
in light the fuse and hower to be pulled out
of the way.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
They used a.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Huge amount of power that was shipped to them from Sacramento.
The Chinese made the roadbed and laid the track around
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 laborers on the
(11:47):
Central Pacific, mainly because, unlike the work in the tunnel,
it makes for a spectacular diarrhum as well it should.
Hanging from those baskets, Drilling holes in the cliff, putting
in the powder, placing the fuse, and getting hauled up
was a spectacular piece of work. The White laborers couldn't
do it. The Chinese could, if not, as a matter
(12:12):
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 at
Cape Horn. 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
(12:35):
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 You need to know that California has
on its eastern side the Sierra Nevada that is granted,
(12:59):
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. And the
tunnels had to 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
(13:22):
have to blast out before getting to the east slope
were clustered in a small stretch of two miles at
the top of the long climb. 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.
(13:47):
Of all the backbreaking labor that went into the building
of the CP and the up of all the dangers
inherent in the work, this was the worst. The drills
lost their edges to the ground and had to be
replaced frequently. One Chinese worker would hold that drill up,
and then there were two men behind him with sledgehammers.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
And the other guy off, and the other guy waff
and that went on for eight hours.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
The man holding the drill.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Had to be steady or he would get hit by
the sledgehammer. The man swinging the hammer had to have
muscles like steel. 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.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
The blast, and they would hope.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Sometimes the fuse worked, sometimes it didn't.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Often the workers had put in two.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Much powder, and most of it blew toward them harmlessly
as far as the granite 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.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
That's more than went up in a day.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
In the Civil War, progress was incredibly slow with men
working round the clock. This is twenty four hours a day,
eight hours, eight hours and eight hours between six and
twelve inches was a normal twenty four hour day.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Of how much they gained.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Charlie Crocker, in charge, gave orders to establish permanent work
camp on each side of the summit to facilitate the
round the clock drilling, blasting, scraping, shoveling and hauling by
the Chinese. Charlie figured there was no night or day
within a tunnel.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
The men worked in groups of.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Twenty years sold because only a handful could work at
any one time. They ate healthy, well cooked, and tasty food.
Unlike the white workers on the Union Pacific. The Central
Pacific provided, as did the Union Pacific the Americans with
boiled beef and potatoes.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
And that's all they wanted and some salt.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Each of these foods.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Came dried purchased from one of the Chinese merchants in
San Francisco. Further, the Chinese ate rice, solid cabbage, vermiculai, bacon,
and sweet crackers. Very occasionally they had fresh meat, park
being a prime favored along with chicken. That food helped
keep the Chinese healthy. The water they drank was even
more important. The Americans drank from the streams and lakes,
(17:19):
and many of them got diarrhea, dysentery, and other illnesses.
The Chinese drank only tepid tea. The 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 1 (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. The men who built
the Transcontinental Railroad. This is our American stories. And we
(18:08):
continue with our Americans stories, and let's return to Stephen
Ambrose telling the story of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
According to contemporaries, the white worker had a hydrophobia which induced.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Him to avoid any contact with the water.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
In contrast, the Chinese are accustomed to daily.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Evolutions of their entire person.
Speaker 2 (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 Chinese 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 gold fields.
The Chinese and didn't do it that way, and Crocker said,
a Strawberry, let's try Chinese. And Storberges said, you're crazy.
(19:17):
They're only that high, the only weigh one hundred and
ten pounds. They can't possibly do this work. And Crocker said,
they'd 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, you know,
(19:38):
it wasn't. There were German descendants, and there were Scandinavians,
and there were Italians, and there were Ritian 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 they were almost
(20:00):
all 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.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
You look at.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
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 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.
(20:31):
Falling mind 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 signed on with
the Union Pacific to go to work to build something
(20:53):
that they knew, and they did they could bring their
grandchildren to and say, hell, help build that. And General Dodge,
who he wasn't general anymore, he had been in the
Civil War, but he was superintendent and head of construction
and the chief engineer for the UN Pacific. He said
(21:15):
it was the best organized, best equipped, and best disciplined
workforce I have ever seen. And Dodge built 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.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
And this road, first of all, was going through their land.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
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 go on to Rollins or wherever in
(21:59):
Wyoming and disembark from the train and boom. They could
hit the Indians just like that, and the Indians were
aware of that. 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
(22:20):
laying of the track across the Great Plains meant.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
You were splitting the buffalo herd in half.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So they attacked often, and sometimes with some effect, and
sometimes with.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Great effect, because they would.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
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 whoof over and win
And then the Indians would attack and they would take
everything they could out of the cars, and especially if
they could find some whiskey, and that became very notorious
at Jewlesburg in Colorado. One of the ways that the
(22:58):
railroad got control 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 up or not.
But dog 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 3 (23:20):
Officers in the Civil War.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
And they would see a hostile engine 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 mine 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. They kept on working. They
didn't whine, they didn't complain, they didn't quit, They just
(24:31):
kept working. They had taken on a job that is
accurately described as backbreaking. It was in an addition, a
job that experts said could not be done in the
ten years it had been allotted. If ever, a day's
routine was something like this. In the morning, the men
were up at first light, after their toilet and washing
(24:52):
their faces and hands in a ten base, and they
had a hearty breakfast and then went to work.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
The noontime was caught.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
And they had an hour for a heavy dinner that
included pictures of steaming coffee, pans of beef soup, platters
heaped with boiled beef potatoes, sometimes condensed milk diluted the water.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
The men were there to eat.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (25:39):
The evening meal was more leisurely, then to.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (26:02):
When they did, they were shot. One a day or
more there was no law.
Speaker 2 (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 hale to be repeated the next
day and the next and the next.
Speaker 1 (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. It's life itself, it's sustenance.
(26:47):
And by the way, this story of the Union pacifica
of the Irish. Fifty percent of the Irish dominated this
and these crews, and almost all were Vets. As he
pointed out, they didn't.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Want to go back to the farm.
Speaker 1 (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
product and say I helped build that. When we come
back more of this remarkable story, the building of the
(27:19):
Transcontinental Railroads and Steven Ambrose here on our American stories.
And we continue here on our American stories. Let's pick
(27:40):
up where Steven Ambrose last left off.
Speaker 2 (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 PA went out in the early summer to offer
time and half pay to ensure that the up reached
the hundred meridian before any other line. He also offered
(28:07):
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 3 (28:25):
He was impressed by the results. The workers, he.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
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 sixty six sixty
(28:50):
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 depositive more.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
At the summit, the pack I reaged.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Eighteen feet on the level, more snow falls on the
Sierra Nevada than any place else in the forty eight states.
Only Alaska guesst 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
(29:22):
to the tunnel opening. If it had 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 the rival drove them on. The Chinese
laborers dug snow tunnels from fifty to five hundred feet
long to get to the granite tunnels.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
And they lived in these igloos, is what they were.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
And these Chinese, for sometimes as long as six months,
never 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 let in a little bit of light. Also
a chimneys and airshafts. But for the most part the
(30:04):
Chinese worked eight drank their tea, gambled smoked opium, which
they did on Sundays. They got Sundays off and they
smoked opium.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
They didn't get.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
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 the holes
in the granite, placing the black powder and then the fuse,
(30:34):
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 of Arairoad,
nothing exceeded the cuts in time and cost it made
for people traveling across the continent.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Before the Mexican War.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
During the Gold Rudjs that started in eighteen forty eight
through the eighteen fifties, and until after the Civil War
entered in eighteen sixty.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Five, it took a person half a year.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Or they went all the way around South America and
came back up again.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
And then there'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
San Francisco in seven days. That included stops so fast
(31:57):
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
first class, seventy dollars for immigrant. By June eighteen seventy,
that was down to one hundred dollars for first class,
(32:18):
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 meant a pullman sleeping car.
The immigrants sat on a bench. Freight rates by train
were incredibly less than for ox or horse drawn wagons,
(32:38):
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
eighteen sixty two Pacientic Railway Act, and which did for
(33:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
And we went through the biggest change.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
And my grandparents, 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
boli slavery, and they built the transcontin Hill Railroad, and
(33:39):
in the building of that railroad they brought in the telegraph.
We think we are an instant communication today. The telegraph
puts you an instant communication. 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 hossible, and so much else in American
(34:03):
business that came about because of that telegraph. So the telegraph,
meanwhile could move ideas, thoughts, statistic any words or numbers
that could be put on paper from one place.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
To another, from Europe or England or New York to San.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
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 May thirty, eighteen seventy, that's
almost exactly one year after the Golden Spike. The paper
(34:36):
had this item. It was a cheering 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 at home, which fact was announced,
and loud applause followed from all.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
In the car. Just imagine that.
Speaker 2 (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 had taken seemingly forever to get from the
(35:47):
east to the West coast now cost pennies and got
there in a few days. 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
(36:11):
want to know when it's high noon. You look up
in the sky and when the sun is 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
(36:33):
have trains going in both directions and you don't have
the same time in Cheyenne as you do in Omaha,
they're going to cry. 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 oubsessed with time, as we
(36:55):
still are.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Time's up, time's wasting, the train is leaving the station,
and saw it.
Speaker 2 (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 continent 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 3 (37:38):
So we admire those who did it.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
For what they were and what they accomplished, and how
much each of us owes them.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
And what storytelling. 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 audience. And by
the way, nothing like it in the world. The men
who built the Transcontinental Railroad is a terrific read here
on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories.
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.
(00:31):
His Bestseller's chronicle Our Nation's critical Battles and Achievements. From
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 as estate.
(00:55):
Here's Stephen Ambrose to tell us the story from his
bestseller Nothing Like It in the World. The men who
built the Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
My editor ause 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. And I don't want to deal with these
robber barons, and.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
She said, you do you?
Speaker 2 (01:38):
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 track.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
So that was how I got started.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
This 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 3 (02:07):
I said, listen, I'm a writer.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
You can't put.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Those bridges over this river. Our steamboats are going to
run into them. Lincoln defended the Rock Island. I mean,
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
west as your steamships have to go north and south.
And that principle was accepted by the Illinois Supreme.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Court, and that's what made railroading in America.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Lincoln got written into the eighteen sixty Republican platform support
for the building of a trans continental railroad, and that
was done, and 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, Aile. It
(03:26):
was eighteen fifty nine, and the man he was staying with,
his name was Pusey, pointed to a man down the
way on the veranda 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 3 (03:43):
And that snapped Lincoln's head around. Let's go meet, he.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Said, And you know those great big long legs of
his ev 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 from right up the plat u
of Valley.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Why do you think so?
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Lincoln ask and Dodge told him why he thought so,
And from 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
(04:25):
of the American people in the nineteenth century. 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
(04:48):
been done without a representative, democratic political system. Without skill
and ambitious engineers, without bosses and foreman who had learned
how to organizing lead men in the Civil War, without
free labor, without hard working laborers who had learned how
(05:08):
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 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
(05:33):
order to win all. Most of all, it could not
have been done without teamwork. The United States was less
than one hundred years old when the Civil War was won,
slavery abolished, and the first transcontinental railroad built.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Not until nearly.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
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 road that the Russians got
started in the 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
(06:11):
Chinese in addition, the Russians had hundreds of thousands of
convicts working on the line as slave laborers. Even at
that It 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
(06:34):
did it first, and they did it even though the
United States was.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
The youngest of countries.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
It had proclaimed its independence in seventeen seventy six, won
its independence in seventeen eighty three, bought the Louisiana Purchase,
through which much of the Union Pacific rand in eighteen
o three, added California and Nevada and Utah to the
Union in eighteen forty eight, through which the Central Pacific
Grand and completed the linking of the continent in eighteen
(07:02):
sixty nine, thus ensuring an empire of liberty running from
sea to Shining Sea.
Speaker 1 (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. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
(07:58):
to learn more. 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
(08:22):
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. Read them with the family. There
is no better storytelling about our great country than Stephen Ambrose.
Let's continue with the story.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Feet below the line of the railroad.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
There are no trails, not even a goat path. The
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 would be curved around
the mountain. The curves that hugged the monolith were either
(09:19):
upgrade or occasionally down.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Men had to be lowered in a.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Boston's chair from above to place the black powder.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
First of all to drill a hole for it.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Then to place the black powder, fixing light the fuses,
and then yelled on the man above to hoss up.
With regard to cape 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
(09:54):
the summer of eighteen sixty five, a Chinese foreman went
up to Strowbridge, who was the for the Central Pacific.
The Chinese nodded and then waited for permission to speak.
When it was granted, he said that men of China
are skilled at work like this. Our ancestors built fortresses
in the Angsty garges. Would you permit Chinese crews to
(10:18):
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. 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
(10:39):
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 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
(11:02):
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. The Chinese, working then
hanging in their baskets, had to bore the holes with
their small hand drills, then tamp in the explosives, set
(11:22):
in light the fuse and hower to be pulled out
of the way.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
They used a.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Huge amount of power that was shipped to them from Sacramento.
The Chinese made the roadbed and laid the track around
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 laborers on the
(11:47):
Central Pacific, mainly because, unlike the work in the tunnel,
it makes for a spectacular diarrhum as well it should.
Hanging from those baskets, Drilling holes in the cliff, putting
in the powder, placing the fuse, and getting hauled up
was a spectacular piece of work. The White laborers couldn't
do it. The Chinese could, if not, as a matter
(12:12):
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 at
Cape Horn. 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
(12:35):
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 You need to know that California has
on its eastern side the Sierra Nevada that is granted,
(12:59):
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. And the
tunnels had to 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
(13:22):
have to blast out before getting to the east slope
were clustered in a small stretch of two miles at
the top of the long climb. 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.
(13:47):
Of all the backbreaking labor that went into the building
of the CP and the up of all the dangers
inherent in the work, this was the worst. The drills
lost their edges to the ground and had to be
replaced frequently. One Chinese worker would hold that drill up,
and then there were two men behind him with sledgehammers.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
And the other guy off, and the other guy waff
and that went on for eight hours.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
The man holding the drill.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Had to be steady or he would get hit by
the sledgehammer. The man swinging the hammer had to have
muscles like steel. 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.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
The blast, and they would hope.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Sometimes the fuse worked, sometimes it didn't.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Often the workers had put in two.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Much powder, and most of it blew toward them harmlessly
as far as the granite 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.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
That's more than went up in a day.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
In the Civil War, progress was incredibly slow with men
working round the clock. This is twenty four hours a day,
eight hours, eight hours and eight hours between six and
twelve inches was a normal twenty four hour day.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Of how much they gained.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Charlie Crocker, in charge, gave orders to establish permanent work
camp on each side of the summit to facilitate the
round the clock drilling, blasting, scraping, shoveling and hauling by
the Chinese. Charlie figured there was no night or day
within a tunnel.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
The men worked in groups of.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Twenty years sold because only a handful could work at
any one time. They ate healthy, well cooked, and tasty food.
Unlike the white workers on the Union Pacific. The Central
Pacific provided, as did the Union Pacific the Americans with
boiled beef and potatoes.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
And that's all they wanted and some salt.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Each of these foods.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Came dried purchased from one of the Chinese merchants in
San Francisco. Further, the Chinese ate rice, solid cabbage, vermiculai, bacon,
and sweet crackers. Very occasionally they had fresh meat, park
being a prime favored along with chicken. That food helped
keep the Chinese healthy. The water they drank was even
more important. The Americans drank from the streams and lakes,
(17:19):
and many of them got diarrhea, dysentery, and other illnesses.
The Chinese drank only tepid tea. The 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 1 (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. The men who built
the Transcontinental Railroad. This is our American stories. And we
(18:08):
continue with our Americans stories, and let's return to Stephen
Ambrose telling the story of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
According to contemporaries, the white worker had a hydrophobia which induced.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Him to avoid any contact with the water.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
In contrast, the Chinese are accustomed to daily.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Evolutions of their entire person.
Speaker 2 (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 Chinese 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 gold fields.
The Chinese and didn't do it that way, and Crocker said,
a Strawberry, let's try Chinese. And Storberges said, you're crazy.
(19:17):
They're only that high, the only weigh one hundred and
ten pounds. They can't possibly do this work. And Crocker said,
they'd 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, you know,
(19:38):
it wasn't. There were German descendants, and there were Scandinavians,
and there were Italians, and there were Ritian 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 they were almost
(20:00):
all 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.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
You look at.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
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 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.
(20:31):
Falling mind 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 signed on with
the Union Pacific to go to work to build something
(20:53):
that they knew, and they did they could bring their
grandchildren to and say, hell, help build that. And General Dodge,
who he wasn't general anymore, he had been in the
Civil War, but he was superintendent and head of construction
and the chief engineer for the UN Pacific. He said
(21:15):
it was the best organized, best equipped, and best disciplined
workforce I have ever seen. And Dodge built 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.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
And this road, first of all, was going through their land.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
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 go on to Rollins or wherever in
(21:59):
Wyoming and disembark from the train and boom. They could
hit the Indians just like that, and the Indians were
aware of that. 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
(22:20):
laying of the track across the Great Plains meant.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
You were splitting the buffalo herd in half.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So they attacked often, and sometimes with some effect, and
sometimes with.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Great effect, because they would.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
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 whoof over and win
And then the Indians would attack and they would take
everything they could out of the cars, and especially if
they could find some whiskey, and that became very notorious
at Jewlesburg in Colorado. One of the ways that the
(22:58):
railroad got control 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 up or not.
But dog 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 3 (23:20):
Officers in the Civil War.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
And they would see a hostile engine 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 mine 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. They kept on working. They
didn't whine, they didn't complain, they didn't quit, They just
(24:31):
kept working. They had taken on a job that is
accurately described as backbreaking. It was in an addition, a
job that experts said could not be done in the
ten years it had been allotted. If ever, a day's
routine was something like this. In the morning, the men
were up at first light, after their toilet and washing
(24:52):
their faces and hands in a ten base, and they
had a hearty breakfast and then went to work.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
The noontime was caught.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
And they had an hour for a heavy dinner that
included pictures of steaming coffee, pans of beef soup, platters
heaped with boiled beef potatoes, sometimes condensed milk diluted the water.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
The men were there to eat.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (25:39):
The evening meal was more leisurely, then to.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (26:02):
When they did, they were shot. One a day or
more there was no law.
Speaker 2 (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 hale to be repeated the next
day and the next and the next.
Speaker 1 (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. It's life itself, it's sustenance.
(26:47):
And by the way, this story of the Union pacifica
of the Irish. Fifty percent of the Irish dominated this
and these crews, and almost all were Vets. As he
pointed out, they didn't.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Want to go back to the farm.
Speaker 1 (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
product and say I helped build that. When we come
back more of this remarkable story, the building of the
(27:19):
Transcontinental Railroads and Steven Ambrose here on our American stories.
And we continue here on our American stories. Let's pick
(27:40):
up where Steven Ambrose last left off.
Speaker 2 (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 PA went out in the early summer to offer
time and half pay to ensure that the up reached
the hundred meridian before any other line. He also offered
(28:07):
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 3 (28:25):
He was impressed by the results. The workers, he.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
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 sixty six sixty
(28:50):
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 depositive more.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
At the summit, the pack I reaged.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Eighteen feet on the level, more snow falls on the
Sierra Nevada than any place else in the forty eight states.
Only Alaska guesst 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
(29:22):
to the tunnel opening. If it had 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 the rival drove them on. The Chinese
laborers dug snow tunnels from fifty to five hundred feet
long to get to the granite tunnels.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
And they lived in these igloos, is what they were.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
And these Chinese, for sometimes as long as six months,
never 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 let in a little bit of light. Also
a chimneys and airshafts. But for the most part the
(30:04):
Chinese worked eight drank their tea, gambled smoked opium, which
they did on Sundays. They got Sundays off and they
smoked opium.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
They didn't get.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
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 the holes
in the granite, placing the black powder and then the fuse,
(30:34):
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 of Arairoad,
nothing exceeded the cuts in time and cost it made
for people traveling across the continent.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Before the Mexican War.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
During the Gold Rudjs that started in eighteen forty eight
through the eighteen fifties, and until after the Civil War
entered in eighteen sixty.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Five, it took a person half a year.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Or they went all the way around South America and
came back up again.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
And then there'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
San Francisco in seven days. That included stops so fast
(31:57):
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
first class, seventy dollars for immigrant. By June eighteen seventy,
that was down to one hundred dollars for first class,
(32:18):
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 meant a pullman sleeping car.
The immigrants sat on a bench. Freight rates by train
were incredibly less than for ox or horse drawn wagons,
(32:38):
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
eighteen sixty two Pacientic Railway Act, and which did for
(33:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
And we went through the biggest change.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
And my grandparents, 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
boli slavery, and they built the transcontin Hill Railroad, and
(33:39):
in the building of that railroad they brought in the telegraph.
We think we are an instant communication today. The telegraph
puts you an instant communication. 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 hossible, and so much else in American
(34:03):
business that came about because of that telegraph. So the telegraph,
meanwhile could move ideas, thoughts, statistic any words or numbers
that could be put on paper from one place.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
To another, from Europe or England or New York to San.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
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 May thirty, eighteen seventy, that's
almost exactly one year after the Golden Spike. The paper
(34:36):
had this item. It was a cheering 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 at home, which fact was announced,
and loud applause followed from all.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
In the car. Just imagine that.
Speaker 2 (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 had taken seemingly forever to get from the
(35:47):
east to the West coast now cost pennies and got
there in a few days. 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
(36:11):
want to know when it's high noon. You look up
in the sky and when the sun is 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
(36:33):
have trains going in both directions and you don't have
the same time in Cheyenne as you do in Omaha,
they're going to cry. 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 oubsessed with time, as we
(36:55):
still are.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Time's up, time's wasting, the train is leaving the station,
and saw it.
Speaker 2 (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 continent 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 3 (37:38):
So we admire those who did it.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
For what they were and what they accomplished, and how
much each of us owes them.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
And what storytelling. 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 audience. And by
the way, nothing like it in the world. The men
who built the Transcontinental Railroad is a terrific read here
on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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