The Transcontinental Railroad, Part IV
Brian Trumbore
President/Editor, StocksandNews.com

The following may seem a bit repetitive, given last week's snow tales and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, but it helps to reinforce just how difficult it was to build the stretch over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, starting just 40-50 miles east of Sacramento. So we continue, with David Haward Bain's "Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad" as the source.

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It's June 1867, and the snow pack at 7,000 feet in the Sierra was compacted with the melting and nightly refreezing. Avalanches were a major concern. As was a lack of labor, for it seems the Chinese had other work to attract them such as mining. Charley Crocker, co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad (CP), noted "We have proved their value as laborers, & everybody is trying Chinese & now we can't get them."

Crocker had raised the monthly wages from $31 to $35 in the spring and the CP was looking for new workers as the ships came in from Canton.

But on June 25, 1867, laborers suddenly threw down their picks and shovels and went back to camp. Construction Chief Strobridge, a most intimidating sort, couldn't get them to return. Now the Chinese wanted $40 per month and their day shortened from eleven to ten hours. Said Crocker's brother E.B., "This strike of the chinamen is the hardest blow we have had here. If we get over this without yielding, it will be all right hereafter."

Charley Crocker confronted the labor leaders and told them he wouldn't pay a cent over $35. But the chinamen didn't budge. The Central Pacific began to think about looking east for workers. Then management came up with a solution. Stop providing food. E.B. Crocker noted:

"?they really began to suffer. None of us went near them for a week?Then Charles went up, & they gathered around him - & he told them that he would not be dictated to - that he made the rules for them & not they for him. That if they went to work immediately they would remit the fines usually retained out of their wages when they did not work, but if they refused, he would pay them nothing for June."

With the evil-looking, eye-patched Jim Strobridge by Crocker's side, some armed men and a mob of whites, the hungry workers were, in the words of E.B. Crocker, "glad to go to work again."

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December 1867. David Haward Bain writes:

"On Monday, December 16, rain began to pour down on Sacramento. On the summit it took the form of the snowfall that would stop them in the Sierra for the winter. Charley Crocker, up there to distribute the payroll, telegraphed that six feet had fallen and was 'too deep to handle.'"

But the snowplows were able to keep the road open and the Crockers et al became way too optimistic about the prospects for the winter. They were wrong. CP carpenter A.P. Partridge recalled that soon 4,000 laborers were moved into camps from the stormy upper slopes.

"Most of the Chinese came to Truckee and they filled up all the old buildings and sheds?.With the heavy fall of snow the old barn collapsed and killed four Chinese. A good many were frozen to death. There was a dance at Donner Lake at a hotel, and a sleigh load of us went up from Truckee and on our return, about 9 A.M. next morning, we saw something under a tree by the side of the road, its shape resembling that of a man. We stopped and found a frozen Chinese. As a consequence, we threw him in the sleigh with the rest of us, and took him into town and laid him out by the side of a shed and covered him with a rice mat."

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March 1868. David Haward Bain:

"Five feet of snow already stood in Cisco, but then in three days another thirteen feet fell?.Train service had halted below Cisco at Blue Canyon (roughly 50 miles from Sacramento on present- day Route 80), but the giant snowplow, eight engines, and three hundred men cleared upward to Emigrant Gap, hoping to meet an equally large force working downward from Cisco."

This particular storm was so bad, Charley Crocker himself, stranded in Cisco, used snowshoes to get to Emigrant Gap, where he caught a train and returned to Sacramento with bad news. "There is no place between Cisco & Cold Stream Gap with less than fifteen feet of snow lying on the track & line of uncompleted work," he reported on March 29. Some places had between 50 and 100 feet drifts. Of course more avalanches delayed work further.

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April 1868. After four feet fell on April 10, more workers were sought to clear the area up near the summit. But now, as the days were lengthening, there was a new, cruel problem confronting them. The sunlight reflecting off the mountainsides was blinding, so E.B. Crocker sought to buy up all the cheap goggles.

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May 1868. The snow on the western slope of the Sierra measured 7 to 12 feet deep and was solid ice. On the other side workers faced a crushing task. David Haward Bain:

"On the eastern slope at the Cold Stream gap, the snow was so much deeper and so compacted that the workers had to cut in large, descending steps, or benches, down toward where the tracks would be. The deeper the gangs dug, the more snow had to be flung upward to the next higher bench and thenceforth up to the next - 'in some places six times over from bench to bench,' Hopkins said, 'to get it up to the top of the snow cut & out of the way.' Leland Stanford would recall there were places where a snowfall of 63 feet 'was pressed down, perhaps, into not more than 18 feet, but packed as hard as ice, and requiring the pick and powder to make a passage.'

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Meanwhile, the Union Pacific Railroad had a few weather issues of its own as it made its way across the Rockies. A Blizzard covered most of Wyoming in February 1868, blocking some ninety miles of track for three weeks. [Present-day Route 80, between Laramie and Rawlins.] Hundreds were stranded on stalled trains. One man noted the difficulty of clearing the drifting snow.

"You can't get trains over this division by sending a snow outfit ahead with provisions?.as soon as you get through a cut have train follow. Have seen a cut fill up in two hours that took one hundred men ten hours to shovel out."

Laramie filled up with those stranded, and at Rawlins two hundred on one train were stuck at the station. David Haward Bain writes:

"Food and water soon ran short. The station restaurant and other establishments in the raw, windswept hamlet took advantage of the situation, charging exorbitant prices, such as $1.50 for a piece of bread and molasses. The train crew consoled themselves with whiskey and refused to stir."

It took ten days before the crew attempted to press on, but only when the passengers agreed to clear a drift a thousand feet long. "But when that was open the engineer had only enough steam to carry them into the deepest part of the drift, where the locomotive stalled again. A telegram from divisional headquarters to Rawlins forbade any further sorties. At this point the crew went on a two-day drunk. About fifty passengers then left on foot for Laramie. They arrived there in four days after terrible suffering." [David Haward Bain]

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Well, you get the picture by now. Next week the two sides finally hook up. [Or maybe we take a detour? Like the story of Donner Pass.]

Brian Trumbore