Authors: H.W. Brands
“Brigham was cold and close,” Stanford reported to Hopkins, regarding his first audience with the Mormon theocrat. But on this visit and subsequent ones, Stanford thawed Young enough to engage construction crews for the Central Pacific. The Central Saints would work west from Ogden and around the north shore of the Salt Lake.
L
ABOR WAS A CHRONIC
problem, and the most pressing one after an 1864 revision of the federal railroad law put investors
ahead
of the
government in claims upon the roads. As the money started coming in, the race between the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific began in earnest. Each side scrambled to find the crews needed to cross the continent. Besides the Mormons in Utah, the Union Pacific relied on Irish immigrants, who had first left Ireland in the potato famine of the 1840s and never stopped coming to America.
The Central Pacific likewise started with Irish laborers. This particularly suited James Strobridge, the superintendent of construction, who had worked with the Irish before. But there weren’t enough Irish in the West, and they developed what Stanford and his partners conceived to be an inflated sense of their worth. “Four or five of the Irishmen on pay day got to talking together,” Crocker recalled. “And I said to Mr. Strobridge there is some little trouble ahead.” The “trouble” materialized in the form of a committee of workmen who requested an increase in wages. “I told Mr. Strobridge then to go over to Auburn and get some Chinamen and put them to work,” Crocker continued. This quieted the demand for better pay—so effectively that Crocker wanted to go ahead even after the Irish retreat. Strobridge was reluctant. “I was very much prejudiced against Chinese labor,” he conceded. “I did not believe we could make a success of it.”
To judge by his earlier comments extolling California as white man’s country, Stanford was similarly prejudiced against Chinese labor. Indeed, he had reiterated his anti-Chinese feeling in his inaugural address as governor. “To my mind,” he said then, “it is clear that their settlement among us is to be discouraged by every legitimate means. Large numbers are already here, and unless we do something early to check their immigration, the question—which of the two tides of immigration meeting upon the shores of the Pacific [the Caucasian and the Asiatic] shall be turned back— will be forced upon our consideration when far more difficult than now of disposal.”
But that had been politics, and this was business. (The distinction became easier when Stanford retired from the governorship after one term to concentrate on the railroad.) Like Strobridge, Stanford modified his views, especially as he discovered how cheaply the Chinese worked. Where white workers received $30 a month plus board, the Chinese got $26 per month
and boarded themselves. (Food prices had fallen since the high Gold Rush, but this still represented a major savings.) At first the Chinese were confined to the unskilled jobs. Yet when Irish stonemasons went out on strike, Crocker ordered Chinese replacements. Strobridge objected that he couldn’t make masons out of Chinese. Crocker replied that of course he could. “Didn’t they build the Chinese Wall?”
The Chinese had built much besides their great wall, and in doing so had mastered techniques they put to spectacular use in the Sierras. On the steepest rock faces they lowered themselves in woven baskets from the cliff tops; swaying in the wind, they drilled holes for blasting powder, then tamped in the charges and lit the fuses before being pulled (usually, but not always) out of harm’s way.
The addition of the Chinese to the Central workforce accelerated construction at a critical time for the road. “We swarmed the mountains with men,” a satisfied Stanford explained.
W
ILLIAM SHERMAN’S CONNECTION
to the Union Pacific was less direct than Stanford’s to the Central Pacific, but it was hardly less significant. Sherman’s wartime experience convinced him of the importance of railroads. “The Atlanta campaign would simply have been impossible without the use of the railroads from Louisville to Nashville—one hundred and eighty five miles—and from Chattanooga to Atlanta—one hundred and thirty-seven miles,” he wrote. By then he agreed that a railroad across the continent—not a wagon road—was what the nation needed. In fact, he saw the construction of the railroad connecting East and West as no less important than the ongoing efforts to reconnect North and South. “I think this subject as important as Reconstruction,” he told brother John, regarding the railroad.
For years John, the lawmaker in the family, had been the one with the power to help or hinder the railroad; now it was William’s turn. After the parades and reviews celebrating the Union victory in the Civil War finally ended, Sherman was appointed to command the military division of the Mississippi (a designation later changed to Missouri). His headquarters
were at St. Louis, and he had responsibility for a vast stretch of the territory through which the Union Pacific would run. He took a personal interest in the construction. “Every time they build a section,” he promised, “I’ll be on hand to look at it and see that it is properly built.” Making his tours more attractive was the fact that many of the laborers were his former soldiers. As he rode beside the line of work, the men put down their tools and waved their hats for “Uncle Billy.” He and they reminisced about the old days in Georgia and the Carolinas, and he laughed to remind them how he had taught them to tear up tracks; now they were doing just the opposite.
Meanwhile the Union Pacific took a special interest in Sherman. His brother Charles was appointed a federal director of the line. (Ostensibly guardians of the public interest, the federal directors in fact were creatures of the companies. “They are not worth an iota to the government,” Huntington privately conceded.) An old friend and wartime comrade of Sherman’s, Grenville Dodge, became the railroad’s chief engineer. Thomas Durant named the Union’s first locomotive the
General Sherman
, and he treated the real general to the inaugural ride on the initial stretch of sixteen miles running west from Omaha.
The ride was rough, with the guests seated on nail kegs resting on flatcars. But the rhetoric was appropriately enthusiastic, recalling to Sherman’s mind a speech Edward Baker had given on a similar occasion, regarding Sherman’s own railroad in California. “Baker had electrified us by his unequalled oratory, painting the glorious things which would result from uniting the Western coast with the East by bands of iron.” That had been before the war, which swallowed up Baker (at the Battle of Balls Bluff) and a generation of America’s youthful manhood, and forestalled the feat he forecast. Sherman perceived a better chance of success this time, but despite the enthusiasm of Durant and everyone else associated with the Union Pacific, he didn’t see success coming easily or soon. “When the orators spoke so confidently of the determination to build two thousand miles of railway across the plains, mountains, and desert, devoid of timber, with no population, but on the contrary raided by the bold and bloody Sioux and Cheyennes, who had almost successfully defied our power for
half a century, I was disposed to treat it jocularly.” To some of his fellow guests that day, he declared, “This is a great enterprise, but I hardly expect to live to see it completed.”
As military commander for the Missouri region, Sherman was responsible for maintaining peace with the Sioux and Cheyennes and other tribes of the plains. He didn’t anticipate a great deal of trouble, at least not at first. He wrote Grant in August 1866 that the Indians were “pure beggars and poor devils more to be pitied than dreaded.” To be sure, the Indians got into scrapes with white settlers, but the latter were usually to blame. The settlers wanted the army to “kill all the Indians,” Sherman told Grant, and they behaved in a manner to force the army’s hand. Sherman had scant sympathy for the settlers. There would be no offensive against the Indians if he could help it. “I will not permit them to be warred against as long as they are not banded together in parties large enough to carry on war.”
This last part of Sherman’s statement was the crux of the difficulty. As the railroad crews pushed out across the plains, the Indians realized that the threat to their way of life posed by the railroad was like nothing they had encountered before. However numerous the overland emigrants had been, clearly they were just passing through, and the less they were molested the sooner they’d be gone. But the railroad altered the landscape— the Indians’ home—permanently. Towns were even now springing up beside the rails, and settlers were arriving. Whether or not the Indians— or anyone else, for that matter—fully recognized at this early date what the railroads would do to the buffalo, the chief sustenance of the Indians and of the entire culture of the plains, it was apparent that the Indians’ way of life was under mortal assault.
Predictably, the Indians struck back. In an initial statement of purpose, a coalition of Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos surprised a contingent of U.S. cavalry and wiped it out. The attack sent chills across the plains and prompted renewed demands for army action.
Sherman’s condition for leaving the Indians alone—that they not threaten white predominance in the West—obviously was not being met. He responded with the same vigor as in the Atlanta campaign. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux,” he told Grant, “even to
their extermination: men, women and children.” As events proved, Sherman’s temper, and his concern for his troops, had got the better of him in this instance; he never pursued an extermination campaign. But his change of mind from just a few months earlier, when he had seen no cause for an offensive against the Indians, was striking nonetheless. He assured Grenville Dodge that “we can act so energetically that both the Sioux and the Cheyennes must die, or submit to our dictation.”
In time the Sioux and Cheyennes did some of both, but meanwhile they terrorized the construction gangs. The spring of 1867 brought a series of attacks along the rail route. An engineering crew was ambushed despite its military escort; a soldier and a surveyor were killed, the latter dying twenty-four hours after being scalped and mutilated. A separate band of Indian raiders killed another surveyor and stole a herd of cattle. A war party attacked a train that had reached the end of the track; three men were killed. A group of Cheyennes pulled up the rails on one stretch of the line; when a locomotive derailed, the Indians killed and scalped the engineer and brakeman. The most shocking attack, albeit not the most violent, occurred against a trainload of dignitaries who came out from Washington to inspect the construction. A hundred Indians ambushed the train; seeing the size of the group, they contented themselves with stealing livestock before disappearing.
The raids on the railroad were part of a broad counteroffensive against the white presence in the West. The famous newsman, Henry Morton Stanley (who hadn’t yet discovered David Livingstone in Africa), described the Indians’ style of warfare and what it appeared to presage:
When the opportune moment arrives, from every sandhill and ravine the hawks of the desert swoop down with unrivalled impetuosity, and in a few seconds the post or camp is carried, the tent or ranch burnt, and the emigrants are murdered. It is generally believed here that if the present suicidal policy of the Government is carried on much longer, the plains’ settlers must succumb to the unequal conflict, or unite in bands to carry on the war after the manner of the Indians, which means to kill, burn, destroy Indian
villages, innocent papooses and squaws, scalp the warriors, and mutilate the dead; in fact, follow in the same course as the red men, that their name may be rendered a terror to all the Indians.
In the short run the Indian offensive threatened to halt the railroad construction. Grenville Dodge declared, “We’ve got to clean the damn Indians out or give up building the Union Pacific Railroad. The government may take its choice!” Thomas Durant cabled Grant at the War Department, “Unless some relief can be afforded by your department immediately, I beg leave to assure you that the entire work will be suspended.”
Neither Grant nor Sherman was willing to see the construction abandoned. Sherman considered summoning volunteers for a campaign against the Indians, but dropped the idea from fear it would make things seem worse than they were. Instead he authorized the enlistment of four companies of Pawnees, whose knowledge of the plains, combined with their traditional hatred of the Sioux and Cheyennes, made them invaluable allies. The Pawnee companies were assigned to guard the rail crews, and though they had little effect on the larger war, they allowed the work to continue.
At the same time, Sherman addressed the overall question of the future of the Indians on the plains. He communicated to their leaders that if they wanted peace, they would be allowed to live in peace, although not necessarily where they desired. On the other hand, if they chose war, they would get war. In September 1867, Sherman headed a commission delegated by President Andrew Johnson to deliver precisely this ultimatum. The meeting took place at Fort Laramie; hundreds of Indians came, including the principal chiefs of the Sioux and Cheyennes. The chiefs complained that the railroad and the settlers were destroying the Indians’ way of life; game was already growing scarce and their women and children were going hungry.
Sherman offered no false hope that the traditional ways could be salvaged. The only answer for the Indians was to accept the land—the reservations—the government was offering them. “If you don’t choose your homes now, it will be too late next year,” he said. The white men were coming, whether the Indians liked it or not. “You can see for yourselves
that travel across the country has increased so much that the slow ox wagons will not answer the white man. We will build iron roads, and you cannot stop the locomotives any more than you can stop the sun or the moon.” The one decision left to the Indians was how to accept their defeat. “We now can offer you this: choose your homes and live like white men and we will help you.” If the Indians resisted, they would be crushed. “Our people in the East hardly think of what you call war out here, but if they make up their minds to fight, they will come out as thick as the herd of buffaloes, and if you continue fighting you will all be killed.”