Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Build the Transcontinental Railroad by Stephen Ambrose
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the U.S. War with Mexico. But it did more than that. It also expanded America’s boundaries from sea to shining sea, Atlantic to Pacific. It made Manifest Destiny truly manifest in the sense that now America’s borders stretched wide as her ambitions.
Shortly thereafter, the Gold Rush was on, and fortune-seekers the world over were making their way to California. For Americans in the East, it was an arduous journey. It involved sailing south to the Isthmus of Panama to the port town of Chagres. From there they would have traveled by small boat up the Chagres River and then walked or ridden mules through the jungles to the other side of the isthmus where they would catch yet another ship to take them to California.
The alternative was to sail clear around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, where brutal winds might keep a ship stalled for weeks in the bitter Antarctic chill. The whole trip often took up to six months, less if one took the Isthmus, but that risked death by cholera, malaria, or worse. The cost would often run to more than $1,000 a head.
For all of America’s progress, according to Ambrose, “A man whose birthday was in 1829 or earlier had been born into a world in which President Andrew Jackson traveled no faster than Julius Caesar, a world in which no thought or information could be transmitted any faster than in Alexander the Great’s time.”
But that was all about to change.
Less than a week after the pounding of the Golden Spike, a man or woman could go from New York to San Francisco in seven days. That included stops. So fast, they used to say, “that you don’t even have time to take a bath.” And the cost to go from New York to San Francisco, as listed in the summer of 1869, was $150 for first class, $70 for emigrant. By June 1870, that was down to $136 for first class, $110 for second class, and $65 for third, or emigrant, class.
Stephen Ambrose’s account of the building of the transcontinental railroad is illuminating, occasionally entertaining, but ultimately a bit of a letdown coming off what I felt was his spectacular book on Lewis & Clark, Undaunted Courage.
Admittedly, any telling of this tale of corporate ambition will invariably involve numerous dealings with banks, bonds, land grants, legislation, lobbyists, contracts, supply chains, correspondences, and back-room deals. You’ll find all of that here. In abundance.
Ambrose even falls victim at times to research dumping, a bad habit I’ve occasionally spotted when historians regurgitate their unedited source material to either pad their page count, or because they feel that the lay reader will find the minutiae as illuminating as they did. We find it here in the form of transcripts of telegraph correspondence regarding supply chains and financial dealings that go on just a bit longer than was probably warranted.
That being said, Ambrose does do a fairly good job of laying out this immense story in a pretty readable fashion for the most part.
He begins with a look at the enormity of the task at hand: laying out by hand, with no machines to help, about 1,912-miles of track. It would be constructed piece by piece out of the West by the newly-created Central Pacific (CP) and from the East by the nascent Union Pacific (UP).
Both railroad companies were led by small groups of highly motivated, ambitious, and let’s say, ethically-challenged men.
Ambrose introduces us to all the major players in turn. From the CP side, we first meet intrepid engineer Theodore Judah, and his UP counterpart, Grenville Dodge. Both men were pioneers in surveying lines for the railroads that would lead to tracks laid through the heart of towering mountains, across scorching deserts, over gaping canyons, and along the deceptively languid Great Plains.
Later we meet the men who would form what were to be, at the time of their founding, the largest corporations in American history. From the CP we’re introduced to Crocker, Huntington, Hopkins, Strobridge, and Leland Stanford. While the UP leadership seemed to primarily consist of the irascible and ambitious Doc Durant.
But the book’s best parts are the day-to-day details of the unfathomably hard-working crews of mainly Irish and Chinese immigrants.
Ambrose seems especially sympathetic to the Chinese who worked the CP line. They were not only hard-working and selfless but endlessly innovative, though there was initial hesitation from Strobridge to hiring them due to their diminutive stature.
They couldn’t possibly do the work. They averaged 120 pounds in weight, and only a few were taller than four feet ten inches. “I will not boss Chinese!” he declared. “They built the Great Wall of China, didn’t they,” replied Crocker. Besides, “who said laborers have to be white to build railroads?”
Strobridge quickly changed his tune once he saw them at work.
AFTER a month’s labor, Strobridge admitted, albeit grudgingly, that the Chinese had performed superbly. They worked as teams, took almost no breaks, learned how to blast away rocks, stayed healthy and on the job. Engineer Montague praised them and declared in his 1865 report, “The experiment has proved eminently successful.”
Ambrose receives criticism in online reviews for being too sympathetic to the money men like Crocker who financed and led the construction of the railroad, but I didn’t find that to be the case at all. In fact, in the book’s introduction, he even flat out states that he wasn’t initially drawn to the project because of the men’s greed and corruption.
He goes on to state later in the book,
They spent their fortunes lavishly, to the point that they became the very model of conspicuous consumption. The men who held stock in the Crédit Mobilier also got rich from it. In large part this was done by defrauding the government and the public, by paying the lowest possible wages to the men who built the lines, and by delaying or actually ignoring payments of bills to the subcontractors and the workmen. In many ways they used their power to guarantee profits for themselves. Most Americans found it difficult, even impossible to believe that they had actually earned those profits.
Hardly an apologist.
As for the government’s role, he defends the bonds and land grants as brilliant profit-making endeavors that also did immense good for the country’s citizens and goes on to say, “An automatic reaction that big business is always on the wrong side, corrupt and untrustworthy, is too easy, and the error is compounded if we fail to distinguish between incentives, for example, and fraud.”
This isn’t history with an agenda. It’s just history, with all its contradictions, complications, and uncomfortable truths. Ambrose isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but though I didn’t love the book, he still makes these stories come alive in ways that other historians only wish they could. He ends it on a thoughtful note that is a good lesson for modern Americans who seem to want to cast heroes and villains out of history’s makers.
It is possible to imagine all kinds of different routes across the continent or a better way for the government to help private industry, or maybe to have the government build and own it. But those things didn’t happen, and what did take place is grand. So we admire those who did it—even if they were far from perfect—for what they were and what they accomplished and how much each of us owes them.