Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/775

Rh transportation; but on November 7, 1867, the last railroad link east of the Missouri in the transcontinental line was completed. William B. Ogden had pushed the Chicago and Northwestern Railway into Council Bluffs, and that road, then as now a powerful ally of the Union Pacific, began pouring track material into the Council Bluffs yards, giving the latter road an actual railroad base for its supplies. It was needed. The Central Pacific party, taking advantage of the law of 1806, which opened the continent to a race between East and West builders, was bending every effort to get to Salt Lake ahead of its Eastern competitor. During 1807, General Dodge had already pushed the Union Pacific to Cheyenne in Wyoming, which after November 14 became the winter terminus.

The whole country now awoke to the contest that the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific were entering upon. Which should reach Salt Lake first, and which should win the big government subsidies, ranging through the mountains from $64,000 to $90,000 a mile?

The Union Pacific chief engineer, after a New York conference during the winter of 1867-8, returned to Omaha, called his staff around him, and laid out his plans. These centred upon Ogden, Utah, 502 miles west of the end of the track, as the objective point for 1868, and Humboldt Wells, 216 miles west of Ogden, for the spring of 1869. Preliminary lines had been run, but no final location had been made west of Laramie City, where town lots were sold in April, 1868. General Dodge had already solved the vital problem of the pass across the Rockies by getting lost one afternoon in the Black Hills—if it is fair so to describe the accident which led to the remarkable discovery. For over two years all explorations had failed to reveal a satisfactory crossing of this secondary range known as the Black Hills, which, on account of their short approaches and their great height, is the most difficult of all the ranges to get over. On this occasion General Dodge, returning from a Powder River campaign, leaving his troops, with a scout and a few men rode up Lodge Pole Creek along the overland trail, and struck south along the crest of the mountains. Indians beset the little party before noon, and got between them and their trains. Holding the Indians at bay with their Winchesters, they retreated. It was nearly night when they finally escaped the enemy, and meantime they had ridden down an unknown ridge that led out of the hills and clear to the plains without a break. That night General Dodge told his guide that if they saved their scalps he believed they had found the crossing of the Black Hills: over this pass the trains of the Union Pacific run to-day.

This engineering work of running the lines through the Black Hills, then, had in 1867 already been done; but beyond that point absolutely everything remained to be done. Engineering parties were distributed during the winter months to be on the ground when spring opened, and those destined for Utah crossed the Wasatch Mountains on sledges, with the snow over the tops of the telegraph-poles. The track was laid across the Black Hills, and this gave an opportunity of running ties down the mountain streams instead of bringing them 800 miles from the Missouri River. Even after the builders had reached the Hills the country afforded nothing but the road-bed and ties, and it took forty car-loads of material a day to supply "the front." In April, graders were at Laramie working from daylight till dark, and from the start to the season's finish the construction crews worked every day without an hour's loss of time. Every man, from the chief of construction to the water-carriers, seemed bitted for a finish heat, and that season the contractors actually pushed their grade to Green River, to Ogden, to Salt Lake, and to far Humboldt Wells.

Winter caught the builders at the foot of the Wasatch Range, but it no longer stayed them. The spirit of the fight had got beyond that, and the frozen earth was dynamited like rock. Track was laid across the Wasatch on a bed covered with snow and ice, and one of General Casement's track-laying trains, track and all, slid bodily off the ice into the ditch! Even the Mormons roused themselves, and under Brigham Young's exhortation turned mightily into the race. In rail-roading then, as in politics later, the watchword was, "Claim everything," and