Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (5 page)

That is why Lincoln's question to Dodge was inevitably an integral part of the question of slavery's future in the American Republic, an economic question that was also the burning political and overwhelmingly moral question of the day. Lincoln, meanwhile, was about to accept seventeen lots in Council Bluffs as collateral for a loan he was considering making to fellow attorney Norman Judd. So he was in Iowa, among other reasons, to see for himself if the lots were worthwhile as collateral. The answer to that question was the railroad potential of the Great Plains.

T
HE
day he met Lincoln, Grenville Dodge was twenty-eight years old. Born April 12, 1831, in Massachusetts, the son of a common laborer, he
had worked on his first railroad at age fourteen, as a surveyor for Frederick Lander, who became one of the ablest surveyors in the exploration of the West. Lander was impressed by Dodge and told him to go to Norwich University in Vermont to become an engineer. He also gave Dodge his first vision of a Pacific railroad.

In 1848, Dodge entered Norwich, where the enthusiasm for railroad expansion was at a fever pitch. He found a faculty in Norwich who were, in his words, “filled with enthusiasm for expansion of railroads from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” Like them, Dodge was also strong for steam power. In his diary in the fall of 1850, he wrote: “Forty-three years ago today, on October 12, 1807, Fulton made his first steamboat trip up the Hudson River. How wonderful has been the effect of his discovery. In the short space of forty-three years steam power has revolutionized the world.”
18
Two months later, Dodge moved to Illinois, where the Rock Island was just getting ready to grade for the track. He worked for the Rock Island and other railroads. All travel to the West was still over the Indian trails and the plank roads and down the canal. There was much to do.

In January 1852, Dodge went to work for the IC. The railroad drove up the price of lands per acre from $1.25 to $6 in 1853, and to $25 by 1856, the year it was completed. But the twenty-one-year-old Dodge was more interested in the Rock Island's construction to the west than in the IC headed south. He quit the IC in 1853 and went back to work with the Rock Island, writing his father, “It is the true Pacific road and will be built to Council Bluffs and then on to San Francisco—this being the shortest and most feasible route.”
19

He was right about part of this. The Chicago, Rock Island was the first railroad to cross Illinois from Chicago to the Mississippi River. Henry Farnam, who had railroad experience in Connecticut, and Chicago resident Joseph Sheffield had done a survey westward from Rock Island. In 1852, they made another survey across Iowa, this time for the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad, organized by the Rock Island with Peter A. Dey as engineer.

In the autumn of 1852, Dodge made an application to Dey. Dey later said that he took Dodge on that fall and “very soon I discovered that there was a good deal in him. I discovered a wonderful energy. If I told him to do anything he did [it] under any and all circumstances. That feature was particularly marked. He so enhanced my opinion of him that in May, 1853, when I came out to Iowa City to make surveys from Davenport
west, I took him with me.”
20
Since Dey was one of the best railroad engineers in the country, if not the best, that was gratifying. Dodge called Dey “the most eminent engineer of the country, [a man] of great ability, [known for] his uprightness and the square deal he gave everyone.”
21
Dey put the youngster to work on a construction party, then as a surveyor across Iowa for the M&M.

Iowa was a natural link between the roads being pushed west from Chicago and any road crossing the Missouri River. When Chicago became a railroad center, Iowa became the necessary bridge between the Midwest and the Far West. The M&M had made a bargain with the Davenport and Iowa City Railroad by promising to complete the main line from Davenport to Iowa City in two years. Two weeks after this agreement, Dey went to work, with Dodge helping. Then Dodge went surveying on his own, west of Iowa City, with the Missouri River as his destination.

I
T
was 1853. Dodge led a party of fourteen men, including a cook and a hunter. He hoped to make the Missouri before the snow fell. His expenses ran to $1,000 per month. He was pleased by the opportunity and overjoyed at the wilderness he was entering. He wrote his father, “Oh, that you could come out and overtake me on the prairies of Iowa, look at the country and see how we live.” He was also ready to seize the main chance: he told his father, “We shall make an examination of the great Platte as far into Nebraska as we think fit.”
22

Dodge loved the flaming sumac, the gold tinge of the willows, the turning leaves on the cottonwood beside the rivers, and on the elms, black oak, and hard maple, the silvered wild grass, the variety and numbers of animals. All were fascinating to the young engineer from New England. He saw his first Western Indians, a group of Otoes, who fled. On a late afternoon in November, Dodge, on a solitary horseback reconnaissance in advance of his party, drew up at the edge of a great crescent of cliffs and beheld the river that thereafter always held him in thrall.

The Missouri was sprawled out on the floodplain that twisted and turned, gnawing at the sandbars in its sweep between the villages of Omaha and Council Bluffs. The Mormons had arrived at the latter in their wanderings in 1846 and left in 1852, en route to Salt Lake City. This reduced the population of Council Bluffs from six thousand to fewer than twenty-five hundred (Omaha had about five hundred residents).
But Dodge knew, at his first glance, that here was the site for the eastern terminus for the first transcontinental. On November 22, 1853, his party caught up with him, the first surveying party to traverse Iowa from east to west. There would be others, and a race was on, but it would be fourteen years before a train crept into Council Bluffs, even as the Union Pacific reached out from Omaha into the mountains.

Dodge crossed the Missouri on a flatboat. On the western side, he had the party continue to scout while he went on ahead to examine the country to the Platte Valley, some twenty-five miles farther west. Dodge went up the Platte, looked around and studied its bank, and liked what he saw.

Dodge asked every immigrant he ran into, plus the voyagers and Indians, for all the information they could furnish on the country farther west.
23
On the way home he took out a claim on the Elkhorn River. It was the first major tributary of the Platte, only twenty or so miles west of Omaha.

Having completed the location of the M&M, Dodge took a leave and went back to Illinois to marry Anne Brown on May 28, 1854. The couple then returned to his claim on the Elkhorn, where he built a cabin and took out claims for his father and his brother, who joined him in March 1855. Together they plowed the virgin prairie and began to farm. Emigrants crossing Nebraska in 1855 never saw a white man's house between the Dodge cabin on the Elkhorn and Denver.

I
N
July 1855, two exhausted and seriously ill men rode up to Dodge's cabin on spent horses. Dodge was amazed; one of them was Frederick Lander, the man who had influenced him to go to Norwich University. He welcomed Lander and his companion, helped them off their horses and into the cabin, nursed them, and got their story. Lander said he had been surveying for the government from Puget Sound, in the Washington Territory, to the Missouri River, that he had started with six men but only he and the man with him had survived. Still, he had completed his survey.

That evening, Dodge and Lander sat on the banks of the Elkhorn, watching the fireflies and talking railroads. “Dodge,” Lander said, “the Pacific railroad is bound to be built through this valley and if it doesn't run through your claim, I'll be badly mistaken.”

“I've already figured that it will,” Dodge replied. “How else could it go from the Missouri River if built this far north?”

Lander reported that Jefferson Davis, the secretary of war, didn't want
the railroad to be so far north. “He wants the Pacific railroad to be to the south. I'm going to oppose his views as soon as I get to Washington.”

And he did. Davis had reports that stressed the thirty-second parallel as quicker, cheaper, and more dependable than any of the others. Lander, in his report, made a frank comparison of the route from the thirty-second and the one from the forty-second (which would make Omaha or its vicinity the eastern terminus). “The northern route is longer than the southern,” he confessed, “but of central position, it can be more readily defended in time of war; it can be more cheaply constructed; and, when built, will command and unite important and conflicting public and private interests.” He also pointed to a further and enormous advantage—the railroad would stay on flat ground, near water, by following the valley of the Platte.
24

Dodge agreed. He sought the route using the private funds of Farnam and railroad promoter Dr. Thomas Durant, who had interests in the Rock Island. In 1856, Dodge had made a private survey up the Platte Valley to and beyond the Rocky Mountains, and reported to his financiers. Farnam and Durant set out to induce Eastern capital to help complete the road across Iowa, then across the Missouri River into Nebraska and farther west. On the basis of Dodge's reports, they selected Council Bluffs as the place for the Rock Island to end and the Pacific railroad, when the government decided to build it, to begin. This was an adroit and far-seeing move in 1857, and it induced Dodge to make a claim across the Missouri River and near the town of Council Bluffs. Railroad activity was down, however, because of the Panic of 1857.

But this economic downturn must be kept in perspective. In the 1850s, an average of 2,160 miles of new track was laid every year. More miles of track were laid in the United States, mainly in the north, than in all the rest of the world, and by 1859 just under half of the world's railroad tracks would be in the various states of the Union. The brand-new rail network would carry some 60 percent of all domestic freight.
25

The growth of railroads in the United States had been astonishing. The tracks more than doubled in each decade. In 1834, there were but 762 miles. In 1844, it was up to 4,311 miles. By 1854, the trackage numbered 15,675 miles. On January 1, 1864, the amount of completed railway had grown to 33,860 miles, with sixteen thousand more miles under construction, most of it in the Northern states.
26

In 1858, Farnam and Durant—who had a medical degree but never practiced and instead operated on Wall Street, where he was called
“Doc”—asked Dodge to visit them in New York City, at the office of the Rock Island Railroad, located over the Corn Exchange Bank. Dodge thus was present at a meeting of the board of directors, where a secretary read his report on the Platte route. “Before he was half through,” Dodge reported, “nearly every person had left the room, and when he had finished only Mr. Farnam, Doc Durant, the reader and myself were present.” Dodge had heard one of the directors say “he did not see why they should be asked to hear such nonsense.” But Dodge told the two remaining directors: “I believe your road will draw the bulk of emigration crossing the Missouri. From Council Bluffs it will then go up the north side of the Platte River along the Mormon trail. The Pacific railroad is bound to be built along this trail.”
27

Farnam and Durant believed him. And they acted on that belief, saying they felt “that if they could stimulate interest in the Pacific road it would enable them to raise funds to complete their line across the State.” Dodge went to work making a grade
*
east from Council Bluffs.
28

B
Y
no means was anything, much less everything, settled, even though in 1856 both political parties had advocated the transcontinental railroad in resolutions. But whether there would be a Pacific railroad as long as the United States remained half slave, half free, was a long way from being decided. “Can we, as a nation, continue together
permanently—forever—
half slave, and half free?” Lincoln had written to a Kentucky correspondent in 1855.
29
If the country did not change, no one could tell where or if the Pacific railroad would run.

But if the railroad was to be built beside the Platte River, it was the buffalo and the Indians who first picked it out. Then it was used by the mountain men and the fur traders, then by the travelers on the Oregon Trail, then it became the route for the Mormon emigrant trains and their handcarts. It was called the Great Platte Valley Route. Lander and Dodge had seen immediately that this was the route for the Pacific railroad. Dodge once remarked that any engineer who overlooked the Platte Valley route as a natural highway to the mountains was not fit to follow the profession.
30

Peter Dey almost agreed. “Dodge and I read up everything on this subject,”
he declared. “We read all the government reports of everything that had been discovered regarding the routes across the continent. Dodge was deeply interested in them and I was to a considerable extent…. He made his claim on the Elkhorn river … [because] it was his belief that the Platte valley would be the line.”
31
But Dey wasn't ready to go as far as Dodge. He said that Dodge had “taken a great fancy to the Missouri River” and that the sprawling, muddy stream held a fascination for him: “He always felt at home along its shores.”

Dodge, meanwhile, was collecting oral and written information about the country west of his farm and studying the routes from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast. He drew up his own map of the country, “giving the fords and where water and wood could be found, etc.” He called it “the first map of the country giving such information.”
32