BBC Seven Wonders Of The Industrial World
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This is the true story of a line, two thousand miles long.
A line that united a nation and tore it apart.
The more lndians we can kill today
the fewer we will have to be killed in the next war.
Will someone go over there and help my men.
A line that crossed the wilderness and turned it in to the wild west.
For every worker who dies in that accident, we lose four in a shoot out.
A line that fought men, and mountains.
There`s a lot of men buried under those rocks.
You can`t build a railroad under fifty feet of snow.
lt was the greatest line the world had ever built.
No one in the world, no one can do it as well as we do.
lt`s not simply tracks for a railroad we`re laying.
We did it damn it.
lt`s the foundation for a magnificent highway of cities.
We have finished the job that Christopher Columbus started.
lt was the world`s first transcontinental railroad.
ln 1863 the United States was falling apart.
North and South were divided by civil war.
East and West by the wilderness.
The young nation stood on the brink of collapse.
But at the height of the conflict
President Lincoln issued a remarkable challenge.
He called upon America`s finest engineers to build a railroad.
lt would run from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
lt would have to climb fast mountain
ranges across hundreds of miles of desert and prairie.
lt would have to bridge canyons a mile wide and chasms a thousand feet deep.
This will be a work of giants.
And Uncle Sam is the only giant we know who can grapple the subject.
lt would be the world`s first transcontinental railroad.
But this challenge was not taken up by the giants of industry,
nor in the industrial powerhouse of the east.
The world`s first transcontinental railroad began in the far west,
in the small California township of Sacramento.
On the morning of January 8th 1863 the entire population of thirteen thousand
turned up for the inauguration
as the President`s challenge was taken up by four local shopkeepers, a grocer,
a draper and the owners of a hardware store.
We`re all self-made men who er came out here from back east.
Well none of us have any experience of building a railroad or, or running one.
But we know how to run a business and we know how to manage men.
People in the state have been crying for a railroad for some time,
and they ought to have one.
And by God, we plan to give them one.
And so the grocer Leland Stanford shovelled
the first earth of the transcontinental railroad.
Four California shopkeepers had given birth to Lincoln`s dream.
And advance with giant strides
the prosperity of our state and of our country.
The shopkeepers stood to make millions of dollars in government grants.
But they wouldn`t get a cent until they had laid the first forty miles of track.
And they lacked almost everything needed to get started.
The west coast was an industrial desert.
There is no industry in the west, this is it.
We`re a repair shop.
The draper Charles Crocker had been appointed head of construction,
and he faced a major problem of supply.
When it comes to building a railroad, it all comes from the east.
The locomotives, rail stock, iron, steel, gunpowder and men.
Everything had to come by sea, a four month,
fourteen thousand mile voyage around the southern tip of America,
the worst seas in the world.
And the civil war had added to the dangers.
Southern warships attacked the supply vessels on the long route to California,
freight charges were crippling.
The shopkeepers desperately needed money from government.
But to get it they had to complete those first forty miles of track.
And just a few miles outside Sacramento
they confronted the highest mountains ever faced by a railroad.
The Sierra Nevada rises to over fourteen thousand feet.
Settlers from the east had to cross
this final barrier in to California by wagon train.
Lost in this mountain
vastness many of the early pioneers had died of cold and hunger.
Others resorted to cannibalism to survive.
lt`s the strongest case we could have for building a railroad.
l mean tens of thousands of people have died
trying to cross this country by wagon train.
God there has to be a better way.
No one had ever attempted to build a railroad this high.
But the shopkeepers had one major asset.
Theodore Judah was the greatest railroad engineer in America.
But his plans to build a railroad
over the Sierras had earned him a new title, Crazy Judah.
Well if it`s crazy to say
that a locomotive can climb a mountain l stand condemned
and you may have me let off and confined to an asylum but,
but you know a railroad can go where a man or a mule can not,
provided you find the right route for it.
When an engineer looks at a mountain he sees a series of loops
and curves that follow the contour rather like a river.
There will be obstacles of course that they require a bridge or a tunnel and,
well l, l`ve calculated that we will need up to, well fifty bridges between here,
just to get up to the summit and then some thirteen or fourteen tunnels.
Judah had drawn the route through the Sierras.
The hundred and twenty miles over some of the toughest terrain in the world,
reaching a height of seven thousand feet.
But others had to build it.
That would require thousands of men and tonnes of gunpowder.
To lead the workforce Crocker hired
the toughest construction boss on the west coast,
James Harvey Strobridge.
Strobridge who had lost his eye in a powder blast
enforced a crew discipline backed by a pick axe handle
he used as his persuader and a legendary profanity.
Come on now get your ass up there, let`s go.
Come on get a move on that wagon there, for Christ`s sakes.
Come on.
He has a way of persuading people to see his point of view,
that`s what l hired him for and that`s what he does.
Alright let`s go, come on now get this stuff up the hill, let`s go.
Come on get it up here.
Be careful, spark and we`re all gonners.
Now watch what you`re doing there now.
You lrish bastard, get your god damn ass down here and bring me up that wagon,
you`re dirty piece of shit.
Now come on, fill this thing up, let`s go.
You can not talk to these men as gentlemen because they`re not gentlemen.
There as mere brutes as you can get.
But these men too had a dream,
and it wasn`t the same as Abe Lincoln`s or the shopkeeper`s.
lt`s the dream of the goldmines.
These people make enough to stake themselves
with shovels and picks and they`re gone.
Mr Strobridge does his best to persuade them of their foolishness
but er if they want to leave, they`re going to leave.
Let`s go you over here come on.
And they did leave, in their hundreds to dig for gold.
The shopkeepers faced ruin.
There`d be times that l`ve thought about giving up
the whole thing for a clean shirt and a freedom of debt.
Without a workforce the shopkeepers had no way of laying
the vital forty miles of track, and unlocking the government treasure chest.
Then in the Spring of 1864 the seas brought an unexpected bounty.
Fleeing from famine in their homeland
thousands of Chinese immigrants had arrived in San Francisco.
As an experiment Crocker recruited fifty of these newcomers to work on the railroad.
But he encountered fierce opposition.
l will not force Chinese labour.
They are nothing but a bunch of heathen weaklings and from
what l have seen they are not fit for the most menial job of work,
and they sure as hell can`t build a railroad.
l`ve explained to Mr Strobridge he needs to give these men a chance.
They`ve built the Great Wall of China, why not the Pacific railroad?
The Chinese deserved Crocker`s confidence,
they worked harder and faster than the Europeans and for less pay.
Soon there were thousands of them.
They are a great army, laying siege to nature in her strongest citadel,
the rugged mountains look like stupendous anthills,
they swarm with Chinese workers tunnelling,
wheeling, carting, drilling and blasting the rocks and earth.
The Chinese were also laying track.
For the first time
passenger trains were running deep in to the foothills of the Sierras.
ln the Summer of 1865 the shopkeepers finally broke through the forty mile mark
and unlocked millions of dollars in government aid.
But they had taken over two years to lay just forty miles of track,
and they were about to enter the greatest race in railroad history.
Two thousand miles to the east a mighty power had been unleashed.
The civil war was over, all the wealth and industry of the victims was now
harnessed to building a railroad to the Pacific.
ln 1866 on the plains of Nebraska thousands of ex-soldiers waited
at the end of the line for the man
who would lead them in to this new war, with the wilderness.
He was one of the youngest generals in the civil war
and the finest railroad engineer of his generation.
His name was Grenville Dodge.
A year ago we were killing each other in the civil war.
Praise God we are now united in a single purpose.
This will be a great national work transcending in magnitude
anything yet attempted by man,
well l believe this will be the making of the United States of America.
With the war over Congress had upped the stakes.
As well as money for every mile of track laid
they were now giving twelve thousand acres of land.
The railroad that built furthest and fastest would own a huge slice of America.
Within a month of Dodge`s arrival the railroad had advanced forty miles west.
Special supply trains ferried men and materials up to the rail head
where the tracks were laid with military precision.
These men can lay a length a track in just half a minute.
That`s about the time
it takes a highly trained gun crew to load and fire a field gun.
Done.
But Dodge`s army was about to fight its first major battle.
At every railhead a vast city of tents sprang up on the prairie.
lt catered for almost every need of the workers, including drink, gambling and women
And with the gamblers and the girls came the gun men.
The railroad had given birth to the Wild West.
This was a hell on wheels, a hot bed of vice, violence and death.
lt suckered in the free spending rail workers and sent them out in coffins.
Angered and alarmed by the killings Dodge risked a secret visit.
First place we visited was a dance hall
where some fresh strumpets had just been received.
The vulgarity, the profanity,
the indecency would disgust any God fearing man or woman.
These people are good for nothing, beside drinking, gambling, whoring and brawling.
Most if not all of these creatures are squatters.
On land granted by Congress to the railroad.
Land that was intended to be leased to decent hardworking Christians,
farmers and their families.
lf we let this anarchy continue that will not happen.
Dodge had to do something, and he had just the man to do it.
Dodge`s enforcer as labour boss was Jack Casement, known as the Cossack,
he was a ruthless disciplinarian with an explosive temper,
and he was incensed by the toll on his workforce.
For every worker who dies in an accident we lose four in a shoot out.
That is not a figure we`re prepared to tolerate.
Arming two hundred of his rail workers Casement set off on a mission.
Civil law is nonexistent.
The only sure preventative is marshal law.
There were dead bodies all over.
They fired right in to the crowd, the railroad thinks they`re law around here.
They treat us like animals.
l`ve seen men going down, women too.
l saw the boss man from the railroad.
He looked like a Cossack, with his hat and his whip.
There was a whole load of railroad men
packing pieces disputing the toss with the gaming boys.
A whole crew of them came out in to the street cutting up a ruckus.
And l hear someone shout, open fire.
l gave the orders to Jack Casement to clean up the town,
when l spoke to him after a while, after the event,
he says General, they all died with their boots on.
And Joesrth has been quiet ever since,
as far as l`m concerned the subject is now closed,
we can get on with building a railroad.
Lynch law had come to the Midwest, and it was here to stay.
But the prairies harboured a greater peril than gunmen and gamblers.
And it drew closer with every mile the railroad advanced to the west.
Within six months of Dodge`s arrival the Union Pacific
had laid two hundred and fifty miles of track,
worth five million dollars in government grants.
Far to the west, after almost three years,
the shopkeepers were still stuck in the mountains,
just eighty miles from their start point.
The Chinese workers were at home on the perilous rock face.
But the gunpowder they were using was just not powerful enough.
With the other railroad racing across the prairies
the shopkeepers desperately needed to force the pace.
Strobridge decided to try a dangerous experiment.
lt`s safe enough, we have a chemist, an Englishman, fixes his stuff up on site.
Nitro-glycerine, with eight times more power than gunpowder,
but notoriously unstable.
When he`s mixed it, well you wouldn`t want to go shaking the bottle.
He say, they pull out seven bodies,
some hands, some legs, a few men are still missing.
He say one of the dead man was his older brother.
Our average daily progress is twelve inches, twelve inches a day
that`s how long it takes us to drill and blast through this rock.
We`ve got to do better than that.
There`s a lot of men buried under those rocks, good men.
Bury the stuff.
Now it`s back to packed powder and twelve inches a day.
At this rate we`ll be in Nevada by the end of the century.
The shopkeepers` dreams of riches were being buried on the slopes of the Sierras.
After three years they were still twenty miles short of the summit.
Beyond lay a fortune in government grants and real estate.
But first they had to beat the mountain.
Dodge meanwhile had advanced three hundred miles from his start point.
He was now deep in to lndian territory, and facing his greatest challenge.
The Sioux and Cheyenne were two of the most warlike tribes in America
and the railroad threatened their way of life.
The sight of these iron monsters
hurtling across their homeland was both alien and alarming.
They fought back with a fury
that struck terror in to every railroad worker in the Midwest.
On the night of August 27th 1867
a supply train was heading westward across the prairies.
About four miles out from the rail depot at Plum Creek in Nebraska,
the engineers saw a fire on the tracks.
Out of the smoke two men came running towards them.
lndians coming.
Get on the back cart.
The train ahead had been derailed by the Cheyenne,
and the wrecked engine had caused a fire.
The war party could still be heard in the darkness.
The rescuers fled from the scene taking the terrified survivors with them.
l looked out of the window and l see this, this,
this whole pass of lndians out there.
They, they was riding alongside locomotive,
you know firing, shooting their rifles at it,
and er, and we was going full chisel, engineers he`s trying to outrun them.
Er, and all of a sudden we, we, we were in a heat you know.
l didn`t see what happened to the engineer or the fireman.
l don`t reckon they stand much of a chance back there.
Of the twelve victims of the ambush seven were still missing.
The train sought refuge at Plum Creek depot.
lsolated the handful of men prepared for attack.
But instead of the Cheyenne daybreak brought a different sight.
He was the sole survivor of the missing men.
And he was carrying his own scalp in his hand.
By noon Grenville Dodge had arrived at a scene of carnage.
Seven dead, five linemen shot and scalped.
An engineer and a rail man burnt to death.
This is a war.
We have got to clear the damned lndians out or give up building the railroad.
The massacre at Plum Creek spread panic throughout the railroad.
The march westward came to a dramatic halt.
Meanwhile up in the mountains the shopkeepers confronted their own killers.
Frequent avalanches swept all before them equipment, track and men.
They were blowing out tree stumps and a portion of snow fell on them.
l don`t know how many are dead, we don`t keep track of them.
To tell you the truth l don`t know
who they are when they`re alive let alone when they`re dead.
We`re sending the bodies back to China.
Well that`s the deal we had with the agents.
They got a right to be buried where they came from.
That`s about all we can do.
As blizzards swept across the mountains the shopkeepers floundered in the drifts.
The death toll rose even higher.
Down on the prairie Dodge too was counting his dead.
Seven bodies were recovered from the train wreck at Plum Creek.
This is a savage useless waste of life,
if it continues at this present rate we`ll have no one left to build a railroad.
ln the wake of the killings the railroad was in constant fear of attack.
Workers were ordered to carry guns at all times.
For Dodge, a veteran of the conflict between the states,
this war had become personal.
l`ve fought in the late conflict, l saw many good men killed and wounded.
Never did l see anything to cause me to hate my enemy.
l have seen what they do when they kill a man.
This is a different kind of war,
there is no room in this land for us and them and that`s about it.
For Dodge nothing must stand in the way of the railroad.
He began a process
that would lead to one of the bloodiest chapters in American history.
Dodge used the power of the railroad to launch a war of annihilation.
To fight it the government sent in one of the most ruthless generals
in the Federal Army, William Tekomsay Sherman.
Sherman, the man who raised Atlanta to the ground
and burned a swathe through Georgia to win victory in the civil war.
l have six companies of cavalry,
and General Custer is coming from the Smoke Hill route.
The more lndians we can kill today
the fewer will have to be killed in the next war.
But the more l see of them the more l am convinced
that they will all have to be killed, or maintained as a species of pauper.
We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux and the Cheyenne,
to the point of their very extermination.
Men, women and children.
For Sherman there would be no compromise and no mercy.
The first task was to hunt down the Cheyenne war party
that had attacked the train at Plum Creek and killed the seven men.
A number of prisoners were taken,
one of them a Cheyenne warrior called Porcupine,
he gave a first hand account of the incident.
We said among ourselves now the white people have taken all we had,
we are to do something.
lf we can throw these wagons off the iron they run upon and break them open
we should find what is in them and can take whatever might be useful to us.
We cut down one of the big sticks that stand by the track,
and just before sundown we tied it to the rails
and sat down to watch what would happen.
Then looking east we saw small light close to the horizon,
someone said the morning star has risen.
We sent men on the best horses along the track to yell
and shoot in the hope that they might frighten it.
But it kept going until it hit the sticks we had put on the track.
The railroad is death to us.
When the people hear the sound of the bell on the iron horse they mourn.
lt is the signal that the life they have known is over.
lt was over.
Sherman and the army would drive the native Americans out of the path of the railroad.
Every mile further west would be laid over the grave of their homeland.
Dodge`s Union Pacific was now in Wyoming, five hundred miles from its start point.
While in the mountains the shopkeepers were approaching
the highest point of their route across the Sierras.
They were now running trains high in to the mountains,
helped by the invention of small pilot wheels or bogeys
that enabled the locomotives to twist and turn with the contours of the track.
As they climbed the mountain threw more obstacles in their path.
The route was severed by deep chasms.
Too deep for conventional bridges.
So the engineers built wooden trestles, hundreds of feet tall.
The largest wooden structures ever built.
But the worst problem was above the snow line.
This winter we had forty four snow storms,
varying from a small squall to a two week blizzard.
February 18th we had six feet of snow, the drifts had measured up to fifty feet.
You can`t build a railroad under fifty feet of snow.
And you sure as hell can`t run a train through it.
For six months of the year the track was blocked with snow.
The engineers had a solution.
To run the trains under the snow.
On the worst stretches of track they built long wooden sheds angled in to the mountain
to keep the rails clear of drifts.
As the snow melted it caused major problems for Dodge down on the plains.
Normally placid rivers turned in to raging torrents,
sweeping away miles of track and trestle.
And then came the rain.
Sandbags were all that stood between Dodge and disaster.
The river has taken a hundred feet of trestle,
and if we don`t shore up the bank it will take as many miles of track.
l`ve never seen a winter like this.
We`ve had temperatures as low as minus forty degrees.
Hundreds of miles of track have been destroyed by frost.
And now with the thaw we get this.
The weather had stopped Dodge in his tracks.
And he was about to face a financial storm that would make his problems
with the weather pale in to insignificance.
Up in the mountains the shopkeepers were just a few hundred feet from the summit.
Beyond they had a clear run across hundreds of miles of mountain plateau,
Worth millions of dollars in government grants.
But those few hundred feet would be the worst along the entire route.
They had to tunnel through sixteen hundred feet of solid granite.
The burden fell on the Chinese labourers.
They tackled it from both sides of the mountain.
Toiling in shifts around the clock.
working and even sleeping seven thousand feet above sea level.
They sleep in cabins buried under the snow.
With er tunnels, they`re more like burrows
that link them to wherever the hell it is they have to get to work.
They stay there all winter, never see the light of day.
The long suffering Chinese finally cracked.
They went on strike.
For once Strobridge was on their side.
Now if you don`t go in there and negotiate this thing is coming to a standstill.
l`ve got four hundred men that have already stopped.
There is no plans to negotiate.
There`s only one man running this railroad, by God it`s not them.
You`re not listening to what l`m saying.
You either put this to an end or l`m out with them.
Strobridge was now the voice of moderation.
But Crocker was determined to starve the men back to work.
Greed had made the shopkeepers ruthless.
The race to unite America had been transformed in to a race for riches.
Down on the plains greed was about to plunge the Union Pacific in to a scandal
which threatened to bring the entire venture crashing to a halt.
Unknown to Dodge the railroad was being robbed by its own directors.
Behind the fraud was the rail baron Dr Thomas Durant, a supreme salesman.
Durant had raised millions
by bringing potential investors on joyrides to the Wild West.
lt`s not just simply tracks for a railroad we`re laying.
lt`s the foundation for a magnificent highway of cities.
Cities that will make the United States of America
the richest and most powerful nation in the world.
But Durant`s patriotic fervour hid a spectacular fraud.
And it was about to be exposed.
The scandal was first uncovered by a freelance journalist Charles Adams.
Well by law all the construction, labour, the materials from the um the timbers,
the locomotives, the ore for the grating, it all has to go out to private tender.
Which is to say to independent contractors
who are supposed to bid with each other to keep the cost down.
But Adams had discovered that instead of going to different companies
the contracts were going to just one, the Credit Mobille.
And just who do you suppose owns the Credit Mobille?
Why the good doctor Durant,
and a handful of shareholders who also happen to be directors of the railroad.
Posing as a legitimate contractor Durant and
his partners were illegally charging the government double what it needed to pay.
For every mile of track that`s laid twenty thousand dollars
finds its way to Doctor Durant and his shareholders.
Now over the course of the rail this adds up to many, many millions of dollars.
lt`s a swindle.
This is perhaps the greatest swindle ever perpetrated on the American people,
and that congress can stand by and allow this to happen is,
really is a little short of incredible.
lt would be some years before the American people discovered
that congress too was in Durant`s pocket.
But the exposure of the Credit Mobille had had an immediate impact at the railhead.
l will not allow my men to be directed by a man
who has not an honest drop of blood in his veins,
and is connected to the railroad for the sole purpose of bleeding it dry.
Dodge threatened to quit, unless Durant gave up his role in the construction.
High in the Sierras Crocker`s tactics had paid off.
Starved of supplies the strikers returned to work.
Only a few feet of rock now separated the two sections of tunnel
in the heart of the mountain.
Finally after five years the light at the end of the tunnel.
After digging in opposite direction for over sixteen hundred feet
the tunnels were just two inches out of line.
We did it damn it, damn it we did it.
The completion of the summit tunnel was a watershed in the shopkeepers` fortunes.
The worst was now behind them.
Regular train services were now running through the Sierras.
At last there was an alternative to the wagon trains.
Men, women and children would no longer die crossing the mountains.
But the race was not over yet.
There was still hundreds of miles of wilderness between the two railroads.
The Union Pacific was still mired in scandal.
With the men idle Durant had no option but to agree to Dodge`s demands.
The affair has been settled amicably.
l have no further comment to make.
Dodge could now get on with building the railroad.
The two routes were fast converging,
and congress finally drew a line where they would meet, Promontory Point in Utah.
lt now became a race not for money but for prestige.
Who would be the first to reach the finishing post?
ln the twelve months after breaking through the Sierras,
Crocker`s Chinese labourers laid three hundred miles of track across Nevada.
We`ve now got this track laying down to an exact science.
There`s no where in the world, no one, not the French, not the British,
not even Grenville Dodge can do it as well as we do.
The shopkeepers were now racing across the salt flats of Utah.
And Dodge was heading through the one gap he had found in the Rockies.
After six years they were just fifty miles apart,
and racing flat out for the finishing post.
Close to their goal the Chinese labourers set an historic record.
ln a single day they laid an astonishing ten miles of track.
Dodge too was setting a remarkable pace.
The two companies were neck and neck, anyone could win.
On April 30th 1869 a single train crossed the finishing line at Promontory Point.
Six years and seven hundred miles
after spreading the first shovel of earth in Sacramento
the shopkeepers had reached their goal.
We`re now waiting on the Union Pacific,
l have been reliably informed they`ve been delayed by rain.
lt would be two days before the Union Pacific finally arrived at Promontory.
On May 10th 1869 the two rival companies were face to face.
A single length of track apart, at the end of the line.
And in a symbolic gesture of unity that last length of track was laid by a team,
from each railroad.
Done.
l can`t believe we did it.
l know we did it, hell l was there for the best part of it.
But damn l don`t know how we did it.
l know we would have never done it if it hadn`t been for these men.
And l don`t forget
that l was opposed to the notion of employing them in the first place.
This railroad, this nation owes these men a great debt,
and l sure as hell hope we don`t forget it, because l know l won`t.
Where we`re standing now l feel in a sense it was nothing here
but the path of wild deer.
And now a thousand wheels roll,
on their axles will be carried the wealth of half the world.
l think by this day`s work we`ve changed the commerce and finance of the whole world.
We have finished the job that Christopher Columbus started.
What had started as a shovel of earth
in a small town in California had become the world`s first transcontinental railroad.
lt had taken six years, claimed the lives of over two thousand men,
and changed the course of American history.
But a single line of track now stretched
across America from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Two thousand miles of wilderness have been opened to settlement.
A journey which had taken six months by wagon train
and cost the lives of tens of thousands of immigrants could now
be completed in just seven days.
Lincoln was dead but his dream was a reality.
lt was now truly the United States of America.
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