TCRR Infrastructure

Wind the years back to 1850, before the Transcontinental Railroad.  To get from the outer edges of civilization (Independence, Missouri) to the brand new state of California, you had three choices. 

1.  Board a ship on the East Coast, sail around the tip of Argentina, and sail back up to San Francisco.  From New York, that would be over 13,000 nautical miles.  It would take six months, and it could cost your life via shipwreck or disease. 

2.  Board a ship and sail to Panama, walk across the Isthmus, and sail to San Francisco.  That would cut your trip to just two months, but you had a high risk of death from malaria or yellow fever.  (That was nothing to sneeze at, pun intended.  It actually happened to Theodore Judah of the Central Pacific Railroad.) 

3.  Gather supplies for six months and join a wagon train to plod across the prairies and mountain ranges.  This would also take six months, and also carried a high risk of death from accidents, hostile attacks, or disease.  Plus, whatever you forgot to take, you did without.  There were no seaports where you could stop for supplies.

Any way you sliced it, you had a long, difficult trip ahead of you.

Left: Mountain Camp in the Sierra Nevada, drawing by Daniel A. Jenks, 1859, Library of Congress.  Cropped and color enhanced by The Novel Historian, 2019.  Right: Mormon pioneer reenactment, photo by Harry A. Kelley, 1912, Library of Congress.  Cropped.

Now fast forward to May 10, 1869.  All of a sudden, you had choices.  You could go the old route, and many people did.  Or you could cough up a small fortune (about $60 for a one-way emigrant ticket) and take a one-week ride aboard the Transcontinental Railroad.  Hmmm, how much would 5 months of your life be worth to you?  Multiplied by the number of people in your family?  It won’t surprise you to learn that many families decided to save up the extra money and take the train!

But if families had to pack everything they needed for six months in order to cross the plains, what kind of infrastructure would the rail companies need to build to support the Transcontinental Railroad?  Old pictures give us some clues.

1.  Water towers.  Steam engines don’t run without water.  Neither do people, and there were thousands of thirsty workers to take care of.

Before and After: Left: Crew members build a water tank near Trout Creek Mountains, circa 1865-69, by Alfred A. Hart, Library of Congress.  Right: Water Tower at the Lower Crossing of the Humboldt River, circa 1865-69, by Alfred A. Hart, Library of Congress.

2.  Depots.  Once the route of the TCRR was announced, people bought the land around it and towns sprang up.  The towns that survived were the ones where the trains stopped for water and coal. 

Depot at Elko, NV, circa 1865-69, by Alfred A. Hart, Library of Congress.  (If you look closely, you can see a pair of “ghosts” on the track.  These two individuals didn’t hold still long enough for the photo to be taken.)

3.  Telegraph lines.  A fully functioning rail line needs to communicate.  What if a train were late?  You’d have to signal the next station to hold the train coming the other direction so the two wouldn’t crash.  Fortunately, Samuel Morse had come up with a solution.  (To be fair, scientists had been working on it for years.) 

The telegraph wires strung along the railroad had another purpose as well.  Communication that took months (or days via Pony Express) could now be transmitted in the time it took a telegrapher to send and receive the code.  It was just as startling an advancement in that day as the cell phone was to my generation.

Interestingly enough, the TCRR inspired one of the shortest telegraph messages in history.  When the Golden Spike was driven on May 10, 1869, the telegraph delivered a final, one-word message to the newspapers waiting back East.  “Done!” it proclaimed.  And the rest is history.

Telegraph lines under construction on the Humboldt Desert (Nevada), circa 1865-69, by Alfred A. Hart, Library of Congress. 

It should be noted that the Native Americans received the TCRR with considerably less glee than the Americans did.  To them, it was more like an invasion.  And you might think the telegraph wires would be their easiest point of sabotage.  Those silly wires, whistling in the wind like a ‘prairie harp,’ would be so easy to bring down.

Perhaps the railroad companies thought of that, too.  So they tried diplomacy.  The Pacific Tourist (1879) tells the story this way:

Shortly after the wires were erected, the attaches of the Telegraph Company invited a number of Indian chiefs to meet them at a given point, and from thence to travel, one party East and the other West. When they had reached a distance of 100 miles apart, each party was invited to dictate a message to the other, which was sent over the wires. Then turning backward, they rode rapidly toward each other, and two days later met and compared notes. They were greatly astonished, and expressed themselves convinced that the “Great Spirit” had talked to them with the wires. They decided from that time it would be well to avoid meddling with the wires.

Not everyone was convinced, however.

Soon after a little incident happened, which, in the minds of the Indians, seemed to settle forever the opinion that the telegraph belonged to the Great Spirit. A young Sioux Indian was determined to show that he had no faith in the Great Spirit’s connection with the wires, so he set to work with his hatchet to cut down one of the telegraph poles. A severe thunderstorm was going on at a distance; a charge of electricity being taken up by the wires, was passed to the pole which the Indian was cutting, and resulted in his instant death. After that the tribe never molested the telegraph again.

I think that would have convinced me, too.

(Quotations cited from The Pacific Tourist. Williams’ illustrated trans-continental guide of travel, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Containing full descriptions of railroad routes … A complete traveler’s guide of the Union and Central Pacific railroads, Henry T. Williams, New York, 1879, page 64.)

Note:  The historic photos by Alfred A. Hart were stereographic prints.  They have been cropped to highlight the content for modern audiences.

Note: This is part 2.  Find part 1 here. And here’s a link to my historical novel, Trancontinental Runaway. The middle chapters happen on the TCRR in 1871.

Featured image credit: “Poetry and Prose,” Scene at Monument Point, north end of Salt Lake, circa 1865-69, by Alfred A. Hart, Library of Congress.  Cropped and enhanced 2019 by The Novel Historian.