Twenty years before the great tribes of the plains made their last stand in front of the invading white man overland travel had begun; ten years before, Congress, under the inspiration of the prophetic Whitney and the leadership of more practical men, had provided for a survey of railroad routes along the trails; on the eve of the struggle the earliest continental railway had received its charter; and the struggle had temporarily ceased while Congress, in 1867, sent out its Peace Commission to prepare an open way. That the tribes must yield was as inevitable as it was that their yielding must be ungracious and destructive to them. Too weak to compel their enemy to respect their rights, and uncertain what their rights were, they were too low in intelligence to realize that the more they struggled, the worse would be their suffering. So they struggled on, during the years in which the iron band was put across the continent. Its completion and their subjection came in 1869.

After years of tedious debate the earliest of the Pacific railways was chartered in 1862. The withdrawal of southern claims had made possible an agreement upon a route, while the spirit of nationality engendered by the Civil War gave to the project its final impetus. Under the management of the Central Pacific of California, the Union Pacific, and two or three border railways, provision was made for a road from the Iowa border to California. Land grants and bond subsidies were for two years dangled before the capitalists of America in the vain attempt to entice them to construct it. Only after these were increased in 1864 did active organization begin, while at the end of 1865 but forty miles of the Union Pacific had been built.

Building a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean was easily the greatest engineering feat that America had undertaken. In their day the Cumberland Road, and the Erie Canal, and the Pennsylvania Portage Railway had ranked among the American wonders, but none of these had been accompanied by the difficult problems that bristled along the eighteen hundred miles of track that must be laid across plain and desert, through hostile Indian country and over mountains. Worse yet, the road could hope for little aid from the country through which it ran. Except for the small colonies at Carson, Salt Lake, and Denver, the last of which it missed by a hundred miles, its course lay through unsettled wilderness for nearly the whole distance. Like the trusses of a cantilever, its advancing ends projected themselves across the continent, relying, up to the moment of joining, upon the firm anchorage of the termini in the settled lands of Iowa and California. Equally trying, though different in variety, were the difficulties attendant upon construction at either end.

The impetus which Judah had given to the Central Pacific had started the western end of the system two years ahead of the eastern, but had not produced great results at first. It was hard work building east into the Sierra Nevadas, climbing the gullies, bridging, tunnelling, filling, inch by inch, to keep the grade down and the curvature out. Twenty miles a year only were completed in 1863, 1864, and 1865, thirty in 1866, and forty-six in 1867—one hundred and thirty-six miles during the first five years of work. Nature had done her best to impede the progress of the road by thrusting mountains and valleys across its route. But she had covered the mountains with timber and filled them with stone, so that materials of construction were easily accessible along all of the costliest part of the line. Bridges and trestles could be built anywhere with local material. The labor problem vexed the Central Pacific managers at the start. It was a scanty and inefficient supply of workmen that existed in California when construction began. Like all new countries, California possessed more work than workmen. Economic independence was to be had almost for the asking. Free land and fertile soil made it unnecessary for men to work for hire. The slight results of the first five years were due as much to lack of labor as to refractory roadway or political opposition. But by 1865 the employment of Chinese laborers began. Coolies imported by the thousand and ably directed by Charles Crocker, who was the most active constructor, brought a new rapidity into construction. "I used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull," Crocker dictated to Bancroft's stenographer, "stopping along wherever there was anything amiss, and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not up to time." With roadbed once graded new troubles began. California could manufacture no iron. Rolling stock and rails had to be imported from Europe or the East, and came to San Francisco after the costly sea voyage, via Panama or the Horn. But the men directing the Central Pacific—Stanford, Crocker, Huntington, and the rest—rose to the difficulties, and once they had passed the mountains, fairly romped across the Nevada desert in the race for subsidies.

The eastern end started nearer to a base of supplies than did the California terminus, yet until 1867 no railroad from the East reached Council Bluffs, where the President had determined that the Union Pacific should begin. There had been railway connection to the Missouri River at St. Joseph since 1859, and various lines were hurrying across Iowa in the sixties, but for more than two years of construction the Union Pacific had to get rolling stock and iron from the Missouri steamers or the laborious prairie schooners. Until its railway connection was established its difficulty in this respect was only less great than that of the Central Pacific. The compensation of the Union Pacific came, however, in its roadbed. Following the old Platte trail, flat and smooth as the best highways, its construction gangs could do the light grading as rapidly as the finished single track could deliver the rails at its growing end. But for the needful culverts and trestles there was little material at hand. The willows and Cottonwood lining the river would not do. The Central Pacific could cut its wood as it needed it, often within sight of its track. The Union Pacific had to haul much of its wood and stone, like its iron, from its eastern terminus.

The labor problem of the Union Pacific was intimately connected with the solution of its Indian problem. The Central Pacific had almost no trouble with the decadent tribes through whom it ran, but the Union Pacific was built during the very years when the great plains were most disturbed and hostile forays were most frequent. Its employees contained large elements of the newly arrived Irish and of the recently discharged veterans of the Civil War. General Dodge, who was its chief engineer, has described not only the military guards who "stacked their arms on the dump and were ready at a moment's warning to fall in and fight," but the military capacity of the construction gangs themselves. The "track train could arm a thousand men at a word," and from chief constructor down to chief spiker "could be commanded by experienced officers of every rank, from general to a captain. They had served five years at the front, and over half of the men had shouldered a musket in many battles. An illustration of this came to me after our track had passed Plum Creek, 200 miles west of the Missouri River. The Indians had captured a freight train and were in possession of it and its crews." Dodge came to the rescue in his car, "a travelling arsenal," with twenty-odd men, most of whom were strangers to him; yet "when I called upon them to fall in, to go forward and retake the train, every man on the train went into line, and by his position showed that he was a soldier.... I gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, and at the command they went forward as steadily and in as good order as we had seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire."

By an act passed in July, 1866, Congress did much to accelerate the construction of the road. Heretofore the junction point had been in the Nevada Desert, a hundred and fifty miles east of the California line. It was now provided that each road might build until it met the other. Since the mountain section, with the highest accompanying subsidies, was at hand, each of the companies was spurred on by its desire to get as much land and as many bonds as possible. The race which began in the autumn of 1866 ended only with the completion of the track in 1869. A mile a day had seemed like quick work at the start; seven or eight a day were laid before the end.

The English traveller, Bell, who published his New Tracks in North America in 1869, found somewhere an enthusiastic quotation admirably descriptive of the process. "Track-laying on the Union Pacific is a science," it read, "and we pundits of the Far East stood upon that embankment, only about a thousand miles this side of sunset, and backed westward before that hurrying corps of sturdy operatives with mingled feelings of amusement, curiosity, and profound respect. On they came. A light car, drawn by a single horse, gallops up to the front with its load of rails. Two men seize the end of a rail and start forward, the rest of the gang taking hold by twos until it is clear of the car. They come forward at a run. At the word of command, the rail is dropped in its place, right side up, with care, while the same process goes on at the other side of the car. Less than thirty seconds to a rail for each gang, and so four rails go down to the minute! Quick work, you say, but the fellows on the U.P. are tremendously in earnest. The moment the car is empty it is tipped over on the side of the track to let the next loaded car pass it, and then it is tipped back again; and it is a sight to see it go flying back for another load, propelled by a horse at full gallop at the end of 60 or 80 feet of rope, ridden by a young Jehu, who drives furiously. Close behind the first gang come the gaugers, spikers, and bolters, and a lively time they make of it. It is a grand Anvil Chorus that these sturdy sledges are playing across the plains. It is in a triple time, three strokes to a spike. There are ten spikes to a rail, four hundred rails to a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San Francisco. That's the sum, what is the quotient? Twenty-one million times are those sledges to be swung—twenty-one million times are they to come down with their sharp punctuation, before the great work of modern America is complete!"

Handling, housing, and feeding the thousands of laborers who built the road was no mean problem. Ten years earlier the builders of the Illinois Central had complained because their road from Galena and Chicago to Cairo ran generally through an uninhabited country upon which they could not live as they went along. Much more the continental railways, building rapidly away from the settlements, were forced to carry their dwellings with them. Their commissariat was as important as their general offices.

An acquaintance of Bell told of standing where Cheyenne now is and seeing a long freight train arrive "laden with frame houses, boards, furniture, palings, old tents, and all the rubbish" of a mushroom city. "The guard jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on the platform, called out with a flourish, 'Gentlemen, here's Julesburg.'" The head of the serpentine track, sometimes indeed "crookeder than the horn that was blown around the walls of Jericho," was the terminal town; its tongue was the stretch of track thrust a few miles in advance of the head; repeatedly as the tongue darted out the head followed, leaving across the plains a series of scars, marking the spots where it had rested for a time. Every few weeks the town was packed upon a freight train and moved fifty or sixty miles to the new end of the track. Its vagrant population followed it. It was at Julesburg early in 1867; at Cheyenne in the end of the year; at Laramie City the following spring. Always it was the most disreputably picturesque spot on the anatomy of the railroad.

In the fall of 1868 "Hell on Wheels," as Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, appropriately designated the terminal town, was at Benton, Wyoming, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from Omaha and near the military reservation at Fort Steele. In the very midst of the gray desert, with sand ankle-deep in its streets, the town stood dusty white—"a new arrival with black clothes looked like nothing so much as a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel." A less promising location could hardly have been found, yet within two weeks there had sprung up a city of three thousand people with ordinances and government suited to its size, and facilities for vice ample for all. The needs of the road accounted for it: to the east the road was operating for passengers and freight; to the west it was yet constructing track. Here was the end of rail travel and the beginning of the stage routes to the coast and the mines. Two years earlier the similar point had been at Fort Kearney, Nebraska.

The city of tents and shacks contained, according to the count of John H. Beadle, a peripatetic journalist, twenty-three saloons and five dance houses. It had all the worst details of the mining camp. Gambling and rowdyism were the order of day and night. Its great institution was the "'Big Tent,' sometimes, with equal truth but less politeness, called the 'Gamblers' Tent.'" This resort was a hundred feet long by forty wide, well floored, and given over to drinking, dancing, and gambling. The sumptuous bar provided refreshment much desired in a dry alkali country; all the games known to the professional gambler were in full blast; women, often fair and well-dressed, were there to gather in what the bartender and faro-dealer missed. Whence came these people, and how they learned their trade, was a mystery to Bowles. "Hell would appear to have been raked to furnish them," he said, "and to it they must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its highest seats and most diabolical service."

Behind the terminal town real estate disappointments, like beads, were strung along the cord of rails. In advance of the construction gangs land companies would commonly survey town sites in preparation for a boom. Brisk speculation in corner lots was a form of gambling in which real money was often lost and honest hopes were regularly shattered. Each town had its advocates who believed it was to be the great emporium of the West. Yet generally, as the railroad moved on, the town relapsed into a condition of deserted prairie, with only the street lines and dÉbris to remind it of its past. Omaha, though Beadle thought in 1868 that no other "place in America had been so well lied about," and Council Bluffs retained a share of greatness because of their strategic position at the commencement of the main line. Tied together in 1872 by the great iron bridge of the Union Pacific, their relations were as harmonious as those of the cats of Kilkenny, as they quarrelled over the claims of each to be the real terminus. But the future of both was assured when the eastern roads began to run in to get connections with the West. Cheyenne, too, remained a city of some consequence because the Denver Pacific branched off at this point to serve the Pike's Peak region. But the names of most of the other one-time terminal towns were writ in sand.

The progress of construction of the road after 1866 was rapid enough. At the end of 1865, though the Central Pacific had started two years before the Union Pacific, it had completed only sixty miles of track, to the latter's forty. During 1866 the Central Pacific built thirty laborious miles over the mountains, and in 1867, forty-six miles, while in the same two years the Union Pacific built five hundred. In 1868, the western road, now past its worst troubles, added more than 360 to its mileage; the Union Pacific, unchecked by the continental divide, making a new record of 425. By May 10, 1869, the line was done, 1776 miles from Omaha to Sacramento. For the last sixteen months of the continental race the two roads together had built more than two and a half miles for every working day. Never before had construction been systematized so highly or the rewards for speed been so great.

Whether regarded as an economic achievement or a national work, the building of the road deserved the attention it received; yet it was scarcely finished before the scandal-monger was at work. Beadle had written a chapter full of "floridly complimentary notices" of the men who had made possible the feat, but before he went to press their reputations were blasted, and he thought it safest "to mention no names." "Never praise a man," he declared in disgust, "or name your children after him, till he is dead." Before the end of Grant's first administration the CrÉdit Mobilier scandal proved that men, high in the national government, had speculated in the project whose success depended on their votes. That many of them had been guilty of indiscretion, was perfectly clear, but they had done only what many of their greatest predecessors had done. Their real fault was made more prominent by their misfortune in being caught by an aroused national conscience which suddenly awoke to heed a call that it had ever disregarded in the past.

The junction point for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had been variously fixed by the acts of 1862 and 1864. In 1866 it was left open to fortune or enterprise, and had not Congress intervened in 1869 it might never have existed. In their rush for the land grants the two rivals hurried on their surveys to the vicinity of Great Salt Lake, where their advancing ends began to overlap, and continued parallel for scores of miles. Congress, noticing their indisposition to agree upon a junction, intervened in the spring of 1869, ordering the two to bring their race to an end at Promontory Point, a few miles northwest of Ogden on the shore of the lake. Here in May, 1869, the junction was celebrated in due form.

Since the "Seneca Chief" carried DeWitt Clinton from Buffalo to the Atlantic in 1825, it has been the custom to make the completion of a new road an occasion for formal celebration. On the 10th of May, 1869, the whole United States stood still to signalize the junction of the tracks. The date had been agreed upon by the railways on short notice, and small parties of their officials, Governor Stanford for the Central Pacific and President Dillon for the Union Pacific, had come to the scene of activities. The latter wrote up the "Driving the Last Spike" for one of the magazines twenty years later, telling how General Dodge worked all night of the 9th, laying his final section, and how at noon on the appointed day the last two rails were spiked to a tie of California laurel. The immediate audience was small, including few beyond the railway officials, but within hearing of the telegraphic taps that told of the last blows of the sledge-hammer was much of the United States. President Dillon told the story as it was given in the leading paragraph of the Nation of the Thursday after. "So far as we have seen them," wrote Godkin's censor of American morals, "the speeches, prayers, and congratulatory telegrams ... all broke down under the weight of the occasion, and it is a relief to turn from them to the telegrams which passed between the various operators, and to get their flavor of business and the West. 'Keep quiet,' the Omaha man says, when the operators all over the Union begin to pester him with questions. 'When the last spike is driven at Promontory Point, we will say "Done."' By-and-by he sends the word, 'Hats off! Prayer is being offered.' Then at the end of thirteen minutes he says, apparently with a sense of having at last come to business: 'We have got done praying. The spike is about to be presented.' ... Before sunset the event was celebrated, not very noisily but very heartily, throughout the country. Chicago made a procession seven miles long; New York hung out bunting, fired a hundred guns, and held thanksgiving services in Trinity; Philadelphia rang the old Liberty Bell; Buffalo sang the 'Star-spangled Banner'; and many towns burnt powder in honor of the consummation of a work which, as all good Americans believe, gives us a road to the Indies, a means of making the United States a halfway house between the East and West, and last, but not least, a new guarantee of the perpetuity of the Union as it is."

No single event in the struggle for the last frontier had a greater significance for the immediate audience, or for posterity, than this act of completion. Bret Harte, poet of the occasion, asked the question that all were framing:—

But he was able to answer only a part of it. His western engine retorted to the eastern:—

The oriental trade of Whitney and Benton yet dazzled the eyes of the men who built the road, blinding them to the prosaic millions lying beneath their feet. The East and West were indeed united; but, more important, the intervening frontier was ceasing to divide. When the road was undertaken, men thought naturally of the East and the Pacific Coast, unhappily separated by the waste of the mountains and the desert and the Indian Country. The mining flurries of the early sixties raised a hope that this intervening land might not all be waste. As the railway had advanced, settlement had marched with it, the two treading upon the heels of the Peace Commissioners sent out to lure away the Indians. With the opening of the road the new period of national assimilation of the continent had begun. In fifteen years more, as other roads followed, there had ceased to be any unbridgeable gap between the East and West, and the frontier had disappeared.