Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

FIRST AMERICAN TRANS-CONTINENTAL RAILROAD. 135 but one that permitted a grade of 80 feet to the mile instead of the 116 feet allowed in the Government agreement, Sherman Pass an(j enabled, the company to discovered. , , make large profits out oi the high subsidy granted for the mountain divi- sion. The chief obstacle was the driving of four tunnels with a total length of 1,792 feet. Of these, No. 2, in Echo Canon, 972 miles from Omaha, and 772 feet long, had to be com- menced in July 1868, when rail-head was still T j 300 miles to the eastward, so as not to delay the laying of the rails when the locomotives reached the place. The local stone was unsuitable for lining pur- poses, and as all available transportation was required for handling tools, materials, and provisions, no stone could be brought from elsewhere, so the tunnel had to be lined with timber. Though the men worked hard, the graders were upon them before they had won through. The engineers, in order to get the line past the block, constructed two Y-shaped necks on the mountain side. The train passed up one leg into the neck—which was long enough to hold a train—and then backed out up the other leg to the second Y, where the engine got in front once more. At tunnel No. 3, driven through black lime- stone and quartzite, the engineer in charge decided to use nitro-glycerine instead of powder. Though some of the men struck, on the ground that two shifts could now do the work that formerly required three, the change of explosive effected a saving of $40,000, and, what was even more important, enabled the tunnel to be put through in time. Apart from the actual engineering diffi- culties were those arising out of the great distance separating the workers from Omaha, the base of supplies. The High Cost of wages demanded by the men Materials. , —often in advance — were vastly in excess of those paid for similar service elsewhere. There was no coal, wood, or fuel of any other sort on the plains, and no timber to make sleepers of, so that many of the last cost the company ten shillings each,. The workmen were discouraged by the barrenness, and grew weary of the cloudless sky and dry white earth, and the lack of supplies of fresh food. But probably the greatest trouble in th;e Rockies division arose from the frequent at- tacks by Indians. It has been said that an Indian arrow was shot for every „ , . . , rm. 4. Indians on spike driven into a tie. Inat 1 . the War-path. may be only a picturesque exaggeration ; yet it is a fact that the annals of the construction period are filled with accounts of desperate fights between the track-layer and the war-painted Redskin. The Indians had not molested Brigham Young’s party, and had done comparatively little dam- age to the trains of the “ ’forty-niners ” hurry- ing to the Californian goldfields. But when the white man came with his trail of steel and iron horse, and was guilty of ruthless and wanton destruction of the buffalo—the source of In- dian food and clothing—the savage went on the war-path with a craft and pertinacity that soon made it necessary to send troops to pro- tect the workmen. These last were them- selves, in many cases, old soldiers who had seen service during the Civil War ; who were as ready to fight an Indian as to lay a tie or fix a spike ; who at a word of command would fall in, deploy as skirmishers, and repel an attack, and then return calmly to their work. They formed, with their twofold qualifications, an army of the pick and rifle that thought little of danger. It was the latter trait—con- tempt of perils with which, they had become familiar—that accounted for a large propor- tion of the entries on the death-roll. It is interesting to note that the Pawnees, who had been treated very badly by the Sioux, took the white man’s side, and proved of no little value in checkmating attacks. While the Union Pacific Railroad was being