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Laying Siege to Nature

With Huntington on top of leveraging financing from Washington, Judah removed as a protestor, it was Crocker working in California who managed to actually get the railroad built. One of Crocker's greatest challenges was finding enough laborers to get the job done and done fast. In the mid 1860s, gold was still a greater lure than working on a railroad as a low paid laborer. On the eastern slopes of the Sierras, the Comstock Mines near Virginia City were to yield 4300 million in wealth 1860-1889, and California's gold mines yielded 4170 million.

Who could Crocker find to build the railroad? Immigrants were his best answer. There had been a large influx of Chinese immigrants since the beginning of the gold rush. They were glad to escape the poverty of their homeland for a chance in the gold country of California. But they arrived to find their hopes of wealth dashed by the racial discrimination, such as the Foreign Miners tax law. This left the Chinese no way home, so they were forced to settle into any low paying jobs they could find in the cities and mining camps … they were eager workers, and excellent candidates for the railroad project.

Crocker hired over 6,000 Chinese laborers and had them supervised by 2,500 Irish immigrants and American workers in 1866. By 1869, Crocker had 12,000 Chinese laborers at work.

The New York Tribune called this mixed-race effort "a great army laying siege to Nature in her strongest citadel … shoveling, wheeling, carting, drilling, and blasting earth and rock."

Huntington pushed Crocker to have the crew "Work as through Heaven was before you and Hell was behind you" to get the project done. And they did, in amazing time, using engineering techniques that still seem amazing today.

In Rushes to Riches, J.S. Holiday explains "No mining enterprise, not even the deepest excavation in the Comstock, and no railroad yet built had confronted such formidable obstacles as those awaiting Crocker's army at the summit of the Sierras." This might mountain range did not offer to be conquered easily. Examples Holiday lists of their challenges:
· Blizzards heaped snowdrifts 30 even 60 feet deep.
· Avalanches swept away trestles and workers camps.
· Mountains were piled on mountains through which 15 tunnels would have to be driven stood in the crew's path.
· The Granite was so hard it that powder blasts spurted back out the drill holes and didn't move the hard, massive rock.
· The winter of 1866-67 had 44 snowstorms that could last for two weeks of howling with out let up.
· Twenty Chinese workers disappeared in a snow slide.
· More than 2000 men with shovels attacked frozen snowdrifts to open a 15-mile pathway to get food and supplies to the workers camps.
· Even in July, drifts of ice-cemented snow hampered their work.
· Lumbermen freely cut whatever trees were accessible in ravaged forests. The sheds (that protected the workers and track from snow during construction) alone consumed 65 million feet of timber.

This nearly unbelievable construction project culminated on May 10,1869 when the western stretch of the central Pacific met the eastern stretch of the union Pacific in Promontory, Utah. The union of the tow railroads was marked with a golden spike.

It was a combination of industrialized gold and silver mining, and the industry of forging a railroad through the California wilderness, that made the most pronounced changes in the California Backcountry from the late 1840s to the 1880s.