and moved the town. Tents were taken down, bags and boxes were packed, frames of houses were disjointed, and piled in rough mass upon the cars. The whole moved forward to a new place at the head of the track. An observer at the site that was to be Cheyenne, has reported the arrival of the train at that bare station: "The guard jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on the platform, called out with a flourish, 'Gentlemen, here's Julesburg."" And what had been Julesburg that morning was taken off the cars and set up to be Cheyenne that night. The terminal town of the Central Pacific was a Chinese camp, for Governor Stanford and his associates had repaired their local labor shortage by importing cheap coolie gangs. It was less expensive and more orderly than the Union Pacific camp, for the Chinese workers saved their pay, lived on rice, and wasted less than the Irish laborers who dominated on the eastern end. The engineering problems varied on the different ends of the line. At neither base was there access to a stock of supplies. San Francisco Bay was remote from places of manufacture, with the result that all the heavy tools, the rails, and the rolling stock came by ocean route, with heavy freights and long delays. At the eastern end of the line, there was no railroad connection when construction began. St. Joseph was a railroad terminus, but no line crossed Iowa as yet to Council Bluffs, which was selected as the starting-point. The supplies were freighted up the Missouri from St. Joseph or St. Louis, or from places more remote. The Union Pacific was burdened with the unnecessary condition that it should begin not at the Missouri River but at the western boundary of the State of Iowa. This was a provision offered to their constituents by the Iowa delegation and meant that a long and costly bridge must be built across the Missouri River before the railroad itself could get far under way. Most of the American railroads were still crossing important rivers on car ferries, for the manufacture of steel was not yet far enough advanced to make the steel truss bridge practicable; and there was no satisfactory substitute for it. The western road had an abundance of wood and stone in its vicinity with which to do the heavy work of construction, but the eastern road ran through a treeless plain, with long stretches where neither of these essential building materials was at hand. Neither of the tracks was held down by the engineers to a standard maximum gradient, but both were built along the natural configuration of the country unless the ascents were prohibitive. In spite of the generous aid offered by the United States in the act of 1864, both roads found it hard to raise money as needed to pay the costs of construction. In both cases the same men who controlled the stock of the company organized and controlled as well contracting companies to which were let contracts for construction of the line. In this way they expected to get their profits out of the speculation. On the western end it was the firm of Charles C. Crocker and Company that had the lion's share of business; on the eastern, it was the Crédit Mobilier of America. The Crédit Mobilier of America was a Pennsylvania corporation, created by special legislative act. It was organized with general powers, but without special purpose, except that its promoters proposed to sell their charter to some group of speculators who needed corporate privilege without running the gauntlet of legislation to get it. The Union Pacific men soon gained control of it, and through it the road was built. A Congressional committee later reported that the Union Pacific had cost about fifty million dollars to build, and that the railroad paid the builders this price and an additional profit of about twenty-three million dollars. The procedure was to let the contract for a given section at a stated price, and to pay the builders partly in cash, of which the railroad had little, and more in the securities it could control. It possessed under the law common stock, first mortgage bonds, and the United States bonds which constituted the second mortgage. All of these fluctuated on the market, so that it is almost impossible to say with precision what the cost of any transaction came to. Mr. James Ford Rhodes, who is familiar with business practices of the period after the Civil War, and who has made a careful study of the Crédit Mobilier, has reached the conclusion that in the year 1868, the largest year of the Crédit Mobilier, the holder of a share of stock in the company received as dividends: 230 per cent first mortgage bonds 515 per cent Union Pacific stock All of the securities were far below par, the Union Pacific stock running as low as nineteen cents on the dollar, but Mr. Rhodes's computation is that the holder of a $100 share of Crédit Mobilier stock received in 1868 dividends worth $341.85; and it is his judgment that the profit was not excessive considering the short life of the investment and its risk. The profits would probably not have attracted attention had not one of the promoters, Oakes Ames, a Massachusetts congressman, sold blocks of this stock to his colleagues, lending them the money with which to pay for it until the dividends should earn the cost. The New York Sun brought out the facts of this scandal during the presidential campaign of 1872, showing that a long list of Congressmen and other public officers had accepted these doubtful profits from a company that existed only because of acts of Congress. The Crédit Mobilier case became the text for innumerable sermons on political reform, while Oakes Ames, exposed and censured, died broken by the blow. It was only by such heroic finance that the Union Pacific was able to meet its bills during the years of actual construction. The race for mileage was begun after the legislation of 1866, and during the next two years the two great lines were brought within sight of completion. But as the year 1868 progressed there arose a doubt as to whether the advancing ends would ever meet. The law did not say where that point should be, or require the roads to build along a common survey. Each chose its own route, and a prospect arose of two overlapping lines, each continuing indefinitely. Congress intervened at this stage, and fixed upon the north shore of the Great Salt Lake where the junction should be made. At Promontory Point in Utah, or rather at a point directly north of its base, the last spike was driven May 10, 1869. Sidney Dillon, president of the Union Pacific, drove it in the presence of officers and guests from both coasts, while throughout the United States bells were rung, meetings were held, and orators called attention to the meaning of the event. Among the many poets of the day, Bret Harte stood out with his much quoted verse: "What was it the Engines said, Pilots touching, head to head Facing on a single track, Half a world behind each back?" per He let the eastern engine get the worst of the argument, and mitted the West, which he, beyond most writers of the day could understand, to carry off the honors: "You brag of the East! You do? Why, I bring the East to you! All the Orient, all Cathay, Find through me the shortest way; And the sun you follow here Never again could the wild Indians range the plains from the Rio Grande to the Assiniboin. The Pacific railroad split the northern and southern plains forever. It destroyed the possibility of the wild life as a perinanent condition. The year after the celebration at Promontory Point, the section of the Union Pacific that crossed the plains was paralleled from Denver to the Missouri River by the Kansas Pacific Railroad, which was connected with the main line at Cheyenne. The Kansas and Nebraska towns threaded upon these railroad lines, pushed out into the Indian Country, and their people gave words and definiteness to the demand that there must be a new chapter, and a final one, in the history of the American Indian.' 1 J. P. Davis, History of the Union Pacific Railway (1894), was long the standard becondary work. There now are admirable accounts in Nelson Trottman, History of the Union Pacific. A Financial and Economic Survey (1923). CHAPTER LIII THE DISRUPTION OF THE TRIBES By 1869, almost an even century after the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, it had become impossible to treat the Indians as separate independent tribes without doing violence to the facts of their life or to the reasonable demands of civilization for the use of the land over which they hunted. The theory of the Fort Stanwix Treaty was obsolete, as was that upon which Monroe and his successors acted after 1825. There could not be an Indian civilization maintained in its original form by the legislative enactment of the white race. If the Indian could not put his land to use, another would. In the process of experience by which this fact was learned the Indian tribes declined in civilization and took on the worst attributes of the stronger race. The benevolent theorists, who desired to protect the tribes from actual destruction, were in the older communities of the East. On the frontier, in actual contact with them, lived aggressive men who were realists in life, and saw in the Indians an incumbrance upon the earth. Only an absolute despotism, with high ideals and a powerful machinery of government could have saved the tribes, and this did not exist in the United States. It is not necessary or fair to call the process A Century of Dishonor (1881), as Helen Hunt Jackson did in her literary indictment of our Indian policy, for the only conscious policy of the Government was honorable and generous. But the American machine was far from being exact or competent; and through the different agencies at play, the defects of legislation and administration, and the incompetence of the Indians themselves, a result was attained after a century of American independence that was not far different from what a policy of conscious dishonor might have brought about. In advance of the completion of the Union Pacific, Congress was stirred by the manifest uneasiness of the Indians and the loud recriminations of the frontier States and Territories, to undertake an investigation of the status of the border. The Minnesota outbreak attracted attention after a long period in which the relations were relatively peaceful. The Chivington massacre kept interest alive and raised more doubts as to whether all the right was on |