Free Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 by Stephen E. Ambrose, Karolina Harris, Union Pacific Museum Collection Page B

waste of sand and sagebrush and white alkali deposits, with high mountain ranges to the south and bleak hills to the north. The desert ran nearly a hundred miles, without a tree, without water, without anything that could be used for construction. A popular saying was that “a jack rabbit had to carry a canteen and haversack” to get across it. 22
    The CP spent big money trying to drill wells, but to almost no avail. Clement remarked, “Tunnels were bored into the mountains east of Wadsworth to develop small springs and when water was found, it was carefully protected and conveyed, in some cases, over eight miles in pipes to the line of the road.” 23 The water for men, horses, and locomotives came from the Truckee River and was carried in huge, semiconical wooden vats on flatcars. The vats had big spouts that worked like the spouts of railroad water towers. At the end of track, much of the water had to be transferred to barrels and sent ahead by wagons to the graders. Timbers and boards for ties, bridges, station houses, and other structures, plus wood for fuel and rock for retaining walls and other masonry, camefrom the Sierra Nevada, where such materials were boundless. It was still expensive to bring them east, but it was done.
    That year the CP had a most unusual but major problem with its Chinese workforce. Charlie Crocker explained it to Huntington. “The most tremendous yarns have been circulating among the Chinese,” he wrote. “We have lost about 1,000 through fear of Indians out on the desert.” It seemed that they had been told “there are Snakes fifty feet long that swallow Chinamen whole on the desert, and Indians 25 feet high that eat men and women for breakfast and hundreds of other equally ridiculous stories.” Crocker solved the problem by sending twenty-two Chinamen taken from different groups “up the Humbolt [sic] to see for themselves and they have just returned and things are more quiet since.” 24
    The track layers were making great strides, while the graders ahead of them moved even faster. The
Alta California
described the way the thousands of men at work moved their residence each day. “Camp equipage, work shops, boarding house, offices, and in fact the big settlement literally took up its bed and walked. The place that knew it at morning knew it no more at night. It was nearly ten miles off and where was a busy town of 5,000 inhabitants in the morning, was a deserted village site at night, while a smooth, well built, compact road bed for traveling stretched from the morning site to the evening tarrying place.” 25
    One good thing about the desert—it was flat. Wadsworth, where the Truckee River turned north, was a bit more than four thousand feet in altitude. From there the route moved up in about as gentle a grade as the Nebraska plains. For 275 miles it gained only a thousand feet of altitude. So, in July and early August, the track layers put down and spiked forty-six miles of iron, or an average of one and a half miles per day.
    F ROM the beginning of the summer of 1868 to the end, Charles Crocker kept in much closer personal touch with the men. “I used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull,” he told an interviewer, “stopping along wherever there was anything going amiss, and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not up to time.” When he slept, which wasn’t often, it was on the train. When he woke, he could tell from the movement of his car exactly where on the line the train was. When Mrs. Crocker complained that he talked to her too roughly, he would reply, “Well you know that I don’t mean anything when I am abrupt with you.”
    â€œWell,” she replied, “your manner is overbearing and gruff. That is the way you talk with me and with everybody.”
    Crocker told his interviewer, “I got so that I was really ashamed of myself. That sort of bearing was entirely