132 Years Ago:
The Continent Spanned 
Edward T. O'Donnell * The Irish Echo * May 9, 2001

One hundred thirty two years ago this week, on May 10, 1869, officials and workers of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads gathered in Promontory Summit, Utah to witness the completion of the transcontinental railroad.  The crowd of onlookers, among them many Irish workers and one important Irish politician, roared in appreciation as the ceremonial golden spike was driven.  Against enormous odds they’d just finished one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century. 

From the moment of the building of the first railroads in America in the 1830s, people began to dream of a railroad spanning the length of the American continent.  One of the most vocal champions of the idea was Galway-born John Conness.  As a member of the California legislature in the 1850s and later in the U.S. Senate, he led the way in building support for the project.  The one sticking point, however, was that southerners demanded a southern route to California instead of the northern route favored in the North.  The issue wasn’t settled until the outbreak of Civil War.

 On July 1, 1862 Congress, no longer hindered by southern opposition, passed the Pacific Railroad Act.  It authorized two companies, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, to construct a transcontinental railroad.  Money, not engineering, was the first challenge, since neither the government nor private interests had sufficient capital to build the road.  To pay for the project, Congress granted 6,400 square miles of public land along the proposed route to the companies.  The latter would sell the land and use the proceeds to finance the railroad’s construction.   Government loans also were authorized on a per-mile basis.

 The Central Pacific was to build west to east from California to the Nevada line, while the Union Pacific laid track westward from Omaha, Nebraska.  But in 1866 Congress amended the act to allow the rival railroads to build their lines as fast as they could until they met.  This was an enormous incentive to build fast, for every extra mile of track laid brought acres of free land and thousands of dollars in government loans.  It meant the transcontinental railroad would be built with astonishing speed, but at a cost of hazardous, corner-cutting engineering and construction methods that sacrificed quality and many lives.

 Construction began in 1863.  Both the CP and UP employed huge gangs of workers.  Although many blacks, Mexicans, Indians, Germans, English and native-born Americans worked on the line, the two largest groups were Irish and Chinese.  For the most part, the CP employed the Chinese and the UP the Irish.  Several Irishmen occupied high-level positions in the project, including most especially James Harvey Strobridge.  Born in Ireland, he served as the right-hand man to the CP’s Charles Crocker and oversaw every phase of the construction.

 Work along the lines was hard, dangerous, and low paid.  One popular song along the Union Pacific road in the 1860s was “Poor Paddy, He Works on the Railroad,” the refrain of which went:
     Then drill, my Paddies, drill –
     Drill, my heroes, drill, 
     Drill all day, no sugar in your tay
     Workin’ on the U.P. railway. 

Conflict often erupted between Irish and Chinese workers, especially in the last year of construction as pressure mounted to push the lines to completion.  This was due partly to racial animosity and partly to intense competition.  Foremen and managers for the UP goaded their Irish workers about how much faster the Chinese on the CP worked.  It was a challenge to their ethnic and male identity and implied that they might be replaced by Chinese workmen if they didn’t pick up the pace.

 On occasion the rivalry grew deadly.  After a brawl between Irish and Chinese workers, the Irish took to setting off dynamite charges near Chinese workers without the customary warning.  Several were seriously wounded.  A few days later, a blast set by Chinese workmen went off near a UP gang and buried a number if Irish workers alive.  Both sides agreed to a truce after that.

 By spring 1869 the grand project neared completion.  Promontory Summit in Utah had been selected as the official meeting place.  On April 27 the UP stood only 9 miles away, the CP just fourteen. 

The last stage of the railroad’s construction is the stuff of legend.  On April 28, Strobridge and his crew of mostly Chinese graders and eight Irish track-layers set out to do the impossible – lay ten miles of track in a single day.  The record to that point was a little more than four miles. 

At Strobridge’s order work began at sunup and pressed on until darkness, interrupted only for lunch.  With military precision and dogged determination the workmen laid more track in one day that any before or since – ten miles and fifty-six feet.  Everyone involved deserved credit for the feat, but as historian Stephen Ambrose describes it in his best-selling book, Nothing Like It In the World, The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, the work of eight Irish track-layers was particularly noteworthy.  “Each man among the Irish track-layers had lifted 125 tons of iron … That was 11.2 short tons per man per hour.  Each had covered ten miles forward and the Lord only knows how much running back for the next rail.  They moved the track forward at a rate of almost a mile an hour.  They laid at a rate of 240 feet every seventy-five seconds.”  Simply incredible.

 On April 30 the CP reached Promontory Summit.  The crew of the UP arrived a week later.  The grand ceremony for joining the two lines occurred on the cold morning of May 10.  Representatives from both railroads were on hand, as were workers of every background and politicians, including Senator John Conness. 

At the appointed moment, Leland Stanford, President of the Central Pacific, drove the golden spike into place, joining two rails, one placed by a team of Chinese workers and another by an Irish crew.  Telegraph wires attached to the sledge hammer and spike sent a signal out across the nation, announcing to all the long-anticipated news: the continent had been spanned. 

HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK

May 9, 1650: At the Battle of Clonmel, Black Hugh O’Neill defeats Oliver Cromwell army. 

May 12, 1789: The Society of St. Tammany is founded in New York.  It later becomes the basis of the Tammany Hall political machine.

May 14, 1974: The Ulster Workers Council declares a general strike, a move that soon brings down the government recently established under the Sunningdale agreement.
 

HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES:

May 10, 1810: Union General and U.S. Senator James Shields is born in Altmore, Co. Tyrone.

May 13, 1906: Playwright Samuel Beckett is born in Dublin.

May 15, 1902: Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is born in Chicago.

(c) Edward T. O'Donnell, 2001