About the Transcontinental Railroad

by Clayton Frazer
for the Union Pacific Depot nomination for National Historic Landmark in 2005

A transcontinental railroad, uniting both Atlantic and Pacific coasts, was long a national dream in America. The concept was under discussion for nearly as long as there were railroads in this country. England introduced the world’s first railroad in 1825, and Americans were quick to adopt the new technology. Within two years, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had laid the longest track in the world, 133 miles from Charleston to Hamburg, South Carolina, the first important US rail line. By 1840 some 3,328 miles of railroad ran through the larger Atlantic states, eventually surpassing canals and rivers as the country’s predominant means of transportation. As the Eastern lines developed, talk of a transcontinental railroad to link with the West Coast heated up during the 1840s. After the war with Mexico and the acquisition of the western United States, the notion picked up new momentum. By the late 1850s, as steam revolutionized transportation technology of all kinds, the railroad “came of age as the major instrument of transportation.”

As early as 1845, Asa Whitney, New York businessman and China trader, had lobbied Congress—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—to subsidize just such a venture. “To the interior of our vast and widely spread country,” he stated, “it would be as the heart to the human body; it would, when all completed, cross all the mighty rivers and streams which wend their way to the ocean through our vast and rich valleys from Oregon to Maine, a distance of more than three thousand miles.”2 Following the discovery of gold in California four years later, Congress generally agreed with Whitney that a transcontinental rail link was needed. Unfortunately the groundswell of public enthusiasm for a transcontinental line coincided with a rise of sectional antagonism between North and South. By the time Congress acknowledged the necessity of the railroad, no one could agree upon a route. The path the railroad would take was the subject of partisan bickering among various Congressional factions. The combatants were only temporarily pacified by a series of surveys undertaken by the army in 1853-1854 to determine the most feasible course to the Pacific. The Secretary of War in 1855 presented four viable routes: from Lake Superior to Portland; over the Overland Trail to San Francisco; along the Red River to southern California; and across southern Texas to San Diego.

Southerners objected strongly to any northern route, and during the 1850s decision-making about a transcontinental railroad reached a stalemate. The outbreak of the Civil War and Southern secession eventually broke the impasse. With Congress now controlled by Northerners, the first transcontinental railway would take a northerly route. The most favorable northern route originated at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and roughly paralleled the Overland Trail along the Platte River and across southern Wyoming. The relatively gentle grades of this route made it much more enticing to engineers than other routes to the north and south.

The “Big Four”—Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker—provided the private financial reserves and administrative ability to transform the idea to reality. They commissioned Theodore Judah, a practiced engineer and energetic promoter, to present their plan to Congress. On July 1, 1862, the partnership succeeded, as Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act. The legislation called for two companies to build and operate the road. The Central Pacific, chartered by the Big Four, would bridge the Sierra Nevada; the Union Pacific, chartered by Congress, would build westward from Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Rocky Mountains, to join with the Central Pacific.

The Union Pacific incorporated in July 1862 in Boston, with Oliver Ames as its first president. His brother, Oakes Ames, would serve as director of Credit Mobelier, the corporation charged with actual construction of the railroad. Grenville Dodge, a major in the Civil War and congressman from Iowa, would function as the railroad’s Chief Engineer. The cost to build the transcontinental railroad would be staggering—far beyond the capacity of private industry to bear. To help finance the construction, each company was assured liberal government subsidies, receiving grants of twenty alternate sections of land for each mile of track laid. This included the odd-numbered tracts in a strip forty miles wide, twenty miles on either side of the track.. Additionally, Congress authorized 6 percent loans, on a second-mortgage basis, of $16,000 for each mile built over flat terrain, $32,000 per mile in the foothills, and $48,000 in the mountains. The transcontinental project was made even more appealing by the inclusion of mineral rights grants. By the time the line was completed in 1869, the companies had received nearly $27 million, or one-half the legitimate cost of construction.

Although the US Army had reconnoitered a route seven years earlier, the exact line of both railroads was still undetermined. Grenville Dodge was responsible for mapping the Union Pacific’s route west from Omaha. His route generally followed the route delineated by Capt. Howard Stansbury in 1849, paralleling the Platte River Road—used by the Oregon, California and Overland trails—across Nebraska. Rather than dropping down along the South Platte to Denver to capture the mineral-rich Colorado territory, Dodge routed the line across windswept southern Wyoming to tap known coal resources and avoid the most rugged part of the Rocky Mountain chain. To provide ready water sources for the railroad’s locomotives, he largely kept to the Platte River, Lodge Pole Creek, Rock Creek, Bitter Creek and Bear River drainages across the territory.

Early in July 1865 a small group of workers began laying track for the Union Pacific in the Missouri River mud flats above Omaha. But the Civil War hampered construction of both the Union Pacific and Central Pacific. The CP had begun tracklaying in October 1863 and had laid some 35 miles during the war. By the end of 1865 the UP had laid only about 40 miles of track in eastern Nebraska. At war’s end, however, the Union Pacific—now flush from the first Congressional grant money—could resume construction in earnest. Thomas Durant, an experienced railroad manager, was given responsibility for overseeing the railroad’s construction. In February 1866 Durant contracted with brothers and Civil War officers Jack and Dan Casement to supervise the actual tracklaying. By agreement, the Casements would make no more than a mile per day, unless Durant ordered them to slow to half speed. For this they would be paid $750 per mile. The railroad would provide locomotives, ties and rails, water, and undercarriages for special rail cars that the Casements would construct themselves. “Casement has contracted for tracklaying,” Durant telegraphed an assistant in Omaha. “Will probably want our men. Aid him in building boarding cars. Make arrangements to furnish 3,500 ties per day after river opens.”

The Casements spent the spring gearing up for the construction season—building their four enormous rail cars, stockpiling materials, lining up laborers from among the Civil War veterans then pouring into town for work. “Could get plenty of men here if I was ready to go to work,” Jack Casement wrote, “We will have lots of hard driving to do if they can get the Iron fast enough.” Construction finally got underway on April 6, with men laying the rails at the end of the existing tracks west of Omaha.

The Casements soon developed a system to maximize the crews’ efficiency. Typically, surveyors would demark a hundred-mile right-of-way, which would then be graded with the construction of cuts, fills and bridges, as needed. Gangs of track layers followed, comprised of tie-men, rail-men, screwers, spikers and gandy dancers. “Thirty seconds to a rail for each gang, and so four rails down a minute,” one reporter wrote. “Close behind the first gang came the gaugers, spikers and bolters, and a lively time they made of it. It is a grand Anvil Chorus that those sturdy sledges are playing across the plains. It is in triple time, three strokes to a spike. There are ten spikes to a rail, 400 rails to a mile.” In this manner 240 miles of track were laid down across the Nebraska plains in 1866 at an average of 1¾ miles per day. “It is hard to realise that so great a distance may be accomplished in so short a time,” reported the New York Times.

The Casement brothers contended with considerable construction obstacles posed by the High Plains. All materials had to be transported over vast distances to the sparsely settled region—trees from the mountains for ties and bridge timbers, stone from the quarries of Wisconsin and rails from the forges of Pennsylvania. With the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific each being paid by the mile of completed track, competition rapidly developed. This competition carried with it tremendous stakes, and the pistol-wielding Casements pushed construction relentlessly. They worked their crews long into the evenings and paid triple wages for Sunday work. Graders and teamsters typically made $2.50 per day; spikers, $3.00; iron workers, $3.50. The men were housed in three of the 85-foot-long, four-story boarding cars. The fourth car housed equipment, a butcher’s shop, a bakery and an office for the Casements. Each man paid $20 per month for board, which consisted of a vermin-infested bed and an unvarying diet of beefsteak, bread and coffee. There was little for off-shift laborers to do but sleep, drink and gamble.

By coordinating materials shipments and synchronizing the ways that twelve-man gangs moved and placed the rails, the brothers were able to increase progress from one mile per day in 1865 to six or seven miles by 1869. Such haste had its cost, though, as the crews shaved corners from accepted construction practice. The roadbed was largely unballasted, the bridges were often structurally suspect, the grades were the maximum allowed by law, and the ties were generally untreated and frequently of inferior quality. Most of the line across Nebraska would have to be replaced soon after its completion due to its inferior quality. But with government subsidies tied to completed trackage, this was of secondary importance. The Union Pacific roared across Nebraska and into Wyoming.

Building across most of Nebraska, the UP crews had only to contend with construction-related hardships and difficulties. From the western part of the state onward, however, they faced an additional danger: hostile Indians. The Pacific Railroad Act had called for the establishment of an army post at the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains to provide a military escort for the construction workers. This fort would function as one of a series of outposts along the railroad from which troops would patrol the region. On July 4, 1867, with the railroad construction crew at Julesburg, Colorado, Grenville Dodge met with Gen. C.C. Augur at the point where the railroad would cross Crow Creek to determine the best location for the proposed post and supply depot. Dodge preferred a site close to the settlement rapidly developing in the railroad’s path. Augur wanted to place the fort near timber some fourteen miles away. They eventually agreed on the Crow Creek site. The railroad named the nascent town Cheyenne, after the Indian tribe; the army named the post Fort D.A. Russell (listed as an National Historic Landmark in 1975), after Gen. David A. Russell, killed in the Civil War. Troops of the 13th Infantry soon began building the new post in anticipation of the railroad’s arrival.

Nearly a thousand men strong, the Casement Army reached Cheyenne on November 13, 1867. “A vast assemblage of citizens and railroad men convened to celebrate the occasion of the advent of the U.P.R.R.,” the Cheyenne Leader cheered. “The large transparency near the speakers’ stand bore the motto: ‘The Magic City greats the continental railway.’” What the railroad crew found here was a fully developed town with a population of some 4,000 people, two daily newspapers, over 200 businesses and a functioning town government. The town had been surveyed within a week of Dodge’s visit in July and lots sold by the Union Pacific’s land company. The initial residences and businesses were housed in tents, shanties, adobes and prefabricated buildings that had been erected, dismantled and re-erected at different locations as the railroad moved westward. Cheyenne typified the end-of-tracks towns that followed the railroad’s progress. City lots that had initially sold for $150 had burgeoned to as much as $2000 in the speculative boom. All manners of vice could be obtained from the saloons, gambling houses and brothels that had sprung up literally overnight.

Grenville Dodge himself had predicted that the town would be a “second hell,” but he also foresaw a more lasting legacy for the teeming community. “Government alone will build up here a large town,” he wrote in July, “as it is to be the depot for all posts north and south and also the distributing point for all points in Colorado. . . (The Union Pacific) shall also build a large workshop, machine shops, round houses, etc. The UP’s plans for Cheyenne buoyed the more sober-minded businessmen in town, but as the railroad workers rolled in that November afternoon there was celebrating to do. As the Leader reported, the reception was joyous:

Our citizens swarmed along the grade, and watched with most intense delight and enthusiasm, the magic work of track-laying. The hearty greeting we all gave this gigantic enterprise, so rapidly approaching, was too deep and full for expression. There was no shouting and cheering, but one full tide of joy that sprung from the deep and heartfelt appreciation of the grandeur of the occasion and the enterprise, and that bright future now dawning on the remote regions of the far west. . . All honor to the country that projects, and the managers that carry forward this magnificent thoroughfare, that links the remotest cities and States, or our glorious Union, in stronger fraternal bonds and further, at the same time, all their social, moral and natural interests.

Cheyenne, located some 512 miles west of Omaha, was one of numerous settlements springing up along the railroad’s length. At intervals of between twelve to fifteen miles along the tracks, the railroad established stations. Some consisted of no more than a pile of wood and water tank for the steam locomotives. Others employed frame shacks to house the company’s freight and passenger facilities. Division points, more distantly spaced, contained eating houses, stores, saloons and shops. The end of the line and the eventual Rocky Mountain headquarters for the UP, Cheyenne received an extensive stone roundhouse and several maintenance shops. As the rails moved westward, towns sprang up along the route to service the needs of the laborers. The unsavory nature of these temporary settlements was legendary. North Platte, Nebraska, was a product of the railroad, populated briefly by some 5,000 souls “having a good time, gambling, drinking and shooting each other.” Julesburg, further down the line, was one of the worst of the hell-on-wheels towns, described by Dodge as “a much harder place than North Platte.” In June 1867, before the rails arrived, Julesburg housed 40 men and a woman. Six weeks later, after the first train pulled into town, the population had burgeoned to over 4,000 and was known as the “Wickedest City in America.” As described by one correspondent:

Julesburg continues to grow with magic rapidity and vice and crime stalk unblushingly in the midday sun. General Augur and staff returned here last Friday evening and nothing would do but they must see the town by gas light. I sent for Dan Casement to pilot us. The first place that we visited was a dance house, where a fresh importation of strumpets had been received. The hall was crowded with bad men and lewd women, Such profanity, vulgarity and indecency as was heard and seen there would disgust a more hardened person than I. The next place visited was a gambling hell where all games of chance were being played. Men excited with drink and dally were recklessly staking their last dollar on the turn of a card or the throw of the dice. Women were cajoling and coaxing the tipsy men to stake their money on various games; the pockets were shrewdly picked by the fallen women or the more sober of the crowd.

When a group of gamblers contested the platting of Julesburg by squatting on town lots, Dodge sent in Jack Casement and a contingent of his tracklaying crew to restore order. Casement’s men set upon the squatters, opening fire on them indiscriminately. Later Casement showed Dodge the town cemetery and said, “They all died in their boots and Julesburg has been quiet since.” Many of the hell-on-wheels towns no longer remain, lasting no longer than it took the railroad to move westward to the next division point.

The construction crew made it as far as Granite Canyon, a station twenty miles beyond Cheyenne, before shutting down for the winter. Prospects for the Union Pacific looked promising. The railroad had accrued $3.8 million in government subsidies for 1867. Government business, commercial freight hauling and land sales had netted about $2 million. The Union Pacific was operating regular service over its 517-mile length between Omaha and Cheyenne. As most of the workers laid off by the Casements returned to winter over in Cheyenne, the contractors were stockpiling materials for the more challenging mountain segments that lay ahead in southern Wyoming. Despite the outlook of heavy construction, beginning with the immense Dale Creek Viaduct, the UP directors were predicting that 350 miles would be built in 1868.

The winter of 1867-1868 was relatively mild in Wyoming. Late that winter crews began working on the railroad in advance of the tracks, as far west as Fort Sanders near the future site of Laramie. The trestle bents were completed for the Dale Creek Viaduct, and the L.B. Boomer Bridge Works had begun shipping chords for the truss superstructure. Ties were being stacked along the route in anticipation of the tracklaying that would resume shortly. Work resumed in earnest in March; by April 5 the men had passed the Sherman station, the highest point on the Union Pacific line. Two weeks later, they laid tracks across the newly completed Dale Creek Viaduct. With a length of 707 feet and a height of 127 above the streambed, it was the highest railroad bridge in the world at the time of its construction. The Boomer Bridge works had used timbers cut in Michigan to fabricate the combination trusses in their Chicago plant for a cost of some $200,000. Later that month the tracks reached Laramie, the site of Fort Sanders, a military post established to provide protection for the railroad crews. At Laramie the railroad quickly built a roundhouse and maintenance facility similar to Cheyenne’s. According to historian David Bain:

Before the tracks were run past the new station at Laramie, a tent town had sprung up on the riverbank, populated by speculators and entrepreneurs and other fast-buck artists. On auction day, the railroad men could barely record the sales quickly enough. Some four hundred plots were sold within a few days at prices ranging from $25 to $260, and in another ten days no fewer than five hundred shacks had been slapped together. The first regular passenger train would ease its way slowly over the new, raw mountain grades on May 9, its coaches raucous with saloon keepers, gamblers, peddlers, tradesmen, brothel owners and their “prairie flowers,” the flatcars spilling over with all of their various paraphernalia and with towering stacks of dismantled building sections. Hell on Wheels had advanced a little farther into the West.

That spring and summer the Casements’ crew pushed steadily northward and westward from Laramie, making about three miles per day. On July 21, 1868, the rails passed through the newly established town of Carbon, the Union Pacific’s first coal town, before passing through Fort Fred Steele, another railroad-based military post. A week later the rails had reached Benton, dubiously named after Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, an infamous hell-on-wheels town described by Jack Casement as “the meanest place I have ever been in.” In August the railroad built another roundhouse and maintenance facility at Rawlins. The Casement army pressed grimly westward from there, though the Red Desert, reaching Rock Springs in October. As the tracks approached Green River, a squatters’ town sprang up alongside the site where the railroad built a temporary bridge over the river. Grenville Dodge noted that the town was situated in the bottomland near the river and would certainly be flooded during high water. Rather than rout out the speculators as he did at Julesburg, he instead sited the railroad’s roundhouse complex at Bryan, some twelve miles west of Green River, and the town picked up and moved to the railroad’s new division point. From Bryan the tracks stretched to Granger, the junction of the Oregon and Overland trails.

As winter began to descend in November 1868, the construction army angled southwest from the Red Desert toward Utah. Near the southwest corner of Wyoming Territory, the railroad located the Evanston station, named after Division Engineer James A. Evans, who had been responsible for much of the surveying on the line. Camp followers expected the Union Pacific to establish a division point here. By the time the first locomotive steamed into the fledgling town on December 16, 1868, some 600 people were settling in for the winter. General Williamson, who was responsible for laying out towns along the UP, had platted Evanston along the Bear River. But Dodge surprised the settlers again by locating the division shops, not at Evanston, but at Wasatch, eleven miles west in Utah Territory. “Machine shops of wood were hastily constructed,” stated historian Elizabeth Stone, “so-called ‘rag-houses’ of canvas and wood were hurriedly put up, and two thousand people flocked in.” Here the railroad closed down for the winter. Wasatch, at an elevation of 6,000 feet, was bitterly cold, prompting one wag to comment that coffee spilled in his saucer would freeze before he could pour it back into his cup. Work on the railroad resumed early the following March, as the railroad pushed westward across northern Utah.

On May 10, 1869, a small coterie of workers and officials watched the driving of the ceremonial golden spikes at Promontory, Utah. Americans from coast to coast recognized this moment for the watershed event that it was. “It is,” stated editor Samuel Bowles at the time, “the unrolling of a new map, a revelation of a new empire, the creation of a new civilization.” The economic importance of the transcontinental railroad could hardly be overstated. The slender steel strand represented a symbolic joining of East and West—at a critical time for a nation still deeply divided following the Civil War—and a coming of age for the country, politically, technologically, economically and socially. The Cheyenne Leader captured the national euphoria:

Human language is inadequate to portray, in proper shape, the magnitude and importance of the work just completed. Even imagination is weak in its conceptions of the grandeur of results which shall unfold, in full and immediate realization of untold benefits to humanity. The driving of the last spike of the Pacific Railroads has not only united with indissoluble bonds of friendship the two extremes of our own land, but has inaugurated a revolution in the commerce of the entire globe. . . Throughout our entire Union the electric chime of joyous bells, and the simultaneous boom of rejoicing cannons, in strangely concordant symphony, proclaimed, with each stroke of the silver hammer on the last golden spike at Promontory Point, the triumph of Peace over War—of mind over matter. With the increased facilities for commercial intercourse, thus afforded the sons of men, have we not reason to believe rapid strides have been made towards the millennium promised to man?

The linking of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific in remote Utah has been likened by historians to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in terms of historical significance. Certainly the railroad was pivotally important to the West. The Union Pacific brought a series of towns to Wyoming where none had existed previously. In peculiarly American fashion, the railroad formed the leading edge of development, as railroad-created towns were established in advance of outlying rural settlement. Agriculture and mining soon followed, once the means to ship large, cumbersome loads—cattle, ore, machinery—was in place. As the previously inaccessible region became accessible, population grew and other infrastructural elements— wagon roads, stores, churches and schools, government, social order—soon developed in and around the nexuses formed by the railroad towns.

Wyoming, with its rich mineral resources and abundant grazing lands, was primed for development by the UP. Once a part of Dakota Territory, Wyoming was granted territorial status of its own as the railroad construction had progressed halfway across the territory in 1868. At that time close to 20,000 Euro-Americans lived here—most of them transient railroad workers—a substantial increase over the hundreds that populated the territory only shortly before. The Union Pacific provided a tremendous impetus for future social and economic growth of Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain West. Pioneers who had previously passed through the region could now be assured materials and supplies needed for existence and be guaranteed a ready outlet for their products. The transcontinental railroad virtually transformed the West.

For the nascent community of Cheyenne, the self-proclaimed “Magic City of the Plains,” the railroad represented a powerful economic engine. Cheyenne was “a creation of the U.P.R.R.,” stated the Leader, “and by the acts of that corporation does she stand or fall.” The Union Pacific employed scores of full-time laborers here and supported numerous secondary businesses. Cheyenne, on the basis of the railroad and military presence, had been designated the territorial capital, with its attendant government payroll. Additionally, Fort D.A. Russell and the Camp Carlin supply center had developed into the most important military post in the Rocky Mountain region. As a result, Cheyenne grew into the territory’s largest city, even after losing half its population when the railroad construction crew and the hangers-on moved down the line. Located roughly midway along the Union Pacific’s length at the eastern edge of the Laramie Range, Cheyenne represented a strategic division point for the railroad. Soon after the tracks reached town in 1867, the UP had designated Cheyenne as its principal depot and maintenance yard in the Rockies.

To accommodate these repair facilities, the UP built several wood frame shops and a twenty-stall roundhouse and turntable. The stone masonry roundhouse, characterized as “elegantly designed” by one chronicler, was Cheyenne’s first permanent structure. The nearby depot, in contrast, was as prosaic as the engine house was elegant. A modestly scaled, single-story, wood frame building constructed in 1867 from a standard design, it featured a simple rectangular footprint and a side-gabled roof. The station’s board-and-batten siding and wood-shingled roof earmarked the building as utilitarian, rather than inspirational. It housed a telegraph and express office on one side and a ticket office and waiting room on the other. Situated immediately east of the depot was the Pacific House, a two-story hotel and eating house also built by the railroad in 1868. Like the depot, it featured wood-frame construction and an uncomplicated roofline.

Cheyenne grew incrementally in the 1870s and early 1880s, alternately prospering and suffering—along with the railroad—in response to national economic cycles. The rail yards expanded gradually, as the UP built more offices and shops over time. In 1873 the UP had been both a contributor to and a victim of a nationwide financial panic. The panic had been triggered by the bankruptcy of financier Jay Cooke, principal investor for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Cooke’s failure in turn resulted in a series of bankruptcies that crippled the nation’s rail network. The ensuing financial depression brought the usual constriction in the money supply and the general rush to unload stock and bond holdings. For the railroads, the loss of confidence among investors was exacerbated by the nationally reported scandal involving Credit Mobelier, the finance company organized to pay the construction costs of the Union Pacific. Suspicious purchases with UP stock and federal subsidies, missing funds and preferential stock sales by corporate insiders to members of Congress all combined to bring the UP and other railroads into even greater disfavor around the country. The Panic of 1873 drove some 77 American rail companies into receivership, including—almost—the Union Pacific.

The UP barely survived the Panic but was still dogged by troubles from competitors. To make matters worse, the railroad was further hamstrung by the Thurman Act of 1878, passed by Congress in reaction to the Credit Mobelier uproar. The Thurman Act required that the greater part of the UP’s profits be set aside into a sinking fund to guarantee repayment of the government’s subsidy bonds, due in the 1880s. With much of its operating capital thus encumbered, the Union Pacific was unable to make needed improvements, maintain its rolling stock and right of way or build subsidiary lines.

The Union Pacific building suffered in comparison with the stations that other railroads had more recently built in Cheyenne. Embarrassed, Cheyenne civic groups began to push for a more ostentatious passenger depot to replace the original frame structure still being used. In 1879 the railroad eliminated the men’s waiting room in the depot and expanded the ticket office and women’s waiting room. Few wanted to wait inside the shabby building anyway, preferring to stand in the hotel lobby or outside on the platform. With its rough construction and poorly maintained grounds, the station had by this time become a disgrace to the city. “When the train brought me to your depot,” one traveler wrote in 1881, “though I felt an abiding interest in the welfare of your city and people, yet I could not help but remarking to myself, how coldly barren the neighborhood of your depot appeared.”

In 1885, the railroad erected a new freight depot a hundred yards west of the passenger station. A large single-story frame structure, it featured expanded facilities for freight handling. But the new building did little to mollify a city clamoring for improved passenger facilities. By the 1880s the “principal depot” that the Union Pacific had promised in 1868 had still not materialized. In June 1885 the Cheyenne Sun stated that the old depot had given the city a black eye, stating, “In a business sense, the railroad has no depot.” The Sun’s editor urged the Cheyenne Merchants’ Association to lobby UP President Charles Adams for a new facility:

It should be pointed out to President Adams that building of a new depot would encourage many gentlemen who own cattle and have other interests in the territory to build substantial and handsome residences. It could be a profitable situation, if the Railroad would devote half the money it received from Cheyenne in a month, to building a depot.

With the first impression given to visitors a run-down shack, there was little magic in the Magic City of the Plains. In December 1885 Governor Francis Warren received word that Adams had approved the design for a “large and handsome” new passenger depot at Cheyenne. The design, according to railroad officials, had been under consideration for a long time, and, with the decision to build the depot now made, construction would begin without delay. It is not known what had motivated Union Pacific to build the structure almost twenty years after having promised it. It seems unlikely that the railroad was responding to the entreaties of the Merchants’ Association lobbyists, no matter how convincing. One theory is that UP Director Fred Ames used his influence to push the depot to show appreciation to Warren for having guarded the railroad’s property during labor and racial disputes in the coal mines of western Wyoming. Whatever the reason, the proposed depot would be the grandest west of Omaha. It was much more ostentatious than the railroad could justify for a city the size of Cheyenne.

During this time, the Union Pacific itself was struggling. The railroad had in fact been laboring under financial hardship almost since its inception. The UP had been prevented from building branch lines by its Congressional charter, and shipping revenues from traffic through the sparsely settled West were barely sufficient to sustain the railroad’s operation. The company’s monopoly on western rail transportation lasted only briefly before other corporations began stretching lines into the region.

Jay Gould tried to build the UP into a viable enterprise in the 1870s and 1880s by merging the Union Pacific with the Kansas Pacific to give the railroad a better entree to the East. He was on the verge of bringing the Missouri Pacific into the fold and thus creating a truly transcontinental line but backed off after a subsequent financial panic in 1884. Then Charles Adams had tried to manage the unwieldy mess but, after six of what he called the most frustrating years of his life, admitted defeat. Gould resumed control of the UP in 1890, before going into a sort of receivership himself. In 1892 the old man died, leaving his fortune, his railroads and his desire to control a coast-to-coast road to his son George Jay Gould. But it was too late for the Union Pacific. Starved for traffic, throttled by the government and facing millions of dollars of debt, the railroad declared bankruptcy in October 1893.

The UP emerged from receivership five years later as “two dirt ballasted streaks of rust.” Despite its poor financial condition and decrepit physical state, the company had managed to keep its properties intact. The UP at the turn of the 20th century essentially controlled the same track it had in 1881. It would be up to its new president Edward H. Harriman to forge it into a viable entity. Harriman’s scheme was to transform the UP into the western trunk of a truly transcontinental railroad, with either the Baltimore & Ohio or the New York Central as the eastern leg. To this end he quickly re-acquired the Oregon Short Line, acquired the Southern Pacific and built a new line from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. Harriman also spent some $9 million shortening distances, straightening curves and reducing grades soon after taking over, so that the railroad could function more efficiently with much heavier trains. He was largely successful. Before he died in 1909, Harriman had resurrected the Union Pacific into the forerunner of western rail traffic. He secured financial backing from the powerful Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Banking house to put the Union Pacific in an unusual situation for a Western railroad—it was cash rich. “Applying a combination of talent and hard work,” stated one historian, “Harriman and his associates rebuilt the Union Pacific into one of the strongest, most efficient, and most profitable railroads in the United States.”

Under Harriman’s direction, the Union Pacific upgraded much of its trackage, which had been initially laid hurriedly then allowed to deteriorate after years of deferred maintenance. By 1909 the UP had rebuilt some 253 miles of road on its main line and Kansas division, shortening the route by 54 miles, double-tracking much of the main line and eliminating almost 4500 feet of grade. The railroad replaced almost 100,000 feet of timber trestle. Also during the Harriman administration, the UP embarked on an aggressive program of building construction. Between 1898 and 1909, the company built 45 new section houses, 58 new stockyards, 7 roundhouses, 36 depots and 286 other structures. Up and down the line the railroad constructed substantial masonry railroad depots to replace the earlier frame buildings, some of which were still sheathed with original board-and-batten siding. Such medium-scale depots at Evanston (1900), Rawlins (1901), Rock Springs (1900), Brigham City (1907) and Nampa (1903) featured revival architectural idioms. None could match the Cheyenne depot, however, in terms of scale or grandeur. The Cheyenne facilities during the Harriman administration underwent large-scale improvements. Although the depot itself remained essentially unaltered, several shop buildings were constructed in the Cheyenne yards to create a major complex.

In a little over a decade, Harriman had virtually transformed the Union Pacific into the driving force of western railroading. He had spent some $160 million building new facilities, rebuilding rails, acquiring new lines, purchasing rolling stock and generally improving the company. As a result, the railroad became perhaps the most efficient of its scale in the country. The Union Pacific was at last turning a handsome profit when Harriman’s successor, Robert Lovett, took over the helm in 1909. Lovett took up where Harriman had left off, proposing further improvements soon after taking office. He and his successors continued to nurture the company, as the Union Pacific thrived in the 1910s and 1920s.

The depot in Cheyenne was not the first grand station built by the Union Pacific along its main line, nor was it the last. The railroad’s first architecturally noteworthy passenger facility was the one at Council Bluffs, its eastern terminus. In 1878 the railroad built an elegant three-story depot here to handle passengers and freight transferring to the transcontinental railroad from lines further east. Built to replace an 1874 structure that had burned, the brick masonry building featured High Victorian Italianate architectural detailing and the finest and largest bar between Chicago and Denver. A sign in the waiting room grandly proclaimed, “The West begins here.” The Council Bluffs Transfer Depot was later demolished.

As the Union Pacific built westward from Council Bluffs in the 1860s, it constructed wood frame passenger and freight depots. Hurriedly constructed, these small-scale facilities were generally built from standard designs with little regard for architectural craftsmanship or style. Most were little more than shacks, even in the larger municipalities such as Omaha, Cheyenne and Ogden. In the 1870s the railroad was too strapped for cash to spend much upgrading these earliest stations, other than the Council Bluffs facility. Omaha’s depot was improved somewhat but was hardly what could be considered a high-style structure. Cheyenne’s depot, built in 1886-1887, was the first substantial large-scale depot that the UP built west of Council Bluffs. Its stone masonry construction and grandly detailed Romanesque architecture marked it as the most elegant depot along the line at the time of its completion. It was followed in 1889 by a similarly configured depot at the railroad’s western terminus in Ogden. Also designed by Henry Van Brunt, the Ogden depot was subsequently destroyed by fire in 1923 and replaced a year later with the existing Italian Renaissance Revival structure built over the foundation of the earlier building.

After completion of the Ogden depot in 1889, the UP was stumbling toward bankruptcy and could ill afford construction of other grand depots. During the Harriman administration this all changed, as the railroad emerged from bankruptcy flush with cash and expanding its lines. Around the turn of the 20th century the Union Pacific built several small-scale masonry stations along its main and subsidiary lines. During this time the UP also built major union stations at Omaha and Salt Lake City. Completed in 1899, the Omaha depot was another Van Brunt design. It stood until 1931, when it was replaced by an Art Deco station by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood. About the mausoleum-like building, Underwood stated, “We have tried to express the distinctive character of the railroad—strength, power, masculinity.” Architectural historian Caroll Meeks has more recently had a different take, however. He states that Underwood had made no apparent attempt to rescue the building from “complete lethargy.” “From the outside,” he writes, “it is as impossible to imagine that [it] has an interior as it is to visualize the internal chambers of the pyramids.”

The Salt Lake City depot was clearer in its architectural intent. Designed by Southern Pacific staffer Daniel J. Patterson and completed in 1909, it featured a French Renaissance Revival style, with mansard roofs, carved stone gargoyles and circular dormers. The building’s strict symmetry, blocky proportions and steeply pitched roofs gave it a dour countenance, however, which was hardly inspirational to travelers or townspeople. It was saved architecturally by the stained glass windows and murals that depicted western transportation themes. The Salt Lake City Depot still stands essentially intact and is today used to house a museum and art gallery.

The Central Pacific experienced a similar chronology of depots for its portion of the transcontinental railroad. With fewer populous cites along its length, however, it had fewer opportunities for grand depots. Sacramento, the railroad’s original western terminus, received its first depot in the late 1860s, as the line was still under construction. A single-story frame building, it resembled the earliest Union Pacific depots with its wood frame construction and board-and-batten siding. It was later replaced with a more substantial structure, which was in turn replaced in 1926 with a Renaissance Revival station designed by Bliss & Faville. The first and second depots are no longer extant (although a reproduction of the original station has been built in Old Sacramento, a tourist park). The 1926 building still stands, more or less intact. Reno, Nevada, went through three depots—beginning in 1868—before the current structure was built here, also in 1926. A stuccoed structure with symmetrical facades, Palladian windows and a red tile roof, it still stands, although its predecessors are no longer extant.

The Union Pacific, for its part, expanded during the early 1880s, as it tried desperately to fend off increasing competition from other lines. UP President Charles Adams needed a strong presence in the Rocky Mountains to counter competitors with tracks into Denver, and he wanted to repay Wyoming Governor Francis Warren for quelling a potentially disastrous labor strike in western Wyoming. So he commissioned a nationally prominent architectural firm to design what would prove to be one of the most distinctive depots in the West.

Though built some twenty years after completion of the transcontinental railroad, the Cheyenne Depot served to reinforce the railroad’s commitment to the region. Its unhesitating position at the end of a boulevard facing the Wyoming State Capitol eloquently illustrated the socioeconomic importance of the Union Pacific to Wyoming and the West. Far more grandiose than could be justified for a city the size of Cheyenne, the Depot was intended to make a statement: Power, wealth and permanence for the railroad, and strength, sophistication and commodity for its architect. The railroad recognized what it had in the Cheyenne Depot. The building stood unaltered for decades as one of the UP’s crown jewels as the railroad underwent various booms and busts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1920s, with the Union Pacific flush with cash and still defending against competitors, the railroad first expanded then redecorated the building, in an attempt at modernization to accommodate tourists and transcontinental travelers. It has since stood without serious alteration to the present.

Of all these cities along the original transcontinental railroad, only Cheyenne still maintains its 19th century depot. All the others have been destroyed by fire or demolished to make room for later iterations. As only the second grand depot built by UP on its main line, it was from the start intended to serve as a landmark structure, a point of pride for both the railroad and the city.