Opening the iron trail

It was a tremendous large party. In fact, it looked like a regular military excursion, instead of a survey trip, when in the early morning it moved out from new Julesburg (the “roaring town” was dead tired at this hour) and headed northwest up Lodge Pole Creek by the old Overland Stage road on the Oregon Trail.

There were two companies, B and M, of the Second Cavalry, from Fort McPherson, commanded by Captain (or Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel) J. K. Mizner and First Lieutenant James N. Wheelan, to ride the country and guard the long train of supply wagons. There was Surgeon Henry B. Terry, of the army medical corps—a slender, black-moustached, active man in major’s shoulder-straps. There were the teamsters and farriers and wagoners and cooks and what-not.

There were General Casement, and Construction Superintendent Sam Reed, and Colonel Silas Seymour of New York (the consulting engineer who was General Dodge’s assistant), and Mr. T. J. Carter, a Government director of the road, and Mr. Jacob Blickensderfer, Jr., an engineer sent from Washington by the President, and Mr. James Evans, the division engineer who was going out to examine the route to the base of the Black Hills range. There were General William Myers, chief quartermaster of the Department of the Platte, who was to inspect the site of a new army post on the railroad survey, and several surveyors who were to take the places of men that had been killed by the Indians.

And there was General Dodge’s own party, with notables enough in it to make a boy feel rather small.

Of course, the tall, lean man in buckskin was Scout Sol Judy, a real rider of the plains, always ready for Indians or anything else. He knew the country from Omaha to California.

The pleasant, full-bearded man who rode beside General Dodge himself was none other than General John A. Rawlins, chief-of-staff to General Grant, at Washington. General Rawlins was not well, and General Grant had asked General Dodge if he might not be taken along, sometime, on a trip, to see if roughing it in the Far West might not do him good. So here he was. He and General Dodge had been noted commanders in the Civil War, and were warm friends of each other and of General Grant, too.

The alert trim-bearded man in corduroy coat was Mr. David Van Lennep, the geologist, whose business was to explore for coal-fields and minerals in the path of the survey.

The tall heavy-set, round-faced boyish-looking man was Captain and Major William McKee Dunn, General Rawlins’ aide-de-camp, of the Twenty-first Infantry.

Another round-faced boyish young man was Mr. John R. Duff from Boston. His father was a director of the railroad company.

The tall slim man with side-whiskers was Mr. John E. Corwith, of Galena, Illinois, who was a guest of General Rawlins.

For Terry to get the names and titles straight required most of the day. General Dodge had introduced him in bluff fashion: “Gentlemen, this is Terry Richards, one of the company men who are laying the rails across continent. He’ll be one of us, on the trip.”

Beginning with General Rawlins, they all had shaken hands with him. But it was young Mr. Duff who explained who they were, as on his horse Terry fell in behind, to bring up the rear.

That was the place chosen by Mr. Duff and Mr. Corwith, the other civilian guest.

“So you’re out to see the country, too, are you?” queried Mr. Duff, genially. “What are you? Track inspector in advance?”

“I don’t know,” Terry admitted, a little uneasy in his faded old clothes. But clothes seemed to make no difference. “General Dodge said I could be his ‘striker’—that means help around his tent, and General Rawlins’ tent.”

“Heat the water for the bath, eh?” laughed Mr. Corwith.

“Shucks! No, Corwith! Nobody bathes on a trip like this,” retorted Mr. Duff. “Not unless we come to some hot springs. After a while the water’ll be as cold as ice—right out of the snows. Isn’t that so, Terry? Where’s your home town?”

“U. P. boarding-train, end o’ track,” promptly replied Terry. “It’s a traveling town,” he explained.

“I should say so. Ever been out much farther in this country?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve ridden on the stage part way to Salt Lake.”

“That must have been a great trip. But think of riding by railroad there! Whew! The stage took about ten days, didn’t it? And the railroad’ll do it in three! I was out to end o’ track last fall—on that big excursion from the East and Omaha. We started to go to the Hundreth Meridian, or 247 miles from Omaha; but you fellows built so fast that we kept going till we were thirty miles beyond.”

“Yes, sir. They all laid 260 miles of track in eight months, last year. This year General Dodge and General Casement want us to do 290, about. That’ll take us over the top of the Black Hills mountains.”

“But what’ll they do without your help?” asked Mr. Corwith, slyly.

“Aw, I don’t amount to much,” Terry informed, for fear they might think he had bragged. “I just ride a mule that hauls a truck-load of rails for the men to lay.”

“Don’t the Indians bother?”

“Some,” admitted Terry. “They kill the men they can catch. But they can’t whip the graders or track-layers in a regular battle, though.”

“When do you track-layers expect to reach Salt Lake?”

“In 1870, anyway. It’s 650 miles yet. Congress gives us till 1876 to meet the C. P., but General Dodge and General Casement are going through in half that time.”

“You’ll have to tackle the Rocky Mountains, though.”

“Y-yes,” said Terry. “But we’ll do it.”

“The Central Pacific of California have been building only forty or fifty miles in a year, in their mountains.”

“We can beat the Central. They have timber and supplies close where they’re working, and we haul ours clear across the plains; but Casement’s Irish can lick the Chinks any day,” scoffed Terry.

“Expect to beat the Central to Salt Lake, do you?”

“We’re going to meet them away beyond Salt Lake. They’ll come east as fast as they can and we’ll go west as fast as we can, and then we’ll both see.”

“Yes; and the Central Pacific say they’ll meet the Union Pacific on the west side of the Rocky Mountains, in Utah,” bantered Mr. Corwith.

“Well, they won’t. We’ll meet them before they’re out of California,” boasted Terry. “General Casement says he’ll put on 10,000 more men and be grading several hundred miles ahead, all the time. The mountains will give us ties. There are gangs cutting timber in the Black Hills now, and getting it ready. A railroad will be into Council Bluffs across from Omaha, right away, so we’ll get our rails quick from the East. We’ve got fifty locomotives, and 700 freight-cars, to do the hauling with, and next year there’ll be a lot more. The bridges are made in Chicago and shipped out all ready to be put up. Our men lay four rails every minute—just as fast as they can grab and run forward,” he added proudly. “And the spikers hit each spike only three times.”

“We can see that you’re an enthusiastic U. P. man,” laughed young Mr. Duff. “You ought to be on the board of directors, along with my dad. But the question now is, where are we going? Wonder if we’ll meet any Indians.”

“General Dodge plans to take General Rawlins through to Salt Lake, I understand,” spoke Mr. Corwith. “The surveys have been made, and he wants to check up. We cross the Black Hills by the pass he discovered two years ago, when the Indians chased him. He says it’s a remarkable route for a railroad—an easy climb to over 8,000 feet; if the Indians hadn’t forced him into it, he might never have known about it. But he made a note of it, and sent the surveyors out, and it’s all right.”

“How long before we reach it, then?”

“The Black Hills are 150 miles yet, I guess,” said Terry.

“Ever there?”

“No, sir. The old stage road and the Salt Lake trail went up around north of them. The stage road now goes south of them. There’s never been any road over the Black Hills, in here.”

“Well, hope we see some Indians, anyway,” chatted Mr. Duff. “But all these soldiers probably’ll scare ’em off. I’d like to be out with one of those surveying parties. Those are the fellows who have the good times.”

“George Stanton—he’s my partner—is out with one. He’s out with Mr. Bates,” Terry announced. “General Dodge said that maybe we’d find them.”

With the toiling wagons, they were several days in passing the many gangs of graders. The low huts, called “railroad forts,” of sod walls and sod or sheet-iron roofs only about four feet above the ground, were strewn for miles and miles in advance of the rails.

The old Overland stage road soon branched to the north, for Fort Laramie, and guided by only the railroad grade, the General Dodge expedition plodded on. The ties ceased, the farthest outpost of the graders’ camps was at last left behind, and presently the final squad of construction engineers engaged in running the line of stakes and levels, had been dropped.

Now only the open country of the high rolling plains lay before. The air was frosty, at night, but warm by day. The curious antelope constantly stared, with heads up, at the march, and skimmed away. They supplied fine meat, when hunted by the soldiers and civilians. General Rawlins appeared to be enjoying himself immensely, but he was not strong.

During the day the cavalry rode before and in the rear, and scouted on the flanks. The General Dodge party cantered in the advance. At night camp was pitched, in military order.

This seemed like home ground, to the general. He had explored through it to find a railroad route away back in 1855; and he had campaigned against the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes, hereabouts and beyond, in 1865. That was the time when the Indians had helped him to discover his pass.

A long line of dusky, frowning mountains was gradually getting higher and plainer in the west. These, said the general and Mr. Van Lennep, were the southern end of the Black Hills—the first barrier by the Rocky Mountains.

“I think that tomorrow we’ll strike Crow Creek,” spoke the general, tonight, to the party around the blazing camp fire. “That’s where we locate the next division point, at the eastern base of the Black Hills. I sent word to General Auger at Fort Laramie to meet us there. He has instructions from General Grant to locate a military post where the railroad locates its division point.”

“Then we climb the mountains, do we, general?” young Mr. Duff asked, eagerly.

“Yes, sir. Up we go. But it’s a very easy trail, by a long ridge. According to the engineers’ estimates the grade is only ninety feet rise to the mile. The country is smooth and open. As soon as the Sioux forced my detachment to follow down by the ridge, in ’65 when we were returning from the Powder River campaign up north, I knew that we had found the first passage of the Rocky Mountains. In fact, I told my guide, then: ‘If we save our scalps, I believe we’ve found a direct railroad pass from the plains.’ And as soon as I reached Omaha, I described the place to the engineers and my idea proved to be correct. In the morning I’ll show you the little saddle, on top, that we’ve named Sherman Summit, in honor of General Sherman.”

“And what’s next, general?”

“The Laramie Plains, watered by the Laramie River.”

“And then what?”

“A great basin, without any water at all. And the Bitter Creek country beyond that, where the water is worse than none at all.”

“But where do you cross the real Rockies—the big snow mountains?”

“Oh, before we drop down into the Salt Lake Valley. But we’re 6,000 feet up, right here on these plains. Sherman Summit of the Black Hills, at over 8,000 feet, will be the highest point reached by the railroad. There are several passes in the snowy range, of between 7,000 and 8,000 feet, that we can use. This Sherman Pass is the only one yet discovered by us that will take us over the front range. The company engineers spent two years in the field, exploring all the way from Denver up to the old South Pass of the Oregon Trail, looking for just this very thing; and then it was found by accident—thanks to the Indians.”

“Rather a joke on them, that when they tried to keep you out they showed you through,” laughed Major Dunn, the aide-de-camp.

“There’s something almost miraculous about it,” added General Rawlins. “But the Central Pacific hasn’t been as fortunate, I understand.”

“No, sir. They had a head start on us, but the Sierra Nevadas have fought them hard. While we’ve been laying 370 miles of track across the plains, they’ve been held to 120. They have an enormous amount of blasting and tunneling and trestle building. In 100 miles they’re obliged to climb from sea level to over 7,000 feet. It’s a big job and they’re not out yet. The snows there are heavier than in the Rockies.”

“Some people say the railroad across continent can’t be operated in winter at all, on account of the cold and snow in the mountains,” put in Mr. Corwith.

“Nonsense,” muttered Mr. Van Lennep.

General Dodge laughed.

“Oh, when the road is built, the operating will be attended to. American engine men and train crews who have fought Indians from cab and box car and caboose, and hauled supplies in spite of savages and weather and new roadbed will get the trains through, snow or no snow.”

This was the first of July. The next morning they rode on, and made noon camp on Crow Creek—named, General Dodge explained, not for the bird but for the Crow Indians. The camp was to be a camp for several days, or until the general had picked out the best location for the division point.

There was no sign of any railroad grade—except in the distance before, and behind, tall stakes with white rags tied to them: surveyors’ flags, planted this spring or last fall. So the grade was only waiting for pick and spade to awaken it.

“Those things extend clear to Nevady,” grunted Sol Judy. “Injuns look on ’em as heap medicine. They’re dead afraid to touch ’em. They’re leary of the way the surveyors can squint through a telescope set on three sticks, and set a flag further off’n it can be seen by an Injun eye. They used to call the general ‘Long Eye,’ and when he began to lick ’em, they got the notion he could shoot as far as he could see with his spy-glass.”

General Dodge had taken General Rawlings, Colonel Seymour, General Casement, Superintendent Reed and the Government officials, with an escort of the cavalry, to reconnoiter along the line. Mr. Van Lennep stayed to write up some geological notes, and the rest loafed around camp.

The Black Hills, bulky and dark and brooding, loomed near in the west. They did not appear so very high, because they were so big and rounded; pines on them gave them their name “Black.” Down here on the plains there were few trees; everything was whity-brown.

Sol jerked his head to the northward and spoke shortly.

“Here they come.”

“Who? The Indians?”

“Nope. Those aren’t Injuns; they’re troops—cavalry. General Augur and his escort from Laramie, I reckon.”

“What makes you think they’re soldiers, Sol?” questioned young Mr. Duff. “Maybe they’re Sioux.”

“I don’t think; I know,” Sol retorted. “Don’t you s’pose I can tell the difference ’tween a white man and an Injun, far as I can see?”

Sol’s eyes were the best in the camp; for when Mr. Van Lennep leveled his field-glasses upon the little bunch of moving figures wending down over the rolling ridge of the north, he pronounced them soldiers, sure enough.

They drew on. Presently the cavalry formed to receive them, and Colonel Mizner galloped out to meet them.

It was General C. C. Augur, all right, commanding the Department of the Platte, and an escort of a troop of the Second Cavalry, from the headquarters post, old Fort Laramie.

“Yes, by gosh, and old Jim Bridger! Hooray! Dod rot my cats!” And Sol, striding out, shook hands heartily with the guide.

“Jim Bridger! That’s the man I’ve been wanting to see,” exclaimed young Mr. Duff. “He and Kit Carson are famous, aren’t they? They’re the greatest scouts in the West.”

Sol Judy and Jim Bridger proceeded to squat and hobnob, while Terry and Mr. Duff—and Mr. Corwith, too—lingered near, curiously listening. General Dodge’s party returned in haste. Tonight all camped together. The general had about decided upon a site for the division town; but old Jim principally held the floor with his funny stories and quaint remarks.

He was a tall, wiry, leather-faced man; not so very old in years but old in experience. Had trapped beaver in the far West since 1823—had explored the Salt Lake in a skin boat in 1826—claimed to have been through the marvelous Yellowstone region years before it was known to white men—had been owner of the Bridger’s Fort trading post, in the mountains on the Salt Lake and California Overland trail until the Mormons of Utah had driven him out—had guided the army through Indian country; and withal was so full of funny stories that he could keep everybody in a roar.

He and General Dodge were great friends.

“These gents thought I couldn’t tell you fellows from Injuns, Jim,” complained Sol. “Yes, sir; and didn’t believe me till they leveled the glasses on you. Just as though I didn’t have eyes of my own.”

“Pshaw, now; that’s not a wrinkle to what I’ve had to put up with,” drawled old Jim. “When I was guidin’ the troops on that thar Powder River campaign, same time Gin’ral Dodge was out, I see an Injun smoke only ’bout fifty miles yon, t’other side a few mountains, an’ I reported to the cap’n. Says I: ‘Cap’n, thar’s an Injun camp yon, t’other side them mountains, an’ they’re watchin’ ye, like as not.’ ‘Whar, major?’ says he. ‘Right over thar by that ’er saddle,’ says I, p’intin’ for him. Wall, the cap’n looked through his spy-glass, an’ said he couldn’t see nary smoke. Then he reported to the gin’ral—Gin’ral Conner, that was—an’ the gin’ral he looked through his glass, an’ he couldn’t see. An’ thar was the smoke colyumns as plain as the nose on your face, only fifty mile away. So I didn’t say ’nother word, ’cept that it had come to a pretty state o’ things when a passel o’ paper-collar soldiers’d tell a reg’lar mountain-man that thar wasn’t smoke when thar was. But in two days some o’ Cap’n North’s Pawnees come in from a scout yonder an’ blamed if they didn’t say they’d located an Injun village precisely whar I’d seen that thar smoke. So all we had to do was to go over an’ get the Injuns, in the battle o’ Tongue River.”

“You must have wonderful eyesight, major,” complimented Mr. Corwith. “I expect you are used to seeing things.”

“Yep, arter forty years in the mountains a man gets used to seein’ things. But even then he can’t ’most always sometimes tell. Did ye ever hear about when I was in the Yallerstone? Wall, one time thar, I think I see a passel o’ Injuns in camp ’bout three mile off, an’ I reckoned they saw me; but I watched ’em a long time, kinder curyus, an’ they didn’t get any closer; an’ when I was sneakin’ ’round, durned if I didn’t run slap ag’in the side of a mountain, solid crystal, cl’ar as air, an’ three miles through. You see, them Injuns war on t’other side of it; an’ they couldn’t get at me an’ I couldn’t get at them.”

“That wasn’t the same mountain the Indians chased you around, was it, major?” slyly asked General Dodge.

“No, sir. But that thar was a great trick, wasn’t it? You see, gents, some Injuns got arter me, on the side of a mountain. So I jest run an’ run, afoot, ’round an’ ’round, like a squirrel on a stump, an’ they tuk arter. We all run an’ we run; and what with bein’ on a slant, like, pretty soon the down-hill legs o’ the Injuns’ ponies got stretched, tryin’ to keep their footin’; an’ when I seed, I made for level ground. Then the ponies couldn’t do nothin’ but run circles, their legs bein’ unequal; an’ I got away, easy.”

The next morning the site of the new division point was staked by Mr. Evans and surveyors, under direction of General Dodge. There did not seem to be much choice—the bare rolling plains looked all much the same, clear to the foot of the Laramie Range which was called the Black Hills; but he had figured closely. Crow Creek would supply water; Denver was about 115 miles south, Julesburg was 140 miles east—a branch line would be run down to Denver, and the trains from the east would change engines here, for the climb over the Black Hills. It would be a place for a junction, and for a round-house.

“I name it Cheyenne,” said the general, “for Cheyenne Pass, which you see to the north.”

“The military post will be just north, gentlemen,” quoth General Augur. “The War Department approving, it will be named Fort D. A. Russell, in honor of Major-General David Allen Russell, a gallant soldier who won honors in the Mexican War and was killed in battle September 19, 1864, where his conduct gained him the brevet of major-general.”

“Wall, this hyar business o’ locatin’ towns whar thar ain’t people seems to be rather pecoolar,” drawled Jim Bridger. “A feller hyar with last month’s pay in his pocket couldn’t spend a cent. Anyhow, thar’s plenty elbow room. That’s the best thing about it.”

“Wait till the news gets to Denver, and Julesburg. In six months you won’t be able to turn around, where you’re now standing,” smiled Mr. Van Lennep.

“Listen!” General Dodge sharply ordered.

Distant in the south there welled the faint reports of volleying fire-arms.

“Injun scrimmage, shore,” pronounced old Jim. “Fust an’ original inhabitants are on hand.”

“Sounds like an attack on a wagon train,” rapped the general. “Mount, gentlemen.”

“Here come the cavalry. Hurrah!” cheered young Mr. Duff.

The soldier escort were straightening in their saddles, awaiting command; but from the camp a bugle had pealed, and Troops B and M, led by Lieutenant Wheelan and Surgeon Terry, were tearing in columns of fours across the plain, following the battle signals.