The Incredible Transcontinental Railroad by R. Conrad Stein

Author:R. Conrad Stein [Stein, R. Conrad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4645-0472-3
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Living and working entirely out of doors, the men had to cope with the cruelties of weather on the Great Plains. Summer brought heat and suffocating dust. Workers prayed for rain to cool things down, but when rain came, it often struck like a hammer blow. With no hills or trees to bar their ferocity, prairie winds and rain screamed into the workers’ camps. A Union Pacific employee named William Henry Jackson described a typical “Platte storm” that struck his crew:

It came down raging and howling like a madman, tearing and pulling away at the [wagon] sheets as though it meant to vent its fury upon us personally. It rocked and shook us and [turned] some of the wagons over on their wheels. … After a short spat of hail, the rain came down in steady torrents—the roaring thunder and flashing lightning were incessant. … The storm did not last long, but its force and fury were indescribable.5

Saturday nights were occasions when Union Pacific Railroad builders could unwind from their frantic work pace. Thirty-five dollars a month was considered good pay in the 1860s. Also, with few places to spend the wages, a worker found his pockets stuffed with dollars. Early into the Union Pacific’s great undertaking, hundreds of clever operators devised ways of liberating a man from his money. Every fifty miles or so, a new town sprang up along the Union Pacific’s path. The towns consisted entirely of saloons, gambling halls, and houses of prostitution. These establishments were housed either in tents or in hastily nailed-together shacks. When the workers of the Union Pacific laid track beyond the makeshift towns, the prostitutes and whisky merchants simply set up another settlement farther along the railroad’s path and waited for the crews to arrive. Thus the single track stretching westward created towns and erased them all in the course of a few months. The shifting settlements came to be called “Hell on Wheels.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.