1863-1865: Into the Mountains

January 8, 1863
The CP breaks ground in Sacramento.

October 26, 1863
The CP spikes its first rails to ties.

Late Summer 1865
CP crews begin tunneling slowly through the mountains with hand tools.

December 1865
By year's end, the CP employs about 6,000 immigrant Chinese workers

An Engineer's Dream

"...this railroad is a necessity...a great war measure..."
-- California congressman Aaron Sargent

""We have drawn the elephant, now let us see if we can harness him up."
-- railroad advocate Theodore Judah

In late 1861, 35-year-old engineer Theodore Judah traveled to Congress and unfurled a ninety-foot map of a proposed railroad. His plans called for building bridges and trestles, carving vertigo-inducing ledges, driving eighteen tunnels through solid granite, and laying 140 miles of track from Sacramento to Truckee, California.

Western Starting Point

"Oh Lord, it cannot be done."
-- Sacramento railroad backer Charles Crocker

Mark Twain called the gold rush town of Sacramento, California the "City of Saloons." After 1848, fortune seekers arrived by the thousands. The lucky ones scooped up the easy pickings -- 181.3 million worth of gold in 1852, the peak prospecting year. The town became California's capital in 1854. But the boom did not last. Gold became harder to extract, and by 1857 Sacramento residents were also suffering from a nationwide economic depression.

Across the mountains in Virginia City, Nevada, miner Henry Comstock claimed a giant deposit of gold and silver ore in 1859, creating another boom. The Comstock lode sparked interest in a railroad from Sacramento across the Sierra Nevada. By 1861, a group of California grocers and dry goods merchants had joined with engineer Theodore Judah in an ambitious railroad venture.

The Perils of Surveying

"It is boundless mountain piled on mountain -- unbroken granite, bare, verdureless, cold and gray."
-- New York Tribune reporter Albert D. Richardson

Advance parties of surveyors placed wooden spikes along the route. They traveled on foot, on horseback, or in small horse wagons. They camped in tents and did their best to avoid mountain lions and rattlesnakes as they charted the railroad's course. Graders followed, preparing the land for the railroad. Trains of the era could not handle sharp curves or inclines greater than two percent, nor could they traverse major lakes or rivers.

A Chinese Work Force

"...if we found that we were in a hurry for a job of work, it was better to put Chinese on at once."
-- railroad executive Charles Crocker

Desperate for workers, Charles Crocker suggested to his construction foreman, James Harvey Strobridge, that he hire Chinese immigrants. Strobridge declared, "I will not boss Chinese!" When Crocker countered that the Chinese had built the Great Wall, Strobridge agreed to try fifty Chinese men as an experiment.

He was soon impressed. The Chinese work crews were industrious. Their diet was better than that of their Irish counterparts and they drank boiled tea, as opposed to ditch water, thereby avoiding dysentery.