1868: Full Speed Across Wyoming

April 16, 1868
The UP reaches the highest point on both lines: Sherman Summit, elevation 8,200 feet.

July, 1868
Presidential candidate and war hero Ulysses S. Grant tours Western settlements on a working vacation.

Touring a Barren Land

"It is not a country where people are disposed to linger."
-- surveyor James Evans

"The country over which we passed was a barren desert of alkali composition. There was not a spear of grass or a drop of water in the whole distance... We have to haul our water in barrels... The team returned with casks filled with water. It was as red as blood and filled with all kinds of vermin. The horses and mules as dry as they are would not drink it. We were compelled to return twenty miles to our old camp to get water."
-- surveyor Thomas Hubbard

Republican presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant and two of his sons toured the West in the summer of 1868. They met with UP officials in the rowdy, dusty tent settlement of Benton, Wyoming. By December of that year, Benton would vanish off the map. Grant noted in a letter to his wife that his sons would someday appreciate having seen "the Buffalo and the Indian, both rapidly disappearing now."

A Hasty Job

"The Union Pacific road-bed... is only the width of the tie, or eight feet, sometimes a little over and sometimes a little under. In several places I saw the ends of the ties projecting over the embankment."
-- government inspector Isaac Morris

U.S. government specifications required a railroad bed that was at least 14 feet wide. But at Granite Canyon, Wyoming, where UP workers had to create an enormous fill, the narrow ridge on top of the fill barely accommodated the eight-foot-wide ties. The race to build track resulted in construction that was so hasty and so poorly done that both railroads would need repairs even before locomotives had a chance to test them.