Until the Last Spike Read online

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Omaha, Nebraska 1867

  August 6, 1867, Omaha, Nebraska

  August 7, End of Track, West of Lodgepole Creek, Nebraska

  August 8

  Evening

  August 9

  August 10

  August 11

  August 13

  August 14

  August 16

  August 17

  August 18

  August 19

  August 25

  August 26

  August 27

  August 28

  August 29, Antelope, Nebraska (mile 451)

  September 5

  September 15

  September 18

  September 19

  September 20

  September 21

  September 22

  September 24

  September 26

  October 1

  October 4

  October 6

  October 8

  October 10

  October 15

  October 21

  Wyoming

  October 26, Hillsdale, Wyoming (mile 496)

  October 28

  November 1

  November 9, Archer, Wyoming

  November 10

  November 18, Cheyenne, Wyoming (mile 516.4)

  November 15

  November 17

  November 20

  November 22

  November 28

  November 29

  December 1

  December 5

  December 25

  December 31

  January 10, 1868

  January 14

  January 17

  January 20

  February 10

  February 12

  February 18

  February 17

  March 10

  March 12

  March 23

  March 25

  April 1

  April 5, Sherman Summit, Wyoming

  April 11

  April 12

  April 14

  April 22

  April 23

  April 24

  May 3

  May 16

  May 30

  June 8, Laramie, Wyoming (mile 573)

  June 12

  June 14

  June 20

  July 1, Carbon, Wyoming (mile 656)

  July 11

  July 13

  July 14

  July 19, St. Mary’s, Wyoming (mile 679)

  July 21, Benton, Wyoming (mile 696)

  July 22

  July 24, Rawlins, Wyoming

  July 25

  July 27

  July 28, The Red Desert, Wyoming

  August 1

  August 10

  August 11

  August 15

  August 20, Creston, Wyoming (mile 737)

  September 1

  September 6

  September 18

  September 19

  October 1, Green River, Wyoming (mile 845)

  October 4

  October 7

  October 15, Granger, Wyoming

  October 25

  October 26

  October 27

  October 29

  November 3

  November 11

  November 14

  November 16

  November 18

  November 19, Bear River City, Wyoming

  November 20

  November 23

  November 26

  November 28, Aspen Station, Wyoming (mile 937)

  December 4, Evanston, Wyoming (mile 955)

  December 5

  Utah

  December 10, Wasatch Town, Utah (mile 966)

  December 16

  December 24

  December 25

  December 26

  December 28, Echo Summit, Utah (mile 969)

  December 29, Castle Rock, Utah (mile 975)

  December 30

  January 3, 1869

  January 5

  January 8

  January 15, Echo City, Utah (mile 991)

  January 16

  January 17

  January 18

  January 20

  February 16 (1,000 miles)

  February 18

  February 19

  February 23

  February 29, Devil’s Gate, Utah (mile 1,018)

  March 1

  March 4

  March 6

  March 7, Ogden, Utah (mile 1,028)

  March 8

  March 9

  March 10

  March 11

  March 12

  March 13

  March 14

  March 24

  March 25

  March 27, Corinne, Utah (mile 1,055)

  April 7

  April 8

  April 9

  April 10

  April 12

  April 18

  April 22

  April 28

  April 29

  April 30

  May 1

  May 3

  May 6

  May 7

  May 8

  May 9, Promontory Summit, Utah (mile 1,086)

  May 10

  May 11

  May 12

  May 19

  May 20

  Afternoon

  May 21

  Epilogue

  Life in America in 1867

  Historical Note

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  August 6, 1867

  Omaha, Nebraska

  I saw my first scalp today and I have to admit that it scared me good. I arrived at the train depot in Omaha, scheduled to meet my pa. His train was a few minutes late, so I walked around the station, studying all the activity. Peddlers were hawking everything from fruit and motion-sickness pills to accident insurance and real estate. INVEST IN THE WEST, one sign read, and under it sat a man with slicked-back hair, who was selling stock in a silver mine.

  When the big Union Pacific steam engine finally chugged up to the platform, I walked over to greet Pa. I figured it wouldn’t be hard to find him, since he was riding in on a freight like workmen sometimes do. The first man to get off the train was a pale fellow with a bloody bandage wrapped around his head. His neck and right arm were also bandaged with strips of red-stained cloth. He was carrying a water pail in his left hand. When a lady behind me let out a squeal, a crowd immediately gathered.

  “Excuse me,” the conductor said, stepping forward to help the man get through the curiosity seekers, “there’s been an accident.” As the pale man passed by, I glanced down into his bucket and saw what looked like a drowned muskrat without a tail.

  I was staring openmouthed when Pa walked up beside me and touched my shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to see that, Sean,” he said. Normally there is no missing my pa in a crowd — he’s six foot three and has lively green eyes that get your attention from a long way off — but I was so rattled that I never even saw him until he spoke.

  “Was that a — ?”

  “A scalp.” Pa nodded. He said he hoped that the Indian trouble would be over by now, but that the
re had been a little flare-up lately. Pa stopped and stared at me. “Are you all right, Sean? I hope it wasn’t a mistake to bring you out here.”

  I swallowed deeply and shook my head. “I’m fine,” I lied. For a whole year, I’d been begging to join Pa in his work on the Transcontinental Railroad. I wanted him to know I was grown up enough to handle this.

  “That poor Englishman.” Pa shook his head. He explained that the man’s name was Bill Thompson. Last night, he’d gone out with a crew of five men to check a dead telegraph line, but it was a trap. Their handcar hit a tie that the Cheyennes had laid across the tracks. The men and all their tools flew into the air. They never had a chance. The Indians shot and scalped everyone. Only minutes later the crew of a night freight steamed into that same barricade. The train crashed, impaling engineer Bully Bowers on the throttle lever and pitching his fireman face first against the firebox, where he roasted to death. Meanwhile, Thompson, who had lain still and pretended he was dead, saw that his scalp had dropped off a brave’s belt. He picked it up and started back toward the Plum Creek station, where he was rescued by a troop train.

  “Where’s he headed now?” I asked, stunned that anyone could be that tough.

  “He hopes the doc here in Omaha can patch him back up.”

  August 7, End of Track

  West of Lodgepole Creek, Nebraska

  Yesterday passed in a dizzying rush. I still can’t believe I’m here. Our train passed through a string of railroad towns that everyone back in Chicago is always talking about: Elkhorn, Fremont, Columbus, and Grand Island.

  There isn’t much to the prairie — it’s just big patches of dry yellow grass stretching as far as you can see. Pa says there’s millions of wildflowers in the spring, but it’s hard to believe.

  Just west of a place called Kearney, we saw a dozen covered wagons. Pa pointed and said, “That’s what’s left of the Oregon Trail.” I see why they call them “prairie schooners.” With their big canvas tops puffed out in the breeze, they looked like they were sailing over the grass.

  Near Elm Creek, I saw my first buffalo herd. The shaggy-haired animals were more than a quarter of a mile away, but I could tell they were enormous. The next thing I knew, someone fired a rifle right behind me, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I turned to see a half-dozen rifles pointed out the train windows and shooting away. The noise was awful, but the buffalo, who were well out of rifle range, kept meandering along. When the gunfire stopped, a man near the back of the car shouted, “I got one,” and another said, “So did I.”

  “They never came close,” Pa sneered. “We call them ‘excursionists.’” Though Pa is normally not much of a talker, I could tell he was proud to teach me about the West. “They are itching to go back East and brag that they shot a buffalo,” he said, “but the cowcatchers — we call them ‘pilots’ out here — on the front of our trains kill more buffalo than all these silly fools added together.”

  Just before we got to the Plum Creek station, the passengers checked their six-shooters and rifles and made sure they had extra ammunition in case of an Indian attack.

  I must have looked nervous, because Pa told me not to worry. “Plum Creek is filled with soldiers right now,” he said. “The redskins ain’t about to take your hair here.” I was about to say something about him calling the Indians “redskins” — Mother had never allowed him to use that word — but I decided it wouldn’t be right to start an argument on our first day together.

  Though Mother’s been dead for three years, I can remember how she’d chew him out whenever he spoke badly of the Indians. “Patrick Sullivan,” she’d say, “those natives have been here a lot longer than you Irish.”

  And when Pa would remind her that she was Irish, too, she’d toss her red hair back and say, “It’s not my better half.”

  I knew she was teasing him then, because though she was part German, she was just as proud of being Irish as Pa is.

  Another reason I let Pa’s remark pass was that I wanted to see what things were really like out West. Maybe working on the prairie and seeing what happened to men like Bill Thompson could turn anyone against the Indians.

  We had a short stop in North Platte, the final destination for everyone who wasn’t going on to Ogallala or Julesburg. Since the Oregon Trail crosses the river here and swings north, there were quite a few covered wagons in town. Pa said it was foolish of the settlers not to wait for the Union Pacific to finish the railroad. “They could cover in a day what they’ll make in a whole summer in those wagons,” he said.

  After we ate at a little hotel, Pa showed me the town. “There’s the Platte River,” he said. “People joke that it’s a foot deep and a mile wide.”

  That looked pretty close to the truth to me. The Platte was just a big mudflat with a trickle of brown water headed no place in particular and crossed by a shaky-looking trestle. Beside the tracks was a big, ten-stall brick roundhouse, a wood-frame depot, and a hotel. The other buildings on Main Street looked new but empty. I asked Pa what was wrong.

  He kicked at a dry stalk of yellow weed and said, “North Platte’s dying fast. This place had three thousand people in it last spring and now it’s down to one hundred fifty.” He explained that the railroad was the only reason the prairie towns came to be, and when the road builders moved on, the money moved with them. He said that people are always tagging along with the road, “hoping to make a fast buck, or chasing a dream.” And whether it’s gold or silver or good land they’re after, they all keep heading West.

  When I asked where all the people had gone, he waved his hand to the west and said, “Most of them are just up the line in Julesburg. But there’s lots of fellows over there who never had a chance to move on.”

  Pa pointed to an unfenced cemetery. The irregular rows of wooden grave markers were tilted at wild angles.

  I asked him if a big storm had tipped the markers.

  “We see plenty of wind out here,” he said, “but that’s not the problem. The earth settles real fast over a fresh-dug grave, and there’s nobody left in this town to care.”

  August 8

  I just woke up and have a world of things to tell. Since we got in late last night, I didn’t have a chance to mention the biggest surprise of all. It happened in Julesburg, a place known as a “hell-on-wheels” town because the U.P. workers go there to blow off steam. As we pulled into the station to take on wood and water, Pa told me that the town was so wild that they averaged a killing every single day.

  I figured he had to be stretching things, so while he was chatting with a conductor friend of his, I took a walk. Since it was late in the day, piano playing and loud talking were already coming from the saloons. A lady in a shiny black dress walked by. She was wearing the tallest hat I’d ever seen. It was made of green silk and white feathers and swayed from side to side when she walked. There are lots of fancy women back in Chicago, but I’d never seen one dangling a silver derringer from her pocket chain. She smiled at me and said, “Hey there, Junior.” I lowered my eyes and walked on real fast.

  I crossed over to the far side of the street and hustled back toward the depot. That’s when I saw a pair of boots sticking out from behind a building. I peeked around the corner and nearly jumped out of my skin. A dead man was lying flat on his back with his eyes fixed straight up at heaven.

  I sucked in a quick breath and took off running. Though I was gone in the tick of a second hand, the picture of that man froze in my mind: the blank stare, the dried-blood patch on his shirt, the cigar stub on the ground still giving off a tiny wisp of smoke. But the thing that told the most was the man’s pockets: Every single one was turned inside out.

  When I got back to the train, I was busting to tell Pa what I’d seen, but the moment I saw him, I remembered what he’d said back in Omaha about it being a mistake to bring me out West. So all I could do was swallow my words and try to calm the pounding of my heart
.

  Evening

  Though I start work tomorrow, I’ve promised myself to make time to write in this journal as often as I can. I owe that to my mother and, as I found out shortly after she died, I owe it to myself, too. The journal was my mother’s idea. The Christmas before she died, when I was twelve, she gave me a blank notebook. On the top of the first page she wrote a quote from a fellow named Sir Francis Bacon: “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” The quote made sense to me, but I had to smile when I saw that name. It would be bad enough being called “Francis,” but having a last name like “Bacon” would make it a hundred times worse. Can you imagine all the teasing he had to put up with when he was young?

  Mother was a teacher but had to quit when she married my pa, because her school only hired single ladies. She missed teaching a lot and kept in practice by helping me and my brother, John — he’s two years younger than me — with our schoolwork and sharing stories and quotes from her favorite writers. John and I both got tired of studying at times, but before we got bored, she’d switch to something lively like Robin Hood or Finn MacCool or King Arthur. We could never get enough of her tales about Arthur’s magician, Merlin.

  Mother also copied some lines from a poem that I didn’t understand. It went something like, “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” Mother loved fancy language like that. She explained the lines of that poem by saying, “Lots of people claim to think great things, but it’s a rare man who has the discipline to write them down.”

  Though she said those words nearly four years ago, I’ve never forgotten them. And I’ve learned firsthand that writing can help a person. After Mother died, I put my journal away and I didn’t write in it for two or three months. Then one day for no reason I started writing about how I was so angry at her for dying that I was never going to write again. But after I’d scrawled out a page filled with questions like why did this have to happen to me? and why would God take away a good woman who was only trying to have a baby? I suddenly realized that writing could help me sort out my sadness.

  Now I write all the time. Putting my thoughts down on paper helps me understand what I’m feeling. That might sound strange, but sometimes I’ll pick up my pencil because I’m hot mad at someone like my aunt Katie. Yet before I’ve written down even half of what I aimed to, my anger seems to dry up.

  By rights, I shouldn’t ever be mad at Katie. She and Uncle Willy were the ones who looked after me and my brother back in Chicago after my mother died. It happened so sudden that me and John would have been in a bad way if they hadn’t helped out. Pa was off in the war when Mother had her trouble. She was grinnin’ and jokin’ one day, then the next thing you know she and her newborn baby were dead. With Pa gone, I hate to think what would have happened to us if we hadn’t had Katie and Willy.