TROUBLE EXPECTED
A STRIKE TO BE ORDERED ALONG THE LINE OF THE UNION PACIFIC
Omaha, Sept. 16. Gen Howard has received dispatches from Col. Chittenden to command of the troops stationed at Rock Springs saying that he fears the most serious trouble within the next 48 hours. He is informed and believes that the knights of Labor have ordered a strike all along the line of the Union Pacific Railway…
Rumors have been afloat several days that a strike on the Union Pacific was threatened if the company did not discharge the Chinese miners in its employ. Two weeks ago, after the murder of the Chinese, a committee of miners and businessmen started for Omaha to confer with the railroad people here about the situation at Rock Springs. The committee never reached this city, and it is now learned that it was intercepted by Knights of Labor . . .
The growth of the United States west of the Alleghenies during the past fifty years is due not so much to free institutions, or climate, or the fertility of the soil, as to railways. If the institutions and climate and soil had been favorable to the development of commonwealths, railways had not been invented, the freedom and natural advantages of our Western States would have beckoned to human immigration and industry in vain. Civilization would have crept slowly on, in a toilsome march over the immense spaces that lie between the Appalachian ranges and the Pacific Ocean; and what we now style the Great West would be, except in the valley of the Mississippi, an unknown and unproductive wilderness.
But although these benefits arising from railway construction are so obvious, no one asserts that railways have been laid from philanthropic motives; and therefore, since among the promoters, contractors, and capitalists who have done the work we find men who have acquired large fortunes, western railroad construction and management in general have been bitterly and frequently attacked by the press, and have been and now are the subject of hostile legislation. Grave charges are made; as for instance, that the roads have in numerous instances been fraudulently over-capitalized and excessively loaded with bonded debt;…that they charge unjust rates of freight in order to pay dividends on fictitious values of stock;…that they permit the accumulation of unreasonably large fortunes, and to use a favorite phrase of demagogic orators, constantly “tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”
...Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating,
shuttling at thy sides,
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the
distance,
Thy great protruding head-light fix'd in front,
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate
purple,
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,
Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle
of thy wheels,
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
Type of the modern-emblem of motion and power-pulse of
the continent...
Baltimore, July 11th, 1877 Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company
Office of the President.
To the Officers and Employees of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company:
At a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, held this day, the following preamble and resolutions were adopted:
WHEREAS The depression in the general business interests of the country continues, this seriously affecting the usual earnings of railway companies, and rendering a further reduction of expenses necessary: therefore, bit
RESOLVED That a reduction of ten per cent, be made in the present compensation of officers and employees, of every grade, in the service of the Company, where the amount received exceeds one dollar per day, to take effect on and after July 16th, instant.
RESOLVED That the said reduction shall apply to the Main Stem and Branches east of the Ohio River, and to the Trans-Ohio Divisions, and that it shall embrace all roads leased or operated by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company.
It is hoped and believed that all persons in the service of the Company will appreciate the necessity of, and concur cordially in, this action.
The Board postponed action until some time after its great competitors, the Pennsylvania, New York Central and Hudson River, and New York and Erie Companies, had made general and similar reductions in pay, with the hope that business would so improve that this necessity would be obviated. In this they have been disappointed.
The President, in announcing the decision of the Board, takes occasion to express the conviction and expectation that every officer and man in the service will cheerfully recognize the necessity of the reduction, and earnestly co-operate in every measure of judicious economy, necessary to aid in maintaining effectively the usefulness and success of the Company.
JOHN W. GARRETT
President.
Our foreman then ordered us to pack up and return to Yale. So, although already suffering pangs of hunger, we had to start on our way immediately. When we were passing China Bar on the way, many of the Chinese died from an epidemic. As there were no coffins to bury the dead, the bodies were stuffed into rock crevices or beneath the trees to await their arrival. Those whose burials could not wait were buried on the spot in boxes made of crude thin planks hastily fastened together. There were even some who were buried in the ground wrapped only in blankets or grass mats. New graves dotted the landscape and the sight sent chills up and down my spine. . . .
The work at Hope was very dangerous. On one occasion, there was a huge rock on the slope of the mountain that stood in the railroad’s path and must be removed by blasting before the tracks could go through. However, the sides of the rock were nearly perpendicular all around and there was no easy way to reach the top. The workers had to scramble to the top by use of timber scaffolding and by ropes fastened to the rock. After they reached the top they drilled holes in the rock to hold the dynamite charges. I was one of the workers who were assigned the task of drilling. Each morning I climbed the rock, and after I had finished the day’s work I was lowered again by rope. I remembered that in blasting this rock more than three hundred barrels of explosives were used. . . .
Another incident occurred about ten to fifteen miles west of Yale. Dynamite was used to blast a rock cave. Twenty charges were placed and ignited, but only eighteen blasts went off. However, the white foreman, thinking that all of the dynamite had gone off, ordered the Chinese workers to enter the cave to resume work. Just at that moment the remaining two charges suddenly exploded. Chinese bodies flew from the cave as if shot from a cannon. Blood and flesh were mixed in a horrible mess. On this occasion about ten or twenty workers were killed.
…Universally the evils of powerful combinations in industry and trade were traced to the conspiratorial action of the railroad masters. Moreover the scandals of stockjobbing and railroad-wrecking multiplied in the early ’80s. Tales of the quick fortunes seized by the men who possessed themselves of the common carriers, and of the purses they maintained for political corruption, aroused hot resentment in the breasts of honest middle-class Americans of almost every section…[it did not] escape the eye of politicians that farmers and tradespeople throughout the Southwest, where a great strike raged along Gould’s Missouri Pacific, aided the workers heartily in their struggle. In these years, whenever business flagged in the state legislatures or in the halls of Congress the statesmen rose from their seats and denounced the railway “robbers” in furious rodomontades. That railroads like the Union and Southern Pacific, which owed their inception to federal subsidies of cash as well as land, refused to repay the government mortgage added fuel to the flame of the statesmen’s rhetoric. Their proposals varied from divers plans of regulation to the construction of a People’s Railroad by the government, upon a narrow gauge, for the cheap transport of freight ; from a nation-wide People’s Canal System to legislative acts compelling the humane treatment of immigrant and native passengers—propositions which were always speedily voted down, thanks to the watchful lobbies maintained by the Collis Huntingtons, Goulds and Vanderbilts.
In short order the railroad presidents, the copper barons, the big dry-goods merchants and the steel masters became Senators, ruling in the highest councils of the national government, and sometimes scattered twenty-dollar gold pieces to newsboys of Washington. But they also became in even greater number lay leaders of churches, trustees of universities, partners or owners of newspapers or press services and figures of fashionable, cultured society. And through all these channels they labored to advance their policies and principles, sometimes directly, more often with skillful indirection.