Epilogue

The band was playing ‘Clear the Way’, but all that Collis could hear from inside his private parlour car was the monotonous thumping of the drum — his right ear had been deaf since the accident. His back had also been injured and he still walked with a cane. He had arrived at last in this dry desert basin, surrounded on three sides by heat-hazed mountains, like a man who keeps a long-standing appointment with a woman he is no longer sure that he loves. Yet he knew that he had to be here. The destiny he had talked about with Hannah and Knickerbocker Jane had been fulfilled.

The iron cowcatcher of the Jupiter, the locomotive which had pulled Collis’s car over the Sierras and across the empty wastelands of the Humboldt Sink, was now only fifty feet apart from the cowcatcher of the Union Pacific’s Engine 119. Here, at Promontory Point, Utah, the two railroads had at last joined, spanning the continent.

Collis had been exuberant on the way from Sacramento, inviting newspaper reporters and giggling young girls to share iced champagne in his parlour car. But now he was more subdued. Every now and then he would part the blinds and stare out into the bright Utah morning, squinting as if he had a migraine. From the window he could see the two locomotives, buffed-up and shining in the sunlight and steaming softly. A line of more than a hundred soldiers of the 21st Infantry, in blue dress uniforms and dazzling white gloves, waited beside the track. A crowd of reporters and photographers shuffled impatiently in the sand and the sagebrush, their wooden tripods all set up for the track-joining ceremony, sharing cigarettes and warm bottled beer.

It was 10 May 1869, a glaring Monday, two years after Collis’s men had blasted a pass through the High Sierras. After that, the speed of track-laying had been furious. With the Union Pacific frenziedly putting down rails from the East, Charles had driven their Chinese and Irish graders to the limit, trying to beat the U.P. into the heart of Utah, and as far as the rich commercial prize of Salt Lake City. Each mile of track they laid brought them more federal loans and more land grants, and Collis needed every dollar and every acre of land he could get.

Charles had boasted that it was almost impossible for visiting spectators from California to catch up with his track-laying gang at the railhead; and a San Francisco newspaper reporter wrote with awe that he had seen a half mile of rails laid in under twenty-eight minutes.

On 27 April, as the rival railroads neared Promontory Station, Collis had shared a picnic lunch with Thomas Durant, of the Union Pacific, under a flapping tent. With a flash of his old challenging spirit, he had bet Durant ten thousand dollars that his gangs could lay ten miles of track in a single day. Durant, with his mouth full of game pie, had accepted.