Building the railroads
“For more than 20 miles workmen are seen digging, chopping, lifting, blasting, cursing, and shouting. Trees are crashing down, earth is flying from countless shovels and huge rocks are being riven and scattered from all sides. As the construction train moves slowly forward, the observer begins to realize some of the difficulties of railroad building in the Northwest. This is about the way it is done: The line having been laid, surveyed, and staked, parties of white men, hundreds in a gang, proceed to mow down the forest. The trees are felled with surprising rapidity.. .and a broad swath, 200 feet wide, is opened up through the forest. The trees are immediately trimmed, cut into lengths, and rolled out of the way, when other gangs of men attack these logs and split them into ties. Now comes another party of white men who proceed to dig about the roots of fallen trees: a keg (sometimes two) is placed under the tree stump, a fuse attached, earth thrown about it and tamped down, a light attached to the fuse and the stump is blown up. The white men pass on and now come the China-men, thousands of them. They proceed under the direction of white bosses or "herders" as they are called, to level the earth, throw up a roadbed, carry ties from a construction train, or from teams close by, and lay them in place. Other gangs of Chinamen follow on a gravel train and finish the new-laid track...the Chinese are mostly newly imported coolies. They live in tents furnished by the company and live in gangs of from 50 to 100” (Helena Independent, 1882).
The most famous railroad in Montana, the northern transcontinental, was built by the Northern Pacific in the later part of the 19th century. Although the company was incorporated in 1864, and construction began in 1870, the project almost immediately ran into financial difficulties and wasn’t complete until 1883, with a triumphant golden spike being driven into the ground near Independence Creek, in Powell County, Montana. Building the railroad was a monumental achievement, made possible through the backbreaking labor of thousands of workers, many of them immigrants imported by the company from China and Eastern Europe.
Building a railroad across Montana meant days of felling trees, blasting through rocks, crossing rivers, and hammering spikes into unyielding ground. The work was mainly done by immigrant workers imported by the railroad company. Mile by mile they laid tracks across Montana’s vast area. They blasted their way through mountains and raced across the plains in order to connect Montana’s cities and settlements to the rest of the plains.
Railroad workers acquired a reputation for working hard and drinking harder. Their reputation for unruliness and drunkenness was so strong that, when the tracks had to cross the Flathead Reservation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs insisted that the entire crew be replaced by a Mormon crew. They hoped this would keep the workers from bringing alcohol, gambling, and prostitution onto reservation lands. The last town before the reservation was named Last Chance, a description and a warning all in one.
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