Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 by Stephen E. Ambrose, Karolina Harris, Union Pacific Museum Collection

months. They intended to hold Durant and Duff until it was paid. Something over $200,000 was due.
    Durant said he didn’t have such a sum on him, but assured the mob that he was in full sympathy with their demand. Taken to the telegraph station, he sent a message to Oliver Ames in Boston to send the money. But Oliver sent his own telegram later to Dodge, in Echo City, to call for a company of infantry from nearby Fort Bridger to free Durant. Dodge did, and the company was apparently sent, but for unknown reasons the troop train was waved right through at Piedmont.
    The affair is shrouded in mist. No authoritative account exists. At some point the kidnappers wired Dodge to put up the money within twenty-four hours, or else. What the “or else” signified is not clear. In some accounts, it was that the mob would hang or shoot Durant if he called for troops rather than money.
    Director Sidney Dillon was with Dodge in Echo City. He had been sending a series of telegrams to Boston begging for more money, to satisfy at least some of the demands in Utah. The Ames brothers had scraped up several hundred thousand dollars, but it had all been dispersed (which might have been the cause of the kidnapping: the word may have flashed through Utah that some railroad workers were being paid; word of Durant and Duff’s kidnapping had spread). Now Dillon wired that he must have half a million more at once.
    Dodge seconded Dillon’s plea. On May 7, he sent a second message to Oliver: “You must furnish funds.” He added a warning: “If you wait until [all the UP’s] trains are stopped it will be too late to release them until weare forced to pay in fact every thing due on line.” A half-million dollars, he felt, “will relieve necessities and enable us to keep moving.” The money was dug up somewhere and furnished and distributed to the men, and Durant and Duff were released in time for the ceremony. 5 A reporter for the
San Francisco Bulletin
said Durant had turned over to the men some $253,000 in cash. 6
    Perhaps, but, as usual with Durant, there is more to the story. Both Dodge and Oliver Ames thought the whole thing a put-up job—put up by none other than Durant, who had a deal with one of the contractors, James W. Davis and Co., and wanted the money to pay what Davis was due. In his autobiography, Dodge wrote that without doubt Durant had staged the whole thing “for the purpose of forcing the [UP] to pay.” Ames was the first to suggest that such was the case. He wrote to Dodge on May 12, “Davis & Associate men were the parties stopping the train. Could it be one of Durant’s plans to have these men get their pay out of the Road and we suffer for his benefit.” He closed with a generalization to which everyone who had ever dealt with Doc could subscribe: “Durant is so strange a man that I am prepared to believe any sort of rascality that may be charged against him.” 7
    T HE ceremony was scheduled for May 8. The Central Pacific’s regular passenger train left Sacramento at 6 A.M. on May 6, with a number of excursionists. Leland Stanford’s special train followed. It was made in the early Pullman style, with a kitchen, dining room, and sleeping accommodations for ten. Aboard were Stanford, the chief justice of California, the governor of Arizona, and other guests. Also on board were the last spike, made of gold; the last tie, made of laurel; and a silver-headed hammer.
    The spike was a gift from David Hewes of San Francisco. Hewes had been a resident of Sacramento and was a friend of the Big Four. He was somewhat embarrassed that he had not had enough money in 1863 or 1864 to participate in the financing of the CP. After moving to San Francisco and becoming a real-estate developer, he did have some money. He decided to make a gesture to thank his friends for building the road, and picked the spike as appropriate. It was six inches long, had a rough gold