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In this giant's job, the biggest share will fall to the Union Pacific. And the burden of the U.P.'s job rests on the muscular shoulders of the red-faced, hard-as-nails Irishman who bosses its 10,000 miles of track, William Martin Jeffers.
The Legend. The U.P. was conceived in war. In 1862, Lincoln ordered it built to tie the western territories more firmly to the Union. The U.P., main link in the first U.S. transcontinental railroad, has become a lusty, robust American legend.
Many things went to make up the legend. Some were scandalous: the rail financing of the Credit Mobilier, the fiscal shenanigans of Rail Baron Jay Gould, the first great rail antitrust suit (when U.P. was forced to disgorge the railroads it had gobbled). But most of it was the stirring stuff of pioneering, typified by the track-laying gangs of wild Irishmen. They drove the rails of the U.P. west to meet the track-laying Chinese of the Central Pacific coming east, stood guzzling while the tracks were joined with a gold spike at Promontory Point, Utah (see cut).
Of their wild Irish hell-raising, one chronicler wrote: "Champagne corks popped among the section bosses, barrels of whiskey floated the spirits of the laborers higher than the howls of timber wolves in the forests. Lurching between the roaring shacks they showed off their tricks of close-in fighting, western—and highly personal—marksmanship; their excitingly various ways of love-making . . . violent . . . dangerous. Timber-cutters charged down from their mountain camps and raided the effete shovel heavers like Apaches. The shovel-heavers raided back and returned with blood on the ends of their picks."
At the Bottom. Bill Jeffers was a product of this brawling frontier. His father, William, came over from Ireland's County Mayo in 1868 and, after laying his share of track, settled down to work as laborer for the U.P. in North Platte, Neb. There Bill Jeffers was born, in a tiny clapboard house that was usually crowded with railroad men, always swirled with argument (when all other topics were exhausted, they argued on ways & means of freeing Ireland). It was inevitable that Bill Jeffers should grow up to be 1) belligerent, 2) a railroad man.
He left school at 14, after fisticuffs with the teacher, to become a U.P. janitor and call boy. He had no boyhood to speak of, only work. His unboylike ambition was some day to become president of the U.P.
He learned telegraphy. At 19 he was a train dispatcher. On his salary of $110 a month, he married Lena A. Schatz, a rural schoolteacher, and took a short time off for his honeymoon. It was his last vacation for 35 years.
The Way Up. From then on, Bill Jeffers' career reads like the biography of most railroaders, who miss few rungs on their way up the gritty ladder. He was a switchman, yardmaster, trainmaster, division superintendent, general manager and assistant to the president. In the tough, hard-working game of railroading he was tougher than anyone else, and worked harder. If his authority was questioned, he frequently settled the argument with his iron fist. Once, months after the event, he decided that a Chicago hotel manager had insulted Mrs. Jeffers. Bill Jeffers walked into the hotel and floored the so & so.