Chapter 25: Ted & Anna Judah and Doc Strong find The Route
November 1860 — Dutch Flat, California
Ted & Anna Judah
Ted looked out over pine-covered hills and red-gold canyons and breathtaking vistas of the Sierras as he paced the wooden walkway outside the Dutch Flat Hotel, awaiting Anna’s stagecoach.
The thriving mining town nestled at the headwaters of Bear River, fifty-five miles northeast of Sacramento. There was a general store, an opera house, several hotels, an Odd Fellows Hall, a stone jail, a Masonic building, and a large, industrious Chinese population.
Ted had spent the past months north of Lake Bigler, hauling his barometer, compasses, odometer and gauges by horse and a light, one-seated carryall as he explored the four known emigrant trails over the Sierra Nevada, evaluating each in turn to determine the one that could best support the Western end of a Transcontinental Railroad. Anna had remained in Sacramento, venturing up to see Ted at agreed-upon rendezvous in small towns like this one.
Ted wished he had better news for her this time. With great regret, he had eliminated both the Sierra Trail past Tahoe, and the Hennessy Pass from the headwaters of the Yuba River up to the Comstock Lode.
Now he must venture again to the Donner Pass, legendarily the most perilous leg of the emigrants’ trip across the country. Accounts from the survivors told of how they had looked with terror at the awful sight: an immense wall built directly across their path, as steep as the roof of a house. Mules, wagons, people had routinely tumbled off the mountain in the attempt.
Ted had little hope for the practicality of the route. But it must be searched again. When he had all the facts and figures, the naysayers could not gainsay his honest convictions.
He said aloud, reminding himself: “I must be able to say not merely, ‘There is such a route over the mountains,’ but ‘Here are the maps, profiles and estimates of such a route.”
And then he put discouragement aside. Today, he would see Anna!
She had left word at their original rendezvous in Illinoistown, asking him to meet her further up the mountains in Dutch Flat. All very mysterious—but Anna never did anything without reason. He would be lost without her serene calm.
So he was startled that when the stage finally rumbled into town in a cloud of dust, Anna practically leapt out of the carriage before it had come to a halt. She was waving a letter, nearly bursting at the seams with excitement.
“This came from a Doctor Daniel Strong—”
“Doctor Daniel Strong can wait until I kiss my wife.” And so Ted did, before he gently put her aside and opened and scanned the letter. Strong identified himself as a pharmacist living here in Dutch Flat—
Anna could not wait for him to finish reading; her words came tumbling out even as he tried to digest the sentences. “He read your pamphlet and has much to speak to you about. He has spent time doing his own surveying, hoping to facilitate a wagon road across the Sierra crest that would bring commerce to this town—”
Ted looked from the page to her shining face. “He’s found a route, my love,” she said.
Just minutes away, Strong waited for them in his drugstore.
He was sunburnt, lean and sinewy, with more the look of a prospector than of a druggist. Ted liked him immediately, as did Anna, and soon they were talking as old friends. “Doc” explained he’d taken over the role of town doctor in the early days of the town when there was no one else to fulfill that function.
Doc’s own dream had nothing to do with a railroad. He was determined to bring the wagon trade through Dutch Flat to bolster the prosperity of his beloved town. He’d done a few years of amateur surveying, and believed he had found a viable route. But he was no engineer, and wanted to commission Ted to do a proper survey.
Strong spread a map out on the drugstore counter and they bent over it, Ted’s eyes assessing the routes he already knew as well as the lines in his own palm. And his heart began to beat faster as Doc traced another line.
In his wanderings, Strong had discovered a granite ridge that acted as a natural inclined plane, a ramp, that would connect with Judah’s surveyed route and might carry a rail line over the Sierras at Donner Lake via a much gentler slope than the treacherous old Emigrant Pass.
Strong was watching Ted. “Shall I show you?”
Ted broke into joyous laughter. “At once!” he exclaimed.
The two men packed, sharing between them the burden of Ted’s tools, and commenced the arduous journey up into the mountains.
The impassable Sierra range was really two mountain ranges, divided by a deep river valley, effectively two impenetrable walls. Ted had been searching, so far in vain, for a riverbed passage, through one mountain and then the other.
From a vista, Ted and the doctor confronted the natural phenomenon that had so far stymied Ted’s search. But what Doc Strong now pointed out to him was a ridge between two river valleys that formed an almost continuous incline, like an elevated pathway, from the Sacramento Plain to the Donner Summit, seven thousand feet above sea level.
Instead of going through the mountain, the railroad could go over the mountain.
The two explorers continued upward through rapidly dropping temperatures toward Donner Lake, taking measurements as they went along. Ted became increasingly excited as he gazed at the ridge from different vantage points. There were breaks in the ridge, but those could be bridged, at some expense, with trestles. And tunnels could be burrowed through blocks in the ridge…
At last the men reached the lake. Ted never failed to thrill at the sight of the clear water under those soaring peaks and cerulean sky. But this time the feeling was transcendent.
Because now he knew Doc Strong’s ridge was the key to everything. It could carry the rails over the first steep range to Donner Lake. And beyond this lake was Lake Bigler, from which the Truckee River cut a path through the second mountain range, and descended a manageable incline down into Nevada.
By tunneling here and blasting there, erecting trestles…
He could connect the two stretches.
Ted and Doc Strong made camp for the night, and after their strenuous journey, they soon were sleeping like the dead. They awoke somewhat later than they’d expected the next morning— to the thick silence of an alarmingly heavy snow. They broke camp in a rush, and hiking faster than was truly safe, made it off the mountain just in time, barely escaping being lost forever in the early snowfall.
Below, in Dutch Flat, Anna awaited their return in a frenzy of anxiety. As the two nearly frozen men finally trudged onto Main Street, Anna was so relieved to see them she burst into tears.
“Never do that again!” she sobbed, pounding on Ted’s chest for emphasis. Ted was too exhausted to argue.
— — —
After Ted had spent a day thawing out from the near-fatal adventure, Ted and Anna met Doc Strong in his pharmacy to discuss plans, moving forward.
Doc’s excitement about the route he’d discovered had been over the possibility of a wagon road through Dutch Flat. He wanted to connect Sacramento to the mines via his town. Now Ted set to work convincing Doc Strong of the larger plan: Not just a wagon road, but a railroad to unite the nation.
Magically, Strong saw Ted’s larger vision and caught Ted’s excitement almost immediately. On the pharmacy counter, the two men drew up corporate articles for a Central Pacific Railroad, and pledged their own money for stock purchases.
Strong set out to gather more stock pledges in Dutch Flat and surrounding towns, while Ted went back to San Francisco with Anna. He was confident that Lincoln would be elected, and they would have a powerful ally in the White House. When that happy day came, he must be ready. He sat down to compose another pamphlet detailing his new findings. He had crossed and re-crossed the mountains twenty-three times on foot, on horseback, or with his little wagon, and the pamphlet radiated his certainty:
I have devoted the past few months to an exploration of several routes and passes through Central California, resulting in the discovery of a practicable route from the city of Sacramento upon the divide between Bear River and the North Fork of the American, via Illinoistown, Dutch Flat and Summit Valley to the Truckee River; which gives nearly a direct line to Washoe, with maximum grades of 100 feet per mile.
The Donner Pass route, he reported, was 150 miles shorter than the Nevada-Sacramento route used by the Army for the 1853‑54 "Surveys and Explorations."
Any fool who read it would be able to see the sense in it.
Read After the Gold Rush from the beginning: