Mormon Laborers, Working on the Transcontinental Railroad (1868-1869) (Season 3, Ep. 6)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place. If you subscribe to this podcast or if this is just your first time listening, I hope you will go back to all the other episodes, the prior episodes. There are dozens of them and I hope that you'll have a chance to listen to them as well. Please also rate and review Speak Your Piece on iTunes, Google, and elsewhere.
Today on Speak Your Piece, we'll be discussing the 19th century story of the transcontinental railroad, the territory of Utah and the little known story of the Mormon graders or road builders, who worked for both the Union Pacific Railway and the Central Pacific Railway. This is a story of Mormon shopkeepers, ranchers, farmers who picked up picks and shovels, who used wagons, horses, mules, and oxens, black powder and nitroglycerin and scraped, cut, filled, and tunneled the transcontinental line as far west as the Humboldt, Nevada and to the east just to the edge of the Wyoming border.
Now that's nearly one-fifth of the overall 1,776 miles of grading or road building necessary before the other workers laid down ties, fish plates, rails, spikes, and ballast or rock that was strewn around the line.
So, that's a lot of preparation. One-fifth of that entire line was done by Mormon graders. Utah played a major role, not just in being the completion place for America and the world's first transcontinental railroad, but also because the Mormons appreciably built a portion of the line, a major role for this expanding United States. And this was still a relatively new 19th century country with so many Native Americans still very much living their lives across the West. And the Mormons had a role that's not always been understood in the past. Now Mormon laborers, somewhere between 2,000 or 3,000 of them, worked both sporadically and in some cases continuously between 1868 and 69 on the transcontinental line. Now this number, we've got to put this in perspective, this number pales in comparison to the 15,000 to 30,000 Chinese laborers largely who came from California from the West, or the 10,000 to 12,000 Irish laborers largely coming from Omaha and points East, or even the 3,000 plus Civil War soldiers both from the Union and the Confederacy who also worked on the Transcontinental Railroad, all of whom played a much larger role in the story. However, the Mormon graders, along with the undocumented African Americans and Native American laborers, are all stories that need to be better told and really understood better by the general public. That's the purpose of our podcast today. Now the Transcontinental Railroad story is also a story of human and animal power. It's about hoards, and I use that term intentionally, hoards of humans, mostly poor immigrants and hoards of animals, horses, mules, oxens, put together in the western wilderness to build a road that extended from the Sacramento Valley in California to Omaha, Nebraska. Now, to tell this story about the Mormon Transcontinental Railroad builders, we have two guests today. First, Brandon Flint, the National Park Service Superintendent of the Golden Spike National Historic Park, located on the northern shore of the Great Salt Lake at Promontory Summit in Box Elder County. Now, prior to his appointment, Brandon was stationed in the Cape Cod National Seashore.
Brandon, what was, is that the proper title?

**Brandon Flint** (4:43)
Yeah, Cape Cod National Seashore.

**Brad Westwood** (4:45)
He also completed a National Park Service Bevinetto Fellowship that included a year with the House of Representatives in the Natural Resources Committee staff and a year with the National Park Service Office of Legislative Affairs in Washington, DC. Now, altogether, you spent 10 years there.

**Brandon Flint** (5:04)
I spent 10 years in the DC area.
But I am originally a Utah native, if you will, growing up in Davis County and attending Davis High School. So I'm thrilled to be back home, really.

**Brad Westwood** (5:18)
And your appointment was when?

**Brandon Flint** (5:20)
So I've been back in the state for just over a year. So I started at Golden Spike really at the start of COVID, which made for an interesting first year for sure.

**Brett Dowdle** (5:29)
I'll say.

**Brad Westwood** (5:30)
I'll say.

**Brett Dowdle** (5:30)
Yeah.

**Brad Westwood** (5:31)
Well, and now that with the vaccinations and everything else, you're hoping for something new going on and you have a new event that we're going to be talking about related to these Mormon graders.