Big Four

by Oscar Lewis

Track-layers followed close behind the graders, and locomotives pushed strings of flatcars loaded with construction iron, lumber, explosives, food, drink, and more men to the railhead. Cape Horn, a sheer granite buttress, proved the most formidable obstacle of the year; its lower sides dropped away in a thousand-foot vertical cliff that offered no vestige of a foothold. The indomitable Chinese were lowered from above on ropes, and there, suspended between sky and earth, chipped away with hammer and chisel to form the first precarious ledge, which was then laboriously deepened to a shelf wide enough to permit the passage of the cars. Three years later when overland trains crept cautiously along this ledge, passengers gazed straight down from their windows into thin air.