Free Walking Tour This Saturday of Nevada County’s Newest National Monument— the Transcontinental Railroad Tunnels at Donner Summit by Terry McAteer on August 18, 2025.

Join local historian Terry McAteer for a unique walking tour of the Transcontinental Railroad Tunnels constructed in 1867. The Department of the Interior proclaimed last December that the site is now listed as a National Monument— the second such designation for Nevada County. The tour describes the process of the Chinese workers who blasted and mucked the 16 tunnels in order for the completion of the railroad which opened the West. “This work was the most dangerous, complicated and back breaking of the entire construction of the Transcontinental Railroad,” said McAteer, the retired Nevada County Superintendent of Schools. “It is an amazing site since no power tools were used to construct the tunnels,” said McAteer. On the tour which is relatively flat, participants will walk through the 300 yard tunnel (flashlights needed), view the 1849 covered wagon gold field route, the Lincoln Highway and the amazing workmanship of the Chinese Wall constructed with no mortar.

This tour discusses the mobilizing of Chinese workers to blast granite for a California transcontinental railroad with the origin story of four upstate New Yorkers—Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, and Mark Hopkins—who became immensely wealthy through land dealings and subsidies tied to the railroad. The four men planned a crossing of the Sierra Nevada via Mount Judah, envisioned as a monumental “moonshot,” requiring about 16 tunnels and intense management, lobbying, and logistics; they faced near-constant financial peril despite controlling the project. Much of their fortune came from federal land grants along the Sacramento-to-Utah line, creating a checkerboard of land ownership that made Southern Pacific Land Company California’s largest private landowner; subsidies per mile fueled profits even when rail construction lagged. Crocker hires Chinese labor after white workers leave for the Comstock Lode; Chinese workers labor in three eight-hour shifts, using hand tools to bore and blast with nitroglycerin—the first use in the U.S.—despite high risks and fatalities. The narrative details brutal tunnel work, improvisation (a locomotive pushed into a tunnel to aid blasting), and a multi-shift, multi-end drilling method, with about seven months per tunnel and many more under construction; the site remains largely as it was in 1867, now a historic point with safety concerns and a ceremonial invitation to viewers to look up at a cavern carved for railroad construction.

Full Transcript of the Video:

and the local voters were put on the side as a means to hoist up and down the Chinese
workers and hoist up and down all the granite that you were blasting.

Seven months to doing this, 18 inches a day, okay, that's the amount that you got out of here.

Okay, I'm sorry for this that you couldn't hear me, I truly apologize.

It's for sure.

Thank you for your interest in wanting to preserve this amazing entity here.

Let's begin on telling this story.

It's such an amazing story.

Four guys who happened to live in upstate New York, longed by bold fever, and they came west to make their fortune in bold.

And none of them made their fortune in bold.

But 20 years later, they were the four most wealthy people in the United States.

Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker, and Stanford.

They all had their only bond was that they were from upstate New York and they became friends because they didn't make a nickel mining for gold.

So they went to Sacramento and said, I can make money another way.

Crocker went into banking.

Stanford went into law.

Hopkins and Huntington, my name is a hardware, hardware store.

And somehow throughout this, the talk was always, how do we get a railroad over the she-bearers?
And it became what we call the moonshot of the 19th century.

Okay, you know what I mean by that?
Can you hear me way back there? Just wanting to know.

Yeah.

If you can't, then get your ass over here.

Because this is loud as I can talk.

I know.

So, in the middle of the crowd, both sides can hear you.

He is in the middle.

I hear you now.

Calm down.

You're the next contestant in the press.

That's the truth.

So, they knew one another through Sacramento.

They got together and got together in the higher guide in the city of Georgia.

The mountain next door was named after him, Mount Judah.

And they said to Judah, see if you can design a railroad in the Central Valley.

See if you can design a railroad that will get you.

Get us over to Sierra.

And he does.

It's such a good route that we've had engineers, civil engineers throughout time
try to look for a better route.

And Theodore Judah's word in the early 1860s has never been found to be better.

But he couldn't get the railroad over this peak, as an example.

Because railroads can only go up at a grade of 2% per mile.

If not, they start slipping and going backwards.

So, what we have here is an amazing situation of 16 tunnels.

You are at number six.

The longest.

500 yards over five football fields in length.

The problem is, is it, so let me just tell you, the four people.

Mark, no.

No, hang on, hang on.

Crocker, Crocker is the foreman.

He's the foreman.

Back in Sacramento is Hopkins, and he's doing the logistics.

He's the UPS driver.

He has to get rails all the way from Pittsburgh, around South America, up to San Francisco,
on a guard, to Sacramento, on a train from Sacramento up here.

And make sure you've got enough rails.

Because if you don't have enough rails, then you don't need to hire 10,000 people,
and you're going to go broke.

So, Hopkins is the man down in Sacramento.

Huntington is in Washington, D.

C.

, trying to lobby Congress.

And Sanford, at that time, becomes governor of the state,
and so he's locking up contracts throughout the state of farmers, et cetera,
who want to use the transcontinental railroad.

That's the four of them together.

But they didn't make their money on the railroad.

They nearly went bankrupt multiple times.

This year, nearly put them into bankruptcy.

And I'll tell you why in a second.

But they made their money on the land.

Because if you look at the CRs right up here, you're going to see a checkerboard.

And so what the federal government decided to do to encourage people to be entrepreneurial
is they gave one square mile each other square mile.

So imagine a checkerboard, five miles that way, and five miles that way,
and Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker, and Sanford own every other mile
all the way from Sacramento to Utah.

That's why Southern Pacific Land Company is the largest owner today
of private property in the state of California.

They made their money on land.

Because if you built the railroad, then you want to have your business next to the railroad.

And who do you then rent from?
You rent from Sanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and Crocker.

That's how they made all their money.

Because they didn't make their money building a railroad.

Because the federal government, to that said, on flat land, we're going to pay you $18,000 a mile.

On hilly land, we're going to pay you $26,000 a mile.

And on mountainous, we're going to pay you $36,000 a mile.

Well, when they got here, that's only 500 yards long, and it took 18 months.

They're going to go bankrupt.

So what do they do?
They get teams working this, and then they have the railroad bring the rails up
and the food up and everything else, and they bypass all of this
and put everything on cart and bring it down to Truckee
and start building the railroad to Utah while they're finishing this portion.

We already got that concept.

Interesting stuff.

So Crocker has been shown up here by having to build this tunnel.

And so how does he build this tunnel?
Because they begin each day, and they're only going a foot a day.

And Crocker says, uh-oh, I think, I don't think we can make it.

So here's what he does.

He gets Chinese workers from the Central Valley.

Why Chinese workers?
Mainly because there weren't enough white workers to go around.

Most of the white workers had gone to Nevada to go work in the Comstock Loan.

So there were no jobs available.

I mean, there just weren't any white guys showing up for work.

Because I might make a fortune out in Nevada.

And so what therefore happens is he says that the last moments of, well,
we'll take some Chinese, let's try them out.

And they turn out to be tremendous workers.

Tremendous workers.

He works on this tunnel three eight-hour shifts a day, full-time on this tunnel,
morning, noon, and night on this tunnel.

And the reason why he does it is he's got to make some money.

But he realizes that a full day, I'm not going to be able to make this.

I want you to realize the most important thing to realize in this whole day
is there's not one power tool that's used to get through here.

Not one.

There's no steam shovels.

There's no anything.

There's no trills.

It's all hand-drilling.

Let's explain to you what this would have looked like if we were here in 1867.

There would have been multiple ladders up here on this face, multiple ladders.

And on one set of a ladder would be a Chinese person holding a drill bit about a foot,
like a yard long, and about one and an eighth diameter.

And he pulled it.

And behind him on the ladder was another guy with a full swing of a sledgehammer behind him.

And as he hit it, that person would turn, a quarter of a turn, to be able to make the drill a little bit.

Well, you can imagine how long that takes.

And in an eight-hour shift, your hope wasn't yet a foot.

And there would be six or eight teams right here.

Eight teams doing the same thing.

When you're done, the next eight-hour team comes in.

And at the end of the shift, you hopefully got in, hopefully at the end of the day,
you hopefully got in about 18 to 24 inches.

And then in the beginning, it was only black powder,
but this is the first place in the United States to use nitroglycerin.

And if you know anything about nitroglycerin, it is dangerous stuff.

It is highly flammable, and many a Chinese worker was killed just by the handling of it.

So they put it in a cylinder about eight of these, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

And they put it in that hole, they put it in that hole, and lit the fuse and ran.

And kaboom.

And so at the end of the 24-hour day, the goal was 18 inches to 24 inches a day.

That's two feet a day.

You got two feet a day going from here.

And at the other end, you got another crew of two feet going this direction to meet.

And Crocker calculates it and says, we're goners.

There's no way we're going to make this.

And so what does he do?
He does something amazing.

He has his crews push a locomotive up to the top of this.

They realize there's no cranes, there's no letting up.

It's called horses and manpower pushing an engine up to the top and in the middle.

And when he got to the middle, he told his Chinese workers, drill down.

And so they drill down in the middle of this and use the engine as a means to raise and lower Chinese workers
and raise and lower all the rock that you're pulling out.

So he's got a team going this way.

He's got a team at the other end.

And then he's got two teams in the middle going out to the two ends.

Everyone got that?
No.

Start again.

So that's the basic thing that happens, as you can imagine.

And he doubled the amount of time that he can get done.

So this tunnel takes seven months.

And while they're working on this tunnel, realize there are 15 others that teams are working on
to be able to get this railroad over the mountains.

So what you're going, let's answer some questions.

This is everything you're seeing here is absolutely original.

There's been no work done to here since 1867.

Except the graffiti.

So at the top, you're going to notice a wood bird.

You're going to notice a char up on the top because that is the railroad going through here.

This is no longer used by Union Pacific.

They actually drilled a tunnel in the 1950s, late 50s, early 60s, all the way through the mountain to a truck.

Because this was too costly to maintain.

But they still own it.

And that's one of our concerns is that if Union Pacific owns this, it's not, we're all trespassing.

We have the greatest trespassing of all time.

Congratulations.

Congratulations.

We're all gone.

So when trains would go, I'm about to move, and we're about done with this portion.

When trains would come through here, they would be sending sparks.

Tremendous amount of sparks out of the engine.

And one of the biggest concerns was that those sparks were behind you, and that would light up the trains.

So there were many times, an engineer is driving the train, and he looks behind him, and his entire car goes on fire.

That's why you have a caboose.

And in the caboose are what?
Firemen.

Firemen are in the caboose.

That's the reason why you have cabooses and firemen.

Firemen is because trains fall on fire.

And so you look as high as you could in those days, and in order to limit the amount of sparks going through here.

So what we're going to do is we're all going to march black way.

You're going to turn your light on, and you're going to look because there's too many of you.

As we go towards the middle, I'm going to stand there in the middle and say, look up.

And you're going to see that amazing scene of that cavern that was sunk down in order to build the railroads in the direction.