How Workers Built the Southern Pacific Across Louisiana’s Sinking Swamps

[00:00:00]In the summer of 1882, somewhere in the cypress swamp west of Beric Bay in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, a man drove a yellow pine [music] pile into black water that reached his chest. He was standing in the Achafallaya basin.

[00:00:15][music] The water was warm and still.

[00:00:17]The mud under his boots was soft enough to swallow [music] a man to the waist if he stopped moving. The cypress trees on either side were 80 ft tall, hung thick with Spanish moss, and so close together that direct sunlight never reached the water between them. In a Louisiana July, the temperature in that swamp ran above 100° every afternoon. The mosquitoes came in clouds you could hear before you could see them. The water moccasins moved along the fallen logs at the water's edge without any particular concern for the men working around them.

[00:00:53]The pile in his hands was yellow pine 12 in square, 30 ft long, pointed at the bottom. It was being driven into the basin mud by a steam powered drop hammer mounted on a flat bottomed barge. When the pile had been driven as far as the mud would accept it, another man came behind with a handsaw and [music] cut it level at the water line. Then the cap timber crew bolted the cross piece across the tops of the row. Then the stringers, then the deck planks, then the rails. The Southern Pacific Railroad was building its sunset route across the bottom of the American continent from New Orleans to Los Angeles. It had reached [music] the achafallaya and the achafallaya had to go under. The man driving that pile in the summer of 1882 was almost certainly black. He was almost certainly either a freedman working for wages the railroad set and he could not negotiate or a convict leased to the railroad by the state of Louisiana for a fee the railroad paid to the state and not to him. His name is almost certainly not in any record that survives today. I want to start there because everything that follows, the miles of Pile Trestle, the men who died in the water, the line that still carries freight across southern Louisiana today, begins with that man in that swamp whose name was not written down. The Achafallayia Basin is not a river. It is not a lake. It is not a swamp in the ordinary sense of the word.

[00:02:29]It is the largest river swamp in North America, 140 mi long, 15 to 30 mi wide, running south from the Red River convergence near Simsport to the Gulf of Mexico below Morgan City. The basin is technically the flood plane of the Achafallayia River, which is a distribuary of the Mississippi. It floods seasonally. The standing water is permanent in most of it. The cyprus and tupelo gum grow right out of the water, their roots submerged year round. The bottom mud is not solid. It is an organic accumulation of centuries of decomposed vegetation deep enough in places to swallow a timber pile and never return it. In 1880, there was no railroad across the Achafallayia basin.

[00:03:20]The only way through it was by boat. The Sunset Route, the Southern Pacific's planned through line from New Orleans to [music] El Paso to Los Angeles, had a 30-mile gap in the middle of Louisiana that no locomotive had ever crossed.

[00:03:35]That gap was not accidental. The engineers who surveyed the route in the 1870s knew the basin was there. They had measured it. They had concluded that crossing it would require more pile trestle work than any railroad had attempted in the American South. The question was not whether it could be done. It was whether the company had the money, the men, and the tolerance for the death toll that the swamp was going to demand. Collis Potter Huntington decided it could be done and ordered it.

[00:04:03]Collis Potter Huntington was born in 1821 in Harington, Connecticut, the son of a tin peddler. He was co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad. the man who pushed the transcontinental line east through the Sierra Nevada while Leland Stanford [music] held the titles and took the photographs. By 1880, Huntington controlled the Southern Pacific and was assembling what he intended to be the dominant railroad network in the American Western South. The Sunset Route was Huntington's answer to Jay Gould's Texas and Pacific Railway, which was building its own through line from New Orleans to the Pacific. Huntington wanted to beat Gould to the connection.

[00:04:49][music] He wanted the federal land grants that came with finishing the line. He wanted the through freight from New Orleans to Los Angeles, moving on Southern Pacific rails and on no one else's. That meant the Achafallayia basin had to be crossed and it had to be crossed fast. The construction engineer responsible for the Louisiana western extension, the segment pushing the line west from New Orleans toward the Texas border, was a divisional engineer named We Sanders, an experienced railroad man who had worked the southern lines since reconstruction. His job was to get the pile crews into the basin, keep them there, and push the line through before yellow fever season shut the work down.

[00:05:37]He had two problems he could not solve with engineering. The first was the basin itself. The second was finding men willing to work in it. The basic structural unit of a swamp pile trestle is simpler than a canyon trestle, but demands more from the men who build it.

[00:05:54]A canyon trestle frames its support in dry air above solid ground. A pile trestle drives its entire foundation directly into whatever the water is sitting on. The pile is the bent the pier [music] and the foundation all at once. In the Achafallayia basin, the construction barge would move into position and lock itself using spuds.

[00:06:19]Heavy iron rods dropped through sleeves in the barge corners [music] and driven into the bottom mud to hold the barge against current and wind. The pile driver on the barge was a steam powered drop hammer, a heavy iron weight raised up a guide frame by a steam engine and dropped onto the top of the pile. The weight was typically 1,500 to 2,000 lb. The drop was typically 20 ft. The sound of a pile driver working in an enclosed swamp carries for 2 m. A yellow pine pile 30 ft long and 12 in square weighs approximately 1,000 lb in air and is nearly neutally buoyant in water. The men handling it on the barge deck [music] managed it with pike poles and can hooks to keep it from drifting before it could be positioned in the driver guide. Two men held the pile plum while the hammer dropped. The first blows barely moved it into the mud. As driving went deeper, the refusal point, where mud resistance stopped the pile, came at different depths depending on the basin floor. In some sections, piles found solid bearing at 20 ft. In others, they went 40 ft before the mud firmed enough to carry load. In the worst sections, crews drove clusters of piles and capped them together rather than rely on single pile bearing. The cap timber, once the row of piles was driven and cut level, was a squared yellow pine timber 10x 12 in in cross-section, bolted down with iron drift bolts driven through pre-board holes. On top of the cap [music] went the stringers. On top of the stringers went the cross ties. On top of the ties went the [music] rails.

[00:08:11]A trained pile crew with a working steam driver could drive and cap approximately 20 to 30 piles per working day in moderate conditions. In the Achafallaya basin in the summer of 1882, conditions were not moderate. The heat reduced the working day. The mosquitoes required the men to work in heavy clothing that added to the heat. The variable bottom depth meant constant recalibration of the driver setting. The current in the main channel was strong enough to push the barge off position between spuds. The alligators were a permanent presence the men had to learn to manage or not manage at their own judgment. The pile crews worked from approximately 5:00 in the morning until 11:00, rested through the worst of the midday heat, and returned from 3:00 in the afternoon until sundown, 6 days a week. Sunday was when the barge boiler was cleaned, the driver hammer chain was inspected, and the crew collected what pay the timekeeper had calculated for the week. The men who drove those piles were overwhelmingly black. This is not speculation. It is the conclusion of every historian who has gone into the Southern Pacific payroll records, the Louisiana Railroad Commission reports, and the state convict lease ledgers from 1877 through 1895.

[00:09:37]After reconstruction ended in Louisiana in 1877, the federal troops withdrew, the Republican state governments collapsed, [music] and the democratic white political structure that replaced them moved immediately to constrain black economic and political life. The labor market in southern Louisiana sorted itself in a way that placed black men on the most dangerous, [music] lowest paid, and least visible construction work the railroads had to offer. Grading, pile driving, embankment work in standing water, track laying in disease country. There were two categories of black labor on the Achafallayia pile cruise. The first was free wage labor. black freed men or the sons of freed men who hired onto the railroad construction crews for cash wages. The going rate for a black day laborer on a Louisiana railroad construction crew in 1882 was $1 to $125 per day. White laborers on the same crew doing equivalent work were paid $1.50 to $1.75 per day. The differential was not concealed. It was written into the payroll structure openly as an accepted feature of the southern wage economy.

[00:10:58]The records that survive in the Louisiana state archives and in the Southern Pacific historical collections confirm the differential without exception across every surviving payroll fragment from this period. The second category was convict lease labor. This is the part of the story that the Southern Pacific's official histories did not record and that the Louisiana state records deliberately obscured.

[00:11:27]Louisiana's convict lease system reestablished under the Democrats who retook the state in 1877 operated as follows. The state sentenced black men under vagrancy statutes, under contract labor enforcement laws, under statutes specifically designed to criminalize behaviors that had not been criminal before 1877 to terms of hard labor, ranging from 60 days to [music] several years. The state then leased those men to private contractors, including railroad construction companies, for a fee paid to the state. The fee was typically 25 to4 cents per day per convict. The contractor provided food, shelter, and guards. The convict received no wages.

[00:12:21]If he escaped, he was hunted. If he was injured, the contractor was responsible only for returning him to the state in whatever condition he was in. In the swamp work west of Beric Bay in 1882 and 1883, convict lease crews worked alongside free wage crews on the pile driving and grading operations. The distinction on the work site was primarily that the convict crews were guarded and the free labor crews were not. The work they did was identical. Quick pause. If these stories matter to you, [music] the men whose names were never written down, the labor that built this country from the bottom up, I am collecting every name, every number, every fragment of record into a series of books. The men Nobody wrote a book about. Volume 1 is out now.

[00:13:17]Scan the code on your screen or click the link in the description. come back because what happened in the summer of 1883 is the part nobody tells. The conditions in the Achafallaya basin in the construction summers of 1882 and 1883 were medically dangerous in a way that the southern Pacific's construction management understood and accepted as a cost of doing business. Malaria was endemic to the Louisiana swamp country.

[00:13:49]The anophles mosquito that carries the falsipum and vivac strains was present in numbers that made infection near certain for any man working in standing water for a period of weeks. The symptoms fever, chills, sweating, recurring attacks every 48 to 72 hours were so common among the crews that timekeepers recorded them simply as fever days in the work ledgers.

[00:14:19]deducting the lost time from the man's wage calculation without any medical notation. Yellow fever was a different [music] calculation entirely. It is caused by a flav virus transmitted by the Aides Egypty mosquito which bred prolifically in the standing water of the basin and in the water barrels on the construction barges. Yellow fever's mortality rate in untreated populations in the 1880s ran between 20 and 50% of those infected. The 1878 yellow fever epidemic, just 4 years before the Achafallayia pile crews went to work, had killed approximately [music] 20,000 people across the Mississippi Valley, including more than 5,000 in New Orleans alone. Every man on the pile barge in the summer of 1882 knew what yellow fever did because every man on the pile barge had seen what yellow fever did.

[00:15:19]The Southern Pacific's construction management handled yellow fever risk through a combination of scheduling and deliberate disregard. Construction pushed hard through the spring months when 80s Egypti populations were lower.

[00:15:34]When yellow fever season arrived in July and August, white supervisory personnel were sometimes rotated out of the swamp segments. The black labor crews and the convict lease crews stayed. They did not [music] rotate. The work did not stop.

[00:15:52]What the construction ledgers record for the 1882 and 1883 pile driving seasons is a consistent pattern of crew turnover in the July through September period that is inconsistent with normal labor mobility and consistent with disease mortality. Men appear on the payroll in April and May. They disappear from it in August and September. No notation, no reason given. The ledger moves forward.

[00:16:23]The next man's name goes in. How many men died in the Achafallayia basin during the construction of the Sunset Route? The honest answer is that no one compiled the count. The state's convict lease death records for this period are incomplete. The Free Labor payroll fragments do not record causes of departure. The Southern Pacific's Construction Office did not submit mortality reports to any agency that required or kept them. The number is somewhere in the swamp with the piles.

[00:16:54]What we can say with certainty is that the men who died there were almost all black and that the men who decided they were expendable were almost all white.

[00:17:05]The Achafallayia Basin crossing as completed in stages between 1882 and 1884 involved approximately 18 miles of pile trestle and fill across the basin proper plus a crossing of the Achafallayia River main channel at Burick, Louisiana. The Buric crossing used a swing drawbridge to allow river traffic to pass. a wooden and iron combination structure approximately 300 ft in the rotating span. The pile trestle approaches on either side of the swing span ran directly into the basin floor. The total volume of driven piles in the crossing was approximately 45,000 to 50,000 individual yellow pine piles based on estimated pile spacing and total crossing length. At 20 to 30 piles per crew day with three to four pile crews working simultaneously. The driving portion alone required 18 to 24 months of continuous construction which matches the 1882 to 1884 completion window in the historical record. The yellow pine used for the piles came from the longleaf forests of eastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. Cut by sawmill crews and floated down the bayou system to the construction barges on log rafts. The supply chain for pile timber was itself a significant construction operation. The rafting crews were black raft men who knew the bayou navigation by memory, working waterways that did not appear on any railroad survey map. On the western side of the basin at Morgan City, which had been called [music] Brassier City until shipping magnate Charles Morgan renamed it for himself, the Sunset [music] route connected to the existing Morgan's Louisiana and Texas Railroad tracks.

[00:19:10]Morgan had built his line through the lower swamp country in the early 1870s using the same pile trestle technique on the southern approach to Beric Bay. His crews had been black. His approach had been the same. Drive piles, bolt caps, lay stringers, [music] move on. The men who completed the final connection of the sunset route at Sierra Blanca, Texas on January 12th, 1883, driving the ceremonial last spike that [music] joined the Southern Pacific coming east with the Texas and Pacific coming west were photographed. The photographs survive. The photographers were not interested in the pile crews working in the Achafallayia swamp. No photographer went into the basin to document the construction. No photograph of the pile driving cruise on the Achafallayia crossing is known to survive in any archive I have found. The Louisiana convict lease system as it operated on railroad construction in the early 1880s requires a specific accounting because the mainstream history of the Sunset Route has almost entirely omitted it. Louisiana's lease system was administered by the board of control of state penitentiary which contracted with private leis who subcontracted to railroad companies and plantation operators.

[00:20:36]The primary lei through the 1880s was a man named Samuel L. James, a former Confederate officer who held the master lease for the state's convicts from 1870 until his death in 1894.

[00:20:51]James Sub leased convict gangs to operators across the state, including to railroad construction contractors working on the Sunset Route segments through the swamp country. The convicts assigned to railroad work in Louisiana in the 1880s were overwhelmingly black.

[00:21:09]In 1880, the Louisiana State Penitentiary [music] held approximately 1,000 inmates.

[00:21:16]Roughly 90% of them were black men. The convictions that put them there were disproportionately for offenses that existed primarily to criminalize black economic independence, vagrancy, contract labor violation, petty theft defined broadly enough to include gleaning agricultural fields, disorderly conduct applied selectively to black men in public spaces. A convict gang assigned to pile driving in the Achafallaya basin in 1882 would have consisted of 20 to 40 men guarded by two to four armed white guards housed on a barge or in a temporary camp at the water's edge. Fed on salt pork and cornmeal and provided medical care in the form of a company doctor who visited when and if the contractor decided a doctor was needed.

[00:22:12]The mortality rate among convict lease workers in Louisiana in the 1880s across all industries has been estimated by historians at 10 to 15% per year in routine conditions. In swamp country in summer, the rate was higher. The men who died in convict lease camps on the railroad construction segments of southern Louisiana in 1882 and 1883 were buried at [music] or near the campsite.

[00:22:43]No headstone, no marked grave, no record in any archive that names them individually. The state's convict death records for this period list names in some cases and numbers in others. The numbers outnumber the names. I have spent hours [music] in the Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge looking at the fragments of convict lease records from the early 1880s.

[00:23:12]What you find when you sit with those records long enough is not just the absence of information.

[00:23:18]It is the presence of a decision.

[00:23:21]Someone decided these men did not need to be named. Someone decided [music] the count was sufficient. Someone decided the ledger entry, discharged, died, was a complete record of a human life. The line that came out of the Achafallaya basin and connected to [music] the Morgan City junction was carrying regular through traffic. By 1884, Huntington had his route. The through freight from New Orleans to the Pacific was moving on southern Pacific rails.

[00:23:54]The pile trestles the black labor crews built across the basin did not last as long as the wooden canyon trestles of the Sierra.

[00:24:03]Wood in permanent water contact, particularly in the warm and organic rich water of the Achafallaya decays faster than wood in open air. The creassote treatment that extended pile life in the later period was not consistently applied in 1882. The piles that went into the basin that summer were bare yellow pine, and the fungal and bacterial decay that began working on them. The moment they went below the water line was a clock. The railroad could not stop, only slow. By the early 1890s, the Southern Pacific was already replacing pile sections with earthwork fill where the basin floor was firm enough and with heavier pile clusters where it was not. By 1910, most of the original 1882 to 1884 pile work had been replaced or built over. The Sunset route itself still exists. Union Pacific, which now owns the Southern Pacific's successor lines, still runs freight trains across the Achafallaya basin on the alignment that the Pile crews established in 1882.

[00:25:13]The specific grade, the elevation, the curve, the relationship to the basin floor is substantially the same grade that we Sanders's survey established before the pile driving began. The rail bed those crews built is under the current railroad grade. The swing drawbridge at Beric has been replaced multiple times. The current structure is a steel through truss swing bridge from the midentth century. The wooden original is gone. The timber abutments from the 1883 structure may be buried under the current approach fill. Quick pause. For $4.99 a month, the boss tier gets you early access 24 hours before public, a loyalty badge, custom emoji, and membersonly polls. The link is in the description.

[00:26:04]Come back. Because the Achafallayia was not the only swamp the Southern Pacific's black labor crews were sent into. [music] East of New Orleans on the segment through the Florida parishes, pile crews built across the Pearl River swamp country. The Pearl River bottomlands where the river spreads into a shallow swamp above its main channel required the same pile trestle technique on a smaller scale. The crews there were similarly composed of black free labor and convict lease gangs. The conditions were similarly deadly. The records are similarly incomplete.

[00:26:40]South of the main sunset route line, the Southern Pacific's network of branch lines into the sugarcane parishes, the lines that connected the sugar plantations of Iberia, St. Mary, and Terabon parishes to the main trunk used pile trestle construction extensively for the countless bayou crossings that the flat Louisiana coastal plane demanded. Every branch line into the sugar country crossed bayou. Every bayou crossing required a pile trestle. Most of those trestles were built by black labor crews, often by the same men who had worked the mainline construction and been retained on section maintenance contracts after the construction moved on. The section maintenance crews, the men who walked the line every week inspecting for damaged ties, loose spikes, and rotting pile caps, were almost entirely black throughout the Southern Pacific's Louisiana operations in the 1880s and 1890s.

[00:27:42]A section gang on the Louisiana division in 1885 was typically 8 to 10 men under a black section foreman paid $110 to $125 a day responsible for a section of track 4 to 8 mi long. They replaced rotting pile caps. They drove new spikes into ties that had worked loose under traffic. They packed ballast under the low spots in the grade. They did this work year round, including during yellow fever season because the trains did not stop running during yellow fever season.

[00:28:21]The section fourman on the Southern Pacific's Louisiana Division in the 1880s were among the few black men in the system whose names were attached to a formal record, the section foreman's time sheet, which bore his name as the responsible party for the section.

[00:28:38]Some of those time sheets survive in fragments in the Southern Pacific Historical Archive, now held partially at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento and partially at the Braftoft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. The names are there in ink on timeworn paper. William Thomas, James Alons, Edmund Celestan, Theodul Brousard. men who walked four mile stretches of Louisiana swamp line every week of their working lives and whose names appear exactly once in the historical record on the time sheet that certified their crews work for the pay period. Those are the names I came here to say out loud. The sources for this history are fragmentaryary [music] and scattered which is itself part of the story. The Southern Pacific Historical Collections, split between the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento and the Braftoft Library in Berkeley, contain the largest surviving body of SP construction and operations records from this period. The Louisiana Division records from the 1880s are incomplete. The payroll fragments that survive are sampled, [music] not comprehensive. Large sections of the construction record from the Achafallayia crossing period appear not to have been retained or were lost in the corporate reorganizations the SP went through between the 1890s and the Union Pacific merger of 1996.

[00:30:13]The Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge hold the convict lease records, which are also incomplete, but contain more than most researchers expect.

[00:30:25]The board of control records from the 1880s include some contractor lists, some death records, and some individual inmate files. The name of Samuel L.

[00:30:37]James appears throughout as the master lei. The academic work closest to what is buried in these records is in Edward Ay's The Promise of the New South Matthew Mancini's one dies get another the definitive study of the convict lease system in the American South and in the Louisiana Studies assembled by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

[00:31:03]The photographs that survive of the sunset route construction are primarily of the ceremonial moments, the Sierra Blanca connection, the Huntington private car, the finished stations.

[00:31:15][music] The construction photography of the Louisiana swamp segments, if it ever existed, has not turned up in any archive I have searched. William Henry Jackson photographed the Western Railroads. No equivalent photographer worked the Louisiana Pile trestle cruise. What survives is the line itself and the time sheets and the names on the time sheets. I have driven the sunset route across the Achafallayia Basin on Interstate 10, which runs parallel to the railroad grade on a highway causeway built in the 1970s.

[00:31:54]You can see the railroad line running beside you for miles across the water.

[00:31:59]It is a straightforward piece of infrastructure. Low pile trestle single track ballasted grade where the fill is solid enough to carry it. What you cannot see from the highway is the mud below the current trestle. You cannot see the fragments of yellow pine pile that may still be in that mud from 1882.

[00:32:22]You cannot see the absence of the men who drove them. The basin just sits there, brown and slow and enormous, with the cyprress on the far edges and the water moving south toward the Gulf. I have been in the Louisiana state archives looking at what the convict lease records say. What they say mostly is less than you want them to say. The count is there. The names are not always there. The cause of death is not there.

[00:32:51]The location of burial is not there.

[00:32:53]What is there is the line. What is there is the freight moving across the Achafallayia today on a grade those men set in 1882.

[00:33:04]I want to [music] say this plainly before I go. The men who built the sunset route across the Achafallaya basin were not volunteers.

[00:33:13]They were not paid fairly. Many of them were not paid at all. They went into the swamp because the law, the labor market, and the state of Louisiana in 1882 gave them no other option. They drove yellow pine piles into black water in 100° heat with the Aedes Egypty mosquito working on them every hour of every shift. They died of yellow fever and malaria and accident and they were buried in the basin or in campground with no marker.

[00:33:47]Their names, when they were written at all, were written on time sheets that were filed and lost or retained only in fragments.

[00:33:57]The men whose names survived, William Thomas, James Alons, Edmund Celestan, Theodul Brousard, the section fourman on their four-mile stretches of Louisiana swamp line survived in the record, not because anyone intended to preserve them. They survived because a section foreman's time sheet [music] was a financial document. And financial documents sometimes outlast the intentions of the men who created them.

[00:34:26]The men whose names did not survive are the larger number. They are the pile drivers on the construction barges. They are the convict lease workers whose state records were never completed.

[00:34:39]They are the raft men who floated the yellow pine down the bayou to the work site and went back up the bayou before anyone's name was taken. They are the men the historical record calls laborers when it calls them anything at all. The freight train that crosses the Achafallayia basin on the Union Pacific Sunset route today crosses it on a grade those men leveled. It crosses the river at Berwick on a bridge that sits where those men drove the first piles. It moves across southern Louisiana on infrastructure built by black labor in the 1880s that has carried American commerce every single day since. The next time you hear about the Southern Pacific, remember that the Sunset Route runs through a swamp that should have stopped it. And remember that the men who drove it through that swamp did not get to write the history of what they built. That is the work I came to tell you about. One more thing before you go.

[00:35:41]Every name I find, every time sheet fragment, [music] every convict lease record, every payroll line, I am putting it into a series of books so these men are not forgotten again. Volume 1 is available now. Scan the code on your screen or click the link in the description.