Grenville Mellen Dodge was born on April 12, 1831, in Danvers, Massachusetts. As a child, Dodge moved around with his family as his father followed several occupations. While an adolescent, Dodge helped a neighbor’s son, Frederick Lander, lay some railroad track, which may have contributed to his decision to learn more about railroading and engineering. Although Lander was 10 years older than Dodge, they both decided to attend Norwich University; Dodge graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering. After graduating in 1851, Dodge moved to Peru, Illinois to join the engineer corps of the Illinois Central Railroad, starting as an axman conducting surveys.
From 1852 to 1854, Dodge worked on several railroads in Illinois and Iowa and was hired by the contracting firm of Farnam & Durant to work on the engineering of the Mississippi and Missouri River Railroad (M&MRR). During this time, Dodge explored the region west of the Missouri River for the M&MRR for potential routes across the Rocky Mountains for a transcontinental railroad. In May 1854, he married Annie Brown of Peru, Illinois and in November 1854 moved his family to Council Bluffs, Iowa. In Council Bluffs, he expanded his businesses, founding the banking house of Baldwin and Dodge, and in 1856 organizing the Council Bluffs Guards, the first step in his impressive military career.
At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the Governor of Iowa requested that Dodge raise a regiment and commissioned Dodge a Colonel on July 6, 1861. Dodge recruited the Fourth Iowa Infantry and the Second Iowa Battery. Within two weeks, he was leading his command against Confederate units in northern Missouri. He was promoted to Brigadier General after the Battle of Pea Ridge in March of 1862 at only 31 years of age. Dodge made valuable use of his railroad civil engineering experience in rebuilding the Mobile and Ohio Railroad in 1862 and the Nashville and Decatur Railroad in 1863. He had a reputation for repairing railroads as “faster than the Confederate raiders could cut them.”
Following additional, successful combat command experience, General Grant made Dodge his intelligence chief for the Western Theater during the Vicksburg Campaign. Although Dodge had numerous command responsibilities, he embraced the intelligence role with vigor and attention to detail seldom seen before. Dodge’s network of more than 100 spies and informants, one of the most effective intelligence networks of the Civil War, allowed the Union forces to score significant successes against the Confederates and to keep the trains moving.
Dodge, promoted to Major General in June 1864, commanded a Corps during William T. Sherman's Atlanta Campaign. Performing well in several capacities, Dodge completed the War as commander of the Department of the Missouri. From early 1865, he led Indian campaigns in the Great Plains. During his campaigns against the Indians, he frequently used his transit scope to monitor the Indians movements, which earned him the Indian name of “long eyes.” In 1865, Thomas Durant approached Dodge to become head of survey for the Union Pacific Railroad, but Dodge was not yet ready to leave the Army.
Dodge resigned from the Army in March 1866, and was given leave on May 1, 1866, and immediately went to work for the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) as Chief Engineer. The resignation was formally accepted on May 30th. He was also elected to Congress for the March 1867 to March 1869 term but spent most of his time working on the railroad and did not seek re-election. By May 9, 1866, the railroad had laid only 40 miles of track, largely due to a shortage of working capital. After Dodge became Chief Engineer in 1866, the Union Pacific laid 242 miles of track in 1867, and 260 miles in 1868.
By early 1869, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads were converging in Utah, but no official juncture location was determined. Between Ogden and Promontory, Utah, each company graded a line, running side by side. C.P. Huntington with the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) had already gained approval from the Secretary of the Interior of the CPRR’s line from Promontory to just north of Ogden, so the CPRR had the bonds and land grants almost to Ogden. Despite this, the UPRR continued constructing their line west of Ogden, hoping that the new Grant administration would overturn the decision by Andrew Johnson’s Secretary of the Interior. When that didn’t happen, Dodge met with the CPRR’s C.P. Huntington in Washington, D.C. to determine the meeting point and to agree on how to compensate the UPRR for their constructed line from Ogden to Promontory.
In 1869, Dodge was appointed head of the UPRR's Land Department while remaining as Chief Engineer. Durant was gone, and a large part of the internal strife that had marked the construction of the railroad vanished. Also in 1869, Dodge’s friend President U.S. Grant offered him the cabinet position of Secretary of War in his presidential administration, but Dodge declined. After the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific at Promontory, Dodge spent a good deal of time bringing the railroad to a higher standard than was achieved in the initial rush of construction. Dodge resigned from the Union Pacific in 1870, though he continued to serve on the board of directors until 1897.
After he left the UPRR, Dodge contributed to the engineering and construction of the Texas and Pacific Railway, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railway, and the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway, and consulted for more than thirty other railroads. After the Spanish-American War, Dodge became a partner in the Cuba Railroad Company and engineered a line from Santa Clara to Santiago. The Cuba Railroad was his last major building project. By then, Dodge had been involved in engineering and constructing more than 60,000 miles of railroads. Throughout his career, Dodge was active in a wide variety of philanthropic, military, and memorial organizations. He willed a portion of his fortune to a charitable trust fund, the Dodge Trust, still worth millions in the present day. Dodge lived out his final years at home in Council Bluffs and died of cancer on January 3, 1916.
Named after Grenville Dodge:
• Fort Dodge and Dodge City, Kansas
• Grenville Dodge Memorial Bridge, Interstate 480 bridge over the Missouri River
• Dodge Hall at Norwich University - The Military College of Vermont
References Grenville M. Dodge Autobiography; 1914.
Short Sketch of the Services of Major General Grenville Mellen Dodge; 1907.
In Memorium – General Grenville Mellen Dodge; Norwich University, 1916.
Major General Grenville M. Dodge 1831 – 1916; Ashby, 1947.
Grenville Dodge and the Union Pacific: A Study of Historical Legends; Farnham, 1965.
Grenville M. Dodge, Grant’s Intelligence Chief in the West; Masters of the Intelligence Art, U.S. Army Intelligence Center, 2011.
