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but left the school to join the Union Army in 1862. Sharman enlisted in the Thirty-third Iowa infantry under the command of
Colonel Cyrus H. Mackey as part of the American civil war. In August 1865, Sharman was discharged and by the following spring had arrived in Omaha, Nebraska looking for work with the Union Pacific Railroad's (UPRR) civil engineering corps.
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Sharman was born in
Ireland in 1841 to Reverend Henry Sharman. The Sharman's came to the United States in the early 1850s, first settling in Erie, Pennsylvania. In 1853, Sharman's father died and the family relocated to Des Moines, Iowa. Sharman entered Iowa Central College to study civil engineering
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of
Casement Brothers. After this experience, Sharman worked with Gen. Marshall Farnum Hurd (1823-1903) one of the principal construction supervisors working Superintendent Reed. During the civil war, Hurd had commanded what was the equivalent of a combat engineers battalion. Hurd was in charge of
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in 1936. "Trouble
Shooter," told the story of Frank Peace, nominally a (civil) engineer working with (Samuel) Reed but mostly as (Grenville) Dodge's hired gun on the line. As such, Peace was frequently confined to those iniquitous siding towns, of which Sharman knew little. The novel first appeared
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who at that time was building the first 100 miles of UP track west out of Omaha, Nebraska. Sharman had met Hoxie when he was a fifteen-year-old messenger boy in the Iowa House of
Representatives and Hoxie was its Sergeant-at-arms. Sharman then applied to Samuel B. Reed, the superintendent of
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After the Union
Pacific was built to Promontory, Sharman worked with a number of midwest railroads and in 1920, retired to Fayetteville, Arkansas. Sharman's 1929 manuscript of his work on building the Union Pacific railroad provided the source material for
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locating the North Platte river crossing for the UPRR which at that time in 1867 was treacherous to cross at over a thousand feet in width. During this time, Sharman met another civil engineer and future
Nebraska Chief justice, Arthur Northcut Ferguson.
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At one time, Sharman had been assigned as a rodman to Percy Browne's survey party. This didn't last and
Sharman was reassigned again. Brown's party was ambushed and both Brown and Sharman's replacement, Stephen Clarke of New York, were killed.
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After the Union
Pacific was built to Promontory, Sharman worked with a number of midwest railroads and in 1920, retired to Fayetteville, Arkansas. Sharman's journal of his working on the project provided the source material for
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This and other quotations unless otherwise noted are
Sharman's descriptions from a three-part, thirty-eight-page manuscript, dated October 21, 1929, and a letter, dated November 24, 1929.
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construction for the UPRR. Reed hired Sharman to work for Francis M. Case, a division engineer for the road. Sharman's work assignments included
271:(1835-1928). (Civil Engineer - UPRR, 1864–1869) Sharman along with Bissell was assigned to center-line staking for the railroad contractor,
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in serial form in Collier's magazine in 1936 and was the basis of the Cecil B. DeMille motion picture epic Union Pacific, released in 1939.
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who was part of the effort to build the Union Pacific railroad to Promontory Point, Utah in 1869. Sharman was present at the
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Ancestry.com. U.S., Find A Grave Index, 1600s-Current . Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012.
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Haycox Jr, Ernest. "'A very exclusive party'." Montana; The Magazine of Western History 51.1 (2001): 20.
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in 1936. Thus, Sharman's manuscript written by a civil engineer became the basis for the movie,
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This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the
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Engineers of U.P.R.R. at the Laying of Last Rail Promentory
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He then met another senior civil engineer on the project,
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