Manifest Destiny - Railroads
Railroads and the West
Railroads were an efficient and quick method of transportation in the East long before a transcontinental railroad was possible. By 1860, more than 30,000 miles of track connected the major cities of the East. Construction of a transcontinental railway was not delayed for lack of vision, however. As early as the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, eastern entrepreneurs longed for a shortcut to Asian markets. In 1844 New York City merchant Asa Whitney even proposed that Congress sell him a strip of land running west from Wisconsin to the Pacific Ocean so that he could construct a railway to provide easy access to the riches of Asia. While Whitney's idea was met with interest, it ultimately failed because Congress could not decide which city should be the starting point for the railroad. For nearly two more decades interest in a transcontinental railroad remained high, but political lobbying between the North and the South over where to begin the line kept the project from being started.
When the Southern states seceded (left the Union) and the Civil War began in 1861, Congress was finally able to pass a bill that provided private corporations with federal land and government money to build the railway. Congress launched the construction of the transcontinental railroad with the passage of the Pacific Railroad Act on July 1, 1862. President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) signed the legislation and decided where the line would start. The railroad would stretch from Sacramento, California, to Omaha on the Missouri River in the Nebraska Territory. With government aid, the California-chartered Central Pacific company would lay the track from the west and the federally chartered Union Pacific company would construct the line from the east. In 1864 a second act was passed to provide more loans and land grants to the railroad effort.
A difficult journey Over the years construction continued haltingly. During the Civil War, workers and materials were hard to secure. In 1863 work began in California. Charles Crocker led the laborers and hired ten thousand Chinese workers to help blast a passage through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Chinese laborers made up four-fifths of the workforce and were paid two-thirds what white laborers were. By 1865 only forty miles of track had been laid westward from Omaha. In Nebraska, General Grenville M. Dodge added ten thousand men, mostly ex-soldiers and recent Irish immigrants. The laborers on both sides of the country suffered miserable conditions while working, sometimes in gale-force winds and snowstorms or hanging in baskets over rock faces. Hundreds died in the effort.
Even with the thousands of workers and hundreds of wagons continuously carrying materials to job sites, Indian attacks frequently delayed production. Indians viewed the railroads as a disaster. As the land was cleared, hunters slaughtered the buffalo on which the Indians depended. The transcontinental railroad split the buffalo country into two "herds" when it reached Cheyenne, Wyoming; the construction of the Kansas Pacific Railroad in 1868, the Santa Fe Railroad through Kansas in 1871, and the Northern Pacific Railroad through the Dakotas in 1880 threatened the Indians' way of life and dependence on the buffalo even further. Of the millions of buffalo found in the West in the previous decade, only 1,091 remained in 1887. Indians were displaced all along the route as land was claimed for the railroads.
The Transcontinental Railroad
The Central Pacific and Union Pacific fiercely competed with each other. By 1868, the Central Pacific was forging across the Nevada desert and the Union Pacific tackled South Pass, laying 5 to 10 miles of track a day. The crews were working so quickly that the graders actually passed each other. Congress finally ruled that the two roads would join at Promontory, Utah. On May 10, 1869, a ceremony celebrated the completion of the project. Officials from both companies and other guests assembled to watch the last spikes driven into the railroad ties: one silver spike from Nevada; one of gold, silver, and iron from Arizona; and two gold ones from California. When the two companies' engines met nose to nose, the telegraph carried the news across the nation, starting a series of celebrations from the East to the West.
Railroad Mania
Passenger service began on the railroad five days after the golden spike was driven. From Omaha, the trip cost $111 for first-class tickets, which included private toilets and sleeping coaches called "Pullmans" and "Silver Palace Cars"; $80 for second-class seats, which were unreserved coach accommodations; and $40 for emigrant-class tickets that bought passengers seats in a car that had hard seats, bunks with straw-filled mattresses, a toilet, and a coal-burning stove. The dining cars were open to all. The scheduled trip took four days, four hours, and forty minutes, unless washouts, buffalo, train robberies, or Indians delayed the train.
The transcontinental railroad started what became a railroad mania that would only begin to lag after four other railroads reached the Pacific coast and the "Great Empire Builder" James J. Hill completed, without federal subsidy, his Great Northern Railroad, the fifth transcontinental railroad, in 1893. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, 3,272 miles of track had been laid west of the Mississippi River, and by 1890, 72,473 miles of track connected major areas of the West.
The railroads dramatically changed the economic viability of the West. The "iron horses" led to the development and economic prosperity of new towns, helping support the success of many farms and industries. Carrying passengers more quickly and in greater comfort than other forms of transportation could, the railroads brought another economic bonus as well: tourism.
