As the nation expanded westward at a rapid rate in the 1840s, many persons, gripped by the idea of Manifest Destiny or that the European Americans had been endowed by Providence to subdue and populate the continent, called for the linking of the nation east and west via the railroad. Congressional discussions concerning the feasibility of constructing a railroad to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans occurred in the same decade and gained greater acceptance as the United States resolved the boundary dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon Territory, a war with Mexico brewed, and gold was discovered in California.
An odd coalition of individuals built the transcontinental railroad. The working men were Chinese and Irish. Presidents Lincoln and Grant and General Sherman provided leadership. The business, corporate, and engineer magnates formed at times a rogues’ gallery of competing ambitions. In the end, these men accomplished what was considered nigh impossible. Historian Stephen E. Ambrose observed that ‘‘Next to winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery, building the first transcontinental railroad, from Omaha, Nebraska to Sacramento, California, was the greatest achievement of the American people in the nineteenth century.’’24
One of the early key promoters of such a venture was Asa Whitney, a distant relative of Eli Whitney, who became a prominent New York businessman and profited from overseas trade in China. Upon his return from the Orient in 1844, Whitney championed the cause of the intercontinental railroad. Whitney’s idea was to use the intercontinental railroad to link China and Europe; the United States would serve as the middle man and was poised to profit handsomely from such a prospect. In addition, Whitney had as another goal the idea of human improvement. He believed that the intercontinental railroad would join the far flung regions of the nation into one entity, like a family, and would immeasurably strengthen the moral and social fabric of the nation. Finally, Whitney naively believed that the railroad connecting east and west would incorporate the Native Americans into the expanding American nation. Whitney urged congressional leaders to support his proposal and advocated an approach that would finance railroad construction through government grants of sixty-mile strips of land along an approved railroad route. In 1849 Whitney published a booklet that showed his proposed route for the railroad to the Pacific and additional subsidiary lines. Whitney became well-known for his skillful oratory on the matter and was frequently praised by the press. Even leading statesmen of the day such as John C. Calhoun, Stephen A. Douglas, and Jefferson Davis supported Whitney’s proposal. However, the timing was ill-fated. After the nation obtained additional territory from war with Mexico and through negotiation with Great Britain over the Oregon Territory, the sectional crisis erupted in the early 1850s. In 1851 Congress rebuffed Whitney one last time, and he abandoned his effort for the railroad and retired to private life. Although Whitney lived to see the completion of the transcontinental railroad, it was an endeavor not done in accordance with his economic and philanthropic vision but rather through the auspices of federal government in collusion with profit-grabbing entrepreneurs.
During the 1850s the Army Topographic Corps made five surveys of potential routes for the transcontinental railroad. Each of the routes was deemed favorable, but no federal funding was forthcoming because of the heated Congressional debate over sectional issues. After the outbreak of the Civil War, business interests transformed the idea of the transcontinental railroad into a reality. Abraham Lincoln became convinced that such a railroad would have military purposes and also bind the west coast to the rest of the nation. He supported the Railroad Act of 1862, a measure that provided federal government financing for two railroad companies, the Central Pacific with its terminus at Sacramento and the Union Pacific with its terminus at Omaha. The two companies broke ground and began a seven-year race carving out railroad routes toward each other. The federal government provided land and sold bonds to help finance the venture. However, the Central Pacific spent $200,000 in bribes in Washington to obtain nine million acres of land and $24 million in bonds. The railroad owned its own construction company and made an overpayment of $36 million to that entity. The Union Pacific obtained twelve million acres of land and $27 million in bonds. It began the Credit Mobilier Company and overpaid it $50 million. The Union Pacific sold shares cheaply to members of Congress to ensure no investigation on construction practices would take place. Each railroad also charted a course in order to collect subsidies from towns through which they passed. Thus, in the initial phases of the construction, the companies set no eventual meeting place to join the lines.
By 1865 work on the transcontinental railroad began in earnest. The Central Pacific had created enough jobs for 4,000 men, although the back-breaking work and confusing management practices attracted less than 1,000 mostly Irish immigrant workers. At times these laborers grumbled about wages and carried the stereotype of spending their earnings on alcohol, thus reducing productivity. Reluctantly, the leadership of the Central Pacific Railroad employed Chinese workers who had to overcome a distinct anti-Asian bias prevalent in management and their fellow workers. Initially, the Chinese were assigned only the lowest tasks and paid wages lower than the Irish railroad men. The work ethic of the Chinese, however, soon impressed railroad officials and by 1868 12,000 Chinese workers were engaged on the project, more than 80% of the Central Pacific labor force. They were paid about $28 per month, a sum below that of their Irish counterparts. Eventually, some Chinese workers learned more skilled tasks such as masonry. Furthermore, the Chinese diet, frugal lifestyle, and penchant for cleanliness meant they avoided some of the diseases such as dysentery that ravaged the Irish from time to time and as a result had a better attendance record than their fellow laborers. The work of the Union Pacific Railroad began with much jubilation but also soon slowed due to a dearth of workers. Officials appealed to the War Department to employ freed slaves, but the government refused. A federal general also proposed using Native Americans captured during a campaign in 1864, but that idea faded as well. Two years after the groundbreaking, the Union Pacific had only forty miles of track in operation. Fortunately, thousands of discharged Civil War soldiers, joined also by Irishmen trekking west from eastern cities, gained employment on the railroad and the pace of laying down track increased. In early 1869 as the Union Pacific entered Utah it augmented its workforce with a large number of Mormons recruited after a plague of grasshoppers wiped out their crops.
The overall challenge in constructing the transcontinental railroad was daunting, as the companies not only had to subdue a formidable terrain comprising deserts and mountains but also had to contend with the Native Americans. The Indians resorted to violence on several occasions, killing U. S. soldiers and surveyors from the railroad lines who worked ahead of the construction. The Indians at times rustled livestock or sabotaged the rails by ripping them up or blocking the movement of goods. In one instance the Indians derailed a train and killed two crewmen. For the most part, the harassment by Native Americans was infrequent, although word of incidents or sightings of
Indians along the construction route generated fear and concern. Some tribes welcomed the railroad. The Union Pacific permitted Pawnee tribe members to ride its work trains for free. In return, members of the tribe conducted mock raids and battles to entertain dignitaries visiting the construction sites to check progress. In the end, however, the railroad proved to be a disaster for the Native Americans. They once again lost land as the tentacles of the railroad branched out in the later 19th century and squeezed them into federal reservations. The buffalo herds, that vital link in the survival of the Native Americans, nearly disappeared as thousands of sportsmen and hunters traveled west by rail to slaughter the animals. Ironically, it was the railroad that shipped the hides to markets in the east.
The process of putting down track was methodical and required the coordination of several tasks. One group of men directed horse-drawn carts over the newly placed track. Workers on each side of the cart unloaded rails and put them parallel to each other on the embedded ties. Men with gauges stooped down to verify that the rails were the correct distance apart. The next batch of men bolted contiguous rails on each side of the track and were followed by men who dropped spikes on the grade. Finally, workers with hammers placed the spikes and drove them into the ties with three solid taps. By June 1868 work had progressed to the point that the first locomotive arrived at Reno, Nevada on the Central Pacific Railroad. On April 8, 1869 the two railroad lines agreed to meet at Promontory Summit, Utah. They engaged in a contest to see which railroad could lay the most rail line in one day. On April 28, 1869 the workforce of the Central Pacific line surprised even its officials by placing 10 miles of track. After several delays, on May 10, 1869 Engine 119 of the Central Pacific and the Jupiter of the Union Pacific slowly approached each other and nearly touched, signifying the long awaited joining together of the disparate parts of the nation. The nation rejoiced almost instantaneously. Telegraph wires had been placed around the last spike and the sound of a sledgehammer driving it home was transmitted to cannon facing the oceans in San Francisco and New York causing them to fire and announce to the world the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.
The impact of the Transcontinental Railroad was immediate. The next day a train departed from California carrying a cargo of Japanese teas in a testimony to the dream of Asa Whitney that the railroad would link Asia and Europe through the United States. Walt Whitman had published his ‘‘Passage to India’’ a year earlier in anticipation of the railroad’s potential to join East and West. His vision soon faded with the opening of the Suez Canal six months later, joining Europe to India and the Far East without interaction with America. By 1891 only 5% of the transcontinental railroad’s cargo had a destination for Asia, whereas 95% was local. Nonetheless, the railroad changed the United States forever. On May 15th passenger service commenced and carried travelers between San Francisco and New York in one week. Passengers traveling across country in the summer of 1869 paid $150 for a first class ticket. Within a year the cost had dropped to $136, and a third class ticket could be purchased for $65. The railroad lowered the cost of transporting goods, and within a decade the railroad transported more than $50 million in freight coast to coast. It brought the products manufactured in the east to the booming American population beyond the Mississippi River. Mail once transported across country at $2 per ounce cost only pennies within a year of the railroad’s initial operation. The railroad also facilitated a production bonanza in the west as it ensured the mining, agriculture, and ranching industries particularly had a rapid and cost-effective means to ship their raw materials and goods to markets and industrial centers either in the east or west. In addition, the railroad provided a powerful stimulus to American culture. Passengers traveling across the country began to absorb the enormity, diversity, and beauty of the nation’s landscape. Images of the frontier became the subject for writers, painters, and sculptors. Time and distance compressed but the exchange of ideas among citizens expanded. Within a few years a number of railroad lines snaked north and south from the transcontinental railroad and opened up millions of acres of land for settlement. By the end of the century additional lines had been laid parallel to the original railroad thereby weaving a tight transportation network throughout the nation.25
World History
