First Transcontinental Railroad (North America)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The First Transcontinental Railroad in North America was finished in 1869. Since 1859 the most westerly railroad from the Atlantic coast reached Omaha, Nebraska. To connect it with the Pacific coast the Central Pacific Railroad was built from Sacramento, California eastward and the Union Pacific Railroad from Omaha westward, until they met.
For accuracy it should be noted that this was not the first railroad to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific; that honor goes to the Panama Railway, a 48 mile long line across Panama, completed in 1855.
It was considered by many to be the greatest technological feat of the 19th century. It served as a vital link for trade, commerce and travel that joined the eastern and western halves of the late-19th century United States. The establishment of this transcontinental railroad would quickly end the romantic, yet far slower and more dangerous Pony Express and stagecoach lines. In addition, the march of "Manifest Destiny" and the establishment of the so-called "Iron Horse" across Native American land would greatly accelerate the demise of great plains Indian culture.
History
Although Theodore Judah is considered to be the father of the First Transcontinental Railroad, Asa Whitney made what some consider the first concerted attempt to get the government to seriously consider such a project. He was not the first or only man of his time to conceive of a railroad running across the frontier from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast, but he was the first to lead a team of eight men in June 1845 along the proposed route in order to assay available resources, such as stone and wood; to see how many bridges, cuts and tunnels might be necessary; and to determine how much land would support farming. Additionally, Whitney traveled widely to solicit support from businessmen and politicians, printed maps and pamphlets, and submitted several carefully considered proposals to Congress, and he did all this at his own expense. Unfortunately for Whitney, politics, opportunists, and the war with Mexico obstructed all his best efforts over a period of six years.
Theodore Judah was perhaps no more committed than Whitney, but he had advantages and opportunities that Whitney never got. He became the chief engineer for the newly-formed Sacremento Valley Railroad in 1852, surveyed the route for the road, and oversaw its construction. The job was an especially juicy plum to Judah, because he was convinced that, from Sacramento, a rail line could be laid over the Sierra Nevada mountains, and he wanted to be the engineer to do it.
Interest payments bankrupted the Sacramento Valley Railroad, though, so Judah had to find another way to build his road. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1856, hoping to learn how to lobby Congress for his project. To that end, he wrote a 13,000 word proposal in support of a Pacific railroad, had it printed, and distributed it to Congress, department heads, and other influential persons, all at his own expense.
Judah was chosen to be the accredited lobbyist for the Pacific Railroad Convention, first assembled in San Francisco in September 1859. Although factional bickering threatened to derail the Convention proceedings, Judah rallied them to adopt his plan to survey, finance, and engineer the road. Judah returned to Washington in December 1859, where he was given an office in the capitol building, an audience with President Buchanan, and represented the Convention before Congress. Iowa Representative Samuel Curtis introduced a bill in February 1860, which called for finances and land grants to support the Pacific road, but it was not passed by the House until December that year, and came to nothing when it could not be reconciled with rival bills.
Judah returned to California in 1860, and split his time between raising enough money to live, and crossing and re-crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains in search of a pass suitable for a railroad, convinced that if he found it, no one could deny the worth of his project. That summer, a local miner, Daniel Strong, had surveyed a route over the Sierras for a wagon road, a route he realized would also suit a railroad. He described his discovery in a letter to Judah, and together they formed an association to solicit subscriptions from local merchants and businessmen to support their paper railroad.
Collis Huntington, a prosperous Sacramento hardware merchant, heard Theodore Judah lecture at the St. Charles Hotel in November 1860, and invited Judah to his office to hear his proposal in detail. Huntington was savvy enough to realize the importance of a transcontinental railroad to business. He also knew that selling subscriptions door to door was no way to raise money for such a grand enterprise, so he found four partners to invest $1500 each and form a board of directors: Mark Hopkins, his business partner; James Bailey, a jeweler; Leland Stanford, a grocer, and future governor of California; and Charles Crocker, a dry-goods merchant.
From January or February 1861 until July, Judah, Strong, and a party of ten surveyed the route for the railroad over the Sierra Nevada, through Clipper Gap, Emmigrant Gap, through Donner Pass, and down to Truckee. While he charted the road's line, Leland Stanford met with President Lincoln in Washington, and a special congressional session was convened, where the Pacific Railway bill was re-introduced by Rep. Curtis. Congress was more concerned with issues surround the Civil War, however, and the bill was not passed until the next session.
Judah traveled to Washington in October 1861 to lobby for the Pacific Railroad bill with Aaron Sargent, once a newspaper editor and one of Judah's strongest supporters, now a freshman Congressman assigned to the House Pacific Railroad Committee. Judah was named the committee's clerk. While they help push the Pacific Railroad bill through committee, Standford and Crocker traveled to Nevada to secure a franchise from the Nevada legislature to build the Central Pacific through the territory.
The Pacific Railroad bill pass the House of Representatives on 6 May 1862, and the Senate on 20 June. Lincoln signed it into law on 1 July 1862. The act called for several companies to build the railroad: from the west, the Central Pacific and the Nevada Central; and from the east, the newly chartered Union Pacific. Each was required to build only 50 miles in the first year; after that, only 50 more miles were required each year. Besides land grants along the right-of-way, each railroad was subsidized $16,000 for each mile built over an easy grade, $32,000 in the high plains, and $48,000 for each mile in the mountains. The race was on to see which road could build the furthest.
Six months later, on January 8th, 1863 in Sacramento, California, Governor Leland Stanford ceremoniously broke ground to begin construction of the Central Pacific Railroad. The Central Pacific made great progress along the Sacramento Valley, however construction was later slowed; first by the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, then by the mountains themselves and most importantly by winter snow storms. As a result, the Central Pacific expanded its efforts to hire immigrant laborers (many of which were Chinese). The immigrants seemed to be more willing to tolerate the horrible conditions, and progress continued. Unfortunately, the increasing necessity for tunneling then began to slow progess of the line yet again. To combat this, Central Pacific began to use the newly-invented and very unstable nitroglycerin explosives -- which accelerated both the rate of construction and the mortality of the laborers. Appalled by the losses, the Central Pacific began to use less volatile explosives. Construction began again in earnest.
In the East, the progress started in Omaha by the Union Pacific Railroad, proceeded very quickly due to the featureless terrain of the Great Plains. However, they too would soon become subject to slowdowns as they entered Indian-held lands. The Native Americans living there saw the addition of the rail-line as a violation of their treaties with the United States. War parties began to raid the moving labor camps that followed the progress of the line. Union Pacific responded by increasing security and by hiring marksmen to kill buffalo -- which were both a physical threat to trains, and were the primary food on the Plains Indians. The Native Americans then began killing laborers when they realized that the so-called "Iron Horse" threatened their very existence as a culture. Security measures were further strengthened, and progress on the rail-line continued.
Six years after ground-breaking, laborers of the Central Pacific Railroad from the west and the Union Pacific Railroad from the east, met at Promontory Summit, Utah. It was here on May 10, 1869, that Stanford drove the gold spike that symbolized the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in North America. As soon as the ceremonial spike had been replaced by an ordinary iron spike, a telegraph message was transmitted to both east and west coasts that simply read, "Done". The country erupted in celebration upon receipt of this message (which was the first coast-to-coast broadcast of a media event in the United States). Now travel from coast to coast was reduced from four or more months to just one week.
Between 1865 and 1869 the Union Pacific laid 1,086 miles and the Central Pacific 689 miles of track. The years immediately following the construction of the railway were years of astounding growth for the United States.
Laborers
The majority of the track was built by Irish laborers from the East, Chinese who entered the country from the West, veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies, and Mormons who wished to see the railroad pass through Ogden and Salt Lake City, Utah. The men worked for an average of between one and three dollars a day.
Mostly Irish worked for the Union Pacific and mostly Chinese worked for the Central Pacific even though at first they were thought to be too weak/fragile to do this type of work.
Current passenger service
Amtrak runs a daily service from Emeryville, California to Chicago, Illinois along this railroad. The trip takes some more than 2 days.
In the north of the U.S.A., Amtrak runs a service on another transcontinental railroad, in the south on two more.
Sources
Empire Express, David Haward Bain
Nothing Like It In The World, Stephen E. Ambrose
External link