By Keli Holt
Cannons and fireworks erupted simultaneously in San Francisco, New York, Halifax, and London on May 10, 1869, as the four-letter word “DONE” was transmitted over the telegraph wires across oceans, mountains, and deserts. The Liberty Bell pealed in Philadelphia, and the largest parade in Chicago’s history commenced, stretching for seven miles. On a desolate promontory in Utah set between mountain ranges, the race between the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads had ended. Humans have “annihilated distance and outran time,” the headlines crowed. The Atlantic and Pacific coasts were connected by one single set of iron track.
It had been about 40 years earlier that the first railroad in history was built, running between the English cities of Manchester and Liverpool. Just four years later, an obscure frontier state legislator, Abraham Lincoln, was already arguing for his state of Illinois to fund a railroad from the Illinois River to Springfield. He had never even set eyes on a train.
Within a few years, the self-educated Lincoln would become one of the premier railroad attorneys in the country, setting precedents other lawyers would cite for generations. Lincoln was one of the first Americans to see how a railroad could connect the expanding country and bring the products of the frontier to markets back east.
Flash forward 30 years, and the election of Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 would help set off the American Civil War. For four long years, the 11 states of the Confederacy fought to preserve their “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery and the right to leave the Union they had willingly joined in 1776. They also sought to abandon the Constitution they had unanimously adopted in 1789. Even amid the brutality of the war in which over 600,000 men perished, Lincoln made time to meet with the men who shared his dream of connecting America.
Nothing like a transcontinental railroad had ever been attempted. The 1,900-mile route from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California would have to cross three mountain ranges – the Rockies, Wasatch and Sierra Nevada – as well as the desert lands of Nevada and Utah, where no water or tree could be found for hundreds of miles.
It would take an army of men with different skills all coming together. The men who for four years had used their brains, gunpowder and sweat to combat one another on the battlefield would turn those same skills to conquering some of the wildest topography in the world.
While most Americans believed the railroad could not be built, almost everyone still wanted the iron tracks to reach the Pacific. Immigrants looking to try their luck in the California gold mines or the Nevada silver ones, farmers trying to reach the Eden of Oregon’s fertile Willamette Valley, and religious migrants flocking to the Mormon holy land in Utah all dreamed of a train. Regardless of why migrants fled west, once there they desperately wanted to hear how their families left behind were doing. Companies like Wells Fargo ran stages criss-crossing America, bearing the gold and silver nuggets of the West Coast mines, alongside personal letters, often more precious than the metals themselves. Any cargo took at least six months to reach its destination.
To cross America before 1869 was dangerous, long and expensive. Travelers had three options: to sail around the treacherous waters of Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America; sail from the East Coast to a transit point in either Panama or Nicaragua, then walk or portage across the narrow isthmus, hoping to avoid the deadly malarial diseases and catch a ship on the Pacific Coast; or take a wagon, pulled by oxen or mule across the entire continent.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, congressmen had argued vociferously over possible transcontinental routes. The future states of the Confederacy naturally favored a southern route, while northern politicians put forward northern alternatives.
In 1862 and 1863, with the Southern lawmakers out of Congress, the Pacific Railroad Acts were passed, creating two joint public-private companies – the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, to begin building across the midsection of the country. Since many politicians were weary of investing too much public money into a project most investors believed was fantastical, Congress thus designed the Railroad Acts as a competition to encourage both companies to see the project through to completion in the shortest amount of time.
Upon inspection, the federal government would pay the Central Pacific, building west from Sacramento, and the Union Pacific, building east from Omaha, by the mile of track laid. To further fund the project, Congress issued public land grants to both corporations. The Civil War had been the largest project ever undertaken by the federal government and the lessons gleaned from preserving the Union were now applied to uniting the country.
Next month we will explore the actual building of the railroads as well as their impact.
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