By Keli Holt,
Days before the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg and its failed Confederate infantry assault known as Pickett’s Charge, President Abe Lincoln made time to meet with the men who shared his dream of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by a Transcontinental Railroad. There were two glaring problems: Nothing like the scale of this project had ever been undertaken, and powerful Native Nations controlled the land through which the train would run.
Few believed it was possible to build a railroad over three enormous mountain ranges – the Sierra Nevada, Wasatch and Rockies. The capitalists who did believe it was possible, men like Leland Stanford and the Ames brothers, helped convince the federal government to create two public-private partnerships.
To spur construction and ostensibly to protect taxpayers’ money, Congress set up a competition between the Central Pacific, building east from Sacramento, and the Union Pacific, building west from Omaha. Many of the initial financiers risked millions of their own money and helped swindle the federal government, contractors and taxpayers out of millions of theirs. Despite obscene levels of graft, the competition spurred both corporations to see the project through to completion.
The engineering challenges were hallowing. The Central Pacific (CP) built 15 tunnels through the Sierra Nevada, utilizing more black powder than on the battlefields of Antietam and Chickamauga. The CP’s labor force of almost entirely Chinese workers scratched tiny holes in the granite into which small portions of explosives were laid. On the steepest inclines, the Chinese laborers dangled from baskets on a pulley system, which would lower them to the desired location. They would then cut a small hole, pour black powder inside, light it and call to colleagues to hastily hoist them to safety. Often, the CP measured its daily progress through the mountains in inches.
During the Sierra Nevada winters, more than half of the workforce was employed in shoveling snow. The CP built 40 miles of snowsheds to completely cover both the tracks and laborers to protect them from the elements. The men worked in shifts 24 hours a day. To keep themselves strong, they banded together and paid to have Chinese food and tea brought up from the thriving Chinatowns of California.
While the CP blasted and clawed its way through the Sierras, the Union Pacific (UP) laid track through what was then called the Great American Desert. These lands between the Mississippi and the Rockies often had no trees or water available for hundreds of miles. All supplies, including massive amounts of water and wood, had to be sailed up the Missouri River and hauled to the end of the line.
While the distance increased costs for the UP, one of its largest expenditures was security since the lands through which the UP passed did not belong to the government. It’s true that Americans had been migrating west since Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase, from Louisiana north to Montana and west to northeastern New Mexico. Even so, by 1863, settlers, traders, and occasional U.S. military outposts remained isolated buoys of American influence surrounded by powerful Native Nations. Tribes like the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho utilized these vast prairies to hunt buffalo, wage war on Native foes, seek peace with allies, and enjoy a lifestyle completely incomprehensible to most Americans.
The Native Nations, however, understood perfectly well what the iron tracks meant: floods of settlers, communicable diseases, hunters, miners and U.S. soldiers moving onto their lands. Many of the Nations fought back, tearing up track, attacking advance parties of surveyors and setting fire to the shantytowns that sprung up at the end of the line.
The UP responded with overwhelming force. For now, troops could be quickly brought up to the track’s terminus. The military technologies and tactics perfected on the Civil War battlefields were now utilized on the Great Plains, resulting in assassinations of tribal leaders, massacres, and the destruction of buffalo and crops.
The railroad did not impact all Native Nations in the same manner, however. Some, like the Pawnee, worked as paid scouts for the UP, adapting their economy to wage labor. Others accepted annuity payments from the federal government, again forcing massive upheavals to their traditional economic and social lifestyles.
In 1869, the UP and CP met at Promontory, Utah, officially cutting the travel time between the coasts from six months to seven days. When the rail project was first undertaken, only dreamers like Lincoln had believed it was possible to unite the necessary resources, capital, and manpower to build 1,776 miles of track through such wild topography. The Transcontinental Railroad was an engineering marvel, and its construction helped unite an America torn apart by Civil War. It also hastened the destruction of the traditional Native cultures that had ruled over the middle of the American continent for centuries.
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