First North American Transcontinental Railroad Completed

This series has six easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: The Old West Before the Railroad.

Introduction
When the United States had acquired California from Mexico, the desirability of a railroad across the continent became apparent at once. And this was emphasized two years later, when a stream of gold-seekers was moving slowly over the mountains and through the desert with ox teams. After a few years the “Pony Express” was established, which carried the mails and a few passengers, and before the era of railways would have been considered an excellent means of rapid transit. While the railways were in process of construction, the route of that famous express grew steadily shorter, till the rails met as described in this chapter, when its day was over. The most urgent need of a railroad was seen when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Partly because of the great cost of transportation, but more from fear that the Pacific States would secede if called upon for troops, the Government omitted them in its requisitions for men. The fear was by no means groundless, since separation or union was the question at issue, and separation appeared so easy for those far-off commonwealths. As a fact, they had no thought of it, and California made liberal contributions of money for raising regiments at the East.

The projection and execution, by four men in San Francisco, of a railroad eastward across the Sierras, for which nearly every pound of iron must be brought round Cape Horn, was one of the most daring achievements ever undertaken in the industrial world. Less than a century before, the bell at Philadelphia had rung out for freedom, and on that exciting spring day in 1869 there was a popular feeling as if a great bell Roland had proclaimed union throughout the land. The only large country in the world that borders on both the great oceans was then bound together with a band of iron— the first of many — realizing the dream of unity of interest and common brotherhood.

This selection is from The Union Pacific Railway by John P. Davis published in 1894. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Time: May 10, 1869
Place: Promontory Summit, Utah

Writers and public speakers of every class have well-nigh exhausted their resources of expression in detailing the attributes of the Pacific-railroad project, its promotion, accomplishment, and effects. Asa Whitney assured his readers in 1845, “You will see that it will change the whole world, allow us to traverse the globe in thirty days, civilize and christianize mankind, and place us in the center of the world, compelling Europe on one side and Asia and Africa on the other to pass through us.” Thomas H. Benton passionately pleaded that the great line “be adorned with its crowning honor, the colossal statue of the great Columbus, whose design it accomplishes, hewn from the granite mass of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, overlooking the road, the mountain itself the pedestal, and the statue a part of the mountain, pointing with outstretched arm to the western horizon, and saying to the flying passenger, “There is the East! There is India!’” The congressional orator has not considered himself justified in addressing his fellow-members (or his constituents) on the subject of a Pacific railway without crowning his effort with a fulsome peroration on the greatness and grandeur of the project. Senator Butler (South Carolina) once complained: “It was said of the Nile that it was a god. I think that this Pacific railroad project comes nearer being the subject of deification than anything else I have ever heard of in the Senate. Everyone is Sumner, greatest scholar of them all, when invited in 1853 to at tend the celebration of Independence Day in Boston, apologized profusely in a letter to the mayor of the city for his inability to attend, and added: “The day itself comes full of quickening suggestions, which can need no prompting from me. And yet, with your permission, I would gladly endeavor to associate at this time one special aspiration with the general gladness. Allow me to propose the following toast: “The railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific—traversing a whole continent and binding together two oceans, this mighty thoroughfare, when completed, will mark an epoch of human progress second only to that of our Declaration of Independence. May the day soon come!’” The favorite rhetorical figure of the Pacific-railway orator was a comparison of his theme with the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and a declaration, not admitting of contradiction, that they “dwindled into insignificance” in the comparison. Senator Rusk (Texas) in a letter to the Philadelphia Railroad Convention, in 1850, referred to the Pacific railway as the “Colossus of Rhodes,” and another dignified Senator, with less originality, afterward referred to it in debate as the “Colossus of Rail-Rhodes.”

Before the building of the Pacific railroad, most of the wide expanse of territory west of the Missouri was terra incognita to the mass of Americans. The interest of Thomas Jefferson in the new national purchase of Louisiana had inspired the “novel and arduous undertaking” of Lewis and Clark in 1804, 1805, and 1806, and the tales of bears, snakes, and buffalo, and descriptions of weird Indian customs compiled in their reports had ex cited the curiosity of many readers. The trappers and fur-traders of the Northwest had brought back from the wilderness, at long intervals, a mass of astonishing information of the fierce savages, strange animals, and peculiar vegetation of Oregon and the mountains. The widely circulated reports of Frémont’s three explorations, and of the dangers and perils of the mountains and the desert West, had made the Pathfinder a hero and a presidential candidate. The Pacific Railroad Surveys from 1853 to 1855 added to the fund of popular information; and as each succeeding volume left the hands of the public printer, with its wealth of illustration and description, the naturally keen Anglo-Saxon appetite for adventure and acquisition was only whetted the sharper. The acquisition of California and Texas served only to heighten the ardor of the people to explore the “Great West.” The discovery of the precious yellow dust in California hung up before the imagination of the “Argonauts of ’49” a golden fleece that stimulated thousands of them to risk the dangers and privations of “prairie-schooner” voyages. And the later discovery of precious metals in Nevada and Colorado, in 1860 and 1861, swelled the ranks of the wealth-seekers. The Mormon rebellion, 1848, and the periodical outbreaks of the western Indians, followed by the Civil War and the impending loss to the Union of the Pacific coast territory, made the Pacific railroad, in the minds of most men, a national military necessity.

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