The Transcontinental Railroad and Westward Expansion
...ffalo in the way of the railroad. Then came the construction gangs who, working in shifts, graded (flattened) the land by as much as a hundred miles a stretch. Behind them came the track-laying crews, each consisting of ten thousand men and as many animals. For each mile of track, the government was loaning the railroad from $16,000, for flat land, to $48,000, for mountainous land ("Railroad" 86). The supplies needed to lay a single mile of track included forty train cars to carry four hundred tons of rail and timber, ties, bridgings, fuel, and food, which all had to be assembled in a depot on the Missouri River. But the Union Pacific had the twin advantages of comparatively flat land and a continuous supply line back to the factories of the East coast. It was quite different for the Central Pacific, which had to fetch most of its materials, except timber, by sea, twelve thousand miles around the tip of South America. Another difference between the two companies was their work-forces. The Eastern work gangs were recruited from immigrant Irish, poor Southern whites, and poor Southern blacks, while the Western crews came mostly from China. The Union Pacific was said to be sustained by whisky while the Central Pacific was said to be sustained by tea (Douglas 110). While the Easterners were racing through the prairie, the Westerners were stripping foothill forests, painfully bridging, tunneling, and inching up the mountains. Working summer and winter, it took the Central Pacific two years to hurdle the barrier of the Sierras. A thousand miles back East, the Irish workers frequently fainted in the midsummer heat, but their employers were kept going by the money they would receive from the government upon completion of the transcontinental railroad. With the Westerners over the Sierras, and the Easterners over the Rocky Mountains, the two armies slogged along the sage toward each other. When the two crews came within sight of each other, the Irish turned to their fists to slow down the Chinese. The Chinese resorted to pick axes, which in turn brought the Irish to use their guns. The Chinese finally gave in and the fighting was stopped (Merk 456). On May 10, 1869 the two rails met at a spot in Utah that was named Promontory Point. The crews had laid 1,775 miles of track in just over three years. Five days later, a special Central Pacific train arrived carrying company executives, engineers, and state dignitaries. Three days later, the Union Pacific train came with it's own load of dignitaries, three companies of infantry, and a regimental band. "It promised to be a gallant and decorative ceremony. But in the course of their labor the crew had collected a more colorful assortment of interested parties: saloon keepers, gamblers, whores, money lenders, odd-job rovers. And these, with the cooks and dishwashers from the dormitory trains, made up the welcoming party." (Douglas 121) Five states had sent along gold and silver spikes for the official ceremony. The chosen symbol for the ceremony was a golden spike which was to be driven in by the Governor of California, Leland Stanford. The band stopped playing and a prayer was said. The telegraph operator was connected with San Francisco and New York and was ready to send the first coast-to-coast commentary. It was a single sentence, "Stand by, we have done praying," (Merk 461). Then the Governor of California lifted the sledge hammer above his head and brought it down to meet the rail. He had missed the spike, but the telegraph operator had already sent the message and New York fired a hundred gun salute, Philadelphia rang the Liberty Bell, and a San Francisco paper announced the "annexation of the United States," (Cooke 218). "The country might take to the railroad as a novelty and a tourist fashion, but the companies saw it as a chain of missing links between the Great Plains and the people who would want, or could be urged, to settle it," (Cooke 229). The years 1870-1900 were a period of enormous growth in the United States. During these years, 430 million acres of land were settled, which was more than had been occupied in all preceding American history. A considerable part of this expansion was in the Great Plains ("United States of America" 472). This enormous expansion was the product of a combination of forces. One was the Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act of 1862 was passed by the government to encourage farming in the Mid-West. The government offered any head of family or person over twenty-one, either citizen or alien who wished to become a citizen, a 160 acre section of land. The recipient paid a small fee and agreed to live on the homestead or cultivate it for five years (Merk 236). In addition to the Homestead Act, there was the realization on the part of informed people that the era of well-watered, free land was drawing to a close. A warning had been given in 1880 by the Director of the Census that the era of free land was closing (Horn 130). The swift expansion across the Great Plains was, in part, a rush of American farmers who wanted to take part in free and cheap land in areas that were well watered. A third factor was the sale of land by states at attractive prices. School lands, university lands, and other state lands were put on the market in competition with homesteads. The chief factor, however, in this swift Westward colonization was the railroad companies. All of them were eager to transport settlers to the vast prairie, to get it colonized as a matter of developing traffic. The land-grant railroads had their own areas to sell. But, they also aggressively advertised the free homestead lands of the federal government. The main objective was to build up settlement as a means of creating freight to carry. The prices at which railroad lands were sold varied according to location and soil from five to twenty dollars or more an acre with easy credit terms. Many settlers preferred railroad lands that were favorably located over free homesteads. Railroad companies, especially those possessing land grants, were colonizers of the Great Plains on a large scale. They carried forward on a vast scale the work that had been done on a lesser scale by colonizing companies on the seaboard during the colonial period. The Great Plains were advertised with extraordinary enthusiasm. The Northern Pacific Railroad kept eight hundred agents in various European countries distributing literature and assisting immigrants. Literature was spread in every important European language, especially to areas in which there were droughts or bad soil. Western railroads had agents in New York City to receive immigrants; they offered special immigrant rates to the West, and they gave new arrivals advice on where to settle and about the best methods of farming. The railroad enterprise was one of the most important aspects of the history of the West since the Civil War, and the reason the story is not emphasized more in summary accounts is that the story has so far been told only for individual railroads. "In and all-out campaign to lure settlers, railroad land offices churned out reams of propaganda that painted the prairies and plains as a veritable paradise." (Horn 194) Railroads were not always scrupulous in their colonization methods. They permitted their New York agents to use dubious means of enticing immigrants coming off steamboats to settle on their lands. Some were said to have stolen trainloads of immigrants from each other. High-pressure salesmanship was used in disposing of lands to prospective settlers. Rapturous tales were told about what the land would grow. The climate of the plains was misrepresent...