The Great Railroad Revolution (24 page)

British capital played a role in most of the bigger American railroads, and the two companies that built the first transcontinental, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, were no exception. One of the most immediate effects of the secession of the Southern states was the start of construction on the transcontinental, which, remarkably, began even as the conflict was still raging. The building of a line from the Atlantic to the Pacific had been mooted at the very dawn of the railroad age, and despite the physical obstacles and huge distances involved, the dream of uniting the two oceans had become part of the American psyche. The idea of a transcontinental railroad was integral to the very notion of creating a unified nation across
North America. The land was there, but, for the settlers to come, transportation was needed. In the early days, they traveled in wagon—rather than steam—trains, but it was obvious that the creation of substantial communities in the West was dependent on finding a better transportation solution than the horse and cart. Without the railroad, it would be impossible to open up the huge swath of land between the Mississippi and the West Coast.

Several fanciful and impractical ideas for a transcontinental railroad had been put forward as early as the 1810s and 1820s, but the first detailed proposal emerged just as the first locomotives were chugging along the Charleston & Hamburg and Baltimore & Ohio lines. In 1830, William Redfield, later the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, published a paper proposing a railroad from the East to the Mississippi with extensions right through to the Pacific. Redfield's paper was soon forgotten, but the people of Dunkirk, on the shore of Lake Erie in upstate New York, can lay claim to being the first to lobby for the transcontinental line to pass through their town. At a public meeting in January 1832, they passed a resolution in favor of a line connecting the Hudson with Lake Erie, suggesting it would continue on to the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean. Their idea was picked up by Samuel Dexter, the editor of the
Western Emigrant
of Ann Arbor, who wrote in the following month that “it is in our power to build an immense city at the mouth of the Oregon [on the West Coast] by a railroad by which the traveller leaving the city of New York shall, at the moderate rate of ten miles an hour, place himself in a port right on the shores of the Pacific.”
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Interestingly, like Redfield, Dexter opined that the expense of such a massive scheme would be insignificant in relation to the cost of war, though his estimate of $30 million would prove rather optimistic. He also suggested—quixotically perhaps, because his knowledge of weather patterns was limited—that one reason to build the line would be to facilitate the export of furs to India. But then, to be fair, the notion of a three-thousand-mile transcontinental railroad at a time when there were barely a few dozen miles of line in the whole country could be conceived only by those with a fervent imagination.

Various enthusiasts began to pick up on the idea. There was, for example, John Plumbe, a Welsh engineer who had moved to the United States in
the 1820s and in 1836 began to examine possible routes for the line from his home in Wisconsin, then still a territory rather than a state. Rather presciently, Plumbe, best remembered as a pioneer of photographic techniques, argued that a transcontinental railroad “would hasten the formation of dense settlements throughout the whole extent of the road, advance the sales of the public lands, afford increased facilities to the agricultural, commercial and mining interests of the country . . . and enable the government to transport troops and munitions of war.” Yet when Plumbe petitioned Congress for the idea in 1938, one congressman reckoned it was as silly as asking “to build a railroad to the moon.”
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Poor Plumbe spent much of the 1840s trying unsuccessfully to convince politicians, national and local, of his idea, but returned a broken man to the Midwest in 1857, where he soon committed suicide at the age of forty-seven.

The most serious and effective early proselytizer for the scheme was Asa Whitney, an eccentric self-made merchant whose resemblance to Napoléon Bonaparte was apparently so marked that strangers would often stare at him in amazement. He spent many years and much of his fortune trying, unsuccessfully, to convince Congress to sanction the idea of a railroad across America. More practical and thorough than Plumbe, Whitney conceived of his plan for a transcontinental on a lengthy sea voyage in 1843, as he returned to the United States from China, where he had made his fortune. It was the apparently interminable nature of his journey across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans—for this was the era before the construction of the Suez Canal—that attracted Whitney to the idea of a transcontinental. He believed the railroad would become the corridor of exchange between Europe and Asia, placing America at the center of the world's trade routes. Whitney was also an idealist who, like many early railroad promoters, saw the project as an opportunity for human improvement. As he told Congress, it would bring the dispersed population of the United States “together as one family, with but one interest—the general good of all.” In 1845, after presenting the plan in Washington, he toured the country with a group of enthusiastic young acolytes, extolling the virtues of the project and exploring a rail route that went west from Milwaukee, Wisconsin—which would, indeed, be chosen by one of the later transcontinentals. Whitney became a popular speaker and a darling of the newspapers. He returned several times
to Congress, where he put forward a plan to build the railroad himself in return for a grant of a corridor of land sixty miles wide from Lake Michigan to the Pacific. By selling off parcels of land as the railroad was built, Whitney optimistically believed that it would be self-financing.

Largely thanks to the idealistic enthusiasm of men such as Plumbe and Whitney, a series of railroad conventions was held in various cities across the country to explore the project and lobby for particular routes. There was, of course, one major obstacle to the building of the transcontinental about which little was said—the Native Americans, or Indians, as they were then known. As Dee Brown notes, “During the lively debates over all these various routes, no mention was ever made of the native Americans, the Indians who had lived for centuries on the lands into which the Iron Horses must intrude.”
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Uniquely among early supporters of the transcontinental, Whitney did at least give some consideration to the issue. It was not, though, that he had any more regard for Native American rights than the politicians who did not even trouble to mention them. Not at all. He was simply keen to ensure that their land titles would be extinguished and that they would be forced to settle permanently like white men or move far away from the iron road. It was not the presence of Native Americans that killed off Whitney's idea but the politics of the North-South divide. Southern legislators had no truck with talk of a route in the Far North, running along the southern shores of the Great Lakes and then west from Milwaukee, while the Northerners could not accept the idea of the line going through the South. Whitney, who even went to England in 1851 to try to raise financing for the project, gave up, and the transcontinental scheme disappeared into the government machine. It was not totally inactive, though. The Army Corps of Engineers produced surveys for five possible routes from the Missouri River to California that covered everything from geology to flora and fauna. They provide a remarkable and beautiful compendium of the virgin West before the arrival of the iron horse, but proved to be of little practical value, as the Southern interests blocked any move toward legislating for the line. The transcontinental was thus put on hold until the secessionists left Congress to the Northern interests they so despised.

Whitney, Plumbe, and various other early dreamers, however, had not wasted their time. They had established the idea of the transcontinental as a
topic of popular debate and ensured the concept took hold in the public mind. When the Southern states seceded from the Union in 1861, Lincoln, himself a true railroad visionary, wasted little time in indicating that a bill to build the line was now likely to be blessed with favorable passage through Congress, given the absence of the troublesome Southerners. The strongest lobbying now came from the West in the shape of another visionary, Theodore Judah, who has the best claim to be called the father of the transcontinental. Judah, for whom the epithet
fanatic
might have been devised, had been the engineer on the first California railroad, the Sacramento Valley Railroad, a twenty-one-mile line completed in 1852. He was convinced that it was possible to build a railroad through the Sierra Nevada, even though they appeared to be an insuperable barrier when viewed from the valleys below. He had the talents of both engineer and lobbyist, and he spent several years shuttling between the West, where he surveyed the potential route, and the East, where he labored tirelessly to convince politicians of the need for the transcontinental railroad.

As the bill was being prepared in 1862, he was back in Washington as the official representative of the Pacific Railroad Convention. Remarkably, despite the fact that there was a war going on, with battles breaking out at times within earshot of Washington, both houses of Congress found time to debate the bill in great detail. It was no walkover, but the result was not in doubt, provided the various potentially hostile interests—principally states that might be bypassed and rival railroads—could be appeased. Ultimately, the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 passed through both houses with ease and gave the concession for the construction of the line to two companies, the Central Pacific, which was to start building eastward from Sacramento, California, and the Union Pacific, which would begin at Council Bluffs, Iowa—a confusing nomenclature since it was the
Union
Pacific that started in the center of America. One simple statistic illustrates the scope of the project: the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific would become the biggest two corporations in the country. This also helps to explain the sheer, almost unbelievable, scale of corruption and graft that would accompany the construction of the first transcontinental.

The act completely ignored the interests of the Native Americans. Indeed, it was worse than that. The act clearly contradicted previous efforts to
protect their territory. The 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie between the US government and seven Plains Indian nations recognized that the Cheyenne and Arapaho held a vast territory between the Rockies and western Kansas, including what is now southeastern Wyoming, southwestern Nebraska, eastern Colorado, and the far-western part of Kansas. The deal gave the Indians the right to clearly defined territories in exchange for stopping their attacks on settlers headed west on the Oregon Trail, while the US government offered money to the signatories of the treaty and pledged to deter US citizens from entering Native American territory. Clearly, building a railroad right through Native American territory was a breach of this pledge and ended any meaningful attempt to pay heed to their rights.

In contrast, for the railroad builders, the terms of the initial act were not ungenerous, but when they were improved upon two years later, they offered an astonishing level of federal funding, given that the war effort was taxing government resources to the limit. The companies benefited from two forms of state aid: for every mile of line they completed in the plains, they would receive $16,000 in government bonds, double that in the more difficult terrain of the Nebraska prairies or the Sacramento Valley, and triple the amount, $48,000 per mile, in the mountains. In total, that represented a potential loan of $60 million to the companies, but there was also a generous land grant ultimately representing a total of more than thirty-one thousand square miles, equivalent to an area the size of South Carolina. This was to be distributed on the basis of ten square miles per mile of track in strips alternating on either side of the right of way—which itself was a substantial four hundred feet wide. The meeting point of the two railroads was not specified, giving both companies an incentive to lay track over as many miles as quickly as possible.

Certain restrictions, placing obligations on the companies, were imposed by the federal government. Most notably, no government funding was available until the companies had each raised millions of dollars and built forty miles of track. However, much of the legislation was poorly worded, and details of the precise requirements, such as the sums required and the repayment terms of the loans, were unclear. The two railroad companies, for whom the term
rapacious
is an understatement, would take every opportunity to exploit these loopholes. Each company had been given
two years to build the first fifty miles, but thereafter only fifty miles per year were required, which suggested the near two-thousand-mile railroad could have taken two decades to build. In the event, it was completed far more quickly, thanks to the financial incentives and the competition between the two companies.

The act was signed into law by Lincoln on July 1, 1862, and tradition— but perhaps not historical accuracy—has it that Judah, who had continued his lobbying as a clerk to the bill committee, sent a telegram to his Central Pacific colleagues back in Sacramento saying, “We have drawn the elephant. Now let us see if we can harness him up.” It was not the only crucial piece of legislation passed that year that would help bring about the transcontinental. The Homestead Act, which enabled settlers to claim land that they had farmed and developed for five years—a kind of legal guarantee to squatters—encouraged the migration westward that would be essential in making the new line viable.

Having secured the passage of the act, Judah headed back west by boat with large amounts of equipment, as none was available in California; virtually everything had to be imported via a railroad that crossed the Isthmus of Panama or by sea around Cape Horn. The war was far away, and there was nothing to prevent work from starting on the line. For Judah, it was a moment to savor, a triumphant outcome to an exhausting two years spent first surveying the Sierra Nevada in search of a route for the transcontinental and then canvassing support for the new railroad. To force through a railroad against the myriad of obstacles generally requires an element of obsession, bordering on fanaticism, a common characteristic of railroad pioneers both in America and elsewhere. Judah had worked on various engineering projects in the East when he traveled west to be the engineer of the first railroad in California, the 21-mile Sacramento–Folsom line. The railroad was a financial failure, as the gold mines it was designed to serve soon became exhausted, but that did not stop Judah from exploring the possibility of a line farther eastward through the mountains. He had tried to get a bill for a Pacific railroad through Congress but, having failed, managed to persuade the California legislature to permit the construction of a line from Sacramento to the state line with Nevada, 115 miles away. Ostensibly, it was to serve the recently discovered silver mines of Nevada, but, in fact, Judah's eyes were always on a line right through to the East.