Officials and workers of the Union Pacific and the
Central Pacific railways met on Promontory Summit, in Utah Territory to drive in the Golden Spike on May 10, 1869. This spike symbolized completion of the first transcontinental railroad, an event which joined the nation from coast to coast and reduced a journey of four or more months to just one week.The Corps of Discovery, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, generated the first maps and reports to describe the topography of the trails and passages which led from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Congress recognized the importance of such topographical studies to westward expansion by organizing a Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1838. In the 1850s the Senate ordered ten thousand copies be printed of topographical reports and surveys called the Pacific Railroad Route Reports, including one by John Charles Frémont, a member of the Corps. It was clear to expansionists such as Senator Thomas Hart Benton (Frémont's father-in-law) that both pioneers and railroaders would rely on such topographical reports to transverse the continent and to accomplish what so many believed was the nation's Manifest Destiny, unity from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores. It also became increasingly clear to Congressional leaders, that in the event of a Civil War between the north and the south, which ever side had the best transportation system and access to the west, would hold a great military advantage.
Among the great topographical studies of the nineteenth century were those completed by the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads. Men such as Granville Dodge and Peter Dey, Chief Engineers for the Union Pacific, and Theodore Judah and Samuel Montegue, Chief Engineers for the Central Pacific, plotted railroad lines which were soon laid across prairie and desert, and blasted straight through mountains. It is a measure of their engineering skills that in the twenty-first century the well traveled east-west motor highway, Interstate 80, follows (often within eyesight) the path charted in the 1860s by engineers of the first transcontinental railway.
The Central Pacific Railroad began constructing eastward from Sacramento, California, and the Union Pacific westward from Omaha, Nebraska. The majority of the track was built by Irish laborers from the East, Chinese who entered the country from the West, veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies, and Mormons who wished to see the railroad pass through Ogden and Salt Lake City. (The Mormon leader Brigham Young became a member of the Board of Directors of the Union Pacific). The men worked for an average of between one and three dollars a day. Between 1865 and 1869 the Union Pacific laid 1,086 miles and the Central Pacific 689 miles of track.
The years immediately following the construction of the transcontinental railroad were years of astounding growth for the United States. Between 1860 and 1890 the miles of railroad track interlacing the U.S. rose from 30,000 to 270,000, and the population leapt from 31,000,000 to over 76,000,000 people, many of whom were recent immigrants.
My folks came to the United States from Sweden in 1866; landed in New York, then came to Omaha. When they got to Omaha they had $5.00 in American money, no job, and couldn't speak a word of English. . . . Then they both got work on the new Union Pacific railroad from Omaha to Laramie City. Father worked on the road and mother cooked and washed for twenty-two men, for nine months; when they got back to Omaha they had $900.00 saved up."Mrs. Will H. Berger"
November 21, 1938.
Interviewer, Edna B Pearson
American Life Histories, 1936-1940
