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Golden Spike History In an age when we can cross the country by air in five hours, it requires imagination to appreciate the historical significance of the first transcontinental railroad. The vast distance to be spanned, equal to the breadth of Europe, overwhelmed the early 19th- century mind. When Dr. Hartwell |
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Carver first proposed the idea in 1832, it was as audacious as would have been a prediction in 1932 (before TV and electronic computers) that we would all watch a human walk on the moon by 1969. Exactly a century before that event, the railroad too, in the words of a contemporary reporter, overcame “that old enemy of mankind,” space.
The transformation of the western United States was wrought by two
rails 4 feet 8 1/2 inches apart, snaking across hundreds of miles of
wilderness. They joined two oceans and cemented the political union
of states with a physical link. But they were also a wedge through
the frontier. The West belonged to the Indians and the enormous herds
of buffalo on which they depended. Many Indians fought white settlement
of their land, but as the railroads brought in car after car of troops
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supplies, the warriors could no longer resist the army. Settlers flowed in behind and put the land to the plow, while millions of buffalo were killed. For these late immigrants, the railroad changed what it meant to be a pioneer. A journey that had taken six-months by ox-drawn wagon took six or seven days by train. | |
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The union Pacific built railroad stations along the way, and settlements grew up around them. Some railways sold supplies and even provided dormitories for emigrants until they could settle. Twenty years after the railroad was completed, the frontier was history. Even before it was completed, the railroad had begun to work its changes on the West. As the railheads moved across the land, supply houses and service businesses grew up in their wakes. Some tent towns like Reno and Cheyenne survived to become respectable cities. Workers who had been trained on the railroad built towns and manned factories and mines. A major anticipated benefit of the railroad (increased trade with the Far East) never materialized. The Suez Canal was completed the same year as that railroad, and Far East goods could now be shipped to Europe faster by way of the canal than across America. But that loss was compensated for by the rapidly growing western rail trade, out of which a vigorous, interlocking economy developed. The western mountains were rich with low-grade silver, lead, and copper ores, made profitable by long trains of ore cars. They were used by industries in the East, whose products found a growing market in the West. Western agriculture made great advances as new farming techniques, livestock strains, and machinery moved in by rail. Cash, generated by the produce |
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shipped east, poured into the region, and budding
western financiers learned how to raise money to capitalize new industry.
Factories were build, and the growing industrial population provided a
new market for western farm produce.More than economically, the railroads tied the West to the eastern states.
They altered |
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schedule who
had always geared their activities to natural rhythms. National politics
came west, as candidates made whistle stop tours of small towns in search
of votes. As railroads made travel into the West safe and comfortable,
visitors from the Eastern states and Europe toured the "New America."
Their sometimes exaggerated accounts of the region engendered the Old
West myths that helped shape American culture. With the coming of the
railroads, the West, for so long the vast, forbidding unknown,
was brought into national life. |
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