Danger Ahead: Building the Transcontinental RailroadĬhinese laborers at work on construction for the railroad built across the Sierra Nevada Mountains, circa 1870s.Īfter General Grenville Dodge, a hero of the Union Army, took control as chief engineer, the Union Pacific finally began to move westward in May 1866. (Durant would also illegally set up a company called Crédit Mobilier, which guaranteed him and other investors risk-free profits from the railroad’s construction.) Though the Union Pacific celebrated its own launch in early December 1863, little would be completed until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Thomas Durant had illegally achieved a controlling interest in the Union Pacific Railroad Company, giving him complete authority over the project. They borrowed heavily to finance the project, and exploited legal loopholes to get the most possible funds from the government for their planned track construction.ĭisillusioned with his partners, Judah planned to recruit new investors to buy them out, but he caught yellow fever while crossing the Isthmus of Panama on his way east and died in November 1863, soon after the Central Pacific had spiked its first rails to ties in Sacramento. All were ambitious businessmen with no prior experience with railroads, engineering or construction. In the West, the Central Pacific would be dominated by the “Big Four”–Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins.
From the beginning, then, the building of the transcontinental railroad was set up in terms of a competition between the two companies. The two lines of track would meet in the middle (the bill did not designate an exact location) and each company would receive 6,400 acres of land (later doubled to 12,800) and $48,000 in government bonds for every mile of track built. The Pacific Railroad Act stipulated that the Central Pacific Railroad Company would start building in Sacramento and continue east across the Sierra Nevada, while a second company, the Union Pacific Railroad, would build westward from the Missouri River, near the Iowa- Nebraska border. Two Competing Companies: The Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad He then headed to Washington, where he was able to convince congressional leaders as well as President Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Pacific Railroad Act into law the following year. In 1860, a young engineer named Theodore Judah identified the infamous Donner Pass in northern California (where a group of westward emigrants had become trapped in 1846) as an ideal location for constructing a railroad through the formidable Sierra Nevada mountains.īy 1861, Judah had enlisted a group of investors in Sacramento to form the Central Pacific Railroad Company. Lobbying efforts over the next several years failed due to growing sectionalism in Congress, but the idea remained a potent one.
In 1845, the New York entrepreneur Asa Whitney presented a resolution in Congress proposing the federal funding of a railroad that would stretch to the Pacific. After the railroad was completed, the price dropped to $150 dollars. During that same period, the first settlers began to move westward across the United States this trend increased dramatically after the discovery of gold in California in 1848.ĮThe overland journey–across mountains, plains, rivers and deserts–was risky and difficult, and many westward migrants instead chose to travel by sea, taking the six-month route around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, or risking yellow fever and other diseases by crossing the Isthmus of Panama and traveling via ship to San Francisco.ĭid you know? Before the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, it cost nearly $1,000 dollars to travel across the country. By 1850, some 9,000 miles of track had been laid east of the Missouri River. Īmerica’s first steam locomotive made its debut in 1830, and over the next two decades, railroad tracks linked many cities on the East Coast. Building of the Transcontinental Railroad, circa 1869.
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