You need to get from
New York to San Francisco in a hurry. By train, it will take 7 days and cost
$2,500. Do you go for it?
In 1870, you did. The
transcontinental railroad was completed in May1869, and it revolutionized
travel to the West Coast. A first class ticket cost $136 (about $2,500 today) for
a berth in a Pullman sleeping car—for $65 you could get space on a bench in the
third class coach. I know, don’t even think about it.
Before the railroad was
completed, the best a traveler in a hurry could do was take the Butterfield
Express (later Wells Fargo) overland stagecoach. First, you had to get to St.
Louis, MO, and then the stagecoach offered a spectacularly uncomfortable ride
across the western plains in about three weeks, and sometimes the stage didn’t
make it through. Traveling by boat from the East Coast to the West Coast took
about a month.
Political
shenanigans about the preferred route of the transcontinental line delayed the
construction project until the Civil War began. With southern legislators (who
advocated a “southern” route) out of the picture, the reps from northern states
approved a route from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California. In the
mid-1860s, the national government handed out obscenely large cash grants and
generous land grants to the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad.
There was a lot of corruption, and a lot of worker exploitation, and a lot of
folks got rich as the two companies laid tracks, starting at the endpoints and
ultimately meeting at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.
You know the story
about the golden spike and all the hoorah celebrating the completion of the
rail link across America.
It was a really big
deal that spread a lot of benefits around, although the Native Americans on the
plains and the buffalo herds got the other end of the stick, you know the
story.
p.s. My trusted history consultant tells me that the first “transcontinental” railroad in the
Americas predates the whole Promontory/golden spike extravaganza by more than
14 years. In January 1855, the Panama Rail Road Company completed a 48-mile
line that connected Panama’s east coast/Atlantic Ocean with the west
coast/Pacific Ocean, the same ocean-to-ocean connection achieved by the Central
Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in 1869. Many of the passengers on the
Panama line were prospective gold miners heading to California—they were Johnny-come-latelies
in the 1849 Gold Rush.
Copyright © Richard
Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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