After Promontory: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Transcontinental Railroading

By Robert D. Krebs, H. Roger Grant, Peter A. Hansen and 4 more

“Some of the most accomplished scholars of railroad history…tell the story of these enterprises which totally re-shaped the western landscape.”—The Michigan Railfan

After Promontory profiles the history and heritage behind the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. Starting with the original Union Pacific—Central Pacific lines that met at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, the book expands the narrative by considering all of the transcontinental routes in the United States and examining their impact on building this great nation.
 
Exquisitely illustrated with full color photographs, After Promontory divides the western United States into three regions—central, southern, and northern—and offers a deep look at the transcontinental routes of each one. Included are contributions by such renowned railroad historians as Maury Klein, Keith Bryant, Don Hofsommer, H. Roger Grant, and Rob Krebs.
 
Includes photos

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253039637

Book preview

Introduction

H. Roger Grant

With the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, which doubled the size of the United States, President Thomas Jefferson hailed what he called an Empire for Liberty. His assessment was correct, but his belief that it would take hundreds of years before this region would be settled was mistaken. After all, Jefferson was ignorant about most of this landmass. And even more territorial expansion was yet to come: annexation of Texas in 1845, acquisition of the Oregon Country in 1846—and two years later, a third of the Republic of Mexico, which included the future states of Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Stars and Stripes flew proudly from sea to sea.

Texas Fever! Oregon Fever! California Fever! All had great power over the American psyche.

During the antebellum years, Americans looked forward to creating dependable arteries of transportation throughout the trans-Mississippi West. Initially they focused on improving land routes and waterways, hoping that stagecoaches and steamboats could serve much of this vast region. The former offered greater possibilities than the latter, but most roads were little more than animal and Indian trails.

At an amazingly early date, however, a few visionaries proposed exceptionally long railroads that could shatter the tyranny of distance. This occurred at the dawn of the railway age, when the steam locomotive and other aspects of railroading were still experimental. A prominent pioneering advocate was William Redfield, a New Yorker who earlier had worked successfully with steamboats and had served as the first president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1829 he wrote a widely disseminated pamphlet, which he revised the following year: A Sketch of the Geographical Route of a Great Railway by Which It is Proposed to Connect the Canals and Navigable Waters of New-York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and the Adjacent States and Territories. His 48-page work—just a little longer than its title—focused on reaching the Mississippi River Valley from the Eastern seaboard, but he went so far as to suggest advancing the iron horse to the Pacific Ocean. A few years after the Redfield publication, railroad enthusiasts from the Deep South and the Ohio River Valley gathered in Knoxville, Tennessee, to hammer out details for construction of the more-than-700-mile Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston Rail Road. This monster undertaking would connect the cities in its corporate name and would provide a direct route between the nation’s midsection and the Atlantic Ocean. But by the early 1840s, only about ten percent of this heavily promoted carrier had been built, and the project then fizzled.

During the 1840s and 1850s, additional schemes were hatched to create either long-distance or full-blown transcontinental arteries. The Philadelphia, Fort Wayne & Platte Valley Air Line proposal, for example, won scant attention. More significantly, Asa Whitney, a merchant who had traveled widely overseas, began in the 1840s his quest for a Pacific railway, proposing rails from Lake Michigan to the Oregon Country. Whitney considered such a massive undertaking to be technologically practical and a way to revolutionize world commerce, especially to tap the riches of China and the Far East. He also saw it as the best way to unite America. Whitney did more than anyone of his time to seek a Pacific railroad, and he attracted considerable attention. Public enthusiasm for such projects grew, and an increasing number of citizens no longer considered such advocates to be lunatic thinkers or obsessed dreamers. The realization grew that animal-powered conveyances and those on water were impractical for long distances, with the former limited in capacity and the latter in scope.

ANDREW J. RUSSELL

Tunnel no. 3, Weber Canon, Utah, 1870 Union Pacific Railroad California State Library 1470581

Utah’s Weber Canyon was the last major obstacle before Union Pacific reached the Salt Lake Valley. Completed in April 1869, Tunnel No. 3 was dug largely by Mormon contractors, whose isolation in Zion would soon come to an end.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan Ye Gardner caught in the act. [Gardner at work in his tent], 1867-1869, Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley, BANC PIC 1957.027:005-ffALB VAULT

At mid-century, the federal government began to show interest in rail links to the Pacific. Although Congress would not pass the Pacific Railroad Act until 1862, twelve years earlier it had awarded a huge land grant to the Illinois Central and Mobile & Ohio railroads, designed to unite America’s midsection with the Gulf of Mexico, or what some called the wrong-way transcontinental. Significantly, the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers undertook surveys for east-west transcontinentals. The resulting 1853 studies found five parallel routes that rationally dissected the West. That same year, the U.S. government negotiated with Mexico for acquisition of a strip of territory, located south of the Gila River in the southern part of present-day New Mexico and Arizona. At a cost of $10 million, the Gadsden Purchase provided a low-grade route for a Southern railroad to deep water, something that pleased slave-holding states.

In the 1850s, the decade before the outbreak of the Civil War, the rivalry between the slave states and free states grew irreparably worse. The spread of the peculiar institution had been a burning issue for decades, the subject of numerous compromises intended to maintain a balance in Congress. The controversy became particularly acute, however, following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. This measure provided for popular sovereignty on slavery—allowing white male residents to decide by ballot whether or not to allow slavery in their territories.

To protect their interests, Southerners, including Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, agitated for a transcontinental railroad that stretched westward to California from Memphis or perhaps New Orleans or possibly St. Louis. Northerners, on the other hand, wanted to build west from Chicago, roughly along what became the Overland Route of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, with several connecting lines between UP’s eastern terminus at Omaha and Chicago. By 1853, Chicago showed signs of emerging as that future railroad mecca—the hub of the universe—having been connected to the East in 1852 with the arrival of the Michigan Southern and Michigan Central railroads. Soon the Chicago & Rock Island and the Galena & Chicago Union railroads headed toward the Mississippi River, with the former reaching its eastern bank in 1854. It was expected that these Prairie State carriers would connect with gestating lines in Iowa and continue into the Free West.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan Sand Dunes, Carson Sink, 1867 J. Paul Getty Museum 84.XM.484.42

Many Americans assumed that there would be only one transcontinental, so it was impossible for North and South to compromise on its route. The railroad would drive growth, and growth would drive the size of congressional delegations. The issue wasn’t resolved until the Civil War, with the departure of Southerners from Congress. The Pacific Railroad Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln on July 1, 1862, advanced the building of the first transcontinental railroad. Similar legislation would aid in the construction of other transcontinentals, and by the time the nineteenth century ended, every route surveyed by the Army in the 1850s had become reality. Much of this construction coincided with a burst of new lines that occurred during the 1880s, when more than 70,000 miles were added to the national rail network. Additional direct or indirect transcontinental connections came during the early years of the twentieth century.

The transcontinental railroads, including the Union Pacific–Central Pacific and those that came after them, produced powerful benefits. They brought a multitude of farmers, ranchers, miners, lumbermen, soldiers, businessmen, and professionals to the West; naturalists, scientists, and vacationers followed in their wake. And, too, hoboes and tramps hopped side-door Pullmans or rode the rods. In the process of agricultural and industrial development, countless Americans gained employment. Railroads that built ahead of settlement were essential for making largely unpopulated and underpopulated regions of the nation mature over time. Simply put: the transcontinentals helped to win the West.

William Henry Holmes U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories (Hayden Survey), Sheet No. 5. Landscape view. Point of Rocks station and railroad tracks are labeled in center. Wyoming, 1878, Union Pacific Railroad, U.S. Geological Survey 8.30E+03

Surveys weren’t as glamorous as locomotives or as colorful as gangs of tracklayers, but they were the indispensible foundation for all that followed. The U.S. Army in the 1850s surveyed five potential routes for a Pacific railroad; all were found feasible, and all eventually had transcontinental lines. Surveys continued after construction, too: railroads had changed the landscape, as this U.S. Geological Survey from 1878 demonstrates.

Even if someone never traveled over a transcontinental line, that person likely encountered the grandeur of such a journey. During the age of railways, the rapidly perfecting art of photography allowed armchair travelers opportunities to see the Western half of America. Scenes of the vast West, most of all soaring mountains, opined a pleased observer early in the twentieth century, create a sense of national pride and personal optimism.

Years before the Union Pacific–Central Pacific route opened, completion of lines across the Appalachian Mountains inspired pioneer photographers. In 1858 the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad sponsored a promotional tour through present-day West Virginia, becoming the first domestic carrier to publicize its route by means of the visual arts. More photography followed. During the immediate post–Civil War years, Andrew Joseph Russell documented the building of the Union Pacific westward from the Missouri River. With completion of this greatest engineering feat of the nineteenth century, Russell’s popular work, The Great West Illustrated, was published to rave reviews, and it adorned countless parlor-room tables.

Western railroads continued to employ photographers to capture on-line scenes, even after construction. Not only would such images entice permanent settlers, commercial developers, and others, they might inspire Americans to see new parts of their country. The list of railroad photographers in the Gilded Age and afterward reads like a Who’s Who of the profession: William Henry Jackson, Alfred A. Hart, Alexander Gardner, Charles R. Savage, F. Jay Haynes, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, and Henry Bennett, among others.

Many more photographers appeared. One outlet for their creative work became stereoscopic scenes, helping to fuel a craze of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Europeans, especially those from the British Isles, likewise found Western photographs fascinating. They cast a mystical spell, remarked an English woman in 1880.

Artists and illustrators also found inspiring scenery along these great transcontinental thoroughfares. Their subjects might be rolling prairies, towering mountains, or cascading waterfalls. As with photographers, their visuals graced public timetables, travel and promotional guides, stock and bond certificates, newspaper and magazine advertisements, and the walls of city ticket offices and depot waiting rooms.

Even the less muscular railroads, transcontinental or not, used the works of photographers and artists. The Colorado Midland Railway is a good example. This standard-gauge short line, which stretched nearly 300 miles across the spine of the Rocky Mountains between its Colorado terminals of Colorado Springs and Grand Junction, used promotional prints and drawings of its awe-inspiring Hagerman Pass to adorn waiting rooms, not only in its own depots, but in similar venues throughout the Midwest. Although the Colorado Midland shut down in 1921, Hagerman Pass photographs often remained; several county-seat depots along the main line of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy in Iowa and Nebraska continued to display Hagerman Pass images until the 1960s. Citizens might have their own wall hangings. They might own the colored works of lithographers Nathaniel Currier and James Ives or some lesser-known commercial producers. Passenger trains in scenic settings were the most popular subjects.

It is understandable that over the decades, various individuals and organizations have collected and preserved a plethora of visual images that transcontinental railroads made possible. And the photographic record of Western railroads has continued into the present. In the 1920s and 1930s, railroad enthusiasts launched a number of organizations. While members enjoyed taking excursions and collecting railroad ephemera, they nearly always took or collected photographs. Although the majority of enthusiasts featured locomotives, there were those who relished taking photographs of freight and passenger trains throughout the West. Particularly popular were images of trains in Colorado’s Royal Gorge, the Cascade Mountains of Washington state, and the Sierra Nevada in California. At times this photography exuded real excitement, perhaps capturing a snow-bound train or a work-train with a monster rotary plow pushing through seemingly impossible drifts.

Photography continues to be a part of transcontinental railroading. Although the passenger network in the West shrank dramatically by the 1960s, Amtrak travelers can still capture on their cameras, smartphones, and video devices wonderful visual memories resembling those made by previous generations. Commercial photographers and artists also remain active, maybe taking a train to Glacier National Park, the Grand Canyon, or some other awe-inspiring location.

More recently, photographers have sought to show the railroad in the broader contexts of geography, geology, ethnicity, and the larger built (or oftentimes abandoned) environment. Such images need not include trains at all, yet they say much about the West the railroads found, the West they helped create, and the West that evolved.

In the pages that follow, you’ll see the work of the best of these photographers, both past and present. You’ll also read thoughtful essays from eminent scholars of transcontinental railroading, reflecting on what these past 150 years have meant. Significantly, each of them have focused on different aspects of the Western railroading experience:

•  Maury Klein discusses the pioneering nature of the first transcontinental—how it captured the public imagination, unified the country, and gave birth to one of the nation’s biggest scandals;

•  Keith Bryant writes about the Southern transcontinentals, including the rise of Texas and Southern California;

•  Don Hofsommer focuses on the Northern lines, and on the ways in which cities and the hinterlands created each other, with all of their fortunes linked to the railroads.

We’ll conclude with an essay by photographer Drake Hokanson, who offers reflections on the artistry of the men who photographed the first transcontinental railroad, and the impact they had on those who followed. Hokanson, Richard Koenig, and Mark Ruwedel are three such modern photographers, traversing the same ground as Russell, Hart, and the others in order to record the route today. All of them combine historical and geographical research with an archaeological approach to their photographs.

Taken as a whole, the photographs and the essays in this book ask the same fundamental question: 150 years after Promontory, what kind of a West did the railroads make? Like most historical questions, the answers are complex and sometimes elusive; the reward is in the asking.

Alfred A. Hart Stereograph #340, Indian viewing R.R. from top of Palisades, 435 miles from Sacramento, circa 1865-1868 (detail) Central Pacific Railroad Library of Congress LC-DIG-stereo-2s00629

What the First Transcontinental Railroad Wrought

{ Maury Klein }

What the First Transcontinental Railroad Wrought

Maury Klein

Every age creates a symbol that seeks to capture the essence of its character for later generations. For Medieval Europe it was the great cathedrals; for the twentieth century the automobile and the computer; and for our own times the internet. Like the medieval era itself, the cathedrals were stationary in nature. All the other symbols conveyed movement, triumphs over time and distance. The nineteenth century found its most potent symbol in the locomotive, a machine that fueled the loftiest visions of the nation’s personal and national destinies. For a people addicted to the idea of progress, the locomotive heralded the first great conquest of space and distance. Its raw power enchanted starry-eyed dreamers and hard-nosed businessmen alike. Daniel Webster proclaimed in 1847 that the railroad towers above all other inventions of this or the preceding age. Walt Whitman celebrated this coming new force in his Passage to India, only a year before the golden spike ceremony at Promontory:

I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad,

surmounting every barrier;

I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte,

carrying freight and passengers;

I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring,

and the shrill steam-whistle;

I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest

scenery in the world.

If there is one event that reflected the changing world of the nineteenth century for Americans, it was the driving of the golden spike, signifying completion of the first transcontinental railroad. Nothing else captured the public imagination so fully or maintained its hold so completely on later generations. It continues to occupy a prominent place in our pantheon of national myths, one that represents the finest of American achievements. It offered the possibility of traveling from one coast to the other in a mere week or so. Even more enticing, it opened a doorway to the Pacific and to the Far East, with its storehouse of goods and wealth that had tantalized ambitious imaginations going back to Marco Polo. Indeed, on the other side of the world another great project, the Suez Canal, would open for traffic later in that same year of 1869.

As historian Albro Martin observed, The original transcontinental had a dramatically different purpose from any of the railroad ventures up to that time. It was undertaken by the people as a national enterprise. … It had been impossible for most people to imagine an American republic occupying the entire continent from ocean to ocean before the coming of the steam railroad. Was it any easier to imagine, even if one or more railroads were built over trackless wastes, for thousands of miles, through the great American desert which, as far as anyone then knew, would never be worth a single buffalo chip?

Not everyone viewed the locomotive and the golden spike as benign symbols. Some saw them as engines of destruction—metaphors for the price of industrial progress—and wondered about the cost, financial and otherwise. Others charged the road and its officers with venality, incompetence, and corrupt political influence. However, far more people believed fervently that the presence of the railroad made the cost worthwhile. We are the youngest of the peoples, but we are teaching the world how to march forward, blared the New York Herald. Corruption there had been, and plenty of it, the paper charged, but even so it considered the road cheap to us at a cost of five hundred millions of dollars. Commercially it places the United States in contact with Asia; internally it will make North America sparkle with cities; politically, as a national binding force, it is invaluable.

ANDREW J. RUSSELL

East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail, 1869 Central Pacific Railroad Union Pacific Railroad Oakland Museum of California H69.459.2030

Drake Hokanson UP mainline, Argenta Point, Nevada, 2013 Union Pacific Railroad

By the time Central Pacific track crews reached this point in late 1868, they were hardened, efficient, and building quickly eastward toward the meeting of the rails at Promontory. Across much of northern Nevada, the railroad follows the Humboldt River, avoiding several mountain ranges. Today’s Union Pacific Railroad sees busy intermodal and manifest freight traffic here, plus Amtrak’s daily California Zephyr.

As the first transcontinental railroad celebrates the 150th anniversary of its completion, it is oddly reassuring to know that controversy still surrounds nearly every aspect of it. To some it continues to be the accomplishment of the century, to others a boondoggle, if not outright fraud. Among those who shared the latter view were the Adams brothers, Charles Francis and Henry. The most recent, and in many ways the most sophisticated, critic of the transcontinental roads is Richard White in his widely acclaimed 2011 book, Railroaded.

The question, wrote White, is not whether transcontinentals eventually proved to be a good idea; it is whether they were a good idea in the mid and late nineteenth century. He argues that too many of them were built, often in the wrong places, at a time when they were not needed. While many of their builders profited handsomely, they created inefficient, costly, dysfunctional corporations. … They built railroads that would have been better left unbuilt, and flooded markets with wheat, silver, cattle, and coal for which there was little or no need. They set in motion a train of catastrophes for which society paid the price. They often squandered large amounts of capital and labor for no good end. Many of the investments would have been better made in other sectors of the economy. By the 1890s their legacy consisted of Western railroads that were bloated, ill-managed, heavily indebted, and corrupt.

As for the entrepreneurs who presided over the construction and operation of these roads, White views them as venal, self-serving, narrow-minded, corrupt, and corrupting, the most unattractive and uninteresting men of their generation. Railroad entrepreneurs were innovators, he concedes, but they "usually succeeded at the expense of the firm. … The innovations entrepreneurs brought to the railroads—financial mechanisms, pricing innovations, and