Railroads and the Pacific Railroad Act

A Continent Eight Days Wide

In 1860 a wagon journey from New York to San Francisco took six months. In 1869 the same journey took just over a week. The completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad on 10 May 1869, when the lines of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were joined at Promontory Point, Utah, was the single biggest infrastructure event in the period c1835–c1895. It accelerated everything that came after: settlement, the cattle industry, the destruction of the buffalo, and the slow tightening of federal authority over the West.

The story begins not with engineers but with politicians. In the summer of 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, a Republican Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act. Without Southern senators in the chamber, Congress could finally agree a northern route. The Act chartered two private companies: the Union Pacific to build west from Omaha, Nebraska, and the Central Pacific to build east from Sacramento, California. They would meet somewhere in between.

Government Help: Land Grants and Bonds

No private investor would have built the line on commercial terms alone. The 1862 Act and its 1864 amendment offered two huge subsidies. First, federal bonds at $16,000 per mile of flat track, $32,000 per mile in foothills and $48,000 per mile in mountain country — loans the companies repaid only later. Second, and more important in the long run, land-grant railroads received ten alternating square-mile sections of public land for every mile of track laid, doubled to twenty by the 1864 amendment. The railroads became the largest private landlords in the West, advertising 160-acre and 320-acre plots in newspapers across Europe and shipping the buyers out on their own trains.

The political logic was free-labour Republican: a continental railroad would tie the Pacific coast to a free-labour, free-market North — not to a slave-labour South that, by 1862, was at war with the Union. The economic logic was that land was abundant, cash was scarce, and federal land was a way to pay for infrastructure without raising taxes. The consequence, however, was that for the next three decades the railroads, not Congress, decided who settled where.

Building the Line, 1863–69

The build was a feat of engineering that required two very different labour forces. The Central Pacific, working east from Sacramento, faced the Sierra Nevada almost immediately — granite tunnels, snow-blocked passes and gradients no railway had attempted. To break the rock, the construction boss James Strobridge began hiring Chinese workers in 1865, at Charles Crocker’s suggestion; around 15,000 were at work at the peak. Paid less than white workers and given the most dangerous tunnelling and blasting work, Chinese crews drilled, packed nitroglycerine and dynamite, and lost an unrecorded number of lives. Their work, more than any other single factor, made completion possible.

The Union Pacific, working west across the Plains under chief engineer Grenville Dodge, faced different problems — vast distances, weather and conflict with Indigenous nations whose territory the line crossed. Its workforce was largely Irish, with many Civil War veterans of both armies. At full speed both companies laid 1–10 miles of track a day; on one famous day in April 1869 the Central Pacific laid ten miles in twelve hours to win a bet. On 10 May 1869 a ceremonial golden spike at Promontory Point joined the lines and the telegraph carried the word ‘done’ to a watching nation.

The Network Spreads: 1869–1893

One transcontinental line was only the start. By 1880 the United States had around 93,000 miles of track, much of it new in the West. The Northern Pacific opened its Minnesota-to-Pacific line in 1883. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe pushed across the Southwest, reaching California the same year. The Southern Pacific completed a second southern transcontinental route in 1881. By 1893 four transcontinental lines crossed the country and a dense web of branch lines knitted the Plains and the Far West into the national economy.

Why It Mattered: Linked Consequences

For the cattle industry, the railroad was decisive. In 1867 a young Illinois cattle dealer named Joseph McCoy built stockyards beside the new Kansas Pacific line at Abilene, Kansas. Texas longhorns walked north up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene’s pens; the railroad shipped them east to the Chicago slaughterhouses. By 1885 refrigerated cars carried beef rather than live cattle, lowering the price of meat in eastern cities and turning ranching into big business. For homesteaders, the railroad shipped settlers west and crops east. For miners, it carried gold, silver, copper and ore samples to the assayers and customers; for travellers, it carried mail in days rather than months.

For Indigenous peoples, the consequences were destructive. The line cut hunting grounds in two; the buffalo were hunted to near-extinction by hide hunters such as William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody; reservation policy hardened as the Plains became navigable in days; and federal troops could now be moved to a flashpoint by rail in hours. The railroad was the spine of the West — for the people building the new economy, and against the people who had lived there before.