Transcontinental Railroad Completed
A golden spike was driven at Promontory Summit in Utah on 10 May 1869, joining two railways and connecting the American coasts. The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 had chartered two companies and paid them by the mile in government bonds and in land — twenty square miles of public land for each mile of track, alternating on either side, which eventually amounted to an area larger than Texas. The Union Pacific built west from Omaha across the plains, largely with Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. The Central Pacific built east from Sacramento and had to cross the Sierra Nevada first — fifteen tunnels through granite, worked by hand and black powder, in winters that buried the camps. Some 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese labourers did that work, brought in when the company could not keep white workers, paid less, housed separately, and lowered over cliffs in baskets to set charges. Perhaps a thousand died, and no Chinese worker appears in the photograph taken at the junction. The Plains nations understood what it meant. The line ran through hunting grounds, and the buffalo herds were destroyed within fifteen years partly by hunters the railway carried and partly as policy. The journey from New York to San Francisco fell from six months to about a week. Both companies were involved in fraud on a scale that produced the Crédit Mobilier scandal, in which the Union Pacific's directors paid themselves through a construction company they also owned and distributed shares to congressmen.
- Year: 1869 CE
- Category: Technological
