Transcontinental Railroad Background

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Transcontinental Railroad Background

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"Immigration, Railroads, and the West"

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Open Collections Program

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Harvard University

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Work on the first transcontinental railroad began after President Abraham Lincoln approved the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, a landmark law that authorized the federal government to financially back the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Due to the American Civil War, work was delayed for several years. By 1866, however, the great race was on between the Central Pacific Railroad, which was charged with laying track eastward from Sacramento, and the Union Pacific Railroad, which started laying track westward from Omaha, to see which railroad company could lay the most miles of railroad track before the two railroad lines joined up. Because the federal government subsidized at least $16,000 for each mile of railroad laid as well as generous land grants along the track, each company had a strong financial incentive to lay track as quickly as possible.

The Union Pacific was built primarily by Irish laborers from the Eastern Seaboard who were veterans of the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Although the Irish did not suffer from the same kind of racial discrimination as the Chinese did on the Central Pacific, they were still paid relatively little for hard work in dangerous territory. Irish laborers were killed by Native American war parties, who attacked laborers and construction parties for their efforts to build a railroad that Native Americans believed threatened the continued existence of their culture and violated treaties granted by the US government.

Between 1865 and 1869, the Central Pacific had laid 690 miles of track and the Union Pacific 1,087 miles of track. The meeting of the two railroads and the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, was a major national achievement that could not have occurred without immigrant laborers.

After the first transcontinental railroad was completed, immigrants who entered the US at immigration checkpoints on the Eastern Seaboard such as Ellis Island began using the train system to migrate west. In fact, the railroad companies themselves promoted such plans, because increased population in the west meant more business for railroads. Railroads, then, were the means by which the population of western states increased dramatically due to the creation of new immigrant settlements and the westward migration of native-born Americans.




"Immigration, Railroads, and the West." Open Collections Program: Immigration to the US,. Harvard University, 2014.

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