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THE STORY OF THE FIRST AMERICAN TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD AN EDUCATIONAL TOOLKIT PROVIDED BY THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD MUSEUM

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Page 1: THE STORY OF THE FIRST AMERICAN TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD€¦ · THE STORY OF THE FIRST AMERICAN TRANSCONTINENTAL ... for telling the story of the first American transcontinental

THE STORY OF THE FIRST AMERICAN TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD

AN EDUCATIONAL TOOLKITPROVIDED BY THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD MUSEUM

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ABOUT THIS TOOLKITThis resource, developed by the Union Pacific Railroad Museum, is a comprehensive guide for telling the story of the first American transcontinental railroad. In addition to bringing to life this important achievement in American history, this kit allows students to examine firsthand historical resources, including:

• A foldout poster, depicting the most iconic photograph from the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Andrew J. Russell’s “East Meets West.” Rendered from the only remaining print made before the glass plate negative cracked, this photograph is part of the Union Pacific Railroad Collection, housed at the Union Pacific Railroad Museum.

• 10 stereo card reproductions, from the Union Pacific

Railroad collection, documenting the construction of the first transcontinental railroad. These cards, originally produced between 1866 and 1869, bring the past to life in 3-D, capturing the adventure and excitement of building the transcontinental railroad.

• Plastic stereo card viewer. To experience the 3-D effect, fold down the nose piece on the plastic lenses and place it firmly against the bridge of your nose. Holding a card in one hand, move it toward and away from your eyes until the image focuses into one, 3-D picture.

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Student Reading

Grades 4-6Fraser, Mary Ann. Ten Mile Day and the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad. New York: H. Holt, 1996. Print.

Halpern, Monica. Railroad Fever: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, 1830-1870. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Children’s Books, 2004. Print.

Perritano, John. The Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Children’s Press, 2010. Print.

Yin, and Chris K. Soentpiet. Coolies. New York: Puffin, 2003. Print.

Olson, Nathan. The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad. Mankato, MN: Capstone, 2007. Print.

Blumberg, Rhoda. Full Steam Ahead: The Race to Build a Transcontinental Railroad. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1996. Print.

Grades 5-8Gregory, Kristiana. The Great Railroad Race: the Diary of Libby West. New York: Scholastic, 2003. Print.

Durbin, William. The Journal of Sean Sullivan, A Transcontinental Railroad Worker. New York: Scholastic Inc., 1999. Print.

Houghton, Gillian. The Transcontinental Railroad: A Primary Source History of America’s First Coast-to-Coast Railroad. New York: Rosen Central, 2002. Print.

Barter, James. A Worker on the Transcontinental Railroad. San Diego, CA: Lucent, 2003. Print.

BUILDING AMERICA The completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869, has had an enduring impact on the growth of the United States. Traveling from the East to Pacific Coast, previously a dangerous trip with many hardships that took as long as six months, was reduced to just seven days’ time. Water stops marked the route every 25 miles – the distance a steam locomotive could travel before needing to refill. And each station held the opportunity for a new community to grow, for immigrant families to settle and for commerce to flourish.

Today, nearly everything that American families and businesses depend on is carried on trains – raw materials such as lumber and steel to construct homes and buildings; chemicals to fight fires and improve gas mileage; coal that generates more than half of our country’s electricity needs; produce and grain for America’s food supply; and even finished goods such as automobiles and TVs. After 150 years, Union Pacific now serves a global economy and more than 7,300 communities across 23 states.

National Standards for History

Grades 3-4 5A.1 & 8.B. 4 & 6 www.nchs.ucla.edu/Standards/standards-for-grades-k-4 National Center for History in SchoolsGrades 5-12 Era 4 Expansion and Reform (1801-1861). 4A.2.1-3, 4E.1 & 4 www.nchs.ucla.edu/Standards/us-history-content-standards National Center for History in Schools

Additional Resources Klein, Maury, Union Pacific: Birth of a Railroad 1862-1893, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & CO., Inc, 1987.

www.uprrmuseum.org The Union Pacific Railroad Museum official website. For more in-depth information and activities.

www.up.com Union Pacific’s official website.

www.nps.gov/gosp The Golden Spike National Historic Monument.

www.ourdocuments.gov U.S. National Archives. For printer-friendly version of the 1862 Pacific Railway Act.

memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/rrhtml/rrhome.html Railroad map collection.

www.cprr.org Central Pacific Railroad Museum. For resources and discussions about the construction of the transcontinental railroad.

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THE STORYOpening the West, Land of OpportunityDiscovery of gold in California not only created a market for transcontinental traffic, it also significantly changed the American public’s attitude. The West was no longer considered a wasteland; instead it was seen as the land of opportunity. People began traveling and settling beyond the Mississippi River, in territories that stretched to the Pacific Coast.

In 1853, Congress passed an act providing for the survey of possible railroad lines from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. At least five routes were explored, but unfortunately, an increasing rift between the Northern and the Southern states rendered agreement on a route impossible.

In 1859, Abraham Lincoln traveled to Council Bluffs, Iowa, to inspect land in his possession. While there, he was introduced to Grenville Dodge, a young railroad engineer, who was completing surveys west of the Missouri River for the M&M Railroad (Rock Island Railroad). As they talked, Lincoln became more and more convinced that the route proposed by Dodge, beginning in Council Bluffs and following the Platte River Valley through Nebraska, was the best path west for the transcontinental railroad.

As part of the Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864, both the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were given alternating sections of land to sell along the transcontinental route to fund part of the construction. The white squares are government land reserved for homesteaders under the Homestead Act (1862). Colored squares designate land that Union Pacific owned or sold.

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Recruiting Laborers in Race to Construct the RouteCentral Pacific broke ground in Sacramento, Calif., in January 1863. Union Pacific began construction at the Missouri River in Omaha, Neb., in December 1863. Competition swelled between the railroads’ construction crews as they raced to finish first.

In 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad faced a severe labor shortage. Many of the men hired to build the railroad worked only as far as the gold mines and then went their own way. Continuously looking to grow its forces, the Central Pacific hired Chinese workers against the wishes of many crews and supervisors, but when the first group proved to be efficient and hardworking they reversed their opinions. In fact, the Chinese crews were largely responsible for Central Pacific forging through the Sierra Nevadas.

Nearly two years after breaking ground, Union Pacific track crews had only reached the outskirts of Omaha. Not until the end of the Civil War in 1865 were there finally enough laborers to make significant progress. The Union Pacific workforce, largely made up of Irish Americans, was supplemented by organized and disciplined veterans from the Civil War, including railroad engineer Grenville Dodge, now a military general, who joined the effort in 1866.

As the two companies approached Utah’s Great Salt Lake during the spring of 1869, there was no consensus as to exactly where the railroads should meet. On April 8, 1869, Union Pacific’s Grenville Dodge and Central Pacific’s Collis P. Huntington convened in Washington D.C. and with the Treaty of Hooper’s House agreed the meeting point would be at Promontory Summit, Utah.

Telegram from General Grenville Dodge to Union Pacific President Oliver Ames Date: May 9, 1869. Union Pacific and Central Pacific reached Promontory Summit on May 9, 1869. General Dodge, chief engineer for Union Pacific, notified his boss, President Oliver Ames via telegraph that the crews were finished. Not coincidentally, The Pacific Railway Act required telegraph wires to be built alongside the transcontinental railroad’s track, allowing the historic announcement to be sent from Promontory, Utah, to New York City.

Pacific Railway Act Signed, Construction BeginsIn 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the 16th President of the United States. Almost immediately his election caused the longstanding rift between the North and the South to intensify, and very shortly thereafter, the Southern states followed South Carolina into secession. The American Civil War had begun. With the Southern states no longer participating in the discussion, the disagreement over the transcontinental railroad routes ended. Both the Senate and House of Representatives were able to pass the Pacific Railway Act of 1862. President Lincoln signed the act into law on July 1, 1862, creating the Union Pacific Railroad Company. Under his direction, construction of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad began with Union Pacific building west and the already established Central Pacific Railraod building east.

Charters awarded to the railroads gave them territory to build on, the use of available stone and timber, and alternating 10-square miles of land on both sides of the track to sell for construction funds. This land grant was increased by the 1864 Pacific Railway Act to 20-square miles of land. The act also awarded both railroads money for each mile of track completed; however, these funds were loans to be repaid.

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Union Pacific and Central Pacific Meet, Uniting the NationAt noon on May 10, 1869, the “golden spike” ceremony began with approximately 600 people in attendance. Positioned nose to nose at the end of the last rail were the Central Pacific’s Jupiter locomotive and the Union Pacific’s No. 119. A bottle of champagne was broken over the laurel tie, while a telegraph went out across the nation with the simple message: “Done.” The transcontinental railroad was complete.

At that instant, in Promontory Summit, Utah, coast-to-coast travel time was reduced from four to six months to only seven days, having an instrumental impact on the growth and development of the United States. The seven years of physically demanding and dangerous work, to which many laborers lost their lives, led to the uniting of the nation. Union Pacific had built 1,086 miles of railroad lines from Omaha, Neb., conquering the Rocky Mountains, and Central Pacific had built 690 miles from Sacramento, Calif., prevailing through the rugged Sierra Nevadas.

The transcontinental railroad was started in the midst of a war that divided America, but its completion marked a connection between the East and West coasts that defined the United States as a single nation.

3-D Images Market RailroadThe construction of the transcontinental railroad required financial backers, and the finished railroad would need customers. Both Union Pacific and Central Pacific leaders realized that photography could be a vital tool to entice settlers and investors. Scenes from the Great West soon became a favorite fixture in most 19th century parlors. The most popular form of parlor photography were stereo cards printed with dual images that when viewed through a special viewer, would create a single 3-D picture.

In 1864, Central Pacific hired Alfred A. Hart to photograph the building of its railroad over the imposing Sierra Nevadas in California and beyond. Union Pacific Vice President Thomas Durant commissioned Andrew J. Russell to photograph Union Pacific’s 1868 crossing of the Continental Divide. Hart and Russell produced an unprecedented pictorial record of one of the world’s most extraordinary construction projects; a work that brought sweeping social change at a pace never seen before in history.

Map of the completed transcontinental route showing the land grants for both railroads. Date: circa 1870

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200 Pearl Street • Council Bluffs, IA 51503 • Open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Free Admission • (712) 329-8307 • www.uprrmuseum.org

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Alfred A. Hart, Scene near Summit tunnel, eastern slope of Western Summit, 1866

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Alfred A. Hart, Scene at Truckee, [Calif.], 154 miles from Sacramento, 1868

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Alfred A. Hart, Shoshone Indians looking at Locomotives on Desert, 1868

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Alfred A. Hart, Curving Iron, Ten Mile Canyon, [Nevada], circa 1868

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Andrew J. Russell, Dale Creek Bridge from the South, 1868

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Andrew J. Russell, Laying Track, [Wyo.], 1868

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Andrew J. Russell, Before Laying of the Last rail, Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869

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Andrew J. Russell, Snow sheds looking west from Summit, 1869

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Andrew J. Russell, Telegraph Corps, Weber Canyon, 1869

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Andrew J. Russell, Sacramento River, 1869