4 6 crossing the nation by rail

As the United States began to spread westward in the 1800s, a railroad was built that would reach from coast to coast.. 5 The Push for a Transcontinental Railroad The United States was

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Scott Foresman Social Studies

Nonfi ction Sequence • Map

• Sidebar

• Captions

ISBN 0-328-14865-2

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Fascinating Facts

• In the 1820s many of the nation’s railcars were

pulled along their tracks by teams of horses

• The city of Cheyenne, Wyoming, was built by

Union Pacific workers as a place to live while

working in the area

• When trains first became popular, some doctors

warned that riding them at such fast speeds was

not healthy

Scott Foresman Social Studies

Nonfi ction Sequence • Map

• Sidebar

• Captions

ISBN 0-328-14865-2

ì<(sk$m)=beigfd< +^-Ä-U-Ä-U

Fascinating Facts

• In the 1820s many of the nation’s railcars were

pulled along their tracks by teams of horses

• The city of Cheyenne, Wyoming, was built by

Union Pacific workers as a place to live while

working in the area

• When trains first became popular, some doctors

warned that riding them at such fast speeds was

not healthy

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ISBN: 0-328-14865-2

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Vocabulary

transcontinental railroad

transportation engineer gold rush immigrant

Write to It!

Think about what your daily life would have been like if you worked to help build the transcontinental railroad Write a short journal entry describing your day Be sure

to include challenges you face as well as successes

Write your journal entry on a separate sheet

of paper.

As the United States began to spread

westward in the 1800s, a railroad was built

that would reach from coast to coast In this

book you will read about the challenges that

this enormous project faced and how they

were overcome.

Editorial Offices: Glenview, Illinois • Parsippany, New Jersey • New York, New York Sales Offices: Needham, Massachusetts • Duluth, Georgia • Glenview, Illinois Coppell, Texas • Sacramento, California • Mesa, Arizona

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2 3

Roads West!

In May 1869, people all across the United States were celebrating After six years of hard work, the

nation’s first transcontinental railroad was

completed People who wanted to travel across the country could now do so in ten days or less

Today people have many choices about how to travel from coast to coast Many choose to fly because that is the fastest way Others drive their cars, take a bus, or

go by train

For most of the 1800s, however, people had only a few ways to travel to the West They could sail around the tip of South America or to Panama and back up along the Pacific coast, or they could travel across the country

by covered wagon These forms of transportation took

many months They were also expensive and dangerous

When the transcontinental railroad was completed,

an American dream had come true

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Rails in the United States

The history of the railroad in the United States

began in the 1820s The first rail lines were built

across the East Coast because this was where most

large cities were located at the time Even in cities,

however, the horse was still the most common form of

transportation

In 1830 a railcar called the Tom Thumb raced against

a horse-drawn railcar The Tom Thumb was not pulled

by a horse—it had a steam engine The Tom Thumb lost

the race when its engine broke Even so, engineers

were convinced that railroads would soon replace horses

The 1830 contest between the steam-driven Tom Thumb

and a railcar pulled by a horse was a historic race Soon

new railroads would start to replace horses.

5

The Push for a Transcontinental Railroad

The United States was growing and changing in the 1800s After winning a war against Mexico in 1848, the United States gained more land in the Southwest In

1849 thousands of people hurried to California during

the gold rush California became a state the next year

At first, most people thought that the idea of a transcontinental railroad was foolish The United States only had about one thousand miles of railroad tracks in 1835 As the country continued to spread west, so did the rail lines In time many people agreed that a railroad that crossed the nation was a good idea

In 1853 the government sent engineers to study five different possible routes Leaders in Congress argued about which was the best route, but a railroad engineer

in California named Theodore Judah took action

In 1861 Judah convinced four California businesspeople to form the Central Pacific Railroad Known as the “Big Four,” the men who owned this company went to Congress They announced that they were ready to start building the transcontinental railroad

Leland Stanford was one of the

“Big Four.” He was a California businessperson and a state governor.

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The Transcontinental Railroad

In 1862 the government passed the Pacific Railway

Act This gave the Central Pacific the right to lay

tracks eastward from Sacramento, California The

government also created the Union Pacific Railroad

This new company was to lay tracks heading westward

The two lines would meet somewhere along the route

The Central Pacific held a groundbreaking ceremony

in Sacramento in January 1863 Railroad officials made

speeches Workers then dug their shovels into the ground

The building of the transcontinental railroad had begun!

At first progress heading east from Sacramento was

slow Central Pacific workers had built only fifty-five

miles of track by September 1865

7

Laying the Tracks

Engineers chose the route that the railroad would take, and workers cleared the path of trees and stones Workers then built the roadbed, or the surface the railroad would ride on

Once the roadbed was ready, huge groups

of workers laid the tracks First they planted railway crossties, or wooden supports, firmly into the ground They then placed two long iron rails parallel across the crossties Finally they hammered the rails into the crossties with spikes

This postcard shows the first engine to operate on the Central Pacific Railroad out

of Sacramento, California

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Working on the Railroad

At first the Central Pacific had a hard time finding

workers The work was difficult and dangerous

Many laborers wanted more than thirty-five dollars a

month—a lot of money back then By early 1865 only a

few hundred Irish immigrants had been hired by the

Central Pacific

As a solution to this problem, the Central Pacific

hired Chinese immigrants Fifty new workers arrived at

the railroad camps in the summer of 1865 While at first

the other workers did not welcome them, many Chinese

proved to be skilled, hardworking, and courageous

Soon the Central Pacific hired more Chinese

immigrants from San Francisco They also asked

agents in China to send even more workers By the

time the railroad was complete, about ten thousand

Chinese immigrants had done most of the labor

Thousands of workers on the transcontinental railroad were Chinese immigrants.

9

The Sierra Nevada

The Central Pacific crews faced their most difficult job after they left Sacramento They had to lay tracks across the Sierra Nevada, with peaks that loomed thousands of feet high

Working six days a week, crews carved roadbeds out

of steep mountainsides They had to blow up cliffs and cut passages through rock They also dug fifteen tunnels through the mountains Because they had no modern equipment, workers used picks, shovels, axes, animals, wheelbarrows, and gunpowder to do the work

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A Harsh Winter

Central Pacific workers were drilling tunnels near

the top of a mountain pass when the winter of 1866

hit For the next few months, crews braved freezing

temperatures, piles of snow, and dozens of storms One

blizzard lasted for thirteen days!

That winter, workers lived in tunnels underneath the

snow or in shacks on the mountainside Work continued

around the clock, but the crews could only build about

eight inches of track each day

11

During the winter

of 1866–1867, snowslides killed dozens of workers.

Work on the Union Pacific

Progress on the Union Pacific line went even more slowly Omaha, Nebraska, had been chosen as the starting point for the rail lines heading west The Civil War, however, delayed work until 1865

After the war ended, crews of former soldiers, freed African Americans, and European immigrants laid tracks westward across the flat prairie

The Union Pacific’s biggest problem came from American Indians, or Native Americans The railroad tracks ran through American Indian buffalo hunting grounds The American Indians tried to keep the train away by attacking the crews United States soldiers were sent to the Great Plains to guard the crews, and the “iron roads” kept moving westward

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Racing to the Finish

In 1868 the Central Pacific line came down from the

Sierra Nevada Both companies were now on flat land

Workers rushed to complete the most track—and to

earn as much money as possible

There was a problem, however The two railroad

companies had never chosen a meeting point for the

two sets of tracks By the spring of 1869, each company

had cleared roadbeds that did not connect In fact, the

two lines ran past each other, missing by more than one

hundred miles

President Andrew Johnson and Congress forced

officials from the two companies to find a solution

Officials picked a spot where the tracks would join

They chose Promontory, Utah

The crews of each company wanted to reach

Promontory first This race fascinated people all

over the country They eagerly followed the railroad’s

progress, mile by mile, in the newspapers

Omaha

San Francisco Sacramento

C A N A D A

M E X I C O

Union Pacific

Cen tra

N

0 250 500 Miles

0 250 500 Kilometers

13

The End of the Race

The race to the finish made crews from both companies work at top speed Central Pacific workers laid six miles of track in a single day Then Union Pacific crews laid seven miles of track in a single day

On April 28 a Central Pacific crew worked from sunrise until seven o’clock at night It set a record by laying more than ten miles of track Two days later Central Pacific crews reached Promontory and put down their tools They had won the race to the finish

The First Transcontinental Railroad, 1869

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The Big Day

Union Pacific workers reached Promontory one day

after the Central Pacific The railroad was almost

complete In six years the companies had built 1,776

miles of track

A big celebration was planned to mark the event On

May 10, 1869, reporters, workers, and special guests

met at Promontory Only one more spike was needed to

connect the two lines

Leland Stanford, the president of the Central Pacific,

strode up to the rails Using a silver hammer, he swung

at a specially made solid gold spike—and missed Then

Dr Thomas C Durant, head of the Union Pacific, took a

try He missed too!

A few moments later one of the workers hammered

in the last spike The crowd cheered, and the news was

announced: “Done!” Around the country, people celebrated

the event with speeches, parades, and bell ringing

Sometimes large valleys were filled in with dirt to lay the roadbed

of the railroad track

Other times trestles,

or wooden supporting structures, were built

15

A New Era Begins

The transcontinental railroad was finally open for business Many people took the trip across the country

The journey lasted for eight to ten days Passengers could sleep in comfortable built-in beds, eat in the dining cars, and buy candy and magazines

The nation had made its dream of spreading from coast to coast come true A new era now began The railroad opened the West to tourists, travel reporters, and job seekers In later years several railroads

would cross the continent Soon trains would connect communities, large and small, all over the United States

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Glossary

engineer a person who uses scientific and

mathematical ideas to design, make, and run structures and machines

gold rush the sudden movement of many

people to an area where gold has been found

immigrant a person who comes to live in a

new land

transcontinental railroad a railroad that

crosses a continent

transportation the moving of goods, people,

or animals from one place to another