First transcontinental railroad

Built between 1863 and 1869, the first railway across the United States joined the existing eastern network at Council Bluffs, Iowa, to San Francisco Bay, a distance of about 1,911 miles. Two companies, the Central Pacific working east from Sacramento and the Union Pacific working west from Omaha, met at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory on 10 May 1869. Crossing the continent, which had taken months by wagon or ship, now took about a week, reshaping how the American West was settled and how its economy worked.

Proposals for a Pacific railway had circulated since the 1840s, but Congress long deadlocked over the route, as Southern members wanted a southern line. Once the Southern states had seceded, the bill passed, and Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act on 1 July 1862, in the middle of the American Civil War. It created the two companies and promised them government bonds of $16,000 a mile on level ground, $32,000 in the foothills and $48,000 in the mountains. They also received strips of land alongside the track in a checkerboard pattern, which they could sell to settlers or borrow against. A further act followed in 1864.

The Central Pacific was backed by four Sacramento merchants, Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker, later known as the Big Four, who had heard the engineer Theodore Judah present his plan for a line over the Sierra Nevada. The Union Pacific was dominated by the financier Thomas Durant. Weak federal oversight let both groups set up their own construction firms and bill the railways generously, so that they profited from building the line whatever its later earnings.

The Central Pacific broke ground in Sacramento on 8 January 1863. Almost all its rails, locomotives and machinery had to be shipped from the East Coast, around Cape Horn or across Panama. Progress slowed in the mountains, where crews blasted 15 tunnels through granite, sometimes advancing barely a foot a day, and built miles of wooden snow sheds against avalanches. Struggling to keep workers, who often left for the mines, the company began hiring Chinese labourers in 1865, first from California and then directly from Guangdong. They soon made up most of its workforce, doing the heaviest and most dangerous work and earning less than white employees, who mostly held skilled or supervisory posts; a strike in 1867 was followed by a pay rise.

The Union Pacific did not begin laying track until July 1865, delayed by the war and a shortage of money. Its crews, many of them Union and Confederate veterans and Irish immigrants, moved quickly across the open Plains. The line ran through lands held by Native American nations in violation of treaties, and war parties attacked work camps. The railway responded with armed guards and hunters who killed bison, the main food source of many Plains peoples, while the army made protecting construction a priority. In Utah, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built much of the line under contracts with Brigham Young.

On 10 May 1869 the two lines met at Promontory Summit. Leland Stanford drove a ceremonial golden spike, and a one-word telegraph message, "DONE", announced the result to both coasts. The last stretch, linking Sacramento to the bay, opened later that year, with the first through passengers reaching Alameda on 6 September 1869.

Freight and passengers could now cross the country in days at a fraction of the old cost, making farming, ranching and mining in the West profitable and drawing settlers to the land grants. For Native Americans, the railway and the destruction of the bison herds hastened their confinement to reservations. The project's finances also produced the Crédit Mobilier scandal, exposed in 1872, in which Union Pacific insiders were found to have overcharged for construction and handed shares to members of Congress. It became a major issue in the 1872 election, which returned Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency.

Our 1878 map shows the United States spanning the continent in the decade after the railway was completed.