Eighth Grade Social Studies: The Transcontinental Railroad and the Settlement of the Great Plains
The construction of the first transcontinental railroad and the settlement of the Great Plains revolutionized the geography, economy, and ecology of the North American continent, integrating the Atlantic and Pacific coasts into a unified industrial empire.
The Pacific Railway Act and the Transcontinental Vision
For decades prior to the Civil War, visionaries and entrepreneurs had dreamed of constructing a continuous iron railway stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. However, sectional rivalries between North and South over the eastern terminus had paralyzed Congress throughout the 1850s.
The outbreak of the Civil War broke the political impasse. With southern congressmen absent, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, which President Abraham Lincoln signed into law on July 1, 1862. The legislation chartered two private corporations to construct the railway and telegraph line:
- The Union Pacific Railroad: Authorized to build westward from Omaha, Nebraska, across the open plains of Nebraska and Wyoming.
- The Central Pacific Railroad: Authorized to build eastward from Sacramento, California, through the granite barrier of the Sierra Nevada mountains and across the deserts of Nevada.
To finance this colossal engineering undertaking, the federal government provided unprecedented direct subsidies. The railroad corporations were granted:
1. Public Land Grants: Right-of-way access plus ten (later twenty) alternating square miles of federal public land for every mile of track laid, arranged in a checkerboard pattern along both sides of the tracks. In total, Congress transferred over 130 million acres of public land—an area larger than the state of California—to railroad corporations.
2. Federal Government Bond Subsidies: Direct thirty-year low-interest loans based on topographic difficulty: $16,000 per mile across flat prairie, $32,000 per mile across hilly terrain, and $48,000 per mile through treacherous mountain ranges.
Because profits and land grants were tied directly to track mileage, the two companies entered into an intense, hyper-competitive race to lay the greatest length of track before meeting in the middle.
THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RACE
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| CENTRAL PACIFIC (Eastward) | =====>| UNION PACIFIC (Westward) |
| Origin: Sacramento, CA | | | Origin: Omaha, Nebraska |
| Labor: 12,000+ Chinese men | | | Labor: Irish immigrants, vets |
| Obstacle: Sierra Nevada peaks | | | Obstacle: Plains terrain, |
| Summit Tunnel, granite bluffs | | | Indigenous resistance |
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PROMONTORY SUMMIT, UTAH (MAY 10, 1869)
"Golden Spike" Driven
The Labor Forces: Chinese and Irish Workers
Constructing a railroad through two thousand miles of wilderness required the mobilization of immense armies of manual laborers. Both companies faced desperate labor shortages that were solved by recruiting immigrant workforces.
The Central Pacific and Chinese Laborers
The Central Pacific was directed by the "Big Four" Sacramento merchants: Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. Crocker, in charge of construction, struggled with white laborers who continually abandoned the grueling mountain work to rush to silver strikes in Nevada. Desperate, Crocker suggested hiring Chinese immigrants who had arrived during the Gold Rush. When foremen objected that Chinese men were too small physically for heavy railroad labor, Crocker famously retorted: "Did they not build the Chinese Wall, the biggest piece of masonry in the world?"
Beginning in 1865, the Central Pacific recruited over twelve thousand Chinese laborers, who eventually comprised nearly ninety percent of its total workforce. Chinese workers proved extraordinarily disciplined, industrious, and skilled:
- Dietary and Health Advantages: Unlike white laborers who drank contaminated creek water and ate greasy beef, Chinese workers drank boiled tea and maintained balanced diets of dried fish, vegetables, and rice. Consequently, Chinese work camps were virtually immune to the dysentery and cholera epidemics that crippled white camps.
- Engineering Miracles in Granite: Chinese workers performed the most dangerous tasks in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Lowered over sheer vertical cliffs in wicker baskets along Cape Horn, they hand-drilled blast holes into solid granite, packed them with unstable nitroglycerin, and lit fuses before being hauled up. During the brutal winter of 1866–1867, they lived and worked in tunnels beneath forty-foot snowdrifts, enduring lethal avalanches that swept entire bunkhouses off mountainsides.
- Discrimination and Strikes: Despite their heroic labor, Chinese workers were paid less than white workers ($30 per month versus $35 for whites) and were forced to pay for their own food and lodging, which white workers received free. In June 1867, thousands of Chinese workers organized a peaceful strike in the mountains demanding equal pay and eight-hour workdays. Crocker cut off all food supplies to their camps, starving them back to work after a week.
The Union Pacific and Irish Laborers
The Union Pacific workforce was dominated by thousands of Irish immigrants fleeing famine and poverty, joined by demobilized Union and Confederate Civil War veterans, freed African Americans, and German immigrants. Construction was directed by former Union General Jack Casement and Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge.
Operating with military precision, the Union Pacific functioned like an invading army:
- Track-laying crews developed astonishing mechanical speed, dropping and spiking rails to a rhythmic cadence. On April 28, 1869, in a wager against the Union Pacific, Central Pacific crews laid an astonishing ten miles and fifty-six feet of track in a single day, a world record that has never been broken.
- "Hell on Wheels" Towns: As the tracks advanced westward, temporary, raucous tent cities followed the end-of-track, nicknamed "Hell on Wheels." Filled with saloons, gambling dens, brothels, and dance halls, towns like North Platte, Julesburg, and Cheyenne were notorious for frontier lawlessness, gunfights, and drunkenness before being dismantled and moved fifty miles further west.
The Golden Spike: Promontory Summit (May 10, 1869)
On May 10, 1869, the two railheads finally met at Promontory Summit, Utah, completing the transcontinental link. A ceremonial crowd of several hundred engineers, railroad officials, laborers, and soldiers gathered for the driving of the "Golden Spike."
Leland Stanford swung a silver-plated maul to drive the ceremonial gold spike (inscribed with the words: "May God continue the unity of our Country, as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world"). The maul and the spike were wired directly to the Western Union telegraph system. As Stanford struck the iron tie, the telegraph clicked a single four-letter word across the nation: "D-O-N-E."
Church bells tolled, fire department sirens wailed, and cannons fired across New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. A transcontinental journey that had previously required five to six grueling months in a covered wagon or thousands of dollars on a steamship around Cape Horn could now be completed in a mere six to seven days for less than one hundred dollars. The continent had shrunk.
THE IMPACT OF THE RAILROAD
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| TRAVEL TIME: Reduced from 6 MONTHS by wagon to 6 DAYS by rail |
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| STANDARDIZED TIME ZONES (1883): Established Eastern, Central, |
| Mountain, and Pacific zones to replace chaotic local solar time |
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| ECONOMIC INTEGRATION: Raw materials moving east; manufactured |
| goods moving west; nationwide domestic consumer market created |
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The Settlement of the Great Plains: Sodbusters and Cattle
The completion of the railroad, combined with the Homestead Act of 1862, triggered the rapid transformation of the Great Plains—a vast, semi-arid grassland once dismissed by early explorers like Stephen Long as the "Great American Desert."
Between 1862 and 1900, the federal government granted 160-acre homesteads to hundreds of thousands of independent farmers, known as "Sodbusters." Settlers included native-born eastern farm families, demobilized Civil War soldiers, African American "Exodusters" fleeing southern violence, and massive waves of European immigrants—particularly Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians recruited by railroad companies marketing land in Europe.
Environmental Hardships and Sod Houses
Pioneer life on the Great Plains was characterized by extreme environmental isolation and unforgiving geography:
- Lack of Timber and Sod Houses: The plains were devoid of trees. Lacking lumber to build log cabins, homesteaders cut thick blocks of native prairie grass turf—known as "Nebraska marble"—using them like bricks to construct sod houses ("soddies"). These crude dwellings had dirt floors and turf roofs that dripped mud into food during rainstorms and housed mice, snakes, and bedbugs.
- Water Scarcity and Windmills: Rainfall was unpredictable and scarce. Settlers had to dig wells hundreds of feet into the earth, using newly invented metal windmills that harnessed the constant prairie winds to pump groundwater to the surface.
- Natural Disasters: Farmers endured blistering summer heatwaves, devastating droughts, prairie fires, winter blizzards, and terrifying swarms of grasshoppers (locusts). In the summer of 1874, the "Great Locust Plague" descended in clouds so dense they blotted out the sun, devouring wheat, corn, tree bark, and even sheep's wool.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL ADAPTATIONS OF THE SODBUSTER
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| 1. JOHN DEERE STEEL PLOW (1837): Sliced through tough prairie sod|
| 2. WINDMILLS: Pumped deep groundwater automatically using wind |
| 3. BARBED WIRE (Joseph Glidden, 1874): Fenced treeless plains |
| 4. MECHANICAL REAPERS & DRY FARMING: Cultivated hard red wheat |
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The Barbed Wire Revolution and the Open Range
Settlers faced a major dilemma: without timber or stones, how could they construct fences to protect their crops from roaming herds of cattle? The solution came in 1874 when Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden patented an inexpensive, mass-producible invention: barbed wire.
Consisting of two twisted strands of iron wire holding sharp barbs at regular intervals, barbed wire revolutionized western agriculture. Farmers fenced in their homesteads quickly and cheaply.
However, barbed wire ignited violent conflict with open-range cattle ranchers:
- Following the Civil War, Texas ranchers had driven millions of longhorn cattle northward along trails (such as the Chisholm Trail) to Kansas railheads like Abilene and Dodge City.
- For two decades, the Cattle Kingdom dominated the northern plains, grazing cattle freely on the open public domain.
- When homesteaders strung thousands of miles of barbed wire across public trails and water holes, cattlemen retaliated by cutting fences, sparking the "Fence-Cutting Wars."
- The open range era ended permanently in the catastrophic winter of 1886–1887—known as the "Great Die-Up"—when blizzards and forty-below temperatures trapped millions of cattle against barbed-wire fences, killing up to ninety percent of herds and ending the open-range cattle boom.
The 1890 Census and Turner's Frontier Thesis
By 1890, decades of railroad construction, homesteading, mining, and ranching had permanently transformed the American West. In the official report of the 1890 United States Census, the Superintendent of the Census made a momentous historical declaration:
"Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line."
For the first time in North American history, the continuous physical frontier had officially ceased to exist.
In 1893, at a meeting of the American Historical Association at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a thirty-one-year-old historian from Wisconsin named Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a landmark academic paper titled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."
Turner formulated what became known as the Frontier Thesis:
- Turner argued that the continuous experience of moving westward and conquering a physical frontier was the single most important factor shaping distinctive American democracy and national character.
- The frontier had acted as a "crucible" that melted away European traditions, fostering individualism, egalitarian democracy, inventiveness, self-reliance, and restless energy.
- Crucially, the frontier had served as a vital socioeconomic "safety valve," allowing discontented eastern workers to escape urban misery and acquire cheap land, thereby preventing the violent class warfare that plagued industrial Europe.
Turner asked an ominous question: Now that the continental frontier was closed, where would the nation find new frontiers to preserve its democratic vitality, economic growth, and energetic national character? Turner’s thesis provided a profound intellectual justification for the rise of American overseas imperialism in the late 1890s.
Chapter Exercises
Exercise 1: Describe the provisions of the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, explaining how the federal government subsidized the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads.
Exercise 2: Analyze the vital contributions of Chinese and Irish immigrant laborers in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, noting the specific working conditions and challenges they faced.
Exercise 3: Explain the technological adaptations that allowed "sodbusters" to settle and farm the treeless, semi-arid Great Plains during the late nineteenth century.
Exercise 4: Describe the role of Joseph Glidden's invention of barbed wire in the transformation of the American West, explaining how it contributed to the end of the open-range cattle era.
Exercise 5: Summarize Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis" delivered in 1893, explaining why Turner believed the closing of the frontier reported in the 1890 Census posed a challenge to American democracy.
Solutions and Explanations
Solution 1: The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 chartered the Union Pacific (building west from Omaha) and Central Pacific (building east from Sacramento). To subsidize construction, the federal government granted 10 to 20 square miles of public land in a checkerboard pattern for each mile of track laid (over 130 million acres total) and provided 30-year low-interest loans ranging from $16,000 per mile on flat prairie to $48,000 per mile through mountain ranges.
Solution 2: The Central Pacific employed over 12,000 Chinese immigrants (90% of its workforce), who performed perilous work hand-drilling granite and blasting tunnels with nitroglycerin in the Sierra Nevada, enduring deadly blizzards while facing discriminatory lower wages. The Union Pacific employed thousands of Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, who laid track at military speed across the plains, frequenting rough "Hell on Wheels" tent towns.
Solution 3: Sodbusters adapted to the treeless, dry plains by: cutting native turf to build sod houses ("soddies"); utilizing John Deere's steel plow to cut tough prairie roots; installing wind-powered steel windmills to pump deep groundwater; planting drought-resistant Russian red wheat using dry-farming techniques; and stringing barbed wire to enclose farmland.
Solution 4: Patented in 1874 by Joseph Glidden, barbed wire provided an inexpensive, wood-free fencing material that allowed farmers to protect crops from roaming cattle. This led to conflict with open-range cattlemen, sparking the "Fence-Cutting Wars." Combined with the catastrophic winter of 1886–1887 ("Great Die-Up"), where cattle froze against fence lines, barbed wire ended the open-range era, forcing ranchers into fenced, commercial ranching.
Solution 5: In his 1893 Frontier Thesis, historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier was the defining force shaping American character, fostering democracy, rugged individualism, self-reliance, and social mobility while acting as a "safety valve" against urban unrest. He warned that the 1890 Census finding that the frontier had closed posed an existential question for the nation, suggesting the U.S. would need to look abroad to find new frontiers to maintain its economic and democratic vitality.