Today in U.S. History: East and West United by Railroad

On this date in 1869, the presidents of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads joined their tracks in Promontory, Utah, with a ceremonial spike.

This event signaled the beginning of transcontinental railroad travel in the United States. No more stagecoaches or wagon trains were needed as West and East united and civilization gradually subdued the last wild places of America.

Leading the enterprise were four principal investors, whose names are prominent in California: Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins.

Eastern and Western businessmen and leaders knew in the 1830s that the country needed to be connected. Not until 1853 did Congress appropriate funds to survey several routes for the transcontinental railroad. The actual construction took even longer because of tensions between the Northern and Southern states.

In 1862, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act. It guaranteed public land grants and loans to the two railroads it chose to build the transcontinental line, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific. With these in hand, the railroads began work in 1866 from Omaha and Sacramento to forge a northern way across the country.

Harsh winters and summers, Indian raids and the lawlessness of western towns made conditions for the Union Pacific laborers miserable. These men were mostly Irish Civil War veterans, while the Central Pacific workers were mostly Chinese immigrants. As they laid tracks over Sierra Nevada Mountains, whole crews were lost to avalanches or to mishaps with explosives.

For all the adversity they suffered, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific workers did finish the railroad--laying nearly 2,000 miles of track--by 1869, ahead of schedule and under budget. Trips that had taken months by wagon train or weeks by boat now took only days.

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