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Great Iron Trail The story of the first transcontinental railroad Robert Howard
The Great Iron Trail The story of the first transcontinental railroad by Robert Howard Dust Jacket 1967 376 pages indexed
THE GREAT IRON TRAIL brilliantly recounts how the blood, sweat, tears and dollars of the dreamers, explorers, inventors, iron men, graders and financiers combined to build America's first transcontinental railroad.
Only a century ago, the United States consisted of two littoral encampments on the East and West coasts.
HE GREAT IRON TRAIL brilliantly recounts how the blood, sweat, tears and dollars of the dreamers, explorers, inventors, iron men, graders and financiers combined to build America's first transcontinental railroad.
Only a century ago, the United States consisted of two littoral encampments on the East and West coasts.
The perilous sailing trip around Cape Horn took from four to six months; the plague-ridden shortcut across the Panama Isthmus required five weeks; on the trails crossing the 2,000 miles of "The Great American Desert," stagecoaches and prairie schooners faced a deadly gamut of Indian attacks, starvation, fevers and blizzards.
As early as the 1830s, a few visionaries had pursued the dream that a new invention would enable a rapid overland Northwest Passage to join East and West and provide for a thriving and lasting union. But in 1836-when Ted Judah, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Thomas Durant, Bret Harte, were youngsters at the pioneer railway center of Albany and Troy, N. Y.-there were only one hundred miles of railway track and ten primitive locomotives in all the U. S. A.
Through the 1840s and 1850s, the railroad grew from "an engineer's toy" to a young giant. Chicago, as a railroad center, challenged St. Louis for the trade of the West. Locomotives chuffed restlessly on the banks of the Mississippi while politicians of the North and South fought over whether the first transcontinental railroad would follow a "slavery" or an "abolitionist" route.
The momentous task of conquering a continent began on July 2, 1862, when, in the face of successive defeats of the Union's armies, Abraham Lincoln signed The Pacific Railway Act. During the next seven years shrewd manipulators, improvising geniuses and nameless heroes laid the tracks, foot by painful foot, from the eastern and western terminals.
Construction of the 2,000 miles of high-iron between Omaha and Sacramento was marked by the fetid breath of Credit Mobilier scandals and The Associates' ruthless drive to economic power. The railhead towns of North Platte, Julesberg, Cheyenne, Laramie, became "the worst hell-holes on earth"; gamblers, cutthroats and ladies of easy virtue organized their "Hell-on-Wheels" for the Irish, German and "Galvanized Yankee" track gangs. The Cheyenne, Sioux and other northern tribes loosed bloody vendettas against the Iron Horse. Chinese coolies blasted a way over the mighty Sierras of California, and Utah's Mormons performed miracles of construction through canyon and desert, sustained by "nightly song and prayer."
On May 10, 1869, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific locomotives, "facing on a single track, half a world behind each back," touched cowcatchers at Promontory Point, Utah.
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