How Did Trains And Railroads Change Life In America Research Paper

The Transcontinental Railroad | Article

The Bear upon of the Transcontinental Railroad

American Heritage Middle, University of Wyoming

On May x, 1869, as the last fasten was driven in the Utah desert, the blows were heard across the country. Telegraph wires wrapped around spike and sledgehammer transmitted the impact instantaneously east and west. In San Francisco and New York, wires had been connected to cannons facing outward across the ocean. When the betoken from the spike came through, the cannons fired. The world was put on notice: the transcontinental railroad was completed and America was moving to the forefront of the earth'due south phase.

The Earth Grew Smaller
1 twenty-four hour period later, the first transcontinental freight train rumbled out of California on its fashion to the due east coast. It carried in its hold an emissary of the Asian markets: a shipment of Japanese teas. On May 15, though the road required hundreds of thousands of dollars in patchwork along its length, regular passenger service opened for business. Travelers could make the trip between San Francisco and New York in a week. No longer did passengers or cargo have to take the treacherous road across sea and Panama that had killed railroad abet Theodore Judah. The coasts were connected -- and the globe equally Americans knew it had grown smaller.

A Competing Canal
Railroad pioneer Asa Whitney had once dreamed an iron route would re-heart the world toward America, making it a conduit of substitution betwixt Asia and Europe. In this sense, his vision of the grand project remained unfulfilled. Just six months afterwards the meeting at Promontory Acme, workers half the world away consummated their ain monumental feat of engineering science. Opened in Nov, 1869, Egypt's Suez Culvert linked Asia and Republic of india to Europe by a single waterway, thus ensuring that exchange between the two regions would go on to circumvent American soil.

Surging Interstate Trade
Nonetheless, the transformation achieved in intracontinental trade was substantial. Within ten years of its completion, the railroad shipped $50 million worth of freight coast to coast every year. Just as it opened the markets of the west declension and Asia to the due east, it brought products of eastern industry to the growing populace across the Mississippi. The railroad ensured a production boom, as manufacture mined the vast resources of the middle and western continent for use in production. The railroad was America'due south commencement technology corridor.

Improved Public Soapbox
As it encouraged the growth of American business, so too did it promote evolution of the nation's public discourse and intellectual life. Americans could travel beyond the length of the continent in a affair of days, and gaze upon their country in its entirety from the windows of their train cars. Conversations begun in the east ended in the west. Books written in San Francisco institute homes on New York shelves just one week afterward their publication. The runway carried more than goods; they provided a conduit for ideas, a pathway for soapbox. With the completion of its great railroad, America gave birth to a transcontinental culture. And the route further engendered some other profound change in the American mind. Here was manifest destiny wrought in iron; here were two coasts united; here was an interior open to settlement. Distances shrank, merely identification to state and fellow American grew in changed proportion.

A Disaster for Native Americans
Not everyone would benefit from that transformation. The transcontinental railroad was not the beginning of white settlers' battles with Native Americans. Nor was information technology the terminal nail in the coffin. Merely it was an irrevocable marker of encroaching white society, that unstoppable force which would force Indians onto reservations within decades. By 1890, even the Powder River Valley — the rich hunting ground so hard won by ruby Cloud and the Oglala Sioux — would be lost. New treaties scattered the Indians to reservations and opened the terminal great Native American property to the settlers then steadily branching outward from the iron road. And the buffalo herds upon which Indians depended had been nearly depleted. They were easy prey to sport-hunters brought to the plains by the carload. More disastrously, the railroad introduced the herds to American industrial production, for which they became one more resource to be mined en masse. Millions of buffalo savage to indiscriminate slaughter, their hides shipped back along the rail to the markets of the E.

A Web of Runway
The transcontinental railroad did non long remain the sole venue of travel through America'southward middle. Lines spiderwebbed outward from its branch points, carrying north and s the settlers coming west to eat millions of acres of land. By 1900 a number of routes ran parallel — the Northern Pacific and Southern Pacific among them — reaching west from Mississippi to the Pacific just like the pioneering road.