Come at 7 every morning. Go home at 8 every night. Light the fire. Sweep the rooms. Wash the clothes. Wash the windows. Sweep the stairs. Trim the lamps. I want to cut his wages. Many of the railroad's builders viewed the Plains Indians as obstacles to be removed. General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote in "The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next year, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.
Construction of the railroad provided many opportunities for financial chicanery, corruption, graft, and bribery. The greatest financial scandal of the 19th century grew out of the railroad's construction. The president of the Union Pacific helped found a construction company, called Credit Mobilier, which allowed investors, including several members of Congress, to grant lucrative construction contracts to themselves, while nearly bankrupting the railroad.
The railroad had profound effects on American life. New phrases entered the American vocabulary such as "time's up," "time's a wasting," and "the train is leaving the station. Books written in San Francisco found homes on New York shelves just one week after their publication. The rails carried more than goods; they provided a conduit for ideas, a pathway for discourse.
With the completion of its great railroad, America gave birth to a transcontinental culture. And the route further engendered another 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, but identification to land and fellow American grew in inverse 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 it the final nail in the coffin. But it was an irrevocable marker of encroaching white society, that unstoppable force which would force Indians onto reservations within decades. By , even the Powder River Valley — the rich hunting ground so hard won by red Cloud and the Oglala Sioux — would be lost. New treaties scattered the Indians to reservations and opened the last great Native American holding to the settlers so 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 fell to indiscriminate slaughter, their hides shipped back along the rails to the markets of the East. A Web of Rails The transcontinental railroad did not long remain the sole venue of travel through America's center. Lines spiderwebbed outward from its branch points, conveying north and south the settlers coming west to consume millions of acres of land.
After the loud band music, the flowery oratory, and the last sledgehammer blows drove a golden spike into place, the Glittering Ones reboarded their special trains and left Gold Creek, most of them never to return to Montana. The day had been rich in symbolism. For one moment the old Wild West popularly associated with Indians, fur trappers and pioneer settlers stood face to face with the new West of high finance, nationwide mark ets and rapid advances in communication and transportation.
A little more than two months later in , on another day rich in symbolism, North Americans collectively reset their clocks and watches to standard time, and like the symbolism of business moguls driving a golden spike in the wilds of Montana, the new system of timekeeping was an unadorned statement of railroad power. Our present time system was invented to resolve the confusion caused for the railroads of North America by dozens of local time standards—hundreds, in fact.
Time back in the days of trail travel to Oregon and California needed only be measured casually by noting the position of the sun or by mark ing off each passing day. Every spring in the s and s individuals and families traveled west by wagon train, leaving the familiar Missouri Valley and rolling slowly across the lush grasses of the Great Plains. Their collective goal was to reach Golden California or fertile Oregon by September or October before snowfalls blocked mountain passes.
The Donner Party resorted to cannibalism because it lost the seasonal race to the West Coast and became trapped by deep snow in the Sierras during the winter of Before the fall of when the railroads created standard time, local variations prevailed throughout the West, and in most places approximate time was good enough to meet the demands of daily life.
Minutes seldom seemed to matter. Railroad managers wanted to schedule their trains safely over single-track lines—the kind that predominated across the West and much of the rest of the United States —but safe operation was impossible except by imposing a precise system of time discipline. Failure to observe accurate time might well result in a bloody head-on collision between two speeding trains inadvertently attempting to defy physics by occupying the same section of track at the same time.
That was the kind of headline-grabbing misfortune every railroad engineer feared most. A growing number of long-distance travelers grew concerned about accurate timekeeping, too, because the numerous local time standards caused confusion that resulted in impossibly tight connections and missed trains. However, across the nation there were pockets of resistance. To the critics, the unilateral action by railroad managers was highhanded and thus all too typical of railroad power to shape and dominate all phases of human existence.
The diehards kept their clocks and watches set on local time, but they were fighting a losing battle and they knew it. Symbolically, the railroad companies of the United States and Canada had collectively taken upon themselves a form of power that for millennia had belonged solely to God, or so their critics complained.
What was the brave new world defined by railroad power coming to? The railroads new role as the self-appointed guardians of time epitomized as nothing else their seemingly limitless power to transform the Wild West through the practical application of science and engineering.
Imposition of standard time was only the most successful and far-reaching triumph of railroads over local and pre-modern ways governed by the rhythms of nature such as seasonal changes, extremes of weather, and even the contrast between the hours of daylight and darkness.
The image illustrates a common method railroads used at the time to field-test the strength and safety of bridges before the first passenger and freight trains chugged across them. Less obvious was that the bridge at Bismarck towered above the water corridor that Lewis and Clark followed eight decades earlier and steamboats based in St. Louis had used in more recent years for fur trade commerce and gold-camp traffic.
Feats of railroad engineering triumphed literally as well as symbolically over familiar steamboat technology and the seasonal variations that could impede or halt steamboat travel on the rivers of the northern West for months at a time.
One reason that the Lewis and Clark Expedition spent the winter of at Fort Mandan, an historic site about 50 miles north of the new bridge, was that the Missouri River froze solid and impeded water travel until the spring thaw six months later. In later years, the Missouri River commerce based in St. Louis shut down each winter.
During the s and s, when steamboats and stagecoaches dominated long-distance travel across the West, their schedules varied according to the season. Not only did cold weather and ice halt river travel for months at a time, but ice and drifting snow in high mountain passes greatly slowed the pace of overland stagecoaches and their vital cargoes of mail, or stopped them literally in their tracks.
In the new railroad era, steam locomotives and their passenger and freight trains would roll with impunity across frozen waterways and through the icy mountain passes of the West to reach their destinations regardless of the weather, and generally they would do so according to the printed schedule. Railroads used a combination of technology and muscle to triumph over nature. They dispatched snowplows of various types and armies of shovel-wielding workers to clear the tracks and keep trains moving.
Only infrequently did their best efforts fail. On the rare occasion when railroads of the West lost a battle with Old Man Winter, their temporary plight gladdened the hearts of local journalists eager to write maudlin human-interest stories about snowbound trains and passengers marooned in the high Sierras, Rockies or Cascades.
With proper equipment on the job and hard work, there was no reason why winter passenger train schedules should be significantly different from summer.
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