On Jan. 28, 1845, Whitney’s four-page letter was presented to Congress. It had only been 15 years since the first steam engine railroad was built in America―the initial 13-mile-long stretch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line―but the railroad industry was starting to boom.
![Asa Whitney (1791–1874), American merchant and transcontinental railroad promoter. (Public Domain)](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.theepochtimes.com%2Fassets%2Fuploads%2F2024%2F05%2F29%2Fid5658927-Asa_Whitney.jpg&w=1200&q=75)
Whitney expressed his concern about a mass migration to America due to the “over population of Europe.” Rather than a diatribe, his letter took an understanding tone. He believed that the “thousands, in the fear of starvation at home, are driven to our shores, hoping, from our wide-spread and fertile soil, to find a rich reward for their labor.”
Though he understood why Europeans were fleeing to America, he feared that becoming city dwellers in already overpopulated cities would plunge “them into vice, and often crime, and they [would] become burdensome to our citizens.” He argued that “some great and important point in our interior” could attract masses away from the cities where they could ”purchase lands, … escape the tempting vices of our cities,” and “where they will have a home.” They would ultimately achieve “an affluence of which they could never have dreamed in their native land.” To accomplish such an undertaking, he believed private industry required collaboration with the federal government, specifically “a grant of a sufficient quantity of the public domain.”
Paths to the Pacific
Just as the War of 1812 was starting, a Scotch-Canadian fur trader by the name of Robert Stuart discovered a wagon-safe path across the Continental Divide. The Oregon Trail was born. Between 1840 to 1860, approximately 400,000 migrants traversed the trail. The Oregon Country had been part of the Pacific Northwest that was jointly occupied by the Americans and British. The joint occupancy ended with the Treaty of Oregon on June 15, 1846, which established the 49th parallel between America and modern Canada. Two months prior, the Mexican-American War erupted. The war ended on Feb. 2, 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which extended American territory into modern-day California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, most of Arizona and Colorado, as well as portions of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.![Oregon Trail map, 1907. (Public Domain)](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.theepochtimes.com%2Fassets%2Fuploads%2F2021%2F12%2F24%2FOregontrail_1907.jpg&w=1200&q=75)
In August of 1848, Congress established the Oregon Territory, encompassing modern-day Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Nestled between the treaty-signing and the creation of the territory was the beginning of the California Gold Rush. With the Pacific coast secured and hordes of people migrating west, Whitney was more right than ever: A Pacific railroad was a necessity.
Finding a Parallel
In 1853, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was authorized to “survey for a railroad from the Mississippi river to the Pacific.” With funds provided by the recent army appropriation bill, four surveys were conducted: Isaac Ingalls Stevens, governor of the Washington Territory, directed the survey along the 47th and 49th parallels—the route advocated by Whitney; Capt. John Gunnison led the survey along the 38th and 39th parallels, until he was killed in an Indian attack; Gunnison was replaced by Lt. Edward Beckwith, who continued along the 41st parallel; Capt. Amiel W. Whipple and Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives led the survey along the 35th parallel; and Lt. John G. Parke led the survey along the 32nd parallel.The Railway Acts and Construction
In the summer of 1861, only months after the start of the war, four wealthy merchants of Sacramento―Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker―founded the Central Pacific Railroad. By December, Congress presented the Pacific Railway Act to “aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean,” leading to the creation of the Union Pacific Railroad, which would “meet and connect with the line of the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California.” The act, which passed on July 1, 1862, required the starting point to be located “on the one hundredth meridian of longitude … in the Territory of Nebraska.” The location of Omaha was selected.Construction for the Pacific Railroad began in early 1863 and was completed when the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific met at Promontory, Utah on May 10, 1869. Whitney’s vision was finally accomplished, though he was not involved. During construction, Whitney’s objective to help migrants was met as the two railway companies hired approximately 20,000 Irish, German, and Chinese immigrants to build the railroads. The method for building the transcontinental railroad followed his suggestions, as the federal government paid the railroad companies $16,000 for each mile built over flat land, $32,000 per mile in the foothills, and $48,000 per mile in the mountains. Also, the companies received 6,400 acres of land for every 10 miles of track laid. The total of state and federal land grants totaled about 180 million acres, a “sufficient quantity of the public domain” indeed.
![It was a day of celebration when the last "golden" spike was driven into the first railroad line to cross the United States. (Public Domain)](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.theepochtimes.com%2Fassets%2Fuploads%2F2024%2F04%2F04%2Fid5621902-East_and_West_Shaking_hands_at_the_laying_of_last_rail_Union_Pacific_Railroad_-_Restoration-600x400.jpg&w=1200&q=75)
The Need for Speed
Along with the suggestions, Whitney’s prediction for how short a transcontinental train journey would be was incredibly accurate. He predicted that the transcontinental railroad “would enable us in the short space of eight days (and perhaps less) to concentrate all the forces of our vast country at any point, from Maine to Oregon, in the interior or on the coast.” The average cross-country travel averaged 10 days, with the fastest trains covering the distance in a week.Henry C. Jarrett, of Jarrett & Palmer, which managed the Booth Theatre in New York City, concocted an idea that would be a thrilling though brief sensation. Jarrett contacted the railroads that connected New York to San Francisco and scheduled a seemingly impossible trip. Jarrett informed newspapers and the Post Office Department that his Jarrett and Palmer Special would cover the distance in 84 hours―half the time of the fastest trains. The passengers included Jarrett, several journalists, and the cast of the upcoming Shakespearean play “Henry V” scheduled to perform on June 5, 1876 at the California Theatre in San Francisco.
![Jules Calvin Ladenheim, an American neurosurgeon, wrote about the journey of the Jarrett-Palmer Express.](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.theepochtimes.com%2Fassets%2Fuploads%2F2024%2F05%2F29%2Fid5659007-6_TWIH-Jarrett-Palmer-Express.jpg&w=1200&q=75)
The Brooklyn Union, though a competitor with The New York Herald which had endorsed the event, reported that “nothing occurred to mar the complete success of the project,” but doubted the “Herald’s prophecies about the dawning of a new era in railroad travel.” Nonetheless, the competitor admitted that “the movers in the project wanted a colossal puff, and they have got it free of charge—at the hands of the newspapers—and sooth to say, they deserved it. … As an advertising medium, the transcontinental trains was a brilliant success, but it was ‘sui generis.’”