A Theater Manager’s Gimmick and a Train Ride into History

The construction crew of the Union Pacific Railroad line pose in front of a supply train in 1867. MPI/Getty Images

Asa Whitney, a businessman who had recently returned from China where he had made his wealth, wrote Congress with a very interesting request. He asked Congress to provide him “a grant of land, to enable him to construct a railroad from Lake Michigan to the Pacific ocean.”

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

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.”

The letter was “referred to the Committee on Roads and Canals,” but did not go any further. Nonetheless, for years Whitney preached the need for such a railroad. Whether Whitney knew it or not, international affairs would soon open the door to his vision.

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

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.

The journey along the Oregon Trail averaged six months with dangers aplenty, from the elements to attacking native tribes. Many chose to travel by sea to reach the Pacific coast; the two options were to either sail approximately 18,000 miles from the east coast around the tip of South America and up toward San Francisco; or to sail to the Isthmus of Darien (today’s Panama), cross by land, and then catch a ship to sail up the California coast. Though not as arduous, the ocean voyages still averaged six months and possessed their own hazards.

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 surveys were presented, but Congress could not agree on a route. Northern politicians preferred a northern route, while Southern politicians preferred a southern route. The construction of a Pacific railroad would await Congress. Congress, ironically, would only become united in this effort with the outbreak of the Civil War, as southern states joined the Confederacy.

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

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.

The passengers were provided elegantly designed 10-page ticket booklets. They boarded the train with its glamorous “Marlborough” Pullman Palace Hotel Car nestled between the locomotive and a combination passenger-smoking car, their luggage stowed in the baggage car. On June 1 at 12:40 a.m., the train began a nonstop trip from New York City to Pittsburgh in 10 hours―a pace, according to a 1926 article by the “The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society,” that remained unbeatable. Seven minutes later, the train left Pittsburgh and, after 25 stops, including four to change locomotives, arrived in Chicago. From there it zoomed to Council Bluffs, Iowa, having made four locomotive changes in the process. The Jarrett and Palmer Special was finally on the Union Pacific Railroad, where eight different locomotives were used to reach Ogden, Utah, at 10:57 a.m. MT on June 3. Over the final leg of the journey, the Jarrett and Palmer Special―which was also labeled the “Transcontinental Express”―was pulled by the Central Pacific locomotive “Black Fox.”

It was during this week in history, on June 4, 1876, at 9:45 a.m. PT, the Jarrett and Palmer Special, at an average speed of 42 miles per hour, arrived in San Francisco on schedule to a vast crowd, or as the Brooklyn Union reported: “eighty hours and twenty minutes calendar time, or eighty-three hours fifty-nine minutes and sixteen seconds real time, forty-four seconds ahead of the time allowed in the schedule.”

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.’”

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