The Railroads - Madison

              

              The railroads were constructed rapidly after the Civil War ended.  In 1865, the U.S. had approximately 35,000 miles of tracks that ran along to almost the entire eastern part of the Mississippi River.  There was 200,000 miles of tracks at the beginning of the 1900’s, which was a significant jump from the previous 35 years.  All of this would not have been possible if it weren't for Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862, starting the production of these railroads.  It forced two corporations of railroad contractors and laborers to work together and form the Transcontinental Railroad.  The government enticed them with the offer of bountiful land to build the tracks over.

                One of the corporations, the Union Pacific, employed Civil War veterans, Irish immigrants, miners, farmers, cooks, and ex-convicts.  They had a total of 10,000 of these workers, sweating and exerting themselves every day to help construct this ridiculously long railroad that stretched clear across the continental U.S.  It began building westward from Omaha, its goal along the lines of the Pacific Ocean.  The workers had to eventually face the arid heat of the scorching desert and the wrath of the angry Native Americans.

The other railroad corporation was the Central Pacific Railroad.  This railroad company was led by four Sacramento merchants named Charley Crocker, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington.   They hired around 10,000 workers too, but these were from California and China.  Their daily wages were a dollar, and it was enough to keep them from quitting.  They used new, industrial equipment to build the tracks and the locomotives, and all of it was supplied from the eastern U.S.