The muscle that built the rail: to complete the transcontinental railroad, two companies hired cheap immigrant labor and raced to lay the most track.

• Author: McCollum, Sean
• Position: History

On May 10, 1869, a telegraph operator at Promontory, Summit, in what was then Utah Territory, tapped out a single momentous word to the rest of the country: "Done." Two railroads--one under construction from the East, the other from the West--had finally reached their meeting place, and dignitaries were pounding in the last spikes to create America's--and the world's--first transcontinental railroad. In major U.S. cities, crowds cheered the news and the promise of a transportation revolution.

Funded by huge government loan and land giveaways, and built by the muscles and guts of thousands of men, this iron road promised to link the U.S. population and commerce from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

But creating it would present tool monumental challenges: Workers would have to blast through mountain ranges and lay track across broad deserts; they'd have to fend off attacks by Native Americans, and endure brutal winters. Corporate and political corruption would tarnish the project from beginning to end.

But most Americans saw the westward push as nothing less than destiny, and the locomotive as its vehicle. "[The railroad] well suits the energy of the American people," said one Missouri businessman. "They love to go ahead fast, and to go with power. They love to annihilate the magnificent distances.

IMAGINING THE RAILROAD

The same month in 1860 that Abraham Lincoln was elected President, civil engineer Theodore Judah surveyed a Sacramento, California, street for what would become the Central Pacific Railroad. Judah, one of the transcontinental railroad's visionaries, had called the idea of a sea-to-sea rail link "the most magnificent project ever conceived."

Steam-powered railroads had operated in the U.S. since 1830, and Chicago bad already become a vital rail hub. But the vast majority of track still lay east of the Mississippi.

Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act into law in 1862, as the Civil War was raging. Lines from Chicago would be extended out to Omaha, Nebraska. Meanwhile, two railroad companies would try to build the treacherous 1,700-mile final leg of the transcontinental route.

The Union Pacific was created to build westward from Omaha; the Central Pacific, guided by Judah, was already laying track heading east from Sacramento.

But how to pay for it? With projected costs upward of $1 00 million, it was to be the most expensive single enterprise in the nation's history.

Together, the railroads and federal government devised...