We have been watching your planet's history from our comet for thousands of years. We have watched you invent technologies that help humans communicate with each other and get from one place to another. (You should have seen how hairy and smelly the dude was who invented the wheel back in the Stone Age! We actually gave him the idea, but since we are not supposed to interfere in human history, we can't talk about it. Let's just say that our Comet master ruler was really ticked off at us that day. Hey, we don't want to brag, but we gave you guys some help on making fire too.)

Oops. Better get back to your modern United States History. Let's ride the Red Comet through the time warp and look at some things you need to know.

OK. To many of you, history is boring. To be honest, most people on our Red Comet don't exactly love history either. So let's get through this together through a time warp where you can get a glimpse of some important events, pass the test, and get on with your life. Go make your own history or something.

Ready? (NO, we can only take you up to today. We are not allowed to show you the future. That would not be fair to everyone else since you would know what stocks to buy and which teams win.)

Let's warp over to May 10, 1869 at Promontary Point, Utah.

There were no highways, no automobiles and very few good roads to connect the country even by horse drawn carriage. There were wagon trails but they were bumpy and slow. It took months for the mail service to deliver a letter coast to coast. The newest technologies of the 1860's were telegraphs and railroads.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party had promised a transcontinental railroad if elected. (Transcontinental means "across the continent")  In 1862, therefore, Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act, which provided for two companies to build a transcontinental line. The Union Pacific would build west from Nebraska. The Central Pacific would start in California. Lincoln never lived to see the completion of this railroad.

It was an enormous job and required a huge amount of capital (money for investment). Congress therefore, offered the railroad builders government land as well as loans. The railroads were to receive sections of land along the new tracks. In the end these land grants amounted to 20 million acres.

Railroads Change America Forever

A large crowd was gathered at Promontary Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. More than 500 men and women, including Chinese and Irish workers, American soldiers, and important visitors, stood beside a newly laid railroad track. For three years the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads had been building their lines toward each other in a race to see who could lay more track. The Central Pacific had started in California. The Union Pacific had begun in Nebraska. Now the whole country was waiting for the last spike to be driven into the ground.

This was the moment the nation had been waiting for. Leland Stanford, the president of the Central Pacific Railroad, climbed onto the railroad track holding a silver hammer in his hand. Then, at exactly 12:45 p.m., Stanford raised the hammer and drove a golden spike into place. The transcontinental railroad was completed!

Americans rejoiced at the news. You could send a person across the country by train!!!!! Everyday people could head WEST. That is exactly what they did, by the tens of thousands.

Building the Railroads

The railroad companies needed many workers to lay the miles of track. They hired a variety of people, including African Americans, American Indians, and immigrants. For most of its laborers the Union Pacific turned to Irish immigrants.

During this time about one of every five immigrants to the United States came from Ireland. It was backbreaking labor on the railroads.

The Central Pacific relied on Chinese immigrants. Americans discriminated against the Chinese, and at first the construction manager of the Central Pacific had not welcomed them. They were small, weighing about 110 pounds - and in no way looked like the larger Irish laborers working on the Union Pacific. The manager soon discovered, however, that the Chinese were hard workers and fearless. They also drank tea - gallons of it - and thus were less likely to get sick than workers who drank ditch water. Impressed, the railroad began a drive to bring Chinese laborers to the United States. At the peak of construction, more than 10,000 Chinese worked on the railroad.

The biggest challenge for the Central Pacific worker was to cross the Sierra Nevada. These mountains separate California from the desert lands to the east.

At one place, workers had to lay track along a cliff face with a 1,400-foot drop. To blast out a roadbed from the cliff face, Chinese workers were lowered in baskets over the edge. There they drilled holes, put in sticks of dynamite, lit the fuse, and tugged the rope to be pulled up before the explosion.

There was no way over the mountains. The only answer was to tunnel through them. The engineers, a growing professional class in America, figured out how the tunnel would work. It would have to curve and at the same time change its level.

To build the tunnel, workers began drilling from each side of the mountain. After more than a year of round-the-clock drilling and blasting, the workers met in the middle of the mountain. The engineers figured that they were off by only two inches!

Once through the Sierras, the Central Pacific moved fast. After all, it was racing with the Union Pacific to see who could lay the most track. (The Union Pacific had no such mountains to contend with.) Track was laid at an average of one to two miles a day. By May 1869. The Union Pacific had laid 1,086 miles of track. The Central Pacific had laid 690 miles of track.

The Track Is Completed

Imagine Americans' pride when these railroads were first completed! American engineers and workers had to use all of their knowledge and practical skills to solve new construction problems. For example, to complete the Central Pacific Railroad, crews had to tunnel through the solid granite of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. To do this, Americans used dynamite for the first time.

Not every rail line had to blast through solid rock. But all of them had to deal with supply problems. Iron rails had to be shipped from the East Coast to the West. Wooden ties had to be brought to the Great Plains, for no trees grew there. Food, water, and tools also had to be shipped to the work sites. The thousands of workers who built these transcontinental lines were unknown American heroes. Most were Irish and Chinese immigrants and Civil War veterans. Their work was backbreaking and seemed never-ending. Yet they were paid only about $25 to $35 a month.

The construction crews had no power tools. Picks, shovels, hammers and drills all used muscle power. A group of workers would grab a rail from a supply wagon and carry it to the track. With the shout of "Halt!" and then "Down!" they laid the rail in place on the wooden ties. While the rail workers went back for more rails, a gang of spike drivers and bolters secured the rail to the ties. "On with another!" shouted their leader, and quickly a new rail was put down.

When the work went well, the results were amazing: "four rails to the minute, three strokes to the spike, ten spikes, four hundred rails to the mile -- eighteen hundred miles (2,880 kilometers) to San Francisco!"

Of course, work did not always go smoothly. Avalanches in the mountains, Indian attacks on the Great Plains, snowstorms, blazing heat -- these were all part of the railroad builders' life. Many men died building the railroads because of these things and the fact that safety regulations and health conditions of today did not exist then.

On May 10, 1869 (OK, this is going to be on the test so remember this date and what happened.) -- nothing but one span of track separated the two lines. On that day at Promontary, Utah, the work that began in Nebraska and California, all came together, connected by a golden spike.

HEY! Did you know that over 130 years ago, before computers and the telephone, people sent a form of e-mail to each other by way of the telegraph? It's true!!!

Once a railroad track is laid down it is easy to put in a telegraph wire. This put both the best technologies of the time, a telegraph line and a railroad line, together. Remember that this was before the telephone, the Internet, and modern communication. It took months for a written letter or a person to get across the country. Now, with electricity pulses in telegraphs, messages zipped across the country in seconds. That meant that Americans could send a short message from a telegraph office in California to a telegraph office in New York to ask Grandma to jump on a train to come west. At the time, this was as important as the invention of the Internet. A spike was attached to a telegraph wire so that when the spike was struck, the telegraph message would be transmitted across the nation.

Therefore, before the telephone became an almost indispensable part of our lives, the telegram was the most popular method with which to dispatch a written message faster than the postal service. The word “telegraph” originated in Greece; with "Tele" meaning distant and "graph" meaning to write. The telegraph system was based on a simple system of dashes and dots that were used to communicate messages symbolically. This system of symbols, called Morse Code, came into its own as an international communication system which finally allowed for the efficient transmission of messages throughout the world.

The 1800s were a time of mass invention, and even the earliest 19th century inventors had experimented with the concept of using electricity to transmit messages over wires. In 1832, Morse became intrigued by the telegraph, a cumbersome piece of equipment initially proposed in 1753 and first built in 1774. Up until 1833, the devices were impractical, requiring 26 separate wires, one for each letter of the alphabet. By 1835 Morse had developed a 1-line telegraph model and in 1838, he had invented a code that utilized different numbers to represent the letters of the English alphabet and the ten digits.

By 1843, Morse had obtained government support for his invention and he subsequently built a mini-telegraph system along a railroad line between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland. It was just one year later that the first telegraph message was transmitted: "What hath God wrought!" The person on the receiving end of that transmission was Alfred Vail.

Once Morse's patent became officially approved in 1854, following an extensive legal battle that the inventor finally won at the U.S. Supreme Court, communication both inside the United States and across the Atlantic was completely revolutionized. In 1866, the first telegraph was successfully transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean, designating the start of a new era in telecommunications. In 1869, the first telegraph line connected the East and West Coasts with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad at Promontary Point, Utah.

Did you know that AT&T Corporation, originally stood for American Telegraph and Telephone Company?

Ever hear of "S.O.S." being written on the beach of a deserted island by someone wanting help? Using S.O.S. came from the telegraph's Morse Code and is recognized around the world as a call for help. We Americans say that it stands for "Save Our Ship" but really it is just a code that means "help" according to international agreements about Morse Code signals coming from ships on the sea.

Today, Morse's first telegraph is housed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

How Railroads Changed American History

The railroads helped end Indian control of the West. The Plains Indians, across whose lands the railroads cut like knives, fought this invasion, but in vain. Indian fears were justified. The railroads brought the buffalo hunters, miners, and settlers who would destroy their world. The Great Plains was filled with settlers. The Indian Wars occurred on the Plains.

The railroads tied together the economies of the West and East. From the West, the railroads carried eastward such raw materials as lumber, minerals, livestock, and grain. In Midwestern cities like St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Cleveland, the raw materials were processed. Grain was milled into flour. Hogs became bacon and hams. Cattle became beef. Iron ore was converted into steel. Lumber was cut into wood for housing. The processed goods were shipped by rail to eastern cities. From eastern cities, in turn, came manufactured goods, which were sold to westerners. By turning the nation into a single giant marketplace, the railroads helped the growth of American industry. They also spurred the growth of those cities connected by railways.

The railroads helped people settle and farm the plains and valleys of the West. The cattle and wheat these people raised would feed the cities. Many of these farm families had moved west with dreams of independence. Yet they often found themselves at the mercy of outside forces. Railroad companies controlled their ability to move their crops and the cost of transporting them. Eastern buyers determined how much they would pay for the crops.

Railroads changed the way people thought about the environment. Until the age of railroads, people lived and worked mainly where there was water transport, such as rivers or the sea. Roads were primitive, following valleys from town to town. Railroads were different. Engineers and surveyors laid out the railroads in almost straight lines between cities. Railroads made possible cities like Denver, Colorado, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. These cities had no water transport at all.

Schedules became part of American life. Snow, ice, rain, and floods could close down both water and road transportation. It was hard to keep to a schedule in the face of such hazards. Climate, however, had little effect on the trains; therefore, in summer storm and winter snow, in cold and in heat, the trains kept moving, delivering passengers and goods on time.

How Americans kept track of time changed. Railroads broke free of what was called "sun time." Formerly wherever people had lived, noon was the time when the sun was highest in the sky. This system created a nightmare for the people who set railroad schedules. At first the railroads set up "railroad time" along sections of the track. These time zones were so local, however, that there were about 100 of them in 1883. To deal with this problem, the railroads agreed to a system of standard time. They divided the United States into four time zones. Although the plan went into effect on November 18, 1883, many communities refused to accept it. Congress itself did not adopt the scheme until 1918. Today the country is divided into six time zones, the four original ones plus Alaska Time and Hawaii -- Aleutian Time. The transcontinental railroad system, completed on May 9, 1869, made a national time zone system necessary so that train schedules could be understandable.

Railroads helped make the telegraph a nationwide communication system. Because telegraph equipment had been used for years as a communication device to help change track and avoid train collisions, combining telegraph building with rail building was relatively easy. The need to "stay in touch" that could be done coast to coast after the building of the transcontinental railroad still exists today. Telecommunications, cell phones, and all the rest have come from the days when your great-great-great Grandpa could send a telegram to your great-great-great Grandma.

Railroads ended the frontier era. In 1890 the Bureau of the Census formally announced the closing of the American frontier. Pockets of unoccupied land remained, but no longer was there a distinct line separating settled from unsettled areas. Internal migration for more than 250 years had been a response to the opportunities available on the frontier. Still, internal migration continued in succeeding years, though its changed character reflected the changed circumstances. You did not have to be an adventurous explorer like Lewis and Clark or travel a perilous trail to get out West anymore; you bought a train ticket. And when you got there, you sent a telegram back home to tell them you had arrived safely.

The American frontier was gone forever.

TOPIC ESSAY QUESTION

How did the transcontinental railroad change American history?

HINT: The essay question will be worth 40% of your grade. Read the section and provided links several times and practice writing an answer that makes your point and covers the materials required.

There are eight paragraphs above and each gives a different example of how railroads changed American History. Each of these ideas you name gives you 5 points. A perfect essay is worth a total of 40 points and would have each of these 8 ideas with a sentence or two to explain them.

Write a practice essay. When you have finished, review your work with your Red Comet Contact Person. Remember, this question is a big chunk of your final grade so prepare for it!!

TOPIC PRACTICE

Online Quiz
Students, you can take this quiz as many times as you want.

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