The Line Goes West

Lincoln chose Omaha in eighteen sixty-three. The Pacific Railroad Act of eighteen sixty-two had authorized the Union Pacific, and the president fixed its eastern starting point at this raw Missouri River city, the line that would push west to meet the Central Pacific coming east from California. The choice was no accident of geography. Abraham Lincoln had spent time across the river in Council Bluffs, and he knew the strategic logic of the crossing. Omaha was positioned to pull the great weight of the continent's interior freight toward the east.

Groundbreaking took place on December second, eighteen sixty-three, but the real work was slow. By the end of eighteen sixty-five, crews had laid only forty miles of track west of the city. That changed when Grenville Dodge, a former Union Army major general, took over as chief engineer in eighteen sixty-six. Dodge ran the operation the way he had run supply lines in the war, with military discipline and organized urgency. The crews were largely Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. They laid track across the Great Plains at a pace that astonished contemporaries.

When the golden spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, the line from Omaha westward measured one thousand and eighty-five miles. What had taken a wagon train six months now took seven days by train. The transcontinental railroad compressed the American West into a schedule, and the compression began at Omaha's riverbank.

The Union Pacific kept its headquarters in Omaha and does to this day, making the city the seat of one of the continent's great railroad empires for more than a century and a half.