The Union Pacific and the Transcontinental Railroad

In the summer of eighteen sixty-five, the Union Pacific Railroad began laying iron rails west from Omaha into a land that, from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains, had no permanent rail connection to anything. What followed was one of the most concentrated feats of industrial construction in the nineteenth century, and it happened largely right here.

The Union Pacific's workforce in Nebraska consisted substantially of Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, men who had survived something enormous and now needed work. They graded roadbed, hammered spikes, and moved forward at a pace that shocked observers. At peak construction, crews were laying a mile or more of track per day across terrain that offered no shade, no reliable water supply, and, during the Sioux and Cheyenne resistance of eighteen sixty-seven and sixty-eight, the constant possibility of attack.

The Central Pacific, building east from Sacramento with a workforce largely composed of Chinese immigrants, met the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory on May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine. A golden spike was driven to mark the connection. The country could now be crossed by rail in a matter of days.

Nebraska was transformed immediately. Towns sprang up along the rail line wherever the Union Pacific established depots. Columbus, Kearney, North Platte, Ogallala, and Sidney all owe their locations and their early growth directly to where the railroad decided to stop. The cattle drives from Texas, which would define the Great Plains economy through the eighteen seventies and eighties, were organized around the rail-loading points the Union Pacific created.

The main line still runs the same corridor today, carrying freight from the Pacific coast to Chicago. You can sometimes see it from the interstate, running alongside, carrying the same loads in the same direction it always has.