Description
This map was re-published in the same year the first transcontinental railroad was completed. The push to connect the coasts by rail began in earnest when Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act, which President Lincoln signed into law on July 1, 1862. The act allowed the Union Pacific Railroad Company to lay track from east to west, beginning in Council Bluffs, Iowa, just east of Omaha, Nebraska. The Central Pacific Railroad Company would lay track from west to east, beginning in Sacramento, California. Both companies were rife with corruption, exploiting generous government loans and land grants and making shady contracting arrangements to enrich the unscrupulous company officers. But despite the egregious fraud, the stretch of track from Council Bluffs to Sacramento was, in fact, completed earlier than expected when the two companies met in Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869 with much fanfare.
The term “transcontinental railroad,” is actually a misnomer. There was no single railroad company that owned or controlled a line of track from the east coast to the west coast. A passenger had to navigate their way across the country on a complicated tangle of privately held railroad companies, which is so wonderfully depicted on Watson’s map. But regardless of the number of railroad companies, the laying of track from Council Bluffs to Sacramento meant a trip that once took months of dangerous travel by wagon could be completed in a matter of days with a dramatic increase in safety for the traveler.
Americans believed that the transcontinental railroad would place the United States at the center of global commerce, creating an easy way for European goods to reach Asian markets and vice versa. In the shadow of the Civil War, Americans also believed that connecting the states and territories by rail would prevent the country from splintering again. They believed it would create an incentive for people to move west, claiming America’s so-called Manifest Destiny of domination over the continent. William Bross, the Lieutenant Governor of Illinois, told the Chamber of Commerce of New York during a speech on January 25, 1866, “As Greece, a little speck upon the map of Europe, gave language and literature and law to all subsequent history, so will these narrow valleys of the Atlantic seaboard give Christian civilization and freedom to this vast continent.” (Bross, 7)
Certainly the transcontinental railroad was not a boon for everyone. Its construction and the government policies that promoted it and settlement in the west displaced Native Americans and fomented violent interactions between Native Americans and railroad workers and settlers. The Central Pacific Railroad Company hired thousands of Chinese workers, whom they paid only half the rate of white workers. Workers on both lines were subjected to dangerous conditions and mistreatment while company officials lined their pockets with embezzled money.
Despite the rampant chicanery, worker abuses, and violence against Native Americans, the transcontinental railroad was a romantic notion of unity and supremacy in the collective American mind. Every aspect of this map celebrates those romantic ideas. From the map’s large size, to its colorful depiction of American states and territories, as well as highly detailed information about each railroad company and the cartouche featuring a locomotive named “San Francisco,” this map invites the viewer to imagine what lies to the west and to consider a cross-country trek, perhaps even to move west for new adventures and fortunes.
Ten years after Watson published this map and the transcontinental railroad connected the east coast with the west coast, Scottish author Robert Lewis Stevenson made a journey from New York to San Francisco by train. His essay "Across the Plains" provides a literary peek into what it was like to travel at that time.
Read an excerpt from "Across the Plains."
References:
Bross, William. Address of the Hon. William Bross, Lieutenant Governor of Illinois, on the Resources of the Far West, and the Pacific Railway, before the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New-York, at a Special Meeting, Thursday, January 25, 1866. New York: John W. Amerman, Printer, 1866.
Gordon, Sarah H. Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829-1929. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997.
Stevenson, Robert Lewis. “Across the Plains” in Across the Plains with Other Memories and Essays. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892.
Wolmar, Christian. The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America. New York: PublicAffairs, 2012.