UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD
Union Pacific bridge and tunnel in Weber Canyon
The Union Pacific Railroad has been an essential link in the
transportation network of the West for more than one hundred twenty
years. The Union Pacific Railroad was the eastern segment of the first
transcontinental railroad completed in 1869. After years of agitation for
a railroad link to the Pacific coast, in 1862 the United States Congress
authorized such a venture. When the original legislation failed to attract
sufficient capital for undertaking the project, a new law was enacted in
1864 doubling the federal land- grant offerings and making generous
thirty-year loans for much of the building costs of the road. The Union
Pacific Railroad Company was authorized to begin construction from
Omaha, Nebraska westward, while the Central Pacific, was to
commence building at Sacramento, California and cross the Sierra
Nevada Mountains heading eastward. In general, the corporate
competition to build the most miles of railroad and thus garner the
greater share of land grants and bond money did nothing to enhance
the quality of construction.
Nevertheless, each company did an impressive job of meeting their
respective obstacles as the project got under way. From the time the
Union Pacific began serious work in 1865, the company averaged over a
mile a day, accomplished largely through the arduous labor of recently
arrived Irish emigrants with picks, shovels and mule-drawn scrapers.
Supplying these workmen with the necessities of life gave several men
long-lasting reputations as buffalo hunters, and otherwise taxed the
ingenuity of the company providers. There were others who inevitably
followed the work crews to provide the liquor, feminine companionship
and gambling facilities documented in dozens of photographs-the "hell
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on wheels" that crossed the plains adjacent the construction camps.
As the railroad stretched inexorably westward, it opened portions of
Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming to more extensive
development. Mining, cattle raising and agricultural activity were
generally enhanced by providing more effective transportation of goods
to eastern markets. Perhaps no area was more heavily impacted by the
Union Pacific than the Intermountain domain settled by members of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Brigham Young, leader of
these isolated colonists, recognized the advantages and liabilities of the
approaching railroad, and unable to stop it, he attempted to make the
best of its coming. It would make the large annual emigration of
converts from Europe and the East faster, less dangerous and less
expensive. And it promised to provide good paying work for numerous
Mormon men and draft animals. However, on the other hand, the
railroad would bring into the midst of Mormondom all the ills of the
outside world Young and his associates had long denounced and
abhorred. The coming of the railroad also immeasurably enhanced the
profitability of mining in the territory and stimulated a large influx of
semi-permanent Gentile residents into the region.
Young arranged with the railroad company for extensive grading
contracts through the difficult mountain canyons from Evanston,
Wyoming to Ogden, Utah. In the final year of the construction project,
Salt Lake City newspapers advertized for anyone wishing employment
or subcontracts to apply to Joseph, John W. or Brigham Young Jr., all
sons of the church leader. They and Bishop John Sharp worked as
intermediaries between the Union Pacific and the local work crews thus
recruited. Many of the Mormon workmen were present at the
momentous event of the driving of the golden spike on 10 May 1869,
celebrating the completion of the transcontinental railroad. However,
the church president was absent from the occasion and was represented
in official circles by Sharp, who in later years served on the Board of
Directors of Union Pacific Railroad.
Brigham Young was unhappy at not being able to persuade either the
Union Pacific or Central Pacific to direct the route through Salt Lake
City. But soon after completion of the main line, with close and
continuing cooperation from Union Pacific, a Mormon-controlled Utah
Central Railroad finished a branch line from Ogden to Salt Lake City. For
the next generation, southern Utah citizens and mining promoters
sought construction of a railroad stretching through the largest region in
the United States yet untapped by such transportation facilities,
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between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, California. Although many such
schemes were projected, none came to fruition, largely because Collis
P. Huntington, of Central Pacific and associated railroads, aimed to
maintain a monopoly on transportation into California.
The Union Pacific Railroad consistently demonstrated interest in building
the Salt Lake and Los Angeles line, and subsidiary companies did
gradually extend tracks all the way to the Nevada border, near Caliente.
But burdened by scandal, financial depressions and finally bankruptcy,
the larger company could not do more at that time. However, after
Huntington died in 1900 and independent Montana financier, William A.
Clark, began extending the railroad through the Nevada and California
deserts, the resurgent Union Pacific, under powerful New Yorker, Edwin
H. Harriman, forced Clark to relinquish control and the Salt Lake and
Los Angeles line has remained an essential segment of the Union Pacific
Railroad ever since.
See: Nelson Trottman, History of the Union Pacific: A Financial and
Economic Survey (1966); Robert G. Athearn, Union Pacific Country
(1971); Maury Klein, Union Pacific: The Rebirth, 1894-1969. New York:
Doubleday, (1989).
E. Leo Lyman
SOURCE... Article is from the Utah History Encyclopedia. Powell, Allan Kent, ed. Salt Lake City, Utah : The University of Utah Press, 1994
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