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Economy10 May 1869

First Transcontinental Railroad

Also called: Pacific Railroad

Lines built from east and west met at Promontory Summit, Utah, linking the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the United States by rail.

The locomotives of the two railroads meet at Promontory Summit, 10 May 1869 — photograph by Andrew J. Russell
The locomotives of the two railroads meet at Promontory Summit, 10 May 1869 — photograph by Andrew J. Russell

Andrew J. Russell / Adam Cuerden · Public domain · Source

Under the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, passed during the Civil War, the Central Pacific built east from California and the Union Pacific west from Nebraska. Chinese workers did much of the hard labour through the Sierra Nevada, while Irish immigrants and discharged soldiers worked the plains. On 10 May 1869 the two lines met and a golden spike was driven.

The railroad hastened western settlement and the integration of the national market, but Native Americans lost their land and the bison and were pushed onto reservations. America’s reach to the Pacific extended toward Asia; in the same years Korea saw the General Sherman incident (1866) and the US expedition of 1871.

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States and rulers at the time
United States · builder — President Ulysses S. Grant

People

  • Abraham Lincoln1809 – 1865

    related figure · 16th US president (1861–1865) who preserved the Union in the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation; assassinated just after the war ended

Before and after

Earlier
1866 General Sherman Incident
Later
1871 United States expedition to Korea

Themes that include this event

  • Revolutions and Nation-States1776 – 1871

    From the Declaration of Independence to the German Empire — a century in which liberalism and nationalism toppled the old order in Europe and the Americas and built nation-states