Sometimes it’s better to take a view of something the other way around in order to gain a more comprehensive appreciation of what was done and why.
The Duke was also in the cavalry (well, he rode horses, in the movies; I rode a tank, for real).
After leaving Yosemite along a 15-mile 7% declining road winding along a steep mountainside, I made my way up Route 295 past Mono Lake and stayed at a great little Western-style motel run by a husband-and-wife team with a great sense of humor. I dubbed my room the “John Wayne Room” as it was decorated with pictures of the Duke in especially his roles as a cavalryman, which of course reminded me of my formative days in uniform in the (armored) cavalry. From Bridgeport, I bid a fond farewell to the Golden State, making my way up the scenic valleys leading me through Carson City and Reno, Nevada, where I turned eastward again along Interstate 80 – the path of the Central Pacific Railroad as it had hacked its way out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains from Sacramento. And as I made my way “back East” to look at two of the most significant endeavors in America’s quest for frontiers on a global scale in the 19th century – the Transcontinental Railroad and the Lewis & Clark expedition – and recorded the second four thousand miles of my trans-American journey, I was fortunate to gather impressions of two of the most significant projects that defined America as a continental and then a world power from the opposite side of their general direction of development.
Stephen Ambrose, in Undaunted Courage, his seminal work on the Lewis & Clark expedition, noted that Thomas Jefferson, as the third president, exercised extraordinary vision not only in committing government funds to the controversial Louisiana Purchase, but in sending Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to survey the land and find a passage to the Pacific through the Northeast Territories. Jefferson did this, like all great visionary leaders, for numerous cogent reasons, but chief among them was to secure the position of the United States as the dominant power on the North American continent.
In another other major work, on the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, Nothing Like It in the World, Ambrose reflects that Lincoln, as if in continuation of Jefferson’s thought – and in the middle of the Civil War – continued to encourage work on the project, not only to complete it, but to insure the unity of the nation and culminate its conquest of the West following the country’s own war of unification. (At the same time, he purchased Alaska from Russia.)
These two critical projects, by the way, are prime examples of military involvement in nation-building. Lewis and Clark, of course, were commissioned officers while performing an essentially military operation at the behest of the Commander-in-Chief, while a great many of those who led and managed the building of the transcontinental railroad were veterans of the Civil War.
These things I had already read and learned about before taking this journey; but, by coming in from the West to the East, I was better able to contextualize them as part of a continuous flow. (It wasn’t something I had conscientiously planned; it just worked out that way. Serendipity, indeed, is a wonderful thing.)
It’s hard to overestimate the impact the railroads had on the development of the United States and its rise as a continental power. From the 1830’s on, a national network rapidly took shape, much as the Interstate Highway system did in the next century. By 1861, 31,000 miles of rail linked the eastern states, more than in all of Europe. However, almost all of it was east of the Missouri and Mississippi Valleys. The idea of a transcontinental railroad came from numerous sources, and not just from east to west. By 1862, the young Californian engineer Theodore Judah had surveyed a route over the Sierra Nevada and persuaded wealthy merchants in Sacramento to form the Central Pacific Railroad, which Congress authorized that year to build eastward in the same act that chartered the Union Pacific Railroad of New York to begin along the route of the Mormon Trail laid a few years back, with the eastern terminus in Omaha, Nebraska.
The Central Pacific broke ground in January 1863 and the Union Pacific that December. Neither made much headway, despite loan subsidies of $16,000 to $48,000 per mile (more than one to three million in today’s dollars), as well as 10 land sections for each mile of track laid (of greater interest to the railroads then). With the country’s attention and investors’ profit incentives, labor, and material diverted by government contracts, there was little progress until the two railroad companies, in an exemplar of the free-wheeling business ethics of the 19th century, vigorously lobbied (or, perhaps more accurately, bribed) key members of Congress, in a second railroad act of 1864, doubled the land grants. Once the war was over – and huge pools of unemployed laborers, managerial know-how, and capital were freed – work began in earnest.
Central Pacific work crews faced the rugged Sierra immediately, its mostly Chinese workers hammering out tunnels through the Sierra Nevada, sometimes at an agonizing eight inches a day. With eight flat cars of material needed for each mile of track laid, logistics were a nightmare, especially for the Central Pacific, which had to bring in every rail, spike, and locomotive 15,000 miles around the Cape Horn (and later a case study to justify the building of the Panama Canal).
Meanwhile, the Union Pacific, which drew on Irish, German, and Italian immigrants for labor, Civil War veterans from both sides, ex-slaves, and even some American Indians, to cross easier but longer terrain, faced sometimes severe winds, thunderstorms and brutal winters, along with incessant attacks by Sioux and Cheyenne, creating an incentive for contract security forces. (Yes, Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t the first examples of private security companies. And if the 24/7 media of today existed back then, the project may have not been completed as it was. No one knows for sure, but estimates run between 1,000 and 2,000 as to how many workers perished in building that railroad line.)
By mid-1868, these polyglot work teams, drilled for precision track-laying by their mostly ex-army officer team chiefs, invented a pace far faster than anyone had originally thought. Driven by land subsidy incentive, they began to pass each other for about 200 miles until Congress finally intervened to declare Promontory Summit in Utah to be the connection point, at the suggestion of the railroads driving on as much as 10 miles per day absent government direction. When it was over on 10 May 1869, the Central Pacific was credited with 690 miles of track; the Union Pacific with 1,086.
Seems that everything points to the Red Garter hotel and casino in West Wendover - the last gambling town before Utah (or the first one from the other side). Even "Wendover Will" helps out. American kitsch at it best. Barely visible in the far distance, over the salt flats, are the chain of mountains that cover the approaches to Salt Lake City. Those mountains are almost 100 miles away.
After breaking away from the route of the Central Pacific at West Wendover, Nevada (which offered a stunning vista over the Salt Flats to the mountains masking Salt Lake City, about 100 miles away), I crossed the saltine plain with two retired Air Force members I had met in Winnemucca, Nevada. (“Winnemucca”, Shoshone for “one moccasin”, is also where we shared a Basque meal at a restaurant that was the meeting place for the ethnic population there). As we rode through Nevada and especially Utah, I marveled at the vastness of the West. We were led by their friend from West Jordan (south of Salt Lake City) who afforded us the exceptional kind of warm hospitality that I had seen among other down-to-earth folks in my travels around the world, reinforcing my faith in humanity. The following day, I headed north through town to take a look at the simultaneously religious, political, and economic capital city of Salt Lake City.
The Temple of the Church of Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake City, UT.
Joseph Campbell remarked how Salt Lake City was one of the few places where you could see, displayed in close proximity, the chronological progression of predominating values in the Western world, first with the spiritual world of the Middle Ages, the politics and governance of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and the industrial and commercial age we now live and work in, as the buildings correspondingly became the tallest – all within a few blocks.
True to this progression and order of values, as the spiritual center, the Temple constitutes the central point of Salt Lake City. The State Capitol, as the political center, is slightly taller and built just a bit later. The tallest and most recent structure is the nearby Latter Day Saints Administrative Building, which also oversees the substantial financial activities of the community.
Standing between two engines of connectivity over the railroad tie where the golden spike was driven on 10 May 1869 at Promontory, UT. My left foot is on the Union Pacific (eastern) side; while my right foot is on the Central Pacific (western) side.
Edging past the Great Salt Lake, I entered the open vista of northern Utah – a 100 mile diversion – to take a look at Promontory, and was more than glad I made the excursion. It was not only seeing the final point of connection that helped me draw it into perspective. It was a poignant quote from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1869 on the wall of the visitor’s entrance: “The journey across the plains was a great undertaking that required great patience and endurance. Now all is changed… The six month’s journey is reduced to less than a week. The prairie schooner has passed away, replaced by the railway coach with all its modern comforts.”
I then rode back down the hills and gazed over the vastness of the area, noticing and contemplating the seemingly endless strands of barbed wire – the other great development back then that led to the closing of the frontier (in 1890) at least a century or so sooner than Jefferson had foreseen when he sent out Lewis & Clark only 66 years earlier. (Barbed wire allowed great expanses of property to be claimed by ranchers – and taken away from the Indians).
This plaque marks the location of Camp Pleasant, where Lewis & Clark held up before pushing into much less known territory up the Missouri valley in 1803.
Another piece of the cognitive puzzle had fallen into place. Much later on, as I came upon the site of Camp Pleasant near Chamberlain, South Dakota, to survey the Missouri Valley up which the Corps of Discovery embarked into unknown territory, my mind’s eye opened further. It reached full aperture in Omaha, Nebraska, at the Durham Museum housed in the former Union Station, where I learned about Omaha as more of a gateway to the West than even St. Louis has been – the departure point for Lewis & Clark’s Corps of Discovery, the start of the Mormon trek to Utah in 1857, and the beginning point of the Union Pacific’s negotiation of the Great Plains.
And then the final pieces, again in the Durham Museum: In addition to the Transcontinental Railroad and the invention of barbed wire, what really accelerated the settlement of the West and the formation of the United States as a continent as much as a country was the Homestead Act signed by President Lincoln in 1862, providing land grants for the farmers and especially ranchers who displaced the aboriginal population.
In this display at the Durham Museum in Omaha, NE, posters in English and French promising cheap farms and free homes under the Homestead Act.
My epiphany had arrived. The push of the pioneers across the frontiers of the North American continent was, of course, another link in a chain of endeavors in the American experience to find and conquer new frontiers. But then I realized: In the first century of the history of the United States, these frontiers were essentially physical; by the end of the last century, they were becoming more abstract. (Think the internet enabling this blog, perhaps the great game-changer of global connectivity, an endless cyber-frontier that is among the latest examples of the military’s contribution to nation-building.)
John F. Kennedy, in his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination the summer before my birth, articulated this shift: “We stand on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, a frontier of unknown opportunities and beliefs in peril. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”
In the early 21st century, the United States is confronted with the opportunities and perils of the process of globalization. As I traversed this continental country in reverse order of its development, it became clear to me that all of these efforts, extending into the 20th century on a global scale, were integral parts of a series of actions not acting merely on the impulse to expand, surmount an obstacle, or answer to a challenge (and Americans always seem to be at their best when challenged).
Rather, each and every one of these expansionary endeavors seems to have also acted on the impulse to connect, to unite, or to attach one place with another, or the past with the future. America’s quest for frontiers was not about imperial expansion; it was about connectivity. After it exhausted the frontiers of its own geography, the United States transformed itself into a truly trans-continental power to connect – not conquer – the world because it’s inherent existence depended on it. The fate of this nation of nations is, in this way, extricable to the fate of the world, and vice-versa.
In other words, the history of the United States is, among many things, the history of a nation that, in many ways, serves as the global engine of connectivity – in space, in time, and most importantly in the world of ideas. From its very inception, the United States was destined to fulfill this role. This is America’s place in the world.
