Pacific Railroad

Term used to denote the prospective transcontinental railway that would link the east coast of the USA and California. Completed in the 1860s, the line was crucial in spreading White settler culture across the continent and in hastening the demise of American Indian peoples on the Great Plains.

The idea of a transcontinental railway was first mooted in the 1830s, but it was the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and the area's subsequent rapid development that galvanized government and private enterprise into serious planning. However, construction was delayed by wrangling in the US Congress between Northern and Southern interests over the choice of route. The outbreak of the Civil War abruptly ended the debate, and in July 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act, authorizing the Union Pacific (from Nebraska) and Central Pacific (from California) railroads to begin building towards each other. The meeting of these lines at Promontory, Utah, on 10 May 1869, completed the first transcontinental railway line. Indian land along the line's route was annexed for farming and ranching; most devastatingly, the railway brought hunters who quickly slaughtered the vast herds of buffalo upon which the Plains peoples depended.

The east and west coasts of the North American continent were subsequently joined by the meeting of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific lines at Deming, New Mexico, in 1881; by the 1883 completion of the Northern Pacific's line to Puget Sound; by the 1885 completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway's main line to Burrard Inlet, British Columbia (the ‘Pacific Railway’); by the 1893 Great Northern Railway line; by the 1909 Milwaukee Road line; and by the 1915 completion of the Canadian Northern line (now part of the Canadian National Railway system).