Indian genocide during the construction of the first transcontinental railway

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

150 years ago, the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in the United States. The implementation of the project became one of the most ambitious scientific and technological achievements of the United States in the 19th century and led to the revival of the national economy. However, construction was mainly carried out in the territories captured from the Indians.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Great Britain was at the forefront of the development of rail transport. It was here that the first railways appeared, carrying out regular horse-drawn transport, and active work was underway to create a locomotive. In 1825, the world's first public steam railway was built between Stockton and Darlington. However, the initiative from the former metropolis was quickly intercepted by the United States. In the United States, in the late 1820s, short steam-powered railways began to be built for industrial purposes. And already in 1830 in the state of Maryland, a road opened for public passenger transport. In 1860, the total length of railways in the United States reached more than 30 thousand miles (about 48 thousand km).

Expansion to the West

The development of the railroad network in the United States in the 19th century was directly related to the territorial expansion of the American state. Initially, British colonists occupied a narrow strip of coastline along the Atlantic Ocean. At that time, the numerical superiority was on the side of the Indians, so the white colonists rubbed themselves into the confidence of the leaders, pitted individual tribes against each other, contributed to the spread of alcohol and infections. Having received reinforcements from overseas, the Europeans began to practice more and more open violence. A number of tribes were completely destroyed.

In addition, the colonists everywhere entered into fraudulent agreements on the ownership of land, which were either signed with unauthorized persons, or contained extremely vague wording. After the formation of the United States, the country's authorities introduced a state monopoly on the ownership of Indian lands. In 1823, the Supreme Court of the United States made a decision, from which it followed that the Indian territories "did not belong to anyone" and could become the property of those colonialists who were the first to "discover" them.

In 1830, just at the beginning of the development of regular rail services in the country, with the entry into force of the Indian Resettlement Act, Native Americans began to be massively displaced west of the Mississippi River. Some tried to resist, but by 1858 the Indians living in the eastern regions were completely defeated. In addition to a small group hiding in the swamps of central Florida, they were deported to what is now Oklahoma. Forced resettlement was accompanied by mass deaths from hunger and disease.

Forced relocation of Indians

Although official Washington has repeatedly given the Indians guarantees that it will not interfere in the life of the peoples living west of the Mississippi, the US government quickly forgot about its promises. As a result of the war of 1846-1848, the United States annexed about half of Mexico's territory, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific coast of California. The power of the official Mexico City, and then of Washington, in the interior regions of the continent was initially nominal.

However, the Americans began to settle down very actively in coastal California. Gold was discovered there in 1848. With the onset of the gold rush, thousands of East Coast poor people who could not afford to travel by sea moved to California in wagons. This angered the Indians, many of whom knew about whites only by hearsay. Conflicts began.

The first transcontinental railroad in the USA globallookpress.com © H.-D. Falkenstein / imageBROKER.com

American fur traders also did not always settle the Great Plains peacefully. Following the gold prospectors and merchants, the military also infiltrated the territories located west of the Mississippi. The Americans no longer hid the fact that they consider the Indian territory as their fiefdom. However, on the wide expanses of the prairies, the question of transport was sharply raised before them. If a developed rail network had already been created to the east of the Mississippi, then the west could only be reached on horseback or in vans.

First transcontinental

The influential American businessman Hartwell Carver was the first to speak publicly about the construction of a railway in the direction of the Pacific Ocean in the 1830s. And after the annexation of California, he made a proposal to the US Congress. Parliamentarians supported Carver's idea with a special charter.

"Like many other transport projects in the United States, preparations for the construction of a new railway were supervised by the military," said in an interview with RT an academician of the Academy of Political Sciences of the Russian Federation, head of the department of PRUE. G. V. Plekhanov Andrey Koshkin.

According to him, in 1853-1855, the US Department of War organized geographic studies of an area with a total area of about 1 million square meters. km. As a result of scientific research, three potential construction routes were developed: the northern one along the Missouri, the central one in the Platte River area and the southern one through Texas. They decided to stop on the central route, which was actively lobbied by the famous American railway engineer Theodore Judah. In 1862, US President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Pacific Railroad Act regulating construction. Over time, the main line was named the First Transcontinental Railway.

Railroad in California, 1876 © National Library of Wales

The implementation of the project was entrusted to two railway companies - Union Pacific and Central Pacific, each of which erected its own section. To finance the construction, the US government issued 30-year government bonds at 6% per annum.

Depending on the complexity of the section, the railway companies were paid $ 16-48 thousand for the construction of a mile of tracks. One of the major shareholders of Union Pacific was the Mormon Church, past whose settlements in Utah the road passed. Former military personnel who participated in the Civil War were recruited as skilled workers for the construction. And laborers en masse recruited Chinese, who were specially imported from Asia.

Central Pacific began construction work directly in 1863, and Union Pacific in 1865. In the course of construction, bridges were erected, which at that time were considered the last achievement of engineering. When laying the tunnels, a new explosive was used - nitroglycerin. It was extremely effective, but unstable, resulting in frequent fatal accidents.

On May 10, 1869, construction was officially completed. At the ceremony, the last crutch made of gold was hammered in. The names of construction managers and railway directors were engraved on it. The length of the First Transcontinental was 3077 km.

The Golden Crutch Driving Ceremony, May 10, 1869 © Yale University Libraries; Wikipedia

The end points of the road were originally the cities of Sacramento and Omaha. Due to the fact that no other transport infrastructure was connected to them, a full-fledged connection between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States was being established for several more years. In 1869-1872, additional highways and bridges were erected across the Missouri River, and since then, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean can be reached directly.

On June 4, 1876, the American railway record was set: the train reached from New York to San Francisco in 83 hours and 39 minutes. A decade earlier, traveling the same route in a van had taken several months.

Predatory Extermination

Meanwhile, railway construction, which was beneficial to white Americans, became a real tragedy for the rightful owners of the continent - the Indians. Invading the prairies in the middle of the 19th century, US citizens encountered fierce resistance from the indigenous people of the Great Plains, who were excellent horsemen and quickly mastered firearms. The Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Comanche tribes developed tactics that allowed them to effectively deter the American colonists for several decades. In the 1860s, the Sioux were able to inflict even several painful defeats on the regular US troops. Washington had to conclude a truce with the Indians on their terms. However, the construction of the First Transcontinental Railway changed a lot.

“Construction has become an annoying factor for the indigenous population. Villages and farms grew along the highway. It became clear that the land in the area of the railway tracks no longer belonged to the Indians. Therefore, they constantly attacked the workers and damaged the canvas,”said Indian historian Alexei Stepkin in a conversation with RT.

However, the biggest tragedy for the indigenous population of the United States, according to experts, was the extinction of the bison associated with the construction of the road, due to the hunting on which the Prairie Indians lived.

“Trains frightened animals, their migration routes were disrupted. Bison have lost their traditional food supply. But most importantly, their predatory extermination began - first by railroad workers, and then by passengers, Stepkin explained.

Bison skulls killed by white hunters © Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

Herds of bison, even during the construction of the road, blocked the movement of the first trains. In addition, the organizers of the construction fed the workers with meat from these animals.

The railroad workers even hired a brigade of hunters, including the famous William Cody, nicknamed Buffalo Bill, who personally killed more than 4,000 buffalo in 17 months. In the early 1870s, enthusiasts tried to initiate restrictions on such hunting in Congress, but to no avail. In 1874, conservationists were still able to lobby for the adoption of the relevant law by Congress, but then President Ulysses Grant personally vetoed it, listening to the military.

“The buffalo hunters have done more in the past two years to address the Indian problem than the entire regular army has done in the past 30 years. They are destroying the material base of the Indians … Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like … and let them kill, skin and sell them until they destroy all the buffalo! - said at a hearing in Washington one of the Indians' worst enemies - General Philip Sheridan.

He was echoed by Colonel Richard Dodge, who owns the words: "The death of every buffalo is the disappearance of the Indians."

The railroad workers, meanwhile, called on passengers of the First Transcontinental to shoot the buffalo directly from the windows of the trains and organized recreational hunting trips. If at the beginning of the 19th century the number of bison in the United States, according to biologists, reached 75 million, then by the end of the century there were less than a thousand of them. And it really was a terrible blow to the Indians.

Train station in Nevada, 1876 globallookpress.com © World History Archive

The War of the Black Hills of 1875-1876 was the last major conflict with the indigenous people of the continent. The Indians were left without food, and the American troops reached a new level of mobility thanks to the railroad. America's rightful owners were partly destroyed and partly herded into barren reservations. According to historians, the number of Indians in the United States from the beginning of colonization until 1900 fell from several million to 250 thousand.