Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
1869
The “golden spike” is hammered in at Promontory Point, Utah, completing the first transcon-
tinental railway link in America between the Atlantic and the Pacific. (In Canada, a similar link was
made in 1885.)
1869
The Suez Canal opens, a 101-mile waterway connecting the eastern Mediterranean to the Red
Sea. Completed ten years after work began under the direction of French engineer Ferdinand de
Lesseps (1805-94), the canal cuts more than four thousand miles off the sea route from Great Bri-
tain to its colony in India. An attempt by de Lesseps to build a canal across Panama ended in finan-
cial scandal and de Lesseps, once an international hero, was ruined.
1869
American geologist John Wesley Powell leads the first expedition down the Colorado River
through the Grand Canyon. A second expedition in 1871, financed by Congress and better equipped
than the first, carefully maps and studies the area.
1870
Mont Cenis Tunnel, the first major railway tunnel, is completed in the Alps.
Geographic Voices
Henry M. Stanley at Lake Tanganyika, 1871
“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
“Yes,” said he, with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly.
I replace my hat on my head, and he puts on his cap, and we both grasp hands, and then I say
aloud:
“I thank God, Doctor, I have been permitted to see you.”
He answered, “I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.”
These were the words reportedly spoken by Welsh-born soldier, journalist, and adventurer Henry M.
Stanley upon meeting Dr. David Livingstone near Lake Tanganyika in 1871. Reported as dead by some
of his followers, Livingstone had become the object of an international search and it was Stanley, a brash
adventurer working for a New York newspaper, who finally found him. Stanley went on to follow in Liv-
ingstone's footsteps as one of the greatest of African explorers.
Known to the natives as Bula Matari, or “Breaker of Stones,” Stanley eventually made three epic jour-
neys in Africa. First he crossed the continent from east to west, proving that the Congo and the Nile Rivers
were not connected and later verifying Speke's claim for Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile. Working
with Belgian King Leopold II, Stanley also explored the Congo region in an attempt to set up a colony
there. And finally in his most grueling expedition, he set out with a large rescue party to relieve Emin
Pasha, governor of Egyptian Sudan. Supposedly isolated and threatened by the Islamic armies of the Mahdi
that had routed the British in the famous disaster at Khartoum, Pasha greeted Stanley's decimated party
and informed the explorer he didn't want or need to be rescued.
1872-76
The British steam vessel HMS
Challenger
makes a round-the-world voyage, the first
oceanographic survey of its kind.
1872
The United States Geological Survey is founded at the urging of John Wesley Powell. A civil-
ian agency charged with geological and geographical exploration, the USGS will also undertake the
mapping of the entire United States.
