HOW IT ALL BEGAN - All Aboard: The Complete North American Train Travel Guide - page 9

prove feasible. Probably the best-known naysayer of the time was
Daniel Webster, who described the West as a “region of savages
and wild beasts, of deserts of shifting sands and whirlwinds of
dust, of cactus and prairie dogs.”
Nevertheless, President Abraham Lincoln decided to move
ahead with the transcontinental railroad and signed the Pacific
Railway Act in 1862. Although foresight and vision were no
doubt involved, the main reason for the decision was a very real
concern that California, which had become our 31st state in
1850, would use the Civil War as an excuse to leave the Union
and become a separate nation. Then, too, with the Gold Rush
in full swing, there was always the threat of attack by a foreign
power. Without a transcontinental railroad, the United States
could never get troops or supplies to California in time to deal
with that potential problem.
When the work finally started, it was certainly in earnest—in
spite of the fact that the Civil War had begun. The Union Pacific
Railroad headed west from Omaha, Nebraska, while the Central
Pacific (CP) Railroad began in Sacramento, California, and went
east. The CP had problems from the outset. Most of the able-
bodied workers were busily mining gold, and those who were
recruited proved to be largely unreliable. Finally, as a desperate
last resort, the railroad hired Chinese laborers. As it turned out,
they were much better workers. During the six or more years of
construction, the Central Pacific used a total of 10,000 workers,
of which 90 percent were Chinese.
It was tough, dangerous work over terribly difficult terrain.
In some areas, laborers were suspended from cliffs by ropes in
order to hack the roadbed out of the mountainside. While dig-
ging the Summit Tunnel in the Sierras, work crews had to blast
through 1,600 feet of granite so hard that in spots they were able
to progress just one foot a day. A new explosive, nitroglycerin,
speeded the work, but in its early form it was extremely unsta-