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Cheyennes reconnoitring the first Train on the Union Pacific
From an old Print
opinion there was from an engineering view-point but one national route for a railroad to cross Iowa, the Missouri River and the great plains. The route proposed by him was that along which the Union Pacific was afterward built. It offered the advantage of a great, open road from Omaha to Salt Lake, 600 miles of it up a single valley—that of the Platte. This, in turn, led to the natural pass over the Rockies, the lowest in all the range, and to the continental divide at a point where it lay in a basin 500 feet below the general level instead of on a mountain summit. Any engineer, in General Dodge's opinion, who should fail to avail himself of so rich possibilities should have his diploma taken from him. In designating the Missouri River terminus as he did, Lincoln acted on these views.
The political aspect of extending government aid in the building of the first transcontinental railroad must always remain an extraordinary feature in our national legislation. The civil war alone made such a step possible. The period had rudely brushed aside constitutional and laissez-faire legislators and reasoning, and the men who stood in Congress for action went in this case to the other extreme. The building of a Pacific road had every war argument in its favor. Such a line, it was urged, would bind California more closely to the Northern interest, and would enable the United States more promptly to repel any attack on the coast ports. Moreover, it would enable the government easily to control Indian outbreaks among those tribes still unreasonable enough to object to being exterminated.
It must not be forgotten, however, that during the gloomy days of the civil war Indian outbreaks, whether justifiable or not, wore serious matters to a government struggling to maintain itself; and an argument seeming trivial now might have seemed serious when people were excited or depressed by every rumor and portent. Even in 18G7 General Sherman regarded the completion of the Pacific road as an end to the Mormon question; and it was the real beginning of the end.
The very name used by Congress in creating the corporation, "The Union Pacific Railroad Company," implies a reflection of the Union sentiment of the civil-war period. The use of the word has been ascribed to the "union" of various corporations and plans in the project. But there is undoubtedly more
