The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 20

Reconnecting America: P.T. Barnum
the Central Pacific Railroad and guided
his company as it started building eastward
from Sacramento in 1861. Dodge
was the lead engineer of the Union
Pacific Railroad, and at the same time
begin building tracks heading westward
from Omaha, Nebraska. The two
railways finally met eight years later. 16
Although Dodge was not the only engineer
to take stock of the west side of the
Missouri River for the Transcontinental
Railroad, he convinced President Abraham
Lincoln that the railway “should be
on the road running almost straight out
the forty-second parallel from Omaha,
alongside the Platte Valley until it
reached the Rocky Mountains and then
over the mountains to meet the railroad
coming east from California.” Lincoln
and Dodge, with help from others,
founded and signed off on “the greatest
building project of the nineteenth
century.” 17 Dodge later told William
T. Sherman that the completion of the
Transcontinental Railroad had “advanced
the country 100 years.” 18
The railways’ workforce had as
many as 15,000 on each line, working at
an urgent pace on “the last great building
project to be done mostly by hand.” 19
This sense of urgency and tracking of
time became dominant elements during
the building and completion of the railroad.
The government had set up railway
work as a race—the company that
built more and built quicker got more
financial aid, a concept still relevant in
modern American economics and democracy.
20 Congress gave out massive
public land grants and government
bonds on internal improvements like
the Transcontinental Railroad, 21 which
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