“…So Important an Enterprise.” (Part 4 of 4)

The reason for delay was simple; the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 charged President Lincoln with the responsibility of selecting the eastern terminus.  But the President had dawdled.  Whether his procrastination was due to uncertainty or whether the war had so diverted his attention that he was unable to give it serious thought is hard to say.  Whatever the reason, the Union Pacific could not make one inch of progress until this critical detail had been resolved.

As he contemplated a terminus somewhere within a band one hundred miles to the north or south of Council Bluffs, Iowa, the President once again called upon the wise counsel of Grenville Dodge in the spring of 1863.  Dodge offered his advice without hesitation.  Omaha, across the Missouri River from Council Bluffs, he said, was the obvious choice, reiterating that the Platte River Valley offered a six-hundred-mile-long corridor of straightforward, uncomplicated construction to the foot of the Rocky Mountains.  The continental divide in this area could be scaled at elevations around eight thousand feet rather than the eleven-to-thirteen-thousand-foot heights that would be encountered elsewhere in the range.  The real issue that had to be resolved, Dodge maintained, was the road’s financing.  The project was too big and too costly for private investment; somehow the government would need to find a way to help.

It would be several more months before President Lincoln would make his decision, but Dodge’s unwavering conviction regarding the terminus had made a lasting impression.  The Union Pacific held its first board meeting at the end of October, electing John Dix as its president and Thomas (Doc) Durant as vice president.  That’s what really got things started; Durant was a driving force of nature, immediately pressuring Lincoln to make a decision.  He claimed to have surveyors in the Nebraska Territory ready to begin.  “Delay is ruinous.” he had telegraphed his survey chief.  But the survey needed a starting point, a distinct, tangible location from which the ties and rails would one day advance toward the west coast.  Lincoln finally acquiesced, signing an executive order on November 17^th stating that the eastern terminus would be “…the western boundary of the State of Iowa…between the north and south boundaries of…the city of Omaha.”  That would place the terminus in or near Council Bluffs, immediately across the Missouri River from Omaha.  Never mind that, at the time, there was no rail-line extending east out of Council Bluffs to connect with the rest of the country, nor was there a bridge across the wide Missouri River to connect the proposed transcontinental railroad with said nonexistent rail-line.  Those were details that would need to be attended to later.

For now, Doc Durant had what he wanted, demanding that the Union Pacific conduct its own groundbreaking ceremony to distinguish “…so important an enterprise.”  Even as the first spade of soil was turned, as the dignitaries strutted before the crowd, speeches were recited, and communiques from governmental officials read, the Union Pacific’s surveyor was identifying and exploring optional routes, some of them outside of the north and south boundaries of the city of Omaha; so much for following Lincoln’s dictum.

As eager as Durant was to push forward, it would be another eighteen months before the first rail for the eastern terminus would be laid, financing as great an issue for the Union Pacific as it was for the Central Pacific, that and the meddling of Doc Durant in finalizing the rail bed’s actual route.  There was, after all, more to consider than what might appear to be the most direct route.  For every mile of track laid, the railroads would receive grants for land on each side of the route.  Anyone conniving to maximize profits may have thought it financially prudent to consider which route offered the most promising land grants.  But that December day in 1863 marked a beginning of an endeavor that would eventually end in the race of the century, a race between two railways whose officials were bent on gobbling up as much real estate as possible, and in so doing would link the east coast with the west, accelerating the growth of the nation to all points in between.