Another figure had taken his place in a procession of dreamers that stretched back to the advent of steam railroading. Asa Whitney’s predecessors, each of them urging that the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America be connected by twin ribbons of iron, were a fascinating and varied lot.1
It has been said that in 1819—six years after primitive steam engines were first used in Britain to haul coal, and ten years before the first real Iron Horse to reach America was given a trial run near Honesdale, Pennsylvania—the South Carolinian engineer Robert Mills, architect of the Washington Monument and other federal structures, proposed a “steam carriage” to run from the head of the Mississippi Valley to the Valley of the Columbia. Mills was a protégé of Thomas Jefferson and a student of Benjamin Latrobe, but despite his connections, his steam carriage idea was studiously ignored in 1819.
The merest suggestion of the idea of a transcontinental railroad surfaced in 1830, around the time that the first American steam locomotive, the Tom Thumb, was designed and built by Peter Cooper and employed on a thirteen-mile track between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland. A pamphlet was published by William C. Redfield, primarily urging that a “Great Railway” be constructed to connect the Atlantic States with the valley of the Mississippi. Redfield looked back in disgust at the vast expenditures of the War of 1812 and stated with confidence that an amount so freely and wastefully spent then could be used, in 1830, to build a rail route not only to the Mississippi but even all the way to the Pacific.2 But two years later, after Redfield and his plan sank out of sight, the year that the former Philadelphia jeweler and bookbinder Matthias Baldwin began constructing Old Ironsides—the first of a long line of Baldwin locomotives—residents of Dunkirk, New York, convened a meeting at the Dunkirk Hotel on January 10, 1832. These citizens of Chautauqua County on the shore of Lake Erie resolved that “among the many reasons why a Railroad from the Hudson to Lake Erie should pass through the southern tier of counties [is that] it would be a strong and powerful link in a Railway to the valley of the Mississippi, and finally to the Pacific Ocean.”3
It is likely that in gamely envisioning the commerce of the world passing through tiny Dunkirk, these burghers might claim credit for the first outright suggestion of a transcontinental railroad. But their place in our procession of dreamers is theirs only by dint of a matter of weeks. On February 6, 1832, a Michigan territorial newspaper, the Western Emigrant of Ann Arbor, published the first lengthy statement on the subject. Samuel Dexter, the editor, wrote,
It is in our power…to open an immense interior country to market, to unite our Eastern and Western shores firmly together, to embrace the whole of the fur trade, to pour those furs into India and in return to enrich our interior with the spices and silks and muslins, and teas and coffee and sugar of that country. It is in our power to build up an immense city at the mouth of the Oregon, to make it the depot for our East India trade and perhaps for that of Europe—in fact to unite New-York and the Oregon by a railway by which the traveller leaving the city of New-York shall, at the moderate rate of ten miles an hour, place himself in a port right on the shores of the Pacific.
Leaving aside the question of what utility furs would have on the Indian subcontinent, Dexter’s plan was quite detailed for its time. “The expense of it would not surpass one year of war,” he supposed—$30 million—and the route could be completed in six years. If the government would not build it, he hoped it would allow a private company to do it with a grant of three million acres of public land. “It is one of those great projects,” Dexter pronounced, “which none but a great nation could effect—but peculiarly adapted to the enterprising character of the people of the United States.”4
Railways had assuredly taken hold in the minds of Americans. The country’s first passenger service was under way on the Baltimore and Ohio, to be joined by the Philadelphia and Columbia, the Memphis and Charleston, the Boston and Worcester, the Lexington and Ohio, the New York and Harlem. The central patent office began to register a multitude of technological breakthroughs, the most far-reaching of which was Robert Livingston Stevens’s system. In a burst of brilliance he conceived a flat-topped, T-shaped iron rail and a flanged wheel. These would replace the English-style, L-shaped rails and plain wheels which severely limited the stability, speed, and weight of trains. (Earlier attempts at employing rails made of wood, to which were fastened iron straps, were proving themselves to be extremely dangerous when the wooden rails warped off their beds, sometimes impaling moving railroad cars. Stevens spiked his T-rails to hardwood ties placed perpendicular to the track. Previously stone blocks had been used to support the rails, which reared up out of the ground at the first frost. Upon this system of T-rails, flanged wheels, and wooden cross-ties all further innovations were based—the counterbalancing cowcatcher and swiveling wheel trucks, improved boiler systems, and safety measures such as headlamps and steam whistles.5
Despite the Great American Desert and the lack of any firm Pacific Coast foothold, observers of the burgeoning railroad scene watched the developments and the chartering of more eastern enterprises—the Boston and Albany, the Philadelphia and Reading, the Central of Georgia, the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston—and some took their place in the procession of transcontinental dreamers. Dr. Samuel Barlow took up the cause in 1833, in the Intelligencer. Three years later arrived a summer number of the literary monthly The Knickerbocker Magazine in which Lewis Gaylord Clark (the editor of Bryant, Irving, Longfellow, and Lowell, and soon to become the bitter literary antagonist of Poe) asserted fathership of the idea. In the next year the Panic of 1837, variously called “the State Public Improvements Follies” and “the Great Land Speculation Frenzy,” bankrupted a number of states and severely trimmed the number of hopeful railroad companies, but others continued to hope: the Erie and Kalamazoo, the Richmond and Petersburg, the Michigan Central and Southern. In 1838 the Reverend Samuel Parker, a pioneer Protestant missionary working the Oregon Trail to the Columbia, published his Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains, which stated that a transcontinental railroad was entirely practicable.
Then there was the Welshman John Plumbe. As a boy he had emigrated to America and worked on a railway survey party in the Pennsylvania Alleghenies before settling in Dubuque, Wisconsin Territory, in 1836. Plumbe contributed to a number of eastern and local journals under the nom de plume of “Iowaian.” In the Iowa News of March 24, 1838, “Iowaian” called for a rail connection between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River, via Dubuque. This unmodest proposal grew during subsequent town meetings and petition-writing sessions. Finally the good citizens of Dubuque, with their eyes on gaining access to unsettled agricultural land, the Mississippi Valley fur trade, and north-central lead mines, composed a congressional memorial announcing their intention to complete an “Atlantic and Pacific Railway.” Some weeks later congressional delegate George Wallace Jones submitted to the House of Representatives a petition “praying for the survey of a route for a railroad from the Mississippi river, at Du Buque, to Milwaukie, Wisconsin Territory.”
“I was amazed at the temerity of my constituents,” Jones recalled many years later, “in seriously sending me such an unheard-of prayer. Nevertheless, I felt in duty bound to present the petition, and did so, when it produced a great laugh and hurrah in the house, members singing out to me that it would not be long before my constituents would ask Congress to build a railroad to the moon.”6
Though the Iowans’ motion in 1838 resulted in some $2,000 being appropriated for a railroad survey between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi, their part in an “Atlantic and Pacific Railway” was not to be, although John Plumbe did not know this when he produced, the following year, Sketches of Iowa and Wisconsin (“one of the finest domains that nature ever offered to man”), in which he predicted a “free Railway, unparalleled in extent; and forming, when completed, the greatest thoroughfare in the world!”7
John Plumbe took his place in the growing procession—although, as will be seen, he would later attempt to push his way to the front of the line. Meanwhile, in 1840, the total length of American railways grew to 3,328 miles, nearly twice that of all of Europe’s. If Mr. Samuel Dexter of the Ann Arbor Western Emigrant was still at work, he would surely have called that a testament “to the enterprising character of the people of the United States.”
Enter Asa Whitney, fresh from China and full of ideas, to join our group, but no sooner had his memorial been registered as Document No. 72 of the Twenty-eighth Congress than another figure—a slightly shady figure—appeared. This was Mr. George Wilkes, a freebooting New York editor who had worked for a number of scandal sheets. His literary works included The Mysteries of the Tombs: A Journal of Thirty Days Imprisonment in the New York City Prison for Libel (1844) and Life of Babe, the Pirate, about a miscreant whom Wilkes met in jail. Having heard about Whitney’s proposal when he emerged from prison, Wilkes hastily drafted his own memorial “to meet the demand of the public.”8 It emerged in The History of Oregon, Geographical and Political, a catchall of hastily digested material on the northwest quadrant. In it, he claimed that the project of a national railroad, “though generally denounced as visionary and impracticable, has long been the author’s favorite idea.”9
On the day before James K. Polk was to be inaugurated, March 3, 1845, Whitney’s plan was tabled in the House Committee on Roads and Canals. Robert Dale Owen, congressman from New York, said he thought the subject was important—but it “ought to obtain the careful and deliberate attention of Congress” at a more convenient time. Owen added that the railroad memorial should have included a specific deadline for construction, that more guarantees were needed to limit speculation on the western lands in question, and that he assumed the military would be required to guard work crews in the wilderness. Finally, Owen said he was worried that building a railroad to the disputed Oregon Country would antagonize the British. One day later such concern was moot, as the newly inaugurated President Polk delivered his bellicose address in which England was notified that soon the Stars and Stripes would wave over all of Oregon, from sea to shining Rocky Mountains.10
Seeing that the political climate, belligerent as it might have appeared, favored discussion of the Pacific railroad, Whitney would not be daunted by the mere setback of having his memorial tabled. Instead, he stepped up his publicity campaign. He sent a letter on April 23 to the National Intelligencer—a letter widely reprinted in other newspapers with favorable editorial comment. “It is my intention,” Whitney announced, “to pass over, examine, and partially survey seven or eight hundred miles of the proposed route for the Railroad from Lake Michigan to the Pacific.” He planned to set out in late May from New York for Green Bay, Wisconsin Territory, proceed down Lake Michigan’s shore to Milwaukee and thence westward to the Missouri River. Whitney, now forty-eight, invited “young gentlemen of high respectability and education,” especially representatives of the South, to join him in the exploration. “The excursion will be pleasant, beneficial to health and useful in the knowledge to be gained of that vast country,” Whitney wrote, “and, should the project for the railroad succeed, those who now accompany me can be usefully and advantageously employed in the great work.”
Whitney was under way on June 2 with a number of positive newspaper clippings about his trip already in hand; he lost no opportunity to either write home himself or persuade others to do it. The New York Tribune soon published its Wisconsin correspondent’s report of Whitney’s arrival. “Our little Town has been honored with a visit from the ‘Whitney Exploring Expedition,’” he said.
The party, consisting of the “Projector” and eight young men lodged with us last night and left here this morning en route to Prairie du Chien. They go today to Fond du Lac, where I learn they spend tomorrow (the Sabbath) with governor Dodge. They have chartered for the transportation of themselves and baggage, from Milwaukee to Prairie du Chien, two wagons, one with steel springs and box like your City furniture wagons, the other a common lumber wagon. Several others are expected to join them at Galena and other points, and at Prairie du Chien arrangements are to be made to supply them all with Indian Ponies, and outfits for the prosecution of their journey Westward. The party seem to be in the finest spirits—have each of them a coarse broad-brimmed straw hat, and with the exception of the Hero, guns of various calibre, with all the implements of sportsmen, and long-legged boots, India Rubber coats, blankets, etc.—according to their various tastes. The beards of the various “Boys” are now of a little more than a week’s growth, and they are bound not to shave until they get back.11
By July 1, Whitney’s little group was in Prairie du Chien. At first they were slowed because only one “laboring man” accompanied them to do the heavy work; then they were daunted for lack of a guide across the increasingly unpopulated prairies ahead. Fifty miles later, at Fort Atkinson, they were still without a guide. Whitney was reluctant to lead the young gentlemen into “probable dangers and sure hardships and fatigues,” but they insisted they could continue. Unused to any labor before, “they never flinched,” Whitney wrote, but “were ready to wade through mud, water and grass to their necks, with their provisions on their heads, to swim rivers, to fell trees for bridges, and other fatigues necessary for the accomplishment of our object.”12 Apparently all this and more was necessary. “We have traveled only 10, 13, and 17 miles a day, since we left the Mississippi, on account of the heat,” one young college graduate wrote. “In crossing the streams we sometimes had to unload the wagon two or three times a day, and lift it over by hand. Some of us have enjoyed the luxury of sleeping over night in wet clothes, from standing in the mud and water waist deep to lift out the wagon. This, however, we regard as only one of the varieties of our prairie life.”13
In one perhaps apocryphal encounter with a large contingent of Sioux, the group was treated to a feast of baked dog. One elder offered his daughter in marriage to Whitney, who chivalrously refused on the grounds that the whites’ tribe frowned on hurried marriages.14
From Fort Atkinson on the Turkey River, Whitney led his men, with compass and sketchy map in hand, across the various branches of the Cedar—where the forests diminished to almost nothing—to Clear Lake, to a branch of the St. Peter, to the Des Moines, by the headwaters of the Little Sioux and the branches of the Calumet, the Vermillion, the Jaques, until finally they arrived at “the great Missouri,” some fifteen miles below the big bend. “A great part of the country over which I passed,” Whitney said later, “had never before been traversed except by savages.” From the Mississippi to the Missouri they had walked, ridden, and swam some five hundred miles of rolling prairie—“the finest country upon the globe,” Whitney rhapsodized, “capable of sustaining more than three times the population of the same space in any other part of the globe…and undoubtedly the most healthy country in the world.”15 He had never found an atmosphere so pure, he wrote in a circular distributed and immediately printed by many newspapers in New York and in most of the country’s large population centers. The soil was as rich as it could be; he had not seen even one-half acre of bad land. All a farmer had to do, he promised, was to plow, plant, and gather his crops. “I have found all I desired,” he exulted,
and far more than I expected when I set out…. If Congress will give me the lands, in a very few months the work shall be commenced, and far sooner than I have dared to hope, it will be completed—when we shall have the whole world tributary to us—when the whole commerce of the vast world will be tumbled into our lap—when this vast and now useless waste and wilderness (and it ever must be so, without this road) shall become, not only the thoroughfare of the vast world, but its garden, feeding, clothing, comforting and enlightening millions, who are now starving, homeless, naked, ignorant and oppressed; and who can oppose such a work?16
While Whitney and his intrepid young assistants had traversed through an oppressive summer heat across the “useless waste and wilderness” of present-day central Iowa, meeting only encampments of Sioux and little to remind them of the East, it might have cheered the former merchant-turned-railroad-campaigner to know that he had already attained a national stature. His dispatches no sooner arrived in a newspaper office than they were typeset and placed on the next edition’s first page. They attracted much attention and comment—the lands he described sounded as bountiful as those in Oregon and California. A line more than eight hundred miles long had once again been drawn toward the Missouri and the emptiness beyond, at a time when tens of thousands had felt their restlessness stirring. And Whitney was not the only wilderness traveler to be abroad during that spring and summer; by August, John C. Frémont and his armed contingent were four months west of St. Louis and bound for the Pacific slope, thinking less about how the approaching snows might block mountain passes and more about the ripe plum of California. With Mexican-American relations deteriorating rapidly—Mexico had broken diplomatic ties as its neighbor prepared to annex Texas—President Polk had sent General Zachary Taylor into the Southwest to defend a line “on or near the Rio Grande.” And that August—as Whitney toiled across the prairies, as Frémont struggled over the mountains, as Taylor inspected his pickets and spat into the Rio Grande, as some five thousand American settlers in Oregon clamored for attention and eyed their few British neighbors with arrogance, a new term was coined in the East and spread with amazing rapidity. “Our manifest destiny,” wrote John Louis O’Sullivan in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, “is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”17
A steamboat from Fort Leavenworth carried Asa Whitney to St. Louis on September 19, 1845. He had been kneeling for twenty-six days in a canoe down the Missouri to the fort, and he arrived in St. Louis eager to make new converts. “Who can oppose such a work?” he asked all who would listen. “I have not exaggerated the results to flow from it. If you or any other intelligent man will calmly and deliberately look over this subject, you will, you must be convinced that it is not chimerical.” He could begin ticking off the benefits on his fingers. “No man’s rights to be abridged,” he would say, “no man’s taxes increased, and not even one cent asked for from any man. All I ask is, that which is now a great part useless, and ever must be without this road.” It was not a sectional question, it had nothing to do with politics, he would say. All would benefit. “It is no stock jobbing or gambling scheme,” he would reassure those burned in the Panic of 1837, “there being no company to manage, or stock to speculate upon, no one can be deceived or frauded.”18 Who could oppose such a work? Whitney could find none in St. Louis. “I find all here in favor of my project,” he wrote home. Yet he fretted; the Congress would begin a new session in just over two months and it was imperative that the question be settled soon. “The lands are fast being taken up, from the Lake to the Mississippi,” he wrote, “and will soon be so much so as to defeat the project,” for his enterprise depended on a supply of public lands along his proposed route. Iowa would soon be made a state, and Wisconsin. Oregon, too, was “entirely dependent” on the road.19
It was time for action.
He had planned to go from St. Louis through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, to New York—all the way cornering newspaper editors, buttonholing politicians, persuading ministers, and holding forth in gatherings large and small. But a national convention was to be held in Tennessee in November, in which would gather railroad fanatics from all over: monomaniacs in Memphis. Whitney changed his plans and, towing a correspondent from the New York Tribune, he took a southbound steamboat. “It is but an act of justice to Mr. Whitney,” the reporter wrote, “to state that his proposition meets with decided favor from the western people, and his amiable and communicative manner, his moderate and well-directed enthusiasm, make him immensely interesting to all on board.”20 What held the Westerners’ interest was the fact that a local politician by the name of Stephen A. Douglas had leveled his sights on the railroad projector. As chairman of the House Committee on Territories and as a vigorous expansionist, Douglas published a pamphlet in which he objected to Whitney’s proposed route. The pamphlet found its way on board before the steamer left St. Louis. What was needed was a proper survey, not a schoolboy’s jaunt o’er the plains, Douglas intimated. And what about California? Surely with growing numbers of American farmers in that Mexican territory its manifest destiny lay in the Union. Finally, Whitney’s projected path was too far north, the Illinois congressman complained; it should not begin at Milwaukee—it should originate in, well, Chicago.21
Asa Whitney’s replies to these objections were tested on his fellow passengers—including, possibly, a tragedian named Booth who was on board (it would have been Junius Brutus—father of John Wilkes and Edwin Thomas Booth). The survey would come later under competent hands, Whitney answered; his expedition had intended to assess the public lands for agriculture, to form a picture of where building materials such as stone and wood were to be found, and see how many bridges would be necessary. As to California—why, by the time his rail crews were through a pass in the Rockies, both California and Oregon would probably be part of the Union. “The road can then extend to either point on the Pacific,” Whitney would have exclaimed, “the distance from the pass being the same.” As to an eastern terminus, the open lands decided where the route would begin, not the sectional interests of one politician.22
As the excitement of friendly debate over the Pacific railroad rose on the steamboat, the waters of the Ohio River receded, detaining Whitney until the Memphis Railroad Convention was well under way. Although he was able to persuade many dignitaries from the various states that his plan had merit, he was too late to maneuver it before the delegates. The convention adjourned without much being decided, and Whitney returned to New York and began to draft a new memorial to take to Washington.
