These surveys extended from the Missouri River to the California State line, and included twenty-five thousand miles of reconnaissances and over fifteen thousand miles of instrumental surveys. They were made almost entirely under army protection, but despite all precaution men were scalped by Indians. Ground for construction was broken at Omaha, with a florid speech by George Francis Train, December 2, 1863, and actual construction began on the Union Pacific very early in 1864. Leland Stanford, on January 8, 1863, had turned the first shovelful of earth at Sacramento for the California end of the undertaking. In nine months the Omaha enthusiasts had completed the first eleven miles of one end of the transcontinental line. The Californians had come to a stand-still with thirty-one miles. Thus the race started slowly; but at its close Jack Casement was laying seven and a half miles of Union Pacific track between sun and sun.
The route the new road followed from the Missouri River had long been famous on the frontier. Spaniards had probably reached what is now Nebraska as early as 1541, but it was more than a hundred years later when Indians on the Mississippi described to Father Marquette the course of the Missouri, and his map showing the Platte flowing into the Missouri is still preserved. White men in 1739 explored the Platte as far as the present city of North Platte in Nebraska, and French traders made a highway of the river for more than a hundred years. The expeditions of Lewis and Clarke, close upon the Louisiana Purchase, opened the country to American influence, and St. Louis became the great outfitting-point for the adventurers and traders who penetrated to the remote regions of the Northwest. In 1812, young Robert Stuart, bound overland from the mouth of the Columbia River with despatches for John Jacob Astor, found himself unhorsed among mountain wastes in what is now Wyoming.
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Thomas C. Durant
Builder of the Union Pacific Railroad
The little party groping half famished toward the head waters of the Missouri stumbled on the North Fork of the Platte River, followed it through the Black Hills, wintered under its cottonwoods on the Nebraska bottoms, and in the spring brought to St. Louis the first definite story of a trip down the line of the future Pacific railroad. In 1825, trappers of the American Fur Company had made headquarters as far west as the Beaver Valley in Wyoming, and Jim Bridger had already tasted of the waters of the Great Salt Lake. In 1820, Jacques Laramie, murdered on the bank of a Wyoming tributary of the Platte, had left his name not alone to that river, but to the plains, the mountains, the peak, the county, the city, and the fort that
