美国的历史受到了英国的影响。在1800年代下半年，在英格兰发明的铁路对美国的西部扩张产生了重大影响。“铁路出生于英格兰，一个拥有茂密的人口的国家，城市之间短距离和大财政资源。在美国有不同的情况，一个巨大的国家稀疏的人口，城市之间的大规模，只有最小的金额。“（“铁路”85）
第一个美国铁路从波士顿，纽约市，费城，威尔明顿，查尔明和萨凡纳（Douglas 23）的大西洋港口始于1830年代。在二十年之内，四条铁路线越过了阿拉伯人，达到了伟大的湖泊的“西方水域”或密西西比州的支流。与此同时，其他线路始于阿巴拉契亚山脉以西，由1850年代中期的芝加哥，圣路易斯和孟菲斯连接到东方。其他线条在西斯丽西比亚之外的西方伸展。国际路线在尼亚加拉，纽约和底特律河之间连接了新英格兰和蒙特利尔和另一个人越过安大略省。在1850年代，北部和南路都开发了Allghenies的东部和西部。然而，直到内战发生在内战之后，这是一个常设铁路桥在俄亥俄州河流中建造。内战结束后，铁路建设的步伐增加了。来自奥马哈，内布拉斯加州的联盟太平洋大厦和加利福尼亚州萨克拉门托萨克拉门托的联盟太平洋大厦已经开始在战争期间建立一个横贯大陆的铁路，以帮助促进民族团结。他们于1869年5月10日在犹他州加入了Promontory，完成了整个大陆的第一根铁路连接。 Before the transcontinental railroad, the Eastern railroads
只有远西部的线路作为奥马哈，内布拉斯加州。西铁路在加州北部和南部的北部有几条线，距离塞拉尼达山脉的墙壁。在这两个网络之间是大约七百英里的平原和山脉的巨大差距。关闭这个差距是许多美国人共享的梦想。商人在拥有整个大陆的全部大陆和使用铁路来满足他们的需求来实现他们所有的钱。浪漫主义者梦想着野生印第安人，侦察员和猎人的发现，当然，金牌。黄金在美国勘探中得到了理想的发现。1849年加利福尼亚州的淘金匆忙再次为寻求黄金而创造了很多兴奋。当内战正在进行时，太平洋铁路成立。在战争结束之前，横贯大的铁路是一家巨型企业，在不情愿的国会和陆军之间争吵，他们对此感到克制（Cooke 254）。 If it had been left to the government, it would have taken another twenty years to complete the transcontinental railroad. However, it was a commercial venture, and it was fortunately fed by the adrenaline of competition. There were two railroad companies building the transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific from the East, and the Central Pacific from the West.
这两家公司在力争打破纪录的赛程中相互竞争。起初，国会热切地推进这个项目，并规定中太海峡在到达加利福尼亚边界时就应该停止(国会里满是东岸人)。1865年，在政府对两家公司提供援助的问题上争论不休之后，横贯大陆铁路的实际建设开始了。然后在1866年，国会决定两家公司应该尽快建造，并在任何地方会合(255)。首先，联合太平洋公司派出了定位小组，追踪铁路线，并通过杀死挡在铁路线上的苏人和水牛来扫清道路。接着是建筑工人，他们轮班工作，将土地平整，每一段最多一百英里。在他们后面是铺设铁轨的工人，每个工人由一万人和同样多的动物组成。对于每英里的轨道，政府从16000美元的平地贷款到48000美元的山地贷款(“铁路”86)。铺设一英里铁轨所需的物资包括40节车厢，用来装载400吨铁轨和木材、枕木、桥梁、燃料和食物，这些都必须在密苏里河上的一个仓库里组装。但联合太平洋公司有两个优势:相对平坦的土地和一条通往东海岸工厂的连续供应线。 It was quite different for the Central Pacific, which had to fetch most of its materials, except timber, by sea, twelve thousand miles around the tip of South America. Another difference between the two companies was their work-forces. The Eastern work gangs were recruited from immigrant Irish, poor Southern whites, and poor Southern blacks, while the Western crews came mostly from China. The Union Pacific was said to be sustained by whisky while the Central Pacific was said to be sustained by tea (Douglas 110). While the Easterners were racing through the prairie, the Westerners were stripping foothill forests, painfully bridging, tunneling, and inching up the mountains. Working summer and winter, it took the Central Pacific two years to hurdle the barrier of the Sierras. A thousand miles back East, the Irish workers frequently fainted in the midsummer heat, but their employers were kept going by the money they would receive from the government upon completion of the transcontinental railroad. With the Westerners over the Sierras, and the Easterners over the Rocky Mountains, the two armies slogged along the sage toward each other. When the two crews came within sight of each other, the Irish turned to their fists to slow down the Chinese. The Chinese resorted to pick axes, which in turn brought the Irish to use their guns. The Chinese finally gave in and the fighting was stopped (Merk 456). On May 10, 1869 the two rails met at a spot in Utah that was named Promontory Point. The crews had laid 1,775 miles of track in just over three years. Five days later, a special Central Pacific train arrived carrying company executives, engineers, and state dignitaries. Three days later, the Union Pacific train came with it’s own load of dignitaries, three companies of infantry, and a regimental band. “It promised to be a gallant and decorative ceremony. But in the course of their labor the crew had collected a more colorful assortment of interested parties: saloon keepers, gamblers, whores, money lenders, odd-job rovers. And these, with the cooks and
来自宿舍列车的洗碗机，弥补了欢迎派对。“（道格拉斯121）五个州沿着官方仪式沿着金银穗派。仪式的所选符号是由加利福尼亚州兰斯坦福的加利福尼亚州长驾驶的金色尖峰。乐队停止玩耍，曾祈祷。电报操作员与旧金山和纽约相连，已准备好发送第一个海岸到海岸评论。这是一个单一句子，“坚持下去，我们已经做过祈祷，”（Merk 461）。然后加利福尼亚州的州长抬起头顶上方的大锤，并将其带下来迎接铁轨。他错过了斯派克，但电报操作员已经派出了纽约，纽约射击了一百枪致敬，费城响了自由贝尔，旧金山文件宣布“美国的吞并”（Cooke 218）。“该国可能将铁路视为一种新颖性和旅游方式，但公司将其视为伟大的平原和愿望的人之间缺失的联系链，或者可以敦促，解决它，”（Cooke229）。 The years 1870-1900 were a period of enormous growth in the United States. During these years, 430 million acres of land were settled, which was more than had been occupied in all preceding American history. A considerable part of this expansion was in the Great Plains (“United States of America” 472). This enormous expansion was the product of a combination of forces. One was the Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act of 1862 was passed by the government to encourage farming in the Mid- West. The government offered any head of family or person over twenty-one, either citizen or alien who wished to become a citizen, a 160 acre section of land. The recipient paid a small fee and agreed to live on the homestead or cultivate it for five years (Merk 236). In addition to the Homestead Act, there was the realization on the part of informed people that the era of well-watered, free land was drawing to a close. A warning had been given in 1880 by the Director of the Census that the era of free land was closing (Horn 130). The swift expansion across the Great Plains was, in part, a rush of American farmers who wanted to take part in free and cheap land in areas that were well watered. A third factor was the sale of land by states at attractive prices. School lands, university lands, and other state lands were put on the market in competition with homesteads.
然而，在这个快速向西殖民化的主要因素是铁路公司。所有这些都渴望将定居者运送到庞大的大草原，以使其作为发展交通的问题而殖民。土地赠款铁路有自己的领域出售。但是，他们也积极宣传联邦政府的自由宅基地。主要目标是建立结算作为创造运费的手段。铁路土地的价格根据五到二十美元或更多英亩的地点和土壤而变化，轻松信用。许多定居者首选有利地位于自由宅基地上的铁路土地。铁路公司，特别是那些拥有土地赠款的公司，是大型平原的殖民者。他们通过在殖民时期殖民期间通过殖民地殖民地在海岸上的公司进行了大规模的工作。伟大的平原以非凡的热情宣传。 The Northern Pacific Railroad kept eight hundred agents in various European countries distributing literature and assisting immigrants. Literature was spread in every important European language, especially to areas in which there were droughts or bad soil. Western railroads had agents in New York City to receive immigrants; they offered special immigrant rates to the West, and they gave new arrivals advice on where to settle and about the best methods of farming. The railroad enterprise was one of the most important aspects of the history of the West since the Civil War, and the reason the story is not emphasized more in summary accounts is that the story has so far been told only for individual railroads. “In and all-out campaign to lure settlers, railroad land offices churned out reams of propaganda that painted the prairies and plains as a veritable paradise.” (Horn 194) Railroads were not always scrupulous in their colonization methods. They permitted their New York agents to use dubious means of enticing immigrants coming off steamboats to settle on their lands. Some were said to have stolen trainloads of immigrants from each other. High-pressure salesmanship was used in disposing of lands to prospective settlers. Rapturous tales were told about what the land would grow. The climate of the plains was misrepresented. Jay Cooke, the financier of the Northern Pacific had weather maps printed in the 1870’s which were altered to show the region a place of warm winters in order to counteract the impression that the region of the Northern Pacific was a harshly cold country. The Northern Pacific was thereafter wittily referred to by newspapers as Jay Cooke’s Banana Belt. Lack of rainfall was known to be a crucial problem on the Western Plains. The whole region is an area of semi-aridity and of climatic cycles. A series of wet years occurs when the annual rainfall is somewhat more that twenty inches; then a dry series will follow, bringing years of droughts. It so happened that the five years prior to 1887 were a wet series on the Great Plains, when Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota had fairly frequent rainfall. The propagandists of the railroads, as a result, either denied the assertion that the Plains were a region of semi- aridity, or contended that the climate was changing for the better. They advanced various theories to explain the change. Plowing the sod was said to produce rain. The stringing of telegraph lines was said to also produce rain. A theory was developed that the noise of civilization, the clanging of the locomotives, etc., lead to the rain. These theories were even repeated by state officials. “The scientists of the federal government were not allowed to
抵消这种宣传。在地质调查的报告中，约翰威斯利鲍威尔有义务，迫使西委会在西委会的坚持下，在他的避孕船上行事，在他的大平原叙述中罢工，每次参考`半熟度’ and substitute the words `semi-humidity.'” (Merk 473) All this propaganda led to even more settlement. A prime example of the effect of the incredible rush of settlement in the Prairie is the growth of the state of Nebraska, specifically Omaha, before and after the coming of the transcontinental railroad.
内布拉斯加州于1867年加入联邦，尽管经历了经济萧条和蝗虫瘟疫，到1890年，该州的人口从大约12万增加到100多万。这种增长在很大程度上是由于该州沿横贯大陆铁路的位置。19世纪80年代，奥马哈成为一个重要的工业和肉类加工中心。铁路连接使这种增长成为可能。牛肉产业是依赖铁路的众多产业之一。当横贯大陆的铁路投入使用时，来自芝加哥的一个名叫约瑟夫·麦考伊的29岁的牲畜商人有了一个想法，那就是牛仔的起源。他计划把牛从南德克萨斯赶到奥马哈的铁路上，同时让牛在两点之间的草地上吃草(库克229)。1870年有了冷藏车厢，牛肉成为东部数百万人饮食的一部分(232)。因此，铁路为中西部和奥马哈市的牧场主创造了一个可持续发展的产业。在19世纪的最后25年，铁路沿线的许多其他小城镇也蓬勃发展起来。 Without the railroad, the homesteads could have only been reached by wagon, which would have discouraged many if not most of the settlers going to become farmers. Unlike the gold miners of the earlier years, the farmers did not dream of getting rich quickly. They wanted to be self-sufficient, and they felt that the land on the Prairie could help them do it. The railroad was an incredible catalyst in the population of the Mid-West and without it the area might still be sparsely populated. The transcontinental railroad proved it’s worth and had a tremendous impact on westward expansion. “In less than thirty years after the Civil War, all across the `enormous gap’ spanned by the railroad, the interior was being conquered and domesticated.” (Cooke 240)
参考书目
Cooke，Alistair。alistair cooke的美国。纽约：Alfred A.Noopf，1977年。道格拉斯，乔治H.都乘坐！美国生活中的铁路。纽约：Paragon House，1992. Horn，Huston。老西方的先驱者。纽约：时间 - 生活书籍，1974年。Merk，Frederick。向西运动的历史。纽约：阿尔弗雷德A.Noopf，1978年。“铁路”。康普顿的百科全书。 1990 edition. “United States of America.” The New Encyclop’dia Britannica. 1990 edition.
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