Editorial About the Transcontinental Railroad—Historic Editorial
An editorial is written to state the official position of a newspaper or magazine on an important issue. These essays are often written to convince readers to believe a certain idea or to take a particular action. Historic editorials help us understand what issues were important to a nation or community in the past. The editorial below was written about the Pacific Railroad Line in 1867.
Primary Source
THE GREAT NATIONAL PACIFIC RAILROAD LINE, which is being constructed, with the aid and under the supervision of the United States Government, between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific Ocean, forming with its existing eastern connections a continuous line across the continent, is destined to become one of the most important channels of trade and communications in the world…. It presents the shortest and most practicable route to the Pacific, and must serve four-fifths of all the population west of the Missouri river…Already centres of population dot its length from Omaha to San Francisco, and it seems certain that a chain of great cities must grow up in its path….
…The half million of people in California would speedily jump to five millions upon the establishment of railroad communication….
The people on the Pacific coast are drawn from the East, and are still bound by the strongest ties to the Atlantic States…. [The railroad will] bring them to within from four to six days of the places they knew in their youth. It is to banish a twenty-two days' ocean voyage, with its Isthmus fevers and its shipboard discomforts….
Excerpts from the journal The Galaxy, Volume 4, Issue 8, December 1867.
Background
On May 10, 1869, the last spike of the transcontinental railroad was driven into the ground at Promontory Point, Utah. The railroad now linked the East to the West with thousands of miles of railroad tracks. Rail travel was now faster, easier, and smoother. and the flurry of movement west grew. While the transcontinental railroad was being constructed, people had different opinions about whether the country should spend so much money to build this railroad. The editorial above was published in The Galaxy in 1867.
