Repercussions

The repercussions of the Transcontinental Railroad was vast and varied. The effects could not be characterized in reductive terms as either positive or negative. Rather, the completion of the railroad produced mixed results.

The building of the Transcontinental Railroad indelibly transformed the physical landscape of the American West. The steel and iron tracks that were laid across the country left a permanent imprint on vast stretches of territories, arid deserts, and mountain ranges. One of the clearest manifestations of this new infrastructure is exemplified by the tunnels that were carved through the Sierra Nevada mountains to create a passage for the railway. As construction moved across western territories, railroad companies sourced lumber from local forests and extracted natural resources for supplies, which further contributed to the exploitation—and degradation—of the natural environment. This newly built environment imposed a logic of industrialization and capitalist development that had a rippling effect across various ecosystems.

Group of Prisoners Including Chief Naiche, Geronimo, And Geronimo's Son in Native Dress, and Soldiers in Uniform With Guns Outside Southern Pacific Railroad Train 10 SEP 1886

If the construction of the railroad altered the physical landscape, it had an even more detrimental impact on wildlife. The intricate network of railways, including the Transcontinental Railroad, facilitated the transportation of hunting parties across western territories. Referred to as “hunting by rail,” men brandished .50 caliber rifles and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of buffalo indiscriminately from open windows and atop the roofs of trains.

The decimation of buffalo herds not only impacted local ecologies. It also reverberated across Native American communities, some of whom relied on buffalo as a crucial source of food, as well as for ceremonies and everyday objects for survival. Where native peoples acted as stewards of the natural environment—for example, taking care not to overhunt buffalo—the devastation of buffalo herds accelerated the displacement of Native American communities and the destruction of their everyday ways of life.

Tunnel No. 12, Strong's Canyon

West End Tunnel and workers

With a new mode of faster transportation, the U.S. government encouraged migration and settlement into western territories that were once difficult to access via wagons and other forms of transport. The new settlements of European immigrants and native-born whites often encroached upon lands already inhabited and used by various Native American groups. These homesteads further eroded the already tenuous claims to lands of Native communities.

In terms of the economic repercussions, by the late 1860s railways did not achieve the degree of profitability that railroad magnates had predicted. In fact, after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, the “Big Four” railroad magnates sought to sell the Central Pacific Company, which was bogged down by its own troubled finances. In addition, the Big Four were also mired in debt to the U.S. government and reeling from economic depressions in the 1870s.

Union Pacific Railroad Advertisement for Land in Kansas, May 1867

Union Pacific Railroad Company advertisement for transportation of immigrants to Nebraska 1879