Hibernian Chronicle 132 years ago: The continent spanned

By Edward T. O’Donnell

One hundred 32 years ago this week, on May 10, 1869, officials and workers of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads gathered in Promontory Summit, Utah, to witness the completion of the transcontinental railroad. The crowd of onlookers, among them many Irish workers and one important Irish politician, roared in appreciation as the ceremonial golden spike was driven. Against enormous odds, they’d just finished one of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th Century.

From the moment of the building of the first railroads in America in the 1830s, people began to dream of a railroad spanning the length of the American continent. One of the most vocal champions of the idea was Galway-born John Conness. As a member of the California legislature in the 1850s and later in the U.S. Senate, he led the way in building support for the project. The one sticking point, however, was that Southerners demanded a southern route to California instead of the Northern route favored in the North. The issue wasn’t settled until the outbreak of Civil War.

On July 1, 1862, Congress, no longer hindered by Southern opposition, passed the Pacific Railroad Act. It authorized two companies, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, to construct a transcontinental railroad. Money, not engineering, was the first challenge, since neither the government nor private interests had sufficient capital to build the road. To pay for the project, Congress granted 6,400 square miles of public land along the proposed route to the companies. The latter would sell the land and use the proceeds to finance the railroad’s construction. Government loans also were authorized on a per-mile basis.

The Central Pacific was to build west to east from California to the Nevada line, while the Union Pacific laid track westward from Omaha, Neb. But in 1866, Congress amended the act to allow the rival railroads to build their lines as fast as they could until they met. This was an enormous incentive to build fast, for every extra mile of track laid brought acres of free land and thousands of dollars in government loans. It meant the transcontinental railroad would be built with astonishing speed, but at a cost of hazardous, corner-cutting engineering and construction methods that sacrificed quality and many lives.

Construction began in 1863. Both the C.P. and U.P. employed huge gangs of workers. Although many blacks, Mexicans, Indians, Germans, English and native-born Americans worked on the line, the two largest groups were Irish and Chinese. For the most part, the C.P. employed the Chinese and the U.P. the Irish. Several Irishmen occupied high-level positions in the project, including most especially James Harvey Strobridge. Born in Ireland, he served as the right-hand man to the C.P.’s Charles Crocker and oversaw every phase of the construction.

Work along the lines was hard, dangerous, and low paying. One popular song along the Union Pacific road in the 1860s was "Poor Paddy, He Works on the Railroad," the refrain of which went:

"Then drill, my Paddies, drill —