Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, November 19, 1867

The Union Pacific Railroad.

ATTENTION has been frequently called in this journal to the marvels of engineering skill accomplished in the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. No road of its length and magnitude was ever before contemplated, much less attempted; and no such work was ever before prosecuted by the most energetic of men or races, under such adverse circumstances as a war with the barbarous tribes whose country the road traverses, and the present high and unexampled cost of all necessary building materials. Few roads were ever built in a country of greater natural difficulties, for it crosses the two highest ranges of mountains in the country. And yet, in spite of these natural, social, and financial obstacles, five hundred miles of the road have been completed in an incredible short period of time, at once astonishing the scientific and laboring world.

But this very material revolution thus accomplished in the construction of the Pacific Railroad is insignificant compared to that commercial revolution which is to follow, of necessity, its completion. When the line stretches unbroken from Omaha to Sacramento, it will affect not merely the rapid settlement of our vast Western States and Territories; it will not merely influence the tide of German and Irish emigration, swelling it, and facilitating that transfer of energy, industry, and genius from the East to the West which has been going on for scores and scores of centuries; it will not merely affect the cultivation of the wide prairie lands of the West, where corn and wheat grow almost without care, and countless cattle can be grazed and reared without cost; it will not merely develop fully the riches of the vast mining regions of the great mountains, bringing the most extensive mining field of the richest and purest of all the metals in the world within the grasp of the capitalist, the reach of the laborer, the center of civilization; but it is to affect the trade of all the world, and to pour into the lap of this metropolis and this country the riches and labor of the Old World as well as the New. Ten thousand emigrants from China delve in the tunnels of the road through the Sierra Nevada, and fifty thousand from Germany and Ireland have followed it across the Plains. It will in the same way attract hither the capital of the East, and will make America not merely the short route from Asia to Europe, but the stopping point, the mart for it in Europe and Asia, and Americans will be the merchantmen of the world. It will not merely shorten by many hours the various routes for travelers from India and China to Europe, but it will make this country the terminus for the various freight routes of the world, and the Exchange Place for the Universe. Europe will, when this road is completed, come to New York, and San Francisco, and St. Louis, and Chicago, not only for our own corn and wheat as heretofore, but for the teas and silks of China, India, and Japan, which these material advantages will place under the control of our capital.

The road is to be finished in two years. Five hundred miles of the route across the Plains were finished last month; the mountain line across the Sierra Nevada was finished the month before, and the line across the Rocky Mountains and the Humboldt Valley, 419 miles, alone remain to be constructed.—Harper's Weekly.