Customer Reviews

American Experience: The Iron Road [VHS]

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While so much is made of the North-South division that led to a civil war, in the late 1850's the United States was actually three separate entities. The third region was the West Coast, with California admitted to the union in 1850 and Oregon in 1859. There were three ways to travel from the eastern section to the western section and each was very difficult. The "easiest" was to travel by ship around the southern tip of South America, navigating the dangerous Cape Horn. Stormy at the best of times, winter weather made transit almost impossible. However, this was the only way bulk cargo could be transported from one coast to another. A shorter, but far more arduous route was to take a ship to Panama, cross the Panamanian isthmus and then take another ship the remainder of the journey. Although the land route was less than 100 miles, the tropical heat and diseases made this route the worst of the three. The shortest route was over land, but the harsh climate, hostile Indians and rugged mountains also made this difficult. Given all of these problems, then clearly the west coast would not be linked to the remainder of the country until there was a fast, efficient way to move people and cargo from one region to another. Therefore, it is impossible to overstate the value of the transcontinental railroad to the growth of the nation.
Constructing the railroad was an incredible feat of engineering, one of the greatest of the nineteenth century. On the tape, it is compared to the Suez canal, but in my opinion, the level of difficulty of the railroad dwarfs that of the Suez canal. The builders of the railroad literally had to move mountains in order to make way for the tracks. Enormous bridges had to be constructed over deep valleys and tunnels had to be blasted through some of the steepest mountains. And all of this had to be done for thousands of miles.
From the tape, you learn about all of these difficulties and come to appreciate how talented the engineers were who put it together. They were forced to solve problems no one had ever encountered before, and they accomplished it without a great deal of mechanized labor. I had always known that constructing the railroad was hard, but until I watched the tape, I never realized how formidable the challenges were. The men who did the physical labor to build it were clearly some of the toughest that you will ever find anywhere.
The transcontinental railroad united the country more than any war could ever do. For the first time, people and goods could move from one coast to the other in a matter of days, and they could now be united into an economic entity as well as a political one. Once the last spike was driven into the wood, the United States became a world power, with the ability to quickly project power over the entire continent. Second only to the civil war in terms of significance in the history of America in the nineteenth century, the building of the railroad should be emphasized more. Watching this tape will convince you of that.