Sheridan was soon able to mount the kind of offensive he desired. As the railways expanded, they allowed the rapid transport of troops and supplies to areas where battles were being waged. The Army’s troops were well equipped for fighting against conventional enemies, but the guerrilla tactics of the Plains tribes confounded them at every turn. The consequence was that every engagement was a forlorn hope.” Philip Henry Sheridan, assuming Sherman’s command, took to his task much as he had done in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War, when he ordered the “scorched earth” tactics that presaged Sherman’s March to the Sea.Įarly on, Sheridan bemoaned a lack of troops: “No other nation in the world would have attempted reduction of these wild tribes and occupation of their country with less than 60,000 to 70,000 men, while the whole force employed and scattered over the enormous region…never numbered more than 14,000 men. Cavalry in Wyoming, scalping and mutilating the bodies of all 81 soldiers and officers, Sherman told Grant the year before, “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” When Grant assumed the presidency in 1869, he appointed Sherman Commanding General of the Army, and Sherman was responsible for U.S. Outraged by the Battle of the Hundred Slain, where Lakota and Cheyenne warriors ambushed a troop of the U.S. Grant, “we are not going to let thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress” of the railroads. William Tecumseh Sherman’s first postwar command (Military Division of the Mississippi) covered the territory west of the Mississippi and east of the Rocky Mountains, and his top priority was to protect the construction of the railroads. But as the Gold Rush, the pressures of Manifest Destiny, and land grants for railroad construction led to greater expansion in the West, the majority of these treaties were broken. government had ratified nearly 400 treaties with the Plains Indians. For in its wake, the lives of countless Native Americans were destroyed, and tens of millions of buffalo, which had roamed freely upon the Great Plains since the last ice age 10,000 years ago, were nearly driven to extinction in a massive slaughter made possible by the railroad.įollowing the Civil War, after deadly European diseases and hundreds of wars with the white man had already wiped out untold numbers of Native Americans, the U.S. Ten millions of emigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years.… This is the grandest enterprise under God!” Yet while Train may have envisioned all the glory and the possibilities of linking the East and the West coasts by “a strong band of iron,” he could not imagine the full and tragic impact of the Transcontinental Railroad, nor the speed at which it changed the shape of the American West. Not long after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, railroad financier George Francis Train proclaimed, “The great Pacific Railway is commenced.… Immigration will soon pour into these valleys. Business was suspended in Chicago as people rushed to the streets, celebrating to the sounding of steam whistles and cannons booming.īack in Utah, railroad officials and politicians posed for pictures aboard locomotives, shaking hands and breaking bottles of champagne on the engines as Chinese laborers from the West and Irish, German and Italian laborers from the East were budged from view.Ĭelebration of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, May 10, 1869. ![]() Bells were rung across the country, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. In City Hall Park in Manhattan, the announcement was greeted with the firing of 100 guns. After more than six years of backbreaking labor, east officially met west with the driving of a ceremonial golden spike. Durant, Sidney Dillon, John Duff, Union Pacific Railroad,” and trumpeted news of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The telegram was signed, “Leland Stanford, Central Pacific Railroad. The point of junction is 1086 miles west of the Missouri river and 690 miles east of Sacramento City. The last rail is laid the last spike driven the Pacific Railroad is completed. on May 10, 1869, announcing one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of the century: The telegram arrived in New York from Promontory Summit, Utah, at 3:05 p.m. ![]() ![]() A pile of American bison skulls in the mid-1870s.
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