In Willa Cather’s novel, A Lost Lady, retired railroad contractor Captain Daniel Forrester proudly says, "We dreamed the railroads across the mountains." Forrester knew that building a railroad demanded backbreaking labor as well as healthy measures of hard cash. A successful railroad enterprise seemed no place for dreamers. But Forrester also recognized that before a share of stock was sold or a mile of track laid there had to be a compelling idea and someone passionate enough to convince others on the merit of that idea.

Asa Whitney, often called the father of the Pacific Railroad, was just such a dreamer. In 1845 he spoke before Congress, advocating a railroad from Lake Michigan to Puget Sound. His plea is frequently cited as the beginning of a long and often heated debate about building a transcontinental railroad, although the idea had been around for a generation.1

Whitney seems an unlikely candidate for the Pacific Railroad’s advocate. A New York businessman who made substantial profit in the China trade, Whitney is an example of someone captured by an idea and obsessed with making it a reality.

Although Whitney refined his plan several times after 1845, its fundamentals remained much the same. He proposed a route that started near present-day Milwaukee and ended at Puget Sound. It would take a northerly track through present-day Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Oregon. Building the line would surely be a vast and expensive undertaking.

Financing always seemed the sticking point in so many railroad schemes. Whitney’s plan was simple: Congress would set aside a strip of land sixty miles wide from Lake Michigan to the Pacific coast. Prospective settlers would buy the land and farm it while also helping build the railroad. The proceeds from the land sales would finance railroad construction. Land not sold by the time the railroad reached the Pacific would be given to Whitney or his heirs to sell for their profit.

The West was an empty space at best and a dangerous wilderness at worst.Whitney’s importance in the history of the railroads lies less in his scheme and more in how he thought the railroad would shape the republic. In 1845 the interior West did not bulk large in his mind. China was the object of his desire. The West was an empty space at best and a dangerous wilderness at worst. Like the creators of the first Northwest Passage, who saw America as a barrier to penetrate, Whitney considered the West an unpleasant geographic annoyance.

Eventually, Whitney reconsidered his ideas. If the West was not Thomas Jefferson’s Garden of the World, perhaps railroad iron could make it so. Whitney came to believe that the railroad could "change the wilderness waste to cities, villages, and richly cultivated fields."2

Whitney’s railroad might also bind east and west into a single nation. Long-standing fears of disunion resurfaced with the territorial acquisitions of the 1840s. What would it mean for the future of the United States if California became an independent republic? What if what is now Washington and Oregon became a sovereign nation with close ties to Canada and the British Empire? Whitney and others were convinced a transcontinental line might be "the iron band" holding the nation together.

But Whitney rightly predicted that there would be a high price to pay. Some would gain while others might lose. Writing in 1846, Whitney predicted that the railroad "would produce a revolution in the situation of the red as well as the white man."3 Employing a divide-and-conquer strategy, Whitney believed the railroad would separate one tribe from another and weaken all native nations.

It is our destiny to accomplish this vast revolution for all mankind. To Whitney, the railroad would help create a world without war. "It is our destiny," he wrote, "to accomplish this vast revolution for all mankind."4 Conflict would cease, prosperity would end poverty, and the promise of domestic tranquility might at last come true. It was as if the locomotive had become the emblem of the Peaceable Kingdom and the American dream. This was the machine in the garden.

Support for the railroad continued to grow, but eventually a bigger issue interfered. In the five years before the Civil War, Congress and the nation were caught up in the debate over the extension of slavery into the territories. The idea of the Pacific Railroad did not die so much as fall into second place.

Disappointed by his failure to win congressional support for his scheme, Whitney quietly left the railroad struggle in 1851. He lived to see his dream fulfilled, however, even though he played no role. He died in 1874, five years after the historic golden spike ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah.

It was not until 1862 that a northern-dominated Congress, goaded by another visionary, passed the Pacific Railroad Act. That visionary was Theodore Judah, a clear-eyed, single-minded engineer who represented California railroad interests. Judah was every bit as determined as Whitney. His great advantages were two: timing, and the financial support of four ambitious Sacramento businessmen - Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford. Known as the Big Four, they provided the cash to fuel Judah’s transcontinental dream. That money and Judah’s persistence carried the day.