Building the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads harmed and displaced scores of American Indian tribes, including the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Shoshone, and Paiute, by altering natural resources or taking native lands.
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Railroads had a significant impact when they were introduced to the American West in the 1870s. Rail access spurred white migration and land occupation, altered the cattle industry, and affected the soil ecosystem.
The railroad fueled the conflict with the Native Americans of the Plains, induced growth in population and economy in previously established urban areas, and lastly expanded the lands that were used for agriculture.
Towns and cities that sprung up along the railroad further encroached upon what had been wild areas. And the railroad and other rail routes that followed made it easy for large numbers of hunters to travel westward and kill millions of buffalo.
And the railroad and other rail routes that followed made it easy for large numbers of hunters to travel westward and kill millions of buffalo. That slaughter impacted Native Americans, who had hunted buffalo in moderation, and weakened their resistance to settlement of the west.
Answer and Explanation:However, two industries benefited the most from the Transcontinental Railroad. Those were cotton and cattle. Railroads made it possible for cotton farmers in the east to ship their products to the western frontier quickly.
For immigrants to the United States, the Transcontinental Railroadpresented an opportunity to seek their fortunes in the West. There, they found more opportunity than the port cities of the East Coast, where discrimination kept immigrants living in urban squalor.
Good and badThe railroad is credited, for instance, with helping to open the West to migration and with expanding the American economy. It is blamed for the near eradication of the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the decimation of the buffalo and the exploitation of Chinese railroad workers.
They gave the opportunity of secure jobs to millions of Indians and enabled many of them to acquire new skills. They helped the development of the trade union movement. They laid the foundations of the large Indian middle class. They brought sophisticated technology to the sub-continent.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, U.S. railroad companies were expanding at a breakneck pace, straining to span the continent as quickly--and cheaply--as they could. The work was brutally difficult, the pay was low, and workers were injured and killed at a very high rate.
As early as 1868 most western railroads established profitable land departments and bureaus of immigration, with offices in Europe, to sell land and promote foreign settlement in the western United States.
The work was tiresome, as the railroad was built entirely by manual laborers who used to shovel 20 pounds of rock over 400 times a day. They had to face dangerous work conditions – accidental explosions, snow and rock avalanches, which killed hundreds of workers, not to mention frigid weather.