What groups helped build the Central Pacific Railroad?

Beginning in 1863, the Union Pacific, employing more than 8,000 Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, built west from Omaha, Nebraska; the Central Pacific, whose workforce included over 10,000 Chinese laborers, built eastward from Sacramento, California.



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Teachers should understand that most of the people who worked to build the transcontinental railroad were immigrants from China and Ireland. These immigrants faced discrimination in the U.S., but their labor made this national achievement possible.

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Beginning in 1863, the Union Pacific, employing more than 8,000 Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, built west from Omaha, Nebraska; the Central Pacific, whose workforce included over 10,000 Chinese laborers, built eastward from Sacramento, California.

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While Chinese workers dominated the railroad workforce in the West, most eastern and southern railroad companies relied on Black Americans to do the back-breaking construction work.

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One of the early and most prominent people making the case for a transcontinental railroad was Asa Whitney. In 1849 he published his ideas on the idea of a railroad that began in Chicago and went to California.

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In 1885 the Central Pacific Railroad was acquired by the Southern Pacific Company as a leased line. Technically the CPRR remained a corporate entity until 1959, when it was formally merged into Southern Pacific.

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Whitney suggested the use of Irish and German immigrant labor, which was in great abundance at the time. Wages were to be paid in land, thus ensuring that there would be settlers along the route to supply produce to and become patrons of the completed line.

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The hiring of Chinese-American workers became a crucial part of the construction of the railroad, and in the end had a profound effect on the United States' development as a nation, its immigration policies, and its Asian-American population.

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He told President Andrew Johnson that the Chinese were indispensable to building the railroad: They were “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.” In a stockholder report, Stanford described construction as a “herculean task” and said it had been accomplished thanks to the Chinese, who made up 90% of the ...

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The idea of a transcontinental railroad originated with Theodore Judah, but his plans were held up by the dispute between the North and South in the pre-Civil War Congress. In 1854 Judah came to California where he built the state's first railway.

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The Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway, also known as the Big Four Railroad and commonly abbreviated CCC&StL, was a railroad company in the Midwestern United States.

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The Central Pacific Railroad Company started construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in Sacramento, California, while the Union Pacific Railroad Company started near the Iowa-Nebraska border. Both companies were promised vast amounts of land and government bonds for each mile of track laid down on the railroad.

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