The Railroad, part 12

Whitney used up seven years of his life in an effort to bring about a railroad reaching the west. But, at last, he gave up his dream and retired to his dairy farm at Locust Hill near Washington.

Not until August of 1853, did President Franklin Pierce send the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W. Manypenny, to visit the Indian country to meet with the various tribes to begin negotiations with them to gain their assent for the territorial government to lay a railroad and to extinguish the Indians' title to the necessary lands. But Manypenny, perhaps wisely, did not go anywhere near the Indians who resided in the proposed parallel intended for a transcontinental railroad, an area mainly occupied by the Sioux. Instead, he visited such tribes as the Omaha, Oto, Missouri, the Sauk and Fox, the Kickapoo, Delaware, and Shawnee. These were tribes that had, at an earlier time, been driven across the Mississippi to live in new lands with the promise that this land would be theirs "as long as the grass shall grow or the waters run."

Manypenny did his work well, as well as he did it. He persuaded the Delawares to cede all of their land except eighty acres to be reserved for each tribal allottee. Eventually, with the assistance of the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs, the Delawares and Potawatomies were swindled out of the rights to hundreds of thousands of acres of tribal land, with the Delawares finally being forced to surrender all of their land and be driven to Indian Territory. The Sauk and Fox tribes ceded four hundred square miles of land.

The United States Civil War came, giving some respite to the Indians whose home and hunting grounds lay in the path of the railroad. But with the wars' end, railroad construction resumed in full force, especially across the Kansas Plains. This was the heartland of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. And from 1868 through 1869 Indian resistance reached a peak. This period of time also saw Lieutenant-Colonel George Armstrong Custer arrive at Fort Riley, Kansas to begin organizing the Seventh Cavalry in order to drive the Plains Indians from the path of the railroad.

Now the race was on to complete the railroad. The Union Pacific Company was given until July 1, 1876, which was the centennial of the republic, to have the tracks reach the western boundary of Nevada Territory,

Go To Page: 1 2 3