For many Americans, railroads and the West seemed the embodiment of the American dream. Louis symbolized progress, prosperity, and the promise of the future. Trains and tracks out beyond Chicago and St. opening up a great new artery of traffic, and bringing in its train joy and gladness for thousands of our people.” Joy and gladness were invisible emotions, but Cox assured his Seward County friends that a new railroad was “building up three new villages along the way, and infusing new life and activity into a fourth, and adding new life to the city.” Cox was sure that the earth itself would be touched by Emerson’s magic rod.īut the railroad did more than simply give the West a new look. Cox portrayed a West transformed by the railroad when he informed his readers that “a new railway has been commenced and completed. Writing about Seward County, Nebraska, at the end of the 1880s, local historian W. Nowhere did Emerson’s prediction seem more true than in the American West. Addressing a Boston audience, he described railroads as “a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.”
A quarter century before that moment at Promontory, Ralph Waldo Emerson envisioned what the railroad might mean for American life. The presence and power of the railroad could be seen on every farm and ranch, in every booming western city and sleepy tank town, and in the lives of the natives and countless newcomers. With the exception of the federal government, no one institution more fully shaped the appearance and character of the West than the railroad.
Some enthusiastic real estate promoters and railway officials even claimed that the railroads invented the West-or at least the national image of the West. Half a century after engines touched pilot to pilot at Promontory, Utah, to complete the first transcontinental railroad, the imprint of the Iron Road was nearly everywhere in the American West.
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