An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859

Book excerpt

By: Horace Greeley

Date: 1860

Source: Greeley, Horace. An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859. New York: C.M. Saxton, Barker & Co., 1860.

About the Author: American journalist and politician Horace Greeley (1811–1872) founded the New York Tribune in 1841 and served as its editor for the next thirty years. He made the Tribune one of the most influential journals of his time. It set new standards for newspaper reporting and was the platform from which Greeley advocated his progressive views as a campaigner against alcohol and tobacco consumption and for women's rights, workers' associations, and a transcontinental railroad. In 1859, Greeley traveled through the west by stagecoach, publishing accounts of his travels in the New York Tribune. The purpose of the trip was partially to sketch in writing the character of the western regions and the people who lived there, both the indigenous population and the settlers. It was also designed to generate enthusiasm for building a railroad, which would make a journey like the one he undertook far less arduous and more commonplace.

INTRODUCTION

Greeley's enthusiasm for building a transcontinental railroad was not motivated by a desire to explore or open up the west. The west had been opened and was being settled. His overland journey was in part a piece of investigative, on-site reporting and, in part, an early example of advocacy journalism. As he traveled across North America, Greeley sent dispatches back to New York to be printed in the Tribune. These articles, which became An Overland Journey, detailed what the country was like and how settlers lived. Thus he provided both a map of the natural environment, and an early sociological study. Greeley used the stories to suggest that because of the dissipation and slothfulness he kept encountering, there was a need for the railroad. He also argued that the land was fit to profit diligent and industrious men and women who devoted themselves to making a livelihood in the west.

The railroad, as Greeley saw it, would bring civilization and civility to regions that had been opened to settlement but not domesticated. He looked for "social, moral, and intellectual blessings" from a railroad. The railroad, Greeley argued, would facilitate communication through the swift exchange of letters and the delivery of the implements of civilization, books, and journals to the west. Just as important was the need to increase the number of "intelligent, capable, virtuous women" out west, for he believed in their stabilizing and uplifting influence. The railroad, too, would allow men to establish families or bring west the families they'd left in the east when they set off to seek their fortunes.

Besides offering reasons for building a railroad in An Overland Journey, Greeley offered practical financial and engineering advice, arguing that it was not a daunting enterprise but could be accomplished.

PRIMARY SOURCE

… The social, moral, and intellectual blessings of a Pacific railroad can hardly be glanced at within the limits of an article. Suffice it for the present that I merely suggest them.

1. Our mails are now carried to and from California by steamships, via Panama, in twenty to thirty days, starting once a fortnight. The average time of transit from writers throughout the Atlantic states to their correspondents on the Pacific exceeds thirty days. With a Pacific railroad, this would be reduced to ten; for the letters written in Illinois or Michigan would reach their destinations in the mining counties of California quicker than letters sent from New York or Philadelphia would reach San Francisco. With a daily mail by railroad from each of our Atlantic cities to and from California, it is hardly possible that the amount of both letters and printed matter transmitted, and consequently of postage, should not be speedily quadrupled.
2. The first need of California to-day is a large influx of intelligent, capable, virtuous women. With a railroad to the Pacific, avoiding the miseries and perils of six thousand miles of ocean transportation, and making the transit a pleasant and interesting overland journey of ten days, at a reduced cost, the migration of this class would be immensely accelerated and increased. With wages for all kinds of women's work at least thrice as high on the Pacific as in this quarter, and with larger opportunities for honorable and fit settlement in life, I cannot doubt that tens of thousands would annually cross the Plains, to the signal benefit of California and of the whole country, as well as the improvement of their own fortunes and the profit of the railroad.
3. Thousands now staying in California, expecting to "go home" so soon as they shall have somewhat improved their circumstances, would send or come for their families and settle on the Pacific for life, if a railroad were opened. Tens of thousands who have been to California and come back, unwilling either to live away from their families or to expose them to the present hardships of migration thither, would return with all they have, prepared to spend their remaining days in the land of gold, if there were a Pacific railroad.
4. Education is the vital want of California, second to its need of true women. School-books, and all the material of education, are now scarce and dear there. Almost all books sell there twice as high as here, and many of the best are scarcely attainable at any rate. With the Pacific railroad, all this would be changed for the better. The proportion of schoolhouses to grogshops would rapidly increase. All the elements of moral and religious melioration would be multiplied. Tens of thousands of our best citizens would visit the Pacific coast, receiving novel ideas and impressions, to their own profit and that of the people thus visited. Civilization, intelligence, refinement, on both sides of the mountain—still more, in the Great Basin inclosed by them—would receive a new and immense impulse, and the Union would acquire a greater accession of strength, power, endurance, and true glory, than it would from the acquisition of the whole continent down to Cape Horn.

The only points of view in which a railroad from the Missouri to the Pacific remains to be considered are those of its practicability, cost, location, and the ways and means. Let us look at them:

I. As to practicability, there is no room for hesitation or doubt. The Massachusetts Western, the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore and Ohio, have each encountered difficulties as formidable as any to be overcome by a Pacific railroad this side of the Sierra Nevada. Were the railroad simply to follow the principal emigrant trail up the Platte and down the Snake and Columbia to Oregon, or south-westwardly from the South Pass to the foot of the Sierra, it would encounter no serious obstacle …

But let that government simply resolve that the Pacific road shall be built—let Congress enact that sealed proposals for its construction shall be invited, and that whichever responsible company or corporation shall offer adequate security for that construction, to be completed within ten years, on the lowest terms, shall have public aid, provided the amount required do not exceed fifty millions of dollars, and the work will be done, certainly for fifty millions' bonus, probably for much less. The government on its part should concede to the company a mile in width, according to the section lines, of the public lands on either side of the road as built, with the right to take timber, stone and earth from any public lands without charge; and should require of said company that it carry a daily through-mail each way at the price paid other roads for conveying mails on first-class routes; and should moreover stipulate for the conveyance at all times of troops, arms, munitions, provisions, etc., for the public service, at the lowest rates, with a right to the exclusive possession and use of the road whenever a national exigency shall seem to require it. The government should leave the choice of route entirely to the company, only stipulating that it shall connect the navigable waters of the Mississippi with those of the Pacific Ocean, and that it shall be constructed wholly through our own territory….

By adopting this plan, the rivalries of routes will be made to work for, instead of working against, the construction of the road. Strenuous efforts will be made by the friends of each to put themselves in position to bid low enough to secure the location; and the lowest rate at which the work can safely be undertaken will unquestionably be bid. The road will be the property of the company constructing it, subject only to the rights of use, stipulated and paid for by the government. And, even were it to cost the latter a bonus of fully fifty millions, I feel certain that every farthing of that large sum will have been reimbursed to the treasury within five years after the completion of the work in the proceeds of land sales, in increased postages, and in duties on goods imported, sold, and consumed because of this railroad—not to speak of the annual saving of millions in the cost of transporting and supplying troops.

Men and brethen! Let us resolve to have a railroad to the Pacific—to have it soon. It will add more to the strength and wealth of our country than would the acquisition of a dozen Cubas. It will prove a bond of union not easily broken, and a new spring to our national industry, prosperity and wealth. It will call new manufactures into existence, and increase the demand for the products of those already existing. It will open new vistas to national and to individual aspiration, and crush out filibusterism by giving a new and wholesome direction to the public mind. My long, fatiguing journey was undertaken in the hope that I might do something toward the early construction of the Pacific Railroad; and I trust that it has not been made wholly in vain.

SIGNIFICANCE

Greeley was a visionary and a pioneer in the field of communications, whether through words or through transportation. He believed in the importance of industrial technology for the development of a productive, democratic society in a world where vast amounts of territory—administered by one central authority, the United States—would nevertheless constitute a democracy and not an empire, as they had throughout past history. He was not an environmentalist in the common understanding of the word. His goal was not to preserve nature but to establish the conditions that would help people lead civilized lives through the force of their own democratic authority. Although he favored cities and industry, he was not an adherent of the industrial revolution as it prevailed in the nineteenth century. He associated human injustice with monopolistic capitalism and called for workers' associations and economic justice. He was a progressive Puritan, wishing to see religion, family, and morality prevail where there was wilderness and wildness. In many respects, his vision of a unified continent was an early version of globalism.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Cross, Coy F. Go West, Young Man!: Horace Greeley's Vision For America. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Web sites

Horace Greeley. 〈http://www.tulane.edu/∼latner/Greeley.html〉 (accessed November 14, 2005).

The Yosemite Web. "An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859, by Horace Greeley (1860)." 〈http://www.yosemite.ca.us/history/greeley/〉 (accessed November 14, 2005).