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Around nine o’clock during a warm mid-June evening in 1867, diners had just finished a sumptuous and elegant banquet in the Southern Hotel, one of the finest in all of St. Louis, Missouri. Sen. Richard Yates of Illinois, speaking for the indisposed president pro tempore of the United States Senate, Benjamin Wade, stood and addressed an audience of other U.S. senators, local politicians, and reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Cincinnati Gazette, New York Times, New York Tribune, and the Chicago Republic. The president of the Union Pacific Railway Company, Eastern Division (UPED),1 John D. Perry, had assembled and sponsored this distinguished entourage , which had just finished touring his accomplishments in Kansas. Addressing an enthusiastic audience, Senator Yates declared the Union Pacific Railway Company, Eastern Division, the “new agent of civilization.” By this statement he plainly conveyed railroad building across the grasslands of Kansas as the essential technology, preceding and preparing the ground for an American empire, one that would take root and flourish in the land itself.2 Five years prior to this feast, many avid supporters and investors had already anticipated similar outcomes of railroad building after President Abraham Lincoln had signed into law the Pacific Railway Act of July 1, 1862. For instance, Horace Greeley, never at a loss to promote transcontinental railroad building, caught the tenor of the times in his New York Daily Tribune—well, at least he caught the Republicans’ enthusiasm for using iron rails to bind the nation. At the height of the Civil War, while President Lincoln worried whether or not a nation “conceived in liberty” could “long endure” and remain united and governed “by the people,” Greeley’s Tribune heralded the prospects of an empire created through railroad building. Such an empire would assure that fast-growing centers of capital, commerce, and manufacturing , such as Chicago and New York, would complete their national dominance over Southern interests. So proclaimed the Tribune, “Of the magnitude of the [building of the UPED railroad], or of its value to “THE NEW PIONEER OF POPULATION AND SETTLEMENT” The Making of an American Imperial Landscape If you want to see what the railroad is, and how civilization and progress date from it—how it is the conqueror of crude nature, which it turns to man’s use, both on small scales and on the largest—come hither to inland America. —walt whitman, “Upon Our Own Land” Figure 2. Title page of William A. Bell’s New Tracks in North America (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869), with a lithographic reproduction of Alexander Gardner’s photograph, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” = 7 = “THE NEW PIONEER OF POPUL ATION AND SET TLEMENT” = 8 the country, nothing need be said. The completion of the road would stimulate emigration and develop the ‘inexhaustible resources of our new mineral and pastoral States and Territories in the West—an influence in itself equal to the acquisition of an empire.’”3 At the same time, George T. Pierce, writing for the American Railroad Journal, noted how the Union Pacific Railway Company, Eastern Division, upon completion would have “absolute control of all the vast New Mexican trade.”4 Any Eastern company, Pierce predicted, would race to connect with the Union Pacific Railway Company, Eastern Division, in order to command the trade coursing over its rails. While Lincoln may have embraced a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, his signing into law the Pacific Railway Act of July 1, 1862, gave birth to an empire shaped and controlled by railroad companies, their technologies, and the cultural values of their promoters.5 Railroad entrepreneurs and supporters understood that locomotives towed more than freight and passenger cars. Railroads, the “new agent,” led the way for an American empire, one designed to replace a perceived wilderness with an idealized civilization and landscape. Railroads possessed the power to clear the way of American Indian peoples to make room for capitalists, promoters, farmers, and town builders who would plant an American civilization—complete with its institutions, economy, and social structure—into the land in such a way as to deliver its fruits into an urbandriven national and international economy.6 In addition, the Union Pacific Railway Company, Eastern Division, hauled into Kansas the Northern ideal of a “free labor” society devoid of slavery and a planter class. On June 8, 1867, when the entourage had reached Fort Harker, Kansas, Benjamin Brewster, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, put it this way...

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