Transcontinental Railroad | Hell on Wheels | 3

American History Tellers

Wondery

Society & Culture, Kids & Family, History, Education For Kids

4.7 • 18.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In early 1866, Central Pacific workers were stalled in California, facing the monumental task of blasting 15 tunnels through solid granite in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Thousands of Chinese laborers would be pushed to their breaking point.

One-thousand miles to the east, workers on the Union Pacific faced Plains Indians desperate to defend their ancestral homelands from the encroaching railroad.

But the men in charge of the railroads knew that every mile of track meant money in their pockets, and they would stop at nothing to capture victory.

Order your copy of the new American History Tellers book, The Hidden History of the White House, for behind-the-scenes stories of some of the most dramatic events in American history—set right inside the house where it happened.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wonderly Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American history tellers early and ad-free right now.
0:06.6	Join Wonderly Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:32.3	Imagine it's May 1866, and you're seated at a corner table in the bustling dining room of the National Hotel in Washington, D.C.
0:36.2	Chandeliers cast a warm light over the remnants of your meal.
0:38.8	You're a lobbyist for the Central Pacific Railroad, and you've just finished dinner with a Michigan Congressman. You sip your wine and
0:44.1	lean forward in your chair. Now, I think you know why I invited you here tonight, Congressman.
0:49.0	Something's troubling my friends at the Central Pacific. The congressman pushes his empty
0:53.9	plate aside and takes a cigar
0:55.7	out of his pocket, lighting it with a flame of a tapered candle. No, and what's that? Well, they've
1:02.1	never been happy with the 1864 railroad bill. It prohibits them from laying tracks more than 150
1:07.4	miles beyond the California border. No, I've never heard something so ludicrous.
1:12.8	They're upset that they can't lay tracks across Nevada.
1:16.1	Seems to me they have bigger fish to fry,
1:18.0	considering they've been stalled on the western side of the Sierra's for months.
1:21.7	The worst of their labor is still to come.
1:23.8	But they won't be stuck there forever.
1:25.9	The Union Pacific is speeding across the Great Plains.
1:28.2	It's not fair that they have the right to build as far as they'd like,
1:31.5	but the Central Pacific doesn't.
1:33.9	The congressman takes a deep puff of his cigar and shakes his head.
1:38.1	Well, if you ask me, it's going to take your bosses a decade to blast their way out of the
1:42.0	Sierras.
	...

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