![]() After a restless night of little sleep, the group flew east again the next day only to be forced by dense fog to make a second emergency landing, this time in Laramie. the site of “a beacon tended by a man and his wife and his daughter who lived in a little woolly-western shack on the edge of the field.”Īt this isolated airfield the passengers waited out the tempest. government airmail emergency field called Parco, Wyo. On the segment from Salt Lake City, United forwarded the eight passengers aboard a lumbering trimotor biplane that followed the Overland route “made dear by song, verse, and story, the route of the ox trains, the Forty-niners, the stagecoaches, the pony express.” On the way to Cheyenne, bad weather forced Davenport’s plane to make an unscheduled landing at a U.S. It required four separate flights to make the transcontinental journey. “So, of course, I flew.” Davenport believed that to cross the United States from Los Angeles to New York “prosaically by rail was to be cheated.” She explained that it “made no sense for me to sit for days in big plush armchairs, tended by troops of expert servitors, eating and drinking delicacies, looking for ways to consume one’s ennui.” Instead of the steady “hum of the safe steel rails,” Davenport embarked on a journey that for her invoked the romance of “Oh, Susanna!” gone to Oregon by covered wagon “with a banjo on my knee.” “ wanted adventure, or whatever semblance of it could be had in the year 1932,” she wrote. Davenport, however, did find her Wild West and wrote about it in Good Housekeeping magazine in an article she titled “Covered Wagon-1932.” That year the wildest encounter for most people would be grappling with economic gloom and doom. The problem was that her quest for that West took place only in 1932, a few decades too late, many Americans must have thought. The transcontinental transportation network revolutionized the American economy because the transport of goods was made much faster, cheaper and more flexibleĪmerican novelist Marcia Davenport wanted to discover for herself the Wild West. The Transcontinental Railroad was finished and opened for traffic on May 10, 1869. Engineers and supervisors were mostly Union Army veterans, experienced in operating and maintaining trains during the Civil War. The workers involved in the building operations were mainly army veterans from the Civil War and immigrants from Ireland. The land through which the railroad was supposed to pass was mainly worthless desert, although some portions of good farming land had to be crossed as well. They chose two independent companies, the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad and supported the project by issuing US government bonds. This was the time of the American Civil War and the southern Democrats who opposed the idea before were now absent from Congress so the Republicans used the opportunity to vote the construction of the transcontinental railroad without them. The idea of building such a line was present in America for decades before the construction was authorized by the Pacific Railroad Acts of 18. The Transcontinental Railroad was also known as the Pacific Railroad for a while and later on as the Overland Route – after the main passenger transport service that operated the line. ![]() ![]() It was 1,776 miles long and served for the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States to be connected by rail for the first time in history. Transcontinental Railroad summary: The First Transcontinental Railroad was built crossing the western half of America and it was pieced together between 18. (National Park Service) Facts, information and articles about Transcontinental Railroad, an event of Westward Expansion from the Wild West The “Wedding of the Rails” at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869. ![]()
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