The Transcontinental Railroad’s Surprising History of the Dead on the Overland Trail

The completion of the United States Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 not only linked East and West but also the past, present, and future. This paper explores how the railroad became one of the first great historians of the United States West. The railroad made history to read - in its many guidebooks and promotional materials - and to experience. Because the Transcontinental’s route paralleled the central route of the overland trail – the mid-nineteenth-century wagon train migration to Oregon and California – the railroad became a vehicle for Gilded Age Euro-Americans to approximate that historic migration. Former emigrants traveled the rails to indulge in nostalgia for their wagon train days while other passengers imagined journeying in covered wagons. The railroad promoted this approximation, but it also emphasized the contrast between what had been and what was. In promotional materials, the transcontinental called on palace car passengers to contrast their safety with the dangers “wild savages” posed to covered wagons. The West was now safe, the railroad declared, because it had replaced the wagon trains.

Yet, the railroad not only described itself as historical change embodied but also the greatest protector of historical memory of the trail. The railroad did so by telling stories of the trail in its promotional materials and through preserving specific emigrant graves. Most tellingly, when commemorating emigrant graves railroad engineers and promoters selected graves of women over men and of maidens over matrons. The poignant narrative of male engineers discovering and commemorating the graves of vulnerable virgins bolstered the image of the railroad as a chivalrous and powerful entity. The maiden dead, in contrast, epitomized purity and vulnerability. In styling itself their protector, the railroad manipulated the trail's past in order to make itself the dominant historical force.