Why was the Transcontinental Railroad built?
The Big Four were merchants in Sacramento and knew about 19th century travel — how slow, difficult, and dangerous it was to cross the continent on the overland trails, hardships of life along the trail, to cross Nevada and reach California. They wanted to connect the east and west coasts and to make it easier to trade with the east coast and open up transcontinental trade with Asia. The discovery of gold in 1849 (150 million ounces of gold came from California in the 19th century) also started the gold rush and lead to the building of the transcontinental railroad, which also used hydraulic gold mining construction methods. Like the present day Silicon Valley visionaries, they were the great entrepreneurs of their day and used both business savvy and engineering genius — It was the greatest engineering project of the 19th century, permitting transcontinental travel in 6 days instead of 6 months and allowed the United States to expand across the entire continent and to become a world po
