How did they decide where to lay the tracks for the railroad?
“An American national interest in a transcontinental railroad system manifested itself as early as 1832 when [Judge S. W. Dexter, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, … in an editorial in his paper, The Emigrant, of February 8, 1832] … published at Ann Arbor, Michigan, suggested that the country should begin to make plans for an East Coast-to-West Coast railway [from New York City to the Great Lakes, then over the Mississippi River and on to the Missouri River, then up the Platte, over the mountains, and on to Oregon]. In early 1845, Asa Whitney, a New York businessman and China trader, proposed to Congress that the government grant a sixty-mile-wide strip between Lake Superior and the Oregon country to any company willing to risk construction.” Asa Whitney wrote a book A Project for a Railroad to the Pacific, printed by George Wood of N.Y. in 1849. Various possible routes across the country were proposed by men such as John Plumbe (1838), Asa Whitney and Edwin Johnson and explored by the Army
