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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
6 pages in length. Few events have impacted America's history like the construction of the nation's railroad system. Prior to its existence, getting from place to place meant days and even months of travel by foot, horse or sea, leaving people weary and prone to Indian attacks and environmentally related health issues such as exposure. Moreover, those who labored to construct the railroad faced fierce adversaries in both man and nature. Once the trains began to roll, however, the extent to which their presence created a synergistic wave of convenience and prosperity is both grand and far-reaching. Bibliography lists 8 sources.
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6 pages (~225 words per page)
File: LM1_TLCralrd.rtf
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or sea, leaving people weary and prone to Indian attacks and environmentally related health issues such as exposure. Moreover, those who labored to construct the railroad faced fierce adversaries
in both man and nature. Once the trains began to roll, however, the extent to which their presence created a synergistic wave of convenience and prosperity is both grand
and far-reaching. "...Before the railroad, getting to the west coast involved either three-month-long sea voyages or three-month-long overland treks, both equally dangerous, as well as prohibitively expensive for most
people. When the railroad was completed, a person could make that same trip in a week for as little as one hundred dollars" (Kaetz 39). As instrumental in linking
the east to the west, however, those who worked their fingers to the bone in order to construct the massive railroad. Twenty thousand men of various ethnic backgrounds "labored
to build the iron road with their bare hands" (The Iron Road). The primarily immigrant workers - which included Chinese, Irishmen, Germans, Dutch and Czechoslovakians, along with Civil War
veterans - toiled under extraordinarily difficult conditions such as long workdays, oppressive heat and bitter cold, Indian attacks and "the lawless and violent end-of-the-track towns called hell-on-wheels" (The Iron Road).
Explosions and avalanches were commonplace for the Chinese crews, who lost entire crews when walls of snow collapsed upon them. Said writer and historian Connie Yu of The
Iron Road, a film produced by Neil Goodwin that illustrates the traumatic circumstances associated with building the railroad: "One of the strongest images the Chinese-Americans have of working on
the railroad is Chinese workers being hung over cliffs in baskets which they wove themselves...They planted charges and had to scramble up the lines if the charges were short, or
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