Perspective: 150 years after the transcontinental railroad, indigenous activists continue to battle corporate overreach
A replica of the last railroad tie laid on the Transcontinental Railroad is seen Tuesday at Golden Spike National Historic Park in Promontory, Utah. By Alessandra Link Alessandra Link is a research fellow at the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, and on the organizing committee for the “Railroads in Native America” symposium.
For many Americans, the joining of iron and wood at Promontory, Utah, in 1869 symbolized the union of a nation recovering from the Civil War, a binding of disparate North American regions into an integrated whole. Artists, authors and orators marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad as the pinnacle of national unity, a triumph of American technological ingenuity and vision.
Corporate officials and government agents, for their part, considered railroads the “critical infrastructure” of 19th-century America, and they cloaked indigenous dispossession in the rhetoric of “public” service. Corporate acquisition of indigenous land took many forms. Treaties between the United States and Native nations often contained provisions granting the United States the right to build roads, railroads and telegraph lines through reservation lands.
In other instances, corporate agents brazenly trespassed on tribal lands without regard to the legal, political and economic consequences. The Utah and Northern Railway built and operated a line for several years on 2,000 acres of Shoshone-Bannock land without the tribe’s consent. The Northern Paiutes granted the Carson and Colorado Railroad a right of way through their Nevada reservation in 1882, under the condition that the company transport their agricultural goods to market free of charge.
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