Читать книгу Anglo-American Cultural Studies - Jody Skinner - Страница 54

… and take the trainAfter beginning our glance at the Civil War with the Underground Railroad, what better way to end a section on the closing of the frontier than with the union of two real railroads. President LincolnLincoln, Abraham started the project during the Civil War and was perhaps hoping that uniting the country by railroad would also lead to a re-uniting of the divided country. The Union PacificUnion Pacific and the Central PacificCentral Pacific railroads met in northern UtahUtah near a place called Promontory SummitPromontory Summit a few years after the end of the Civil War. Even if the term “transcontinental railroadtranscontinental railroad” doesn’t actually apply to a railroad that only linked NebraskaNebraska with CaliforniaCalifornia, the event at Promontory Summit in 1869 was an important symbolic closing of the frontier, a frontier that was already being divided into parts separated by barbed wire, invented at this time as the only cheap way to establish borders in the vast grasslands that had been previously been open for all to cross. The growth of the railroad across the country was an important economic factor as well as a last encroachment of the white man into IndianIndian territory with the locomotive: the “Iron Horse” winning ultimately against the Indian buffalo and deciding the fate of the remaining Indians ( 7).