448 Chapter 16 The Conquest of the West
various lines indirectly in the form of grants to the
states, but the most lavish gifts of the public domain
were those made directly to builders of intersectional
trunk lines. These roads received more than 155 mil-
lion acres, although about 25 million acres reverted to
the government because some companies failed to lay
the required miles of track. About 75 percent of this
land went to aid the construction of four transconti-
nental railroads: the Union Pacific–Central Pacific line,
running from Nebraska to San Francisco, completed
in 1869; the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, running
from Kansas City to Los Angeles by way of Santa Fe
and Albuquerque, completed in 1883; the Southern
Pacific, running from San Francisco to New Orleans
by way of Yuma and El Paso, completed in 1883; and
the Northern Pacific, running from Duluth,
Minnesota, to Portland, Oregon, completed in 1883.
The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 established the
pattern for these grants. It gave the builders of the
Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads five square
miles of public land on each side of their right-of-way
for each mile of track laid. The land
was allotted in alternate sections, form-
ing a pattern like a checkerboard: the
squares of one color representing rail-
road property, the other government
property. Presumably this arrangement
benefited the entire nation since half
the land close to the railroad remained
in public hands.
However, whenever grants were
made to railroads, the adjacent gov-
ernment lands were not opened to
homesteaders—on the theory that free
land in the immediate vicinity of a line
would prevent the road from disposing
of its properties at good prices. In
addition to the land granted the rail-
roads, a wide zone of “indemnity”
lands was reserved to allow the roads
to choose alternative sites to make up
for lands that settlers had already taken
up within the checkerboard. Thus,
homesteading was in fact prohibited
near land-grant railroads. More than
twenty years after receiving its
immense grant, the Northern Pacific
was still attempting to keep home-
steaders from filing in the indemnity
zone. President Cleveland finally put a
stop to this in 1887, saying that he
could find “no evidence” that “this
vast tract is necessary for the fulfill-
ment of the grant.”
Historians have argued at length
about the fairness of the land-grant system. No railroad
corporation waxed fat directly from the sale of its lands,
which were sold at prices averaging between $2 and $5
an acre. Collectively the roads took in between $400
million and $500 million from this source, but only
over the course of a century. Land-grant lines encour-
aged the growth of the West by advertising their prop-
erty widely and by providing cheap transportation for
prospective settlers and efficient shipping services for
farmers. They were required by law to carry troops and
handle government business free or at reduced rates,
which saved the government millions over the years. At
the same time the system imposed no effective
restraints on how the railroads used the funds raised
with federal aid. Being able to lay track with money
obtained from land grants, the operators tended to be
extravagant and often downright corrupt.
The construction of the Central Pacific in the
1860s illustrates how the system encouraged extrava-
gance. The line was controlled by four businessmen:
Collis P. Huntington, “scrupulously dishonest” butChinese work on a railway in the Far West. “Without them,” Leland Stanford, president of
the Central Pacific Railroad said, “it would be impossible to complete the western portion
of this great national highway.” Some Chinese were drawn from the gold fields farther
north, and others were imported from China, under five-year contracts with the railroads,
which paid them $10 or $12 a month.