The Transcontinental Railroad was the rail line, completed in 1869, that first joined the eastern United States by rail to the Pacific coast. Two private companies built it from opposite ends and met in Utah, backed by federal loans and grants of public land. It cut a journey that had taken months down to about a week, opening the American West to settlement and trade at a heavy cost to the Chinese workers who built it and the Native peoples in its path.
The Central Pacific's hardest miles, the ones that climbed into the high mountains, were laid mostly by Chinese immigrants. They took the deadliest work for the lowest pay, and the company that hired them did not bother to count the ones who died. Barely more than a decade after the last rail went down, the United States passed a law to bar Chinese people from entering the country at all. A nation had asked these workers to help bind it together, and then, almost in the same breath, decided it did not want them in it.