All Aboard!

Prior to the railroad, travel to the west was arduous by ox and wagon, or if wealthy, by a bruising stagecoach ride taking weeks and months.  Less than a week after the ceremony at Utah on May 10, 1869, the trains were scheduled to run - one westbound from Omaha and one eastbound from Sacramento - every single day.

Crossing the country by rails was an adventure vacation-like for the rich.  A first class ticket from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast via Omaha to Sacramento and then by steamboat to San Francisco cost $175,  For another $2 a night, sleeping car accommodations were added and for another $4 a day, a passenger on the once-a-week Pacific Hotel Express could receive their meals on board the train, instead of jumping off the train at roadside stops.

By 1885, three more major railroads were completed - the Southern Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.   These rail lines linked the entire Mississippi Valley with the Pacific Coast.  Once the plains were settled by the 1870s and 1880s, the major traffic on the rails changed...it became short distance journeys rather than the coast to coast adventures.  Cowhands, miner, farmers, schoolteachers, and hunters neither needed nor could afford the luxury prices of first class.  They just needed to get from one town to the next.  The bare bones cars with insufficient heat were greatly different from those in first class.

Those riding first class seldom thought well of those day riders, "They are not elegant, but bearded and mustached individuals, dressed in ragged garments, carrying dirty bundles, with revolvers in their belts" as one first class rider recorded.  Both kinds of passengers were forced to mingle at the track side eateries that sprang up along the track before dining cars were standard features on long distance trains.  Dudes and miners, society matrons and cowhands, all had to vie for attention just to get a cup of lukewarm coffee and half cooked piece of meat.  Food was grabbed and eaten standing up before having to hurry back to the train before it left without them.

The early train rides were not equipped with dining cars and were basic in their accommodations, forcing all levels of society together - something had to change.

Next time - Improvements on the Rails
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On this Day in Pioneer History:  "On May 21, 1881, in Washington, D.C., humanitarians Clara Barton and Adolphus Solomons found the American National Red Cross, an organization established to provide humanitarian aid to victims of wars and natural disasters in congruence with the International Red Cross.