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Originally Posted by Mr Downtown
Then let's see some sort of source that I could use to edumacate myself. Talk about "making shit up!"
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Your snark is amusing considering the corner you are backing yourself into.
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The Galena road was built to bring produce and lead to the port at Chicago, not to an interchange with the Michigan Southern. It was the later Alton road that would be in direct competition with the I&M Canal.
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When did I say it was taking lead to an interchange with the canal? Why would they bring lead to the canal when I said THEY BUILT THE RAILROAD TO
COMPETE DIRECTLY WITH THE CANAL? You said:
"But railroads were initially ways to link busy waterways overland to distant ports, or to bring commodities from agricultural and mining hinterlands to ports."
And I very specfically demonstrated that the exact opposite was true: the first railroads in Chicago were built to nullify the need for ports and bring goods/passengers directly to the cities, which is the OPPOSITE of "interchanging with the canal" as you accused me of saying.
FINALLY the terminus of the Galena & Chicago Union was NOT the port of Chicago, it was near the river at the Wells Street Station. Now I'm not "expert" like you, but I'm pretty sure they weren't exactly loading up the freighters to ship out lead at Wells Street Station...
Pretty sure they were shipping that right to the factories in Chicago.
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I carefully chose the words "thought possible" for the transcontinental railroad. Obviously there had been idle cracker-barrel talk by 1848, but there were only four states west of the Mississippi. Even generalized surveys didn't begin until 1853, and Theodore Judah didn't find a way up the Western Slope of the Sierra until 1860.
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No you are "carefully choosing" to try to argue semantics to deflect criticism from the utter stupidity of what you said. People definitely thought a transcontinental railroad was possible at the same time that Chicago started building railways. Hell, just read the fucking wikipedia article, it says that people were dreaming of it as early as 1830 with the invention of the steam engine and that Asa Whitney was already doing surveys to develop his plan to create a transcontinental railway in
1845 (even though Whitney would not be sucessful, it indicates that you are categorically incorrect because, at a very minimum, at least one person believed it was possible enough spend tons of money surveying a route).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_T...ilroad#History
You are wrong, it's OK, you can admit it. No amount of semantic quivering is going to cover that up. In fact, 1850 was probably when people started realizing such a railroad was an inevitability as California was a state at that point.
Furthermore, the G&C Union was just arriving in ELGIN in 1850... So 1848 was the EARLIEST possible date you could use for this argument, but the railroads didn't start booming in Chicago until the 1850's at which point a transcontiental railroad was an inevitability and, duh duh duh, Chicago's civic leaders, business leaders, and railroad owners, hatched a plan to control the railways of the nation because, despite the blather you are spreading, they were just starting to build railways and, again despite the nonsense you claim, they knew they were the middle of the nation and had a unique chance to make a power grab.
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They were, but the Mississippi is much harder to bridge at St. Louis than at Rock Island. Here are the major lines as of 1860:
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Of course lines were eventually built, they just didn't get much traffic because they weren't built until after Chicago had already dominated the region's layout and built all the railyards, etc that it needed to force everyone to send their trains through Chicago. This is exactly what I am talking about. They saw an opportunity (basically a 10 year window) during which the realized they could control access to the entire interior of the country, and they jumped on it making all competing cities irrelevant.