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The Iron Road in the Prairie State

The Story of Illinois Railroading

Indiana University Press

PRELIMINARIES

The topography of Illinois is particularly conducive to railroading. Trains move best over flat land, and the state has few hills of any size and nothing that could be mistaken for a mountain. Its 56,400 square miles vary from a low of 279 feet above sea level to the 1,235 feet of Charles Mound on the Wisconsin border near Galena. The glaciated north boasted extensive prairies dotted with stands of timber, while in the heavily wooded south, coal deposits lay concealed beneath the surface. The hilliest section of the state is in the northwest. Here the lead-mining region of Galena escaped the graze of the glaciers, as did Calhoun County in the south. The south offered numerous engineering trials, especially around Cairo, strategically placed at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers but swampy and subject to frequent flooding, while much of far-southern Illinois was viewed as "a hilly extension of the Ozark highland." The state's rivers provided obstacles to emigrants and challenges to bridge builders, while bluffs at Peoria and Alton restricted railroad development at those two important towns. Generally, however, the gentle prairies presented few insurmountable or even challenging hindrances except distance: Illinois is larger than England, birthplace of the railroad industry.

PRAIRIES AND INDIANS

Prior to European settlement successive Indian peoples made the Illinois country their home. When French fur traders and missionaries arrived in the seventeenth century the Illini (or Illiniwek), who had dominated the area for a century, were already being pressured by the Iroquois confederation and left the land bearing their name. Others shared their fate, culminating in 1833 with the federal government's forcible relocation of the remaining Indians. In 1717 the French colony in Louisiana annexed Illinois, where settlers had established outposts on the banks of the Mississippi River, including the town of Kaskaskia. The demography of Illinois changed after Britain defeated France in the French and Indian War (1754–1763). The region became more heterogeneous as British immigrants arrived on the Ohio and Wabash Rivers. Indians clustered around Lake Michigan, and white settlers established trading posts on its banks. Water remained the preeminent means of transportation, and the rivers running around and across Illinois served as highways.

But natural flows were unreliable. Waterways froze, fell, and flooded. Sandbars along the shore of Lake Michigan blocked easy access to the stale stream that would later be named the Chicago River, and the shoreline offered no natural harbors to protect shipping from devastating storms on the giant lake. Just a few miles inland lay a low continental shelf; most of the rivers to its west ran from there down to the Mississippi, while the few to its east flowed into Lake Michigan. The marshy territory on the site of what would — after extensive draining and filling — become Chicago offered an unpromising prospect to hopeful settlers, though small numbers kept arriving nevertheless.

Dangerous and uncomfortable boats contributed to the risks of river passage. Traveling to Pekin aboard the steamship Banner on the Illinois River in the 1830s, Eliza Farnham complained, "The doors were broken, the stairs dilapidated; there was no linen for the berths, the hurricane deck leaked." Tar covering the rough wooden roof melted in the hot sun and dripped onto unsuspecting passengers. Farnham recorded how "the waste of steam was so great that the wheels effected only about four revolutions a minute, and the boat had a strange habit ... of occasionally running twice or thrice her length with considerable rapidity, and then suddenly lurching so as to throw everything to the starboard." A decade later Scottish immigrant John Regan spent his first night in Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi after a steamer ran aground. These and a thousand other such tales told of the perils of traveling on the relatively calm rivers forming the state's boundaries. Railroads would seize the competitive advantages their speed and safety offered as an alternative to river travel.

CANALS SHOW THE WAY

Rivers imperfectly met a growing demand for long-distance transportation and were sometimes replaced by canals. These artificial channels enabled humans to harness water for carrying heavy loads over long distances in relative safety. Secure inland haulage on a large scale could boost economic development, as British canal builders demonstrated in the 1760s, but theirs was hardly a recent innovation. While diverting water for irrigation and transportation is as old as civilization, British entrepreneurs pioneered the private, for-profit canal, learning from the public-works engineers who had developed locks for moving barges uphill.

Canal building reached across the Atlantic soon after the American Revolution. Canals in the young republic, often constructed with government funding, carried bulk commodities such as coal and cotton over long distances. As white Americans moved west from the Atlantic seaboard, the states of Virginia and Pennsylvania proposed funding canals to the Ohio River valley. Though not built, these projects whetted an appetite that reached its pinnacle in 1825 with the triumphal opening of the Erie Canal, a state-funded, 340-mile-long ditch linking New York City with Lake Erie via the Hudson River and the Great Lakes, making the country beyond the Appalachians accessible to new immigrants. It was then possible to travel by water from New York City to the young state of Illinois.

STEAM PROVIDES A PUSH

Canals afforded a slow, pastoral means of movement but they could not solve all the problems presented by rivers. Horse-drawn boats did nothing to increase speed and ice could block canals completely, but they did represent a crucial breakthrough. In the realm of technological innovation one improvement frequently leads to others. In this case, proof of the demand for bulk haulage helped convince investors of the need for a faster mode of transportation. Cart horses pulled barges at perhaps five miles per hour while steam locomotives reached twenty-five miles an hour, as rapid as a racehorse. Railroads brought the drama of new technology and the exhilaration of hitherto-unmatched velocity. In one of history's delightful ironies, the world's first public railroad — England's Stockton & Darlington Railway — opened in the same year as the Erie Canal.

The steam locomotive was a strange beast — a "mad dragon" some called it — and it grabbed the American imagination in the 1830s. The pace, noise, and danger of train travel were made culturally safe by applying metaphors such as "the iron horse" to help domesticate the noisy, smelly machines. One Illinois newspaper editor, campaigning in favor of building railroads, wrote in 1851: "A railroad, what an invention! what a blessing! See yon 'iron horse' with his nostrils breathing fire, his long and shaggy mane, in the shape of smoke, streaming far behind, while in his might and strength, with his 'train' in the rear, he comes careering through yon 'neck of timber,' now over that creek, now across the prairie, now again in timber." Excitement and convenience would soon overcome fear of the unknown.

Early locomotives looked like barrels on wheels. Firemen shoveled coal into small fireboxes to boil water, which was released under pressure to power pistons and turn the wheels. The tiny point of contact between wheel and track — less than one-tenth of a square inch — created virtually frictionless motion and demanded ever-improved brakes. The means of slowing and stopping a train was just one innovation railroading inspired. The industry quickly became a leading area for inventions, and Illinois would be the location for many of the workshops, factories, and routes of this technological progress.

Railroads promised a bright future for a young nation. In 1832 one journalist marveled at how "the prosperity and intelligence of the country will be comparatively great" when railroads operated the length and breadth of the land. Modest first steps were being taken at the time of this proclamation. In 1830 the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) opened thirteen miles of track from the port of Baltimore to Ellicott's Mills. The company used an American-built steam locomotive constructed by New York businessman, politician, and inventor Peter Cooper. He called his engine Tom Thumb because it was "so insignificant," by which he meant it was for demonstration purposes only. Unfortunately, the first run was delayed a week after someone purloined the copper in the pipes and boiler.

Tom Thumb foreshadowed the end of canals, but they did not go quietly. In 1830 several newspapers published "A Canal Stockholder's Outburst," a fictional diatribe complaining that railroads threatened to "set the whole world a-gadding," destroy "local attachments," and "upset all the gravity of the nation." The steam train, the anonymous author declared, was "a pestilential, topsy-turvy, harum-scarum whirligig." But an early traveler on the B&O reported that, far from causing social upheaval, the railroad was reviving Frederick, Maryland, by bringing people and commerce into town and dramatically lowering the cost of sending and receiving commodities. This pattern would be repeated across the nation, but for settlements without railroads the consequences could be dire.

Peter Cooper's diminutive machine boasted one horsepower and was quickly superseded. The first American-built locomotive had been constructed and operated in 1826 by Colonel John Stevens on the grounds of his estate in Hoboken, New Jersey. Stevens became the chief engineer on the Camden & Amboy, refining the designs of British locomotives unable to negotiate the New World's lightweight and poorly laid track. A dozen small workshops sprang up to meet the growing demand for engines, ranging from the shortlived, such as the Taunton Works in Massachusetts, to the durable, including the famous Baldwin Locomotive Works. Established in Philadelphia in 1832, Baldwin turned out some of the iconic locomotives of the steam age and lasted into the diesel era of the mid-twentieth century. After much experimentation, the sturdy and reliable "American-type" locomotive, with its characteristic cow catcher and giant headlight, dominated railroading until after the Civil War.

Working with an emerging technology confronting a virtually limitless range of unknown and unfamiliar factors, railroad pioneers woefully underestimated the costs of construction. The first surveys for the B&O, opened in 1830, projected that $5 million would be needed to lay its 290 miles of track, but $16 million, 379 miles, and 22 years later it reached the Ohio River. Investors were cautious: the South Carolina legislature was forced to market and guarantee bonds for the South-Carolina Canal & Rail-Road Company when few individuals or institutions were willing to take the plunge. Building a line from Charleston to Hamburg, it began operations in November 1832 and soon reached its terminus across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Offering regular passenger services and carrying cotton for shipment to mills in the North and to Europe, it helped make the case for building railroads. Other states took note.

THE PRAIRIE STATE

One of those states was Illinois. Gaining admission to the Union in 1818, the Prairie State covered more territory than New York, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island combined. Settlers attracted by relatively easy passage from Missouri and Kentucky entered from the south, while Native Americans harrying and frightening immigrants in the north delayed colonization there. Chicago did not exist until the owners of a few rough houses clustered around Fort Dearborn boldly declared themselves a city in 1833, the last of the local indigenous peoples having been forced at gunpoint to sell their land to federal Indian agents. An early boost to settlement in the north came with rumors that a proposed canal would be dug to connect Lake Michigan with the Illinois River. This immensely popular project was authorized by the legislature in 1822, but delays in financing and construction meant it did not open until 1848. When finally completed, the Illinois and Michigan Canal linked the Chicago River (which emptied into Lake Michigan) with the Illinois River, joining two watersheds flowing in opposite directions. By then, in another of those wonderful ironies with which history abounds, the first railroad was inching its way out of Chicago. Contemporaries did not know it, but the canal age was drawing to a close.

Horse-drawn stagecoaches also provided long-distance travel before railroads. By 1825, one politically connected stagecoach company, Frink and Walker, controlled almost three thousand route miles in northern Illinois and profited from a firm grip on mail shipments. Beginning with construction of a route toward the village of Naperville, coaches and wagons traversed seven plank roads — essentially wooden beams laid across dirt tracks and constantly needing replacement — leaving Chicago. But these thoroughfares did not offer much improvement on the cart tracks remembered in a poem celebrating the opening of Chicago's first railroad:

    Soon the produce of my fields brought to hand
    So soft were the roads o'er the rich mucky land
    I could not transport in the city a load
    But near half was consumed by the cost on the road.

The writer cursed "the road-dragging toil" and "the mud and the slough" until the seasonal and financial advantages of the railroad had been thoroughly hammered home. Railroads condemned plank roads to an early and unlamented demise. In the late 1840s the entrepreneurial John Frink began investing in railroads, aware that the days of his stagecoaches were numbered. In 1848 he joined the board of the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad (G&CU), the first line out of Chicago, and shortly afterward joined the boards of two Peoria-based railroads. Like canals, the plank roads were rendered redundant by the greater reliability, higher speeds, and lower costs of railroad transportation. To exploit these advantages and open the frontier to settlement, Illinois entered the race to build rail lines with a combination of enthusiasm and naïveté that proved disastrous.

DEVELOPMENT DELAYED

The earliest attempts to build steam-powered railroads in Illinois failed miserably. Several private projects laid a few miles of track before going bankrupt; two short coal lines used animals to haul wagons; and an ambitious state-funded network fell victim to an economic depression — called a "panic" at the time — in 1837. But the seed blown across the Atlantic Ocean from Britain fell on fertile soil. Railroads offered relatively fast, all-weather transportation for people and commodities. Engineering challenges, especially safely and reliably harnessing steam power, proved surmountable, and investment capital became available, but the development of the industry was neither smooth nor simple. The demand was fueled in part by roads so poor that Illinois became a notorious "mud state" when the weather turned foul. In the winter of 1848–49, for example, the people of McLeansboro found themselves isolated. Bereft of "coffee, sugar and other necessaries of life," they survived on what they had stored from previous harvests until the roads dried out the following spring. This was a common occurrence in the harsh Illinois climate, and town and country alike needed a dependable, all-weather mode of transportation to combat snow, ice, and mud.

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Excerpted from The Iron Road in the Prairie State by Simon Cordery. Copyright © 2016 Simon Cordery. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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