e the rapid completion of those roads, Congress provided generous subsidies in the form of land grants and loans. Construction was slower than Congress had anticipated, but the two lines met, with elaborate ceremonies, on May 10, 1869, at Promontory, Utah. (See transcontinental rail line.) In the meantime, other railroads had begun construction westward, but the panic of 1873 and the ensuing depression halted or delayed progress on many of those lines. With the return of prosperity after1877, some railroads resumed or accelerated construction; and by 1883 three more rail connections between the Mississippi valley and the West Coast had been completed--the Northern Pacific, from St. Paul to Portland; the Santa Fe, from Chicago to Los Angeles; and the Southern Pacific, from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The Southern Pacific had also acquired, by purchase or construction, lines from Portland to San Francisco and from San Francisco to Los Angeles. (See Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company, The.) The construction of the railroads from the Midwest to the Pacific coast was the railroad builders' most spectacular achievement in the quarter century after the Civil War. No less important, in terms of the national economy, was the development in the same period of an adequate rail network in the Southern states and the building of other railroads that connected virtually every important community west of the Mississippi with Chicago. The West developed simultaneously with the building of the Westernrailroads, and in no part of the nation was the importance ofrailroads more generally recognized. The railroad gave vitality to theregions it served, but, by withholding service, it could doom acommunity to stagnation. The railroads appeared to be ruthless inexploiting their powerful position: they fixed prices to suit theirconvenience; they discriminated among their customers; theyattempted to gain a monopoly of transportation wherever possible;...
