The overland traffic had begun on the heels of the first migrations. Its growth during the fifties and its triumphant period in the sixties were great arguments in favor of the construction of railways to take its place. It came to an end when the first continental railroad was completed in 1869. For decades after this time the stages still found useful service on branch lines and to new camps, and occasional exhibition in the "Wild West Shows," but the railways were following them closely, for a new period of American history had begun.
In a national way, the South struggling against the North prevented the early location of a Pacific railway. Locally, every village on the Mississippi from the Lakes to the Gulf hoped to become the terminus and had advocates throughout its section of the country. The list of claimants is a catalogue of Mississippi Valley towns. New Orleans, Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo, St. Louis, Chicago, and Duluth were all entered in the competition. By 1860 the idea had received general acceptance; no one in the future need urge its adoption, but the greatest part of the work remained to be done.
Born during the thirties, the idea of a Pacific railway was of uncertain origin and parentage. Just so soon as there was a railroad anywhere, it was inevitable that some enterprising visionary should project one in imagination to the extremity of the continent. The railway speculation, with which the East was seething during the administrations of Andrew Jackson, was boiling over in the young West, so that the group of men advocating a railway to connect the oceans were but the product of their time.
Greatest among these enthusiasts was Asa Whitney, a New York merchant interested in the China trade and eager to win the commerce of the Orient for the United States. Others had declared such a road to be possible before he presented his memorial to Congress in 1845, but none had staked so much upon the idea. He abandoned the business, conducted a private survey in Wisconsin and Iowa, and was at last convinced that "the time is not far distant when Oregon will become ... a separate nation" unless communication should "unite them to us." He petitioned Congress in January, 1845, for a franchise and a grant of land, that the national road might be accomplished; and for many years he agitated persistently for his project.