@article{872123,
      recid = {872123},
      title = {Pacific Railway surveys, 1853-1855 : reports of  explorations and surveys to ascertain the most practicable  and economical route from the Mississippi River to the  Pacific Ocean.},
      pages = {1 online resource (13 monographs).},
      note = {Date range of documents: 1853-1855.},
      abstract = {The Pacific Railway surveys were undertaken at the  direction of Congress to determine the best route for the  first transcontinental railway. Army expeditions led by the  Corps of Topographical Engineers and staffed with natural  scientists, artists, and collectors began the surveys in  1853. Exploring parties moved along the four most popular  proposed routes, ranging from the northernmost line,  running from St. paul to Puget Sound, to the southermost,  running through Texas and the Gadsden Purchase to San  Diego. The reports from these expeditions funneled back to  the Office of Pacific Railroad Explorations and Surveys in  Washington, which compiled and evaluated data on the  various factors affecting railway construction--geology,  topography, and the availability of natural resources such  as water, timber, stone, and coal. In 1855 the expeditions  were complete. Each team's field reports, including  narrative descriptions, hundred of maps, and thousands of  illustrations, were organized along with the Survey  Office's assessments into a massive 8,500-page series and  presented to Congress. The reports of explorations and  surveys, originally published in the Congressional serial  set, is one of the great documents on nineteenth-century  scientific endeavor and the exploration of the West. Its  impact on American science was pervasive and enduring. The  work of the topographical engineers at last enabled the  creation of a map documenting the basic contours of the  vast American West. Naturalists, geologists, and  mineralogists brought back specimens and illustrations of a  vast array of new organisms and phenomena. Encounters  between surveying teams and then little-known Indian tribes  resulted in some of the first ethnological records of these  peoples. In addition to the surveys' value to historians of  science, they are prime examples of the interaction between  federal politics and science in the nineteenth century,  demonstrating the government's determination to harness  science in the service of national expansion, defense, and  economic growth. As the historian William H. Goetzman  writes: "The Pacific Railways surveys were an American  encyclopedia of western experience. They included an  immense amount of knowledge, took note of countless  phenomena, and brought back specimens that made the  Smithsonian one of the world's great museums. They  represented, on an elevated level, the enthusiasm of an age  which was just opening out onto the world and its natural  mysteries, one in which every known phenomenon was being  collected so that civilization could digest and account for  them all." (p. 336).},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/872123},
}