![]() It was leased to the Northern Pacific in 1876 and was eventually absorbed by the Northern Pacific. In Minnesota, the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad completed construction of its 155-mile (249 km) line stretching from Saint Paul to Lake Superior at Duluth in 1870. Cloud, the first of which was shipped to Kalama by ship around Cape Horn. Four small construction engines were purchased, the Minnetonka, Itaska, Ottertail and St. The NP also began building its line north from Kalama, Washington Territory, on the Columbia River outside of Portland, Oregon, towards Puget Sound. The difficult terrain and insufficient funding delayed by six months the construction phase in Minnesota. Surveyors and construction crews had to maneuver through swamps, bogs, and tamarack forests. Over the course of 1871, the Northern Pacific pushed westward from Minnesota into present-day North Dakota. The backing and promotions of famed financier Jay Cooke in the summer of 1870 brought the first real momentum to the company. Though John Gregory Smith succeeded Perham as president on January 5, 1865, groundbreaking did not take place until February 15, 1870, at Carlton, Minnesota, 25 miles (40 km) west of Duluth, Minnesota. Jay Cooke takes control įor the next six years, backers of the road struggled to find financing. It could not use all the land and in the end took just under 40 million acres. Josiah Perham was elected its first president on December 7, 1864. Ĭongress granted the railroad a potential 60 million acres (94,000 sq mi 240,000 km 2) of land in exchange for building rail transportation to an undeveloped territory. It had a tumultuous financial history the NP merged with other lines in 1970 to form the Burlington Northern Railroad, which in turn merged with the Santa Fe Railway to become the BNSF Railway in 1996.Ĭongress chartered the Northern Pacific Railway Company on July 2, 1864, with the goals of connecting the Great Lakes with Puget Sound on the Pacific, opening vast new lands for farming, ranching, lumbering and mining, and linking Washington and Oregon to the rest of the country. ![]() The Northern Pacific was headquartered in Minnesota, first in Brainerd, then in Saint Paul. The main activities were shipping wheat and other farm products, cattle, timber, and minerals bringing in consumer goods, transporting passengers and selling land. In addition, the NP had an international branch to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The railroad had about 6,800 miles (10,900 km) of track and served a large area, including extensive trackage in the states of Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin. Grant drove in the final "golden spike" in western Montana on September 8, 1883. ![]() It was approved by Congress in 1864 and given nearly 40 million acres (62,000 sq mi 160,000 km 2) of land grants, which it used to raise money in Europe for construction.Ĭonstruction began in 1870 and the main line opened all the way from the Great Lakes to the Pacific when former President Ulysses S. The Northern Pacific Railway ( reporting mark NP) was a transcontinental railroad that operated across the northern tier of the western United States, from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest. ![]() The former Northern Pacific Office BuildingĤ ft 8 + 1⁄ 2 in ( 1,435 mm) standard gauge ![]()
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