The Northern Pacific Railway (reporting mark NP) was an important American transcontinental railroad that operated across the northern tier of the Western United States, from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest between 1864 and 1970. It was approved and chartered by the 38th Congress of the United States in the national / federal capital of Washington, D.C., during the last years of the American Civil War (1861–1865), and received nearly 40 million acres (62,000 sq mi; 160,000 km2) of adjacent land grants, which it used to raise additional money in Europe (especially in Northern Pacific president Henry Villard's home country of the new German Empire), for construction funding.
Construction began in 1870, and the main line had opened all the way from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean, just south of the Canada–United States border, when Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final "golden spike" completing the line in western Montana Territory, on September 8, 1883. The railroad had about 6,800 miles (10,900 km) of track and served a large area, including extensive trackage in the western Federal territories and later states of Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin. In addition, the N.P. had an international branch, Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway (formed 1888), running north to Winnipeg, capital of the province of Manitoba, in the newly organized Canada. The main activities were shipping wheat and other farm products, cattle, timber, and minerals; bringing in consumer goods, transporting passengers; and selling land. This joint venture ended in 1899 and remaining Canadian trackage and Winnipeg East Yard acquired by the Canadian Northern Railway in 1901.
The Northern Pacific was headquartered in Minnesota, first in Brainerd, then in the state capital of Saint Paul. It had a tumultuous financial history; the N.P. merged with other lines over a century later in 1970 to form the modern Burlington Northern Railroad, which in turn merged with the famous Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway to become the renamed BNSF Railway in 1996, operating in the western U.S.
The 38th United States Congress chartered the Northern Pacific Railway Company on July 2, 1864, with the goals of connecting the Great Lakes with Puget Sound on the northwestern coast of the United States on the Pacific Ocean, opening vast new lands for farming, ranching, lumbering and mining, and linking the federal territory of Washington and state of Oregon to the rest of the country (plus connecting the northern Great Plains of central Canada to the northern states of the U.S. and especially its Midwestern big cities, manufacturing centers and markets.
The U.S. Congress granted the Northern Pacific Railroad a generous potential bonanza of 60 million acres (94,000 sq mi; 240,000 km2) of land adjacent to the line in exchange for building rail transportation to an undeveloped western territory. Josiah Perham was elected its first president on December 7, 1864. It could not use all the land and in the end accepted just under 40 million acres of the allotment.
For the next six years, backers of the road struggled to find financing. Though John Gregory Smith, succeeded Perham as second president on January 5, 1865, groundbreaking did not take place until February 15, 1870, at Carlton, Minnesota, 25 miles (40 km) west of Duluth (on Lake Superior, the westernmost port of the Great Lakes). The backing and promotions of famed New York City / Wall Street financier Jay Cooke, in the summer of 1870 brought the first real momentum to the railway company.
Over the course of 1871, the Northern Pacific pushed westward from Minnesota into the Dakota Territory (in the present-day state of North Dakota). Surveyors and construction crews had to maneuver through swamps, bogs, and tamarack forests. The difficult terrain and insufficient funding delayed by six months the construction phase in Minnesota. The N.P. also began building its line north from Kalama, Washington Territory, on the Columbia River just outside of Portland, Oregon, towards the Puget Sound. Four small construction locomotive engines were purchased, the Minnetonka, Itaska, Ottertail and St. Cloud, the first of which was transported via ship to Kalama around Cape Horn. In Minnesota, the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad completed construction of its 155-mile (249 km) line stretching from Saint Paul east to Lake Superior at Duluth in 1870. It was leased to the Northern Pacific line in 1876 and was eventually absorbed by the Northern Pacific. The famed North Coast Limited was the Northern Pacific's flagship passenger train, and the railroad itself was built along the trail blazed by the Lewis and Clark expedition exploring the new Louisiana Purchase and the further American West in 1804 and 1805.
The Northern Pacific reached Fargo, Dakota Territory (now North Dakota) on the border between Dakota Territory and Minnesota early in June 1872. The following year, in June 1873, the N.P. reached the shores of the upper Missouri River at Edwinton, Dakota Territory (now Bismarck, the state capital of North Dakota). In the west sector, the N.P. track extended 25 miles (40 km) north from Kalama. Surveys were carried out in the Dakota Territory protected by 600 troops of the horse cavalry of the United States Army, under command of Civil War hero General Winfield Scott Hancock.
Fabricating shops and foundries were established in Brainerd, Minnesota, a town named by the N.P. second President John Gregory Smith for his father-in-law, Lawrence Brainerd, a close friend and colleague. The Railway also established its first temporary offices and headquarters there. A severe stock market crash and financial collapse in the East after 1873, led by the Credit Mobilier Scandal and the Union Pacific Railroad stock fraud, caused a nationwide economic recession and financial panic in New York City's Wall Street financial district, stopping further railroad building for twelve years during the latter 1870s and early 1880s.
In 1886, the company restarted and put down 164 miles (264 km) of main line across the northern Dakotas, with an additional 45 miles (72 km) from the west in Washington Territory. On November 1, former U.S. Army general George Washington Cass, became the third president of the company. Cass had been a vice-president and on the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the dominant Eastern lines, and would lead the Northern Pacific through some of its most difficult times in the later 19th century.
Attacks on survey parties and construction crews as they approached the Yellowstone region by Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa native warriors in northern Dakota and Minnesota Territories became so prevalent that the company received protection from U.S. cavalry.
In 1886, the Northern Pacific also opened colonization / emigration offices in Europe especially the newly unified German Empire and north to the kingdoms of Scandinavia, with good reliable steamship lines, attracting Nordic farmers with package deals of cheap land and transportation and purchase deals in the similar cold higher latitudes of climate of the north-central North America continent, but with richer unplowed expansive soil. The success of the N.P. was based on the abundant crops of wheat and other grains already grown and the attraction to settlers of the lower Red River Valley of the Red River of the North, Minnesota, Missouri and Mississippi Rivers basins along the Minnesota-Dakota border in the decade between 1881 and 1890.
The Northern Pacific reached Dakota Territory at Fargo in 1872 and began its career as one of the central factors in the economic growth of
Dakota Territory and later its twin states North and South. The climate, although very cold in the continental interior heartland was still suitable for wheat, which was in high demand in the eastern and Mid-Western rapidly developing industrial cities of the United States and even growing exports overseas to Europe. Most of the settlers were German and Scandinavian immigrants who bought the land cheaply and raised large families. They shipped huge quantities of wheat to Minneapolis, then Milwaukee, Chicago and St. Louis connected by rail. while buying all sorts of farming equipment and home supplies (some ordered and delivered through the beginnings of published mail-order catalogs from the big cities warehouses, to be shipped in by rail.