Joseph A. Smith Collection: May 2017

ID # 1,109

THE "BIG BOY"

The world's longest and heaviest single-unit locomotives, the giant articulated 4-8-8-4 "Big Boys," were built for the Union Pacific Railroad by the American Locomotive Company. Each weighed 1,200,000 pounds in working order with her tender. This example, No. 40I9, was nearly 86 feet long 132 feet with tender. These power factories were designed to pull heavy fast freight Over the Wasatch Mountains without the use of helper engines. Because of their great length and power, they worked mostly in the mountainous area of the West, and used extra-long turntables. According to Union Pacific motive power experts they could make up to 80 miles per hour, but developed their top horsepower at 30 miles per hour. Nearly all of the Big Boys have been scrapped. One of them is on exhibition at the National Museum of Transport, St. Louis, Missouri.

UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD

ID # 907

TROUBLE WITH THE INDIANS

As the Union Pacific Railroad builders pushed westward across the great plains in the middle and late 1860's, the Sioux, Cheyennes and other warlike tribes united to block the iron horse. The Indians made a desperate, futile effort to stop the white men's wholesale slaughter of buffalo herds which supplied their food, clothing and shelter. The Federal Government had solemnly pledged that So long as the Indians were peaceful, buffalo hunting would not be permitted south of the Arkansas River. But white men broke that treaty, railroad builders formed an alliance with the friendly Pawnees, and war was on. As shown in this painting, rails were torn up, ties destroy, trains wrecked, plundered and burned; and hundreds of men on both sides were killed. Blood sprinkled the route from Omaha, Nebraska, to Promontory Utah, where U. P. rails finally joined those of the eastward-advancing Central (now Southern) Pacific on May 10, 1869.

KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY