Abraham Lincoln, Grenville M. Dodge & the Transpacific Railroad

Abraham Lincoln arrived in Council Bluffs on August 13, 1859, looking less like a future president and more like what he was — a traveling lawyer with a worn suit, a dusty hat, and long legs that seemed to fold awkwardly off the steamboat. He came west partly to see the Missouri River country for himself, and partly to learn more about the growing railroad interests pushing toward the Pacific.

On this visit, he met Grenville M. Dodge, a young civil engineer whose surveys of the region were already respected. Dodge later recalled that Lincoln approached him with a direct question that bypassed all small talk:

“I am informed you are a railroad engineer, and that you have made surveys.”

Lincoln wanted just one thing: an honest engineering assessment of where a transcontinental line ought to begin. Dodge told him that the most practical starting point on the Missouri River was Council Bluffs, citing the favorable grades leading west through the Platte Valley. Dodge recalled Lincoln listened with intense focus, asking what he later described as “a series of minute questions” about routes, elevations, and obstacles.

Dodge said Lincoln questioned him so thoroughly that he “completely shelled my woods,” a phrase Dodge used to describe how Lincoln extracted every useful detail he possessed.

The meeting didn’t last long. Lincoln continued his western travels, and Council Bluffs returned to its quiet routines. But Dodge never forgot how carefully Lincoln had absorbed the information, nor how deliberate his questions were. “He obtained,” Dodge wrote, “all the information I had collected.”

Three years later, in 1862, President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act. When the time came to select the eastern terminus of the Union Pacific Railroad, Lincoln chose the location Dodge had identified. In an official endorsement written in 1863, Lincoln described the site as “a point on the Missouri River opposite or near Council Bluffs.”

Dodge spent much of his later life building the very line he once described to Lincoln. Looking back, he wrote that the president had remembered every detail of their conversation on the bluffs — and had acted on it.

The result was one of the most consequential engineering decisions in American history: the point where the transcontinental railroad began was chosen not in Washington, but on a quiet Iowa hillside where a lawyer and an engineer talked through the geography of the West.