Council Bluffs

After meeting four presidential candidates, Iowa didn't have much left to offer. So on Tuesday I decided to press forward on my journey west. I aimed to get as far as Lincoln, Nebraska by evening. If I made it that far, only seven or eight hours of driving would separate me from Colorado.

It's a two hour drive from Des Moines to Council Bluffs, the last place I wanted to stop in Iowa. I couldn't put my finger on a specific reason why I wanted to stop in Council Bluffs, but I felt that I needed to. I'm glad I did because it turns out Council Bluffs is the site Abraham Lincoln selected as the eastern terminus of the Union Pacific railroad, the nation's very first transcontinental engine.

I arrived in Council Bluffs around lunchtime. I had an eye-poppingly cheap sandwich ($3.25) and salad ($3.00) for lunch at the Main Street Cafe then wandered the rest of the way down Main Street before doubling back through the town square. On the western end of a Main Street, an old Victorian-style brick building with a sign that read "Union Pacific Railroad Museum" out front beckoned.

The museum wasn't anything spectacular but it did inform me of a lot that I was ignorant of related to the construction of the Union Pacific line. Union Pacific was initially a public corporation authorized by congress in 1862. There had been debates prior to the civil war about whether the transcontinental railroad should be northern or southern and how it should be paid for. The raging Civil War settled the geographic question (it would be a northern track) and the company was incorporated and funded by congress to build the railroad but also sold private shares. The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 called for the president to select the eastern terminus for the railroad and President Lincoln picked Council Bluffs.

After visiting the railroad museum, I drove the short distance up the bluffs for which Council Bluffs is named to a vista overlooking neighboring Omaha, Nebraska. A monument at this site marks the spot where Abraham Lincoln and General Dodge, the railroad's main surveyor and architect, once looked out on the valley below after Lincoln had selected the site.

Just across the street from the vista and monument is the Fairview Cemetery, home of the legendary Black Angel sculpture, which marks the gravesite of Ruth Ann Dodge, the wife of General Dodge. The angel was commissioned by Dodge's daughters to be sculpted in the likeness of supernatural visions Ruth Ann Dodge had had before she died.