Essays On My History Flashcards
Card 1:
Essay: Why did we invent cowboys and then make them obsolete?
The Mississippi River. Strong currents, over a mile wide with killer under currents that would drown a swimmer in seconds. The mighty Mississippi was a road block for centuries.
St. Louis was the gateway to the West. We even have a Federal monument Gateway Arch to mark the gateway.
Getting across the Mississippi a very dangerous operation. If you tried to swim across, you would be dozens of miles down stream IF you ever made it across.
Yes there were steamboats to transport small freight, but getting thousands of cattle from Texas back East to feed New York and other large cities was almost impossible.
Hence the cowboy job was invented.
The cowboys would make a “Cattle Drive” from the ranches in Texas to St. Louis. Then they would ferry The cattle across the Mississippi and continue to drive the cattle to the Eastern cities.
Kerosene was used for fuel in lamps and other machinery, but there was no way to transport kerosene in bulk from Philadelphia, across the Mississippi, and transport these thousands of gallons another 2,000 miles to the West coast.
We could do it via railroads but the Mississippi River was the giant road block on getting kerosene way out West where everyone was begging for it.
Card 2: Andrew Carnegie had a plan.
Build a giant bridge over the Mississippi located in St. Louis!
This seemed beyond impossible, but Carnegie thinks a giant steel bridge would work. Everybody thought this would be impossible!
Carnegie studied other bridges , hired an architect named Eads to come up with all the engineering specifications to construct this mammoth steel bridge.
Eads was a self-taught engineer. Plus, he never built a bridge before! He had to teach himself how to build a bridge. Now this bridge was to be the largest bridge in the world. When it was constructed, people unofficially called it the Eighth wonder of the world. It was massive!
It accommodated pedestrians, four lanes of car and truck traffic and RR tracks for a full train full of loaded box and tank cars! Huge.
People didn’t believe it would hold all that weight. Many bridges failed and collapsed back then. Everyone was afraid it was unsafe and would collapse.
There was a superstition that an Elephant never would walk on an unsafe surface. So Carnegie rents an Elephant and has it lead the first walk over the bridge. The people followed the Elephant across the bridge and everyone was convinced the bridge would not fail and collapse into the river.
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