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Grand Excursion
Steven James Keillor
其他書名
Antebellum America Discovers the Upper Mississippi
出版Afton Historical Society Press, 2004
主題History / United States / State & Local / GeneralHistory / United States / 19th CenturyHistory / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies)Travel / United States / General
ISBN18904346399781890434632
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=2kx5AAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋To celebrate the completion of the first railroad to reach the Mississippi River, the owners of the Chicago & Rock Island invited a distinguished group of Eastern notables and investors to travel by rail to Rock Island, Illinois, and from there by steamboat to St. Anthony Falls in fledgling Minnesota Territory, all at the railroad's expense. Nearly a thousand invited guests gathered in Chicago on the morning of June 5, 1854, to board two long trains that pulled out of the La Salle Street Station, bound for Rock Island on newly completed track. Arriving in Rock Island that same evening, the trains were greeted by spectacular fireworks, which saw the steamboats and their passengers off on their seven-day trip upriver. This "Grand Excursion" occurred a week after President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act revoking the Missouri Compromise (1820), which had prohibited slavery in Kansas and Nebraska. Historians agree that this act was the decisive event setting the nation on a collision course to the Civil War. A microcosm of antebellum society, the excursionists debated national policy and happily viewed the spectacular Upper Mississippi scenery, while their nation was careening headlong into disaster. To narrate the story of the Grand Excursion of 1854, author Steven Keillor makes excellent use of editors' accounts, journals, and letters.