On October 25, 1853, members of the Paiute Indian Tribe attack U.S. Army Captain John W. Gunnison and his party of 37 soldiers and railroad surveyors near Sevier Lake, Utah. Gunnison and seven other men were killed, but the survey party continued with its work and eventually reported its findings to the United States Congress.
U.S. officials touted the transcontinental railroad as a project that, once complete, would provide critical infrastructure for 19th-century America. But for many Native Americans, the railroad threatened hunting grounds, sacred sites and ancestral homelands, and it wiped out populations of buffalo, which were essential to tribal life. Attacks like the October 25 one by members of the Paiute Indian tribe, were one way Indigenous people tried to resist the intrusion.
Gunnison was a West Point graduate who had led several previous topographical surveys before being assigned to conduct this survey of potential railroad routes across central Colorado and Utah. Gunnison’s mission was only one of four surveys dispatched by the U.S. Congress in an attempt to break a sectional deadlock over which route the proposed transcontinental railroad should follow.
The idea of a transcontinental railroad was jeopardized by a bitter dispute between northern and southern politicians, with both factions insisting that the line should have its terminus in their respective regions. Congress hoped that by turning the question over to the impartial and scientific surveyors of the topographical corps, a clearly superior route would emerge and break the deadlock.
