One of the last bills signed by President Lincoln authorizes pushing the Union Pacific Railroad across the wilderness to California. But financial opportunist Asa Barrows hopes to profit from obstructing it. Chief troubleshooter Jeff Butler has his hands full fighting Barrows' agent, gambler Sid Campeau; Campeau's partner Dick Allen is Jeff's war buddy and rival suitor for engineer's daughter Molly Monahan. Who will survive the effort to push the railroad through at any cost?
Union Pacific is a 1939 American Western drama directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea and Robert Preston. Based on the 1936 novel Trouble Shooter by Western fiction author Ernest Haycox, the film is about the building of the eponymous railroad across the American West. Haycox based his novel upon the experiences of civil engineer Charles H. Sharman, who worked on the railroad from its start in Omaha, Nebraska in 1866 until the golden spike ceremony on May 10, 1869 to commemorate the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. The film recreates the event using the same 1869 golden spike, on loan from Stanford University.
