Canals were really the technology of the 18th century. In 1827 the Baltimore and Ohio was opened as the first passenger and freight railroad and railroads started popping up extrenely rapidly, initially chartered by basically every city to be built along existing roads, then later built with their own right of way.
West of Appalachia, the land is relatively flat and the existing permanent native American settlements were sparse since their population had collapsed from disease brought by colonists centuries earlier. Railroads engaged in real estate speculation platting out and selling land in cities every 10-20 miles (because the early steam locomotives needed water every 10-20 miles, so might as well have them take on passengers/freight too!) and the federal government was practically paying railroads to take land to better establish the United States’ claim to the land. This rail building boom peaked around the 1860s around which point consolidation started reducing the quantity of rails as railroads consolidated and began building more focused trunks out of their existing right of way.
In fact, because of how the land grants were written most railroads built a single track in a straight line as fast as possible between their start and end, then once they’d secured the grant for connecting the two points by the extremely aggressive deadline, only then would they start actually rebuilding the track so that it would actually be usable for real rail service.
So in short, it was a combination of lack of existing (white) cities, land grants by a new government trying to secure its land claims that it believed were it’s manifest destiny, plus innovations in steam engines to make steam locomotives truly viable right at the time when the flegling nation had its feet under it and was ready to start investing heavily into itself.
TL;DR Right place, right time, right legal environment and right technology
Also should acknowledge that the Great Lakes and Mississippi River (and major tributaries) made for efficient water shipping to a lot of the major cities of 19th century America. Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee all have ports.
And yeah, as you say, there just weren’t major settlements of European Americans anywhere else yet except in the plantation south. California wound up aggressively settled before transcontinental rail, but even there was largely along the coasts. Our national population remains pretty coastal alongside density in the great lakes and major tributaries of the Mississippi.
Hilariously I forgot about the natural waterways like the Mississippi despite working directly next to the Mississippi and spending my lunches at a park by it for a full year (and that was in a French colonial city from the 17th century)
Native Americans did in fact have permanent cities, like notably Cahokia in what’s now Illinois. There were also some earlier colonial settlements along major waterways like the Mississippi. It’s likely there were quite a few permanent cities that were lost to time because they weren’t built with materials that would last centuries of abandonment. Notably there are thousands of effigy mounds dotted across the landscape of basically the entire Midwest, which is a very permanent sign of long term habitation or at least locations returned to frequently enough to be worth creating such a monument
Canals were really the technology of the 18th century. In 1827 the Baltimore and Ohio was opened as the first passenger and freight railroad and railroads started popping up extrenely rapidly, initially chartered by basically every city to be built along existing roads, then later built with their own right of way.
West of Appalachia, the land is relatively flat and the existing permanent native American settlements were sparse since their population had collapsed from disease brought by colonists centuries earlier. Railroads engaged in real estate speculation platting out and selling land in cities every 10-20 miles (because the early steam locomotives needed water every 10-20 miles, so might as well have them take on passengers/freight too!) and the federal government was practically paying railroads to take land to better establish the United States’ claim to the land. This rail building boom peaked around the 1860s around which point consolidation started reducing the quantity of rails as railroads consolidated and began building more focused trunks out of their existing right of way.
In fact, because of how the land grants were written most railroads built a single track in a straight line as fast as possible between their start and end, then once they’d secured the grant for connecting the two points by the extremely aggressive deadline, only then would they start actually rebuilding the track so that it would actually be usable for real rail service.
So in short, it was a combination of lack of existing (white) cities, land grants by a new government trying to secure its land claims that it believed were it’s manifest destiny, plus innovations in steam engines to make steam locomotives truly viable right at the time when the flegling nation had its feet under it and was ready to start investing heavily into itself.
TL;DR Right place, right time, right legal environment and right technology
Also should acknowledge that the Great Lakes and Mississippi River (and major tributaries) made for efficient water shipping to a lot of the major cities of 19th century America. Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee all have ports.
And yeah, as you say, there just weren’t major settlements of European Americans anywhere else yet except in the plantation south. California wound up aggressively settled before transcontinental rail, but even there was largely along the coasts. Our national population remains pretty coastal alongside density in the great lakes and major tributaries of the Mississippi.
Hilariously I forgot about the natural waterways like the Mississippi despite working directly next to the Mississippi and spending my lunches at a park by it for a full year (and that was in a French colonial city from the 17th century)
Wait - did native Americans have cities of their own, within the territory of modern USA? Or do you just mean settlements in general
Native Americans did in fact have permanent cities, like notably Cahokia in what’s now Illinois. There were also some earlier colonial settlements along major waterways like the Mississippi. It’s likely there were quite a few permanent cities that were lost to time because they weren’t built with materials that would last centuries of abandonment. Notably there are thousands of effigy mounds dotted across the landscape of basically the entire Midwest, which is a very permanent sign of long term habitation or at least locations returned to frequently enough to be worth creating such a monument