transportation business. The Daily Champion of Atchison, Kansas, reported that the traffic west of the Missouri had increased fourfold between the years 1863 and 1865. In the three years following the war the amount of land granted under the Homestead Act alone rose from 1,160,000 to 2,302,923 acres; while the grants for railroads, agricultural and industrial colleges, public schools, soldiers' bounties, roads, canals, and other internal improvements raised the total annual distribution of the public lands to something like 6,000,000 acres.1

By far the largest item in the government's liberality was the aid in lands and money granted to the projected Western railroads. In the decade preceding the war the roads east of the Mississippi had already been joined into systems and Congress had given some ten million acres of land to the states of the eastern Mississippi basin. Plans for railroad connections between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast had also received considerable attention from Congress, which had made several appropriations for surveys. But the opposition of the South to further expenditures by Congress for the development of free territory in the West had interrupted the plans for a Pacific railroad, just as it had postponed the free allotment of homesteads. On the withdrawal of the Southern members, however, Congress had revived the schemes for the development of the West. On July 1, 1862, six weeks after the passage of the Homestead Act, President Lincoln signed the bill incorporating the Union Pacific Railroad Company to build a line from the western boundary of Iowa to . a point where it should meet the Central Pacific, building eastward from Sacramento, California. Half the public lands in a strip ten miles wide on both sides of the road were given to the companies, and a subsidy of $16,000 in 6 per cent bonds for every mile of track completed." Stock to the amount of $100,000,000 was offered for sale at $1000 per share. On December

1 See the report of the Secretary of the Interior, House Executive Documents, Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Congresses.

2 This subsidy was doubled for miles across the desert lying between the Rockies and the Sierras, and increased threefold (to $48,000) for some three hundred miles of track across the mountains.

2, 1863, with flags flying and cannon booming, the first spadeful of earth was turned at the little town of Omaha, selected as the eastern terminus of the road. But in spite of further favors granted by the government in July, 1864,' capital was slow in seeking an investment whose returns seemed so remote and uncertain, when hundreds of men were making a fortune overnight in oil or metals. The war had ended before the first råil was actually laid (July 10, 1865). Even then there were plenty of sensible people who maintained that it was an impossible task to build a railroad across the wilderness of the desert and over the towering mountain ranges. General Sherman declared in August, 1865, that he "would not buy a ticket on the Pacific Railroad for his youngest grandchild"; yet the general himself lived to have the opportunity to purchase a ticket to the Pacific coast over any one of five great systems.

If the actual difficulties and dangers confronting the builders of the transcontinental railroad were great, the prospective rewards were greater still. Before the close of the war Colorado had sent over $10,000,000 of gold to the United States mints. Nevada was yielding $20,000,000 of silver annually. From Alder Gulch in the new territory of Montana $16,000,000 of gold had been taken in the years 1862-1866. "One vast field of bewildering wealth," was A. K. McClure's description of the territory. Men flocked to the mining regions of the Rockies in the early sixties, as they had flocked to the gold fields of California in the late forties. The trans-Missouri traffic multiplied sevenfold during the four years of the Civil War. In 1866 it was estimated that there were a million white inhabitants west of the "Big Muddy" River. Half of these million were on the Pacific coast, in the great state of California, exploiting the fertile wheat lands of the north or the rich fruit lands of the south; or still farther north, developing the valleys of Oregon and

1 The land grant was doubled to include alternate sections in a strip twenty miles wide on each side of the track, the par value of the shares was reduced from $1000 to $100, the bonds were made a second mortgage on the road to facilitate the sale of the company's securities, and the company was given the priority in the sale of its lands over the other lands along the route.

Washington, and penetrating far up the Columbia River by the Oregon Steam Navigation Company's boats. San Francisco had been joined to New York in 1862 by the electric telegraph. Its harbor was a "forest of masts." The Pacific Mail Company, whose steamers plied up and down the western coast, purchased Vanderbilt's line between New York and Aspinwall in 1865, and on January 1, 1867, inaugurated regular sailings between San Francisco and the Orient. It was possible to buy a through ticket from New York to Shanghai or Yokohama.

The time was ripe for the all-rail connection between the Atlantic and Pacific shores. The stage service over the plains and mountains of the great West had reached the limits of its usefulness. Ben Holladay's famous "Overland Line," controlling nearly 3000 miles of traffic and owning 260 coaches and 6000 horses and mules, was taxed beyond its capacity to handle the trade. Holladay dispatched a coach a day eastward from Placerville and westward from Atchison. But the journey took weeks. The passengers were subjected to the discomfort of many weary hours in cramped positions and to the dangers of storms, drought, prairie fires, highwaymen, and hostile Indians. Besides the mail bags, only the lightest kinds of freight could be carried-all the heavier shipments going by the slow water route via the Isthmus.

As the railhead of the Union Pacific moved rapidly westward,' the rude mining camps, with their lawless gangs of desperadoes, began to be transformed into towns and cities. Churches, schools, libraries, appeared where only saloons and gaming-houses had been before. The trains brought families where the stagecoaches had carried adventurers. In Owen Wister's picturesque phrase, "The nomadic, bachelor West began to give place to the housed and married West."

1 In November, 1866, it was 270 miles west of Omaha. July 1, 1867, it had reached Julesburg in the northeast corner of Colorado, proceeding at the rate of 50 miles a month. By the end of November, 1867, it had reached Cheyenne, Wyoming, 510 miles west of the Missouri; and in January, 1869, it passed the 1000-mile post at Weber Canyon, Utah. From the California end, with the Sierras to blast through and long snowsheds to construct, the work went mcre slowly. Thousands of Chinese were employed in the work on the Central Pacific.

Congress had given the Pacific companies until July 1, 1876, to complete their work. It is not unlikely that the task would not have been finished then, if it had not been for the energy of a group of wealthy men, including Oakes Ames (a congressman from Massachusetts) and his brother Oliver, the Hazards of Rhode Island, Governor Stanford of California, and others, who formed a construction company, called the Crédit Mobilier of America, for financing the work. Several officials of the Union Pacific Company were members of the Crédit Mobilier; and when it was later discovered by an investigating committee of Congress that these men in their capacity as officials of the road had awarded to themselves excessively profitable contracts in their capacity as members of the construction company, and had used the stock of the company for the virtual bribery of certain members of Congress, the Crédit Mobilier fell into merited disgrace and became a byword in our history. But this sad revelation does not alter the fact that Ames and his associates rendered a considerable service in getting the Union Pacific · Railroad completed eight years before the date set by Congress. The tracks building westward from Omaha and eastward from Sacramento met at Promontory Point, near Ogden, Utah, where, on May 10, 1869, amid impressive ceremonies, the last rail was fastened with spikes of silver and gold to a sleeper of polished California laurel. Wires connected with the silver sledge-hammer carried the welcome sound of the alternate strokes of President Stanford of the Central and Vice President Durant of the Union Pacific to telegraph offices all over the land. Then the two locomotives drew together "until their noses touched," while their gala decorations received a christening from the contents of champagne bottles broken over their cabs. The first through train from California to New York arrived at the Hudson River terminal on July 26, 1869, after a run of six and a half days.

The effects of this wonderful achievement, which brought the two shores of our country within less than a week of each other, were immediately visible. Our trade with China and Japan had increased from $10,485,000 to $14,814,000 (or about

41 per cent) in the three years preceding 1869. In the next three years it increased to over $28,000,000, or nearly 100 per cent. In the first ten months of 1870 some 1,700,000 pounds of freight were shipped over the Central Pacific road, and 13,235,000 pounds in the corresponding months of 1871. The other Pacific roads which had been granted lands or subsidies were stimulated to complete their tracks. From Duluth at the head of Lake Superior to New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi, there was scarcely a town of respectable size that did not cherish the hope of becoming the eastern terminal of a Pacific railroad.

The "Pacific fever" invaded Congress. A Senate Pacific Railroad Committee, headed by the enthusiastic Stewart of Nevada, brought in a majority report early in 1869, recommending government aid to some five thousand miles of projected lines from the Mississippi Valley to the coast. The government was to guarantee 6 per cent interest on bond issues of $30,000 a mile until the roads should earn the money. Stewart estimated that this would pledge the United States to a liability of about · $4,500,000 a year for a period of five years, and in return for this moderate outlay inestimable advantages would be reaped. Five dollars' worth of trade would be created for every dollar spent. The hostile Indians would be "permanently conquered."

1 Some of these roads were the Kansas Pacific, the Southern Pacific, the Memphis, Pacific, and El Paso, the Gulf and Pacific, the St. Paul and Pacific, and the Northern Pacific.

2 One of the most serious problems of the period was the control of the Indians on our frontier from Montana to Texas. Resenting the invasion of their immemorial hunting-grounds by the steady westward migration of the "pale faces," they ambushed the stagecoaches, tore up rails, threw down telegraph poles, and massacred the inmates of the government posts. Dishonest agents of the Indian Bureau sold the savages whisky and firearms, which made the task of the soldiers who were trying to restrain ambush and massacres almost impossible. The Indian Bureau and the War Department were at loggerheads, each accusing the other of inefficiency and inhumanity. Commissioner Taylor of the bureau asserted in 1867 that it had cost the government over $40,000,000 to conduct the campaign of 1865; and that at the present rate of extermination it would take twenty-five thousand years, at a cost of $300,000,000,000, to be rid of the "red fiends."