The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864

Could this have been avoided? Could they have done otherwise? It is easy, when the battle is won, to tell how victory might have been bought cheaper,—when the campaign is ended, to show what might perhaps have brought it to an earlier and more glorious close. It is easy for us, with the whole field before us, to see that from the beginning, from the very first start, although the formula was Taxation, the principle was Independence; but before we venture to pass sentence, ought we not to pause and weigh well our judgment and our words,—we who, in the fiercer contest through which we are passing, have so long failed to see, that, while the formula is Secession, the principle is Slavery?

THROUGH-TICKETS TO SAN FRANCISCO: A PROPHECY

We write this article in September. Within a few days, and without much heralding, has occurred an event of prime importance to our country's future. This is the opening from New York to St. Louis of a continuous broad-gauge line under the title of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway. This line is twelve hundred miles long, and pursues the following route: By the New York and Erie Road, from New York to the station of Salamanca; thence, by a separate road of the Atlantic and Great Western, to Dayton, Ohio; thence, over the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton Road, to Cincinnati; and finally, by the Ohio and Mississippi Road, to St. Louis. The first excursion-train accomplished the whole distance in forty-four hours. We understand that the regular express-trains of the line will be required to make equally good time,—ultimately, perhaps, to reduce the time to forty hours.

This valuable connection has been mainly effected by the energy and talents of two men. Mr. James McHenry, a Pennsylvanian by birth, but of late years resident abroad, has raised twenty million dollars for the project in the money-markets of England, Spain, and Germany, the bonds of the Company obtaining ready sale upon the guaranty of his personal high character for uprightness and financial ability. Mr. Thomas W. Kennard, an engineer and capitalist of large views, discretion, and experience, has managed the interests of the project here at home, securing the hearty cooperation and good-will of all the roads now made continuous, and bringing the enterprise to a successful issue with a skill possible only to first-class commercial genius. The former of these gentlemen is Financial Director and Contractor, the latter, Engineer-in-Chief, Vice-President, and General Manager of the line. At any other period than this their success would have been widely talked of as a great national benefit. Even now let us not forget the public-spirited men whose hopeful hands, in the midst of blood and din, have been sowing seeds of commercial prosperity to glorify with their perfected harvest the day of our National triumph and reunion.

This work is the first instalment of the greatest popular enterprise in the world, the initial fulfilment of a promise which America has made to herself and all the other nations,—one which shall be completely fulfilled only when an iron highway stretches across her entire breadth, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. As a people we have grudged neither time nor money to the accomplishment of this end. We have dared the fiery desert and the frozen mountaintop, the demons of thirst, starvation, and savage warfare. Our foremost scientific men, for the sake of the great national enterprise, have taken their lives in their hands, going out to meet peril and privation with the cheerful constancy of apostles and martyrs. The record of expeditions bearing either directly or indirectly on the subject of the Pacific Railroad is one to which every American citizen must point with a pride none the less hearty for the fact that its route has not yet been absolutely decided. The one curse mingled with a young republic's many blessings is the intrusion of political influences into the dispassionate field of national enterprise. We might have determined the line of our Pacific Road before the breaking out of the Rebellion, and by this time its first or Great-Plains section should have been in running order, but for the partisan jealousies which prevailed in high places between the advocates of the different routes. Slavery, that enfant gâté of our old-school and now happily obsolete statecraft, insisted on the expensive toy of a southern and unpractical line, until our representatives, harassed by the problem how to gratify her without incurring the contempt of the financial world, gave over to the drift of events the settlement of their country's chief commercial question. We are now in a position to decide coolly; no entangling alliances with a dead-weight social system bias our plain judgment of practical pros and cons; but the opportunity for decision arrives a little too late and a little too early for action. Congress, the legitimate custodian of the Pacific Railroad, may be said to have passed the last four years in climbing to the level of the country's vital exigency. Till Congress reaches that and understands it fully, there is no surplus energy to be thrown away on the else paramount matters of a peaceful age.

But it must not be forgotten that the Pacific Railroad stands next to the maintenance of National Unity on the docket of causes for adjudication by our representative tribunal. The people have filed it away till the grand appeal is settled; but they have not forgotten it.

It is none the pleasanter thought to them because they have no time to talk about it, that the great highway of the continent has been left, pendente lite, in the hands of squabbling speculators, and that personal recriminations bar the progress of our commerce between sea and sea. The indifference of our public trustees to the disgraceful controversies which have embarrassed work on the eastern end of the line is itself not a disgrace only because human power is limited to the care of one great matter at a time. The first Congress that meets under the olive of an honorable peace must at once take the Pacific Railroad into the Nation's hands, and prosecute it as the Nation's matter, with a liberal-mindedness learned from the conduct of a great war. Next to the salvation of the Union, the completion of the Pacific Road most fully justifies prompt action and comparative disregard of expenditure.

It is not our purpose, nor is this the place, to dictate to our legislators either the precise line of their own action or that of the road. It is still proper to say that the arrangements thus far entered into with private contractors have proved inadequate to the accomplishment and unworthy of the character of the enterprise. Whatever may be the details of the improved plan, it must embrace a sterner national surveillance over the execution of the project, and a direct national assumption of its prime responsibility.

It is a mistaken notion to suppose that the Pacific-Railroad question rests on the same principles as that of our minor internal improvements. It calls for no reopening of the long-hushed controversy between Democracy and Whiggism. The best thinkers of the day are universally agreed to deprecate legislation in every case where private enterprise will do its office. No good political economist approves the emasculation of private effort by Government subsidy. The people are averse to statutory crutches and go-carts, wherever it is possible for them to walk alone. We feel distrust of the railroad which asks monopoly-privileges. The sight of a Governmental prop under any ostensibly commercial concern warns an American from its neighborhood. He has learned that true prestige lies with the people,—that there is no vital warmth in official patronage. Even within the memory of young men a great change for the better has taken place in our commercial manliness. Out first-class public enterprises blush to take Government help, as their directors might blush, if at the close of an interview Mr. Lincoln "tipped" them like school-boys with a holiday handful of greenbacks. There is no doubt that the ideal principle of democratic progress demands the absolute non-interference of Government in all enterprises whose benefit accrues to a part of its citizens, or which can be stimulated into life by the spontaneous operation of popular interest.

But facts are not ideal, and absolute principles in their practical application make head only by a curved line of compromise with the facts. The philosopher cannot go faster than the people. Certain courses are proper for certain stages of development. Few New-York Democrats now denounce the building of "Clinton's Ditch," and the fact that a majority approved of it as a sufficient evidence that it was a measure suited to the period; though even an old Whig at this day could not approve of a State canal under the auspices of Governor Seymour. Here are the two great questions which at any time must regulate the exertion of Governmental power: Is the enterprise vitally important? and, Will it be accomplished by private effort?

Because the Nation in several eminent instances saw the former question answered affirmatively and the latter negatively, it centralized a certain amount of authority for the construction of fortresses and the maintenance of a military force. These matters vitally concerned the entire people, yet the ordinary stimuli to private enterprise were quite inadequate to securing their accomplishment.

The Pacific Railroad stands on precisely the same grounds. It concerns the entire population of the United States, but no ordinary business-organization of citizens will ever accomplish it alone. The mere cost of its construction might stagger the most audacious financier; but that is a minor obstacle. No doubt the city of New York and the State of California contain capital enough for the completion of the entire road,—would subscribe to it, too, upon sufficient guaranties. But who is to give those guaranties? Whose credit is broad enough to secure them? Our Atlantic capitalists have too often been defrauded by stock-companies of moderate liabilities and immediately under their own eyes, to feel quite comfortable about putting millions into the hands of private operators, who shall presently have the Rocky Mountains between them and their bondholders. In the case of almost any other railroad-enterprise this objection might be answered by the proposal to build the line with the subscriptions of people living on its route. But this line must take a route without people, and bring people to the route. Certain other roads are guarantied by the pledge of their way-freight business. This road must be completed before such a business exists; the business must be the product of the road. The ordinary principle of demand and supply is reversed in its application to this case. Supply must precede demand. Furnish the Pacific Railroad to the continent, and the continent in ten years will give it all the business it can do. Wait fifty years for the continent to take the initiative, and there will not yet be enough business to build the road.

This enterprise must be looked at in the light of a cash-advance from California and the Eastern States to the Plains, the Mountains, and the Desert, secured by a pledge of all the mineral and agricultural wealth of the party of the second part, guarantied by the prospective myriads of settlers whom the road shall bring to tracts now lying waste through the mere lack of its existence. In the course of the present article we shall endeavor to show the solidity of this security, the responsibility of these indorsers. While we counsel confidence to the capital which must build the road, we feel it imperative upon the National Government to enforce its position as that capital's trustee. That capital for the most part lies east of the Missouri and west of the Sierra Nevada. Between these two boundaries the road must run for eighteen hundred miles through a region where capital may well be cautious of intrusting its life to any less potent authority than that of the Nation itself.

The claims of the Pacific Railroad have usually been urged upon the ground of its benefit to its termini. This ground is adequate to justify any advance of capital by the cities of New York and San Francisco. With the completion of the road, San Francisco necessarily becomes a depot for the entire China trade of the United States, and an entrepot for much of that between China and Western Europe. With the development of our Japanese relations, still another stream of wealth, now incalculable, must flow in through the Golden Gate. In the reverse current of Asiatic commerce, New York's position at the eastern terminus of the continental belt gives her a similar share. The gold-transport and the entire fast-freight business of New York and San Francisco, now transacted at an enormous expense by Wells and Fargo's Express, must be transferred en masse to the Pacific Road; while the passenger-carriage, now devolving on Isthmus steamers and overland stages, may be passed, practically entire, to the credit of the new line. Certainly, no traveller who has once purchased bitter experience with his ticket on Mr. Vanderbilt's line will ever again patronize that enterprising capitalist, unless he sells his ships and becomes a stockholder in the Pacific Railroad. The most enthusiastic lover of the sea must abjure his predilections, when brought to the ordeal of the steamer Champion. Crowded like rabbits in a hutch or captives in the Libby into such indecent propinquity with his kind that the third day out makes him a misanthrope,—fed on the putrid remains of the last trip's commissariat, turkeys which drop out of their skins while the cook is larding them in the galley, beef which maybe eaten as spoon-meat, and tea apparently made with bilge-water,—sleeping or vainly trying to sleep in an unventilated dungeon which should be called death instead of berth, where the reek of the aforesaid putridities awakes him to breakfast without aid of gong,—propelled by a second-hand engine, whose every wheeze threatens the terrors of dissolution,—morally certain, that, if his floating sty from any cause ceases to float, there are not boats enough to save an eighth of the passengers,—he must admire the ocean with a true poet's enthusiasm, if he can brave the Champion a second time.

The considerations we have mentioned should be sufficiently operative with the capitalists of New York and California, and, as such, are those most prominently urged by the friends of the road. It would, however, be a great mistake to regard the through-business an all-comprehensive, in enumerating the sources of profit to be relied on by the enterprise. For a better understanding of that immense way-trade which lies between the oceans, waiting only for the whistle of the steam-genie to wake it into vigorous life, let us treat the entire line as already continuous from New York to San Francisco, and make an excursion to the Pacific on its prophetic rails. We will suppose the track a uniform broad gauge, as it ought to be,—the Pacific Road connecting at St. Louis with the Atlantic and Great Western by powerful boats, like those in use at Havre de Grace, capable of ferrying the heaviest cars between the Illinois and Missouri shores. We will take the liberty of constructing for ourselves the remainder of the still undecided route to the Pacific. We run our ideal broad gauge as follows:—

From St. Louis to Jefferson City; thence by the shortest line to the Kansas-River crossing; thence to Leavenworth (where St. Joseph, makes connection by a branch-track); thence to that bend of the Republican Fork which nearest approaches the Little Blue; thence along the bottoms of the Republican to the foot of the high divide out of which it is believed to rise, and which also serves for the water-shed between the Platte and Arkansas; and thence skirting the bluffs a distance of about one hundred miles to Denver. At Denver we find two branches making junctions with our line: one connects us with Central City, the great mining-town of Colorado, by a series of grades which might appall the Pennsylvania Central; the other threads the foot-hills and mesas between Denver and the Fontaine-qui-Bouille Spa at Colorado City, with the possibility of its being extended in time to Cañon City on the Arkansas. From Denver we strike for the nearest point on the Cache-la-Poudre, follow its bed as far as practicable, and rise from that level to the grand plateau of the Laramie Plains. Running through these Plains, we cross the Big and the Little Laramie Rivers, here shallow streams, crystal clear, and scarcely wider than the Housatonic at Pittsfield. Just after leaving the Plains, we cross Medicine Bow,—a mere brook,—and a few hours later the North Fork of the Platte, which eccentrically turns up in this most unexpected quarter, running nearly due north from a source which cannot be very far off. The rope-ferry by which the writer last crossed this picturesque and rapid stream we have replaced by a strong iron bridge. Leaving the west end of that bridge, we look out of the rear car and send our final message to the Atlantic by the last stream which we shall find going thither. A stupendous, but not impracticable, system of grades next carries us over the axial water-shed of the continent, by the way of Bridger's Pass. One hundred and fifty miles of tortuous descent brings us to Green River,—the stream which farther down becomes the mysterious Colorado, and seeks the Pacific by the Gulf of California. After crossing the Green by another iron bridge substituted for rope-ferriage, our first important station will be Fort Bridger. Leaving there, we almost immediately enter the galleries of the Wahsatch Range, which form a continuous pass across Bear River and into the tremendous cañons conducting down to Salt-Lake City. From Salt Lake we pursue the shortest practicable route through the Desert to the Ruby-Valley Pass of the Humboldt Mountains; we cross that range to enter another desert, descend to the Sink of Carson, and reascend to Carson City, thence going nearly due north till we strike the line of the Truckee Pass, (where a branch connects us with the principal Washoe mines,) and thence to Sacramento by the long-projected California section of the Pacific Railroad. Another proposed, but still ideal, road completes our connection with the Western Ocean by way of Stockton, San José, and San Francisco.

We do not pretend to assert that the route indicated is in all respects the most economical and practicable; a good deal more surveying must be done before that can be said of any entire route, though we think it may fairly be claimed for our ideal section between St. Louis and Denver. We have chosen this route because along its course are more completely represented the natural features to which in any case the Pacific Railroad must look for all its primary obstacles and part of its subsequent profits.

To complete the conception as its reality must in time be completed, let us unite our Trans-Missouri portion with the Atlantic and Great Western Railway, under the all-inclusive title of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. It will not be very far out of the way to regard thirty-eight hundred miles as the entire length of the line. On the Atlantic and Great Western section express-trains will run at a speed of twenty-seven miles an hour, including stops; but to provide against every detention, let us slow our through-express to twenty-five miles. At this rate we shall traverse the continent in six days and eight hours. In other words, the San-Francisco gentleman who left the Jersey depot by the five o'clock Atlantic and Pacific express-train on Monday morning may reasonably expect (allowing for difference of longitude) to be in the bosom of his family just in time to accompany them to morning service on the following Sunday.

We will suppose our packing accomplished the day before we set out. During the evening we send our watches to get the exact Washington time. The schedule of the entire road is based upon that time; and a thousand inconveniences, once endured by the traveller between New York and St. Louis, are thereby avoided. It is not necessary to alter one's watch with every new conductor. We no longer grow dizzy with a horrible uncertainty on the subject of what-'s-o'clock,—ignorant whether we are running on New-York time, Dayton time, Cincinnati time, or St. Louis time,—whether, indeed, all time be not a pure subjective notion, and any o'clock at all a mere popular delusion. For the introduction of a uniform standard we have originally to thank the Atlantic and Great Western Railway.

In comfort and elegance the second-class cars of the Atlantic and Pacific Road correspond to the omnivorous cars in use on our railroads generally. But we are a family-party, have nearly a week of travel before us, and prefer to sacrifice our money rather than our comfort. It costs a third, perhaps one-half more, to take first-class tickets; but these secure us a compartment entirely to ourselves,—fitted up with all the luxury of a lady's boudoir. We have comfortable arm-chairs to sit in all day, the latest improvement in folding-beds to sleep in at night. Our mirror, water-tank, basin, and all our toilet-arrangements are independent of the rest of the train. We have a table in the centre of our compartment for cards or luncheon. If we are wise, we have also brought along three or four Champagne-baskets stocked with private commissariat-stores, which make us quite independent of that black-art known as Western cookery. These contain sardines (half-boxes are the most practically useful size for a small party); chow-chow; pâtés-de-foie-gras; a selection of various potted meats; a few hundred Zwiebacks from our Berlin baker, and as many sticks of Italian bread from our Milanese; a dozen pounds of hard-tack, and a half-dozen of soda-crackers; an assortment of canned fruits, including, as absolute essentials, peaches and the Shaker apple-butter; a pot of anchovy-paste; a dozen half-pint boxes of concentrated coffee, and as many of condensed milk, both, as the writer has abundantly tested, prepared with unrivalled excellence by an establishment in Boston; a tin box containing ten pounds of lump-sugar; a kettle and gas-stove, to be attached by a flexible tube to one of the burners lighting the compartment; a dozen bottles of lemon-syrup; and whatever stores, in the way of wines, liquors, and cigars, may strike the fancy of the party. This may seem an ambitious outfit, but for the first year of the Pacific Railroad it will be an absolutely necessary one. As civilization spreads westward along the grand iron conductor of the continent, our national gastronomy will develop itself in company with all the other arts; but for the present it is safe to assume that outside of our private stores we shall not find a good cup of coffee after we leave St. Louis, or decent bread of any kind between Denver and Sacramento.

We seat ourselves in our comfortable arm-chairs, without the mortification of removing single gentlemen and the trouble of reversing seats to accommodate our party. The ladies are not compelled to sit in isolation, by the side of passengers who use the car-floor as a spittoon. We may chat together upon family-matters without awakening the vivid interest of any mother-in-Israel mounting guard in front of us over a bandbox. The gentlemen may smoke, if the ladies like it, and, so long as they keep the windows open, nobody shall say them nay. We all enjoy a sense of security and independence, which is like occupying a well-provisioned Gibraltar on wheels. If we have a sick friend with us, he need never leave his mattress till he reaches San Francisco. Should his situation become critical en route, the best medical attendance is at hand,—every through-train being obliged by statute to carry a first-class physician and surgeon, with a well-stocked apothecary-compartment. But our present party are all of them in fine health and spirits; so we may dismiss the doctor's shop from our consideration.

The whistle blows just as the ladies have hung their bonnets in the rack, and the gentlemen exchanged their boots for slippers. We wave adieu to the Atlantic coast and the friends who have come to see us off. A few minutes more, and we pass through the Bergen Tunnel. The remainder of the day is spent amid that wild mountain and forest scenery which the Erie Railroad has made familiar to the whole travelling-population of our Eastern States. At Salamanca we strike the Atlantic and Great Western's separate line. On the way thence to Dayton we shall pass a number of long trains, made up of platform-cars heavily laden with barrels carrying East the riches of the Pennsylvania oil-region. These have connected with our main road by a couple of branches built especially for the accommodation of the petroleum-trade. From Dayton to Cincinnati we shall traverse one of the finest farming-regions of the world, meeting trains laden with beeves, swine, packed pork, lard, grain, corn, potatoes, and every variety of produce that bears transportation. By this time, also, Ohio vine-culture has attained a development which justifies an occasional train entirely devoted to pipes of still Catawba and baskets of the sparkling brands.

From Cincinnati to St. Louis by way of Vincennes, we run through the southern portions of Indiana and Illinois, threading varied and picturesque scenery all the way, unless we have seen the Egyptian prairies so many times before that they pall on us before we reach the Mississippi bluff opposite St. Louis. Till we strike the prairie, our course is among bold, well-timbered hills, which now and then we are obliged to tunnel, and by the side of charming pastoral streams whose green bottom-land is shaded by noble plane-trees and cotton-woods. Certain passages in the scenery between Cincinnati and Vincennes are beautiful as a dream of fairy-land. Every few miles we continue to meet freight-trains laden with all the well-known products of the Western field and dairy. Twice, before we reach St. Louis, a splendid cortege of passenger-carriages shall whiz by us on the southern track,—and each time we shall have seen the daily through-express from San Francisco.

The St. Louis through-passengers will be ready, on our arrival, in cars of their own. We shall switch them on behind us with little over half-an-hour's detention, and strike for Leavenworth, taking Jefferson City by the way. The country we now traverse is rolling, well watered, and well timbered along the streams. Our road has so stimulated production in the mines of Missouri that we frequently pass on the switch a freight-train taking out bar and pig iron to San Francisco, or on the other track a train laden with copper ore going to the East for reduction. We have hitherto said nothing of the innumerable trains which pass us or switch out of our way, carrying through-freight between New York and San Francisco. We are still surrounded by excellent farming-land, a fine grain, fruit, and general-produce country. Not till we leave Leavenworth can we be said fairly to have entered the central wilds of the continent. We are now west of the Missouri River, and for a distance of two hundred miles farther shall traverse a country possessing certain individual characteristics which entitle it to a name of its own among the divisions of our physical geography. This is the proper place for an indication of those divisions, generalized to the broadest terms.

In passing from sea to sea, the American traveller crosses ten well-defined regions:—

1. The Atlantic slope of the Alleghany Range.

2. The eastern incline of the Mississippi basin.

3. The high divides of the short Missouri tributaries.

4. The Great Plains proper.

5. The Rocky-Mountain system of ridges and intramontane plateaus.

6. The Great Desert, broken by frequent uplifts, and divided by the Humboldt Range.

7. The Sierra-Nevada mountain-system.

8. The basin of the Sacramento River.

9. The mountain-system of the Coast Range.

10. The narrow Pacific slope.

By attending to these distinctions with map in hand we shall gain some adequate idea of the surface of our continent. The first and second of the regions we have left behind us, and at Leavenworth are well out upon the third. It would not be just to call it prairie,—and it is equally distinct from the true Plains. As a grain and grass land, Illinois nowhere rivals it; but its surface is remarkably different from that of the prairies east of the Mississippi. It may be described as an alternation of lofty bluffs and sinuous ravines,—the former known as "divides," the latter as "draws." The top of these divides preserves one general level,—leading naturally to the hypothesis that all the draws are valleys of erosion in a tract of alluvial deposit originally uniform with the plateaus of the divides. Some of the larger draws still serve as the channels of unfailing streams; most of them carry more or less water during the rainy season; few of them are dry all the year round. The river-bottoms which traverse this region are thickly fringed with cotton-wood and elm timber; but it is a rare thing to encounter trees on the top of a divide. The fertility of the soil is boundless. Every species of grass flourishes or may flourish here, with a luxuriance unrivalled on the continent. Of the tract embraced between the Little Blue and the Republican Fork of the Kaw this is especially true. The climate is so mild and uniform that cattle may be kept at pasture the whole year round. Haymaking and the building of barns are works of supererogation. The wild grass cures spontaneously on the ground. To provide shelter against exceptional cases of climatic rigor,—an unusual "cold snap," or a fall of snow which lies more than a day or two,—the ranchero constructs for his cattle a simple corral, or, at most, a rude shed. The utmost complication which can occur in his business is a stampede; and few of our Eastern farmers' boys would hesitate to exchange their scythes, hay-cutters, corn-shellers, and mash-tubs for the saddle of his spirited Indian pony and his three days' hunt after estrays. Over this entire region the cereals thrive splendidly. The wild plum is so abundant and delicious as to suggest the most favorable adaptation to the other stone-fruits. Every vegetable that has been tried in the loam of the river-bottoms succeeds perfectly. There is just reason to think that vine-culture might reach a development along the southern slope of the Republican Bluffs not surpassed in the most favorable positions east of California. We believe it no exaggeration to say that this region needs only culture (and that of the easiest kind) to become the garden of the continent. Its mineral wealth has received scanty examination; yet we know that it contains numerous beds of tertiary coal, and easily worked iron-deposits, in the form both of hydrated oxide and black scale.

On our way through this region we strike the Republican bottom near Lat. 39° 30' N., and Long. 97° 20' W. We are now in the primest part of the buffalo-pasture. As we wind along the base of the steep Republican Bluffs, and the edges of those green amphitheatres made by their alternate approach and retrocession, our whistle scares a picket-line of giant bulls, guarding a divide across the stream, and with tails in air, heads at the down charge, they scour away at a lumbering cow-gallop, to tell the main herd of a progress more resistless than their own. Or, perhaps, our experience of the buffaloes is a more inconvenient one. We may find the main herd crossing our track in their migration from the Republican to the Platte. In such case, there will be a detention of several hours, as the current of a main herd is not fordable by any known human mechanism. The halt will be taken advantage of by timid spectators looking safely out of car-windows,—by bonâ-fide hunters, who want fresh meat, and take along the tidbits of their game to be cooked for them at the next dinner-station,—and by excited pseudo-hunters, who will bang away with their rifles at the defenceless herd, until the ground flows with useless blood, and somebody suggests to them that they might as well call it sportsmanship to fire into a farmer's cow-yard, resting over the top-rail.

Now and then we shall whirl through a village of chattering prairie-dogs, send a hen-turkey rattling off her nest in a thicket on the river's edge, or perhaps surprise even an antelope sufficiently close to point out to the ladies from our window the exquisite flight of that swiftest and most beautiful creature in our American fauna. But our road will not be in running order very long before this sight becomes the rarest of the rare. The stolid buffalo will continue to wear his old paths long after the human presence has driven every antelope into invisible fastnesses.

At intervals along the Republican bottom we shall find ranches springing up under the auspices of our road; immense grain-fields yellowing toward harvest; great herds of domestic cattle grazing haunch-deep through the boundless swales of billowing wild grass; with all the other indications of a prosperous farming settlement, which, keeping pace with the progress of the road, shall eventually become one of the richest agricultural communities in the world, and continuous for over two hundred miles. Here and there we pass a lateral excavation in the face of the bluff where some enterprising settler has opened a tertiary coal-vein, a deposit of iron-ore, or a bed of soft limestone suitable for both flux and mortar purposes. The way-freight trains that meet us now are mainly laden with the wealth of the grazier, the farmer, and the gardener, competing with their brethren of the Upper Mississippi for the markets of St. Louis and New Orleans. Iron-ore, coal, and limestone may form a portion of the cargoes,—but in process of time the mutual vicinity of these minerals will become sufficiently suggestive to induce the erection of smelting-furnaces in situ, and then their combined product will travel the road in the form of pigs.

A little to the westward of a line drawn due south from Fort Kearney to the Republican we shall find a comparatively abrupt and unexplained change taking place in the scenery. Our green river-bottoms will give way to tracts of the color and seemingly of the sterility proper to an ash-heap. Our bluffs will recede, grow higher, and exchange their flat mesa-like surfaces for a curved contour, imitating the mountainous formation on a reduced scale. For long distances the vast gray level around us will be dotted with conical sand-dunes, forever piling up and tearing down as the wind shifts, with a tendency to bestow their gritty compliments in the eyes of passengers occupying windward seats on the train. The lovely blossoms of the running-poppy no longer mat the earth with blots of crimson fire; no more does the sweet breath of eglantine and sensitive-brier float in at the window as we whirl by a sheltered recess of the divides; the countless wild varieties of bean and pea no longer charm us with a rainbow prodigality of pink, blue, scarlet, purple, white, and magenta blossoms. The very trees by the river's brink become puny and stunted; the evergreens begin to replace the deciduous growths; in the shade of dwarfed and desiccated cedars we look vainly for the snowy or azure bells of the three-petalled campanula. Gaunt, staring sunflowers, and humbler compositæ of yellow tinge, stay with us a little longer than those darlings of our earlier scenery; but before we have gone many miles the last conspicuous wave of fresh vegetation breaks hopelessly on a thirsty sand-hill, and we are given over to a wilderness of cacti. Here and there occurs a sightly clump of waxen yellow blossoms, where these vegetable hedgehogs are in their holiday attire,—but it must be confessed that the view is a melancholy change from our recent affluence of beauty. With the other succulent plants, the rich herbage of the prairie has entirely disappeared. There is not a blade of anything which an Eastern grazier would recognize as grass between this boundary and the Rocky Mountains. As we whiz over these wastes at railroad-speed, we shall be apt to pronounce them absolutely sterile. When we stop at the next coaling-station, let us examine the matter more closely. The ground proves to be covered with minute gray spirals of herbage, like a crop of vegetable corkscrews, an inch or two in height, and to all appearance dry as wool. This is the "grama" or "buffalo-grass," and, despite its look of utter desiccation, is highly nutritious. It is almost the entire winter dependence of the buffalo-herds, and domestic cattle soon learn to prefer it to all other feed. Its existence, together with the wide group of changes which we have noticed, denotes that we have passed the threshold of the fourth grand continental division, and are now in the region of the Plains proper.

Ex-Governor Gilpin of Colorado, in his "Central Gold Region," very truly styles the Plains "the pastoral area of the continent." The Plains are set apart for grazing purposes by the method of exclusion. There is nothing else that can be done with them. Rain seldom falls on them. The shallow rivers, like the Platte, which wander through them, are too far apart to be used economically for their general irrigation. Only such herbage may be expected to thrive here as can live on its own condensation of water from a sensibly dry atmosphere. Manifestly, art can do nothing for the improvement of such a tract. It must be left to fulfil its natural function, as the great continental pasture. Along the banks of the rivers run narrow strips of alluvial soil, liable to yearly inundation; and these may be made amenable to the ordinary processes of agriculture. On these the herdsman may raise the grain and vegetables necessary for his own consumption. But the vast area of the region seems inevitably set apart for the one sole business of cattle-raising, and all the way-freight trains which pass us here are laden with beeves for the St. Louis market, or dairy-produce for all the markets of the world. We have never tasted grama-cheese, but have a theory that its individual piquancy must equal that of the delicious Schabzieger.

Far off on the gray level we shall still see the antelope. His tribe is coextensive with three-fourths of the continent. No sterility discourages him. He seems as thrifty on the wiry grama as among the most succulent grasses of the Republican. The sneaking coyote and a number of larger wolves put in an occasional appearance. Birds of the hawk and raven families are common. The waters swarm with numerous varieties of duck. It surprises us at this utmost distance from the maritime border to see flocks of Arctic gulls circling around the low sand-hills, and sickle-bill curlews wheeling high in air above their broods. Before we get far into this region we shall notice that one of its most typical features is the alkali-pool. Every few miles we come to a shallow basin of stagnant water saturated with salts of soda and potash. Still another characteristic of the Plains is their tremendous rainless thunder-storms. If we are fortunate enough to encounter one of these, we shall witness in one hour more atmospheric perturbation than has occurred within our whole previous experience on the Atlantic slope. The lightning for half a night will light the sky with an almost continuous glare, brighter than noonday; all the parks of artillery on earth could not make such a constant deafening roar as those iron clouds in the heaven; and though the wind will not be able to blow the train backward, as we have seen it treat a four-mule stage, it will be likely to do its next best thing, heaping sand on the track till the engine has to slow and send men ahead with shovels.

Entering the Denver depot, we shall find a busy scene. All that immense freight-business between the Missouri and the Colorado mining-towns, which formerly strung the overland road with wagons drawn by six yoke of oxen each, has now been transferred to the railroad. The switches are crowded with cars getting unloaded, or waiting their turn to be. What is their freight? Rather ask what it is not. For the present, Colorado imports everything except the most perishable commodities,—and that which pays for all. If you would see that, ask the express-messenger on the train going East in five minutes to lift the lid of one of those heavy iron trunks in his car. Your eyes are dazzled by the yellow gleam of a king's ransom. It is a day's harvest of ingots from the stamps of Central City, on its way to square accounts with New York for the contents of one of those freight-trains.

At Denver we reach the edge of the Rocky-Mountain foot-hills; the grand snow-peak of Mount Rosalie, rivalling Mont Blanc in height and majesty, though forty miles away, seems to rise just behind the town; thence southerly toward Pike's and northerly toward Long's Peak, the billowing ridges stretch away brown and bare, save where the climbing lines of sombre green mark their pine-fringed gorges, or the everlasting ice pencils their crests with an edge of opal. Still we do not leave the Plains region. We glide through the thronged streets of the growing city, cross the South Platte by a short bridge, and strike nearly due north along the edge of the mountain-range, over a broad plateau which still bears the characteristic grama. Not until we enter the cañon of the Cache-la-Poudre, a hundred miles from Denver by the road, can we consider ourselves fairly out of the Plains, and in the fifth great region of the continent, the Rocky-Mountain system of ridges and intramontane plateaus.

Before we begin this portion of our journey, let us examine, in the light of that already accomplished, an assertion made early in this article to the effect that the Pacific Railroad must precede and create the business which shall support it. The consideration shall be brief as a mathematical process.

The river-bottoms and divides along the Lower Republican are peculiarly suited to the raising of farm-produce. But so long as they had no avenue to a market, they might have been fertile as Paradise without alluring settlers to cultivate them. The natural advantages of a country are developed not as a matter of taste, but as a matter of profit. The crops which can be raised to best advantage in this region are the crops which without a railroad must rot on the ground. No man can be expected to settle in a new country from pure Quixotism,—and nothing but the railroad would make anything else of his expenditure of energies beyond the needs of self-support. The Plains are the natural pasture of the continent; but they have no natural fascination for the white man which can induce him to take up his residence there for cattle-breeding en amateur. The greatest enthusiast in butter and cheese would scarcely care to accumulate mountains of rancid firkins and boxes for the mere gratification of fancy. Access to a market is his only justification for spending a nomadic lifetime among herds, or a fortune on churns and presses. The settlement of the country must precede the birth of its industries, and the Pacific Road is the absolutely essential stimulus to such settlement.

As we converse, we are beginning our climb toward the snow. A series of steep grades, mainly following the bed of that wildly picturesque and roaring torrent, the Cache-la-Poudre, take us up through the Cheyenne Pass to the Laramie Plains. In reaching the head of the Cache-la-Poudre we have familiarized ourselves with the ridges of the system; we are now to learn what is meant by the intramontane plateaus. The Laramie Plains form the most remarkable plateau of the Rocky Range,—one of the most remarkable anywhere in the known world. Through a series of savage cañons we enter what appears to us a reproduction of the prairies east of the Mississippi,—a level and luxuriantly grassy plain, bright with unknown flowers, alive with startled antelope, threaded by the clear currents of both the Laramie Rivers, and rejoicing in an atmosphere which exhilarates like the fresh-brewed nectar of Olympus. Bounded on the east by the great ridge we have just passed, northerly by a continuation of the Wind-River Range and Laramie Peak, southerly by a magnificent transverse bar of naked mountains running parallel with the Wind-River Range, and westward by a staircase of sterile divides which we must climb to reach the base of Elk Mountain and find its giant mass towering into the eternal snows three thousand feet farther above our heads,—this plateau is a prairie fifty miles square, lifted bodily eight thousand feet into the air. It is difficult for us to roll over this Elysian mead walled in by these tremendous ranges, and think of the commercial uses to which the level might be put; but from its elevation and its natural crop we may pronounce it a grazing tract of splendid capabilities, unsuited to artificial culture.

Another series of grades takes us past the base of Elk Mountain to a broad and sandy cactus-plain, whence we descend among curious trap and sandstone formations, simulating human architecture, to the crossing of the North Platte. A little farther on, so close to the snow-line that we shiver under the white ridges with a reflected chill, we cross the axial ridge of the continent, and begin our descent toward Salt Lake by the noble gallery of Bridger's Pass. The springs along our way become tinctured with sulphur, alkali, and salt. We know, when we stop at a station to drink, that we are drawing near the primeval basin of a stagnant sea, now shrunk to its final pool in Salt Lake, but once in size a rival of the Mediterranean. We pass over an alternation of mountain-grades and sandy levels, cross the Green or Upper Colorado River, stop for five minutes at the Fort-Bridger station, thread the sinuous galleries of the Wahsatch, and come down from a savage wilderness of sage-brush, granite, and red sandstone, into the luxuriant green pastures of Mormondom, heavy with crops and irrigated from the snow-peaks. Thence, one of the numerous cañons—Emigrant or Parley's most likely—conducts us to the mountain-walled level of Salt-Lake City.

We have now traversed the most difficult part of our road. Its Rocky-Mountain section has cost more capital, labor, and engineering skill than all the rest together. The return for this vast expenditure must be no less vast,—but it will be rendered slowly. It does not lie on the surface or just beneath the surface, as in the pastoral and agricultural regions. It is almost entirely mineral, and must be mined by the hardest work. But it ranges through all the metallic wealth of Nature, from gold to iron, and no conceivable stimulus short of a Pacific Railroad could ever have been adequate to bring it forth.

We shall find the import trade of Salt Lake by the railroad to consist chiefly of emigrants and their chattels. If Brigham Young be still living, his favorite policy of non-intercourse with the Gentiles may also somewhat diminish the export business of the road. But human nature cannot forever resist the currents of commercial interest; and the Mormon settlements possess so many advantages for the economical production of certain staples, that we need not be surprised to find trains leaving Salt-Lake City with sorghum and cotton for San Francisco, and raw silk for all the markets of the East.