two miles a day at one end, and one mile a day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in 1869 or 1870, while the British line remains a dream.
Not only have the Rocky Mountains turned out to be passable, but the engineers have found themselves compelled to decide on the conflicting claims of passes without number. Wall-like and frowning as the Rocky Mountains are when seen from the plains, the rolling gaps are many, and they are easier crossed by railway lines than the less lofty chains of Europe. From the heat of the country, the snow-line lies high; the chosen pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto. The dryness of the air of the center of a vast continent prevents the fall of heavy snows or rains in winter. At eight or nine thousand feet above the sea, in the Black Hills, or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the Pacific line will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter than their brothers on the Grand Trunk or the Camden and Amboy at the sea-level. On the other hand, fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless succession of smaller snowy chains which have to be crossed, upon the Grand Plateau or basin of the Great Salt Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1870 the line will be an accomplished fact.
In the act creating the Pacific Railroad Company, passed in 1862, the company were bound to complete their line at the rate of a hundred miles a year. They are completing it at more than three times that rate.
When the act is examined, it ceases to be strange that the road should be pushed with extraordinary energy and speed, so numerous are the baits offered to the companies to hasten its completion. Money is to be advanced them; land is to be given them for every mile they finish – on a generous scale while the line is on the plains, on three times the scale when it reaches the most rugged tracts. These grants alone are estimated at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alternate sections, a width of four hundred feet, with additional room for works and stations, is granted for the line. The California Company is tempted by similar offers to a race with the Union Pacific, and each company is struggling to lay the most miles and get the most land upon the great basin. It is the interest of the Eastern Company that the junction should be as far as possible to the west; of the Western, that it should be as far as possible to the east. The result is an average laying of three, and an occasional construction of four, miles a day. If we look to the progress at both ends, we find as much sometimes laid in a day as a bullock train could travel. So fast do the headquarters “cities” keep moving forward, that at the Californian end the superintendent wished me to believe that whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass, they threw themselves upon their backs, and held up their legs, that they might be tied and thrown into the cart for a fresh move. “They are true birds of passage,” he said.
When the iron trains are at the front, the laying will for a short time proceed at the rate of nine yards in every fifteen seconds; but three or four hundred tons of rails have to be brought up every day upon the single track, and it is in this that the time is lost.
The advance carriages of the construction train are well supplied with rifles hung from the roofs; but even when the Indians forget their amaze, and attack the “city upon wheels,” or tear up the track, they are incapable of destroying the line so fast as the machinery can lay it down. “Soon,” as a Denver paper said, during my stay in the Mountain City, “the iron horse will sniff the Alpine breeze upon the summit of the Black Hills 9000 feet above the sea;” and upon the plateau, where deer are scarce and buffalo unknown, the Indians have all but disappeared. The worst Indian country is already crossed, and the red men have sullenly followed the buffalo to the south, and occupy the country between Kansas State and Denver, contenting themselves with preventing the construction of the Santa Fé and Denver routes to California. Both for the end in view, and the energy with which it is pursued, the Pacific Railroad will stand first among the achievements of our times.
If the end to be kept in view in the construction of the first Pacific Railroad line were merely the traffic from China and Japan to Europe, or the shortest route from San Francisco to Hampton Roads, the Kansas route through St. Louis, Denver, and the Berthoud Pass would be, perhaps, the best and shortest of those within the United States; but the Saskatchewan line through British territory, with Halifax and Puget Sound for ports, would be still more advantageous. As it is, the true question seems to be, not the trade between the Pacific and Great Britain, but between Asia and America, for Pennsylvania and Ohio must be the manufacturing countries of the next fifty years.
Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough: in 1870 we shall reach San Francisco from London in less time than by the severest traveling I can reach it from Denver in 1866.
Wherever, in the States, Forth and South have met in conflict, North has won. New York has beaten Norfolk; Chicago, in spite of its inferior situation, has beaten the older St. Louis. In the same way, Omaha, or cities still farther north, will carry off the trade from Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Kansas City. Ultimately Puget Sound may beat San Francisco in the race for the Pacific trade, and the Southern cities become still less able to keep their place than they have been hitherto. Time after time, Chicago has thrown out intercepting lines, and diverted from St. Louis trade which seemed of necessity to belong to her; and the success of the Union Pacific line, and failure of the Kansas road, is a fresh proof of the superior energy of the Northern to the Southern city. This time a fresh element enters into the calculation, and declares for Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight line, is in these great distances shorter by fifty or a hundred miles than the straight lines of the maps and charts, and the Platte route becomes not only the natural, but the shortest route from sea to sea.
Chicago has a great advantage over St. Louis in her comparative freedom from the cholera, which yearly attacks the Missourian city. During my stay in St. Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were known to have reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by flight to 180,000. A quarantine was established on the river; the sale of fruit and vegetables prohibited; prisoners released on condition that they should work at burying the dead; and funeral corteges were forbidden. Chicago herself, unreached by the plague, was scattering handbills on every Western railroad line, warning immigrants against St. Louis.
The Missourians have relied overmuch upon the Mississippi River, and have forgotten that railroads are superseding steamboats every day. Chicago, on the other hand, which ten years ago was the twentieth city in America, is probably by this time the third. As a center of thought, political and religious, she stands second only to Boston, and her Wabash and Michigan Avenues are among the most beautiful of streets.
One of the chief causes of the future wealth of America is to be found in the fact that all her “inland” towns are ports. The State of Michigan lies between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but the single State has upon the great lakes a coast of 1500 miles. From Fort Benton to the sea by water is nearly 4000 miles, but the post is a much-used steamboat port, though more distant, even in the air-line, from the nearest sea upon the same side the dividing range, than is the White Sea from the Persian Gulf. Put it in which way you would, Europe could not hold this river.
A great American city is almost invariably placed at a point where an important railroad finds an outport on a lake or river. This is no adaptation to railways of the Limerick saying about rivers – namely, that Providence has everywhere so placed them as to pass through the great towns; for in America railways precede population, and when mapped out and laid, they are but tramways in the desert. There is no great wonder in this, when we remember that 158,000,000 acres of land have been up to this time granted to railroads in America.
One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few lines will be made, and trade being thus driven into certain unchanging routes, a small number of cities will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing stations or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and population. Where a system of cheap railways is adopted, there will be year by year a tendency to multiply lines of traffic, and consequently to multiply also ports and seats of trade – a tendency, however, which may be more than neutralized by any special circumstances which may cause the lines of transit to converge rather than run parallel to one another. Of the system of costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India, where we see the creation of Umritsur and the prosperity of Calcutta
