Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/304

294[February 27, 1869] the vast wild solitudes of Nevada, Colorado, and Utah, and still worse, over the bleak and savage passes of the Rocky Mountains, Congress finally granted to the present company, a charter to make the road, in the summer of 1862. A year passed, and the summer of 1863 found the company still in a state of imperfect organisation. During the following winter, however, its arrangements were being advanced; its boards, officers, and engineers were chosen; and sufficient capital was procured to commence operations. Fifteen directors, with five government directors, undertook to superintend the project. It was only in January, 1866, that the first rails were laid down at Omaha; in January, 1867, three hundred and seven miles had been completed; a year later, the rails had crept westward some five hundred and forty miles; on the first of January, 1869, the extent of the eastern line (running westward from Omaha) had reached one thousand miles. Meanwhile the Central Pacific Railroad—acting in concert with the Union Pacific Railroad, and constructing the lines from Sacramento eastward towards the Rocky Mountains at the same time that the line already described was approaching the mountains on the other side—had by the first of January, 1869, completed about four hundred miles. Thus, of the grand route from Omaha to Sacramento, adding together the work completed on both sides of the mountains, the first of January of the present year, saw one thousand four hundred miles finished and fit for travel; leaving only about four hundred more to be completed. If, as the company promises and as now seems certain, the line be opened for traffic, from end to end, by July the first, 1869, only three years and a half will have been occupied in the actual construction of this immense work. When the line is once open and in active operation, the traveller may reach San Francisco from New York, within a week, and may accomplish his journey from London to San Francisco in a little over a fortnight, while the time of communication between the American Atlantic seaboard and China will be reduced by nearly a month.

The project of a great highway across the American continent, is not a recent one, but is even anterior to the invention of railway locomotion. As long ago as the time of President Jefferson—when the republic had only been founded sixteen years—the ambition to belt the continent with a great road which should connect the two oceans, had sprung up. Public attention had already been called to the magnificent lands and rumoured treasures of the Far West; and the dream of a golden Colorado, which had inspired Cortes and his adventurous followers, still lived among the Anglo-Saxon settlers, and was destined, in our own time, to be fulfilled by the wonderful discovery of the Californian mines. The purchase of Louisiana from the French, effected by President Jefferson, opened to the then young American view, a long vista of wild but precious territory; awoke the ambition to stretch the Republic to the Western seas; and gave a great stimulus to enterprises of emigration and "back-woods" settlement. The government sent an expedition up the Missouri River; the ostensible object being to treat with the Indians, and to transfer their allegiance from France to the United States; the real object to discover if a highway, Rocky Mountain-ward, were possible. The officers of the expedition returned East with a glorious and thrilling story. They had followed the magnificently wide and wild Missouri, almost to its source in the mountains; they had crossed the ravines and gorges, and had reached the sources of the Columbia; they had followed the course of the Columbia, until the shining waters of the Pacific bounded their view in the far horizon. Jefferson, in character cool-blooded and matter-of-fact, was for once all aglow with the ravishing descriptions of the West which Louis and Clark brought back. He foresaw for America, a destiny far grander than even that grand destiny which he had pictured to himself, as belonging to the original British colonies. And, inspiring the community with sanguine words which rarely came from his lips, he and his successors devoted themselves to the great object of opening the West to civilisation, of penetrating to the Pacific, and establishing American enterprise and commerce on the Western as on the Eastern ocean.

Gradually, by successive acquisitions of territory, the American government succeeded in obtaining possession of the immense tract, lying between the Mississippi, and the Pacific. While these acquisitions were being made, came the invention of railways. Ever since the time when the first trains ran, a communication by rail with the Pacific has been mooted in America. At first the idea seemed visionary and absurd. The Rocky Mountains seemed an obstacle, impossible to be overcome; to establish a line of railway across a solitary tract more than two thousand miles in width, where the only inhabitants were hordes of savage aborigines, seemed the height of folly. We are told that some twenty-five years ago, a New York merchant, whose name was Asa Whitney, while doubling Cape Horn en route for home, matured a plan for the construction of a railroad from the "village" of St. Louis to the Pacific. His scheme appears to have been no castle in the air. It was a thoroughly considered, long studied project. He worked out the problem slowly and with difficulty, looking only at its sober practicability, and shutting his eyes to the sentimental phases of his subject. But, the problem once solved, the possibility of the idea once demonstrated, Whitney gave way to his enthusiasm, and became a monomaniac on the subject of a Pacific Railroad. On his arrival in New York, he boldly announced his scheme, and, although pronounced with the unanimity of popular inexperience a visionary enthusiast, he began to lecture on it here, and there, and everywhere. He wrote to the papers, made