Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/767



N history we have the record of every day but yesterday and of every generation but the last. Our first transcontinental railroad was begun only forty years ago; yet as compared with what we know of its story our information concerning the Boston Tea-party is precise. Possibly this is a tribute to the moral over the material; possibly the blinding aurora of the civil war still so plays on the retina of our memories as to obscure all lesser events on that horizon: at all events, when recently an American man of letters was asked for literature concerning the history of this railroad-building he was at a loss satisfactorily to refer to any.

Even in looking back into the story it is difficult to realize that the building of a railroad to the Pacific coast had been publicly proposed before New England had a mile of railroad; and that as far back as 1840 the Pacific railroad project had already become popular, and was timely matter with newspaper and magazine editors.

But by 1845 the subject had taken so firm a hold on popular fancy that an ingenious memorialist of Congress, Robert Mills, in advocating the building of a transcontinental highway for automobiles—"steam carriages," he termed them—modestly claimed to have advanced the idea of a Pacific railroad in 1819. This the historians will not allow; it is certain, however, that in 1840 dispute had already arisen as to the honor of having first proposed a transcontinental line.

The seeds thus sown in the thirties ripened in the succeeding decade into an agitation that became national. A New York merchant surrendered so completely to the fascination of the Pacific-road