Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/768

712 idea that he gave his life and his fortune to efforts to arouse public opinion on the subject and to move Congress to action. It was not that he had aim of personal aggrandizement, for he proposed to assume the construction and general superintendence of the road at a salary so nominal as four thousand dollars a year: he was primarily moved by the glorious national possibilities of his enterprise; and it must still move the reader of the long and somewhat tedious story of the Pacific-road project to picture Asa Whitney, towering in breadth and strength above all early promoters, his illusions still unshattered, but the span of his life exhausted, keeping a dairy in the city of Washington and selling milk to mitigate the poverty of his declining years.

Thomas H. Benton, in a burst of public eloquence, proposed in 1849 that the Pacific line when built be adorned with a statue of Columbus hewn from a granite peak of the Rockies, the mountain itself its massive pedestal, with an outstretched arm pointing India to the west-bound passenger. Benton's idea was never carried out; but in the Black Hills, more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, stands a great cairn overlooking the highest point at which the first transcontinental road crosses the Rockies. A newer track-alignment has left this early monument at some distance from the present route, and though at one point a glimpse of it may still be had from the car window, it is now some hundreds of feet above the railroad summit. It commemorates the energy and perseverance of two men, to whom chiefly is due the credit for the building of the Union Pacific. Sometime, perhaps, beside the monument to Oakes and Oliver Ames a more modest memorial may rise to the memory of poor Asa Whitney, who surrendered his life and fortune to an idea because to him it was a national and a glorious one.

In truth, there never has been in American industrial achievement and there never again can be so widespread and stirring a public sentiment as that which called for the building of a Pacific railroad. We can never again be poor; we can never again be only vaguely conscious of a Samson-like national strength and youthfully impatient to test it. We have tested our strength since then in too many ways; possibly we are not quite proud of all of them. Nor can we ever return to a public sentiment that knows no jealousy of extraordinary riches; and as to industrial enterprises, we have been surfeited: every day we taste of new ones with palates more jaded.

It was otherwise then. The great plains were the home of the Indian and the buffalo. Pikes Peak was a watchword, the Rocky Mountains a dream, and California a fever when national thought crystallized into a demand for the first Pacific road. The idea took hold of men as powerful as Webster, as sagacious as Lincoln, as cold as Jefferson Davis, as dramatic as Sumner, and as politic as Buchanan. Douglas and Benton in their day lent to it their eloquence. The ten years that led up to the civil war saw the project discussed by each succeeding Congress with an earnestness and attention second only to that expended on the slavery question. Indeed, the railroad matter as soon as it became tangible became political, and divided men into alignment of suspicion and resentment as the Missouri Compromise divided them. But it forced recommendations from succeeding Presidents in annual messages for years, and when the young Republican party found itself for the first time in power the Pacific-road project enlisted the aggressiveness of men so resourceful and domineering as Thaddeus Stevens, John Sherman, and Henry Winter Davis. The matter got before the Twenty-eighth Congress in 1845 in the form of Asa Whitney's memorial, and from that time forth for fifty years it engaged Congressional attention in some form during nearly every session. Davis, the historian of the Union Pacific, notes that ten years before a Pacific-road bill was finally passed, the Senate of the Thirty-second Congress was giving more time to the subject than to any other topic of legislation. In 1853 the project got into its first Presidential message; the Thirty-second Congress gave it its first special committee, and national appropriations already made put into the field corps of engineers, whose survey reports filled eleven large volumes.

During all of these years of the early