Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/772

716 than this to it. By far the most powerful arguments in favor of the road were the war needs of the government. The word "Union" was everywhere foremost in the thought and speech of that day, and Federal action was meant to come as a final answer to the demand of nearly twenty years for national legislation on the Pacific-road subject; to the foes of the Union it was flung as an evidence of confidence and strength on the part of the Republican party and its Union administration. But of the burdens carried during those days by Abraham Lincoln there is no more pathetic glimpse than this, that in the midst of the profound anxieties of his struggle to preserve the nation he was required by Congress to determine the detail of the proper track-gauge for the Pacific railroad. Nor will it surprise any one conversant with the legislative spirit of the war period that after President Lincoln had long and painstakingly considered the subject and decided on a track-gauge of five feet, Congress cheerfully and at once passed a law changing the gauge to four feet eight and one-half inches.

The act of 1862 was supplemented by a second act in 1864 containing more liberal subsidy provisions, and under this charter the Union and Central Pacific railroads were built. The coterie of capitalists who undertook the enterprise believed that their chief profits would come from the construction rather than from the railroad as an investment, and in order to insure these to themselves they acquired the charter of the Pennsylvania Fiscal Agency—a name afterward changed by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, at the instance of George Francis Train, to "The Credit Mobilier of America"; and The Credit Mobilier not only constructed the Union Pacific, but made for itself and for a number of American statesmen the most sensational record of a long and exciting day of plots and counterplots in Pacific-railroad history. For the beginning of construction much work had already been done. General Dodge had crossed the Missouri River as early as 1853 in the interest of projected Iowa railroads, which sought to ascertain where a Pacific road would be likely to fix a Missouri River terminus. Until the civil war General Dodge was busy with reconnaissances and surveys. When he entered the service, Peter A. Dey took it up, and in 1862 put regular parties in the field on the first range of the Rockies, called the Black Hills, and over the Wasatch Range, under a son of Brigham Young's.