Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/774

718 still bear it. Trappers, headed by Bridger and Milton Sublette, bought Fort Laramie in 1835, and it became the rendezvous of a generation of men that has passed, and whose like we can never see again. Frémont was there in 1842, and Parkman, following the Platte trail in 1846, has left the story of his trip up the valley that General Dodge was to follow with his surveyors for the overland route.

In 1832, Captain Bonneville camped under Chimney Rock, and penetrating Wyoming, skirted the Wind River Mountains. He was the first white man to take a wagon across the continental divide on the line of the future railroad. Here the Mormon pioneers began their long journey to their unknown home beyond the mountains, for Frémont's narrative had decided Brigham Young upon his great undertaking. Along the Platte, year after year, were strung the wagons of the Forty-niners, and in a calm made sweet by the blossom of the wild plum, rose the camp-fires of the patient home-seekers following the overland trail.

But the valley scenes changed when the railroad contracts were let. The grading-camp made a rough companion to the quiet outfit of the emigrant. Civilization, now really coming, advanced in its mask of vice—the characteristic of its rise and its decline. The grader, the gambler, the criminal, and the adventurer moved together across the plains with the tough town, the outlaw, and the vigilance committee. The forks of the Platte were reached by the track-layers at the close of the second season's building—1866; but before these first 246 miles were completed some conception of the enormous difficulties of the undertaking had dawned on the promoters.

The Union Pacific was building across a desert with a base at Omaha that was likewise beyond a railroad connection. The engine for the Omaha railroad-shops was dragged across country from Des Moines. The Central Pacific, building from the western coast, was compelled to get everything except ties by ship, around the Horn or by way of Panama. Marine insurance was on a war basis, and the capital of the Californians was eaten into by indemnity tolls. The Union Pacific lacked even the tie-supply afforded the Californians by the Sierra Nevadas, and was compelled to skirmish hundreds of miles up and down the Missouri River for ties and bridge timbers. Moreover, the Indians of the plains had already filed their protest against the novel invasion. Before the rails had been laid two hundred miles from the Missouri River, Turkey Leg and his Cheyennes swooped down on Plum Creek, scalped a hand-car pilot, derailed the freight-train following, and with the engineman and fireman burning in the wreckage plundered the box-cars and made away, heavy with booty.

It happened that General Dodge in his car—a travelling arsenal—was on his way down from the "front" when news of the capture reached Plum Creek Station. On his train were twenty-odd men, in part the crews, some discharged men, and adventurers bound for the rear—all of them strangers to the chief engineer. The reports coming in by telegraph brought every one to the little station platform. General Dodge called on the men about him to fall in and go forward to recapture the freight-train. Every man within hearing went into line, and by his bearing showed he was a soldier: and when, reaching the scene, the chief gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, these frontiersmen advanced as steadily and in as good order as the veterans that climbed the face of Kenesaw.

In truth, every contractor's camp had a military front. Engineering parties were always guarded by detachments of United States troops, and a little station in Wyoming still bears the name of Percy, for Engineer Percy T. Brown, killed by Indians. "Engineers reconnoitred, surveyed, located, and built inside picket-lines. Men marched to work at the tap of the drum," says General Dodge. "They stacked their arms on the dump, and were ready at a moment's warning to fall in and fight for their territory. General Casement's track-train could arm a thousand men at a word, and from him as its head down to its chief spiker, such a battalion could be commanded by experienced officers of every rank from general to captain."

Amid these difficulties construction proceeded with such materials as could be brought up from St. Louis and St. Joseph during three months of water