Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 2.djvu/301

 the officers of the railroad, which took him to Denver, as the western terminus of the road, for the first time since he had left the place in 1859. It was a strange turn of fortune that he who, only seventeen years before, had started from a town of perhaps a hundred frame shanties and log-houses containing not over one thousand inhabitants, to cross the Plains in a very humble way with an ordinary team, should now return riding on a special train behind a steam locomotive to a fine city of between thirty and forty thousand inhabitants. Another striking evidence of the wonderful change in that short span of time which he noticed on this trip was that, whereas in the summer of 1859 he had passed enormous herds of live buffaloes on his way to the Rocky Mountains, he now found that they were entirely extinct, and that their bones were being hauled eastward by the train-load for manufacturing purposes.

The proper care of the Oregon and Kansas Pacific interests kept him hard at work in the East during the following winter and the spring of 1877. In pursuance of his Oregon programme, he continued the propaganda for immigration, and kept pressing his European employers for capital for more new steamers and for extending the Oregon Central. But, notwithstanding all his arguments, based on the rapidly increasing ocean traffic and the growing unseaworthiness of the ships in service, he succeeded only in securing two additional steamers, one by purchase and another by construction the latter only by contract ing individually for it. He failed to obtain anything for railroad construction. As for Kansas Pacific matters, owing to the continued bad earnings, nothing could be done beyond organizing a strong American committee of bondholders to support him, and for cooperation with the German committee in formulating a plan of reorganization later on.

Early in the summer of 1877, he started with his family for a stay in Colorado, to be followed by one in Oregon. After passing some weeks in the former State, the party