THE PACIFIC RAILROAD.
When the companions of the explorer Cartier found that the rapids at
Montreal were not the end of all navigation, as they had feared, but
that above them there commenced a second and boundless reach of deep,
still waters, they fancied they had found the long-looked-for route to
China, and cried, “La Chine!” So the story goes, and the name has stuck
to the place.
[Illustration]
Up to 1861, the Canadians remained in the belief that they were at least
the potential possessors of the only possible road for the China
trade of the future, for in that year a Canadian government paper
declared that the Rocky Mountains, south of British territory, were
impassable for railroads. Maps showed that from St. Louis to San
Francisco the distance was twice that from the head of navigation on
Lake Superior to the British Pacific ports.
America has gone through a five years’ agony since that time; but now,
in the first days of peace, we find that the American Pacific Railroad,
growing at the average rate of two miles a day at one end, and one mile
a day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in 1869 or 1870, while
the British line remains a dream.
Not only have the Rocky Mountains turned out to be passable, but the
engineers have found themselves compelled to decide on the conflicting
claims of passes without number. Wall-like and frowning as the Rocky
Mountains are when seen from the plains, the rolling gaps are many, and
they are easier crossed by railway lines than the less lofty chains of
Europe. From the heat of the country, the snow-line lies high; the
chosen pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto. The dryness
of the air of the center of a vast continent prevents the fall of heavy
snows or rains in winter. At eight or nine thousand feet above the sea,
in the Black Hills, or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the Pacific line
will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter than their brothers on the
Grand Trunk or the Camden and Amboy at the sea-level. On the other hand,
fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless succession of smaller
snowy chains which have to be crossed, upon the Grand Plateau or basin
of the Great Salt Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1870 the line will
be an accomplished fact.
In the act creating the Pacific Railroad Company, passed in 1862, the
company were bound to complete their line at the rate of a hundred miles
a year. They are completing it at more than three times that rate.
When the act is examined, it ceases to be strange that the road should
be pushed with extraordinary energy and speed, so numerous are the baits
offered to the companies to hasten its completion. Money is to be
advanced them; land is to be given them for every mile they finish--on a
generous scale while the line is on the plains, on three times the scale
when it reaches the most rugged tracts. These grants alone are estimated
at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alternate sections, a width of
four hundred feet, with additional room for works and stations, is
granted for the line. The California Company is tempted by similar
offers to a race with the Union Pacific, and each company is struggling
to lay the most miles and get the most land upon the great basin. It is
the interest of the Eastern Company that the junction should be as far
as possible to the west; of the Western, that it should be as far as
possible to the east. The result is an average laying of three, and an
occasional construction of four, miles a day. If we look to the progress
at both ends, we find as much sometimes laid in a day as a bullock train
could travel. So fast do the headquarters “cities” keep moving forward,
that at the Californian end the superintendent wished me to believe that
whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass, they threw themselves upon
their backs, and held up their legs, that they might be tied and thrown
into the cart for a fresh move. “They are true birds of passage,” he
said.
When the iron trains are at the front, the laying will for a short time
proceed at the rate of nine yards in every fifteen seconds; but three or
four hundred tons of rails have to be brought up every day upon the
single track, and it is in this that the time is lost.
The advance carriages of the construction train are well supplied with
rifles hung from the roofs; but even when the Indians forget their
amaze, and attack the “city upon wheels,” or tear up the track, they are
incapable of destroying the line so fast as the machinery can lay it
down. “Soon,” as a Denver paper said, during my stay in the Mountain
City, “the iron horse will sniff the Alpine breeze upon the summit of
the Black Hills 9000 feet above the sea;” and upon the plateau, where
deer are scarce and buffalo unknown, the Indians have all but
disappeared. The worst Indian country is already crossed, and the red
men have sullenly followed the buffalo to the south, and occupy the
country between Kansas State and Denver, contenting themselves with
preventing the construction of the Santa Fé and Denver routes to
California. Both for the end in view, and the energy with which it is
pursued, the Pacific Railroad will stand first among the achievements of
our times.
If the end to be kept in view in the construction of the first Pacific
Railroad line were merely the traffic from China and Japan to Europe, or
the shortest route from San Francisco to Hampton Roads, the Kansas route
through St. Louis, Denver, and the Berthoud Pass would be, perhaps, the
best and shortest of those within the United States; but the
Saskatchewan line through British territory, with Halifax and Puget
Sound for ports, would be still more advantageous. As it is, the true
question seems to be, not the trade between the Pacific and Great
Britain, but between Asia and America, for Pennsylvania and Ohio must be
the manufacturing countries of the next fifty years.
Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough: in 1870 we shall reach
San Francisco from London in less time than by the severest traveling I
can reach it from Denver in 1866.
Wherever, in the States, Forth and South have met in conflict, North has
won. New York has beaten Norfolk; Chicago, in spite of its inferior
situation, has beaten the older St. Louis. In the same way, Omaha, or
cities still farther north, will carry off the trade from Leavenworth,
Lawrence, and Kansas City. Ultimately Puget Sound may beat San Francisco
in the race for the Pacific trade, and the Southern cities become still
less able to keep their place than they have been hitherto. Time after
time, Chicago has thrown out intercepting lines, and diverted from St.
Louis trade which seemed of necessity to belong to her; and the success
of the Union Pacific line, and failure of the Kansas road, is a fresh
proof of the superior energy of the Northern to the Southern city. This
time a fresh element enters into the calculation, and declares for
Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight line, is in these
great distances shorter by fifty or a hundred miles than the straight
lines of the maps and charts, and the Platte route becomes not only the
natural, but the shortest route from sea to sea.
Chicago has a great advantage over St. Louis in her comparative freedom
from the cholera, which yearly attacks the Missourian city. During my
stay in St. Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were known to have
reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by flight to 180,000. A
quarantine was established on the river; the sale of fruit and
vegetables prohibited; prisoners released on condition that they should
work at burying the dead; and funeral corteges were forbidden. Chicago
herself, unreached by the plague, was scattering handbills on every
Western railroad line, warning immigrants against St. Louis.
The Missourians have relied overmuch upon the Mississippi River, and
have forgotten that railroads are superseding steamboats every day.
Chicago, on the other hand, which ten years ago was the twentieth city
in America, is probably by this time the third. As a center of thought,
political and religious, she stands second only to Boston, and her
Wabash and Michigan Avenues are among the most beautiful of streets.
One of the chief causes of the future wealth of America is to be found
in the fact that all her “inland” towns are ports. The State of Michigan
lies between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but the single State has
upon the great lakes a coast of 1500 miles. From Fort Benton to the sea
by water is nearly 4000 miles, but the post is a much-used steamboat
port, though more distant, even in the air-line, from the nearest sea
upon the same side the dividing range, than is the White Sea from the
Persian Gulf. Put it in which way you would, Europe could not hold this
river.
A great American city is almost invariably placed at a point where an
important railroad finds an outport on a lake or river. This is no
adaptation to railways of the Limerick saying about rivers--namely, that
Providence has everywhere so placed them as to pass through the great
towns; for in America railways precede population, and when mapped out
and laid, they are but tramways in the desert. There is no great wonder
in this, when we remember that 158,000,000 acres of land have been up to
this time granted to railroads in America.
One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few lines will be
made, and trade being thus driven into certain unchanging routes, a
small number of cities will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing
stations or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and population. Where
a system of cheap railways is adopted, there will be year by year a
tendency to multiply lines of traffic, and consequently to multiply also
ports and seats of trade--a tendency, however, which may be more than
neutralized by any special circumstances which may cause the lines of
transit to converge rather than run parallel to one another. Of the
system of costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India, where
we see the creation of Umritsur and the prosperity of Calcutta alike due
to our single great Bengal line; of the converging system we have
excellent instances in Chicago and Bombay; while we see the plan of
parallel lines in action here in Kansas, and causing the comparative
equality of progress manifested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, in Omaha.
The coasts of India swarmed with ports till our trunk lines ruined Goa
and Surat to advance Bombay, and a hundred village ports to push our
factory at Calcutta, founded by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown
to be the third or fourth city of the empire.
Of the dozen chaotic cities which are struggling for the honor of
becoming the future capital of the West, Leavenworth, with 20,000
people, three daily papers, an opera house, and 200 drinking saloons,
was, at the time of my visit in 1866, somewhat ahead of Omaha, with its
12,000, two papers, and a single “one-horse” theater, though the
northern city tied Leavenworth in the point of “saloons.”
Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte, Atchison, Topeka, Lecompton,
and Lawrence, each praises itself and runs down its neighbor.
Leavenworth claims to be so healthy that when it lately became
necessary to “inaugurate” the new grave-yard, “they had to shoot a man
on purpose”--a change since the days when the Southern Border Ruffians
were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of
abolitionists stuck on poles. On the other hand, a Nebraska man, when
asked whether the Kansas people were fairly honest, said: “Don‘t know
about honest; but they _do_ say as how the folk around take in their
stone fences every night.” Lawrence, the State capital, which is on the
dried-up Kansas River, sneeringly says of all the new towns on the
Missouri that the boats that ply between them are so dangerous that the
fare is collected in installments every five minutes throughout the
trip. Next after the jealousy between two Australian colonies, there is
nothing equal to the hatreds between cities competing for the same
trade. Omaha has now the best chance of becoming the capital of the far
West, but Leavenworth will no doubt continue to be the chief town of
Kansas.
The progress of the smaller cities is amazing. Pistol-shots by day and
night are frequent, but trade and development are little interfered with
by such incidents as these; and as the village cities are peopled up,
the pioneers, shunning their fellows, keep pushing westward, seeking new
“locations.” “You‘re the second man I‘ve seen this fall! Darn me, if
‘taint ’bout time to varmose out westerly--y,” is the standing joke of
the “frontier-bars” against each other.
* * * * *
At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepworth Dixon, just out from
England, and with him I visited the Kansas towns, and then pushed
through Waumego to Manhattan, the terminus (for the day) of the Kansas
Pacific line. Here we were thrust into what space remained between
forty leathern mail-bags and the canvas roof of the mule-drawn
ambulance, which was to be at once our prison for six nights, and our
fort upon wheels against the Indians.