the vast wild solitudes of Nevada, Colorado,
and Utah, and still worse, over the bleak and
savage passes of the Rocky Mountains,
Congress finally granted to the present company, a
charter to make the road, in the summer of
1862. A year passed, and the summer of 1863
found the company still in a state of imperfect
organisation. During the following winter,
however, its arrangements were being
advanced; its boards, officers, and engineers
were chosen; and sufficient capital was procured
to commence operations. Fifteen directors, with
five government directors, undertook to
superintend the project. It was only in January,
1866, that the first rails were laid down at
Omaha; in January, 1867, three hundred and
seven miles had been completed; a year later,
the rails had crept westward some five hundred
and forty miles; on the first of January,
1869, the extent of the eastern line
(running westward from Omaha) had reached
one thousand miles. Meanwhile the Central
Pacific Railroad—acting in concert with the
Union Pacific Railroad, and constructing the
lines from Sacramento eastward towards the
Rocky Mountains at the same time that the
line already described was approaching the
mountains on the other side—had by the first of
January, 1869, completed about four hundred
miles. Thus, of the grand route from Omaha to
Sacramento, adding together the work
completed on both sides of the mountains, the first
of January of the present year, saw one thousand
four hundred miles finished and fit for
travel; leaving only about four hundred more to
be completed. If, as the company promises
and as now seems certain, the line be opened
for traffic, from end to end, by July the
first, 1869, only three years and a half will
have been occupied in the actual construction
of this immense work. When the line is once
open and in active operation, the traveller
may reach San Francisco from New York,
within a week, and may accomplish his
journey from London to San Francisco in a
little over a fortnight, while the time of
communication between the American Atlantic
seaboard and China will be reduced by nearly
a month.

The project of a great highway across the
American continent, is not a recent one, but is
even anterior to the invention of railway
locomotion. As long ago as the time of President
Jefferson—when the republic had only been
founded sixteen years—the ambition to belt
the continent with a great road which should
connect the two oceans, had sprung up. Public
attention had already been called to the
magnificent lands and rumoured treasures of the Far
West; and the dream of a golden Colorado,
which had inspired Cortes and his adventurous
followers, still lived among the Anglo-Saxon
settlers, and was destined, in our own time, to
be fulfilled by the wonderful discovery of the
Californian mines. The purchase of Louisiana
from the French, effected by President Jefferson,
opened to the then young American view, a
long vista of wild but precious territory; awoke
the ambition to stretch the Republic to the
Western seas; and gave a great stimulus to
enterprises of emigration and "back-woods"
settlement. The government sent an expedition
up the Missouri River; the ostensible object
being to treat with the Indians, and to
transfer their allegiance from France to the
United States; the real object to discover if a
highway, Rocky Mountain-ward, were possible.
The officers of the expedition returned East
with a glorious and thrilling story. They had
followed the magnificently wide and wild
Missouri, almost to its source in the mountains;
they had crossed the ravines and gorges, and
had reached the sources of the Columbia; they
had followed the course of the Columbia,
until the shining waters of the Pacific bounded
their view in the far horizon. Jefferson, in
character cool-blooded and matter-of-fact,
was for once all aglow with the ravishing
descriptions of the West which Louis and Clark
brought back. He foresaw for America, a
destiny far grander than even that grand destiny
which he had pictured to himself, as belonging
to the original British colonies. And, inspiring
the community with sanguine words which
rarely came from his lips, he and his successors
devoted themselves to the great object of opening
the West to civilisation, of penetrating to
the Pacific, and establishing American enterprise
and commerce on the Western as on the
Eastern ocean.

Gradually, by successive acquisitions of
territory, the American government succeeded
in obtaining possession of the immense
tract, lying between the Mississippi, and the
Pacific. While these acquisitions were being
made, came the invention of railways. Ever
since the time when the first trains ran, a
communication by rail with the Pacific has been
mooted in America. At first the idea seemed
visionary and absurd. The Rocky Mountains
seemed an obstacle, impossible to be overcome;
to establish a line of railway across a solitary
tract more than two thousand miles in width,
where the only inhabitants were hordes of
savage aborigines, seemed the height of folly.
We are told that some twenty-five years ago,
a New York merchant, whose name was Asa
Whitney, while doubling Cape Horn en route
for home, matured a plan for the construction of
a railroad from the "village" of St. Louis to
the Pacific. His scheme appears to have been
no castle in the air. It was a thoroughly
considered, long studied project. He worked
out the problem slowly and with difficulty,
looking only at its sober practicability, and
shutting his eyes to the sentimental phases of
his subject. But, the problem once solved,
the possibility of the idea once demonstrated,
Whitney gave way to his enthusiasm, and
became a monomaniac on the subject of a
Pacific Railroad. On his arrival in New York,
he boldly announced his scheme, and, although
pronounced with the unanimity of popular
inexperience a visionary enthusiast, he began
to lecture on it here, and there, and
everywhere. He wrote to the papers, made