The Railroad Builders | Page 8

to that time the Mississippi River had marked the Western railroad terminus. Now and then a road straggled beyond this barrier for a few miles into eastern Iowa and Missouri; but in the main the enormous territory reaching from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean was crossed only by the old trails. The one thing which perhaps did most to place the transcontinental road on a practical basis was the annexation of California in 1848; and the wild rush that took place on the discovery of the gold fields one year later had led Americans to realize that on the Pacific coast they had an empire which was great and incalculably rich but almost inaccessible. The loyalty of California to the Northern cause in the war naturally stimulated a desire for closer contact. In the ten years preceding 1860 the importance of a transcontinental line had constantly been brought to the attention of Congress and the project had caused much jealousy between the North and the South, for each region desired to control its Eastern terminus. This impediment no longer stood in the way; early in his term, therefore, President Lincoln signed the bill authorizing the construction of the Union Pacific--a name doubly significant, as marking the union of the East and the West and also recognizing the sentiment of loyalty or union that this great enterprise was intended to promote. The building of this railroad, as well as that of the others which ultimately made the Pacific and the Atlantic coast near neighbors--the Santa Fe, the Southern Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Great Northern--is described in the pages that follow. Here it is sufficient to emphasize the fact that they achieved the concluding triumph in what is certainly the most extensive system of railroads in the world. These transcontinental roads really completed the work of Columbus. He sailed to discover the western route to Cathay and found that his path was blocked by a mighty continent. But the first train that crossed the plains and ascended the Rockies and reached the Golden Gate assured thenceforth a rapid and uninterrupted transit westward from Europe to Asia.

CHAPTER II
. THE COMMODORE AND THE NEW YORK CENTRAL
A story was told many years ago of Commodore Vanderbilt which, while perhaps not strictly true, was pointed enough to warrant its constant repetition for more than two generations. Back in the sixties, when this grizzled railroad chieftain was the chief factor in the rapidly growing New York Central Railroad system, whose backbone then consisted of a continuous one-track line connecting Albany with the Great Lakes, the president of a small cross-country road approached him one day and requested an exchange of annual passes.
"Why, my dear sir," exclaimed the Commodore, "my railroad is more than three hundred miles long, while yours is only seventeen miles."
"That may all be so," replied the other, "but my railroad is just as wide as yours."
This statement was true. Practically no railroad, even as late as the sixties, was wider than another. They were all single-tracked lines. Even the New York Central system in 1866 was practically a single-track road; and the Commodore could not claim to any particular superiority over his neighbors and rivals in this particular. Instead of sneering at his "seventeen-mile" colleague, Vanderbilt might have remembered that his own fine system had grown up in less than two generations from a modest narrow-gage track running from "nothing to nowhere." The Vanderbilt lines, which today with their controlled and affiliated systems comprise more than 13,000 miles of railroad--a large portion of which is double-tracked, no mean amount being laid with third and fourth tracks is the outgrowth of a little seventeen-mile line, first chartered in 1826, and finished for traffic in 1831. This little railroad was known as the Mohawk and Hudson, and it extended from Albany to Schenectady. It was the second continuous section of railroad line operated by steam in the United States, and on it the third locomotive built in America, the De Witt Clinton, made a satisfactory trial trip in August, 1831.
The success of this experiment created a sensation far and wide and led to rapid railroad building in other parts of the country in the years immediately following. The experiences of a participant in this trial trip are described about forty years later in a letter written by Judge J.L. Gillis of Philadelphia:
"In the early part of the month of August of that year [1831], I left Philadelphia for Canandaigua, New York, traveling by stages and steamboats to Albany and stopping at the latter place. I learned that a locomotive had arrived there and that it would make its first trip over the road to Schenectady the next day. I concluded to lie over and gratify my curiosity with a first ride after a