Brown, Appleton, Clark, Hoxie, Snyder, the Casements, and many others under them. Some of them laid down their lives in the work-all reached fame in after years, and were builders and operators on all the great trans-continental lines, including the Canadian Pacific.

On the Central Pacific were Judah, Montague, Clements, Ives, Gray, Town, and others that I can not name. Some of these men have met five times in making the connections that completed the great trans-continental lines. I found some of the men who made the first connection at Promontory again at Sierra Blanca, at the joining of the Texas Pacific and Southern Pacific, and still again at Emery's Gap the present year, in connecting New Orleans and the gulf with Denver. On the Atchison and Topeka and on the Northern, as well as on the Canadian Pacific, some of the same men took part in laying the connecting rails.

The men who made possible this work, who threw their fortunes, their health, their reputations into it, will one day stand in civil life like our great leaders in the war. Monuments to their enterprise dot the country between the Missouri river and the Rocky mountains, between the Pacific and the Wahsatch. They were the men who had made possible a population, within the next twenty years, between the Missouri river and the Pacific coast, of fifty millions of people. They have been libeled, abused, vilified, and, in some cases, bankrupted and driven to their graves; but their works stand, and their monuments will yet come-the Ameses, Dillon, Duff, Durant, Atkins, Dexter, Baker, Dix, Brooks, Stanford, Huntingdon, Hopkins and Crocker.

I do not state this alone on my own knowledge, but I appeal to the most enthusiastic, the most helpful of all the generals in this great enterprise. One who knew these people, who saw them, who watched them at their work, will tell you that they should deserve the same praise for their acts in civil life, that he and his followers did for their victories in the war. The two were inseparable, and the last could not have been but for the first.

Many have supposed that they engaged in it for purely mercenary motives-for the money they could make out of it; but I say to you that their hearts and patriotism were in the work, as much as yours were in the war, and if they had invested their money and credit in any other business as they did in this, they would have been the gainers.

They and their subordinates were determined to build a firstclass road. I have plenty of evidence to sustain this beyond question. The President, Oliver Ames, and the Board of Directors sustained the engineers in building a road of the lowest grades and lightest curvature the country would admit. When some of those interested desired to use the maximum authorized by law and build a surface road, the board invariably stood by for the lines of the engineers-those offering the greatest commercial value.

The instructions given me by Oliver Ames and Sidney Dillon, one at the head of the railroad company and the other at the head of the construction company, were invariably to obtain the best line the country afforded, regardless of the expense. Oakes Ames once wrote me when it seemed almost impossible to raise money to meet our expenditures: "Go ahead; the work shall not stop, even if it takes the shovel shop."

The Ameses were manufacturers of shovels and tools, and their fortunes were invested in that business; and, as we all know, the shovel shop went. When the day came that the business of the Ameses should go or the Union Pacific, Oakes Ames said: "Save the credit of the road-I will fail.”

It took a man of courage and patriotism to make that decision and lay down a reputation and business credit that was invaluable in New England, and one that had come down through almost a century. To him it was worse than death; and it was the blow which, followed by others, put him in his grave.

To emphasize these observations, permit me to quote a brace of paragraphs from a letter dated January 6, 1859, addressed to Hon. John Sherman, M. C., and made public through the National Intelligencer. It was from his brother, then unknown to fame, and is even yet one of the most remarkable and instructive short papers to be found in the literature of trans-continental railway construction. He gave many weighty reasons why a railway to the Pacific should be built, but thought it could not be done unless done by the nation. It is a work of giants," he sententiously declares, "and Uncle Sam is the only giant I know who can or should grapple the subject." That paper alone, in the light of later events, would stamp its author as a far-seeing statesman and an enlightened engineer, and I shall ask his permission to record it as a part of

this paper. The following declarations taken from it show how the project was viewed in 1859:

"It so happens that for the past ten years the Sierra Nevada has been crossed at every possible point by miners in search of gold, by emigrants going and coming, and by skillful and scientific men. I, myself, have been along a great part of that range, and have no hesitation in saying that there are no passes by which a railway, to be traveled by the most powerful locomotion now in use, can be carried through the Sierra Nevada, unless at the extreme head of the Sacramento, near the town of Shasta or Fort Reading, or at the extreme head of the San Joaquin, near the Tejon.

"I now assert my belief that the great railroad will not receive enough net profits to pay interest on its cost. Yet I will not attempt an estimate of either the cost of the road or its income. I believe the cost will not fall much, if any, short of $200,000,000, the interest on which (government bonds, say five per cent. per annum) would be $10,000,000."

The experience of the war made possible the building of this trans-continental railroad, not only physically but financially. The government, already burdened with billions of debt, floated fifty millions more, and by this action it created a credit which enabled the railroad company to float an equal amount, and these two credits, when handled by men of means and courage, who also threw their own private fortunes into the scale, accomplished the work.

If it had been proposed, before the war, that the United States should lend its credit, and issue its bonds to build a railroad 2,000 miles long across a vast, barren plain only known to the red man, uninhabited, without one dollar of business to sustain it, the proposition alone would have virtually bankrupted the nation.

Possibilities of finance, as developed during the war, made this problem not only possible, but solved and carried it out, and accomplished in three years a feat which no plan ever before suggested proposed to accomplish in less than ten years; and while it was being accomplished the only persons who had real, solid, undoubted faith in its completion were that portion of the nation who had taken active part in the war.

Necessity brought out during the war bold structures that in their rough were models of economy in material and strength. In taking care of direct and lateral strains by position of posts and braces they adopted principles that are used to-day in the highest and boldest structures; and I undertake to say that no structure up to date has been built which has not followed those simple prin

ciples that were evolved out of necessity, though reported against during the war by the most experienced and reliable engineers of the world.

A few bold spirits backed the enterprise with their fortunes and independent credit. They were called fools and fanatics, and Oakes Ames-the real pluck of the work-said to me once: "What makes me hang on is the faith of you soldiers," referring, at the time, to the support the army was giving us, led by Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Pope, Thomas, Augur and Crook and all who had direct communication with us on the plains. There was nothing we could ask them for that they did not give, even when regulations did not authorize it, and it took a large stretch of authority to satisfy all our demands.

The commissary department was open to us. Their troops guarded us, and we reconnoitered, surveyed, located and built inside of their picket line. We marched to work to the tap of the drum with our men armed. 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 a head, down to his chief spiker, it could be commanded by experienced officers of every rank, from general to a captain. They had served five years at the front and over half of the men had shouldered a musket in many battles. An illustration of this came to me after our track had passed Plum creek, two hundred miles west of the Missouri river. The Indians had captured a freight train and were in possession of it and its crews. It so happened that I was coming down from the front with my car, which was a traveling arsenal. At Plum creek station word came of this capture and stopped us. On my train were perhaps twenty men, some a portion of the crew, some who had been discharged and sought passage to the rear. Nearly all were strangers to me. The excitement of the capture and the reports coming by telegraph of the burning of the train, brought all men to the platform, and when I called upon them to fall in, to go forward and retake the train, every man on the train went into line, and by his position showed that he was a soldier. We ran down slowly until we came in sight of the train. I gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, and at the command they went for

ward as steadily and in as good order as we had seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire.

Less than ten years before, General Sherman had suggested a different method of disposing of the Indian. Writing to his brother, he said:

'No particular danger need be apprehended from Indians. They will no doubt pilfer and rob, and may occasionally attack and kill stragglers; but the grading of the road will require strong parties, capable of defending themselves; and the supplies for the road and maintenance of the workmen will be carried in large trains of wagons, such as went last year to Salt Lake, none of which were molested by Indians. So large a number of workmen distributed along the line will introduce enough whiskey to kill off all the Indians within 300 miles of the road."

Railroads first built in the United States have been remunerative only in a small way, and have grown and been supported mostly by the vast development of new territory. The advance lines are usually bankrupt, but they feed trunk lines by which they are financially supported, not because of the amount they earn for themselves, but for what is paid to their connection, as every pound of delivered freight and every passenger carried to and from the connection is additional and new business.

The unfriendliness of Congress since 1870, and of all the western states since 1880, has been overcome by the world west of the Missouri river, newly conquered and occupied. Now their hostile legislation will soon have its reactionary effect upon themselves, and I predict that the demagogues who delight to legislate and destroy property that they have no interest in, will soon see the result in their own homes; for these, like the people east of the lakes, are becoming possessed of property and wealth through capital that comes to them, developing their country.

Railroad investment is creeping west of the lakes, and when the people legislate upon something they own or are interested in, no matter how small their interest, they will sustain and support it. I look to the day not far distant when, in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Texas, Minnesota and Missouri, it will be as unpopular to legislate to destroy capital invested in means of transportation as it is to-day in Ohio, New York and the New England States.

The changes in the railroad world have been caused mostly by the improved methods of transportation made necessary during the war; and the great principles then evolved have taught the American people that there was no problem in finance or relating to the