Sidings were graded at intervals of seven to eight miles, and spur tracks, laid on the natural surface, put in at convenient points, sixteen miles apart, for storage of materials and supplies at or near the front. As the work went on, the spur tracks in the rear were taken up. The construction train contained box cars two and three stories high, in which workmen were boarded and lodged. Supplies, as a rule, were taken by wagon-trains from the spur tracks near the front to their destination, an average distance of one hundred miles and an extreme one of two hundred miles. Steamboats were employed to a limited extent on the Missouri River in supplying such remote points as Fort Benton and the Coal Banks, but not more than fifteen per cent, of the transportation was done by steamers. A single item illustrating the magnitude of the supply transportation is that there were shipped to Minot and forwarded and consumed on the work 590,000 bushels of oats.
It is believed that the work of grading 500 miles of railroad in five months, and the transportation into the country of everything consumed, grass and water excepted, and of every rail, tie, bit of timber, pile, tool, machine, man, or team employed, and laying 643 miles of track in seven and a half months, from one end, far exceeds in magnitude and rapidity of execution any similar undertaking in this or any other country. It reflects also the greatest credit on the managers of the railway transportation (it is not invidious to mention the names of Mr. A. Manvel, general manager, and Mr. J. M. Egan, general superintendent, upon whom the working details devolved) when it is stated that the delays for material or supplies on the entire work did not retard it in the aggregate one hour. And every hour counted in this masterly campaign.
The Western people apparently think no more of throwing down a railroad, if they want to go anywhere, than a conservative Easterner does of taking an unaccustomed walk across country; and the railway constructors and managers are a little amused at the Eastern slowness and want of facility in construction and management. One hears that the East is antiquated, and does not know anything about railroad building. Shovels, carts, and wheelbarrows are of a past age; the big wheel-scraper does the business. It is a common remark that a contractor accustomed to Eastern work is not desired on a Western job.
On Friday afternoon, November 18th, the news was flashed that the last rail was laid, and at 6 p.m. a special train was on the way from St. Paul with a double complement of engineers and train-men. For the first 500 miles there was more or less delay in avoiding the long and frequent freight trains, but after that not much except the necessary stops for cleaning the engine. Great Falls, about 1100 miles, was reached Sunday noon, in thirty-six hours, an average of over thirty miles an hour. A part of the time the speed was as much as fifty miles an hour. The track was solid, evenly graded, heavily tied, well aligned, and the cars ran over it with no more swing and bounce than on an old road. The only exception to this is the piece from Great Falls to Helena, which had not been surfaced all the way. It is excellent railway construction, and it is necessary to emphasize this when we consider the rapidity with which it was built.
The company has built this road without land grant or subsidy of any kind. The Montana extension, from Minot, Dakota, to Great Falls, runs mostly through Indian and military reservations, permission to pass through being given by special Act of Congress, and the company buying 200 feet road-way. Little of it, therefore, is open to settlement.
These reservations, naming them in order westward, are as follows: The Fort Berthold Indian reservation, Dakota, the eastern boundary of which is twenty-seven miles west of Minot, has an area of 4550 square miles (about as large as Connecticut), or 2,912,000 acres. The Fort Buford military reservation, lying in Dakota and Montana, has an area of 900 square miles, or 576,000 acres. The Blackfeet Indian reserve has an area of 34,000 square miles (the State of New York has 46,000), or 21,760,000 acres. The Fort Assiniboin military reserve has an area of 869.82 square miles, or 556,684 acres.
It is a liberal estimate that there are 6000 Indians on the Blackfeet and Fort Berth old reservations. As nearly as I could ascertain, there are not over 3500 Indians (some of those I saw were Créés on a long visit from Canada) on the Blackfeet reservation of about 22,000,000 acres. Some judges put the number as low as 2500 to all this territory, and estimate that there was about one Indian to ten square miles, or one Indian family to fifty square miles. We rode through 300 miles of this territory along the Milk River, nearly every acre of it good soil, with thick, abundant grass, splendid wheat land.
I have no space to take up the Indian problem. But the present condition of affairs is neither fair to white settlers nor just or humane to the Indians. These big reservations are of no use to them, nor they to the reservations. The buffaloes have disappeared; they do not live by hunting; they cultivate very little ground; they use little even to pasture their ponies. They are fed and clothed by the Government, and they camp about the agencies in idleness, under conditions that pauperize them, destroy their manhood, degrade them into dependent, vicious lives. The reservations ought to be sold, and the proceeds devoted to educating the Indians and setting them up in a self-sustaining existence. They should be allotted an abundance of good land, in the region to which they are acclimated, in severalty, and under such restrictions that they cannot alienate it at least for a generation or two. As the Indian is now, he will neither work, nor keep clean, nor live decently. Close to, the Indian is not a romantic object, and certainly no better now morally than Lewis and Clarke depicted him in 1804. But he is a man; he has been barbarously treated; and it is certainly not beyond honest administration and Christian effort to better his condition. And his condition will not be improved simply by keeping from settlement and civilization the magnificent agricultural territory that is reserved to him.
Of this almost unknown country, pierced by the road west from Larimore, I can only make the briefest notes. I need not say that this open, unobstructed highway of arable land and habitable country, from the Red River to the Rocky Mountains, was an astonishment to me; but it is more to the purpose to say that the fertile region was a surprise to railway men who are perfectly familiar with the West.
We had passed some snow in the night, which had been very cold, but there was very little at Larimore, a considerable town; there was a high, raw wind during the day, and a temperature of about 10° above, which heavily frosted the car windows. At Devil’s Lake (a body of brackish water twenty-eight miles long) is a settlement three years old, and from this and two insignificant stations beyond were shipped, in 1887, 1,500,000 bushels of wheat. The country beyond is slightly rolling, fine land, has much wheat, little houses scattered about, some stock, very promising altogether. Minot, where we crossed the Mouse River the second time, is a village of 700 people, with several brick houses and plenty of saloons. Thence we ran up to a plateau some three hundred feet higher than the Mouse River Valley, and found a land more broken, and interspersed with rocky land and bowlders—the only touch of “bad lands” I recall on the route. We crossed several small streams, White Earth, Sandy, Little Muddy, and Muddy, and before reaching Williston descended into the valley of the Missouri, reached Fort Buford, where the Yellowstone comes in, entered what is called Paradise Valley, and continued parallel with the Missouri as far as the mouth of Milk River. Before reaching this we crossed the Big Muddy and the Poplar rivers, both rising in Canada. At Poplar Station is a large Indian agency, and hundreds of Teton Sioux Indians (I was told 1800) camped there in their conical tepees. I climbed the plateau above the station where the Indians bury their dead, wrapping the bodies in blankets and buffalo-robes, and suspending them aloft on crossbars supported by stakes, to keep them from the wolves. Beyond Assiniboin I saw a platform in a cottonwood-tree on which reposed the remains of a chief and his family. This country is all good, so far as I could see and learn.