There were General Casement, and Construction Superintendent Sam Reed, and Colonel Silas Seymour of New York (the consulting engineer who was General Dodge’s assistant), and Mr. T. J. Carter, a Government director of the road, and Mr. Jacob Blickensderfer, Jr., an engineer sent from Washington by the President, and Mr. James Evans, the division engineer who was going out to examine the route to the base of the Black Hills range. There were General William Myers, chief quartermaster of the Department of the Platte, who was to inspect the site of a new army post on the railroad survey, and several surveyors who were to take the places of men that had been killed by the Indians.
And there was General Dodge’s own party, with notables enough in it to make a boy feel rather small.
Of course, the tall, lean man in buckskin was Scout Sol Judy, a real rider of the plains, always ready for Indians or anything else. He knew the country from Omaha to California.
The pleasant, full-bearded man who rode beside General Dodge himself was none other than General John A. Rawlins, chief-of-staff to General Grant, at Washington. General Rawlins was not well, and General Grant had asked General Dodge if he might not be taken along, sometime, on a trip, to see if roughing it in the Far West might not do him good. So here he was. He and General Dodge had been noted commanders in the Civil War, and were warm friends of each other and of General Grant, too.
The alert trim-bearded man in corduroy coat was Mr. David Van Lennep, the geologist, whose business was to explore for coal-fields and minerals in the path of the survey.
The tall heavy-set, round-faced boyish-looking man was Captain and Major William McKee Dunn, General Rawlins’ aide-de-camp, of the Twenty-first Infantry.
Another round-faced boyish young man was Mr. John R. Duff from Boston. His father was a director of the railroad company.
The tall slim man with side-whiskers was Mr. John E. Corwith, of Galena, Illinois, who was a guest of General Rawlins.
For Terry to get the names and titles straight required most of the day. General Dodge had introduced him in bluff fashion: “Gentlemen, this is Terry Richards, one of the company men who are laying the rails across continent. He’ll be one of us, on the trip.”
Beginning with General Rawlins, they all had shaken hands with him. But it was young Mr. Duff who explained who they were, as on his horse Terry fell in behind, to bring up the rear.