[CHAPTER XII]
THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER
In a national way, the South struggling against the North prevented the early location of a Pacific railway. Locally, every village on the Mississippi from the Lakes to the Gulf hoped to become the terminus and had advocates throughout its section of the country. The list of claimants is a catalogue of Mississippi Valley towns. New Orleans, Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo, St. Louis, Chicago, and Duluth were all entered in the competition. By 1860 the idea had received general acceptance; no one in the future need urge its adoption, but the greatest part of the work remained to be done.
Born during the thirties, the idea of a Pacific railway was of uncertain origin and parentage. Just so soon as there was a railroad anywhere, it was inevitable that some enterprising visionary should project one in imagination to the extremity of the continent. The railway speculation, with which the East was seething during the administrations of Andrew Jackson, was boiling over in the young West, so that the group of men advocating a railway to connect the oceans were but the product of their time.
Greatest among these enthusiasts was Asa Whitney, a New York merchant interested in the China trade and eager to win the commerce of the Orient for the United States. Others had declared such a road to be possible before he presented his memorial to Congress in 1845, but none had staked so much upon the idea. He abandoned the business, conducted a private survey in Wisconsin and Iowa, and was at last convinced that "the time is not far distant when Oregon will become ... a separate nation" unless communication should "unite them to us." He petitioned Congress in January, 1845, for a franchise and a grant of land, that the national road might be accomplished; and for many years he agitated persistently for his project.
The annexation of Oregon and the Southwest, coming in the years immediately after the commencement of Whitney's advocacy, gave new point to arguments for the railway and introduced the sectional element. So long as Oregon constituted the whole American frontage on the Pacific it was idle to debate railway routes south of South Pass. This was the only known, practicable route, and it was the course recommended by all the projectors, down to Whitney. But with California won, the other trails by El Paso and Santa Fé came into consideration and at once tempted the South to make the railway tributary to its own interests.
Chief among the politicians who fell in with the growing railway movement was Senator Benton, who tried to place himself at its head. "The man is alive, full grown, and is listening to what I say (without believing it perhaps)," he declared in October, 1844, "who will yet see the Asiatic commerce traversing the North Pacific Ocean—entering the Oregon River—climbing the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains—issuing from its gorges—and spreading its fertilizing streams over our wide-extended Union!" After this date there was no subject closer to his interest than the railway, and his advocacy was constant. His last word in the Senate was concerning it. In 1849 he carried off its feet the St. Louis railroad convention with his eloquent appeal for a central route: "Let us make the iron road, and make it from sea to sea—States and individuals making it east of the Mississippi, the nation making it west. Let us ... rise above everything sectional, personal, local. Let us ... build the great road ... which shall be adorned with ... the colossal statue of the great Columbus—whose design it accomplishes, hewn from a granite mass of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, overlooking the road ... pointing with outstretched arm to the western horizon and saying to the flying passengers, 'There is the East, there is India.'"
By 1850 it was common knowledge that a railroad could be built along the Platte route, and it was believed that the mountains could be penetrated in several other places, but the process of surveying with reference to a particular railway had not yet been begun. It is possible and perhaps instructive to make a rough grouping, in two classes divided by the year 1842, of the explorations before 1853. So late as Frémont's day it was not generally known whether a great river entered the Pacific between the Columbia and the Colorado. Prior to 1842 the explorations are to be regarded as "incidents" and "adventures" in more or less unknown countries. The narratives were popular rather than scientific, representing the experiences of parties surveying boundary lines or locating wagon roads, of troops marching to remote posts or chastising Indians, of missionaries and casual explorers. In the aggregate they had contributed a large mass of detailed but unorganized information concerning the country where the continental railway must run. But Lieutenant Frémont, in 1842, commenced the effort by the United States to acquire accurate and comprehensive knowledge of the West. In 1842, 1843, and 1845 Frémont conducted the three Rocky Mountain expeditions which established him for life as a popular hero. The map, drawn by Charles Preuss for his second expedition, confined itself in strict scientific fashion to the facts actually observed, and in skill of execution was perhaps the best map made before 1853. The individual expeditions which in the later forties filled in the details of portions of the Frémont map are too numerous for mention. At least twenty-five occurred before 1853, all serving to extend both general and particular knowledge of the West. To these was added a great mass of popular books, prepared by emigrants and travellers. By 1853 there was good, unscientific knowledge of nearly all the West, and accurate information concerning some portions of it. The railroad enthusiasts could tell the general direction in which the roads must run, but no road could well be located without a more comprehensive survey than had yet been made.
The agitation of the Pacific railway idea was founded almost exclusively upon general and inaccurate knowledge of the West. The exact location of the line was naturally left for the professional civil engineer, its popular advocate contented himself with general principles. Frequently these were sufficient, yet, as in the case of Benton, misinformation led to the waste of strength upon routes unquestionably bad. But there was slight danger of the United States being led into an unwise route, since in the diversity of routes suggested there was deadlock. Until after 1850, in proportion as the idea was received with unanimity, the routes were fought with increasing bitterness. Whitney was shelved in 1852 when the choice of routes had become more important than the method of construction.