All the continental railways were begun before 1873, were checked by the five years of depression, and were revived about 1878. When they began again to build there was associated with them a new project for an old continental route.
The interoceanic canal had been foreseen ever since the first white man stood on the Isthmus and gazed at the Pacific. Its construction had been stimulated by the gold discoveries and the California emigration of 1848-49, and had been arranged for in a treaty signed with Great Britain in 1850. No means to build the canal were found, however, and the project drifted along until De Lesseps finished his canal at Suez, and the new interest in continental communication in America resuscitated the canal at Panama. In 1878 a French company, with De Lesseps at its head, obtained a concession from Colombia. It began work in 1880, at once arousing the jealousy of the United States which was shown in the efforts of Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and procure for the United States a free hand at the Isthmus. Cleveland reverted to the policy of a neutralized canal in 1885, but interest on either side was premature, since no canal was built for thirty years.
The continental railways aroused keen interest in problems of transportation by their completion between 1881 and 1885. The Northern Pacific was finished under the direction of Henry Villard, a German journalist who had been a correspondent in the Civil War and had managed the interests of foreign investors after 1873. He gained control of the partly finished Northern Pacific and the local lines of Oregon through a holding company known as the Oregon & Transcontinental. In September, 1883, he took a special train, full of distinguished visitors, over his lines to witness the driving of the last spike near Helena, Montana. On the way out, they stopped at Bismarck to help lay the corner-stone for an ambitious new capitol of the Territory of Dakota. From Duluth to Tacoma the new line brought in immigrants whose freight made its chief business.
South of the Northern Pacific, the original main line of the Union Pacific ran from Omaha up the Platte Trail through Cheyenne to Ogden, with a branch from Kansas City to Denver and Cheyenne. Between the main line and the branch the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy constructed a road that reached Denver in May, 1882. Here it met, in 1883, the Denver & Rio Grande, a narrow-gauge road that penetrated the divide by way of the cañon of the Arkansas River, and extended to the Great Salt Lake. The two roads together offered a competition to the Union Pacific for its whole length from the Missouri River to Ogden, and drove that road to extend feeder branches south to the Gulf and north into Oregon.
Farther south the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé stretched the whole length of Kansas and followed the old trail to Santa Fé and the Rio Grande, and thence to Old Mexico. Its owners coöperated with the owners of the Atlantic & Pacific franchise, and the Southern Pacific of California, to build a connecting link between the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé at Albuquerque and the Colorado River at the Needles. From this point the Southern Pacific traversed the valleys of California. In October, 1883, trains were running from San Francisco to St. Louis over this road.
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By 1870 the railway net had covered the eastern half of the United States and had just begun its Pacific extension. There were 52,914 miles of railroad.
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