The Great Salt Lake Trail

by Henry Inman; Buffalo Bill

Less than ten years before, General Sherman had suggested a different method of dispensing with 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 the Indians. So large a number of workmen distributed along the line will introduce enough whiskey to kill off all the Indians within three hundred miles of the road.”

In speaking of the climatic changes incident to the building of transcontinental lines of railroad, General Dodge also says:—

The building of the Pacific roads has changed the climate between the Missouri River and the Sierra Nevada. In the extreme West it is not felt so much as between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. Before settlement had developed it, the country west of the Missouri River could raise little of the main crops, except by irrigation. From April until September no rain fell. The snows of the mountains furnished the streams with water and the bunch-grass with sufficient dampness to sustain it until July when it became cured and was the food that sustained all animal life on the plains, summer and winter.

I have seen herds of buffalo, hundreds of thousands in number, living off bunch-grass that they obtained by pawing through two feet of snow, on the level. It was this feature that induced the stocking of immense ranches with cattle. Buffalo never changed the character of the grass, but herds of cattle did, so that now, on the ranges, very little of the bunch or buffalo grass remains.

Since the building of these roads, it is calculated that the rain belt moves westward at the rate of eight miles a year. It has now certainly reached the plains of Colorado, and for two years that high and dry state has raised crops without irrigation, right up to the foot of the mountains.

Salt Lake since 1852 has risen nineteen feet, submerging whole farms along its border and threatening the level desert west of it. It has been a gradual but permanent rise, and comes from the additional moisture falling during the year—rain and snow. Professor Agassiz, in 1867, after a visit to Colorado, predicted that this increase of moisture would come by the disturbance of the electric currents, caused by the building of the Pacific railroads and settlement of the country.[75]

It must be admitted, however, that the growth of the once vast supposed relatively sterile region west of the Missouri River is not due in its entirety to the building of railroads, but that the idea of absolute sterility was a mistaken one; without a fertile soil and other possibilities for the advancement of civilization there, railroads would never have been constructed. The railroads have developed what was inherently not a desert in its most rigid definition, but a misunderstood region, which only awaited the touch of the genius of agriculture, made possible alone by the building of transcontinental highways.

But for the railroads the great central region of the continent would
indeed be a howling wilderness. As the late Sidney Dillon,
ex-president of the Union Pacific Railroad, wrote in a magazine
article on “The West and the Railroads” in the North American Review
for April, 1891,
Like many other great truths, this is so well known to the
older portions of our commonwealth that they have forgotten it;
and the younger portions do not comprehend or appreciate it.
Men are so constituted that they use existing advantages
as if they had always existed, and were matters of course.
The world went without friction matches during thousands of
years, but people light their fires to-day without a thought
as to the marvellous chemistry of the little instrument that
is of such inestimable value, and yet remained so long unknown.
The youngster of to-day steps into a luxurious coach at
New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, eats, sleeps, surveys
romantic scenery from the window during a few days, and
alights in Portland or San Francisco without any just
appreciation of the fact that a few decades since it would
have required weeks of toilsome travel to go over the same
ground, during which he would have run the risk of starvation,
of being lost in the wilderness, plundered by robbers, or
killed by savages. The most beneficent function of the
railway is that of a carrier of freight. What would it cost
a man to carry a ton of wheat one mile? What would it cost
for a horse to do the same? The railway does it at a cost of
less than a cent. This brings Dakota and Minnesota into
direct relation with hungry and opulent Liverpool, and makes
subsistence easier and cheaper throughout the civilized world.
The world should, therefore, thank the railway for the
opportunity to buy wheat, but none the less should the West
thank the railway for the opportunity to sell wheat.

Nothing now marks the spot at Promontory Point where the formal ceremony of driving in the last spike took place on May 10, 1869, and even the small station known as Promontory is at some distance from that point where the connection between the two transcontinental roads was originally made. The whole aspect of the country, from the Missouri River to Salt Lake, has marvellously changed. Where then were only tents, there are now well-built, substantial, and prosperous towns; and instead of the great desert wastes, supposed to be beyond reach of cultivation, one may now see an almost unbroken stretch of corn-fields and cultivated lands.