and three eastern feeders over the plains to Lake Superior, Missouri, or Iowa, and Memphis. The bill failed to become a law, and at no time before the Civil War was there a better chance to pass

one.

While Congress was deadlocked over the matter of route, the machinery for building such a road, when authorized, was being developed. There was a long debate whether it should be by the Government, as Benton wished, or by a private promoter with Government aid, as Whitney wished. Before 1857 it is likely that if a road had been authorized it could have been Governmentbuilt. After the financial experiences of that year the Government could not be driven into business.

But there was a well-developed procedure for Government aid which Douglas had launched in his Illinois Central Bill of 1850. The public lands were there, miles of them unbroken by any plough. If it was reasonable to give millions of acres of the most fertile land of Iowa, Illinois, or Wisconsin to aid in railroad building, it was more reasonable to extend even greater aid to railroads on the plains, where not many as yet expected ever to see a crop. The Illinois Central grant was followed by demands from every western State for similar generosity, and some of the eastern States asked why if the West was to receive lands for railroads, the East should not receive lands for something else. It was answered to this that the railroad land grants were not a gift but an investment by the Government, and that through their use the value of what remained was more than doubled. The Government sections within the limits of the railroad grants were held at double minimum price, or $2.50 per acre. President Fillmore approved railroad grants amounting to 8,198,593 acres; Pierce approved grants of 19,687,179 acres more. The prevailing type of grant was like that to Illinois for the use of the Illinois Central; six sections per mile of track, to be selected alternately with indemnity limits of fifteen miles on either side. The policy of extending aid of this sort was continued through the Civil War and down to 1871. When Donaldson summed the matter up in 1880, for record in his Public Domain, the land grant railroads actually built amounted to 15,430 miles, and it was estimated that their lands would exceed 155,000,000 acres.

A group of business men in California launched the enterprise that eventually was finished as the Union Pacific Railroad. Leland Stanford, governor of the State, Collis P. Huntington, Charles C.

Crocker, and Theodore D. Judah were interested in the charter issued to the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California early in 1861. Judah was the engineer, and ran a survey along the main trail to the Carson Valley that summer. He found nothing but engineering difficulties, for the California end of a railroad was obliged to climb the continental divide and to indulge in heavy mountain construction. Judah was an enthusiast, however, and hurried to Washington that autumn with plans and profiles. He had the support of the California delegation in Congress, as well as the advantage brought to his project by the Civil War.

Before the Civil War there was a reasonable choice among the three best routes, but after secession the two southern lines were out of the question for the same reason that shifted the overland mail to the Platte trail in 1861. There could be no national railroad in Confederate country, and even Missouri was ruled out, as somewhat dangerous. In the summer of 1861, it was not yet certain whether this State would cast its lot with the South or remain in the Union. Judah died that winter before his lobby was successful, but on July 1, 1862, a bill was signed by Lincoln to carry out his enterprise.

It was provided in this bill that a railroad should be constructed from the western border of the State of Iowa to San Francisco Bay, by various corporations already in existence, and one that was to be chartered directly for the purpose. The Central Pacific of California was to construct the western end, within the limits of that State. From the eastern boundary of California, to a point on the one hundredth meridian, the Union Pacific Railroad Company was to do the work. East of this meridian were to be four branches to Missouri River points at Kansas City, Atchison, Council Bluffs, and Sioux City. The main line to Council Bluffs was left to the Union Pacific, the others were ascribed to various corporations.

Private corporations were to build the railroad along the route now crowded with the wagons of the overland service. But the Government was to aid in various ways, by right of way, by land endowment, and by a loan of credit. The right of way was stated as four hundred feet, with extra ground as needed for yards or sidings, and with the privilege of cutting wood and stone from adjacent portions of the public domain. The land grant was to consist of ten sections per mile of track. The loan of credit was to be secured by a first mortgage on the finished railroad and was to

be in form of United States bonds, advanced at the rate of sixteen thousand dollars per mile of track.

The passage of the Union Pacific Act did not build the road, and although its promoters were urging it as a war measure, the Civil War was ended before serious construction began. But the act opened a new period in railroad legislation, and in the disposal of lands. The old fiction of granting the lands to the States instead of directly to the roads was abandoned now. This road was to operate in the territories rather than in the States, and the sensitive southern consciences were gone. The northern members of Congress had no aversion to the idea of direct Federal aid. The overland route was thus the occasion for establishing a new wideopen policy of treatment of the public domain. The policy became even wider before the railroad spanned the route.

CHAPTER L

THE PUBLIC LANDS: WIDE OPEN

THERE were no railroad land grants made by Congress in the Administration of James Buchanan, 1857-1861. There occurred instead the last stand of the sectional influences against the newer view of National power and responsibility that was gaining ground through the logic of events and the advocacy of the western States. Discussion there was in abundance, and had Congress been left free to act there would have been legislative results, for the Republican Party was gaining in strength every month. Many of the Democrats from the North and West were willing to vote with them. But Buchanan stood true to the political alliance that he represented and had no comprehension that the United States might become a government of action. Whatever bills escaped destruction in committee or in either House, he vetoed. In his veto messages of the Homestead Bill and the Morrill Act may be found classic and final statements of the Philosophy that Calhoun had elaborated to protect the South. During these four years of deadlock various western forces were dammed up, any one of which might have gained in time enough head to break the dam. One was the demand for a railroad to the Pacific, and land grants for other lines; this was partly successful before Buchanan was elected and waited for final fulfillment until after he retired. A second was the evolution of agricultural outlook that beheld the passing of the simple farmer, at work with only his own hands and ancient tools, and that saw rising to change his task the various aids of science and machinery. A third was the swelling demand of the free-soil West, repeating the old formula that it was an outrage to charge the pioneer for the farm that he created and insisting that the United States grant him a homestead. All of these found their best expression through the leaders of the Republican Party, and all were successful in the first Republican Administration.

The Union Pacific Act, assuaging one of these demands, was partly founded on the notion that it was good business to give away half the region affected by a railroad, in order to double the value of the other half. But the American farmer was now think

ing of more than mere acreage and original cost, as he considered the factors of success. Thus far his agriculture had been laborious in its execution, and primitive in theory and in practice. He was now conscious that science and mechanics might affect his profits.

The conservatism and ignorance of the rustic has been a familiar theme since the dawn of history. The more sophisticated classes in society have looked upon the farmers with a mixture of contempt and scorn, while literature has invariably depended on them to furnish the material for humor and burlesque. The isolation of the farmer in a roadless world accounts for much of this; the routine character of his work and the conditions under which it must be performed, account for the rest. Farming early became a conventional task, in which formal education had no part, and in which from father to son, by precept and example, the routine methods were handed down. The simple tools, plough, flail, and sickle appear in the earliest of our pictori: 1 records. They were in use when America was discovered, little changed from their forms of antiquity. The frontier farmer, and indeed the farmer everywhere, was using them almost unmodified when the American States gained their independence. The settlers of the Appalachian valleys knew only this sort of agriculture, helped out by some rotation of crops and rule-of-thumb selective breeding of domestic animals. The children of the valleys picked it up and carried it down the Ohio to the West. Through inheritance and isolation it was hard to prove that anything they knew was wrong, or that a better method was good enough to overcome the curse of novelty.

The American farmers suffered for their conservatism and the backwardness of agriculture, and out of their suffering emerged the remedy. It was not long after the settlements pushed into the Great Valley before the farmers of the seaboard found that they could not meet the competition of the frontier. The wheat and corn of the virgin farms came cheaper to the market than the farmers on the older fields could raise them. Each new improvement of a road intensified this competition somewhere. It was true that sometimes the spread of settlement brought better scil into use. More often the old farm had been used up. The soil was exhausted by repeated cropping, which the partial rotation did not cure. The use of manures was rare, for domestic animals were mostly out at pasture. Commercial fertilizers were not known, except that perhaps lime was sometimes used to sweeten soil.

The movement to improve the method of agriculture began with