Era of CHAPTER VI THE NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLANT NATIONAL politics lost much of its hold on the people in the administrations of Hayes and Garfield, in which politicians seemed to be squabbling for factional prosperity advantage and the spoils, and in which few of the recognized leaders had any program to offer for the better adjustment of government to the facts of life. More interesting in all respects were the facts of life themselves, as the depression prevailing for five years after 1873 was replaced by normal conditions, and these in turn by increasing prosperity that burst into an era of lavish speculation while Arthur was President. Robert Ingersoll, perhaps the greatest orator of his day, spoke better than he knew when he declared in the Republican Convention of 1876 "that prosperity and resumption, when they come, must come together; that when they come, they will come hand in hand through the golden harvest fields; hand in hand by the whirling spindles and the turning wheels; hand in hand by the open furnace doors; hand in hand by the flaming forges; hand in hand by the chimneys filled with eager fire, greeted and grasped by the countless sons of toil." Underneath the prosperity that prevailed in the decade of the eighties was confidence in the stability and credit of the Government. Resumption placed all money on a parity and destroyed the uncertainties that came with fluctuating currency. The supply of labor was recruited by increasing hordes of immigrants from Europe. Continuous falling prices made the dollar of the wage-earner go farther than expected every day. Economic leadership at the top was founded upon the completion of a transportation plant national in its extent and upon mechanical invention that enlarged the list of human wants and increased the ease of satisfying them. Disappear ance of frontier Most of the railroads of the United States in 1879 had been built in the preceding forty years and all of them had commonly been operated as private business on a competitive basis. One by one the regions of the United States were relieved from the limitations upon free communication established by the mountain ranges and the direction of river flow. The railroads cut across all obstacles and introduced new competitions with the older highways of trade. Before the Civil War, with thirty thousand miles of track in operation, the East and the old Northwest were well supplied with railroads, and the South was partially provided. In the decade of the sixties the greatest railway changes were north and west of Chicago, and on the border of the Western plains, where the Union Pacific Railway was driven to the Pacific. The opening of this road in 1869 marks the beginning of the final chapter in the building of the railroad plant. The Eastern States were still separated from the Pacific slope by the great barrier of plains, mountains, and desert, but in the next fifteen years this space was crossed and recrossed until, by the end of 1883, the open frontier was gone forever, and the United States was equipped with a national railroad system of 110,414 miles that enabled every region in the country to find a market for its products and that worked continuously to lower the costs of delivery from maker to consumer. In the years between 1869 and 1883, four continental railroads, all encouraged by grants of land by Congress, were carried to completion. The Northern Land railroads Pacific was chartered in 1864 to run from Lake grants to Superior to Puget Sound; the Atlantic and Pacific was to be built from southwestern Missouri to southern California and was chartered in 1866. The Texas Pacific, authorized in 1871, was the last of the land-grant continental railroads, and was proposed to be built from the junction point of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, west to California. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé received a local land grant given by Congress to Kansas and built southwest over the Santa Fé Trail and down the valley of the Rio Grande. All of these railroads were started before the panic of 1873, and the completion of all was delayed until the depression following that panic had spent its force. The construction gangs of the continental railroads reappeared upon the high plains in the building seasons of 1878 and 1879. In the interval of depression, steel rails had increased in popularity and structural steel had begun to be available to take the place of timber and masonry. The discoveries of Sir Henry Bessemer and the resulting processes for the commercial manufacture of steel took place in the preceding decade, but the output of the rolling mills was not sufficient for the needs of building before 1873. The use of steel wrought a revolution in the construction of bridges, in naval engineering, and in city architecture, but nowhere was the change more welcome than in railroad-building where the steel rail provided for the first time a safe and durable roadway for the rolling stock. The Southern Pacific of California, although it had no continental franchise of its own, led in the completion of the Southern group of railroads. By 1883 through trains were running over its tracks to the Colorado River, and thence east over three lines to the Mississippi. It established traffic arrangements with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, which took its trains to Kansas City and St. Louis; and with the Texas Pacific, which took them across the whole width of Texas from El Paso to Texarkana; and it acquired local lines in southern Texas through San Antonio and Houston to New Orleans. The opening of the Southern continental railroads took place in 1882 and 1883. The successful operation of the lines called for a degree of team-work unusual on the railroads, notorious for their rate wars and their cut-throat competition. The Western magnates, drawn into the railroad business to build the Central Pacific, and staying in it to control the Southern Pacific and its eastern connections, desired to simplify their holdings. They secured in The North 1884 a charter from the State of Kentucky for a Southern Pacific Company which they operated as a holding corporation for their Western roads. They secured their charter as far away from the location of the railroads as they could so as to minimize the risk of public interference with their business. The Southern Pacific system, which emerged from their construction and manipulation, dominated the whole southwestern quarter of the United States. Henry Villard, a journalist of German birth, played the most prominent part in the completion of the Northern Pacific Railway. Jay Cooke, the financier of the Civil War, and the best-known American ern Pacific Railway banker of the sixties, had undertaken to build this road and had been broken by it in 1873. From Duluth at the tip of Lake Superior it had been built to the Missouri River before the panic stopped it, and it had constructed a few miles in Washington near its terminal city of Tacoma. In 1879 construction was renewed from the Missouri River to the junction of the Columbia and Snake near old Fort Walla Walla. At this point Henry Villard, who had acquired control of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, began to exert pressure upon the Northern Pacific to secure favorable terms for his rail and steamship lines in the Northwest. He failed to secure these terms by open negotiation, but was able to raise a large sum among his New York friends to form a "blind pool" for a profitable private speculation. With the funds of the pool he bought secretly enough stock to control both the Northern Pacific and the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company and organized the Oregon and Trans-Continental as a holding company to manage it. The Northern Pacific line was opened in September, 1883, but failed to arouse much comment because the news value of Pacific railroads had recently been lessened by the completion of the Southern Pacific links. Villard made a great celebration of it, with a special train and many invited guests, but his road traversed an unsettled country and was in financial trouble from the start. The Denver and Rio Grande, working in coöperation with the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, opened another through service almost continental in its extent in the summer of 1883. Its tracks from Denver to Ogden followed the royal gorge of the Arkansas River, and in Ogden it made a connection with the Union Pacific and lines leading to the Northwest. by a railroad in The continental frontier, first pierced 1869, was completely destroyed by 1884. Along six different lines, between New Orleans and St. Paul, it had been. made possible to cross the sometime American Desert to the Pacific States. No large portion of the United States remained beyond the reach of easy colonization. Instead of a waste that forbade national unity, and compelled a rudimentary civilization in its presence, a thousand plains stations beckoned for colonists and long lines of railroads bound the nation into an economic and political unit. That which General Sheridan had foreseen in 1882 was now a fact. He had written: "As the railroads overtook the successive lines of isolated frontier posts and settlements spread out over country no longer requiring military protection, the army vacated its temporary shelters and marched on into remote regions beyond, there to repeat and continue its pioneer work. In rear of the advancing line of troops the primitive 'dugouts' and cabins of the frontiersmen were steadily replaced by the tasteful houses, thrifty farms, neat villages, and busy towns of a people who knew how best to employ the vast resources of the great West. The civilization from the Atlantic is now reaching out toward that rapidly approaching it from the direction of the Pacific, the long intervening strip of territory, extending from the British possessions to Old Mexico, yearly growing narrower; finally the dividing lines will entirely disappear and the mingling settlements absorb the remnants of the once powerful Indian nations who, fifteen years ago, vainly attempted to forbid the destined progress of the age." The completion of the continental railroads made possible the adoption of a reform long needed for the comfort of |