GIFT OF 
 
THE STRATEGY OF 
 GREAT RAILROADS 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANK H. SPEARMAN 
 
 WITH MAPS 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 NEW YORK:::::::::::::::: 1906 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published November, 1904 
 
 TROW DIRECTORY 
 
 WUNTINO AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 
 NEW YORK 
 
TO 
 
 WILLIAM C. BROWN 
 
 VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL 
 AND THE LAKE SHORE RAILROADS 
 
 182286 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE VANDERBILT LINES. i 
 
 THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM 21 
 
 THE HARRIMAN LINES 47 
 
 THE HILL LINES c 69 
 
 THE FIGHT FOR PITTSBURG -> 91 
 
 THE GOULD LINES . . 113 
 
 THE ROCK ISLAND SYSTEM , 133 
 
 THE ATCHISON I 55'" 
 
 THE CHICAGO, MILWAUKEE AND ST. PAUL . .175- 
 
 THE CHICAGO AND NORTHWESTERN . . . .195. 
 
 THE REBUILDING OF AN AMERICAN RAILROAD . 213' 
 
 THE FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD . . 235- 
 
 THE EARLY DAY IN RAILROADING .... 263 
 
LIST OF MAPS 
 
 FACING 
 PAGE 
 
 The New York Central Lines ........ 12 
 
 The Pennsylvania Railroad System . . . . . . 24 
 
 The Harriman Lines 48 
 
 The Hill Lines ... V . V * ... . . 72 
 
 The Wabash System . . . . 96 
 
 The Gould Lines 120 
 
 The Rock Island System 144 
 
 The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway System . 1 60 
 
 The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway . . . 1 80 
 
 The Chicago and Northwestern Railway. . *. . . 204 
 The Chicago and Alton Railway . . .. .. .214 
 
THE VANDERBILT LINES 
 
THE VANDERBILT LINES 
 
 ON the lower river front of a little New Jersey 
 town, flanked on the one hand by dreaming hulks 
 of rheumatic towboats, and on the other by the 
 decaying buildings of a past generation, stands a 
 forsaken hotel. Its windows, framed once to 
 cheer, stare wide and sightless upon the street, and 
 its heavy oak doors swing crazily to every wind ; 
 its floors creak uneasily under strange feet and its 
 broken halls echo vacantly to living voices. Only 
 bats and spiders and wood-worms seek its hospi- 
 tality now; yet to the American railroad world 
 this ruin ought to be of singular interest. 
 
 The name of the place was once the Steamboat 
 Hotel the genius of its owner breaking out even 
 then in the title he chose for his inn. But the 
 venture was never, at its best, all that its founder 
 hoped. What now lends strange interest to the 
 shabby landmark is, that out of the magic of its 
 early days have risen stately palaces, lofty faades, 
 a dynasty of American railway magnates, the 
 splendor of Oriental dreams, and a system of 
 transportation unapproached in the story of the 
 
 3 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 world; for under the roof of this New Brunswick 
 ruin Mrs. Vanderbilt, it is said, saved the first eight 
 hundred dollars that gave her husband, the Com- 
 modore, his start in the transportation business. 
 
 To-day the Vanderbilts are the merchant princes 
 of the railway world. Yesterday, on their own 
 lines, they handled 70,000 cars ; to-morrow it may 
 be 100,000. When the founder of the system 
 began in those early days to wrestle with problems 
 of transportation, when he was getting his first 
 taste of competition and rate wars and was carry- 
 ing passengers by boat from New Brunswick to 
 New York for sixpence, with their dinners (per- 
 haps literally) thrown in the straight tariff being 
 two shillings Spain still retained a vast American 
 empire ; but the Vanderbilt dynasty, growing ever 
 more powerful, has seen the last vestige of Spanish 
 sovereignty wiped from the maps of two conti- 
 nents. When the founder of the Vanderbilt for- 
 tunes lay in swaddling clothes the house of Baring 
 Bros. & Co. stood at the height of its power, and 
 its founder, Sir Francis Baring, was writing his 
 " Observations on the Founding of the Bank of 
 England." When this young Cornelius Vander- 
 bilt, the future Commodore, had reached the ob- 
 scurity of his twenty-first year, Nathan Rothschild, 
 already powerful, was spurring upon London 
 with the secret of the French defeat at Waterloo ; 
 
The Vanderbilt Lines 
 
 but the Vanderbilts have lived to see the name 
 of many capitalists forgotten and the fame even 
 of the greatest equalled by their own. 
 
 Busied with its transportation concerns, the 
 house saw the earliest alignment of those political 
 movements in the United States that resulted in 
 the most stupendous civil conflict of modern 
 times. They stuck to their ferryboats and their 
 junk rails when Beecher was the pulpit and 
 Greeley and Bennett and Raymond were the press 
 of this country. While still active in their busi- 
 ness they have seen the rise of every existing 
 political party, and they may easily survive the 
 obsequies of the last of them as they stand to-day. 
 In the stage-coach and the canal mule they met 
 and overcame the threatening competition of fifty 
 years ago; and their forces would face to-morrow 
 with equal steadiness a billion-dollar invasion of 
 their railroad territory. They alone, in all the 
 railroad world of to-day, go back, owners and 
 managers in unbroken succession, of the tele- 
 phone, the cable, and the telegraph. Nor in all 
 that time have they ever wrecked a railroad or 
 maintained a poor one. 
 
 The Vanderbilts are not, of choice, fighters; 
 they have been conservative and well-balanced 
 merchants. No other family can lay claim to 
 titles such as theirs to great and honorable achieve- 
 
 5 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 ment as masters of transportation. To meet ob- 
 jection let it at once be conceded that the meaning 
 we attach to these adjectives is relative. But if 
 we consider a moment, what other combination 
 in industrial enterprise can boast a more colossal 
 and creditable monument than the New York 
 Central lines ? 
 
 Aside from their remarkable history, Vanderbilt 
 affairs are of present moment in American railroad 
 control because they are so powerful both in the 
 extent of their holdings and the character of them. 
 A map of the New York Central lines is start- 
 ling. At first glance the spread of their ramifica- 
 tions would seem to cover the United States. 
 There are in the various systems under this con- 
 trol 1 2,000 miles of railroad ; but these figures 
 do not tell all. It must be remembered that a 
 Vanderbilt line is always a good line. If they 
 buy a streak of rust and first and last they 
 have bought many they make a good railroad of 
 it. The outcast youngster is fumigated, scrubbed, 
 and properly clothed before he is allowed to 
 take his place at the foot of the Vanderbilt table, 
 with the aristocratic New York Central and the 
 emotionless Lake Shore. The acquiring of the 
 Nickel Plate years ago, and that of the Lake 
 Erie and Western very recently, are cases in 
 point. Moreover, how shall the mere mileage of 
 
 6 
 
The Vanderbilt Lines 
 
 any system reckon in comparison with New York 
 City terminals that are in themselves equal in 
 value to whole divisions of roads spread over 
 desert stretches ? It is asserted by an alert pas- 
 senger department, and no doubt with truth, that 
 more than one-half the people of the United States 
 live in the territory covered by the Vanderbilt 
 lines; certainly the people within their territory 
 are the active half of the country. Vanderbilt 
 steamboats plough the great lakes from end to end 
 with the speed and with the capacity of freight 
 trains many times enlarged ; and their rails, ignor- 
 ing political boundaries, are factors in the trans- 
 portation systems of Canada. Vanderbilt lines 
 are powerful in New England, and they make 
 their rates over their own roads at Toronto, at 
 London, and at Montreal. Their cars and their 
 boats may be found side by side at the Straits of 
 Mackinac, and their roads stretch thence in un- 
 broken joints to the Mississippi, at St. Louis in 
 Missouri and at Cairo in Illinois. They intercept 
 the Illinois River at Peoria; they tap the Ohio 
 River at its starting point with a road that earns 
 $68,000 a mile, and strike it again and again 
 now at Wheeling, at Cincinnati, and at Louisville 
 and they abandon it only at its mouth. 
 
 If to this map the spheres of Vanderbilt influ- 
 ence are added we should be compelled to annex 
 
 7 
 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 the territory of the whole Northwest with the 
 Chicago and Northwestern system and its branches 
 of 8,000 miles spreading as far west as Wyoming, 
 penetrating the Black Hills, and pushing docks 
 from Marquette to Duluth into Lake Superior. 
 Happily, however, and contrary to popular im- 
 pression, the Northwestern is not a Vanderbilt 
 line, their interests in it being only those of a 
 moderate minority. Nevertheless, at our greatest 
 inland railroad gateway, Chicago, three of the 
 most powerful lines of the Vanderbilt system re- 
 ceive the traffic oyf the Northwest from every road 
 of importance and exchange for it their commodi- 
 ties from the dense territory on the Atlantic sea- 
 board. And notwithstanding the immense ton- 
 nage delivered to the New York Central lines by 
 their Western and Northwestern connections, the 
 great system gives, in turn, to each of them a ton- 
 nage materially greater in amount than it receives 
 demonstrating eloquently the resources of the 
 territory that it serves. 
 
 Paradoxical as it may be, it is true that the Van- 
 derbilt lines east of the Chicago gateway are too 
 strong to own, or at least to grant exclusive favors 
 to, any one line into the West or Northwest. 
 The great transportation capacity of the Michigan 
 Central, the Lake Shore, and the Big Four means 
 that they must receive from, as well as give to, 
 
 8 
 
 
 
The Vanderbilt Lines 
 
 connecting lines a huge volume of freight. The 
 traffic the Vanderbilt lines exchange with the St. 
 Paul road, for example, is far too large to be dis- 
 turbed by any exclusive interchange at Chicago, 
 and it is this particular feature of traffic inter- 
 change that bobs up at every step in railroad con- 
 solidation to disturb the dreams of railroad kings. 
 The Alton, for instance, may be considered the 
 natural link in the Harriman lines to Chicago, but 
 when can the Union Pacific afford to ignore what 
 the Northwestern road has to offer, if treated 
 fairly ? Mr. Hill is a director of the Erie road, 
 but he could hardly venture to stop Burlington 
 interchange of traffic with the Lake Shore and 
 the Michigan Central. 
 
 The truth is, that which people continually see 
 in the railroad sky is consolidation, and there are 
 periodical outbursts of alarm at the menace of rail- 
 road monoply. What people do not realize is that 
 the country all the while is growing faster than 
 the railroads; that it is constantly ahead of all 
 successful transportation combinations, and that 
 railroad consolidation is only a reflection of the 
 country's development in every other direction. 
 
 The New York Central lines, because they are 
 made up of some of the oldest railroads in the 
 country, afford many interesting data on the ques- 
 tion of consolidation, since first and last they are 
 
 9 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 all consolidations. Their beginning goes back to 
 the New York Central Railroad, seventeen miles 
 long, in 1831 ; but the most advanced anti-mon- 
 opoly champion of 1904 could hardly stand for 
 separate lines of railroad in Kansas, much less in 
 New York State, seventeen miles long. The de- 
 velopment of the richest country in the world 
 that covered by the Vanderbilt rails has always 
 forced the investments of the house ahead even of 
 its ambitions. The problem of the New York 
 Central lines has never been so much to secure 
 business by taking it from competitors as to pro- 
 vide for the volume that has naturally fallen to 
 their share. Thus the study ever foremost in the 
 system, growing so fast and so unwieldly, has 
 been the railroad problem of operating the 
 handling of the traffic. 
 
 The proper fitting to its place of each extension 
 and each newly acquired line in a railroad system 
 such as this is in itself a brain-racking matter. A 
 concourse of the railroad presidents of such a com- 
 bination becomes a domestic congress acting as a 
 committee of the whole, in which measures for 
 the well-being of each branch of the system are 
 considered and on which the resources of the 
 keenest railroad intellects are brought to meet 
 the exigencies of each case. 
 
 In the country where railroad operating has 
 10 
 
 
The Vanderbilt Lines 
 
 been brought to so high a degree of excellence as 
 in this it is impossible to award the credit for its 
 development to any one railroad system. Each 
 has its particular achievements, and in operation 
 one or two have particularly high reputations. Of 
 the Vanderbilt interests, however, it must be said 
 that either they have been exceptionally lucky or 
 exceptionally wise in attracting to themselves a 
 type of executive men who are always bigger than 
 anything laid down in railroad books. " System " 
 is recognized pretty generally to-day as a requi- 
 site in the successful conduct of any business; but 
 successful men, better than others, understand 
 the grave danger that lies in system. No railroad 
 can afford to let any system of operation ossify on 
 it. In reality, system in any business is but a 
 necessary evil, and the best system is tearing down 
 all the time as well as building up. 
 
 Herein the New York Central lines show to an 
 unusual degree their power in the transportation 
 world. That adherence to rules which under small 
 men paralyzes a railroad's activities becomes under 
 the Vanderbilt staffs a code elastic enough to cover 
 an emergency rather than rigid enough to cause one. 
 The heart of the Vanderbilt lines is the New York 
 Central; but in its operation it is never for q 
 moment forgotten that "system" was made foi 
 the New York Central and not the New York 
 
 ii 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Central for system. The New York Central lines 
 breathe through the Lake Shore road; but the 
 Lake Shore code of operation is most surprising 
 in its flexibility and its easy adaptation to the one 
 supreme end of getting results. That which may 
 have seemed good railroading on the Lake Shore 
 when these words are written may seem poor rail- 
 roading by the time they are printed. Every day 
 almost the viewpoint changes to meet new con- 
 ditions, and every day from the outposts of the 
 New York Central lines letters go to headquar- 
 ters from trained observers high executive offi- 
 cials bearing a heading that is always the same : 
 
 THE SITUATION 
 
 We feel that wjTget news in the daily press; 
 so we do. But as to the special news that bears 
 continually on the interests of the New York 
 Central lines, one should see these private daily 
 journals. The men that write them are past- 
 masters in the school of journalism and draw sala- 
 ries beyond the dreams of editors. Every day 
 their articles bear the one insistent title : THE 
 SITUATION 
 
 As shifting as the sands of the Mississippi, un- 
 certain as the freaks of fortune, and at times as 
 startling as a political revolution is this daily busi- 
 ness situation. The millions of people in the 
 
 12 
 

 
 V QF'TW 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
THE NEW ' 
 
8 C 
 
 RAL LINES. 
 
The Vanderbilt Lines 
 
 grain-producing territory of the Missouri River 
 country and the Mississippi Valley are, or ought 
 to be, vitally interested in the question of Gulf 
 transportation for their export grain, but they 
 know nothing about the roads that supply their 
 Gulf outlet; not so, however, the Vanderbilts. 
 From month to month, week to week if need be, 
 they know the exact physical condition of every 
 road to the Gulf of Mexico their own rivals in 
 the transportation of grain to the seaboard. If a 
 Gulf road is so poor in condition and equipment 
 as to be harmless the fact is known at Forty- 
 second Street in New York, and every step to 
 better it is there carefully noted. The rise and 
 fall, the growth and decay of every American in- 
 dustry, if it bears even collaterally on railroad in- 
 terests, is malted by the New York Central lines. 
 Grain, for instance, is their most important east- 
 bound commodity, and Chicago is a great thor- 
 oughfare for the grain traffic. Grain is fifty per 
 cent. one-half of the entire eastbound business 
 of the Lake Shore road from Chicago; yet so in- 
 credible are the industrial activities of Indiana, 
 Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that this 
 enormous item is but nine per cent, of the total 
 business of the Lake Shore. 
 
 However, 200,000,000 bushels of grain pass 
 through the Chicago gateway in a single year. 
 
 13 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 In the development of this business Chicago 
 elevators have become of huge importance. It is 
 these enormous and picturesque piles, whose pro- 
 portions mark the skylines of the Chicago sunset, 
 that have been for years a compelling factor in 
 grain transportation. They have stood during a 
 generation as a monument of Chicago industrial 
 enterprise, and but a few years ago the last of them 
 were being built with the bribe of big bonuses to 
 contractors for their rapid completion, and the 
 struggle of men against the elements to make 
 these huge receptacles ready within an imperative 
 limit has been the subject of stirring romance. 
 Within recent years a Chicago road in condemn- 
 ing for terminal purposes the site of a Chicago 
 elevator was compelled in court to cover the 
 ground with gold. To-day it is harAy too much 
 to say that could the railroad have waited it might 
 in time have acquired the site so far as its value 
 for elevator purposes is concerned for the taxes. 
 Chicago has an elevator storage capacity of 
 50,000,000 bushels of grain the regular houses 
 37,000,000 bushels, and the grain "hospitals," 
 where grain is dried and cleaned or mixed for 
 grades, 13,000,000 bushels. Within recent years 
 there have been as high as 30,000,000 bushels of 
 grain in storage in Chicago. No more impres- 
 sive example of the daily readjustment of traffic 
 
 14 
 
The Vanderbilt Lines 
 
 conditions can be had than in the story of the 
 downfall of the elevators in the economy of trans- 
 portation. Two years ago these elevators held 
 12,000,000 bushels; last year their store had 
 shrunk to 9,000,000 bushels ; to-day it is 4,000,- 
 ooo bushels. The fate of the elevator is a revela- 
 tion of the pitiless movement of The Situation. 
 
 There is quite as much grain as ever, but pros- 
 perity has so intrenched the Western farmer that 
 he is no longer compelled to sell on the day that 
 he threshes out his crop. Moreover, the constant 
 trend in railroad affairs is to transport commodi- 
 ties without rehandling. In grain this means an 
 important economy to the shipper, inasmuch as 
 storage, insurance, and delay are thereby done 
 away with. The reading public may or may not 
 be familiar^ith these constantly changing phases 
 of the industrial world; but by the New York 
 Central lines each of them is marked as impas- 
 sively and as accurately as a doctor at a sick-bed 
 notes a rising or a sinking pulse. 
 
 In another way the perfecting of the operating 
 of modern railroad systems has made of Americans 
 very notably a hand-to-mouth people. The last 
 generation laid in its supplies in the fall for the 
 winter; this generation buys from day to day. 
 The country merchant bought then twice a year ; 
 he buys now twice a week. Why carry stock 
 
 15 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 when trains run so often and it has been made so 
 easy to get goods ? If within a hundred miles 
 of his jobbers he hardly takes the time to write a 
 letter; he telephones. The travelling man no 
 longer makes a sixty-day trip. He sees his trade 
 once a week or once in two weeks, and covers 
 three or four towns in a day. 
 
 We become thus wholly dependent for the 
 necessities of life on the masters of transportation, 
 and because we lean on them more and more the 
 slightest break in their facilities becomes each 
 year a more serious matter. Again, such a break 
 causes most unlooked-for changes in the whole 
 situation of supply and demand. The anthracite 
 coal strike caused distress to millions of people 
 who depended for fuel on hard coal. But the 
 railroads are like ants; taking no^account of 
 damage they set at once about repairing it. 
 Soft-coal roads found in The Situation an oppor- 
 tunity to exploit their fuels, with the result that, 
 a year later, boats laden with anthracite coal could 
 not find room in Chicago to unload their car- 
 goes their docks being already piled high with 
 hard coal for which there were no customers : the 
 railroad had shown too easy an escape from an- 
 thracite annoyance and expense. 
 
 Prosperity gives the operating officer even se- 
 verer tests. In the high-tide periods of business 
 
The Vanderbilt Lines 
 
 every weak spot in the operating department 
 makes itself felt. This is the moment in which 
 reputations take wings, and it is in crises such as 
 these that the Vanderbilt lines have not been 
 found wanting. 
 
 Their operation suggests at once the precision 
 of a military discipline. What is most striking 
 is that in their code the stiffness of the martinet 
 is wholly absent. The operating officer of such 
 lines as the New York Central and the Lake 
 Shore has his battalions in the motive power, the 
 car equipment, and the division staffs that are 
 under him, and he handles all with an absolute 
 authority. The car and the train movements of 
 his system lie every morning tabulated before him, 
 and this man and his like become, in effect, the 
 field marshals of our daily bread. He moves 
 every day thirty, forty, fifty thousand cars of 
 freight. He divines from his frequent reports 
 the hard-pressed spots in the far-flung lines of his 
 train movements, and with his reserves massed he 
 strengthens his divisions wherever weak spots 
 develop. Nor are these figures of speech in any 
 degree fanciful ; they are as hard, as practical as 
 possible. It is no uncommon thing for midnight 
 orders to empty roundhouses at Buffalo, Utica, or 
 Syracuse and hea"d a battery of New York Cen- 
 tral engines westward to forestall a blockade at a 
 
 17 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Lake Shore terminal. If the pressure is reversed 
 Lake Shore motive power is thrown with equal 
 celerity into the fight to strengthen car movement 
 on the New York Central. The plan sounds 
 simple, but within very recent years railroad sys- 
 tems of high repute in operating have been com- 
 pletely tied up because motive power to move 
 trains was lacking on one division, or on one 
 road of the system, while on another motive 
 power was standing idle in the roundhouses. 
 
 Prosperity has for three years put a freight 
 traffic strain on American railroads comparable to 
 a steady World's Fair pressure in passenger 
 movement. The weakest link in the operating 
 chain of all our roads has become so apparent un- 
 der the test that a competent operating officer has 
 need to say to a railroad owner only this : Show 
 me your terminal facilities and I will give you the 
 earning power of your road. So precisely is this 
 true that there have been times when the entire 
 activities of the Vanderbilt system were restricted 
 to the facilities of their intermediate terminals 
 when the effective power of so great a railroad as 
 the Lake Shore has been very strictly limited by 
 two freight yards, that at Elkhart, Indiana, and 
 that at Collinwood, Ohio. Hence it is that, 
 turning the attention of railroad operators from 
 the lessening of grades and curves, the struggle 
 
 18 
 
The Vanderbilt Lines 
 
 to-day is a constant endeavor to enlarge terminals, 
 and a Vanderbilt requisition for a new freight 
 yard frequently calls for a million dollars. Their 
 lines show to-day, with those of the Pennsylvania 
 road, the most interesting examples in the world 
 of terminal improvement, the highest present strat- 
 egy in railroad competition. 
 
 A slight consideration of these besetting " feat- 
 ures " of the Eastern railroad situation the pres- 
 sure of traffic and operating problems on the 
 various lines as they now stand will make clear 
 the apparent apathy, so far as new fields of con- 
 trol are concerned, of the most powerful interests 
 in the American railway world. It is more than 
 true that they all have their hands full to keep 
 pace with the pressure of the situation as it is 
 reflected in the bursting growth of the country. 
 That they must meet its demands is evident, and 
 to do this may well, as it does, engage all their 
 abilities without listening to the promptings of a 
 wider ambition. 
 
THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM 
 
THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM 
 
 LAY a hand over a map of the Pennsylvania 
 lines, and the circulation of the blood through the 
 one suggests the circulation of traffic through the 
 other. When Garrett extended the Baltimore 
 and Ohio westward he saw only St. Louis and 
 Chicago, and ran nothing but trunk lines. The 
 Pennsylvania System is so fed and strengthened, 
 division by division, that each link is in itself al- 
 most a self-sustaining unit. On its intricate map 
 each branch has a particular reason for being; 
 each has been definitely thought out and added 
 because it has a function. Capillaries are as essen- 
 tial to the circulation of the blood as arteries, and 
 one great source of Pennsylvania Railroad pros- 
 perity lies in its capillaries. 
 
 The system covers the industrial heart of the 
 continent. North of the Potomac and the Ohio 
 its lines are strong at all traffic points from the 
 Mississippi River to the Atlantic seaboard. But 
 the Pennsylvania Railroad, in its essential strength, 
 stands for the State of Pennsylvania, to which, as 
 a State, an industrial pre-eminence has so long 
 
 23 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 been accorded that the country has become de- 
 cently resigned to its marvels. Its anthracite coal 
 alone would make it the richest of our possessions ; 
 its soft coals and cokes, its iron and gas, have made 
 the Pittsburg district first in the world as a traffic 
 centre. 
 
 Pittsburg itself is a Pennsylvania Road fortress. 
 Its river benches are lined with steel plants and 
 factories, and its river banks are revetted, tier 
 upon tier, with Pennsylvania siding tracks. Penn- 
 sylvania trains are made up under the smoke of 
 its rolling mills and converters, and Pennsylvania 
 shifting engines ceaselessly patrol its industrial 
 camps. There is but one Pittsburg; its locomo- 
 tives are shipped to Siberia, its bridges span the 
 rivers of Africa and .of India, and the battles of 
 Russia and Japan are fought behind its armor- 
 plate. 
 
 Iron and steel thus become heavy factors in 
 Pennsylvania Railroad freight. But even steel 
 tonnage sinks into obscurity when put beside that 
 of coal. East of Pittsburg, in 1903, the road 
 moved seventy-seven million tons of coal and 
 coke. The history of the Pennsylvania Road is 
 in a way the history of the State. The story goes 
 back to the crossing of the Alleghany Mountains 
 by means of waterways and inclined planes. Then 
 comes a Titan, an American engineer, John Edgar 
 
 24 
 
. 
 
WISCONSIN 
 
 I C H I G A 
 
 I 
 ST. 
 
 CHICAGO!/ V 
 
 lurlington 
 iLaHarpe 
 
 (eokuk 
 , Warsaw 
 
 L I 
 
 Decatur 
 
 Crawfo , 
 
 FARRINGTON 
 
 3end 
 
 _ 
 TOLEDO 
 
 st.K 
 
 Vincennes 
 
 lot 
 
 Jefferson i 
 New Albany 
 
 Morrow 
 CINCINNATI 
 
 idison 
 
 "LOUISVILLE 
 
 MISSOURI 
 
 K E N T U C I 
 
 THE PENNSVLV 
 
li.koAl) SYSTEM. 
 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNJYERSITr 
 
 OF 
 
The Pennsylvania System 
 
 Thomson, who runs the pioneer grades and spikes 
 the iron rails clear across the summit of the Alle- 
 ghanies. Thomson laid the foundations of the 
 greatness that underlies the present Pennsylvania 
 System ; he made it possible to move, as this road 
 does, one million tons of freight in a single day 
 on one American railroad. The Pennsylvania 
 men of to-day would laugh if compared to Thom- 
 son. "We are specialists," they say, "that is, 
 pigmies. Thomson was great in everything 
 operating, traffic, motive power, finance ; but 
 most of all in organization." 
 
 Tradition under such circumstances becomes 
 an influence, and the Pennsylvania System has an 
 unbroken tradition of nearly sixty years of suc- 
 cessful railroading. Stress is laid most of all on 
 organization, a legacy rounded out and bequeathed 
 from management to management. Nor has any 
 railroad speculator ever succeeded in seating him- 
 self in the saddle of Pennsylvania affairs; for 
 fifty-nine years the company's destinies have 
 been controlled by its owners, the stockholders, 
 and annually they have approved or disapproved 
 its policies. In return, they have received what 
 few American railway investors can boast a satis- 
 factory return on their shares for every calendar 
 year since 1846. It can hardly occasion surprise, 
 then, that the Pennsylvania Railroad should enjoy 
 
 25 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 high credit; it has earned an international repu- 
 tation for good faith. 
 
 With a background of such united effort and a 
 success so unusual it is not hard to understand 
 why Pennsylvania standards and practice are held 
 high among American railroads. In 1861 the 
 Pennsylvania Road put the first steel fire-box under 
 an American locomotive boiler. The Pennsyl- 
 vania was the first of our roads to lay steel rails 
 and the first, in 1 863, to lay Bessemer rails in this 
 country. It was the first to use the air-brake and 
 the signal block system. The Number One shop 
 still standing at Altoona was the first, in 1873, to 
 use an overhead crane. In 1852 the Pennsylvania 
 Road moved 70,000 tons of freight in a year ; it 
 now moves that much in an hour. It handled, 
 then, half a million passengers in a year, now it 
 cares for a hundred and twenty-three million. 
 The system that once mustered fifty engines now 
 counts 2 15,000 freight cars, and a single shop plant 
 at Altoona turns out five new locomotives every 
 week. 
 
 This is high-pressure railroading. Pennsylvania 
 plans need to be laid on an unexampled scale, for 
 the reason that nowhere do precedents exist for its 
 requirements. Moreover, peculiar difficulties at- 
 tend the operating of the great Pennsylvania main 
 line across the higher Alleghanies, where, the traffic 
 
 26 
 
The Pennsylvania System 
 
 being largely coal, the movement reaches a climax 
 with the utmost regularity in November and 
 March, remaining near the high mark during the 
 winter months between. Thus the heavy move- 
 ment comes against the elements when they are 
 at their worst. If it could be shifted to July and 
 August, when engines run at one hundred per cent. 
 of their rating, no especial difficulty would be felt 
 in mountain railroading; but when grades are to 
 be climbed in winter storms, with engines running 
 at fifty per cent, and sixty per cent, of their effec- 
 tiveness, the problems become severe. 
 
 At the best, operating cost under such condi- 
 tions stands at the high point, and a railroad needs 
 the most ample track and yard room if the charge 
 is not to become excessive. In consequence, a 
 continual effort is made to enlarge Pennsylvania 
 facilities. An Altoona roundhouse cares for 250 
 locomotives every day, and a companion house 
 has been built to take care of 300. The Altoono 
 plant has shopped and repaired as many as 148 
 engines in a single month. 
 
 The material triumphs of Pennsylvania man- 
 agement are thus very considerable ; they do not, 
 however, by any means engage all of its activities. 
 Out of 1,200,000 railroad employees in this coun- 
 try, over 1 53,000 are on the pay rolls of the Penn- 
 sylvania System. Here is the heaviest moral 
 
 27 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 accountability put upon any existing railroad 
 management. What of the employees ? 
 
 When a man enters the Pennsylvania service 
 he may at once protect himself with insurance 
 benefits against sickness or accident, and the same 
 agency which provides this health and accident 
 insurance pays his family a full benefit for his 
 death from any cause. The Pennsylvania em- 
 ployee thus has offered to him the advantages of 
 several insurance companies in one. This Relief 
 Department, too, considered purely as insurance, 
 enjoys advantages that take it quite out of com- 
 parison with ordinary insurance ; for instance, the 
 company pays all costs of its operation. Again, 
 the weak feature of all fraternal insurance is its 
 instability. But the relief insurance provided to 
 Pennsylvania employees is backed by the entire 
 responsibility of the company, a mere statement 
 of whose assets would pale the figures that are the 
 joy of the New York actuary. Beyond this, the 
 retired employee belonging to the Relief Depart- 
 ment receives his superannuation allowance wholly 
 distinct from, and in addition to, a pension, which 
 is likewise provided for all retired employees. 
 
 The distinctive feature in this broadly conceived 
 Pennsylvania Railroad Pension Fund is that the 
 employee contributes nothing whatever to it ex- 
 cept his years of faithful service to the railroad. 
 
 28 
 
The Pennsylvania System 
 
 The company pays the pension, without a tax or 
 contribution of any sort from its employees, and 
 rejoices to-day in one pensioner on its roll of 
 honor ninety years old. Boys and men are in 
 this way made to feel when they enter the service 
 of the company that they become a part of it; 
 that if they will train themselves to co-operate 
 with others they may participate fully and person- 
 ally in the company's success ; and that, after a 
 career of faithful service, every man, from the 
 president down to the laborer, will receive not 
 as a charity but as a gratuity his life pension. 
 
 The provisions for the care of this immense 
 army of workers do not end here. Many Penn- 
 sylvania employees are so situated in their duties 
 that safe and convenient places for saving a por- 
 tion of their wages are not within reach. The 
 Pennsylvania Company thereupon turns every 
 ticket agent on its lines into a depositary for 
 employees' monthly savings, on which it pays to 
 them three and a half per cent, interest. This 
 Pennsylvania Employees' Savings Fund is like- 
 wise conducted without one dollar of expense, 
 direct or indirect, to its fortunate depositors. It 
 is not intended as a place for the investment of 
 the funds of employees, but for their savings for 
 investment. A man may not deposit more than 
 $1OO in any one month, nor keep above $5,000 
 
 29 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 on balance at any one time, and employees receiv- 
 ing above $300 a month have been excluded 
 from using it. But, notwithstanding these restric- 
 tions, the aggregate deposits received since its 
 founding in 1887 excee d ten millions of dollars, 
 and since that time more than one million dollars of 
 interest have been allowed to Pennsylvania Rail- 
 road workers by the Savings Fund trustees. 
 Moreover, six millions of dollars have been with- 
 drawn by employees for homes and investments. 
 
 So many safeguards mean a great deal of pains- 
 taking thought at headquarters, and it comes as a 
 surprise to learn that, in return for duties most 
 exacting, Pennsylvania Railroad directors receive 
 under the company charter no compensation; 
 but in the State of Pennsylvania no position 
 is held in higher esteem than that of director 
 of the Pennsylvania Railroad; it is a badge 
 of honor to which no citizen is too distinguished 
 to aspire. These directors represent, in the his- 
 tory of the road, a continuous line of able finan- 
 ciers, and are aided in their work by four addi- 
 tional directors, who serve as vice-presidents : S. 
 M. Prevost, head of the traffic ; Charles E. Pugh, 
 head of operations ; Captain Green, in charge of 
 the general finances, and Samuel Rea, specially 
 charged with the New York, tunnel extension ; 
 and they are men who command a peculiar loy- 
 
 30 
 
The Pennsylvania System 
 
 alty from their subordinate heads. Indeed, the 
 officers and executives of the Pennsylvania Rail- 
 road have been to a remarkable degree all-round 
 men. From its roll of engineers alone may be 
 named J. Edgar Thomson, Edward Miller, Will- 
 iam B. Foster, George B. Roberts, A. J. Cassatt, 
 Herman J. Lombaert, J. N. Du Barry, W. H. 
 Brown, Strickland Kneass, and Samuel Rea. 
 Vice-President McCrea, in charge of all company 
 affairs west of Pittsburg, is also of this type of 
 men not alone engineer, but thoroughly trained 
 railroad man. Thomas A. Scott and Frank 
 Thomson, though not engineers, were everything 
 else that American railroad men can be, and their 
 chapters in the road's story and their services to 
 the country in the Civil War are national chapters. 
 The continual problem before all of these men 
 has been to keep pace with the transportation 
 needs of the most highly developed and most 
 active industrial portion of the United States. 
 Pennsylvania management of necessity stands in 
 high light in the worlds both of transportation and 
 finance, and because silent under controversy and 
 abuse it is often reproached with being careless of 
 public opinion ; yet silence under clamor does not 
 needfully imply insensibility to criticism. The 
 situation of the present management of the Penn- 
 sylvania is rather that of men under the pressure 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 of serious affairs, and endeavoring day by day to 
 pass for the best on very difficult questions. In 
 particular, Mr. Cassatt, as the executive front to- 
 day of Pennsylvania interests, has been hotly as- 
 sailed as a disturber of public tranquillity. There 
 seems to have been a well-considered attempt 
 to place him widely before the American imagi- 
 nation as a sensational type of railroad chauffeur 
 driving a motor-car down the railroad highway 
 at an insensate speed, reckless of the interests of 
 investors, the opinion of the public, and the com- 
 mon rights of property. But to set him forth in 
 this light has called for the most complete distor- 
 tion of the man as he really is, and the mere sight 
 of this Nestor of American railroad presidents 
 wholly dispels such a conception. 
 
 A grave man and somewhat spare in his 
 height, with the slight stoop of the careful 
 thinker ; easily quiet but perfectly responsive. In 
 his presence no atmosphere of "drive," hasty 
 action, or confused thought suggests itself. This 
 is a very safe man, one reflects instinctively, 
 deliberate in considering, slow of judgment, patient 
 in decision, but capable when action must come 
 of a tremendous initiative and follow-through. 
 The source of such strength is apparent in the 
 man's manner; Mr. Cassatt has the simplicity of 
 Lincoln. 
 
 32 
 
Tho Pennsylvania System 
 
 One could easily associate this executive chief 
 of the Pennsylvania Road with a farm, but not so 
 easily with an automobile. Met on a highway 
 in Iowa, one would expect to find Mr. Cassatt 
 superintending the planting of a six-thousand- 
 acre field of his own corn. The impression under 
 those circumstances would be that such a man 
 would make a good governor of the State, and 
 no surprise would be felt to learn on inquiry that 
 he had been governor. Such a model farm 
 owner, if asked about the adjustment of hoppers 
 on the battery of corn-planting machines lining 
 up then to cross the field, would explain with 
 genuine interest that he had adjusted the planters 
 himself after they left the factory so that the 
 hopper should deposit in each hill precisely four 
 kernels of corn, and not occasionally three or five. 
 Or if you remarked on the sleekness of his hun- 
 dred teams of mules, his appreciation of the com- 
 ment would lead him to speak of the popular 
 misconception concerning the mule as an evil- 
 tempered laborer, and as being less trustworthy 
 than the horse. 
 
 But Mr. Cassatt's cares and responsibilities do 
 not He among corn-planters nor along Iowa high- 
 ways. They have followed him for some years 
 as the head of one of the most important railroads 
 in existence, and he stands with his associates in 
 
 33 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 this management as trustee of an investment so 
 huge that figures lose their force in attempting to 
 express its measure. The Pennsylvania System 
 controls nearly one hundred and fifty corporations 
 mostly railroad companies east of Pittsburg 
 alone. 
 
 About the time Mr. Cassatt took the presi- 
 dency very grave questions became apparent on 
 the horizon of Pennsylvania Railroad affairs. It 
 was evident that the day could be named when 
 the traffic of that large portion of our industries 
 dependent on the Pennsylvania System for trans- 
 portation would swamp its existing facilities. 
 The situation needed to be met by very extensive 
 additions to track and terminal facilities, and 
 plans were at once laid to provide them. But the 
 day of congestion came ; the day of a traffic flood 
 so terrific as to burst in an hour from the control 
 and restraint of the highest transportation facili- 
 ties in the world. 
 
 Strangely enough, the very measures taken to 
 meet these wholly new industrial conditions have 
 been made the particular object of hostile com- 
 ment. There is nothing whatever unnecessarily 
 radical, nothing savoring in the least of the revo- 
 lutionary in the present Pennsylvania better- 
 ments. The simple truth behind them is that for 
 this country's industrial expansion so great an 
 
 34 
 
The Pennsylvania System 
 
 artery of our transportation system must be con- 
 tinually enlarged. 
 
 Nor is this policy new in Pennsylvania Rail- 
 road history; it has prevailed for fifty years. 
 Thirty-five years ago the Pennsylvania Road took 
 on itself the enormous obligations of the leases 
 and investments of that portion of its present sys- 
 tem known as the "Lines west of Pittsburg." 
 There was at the time abundance of criticism for 
 a step declared to be rash and unwarranted ; but 
 will any stand forth to-day to declare that the 
 western terminus of the Pennsylvania should have 
 been fixed at Pittsburg? Thirty-three years ago 
 the Pennsylvania Road assumed control of the 
 United Railroads of New Jersey, by which to- 
 day it reaches New York City, and with their 
 control it assumed the obligation of a ten per 
 cent, dividend on the stock. For many years 
 that investment steadily showed a deficit in direct 
 results to that division of railroad, but is there one 
 to-day to call this an unwarranted investment? 
 The connection at Philadelphia by way of the 
 Delaware River bridge with the West Jersey Sea- 
 shore System was provided at a cost of more than 
 two and a half millions at a time when the presi- 
 dent and none of his staff believed it could be 
 made to pay for years; yet the investment 
 paid from the start, and if a slight extra fare were 
 
 35 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 not imposed that gateway would be swamped 
 with Atlantic City passenger traffic. 
 
 The obligations of the Pennsylvania manage- 
 ment are toward its stockholders and the investors 
 in its securities; but there is also a very definite 
 obligation toward the millions of people of the 
 West and Southwest, who live along thousands 
 of miles of railroads connecting with or tributary 
 to the Pennsylvania System, and find in it their 
 sole gateway into New York City; and unless 
 these people should still be compelled to change 
 cars and baggage in Philadelphia the acquisition 
 of the United Jersey roads must be justified, and 
 it has by unanimous public opinion received such 
 justification that the Pennsylvania's New York 
 Division is now on an equal plane with the Penn- 
 sylvania main line. 
 
 Having solved these problems satisfactorily, a 
 further grave question had for twenty years con- 
 fronted the Pennsylvania management and been 
 the cause of much anxious study. Should the 
 Pennsylvania Railroad remain forever on the 
 west side of the Hudson River? The question 
 was not one to which an answer might lie open 
 indefinitely. Only by immediate action could a 
 passenger terminal in New York City be obtained 
 short of a cost absolutely prohibitive. Should 
 the Pennsylvania Railroad then not endeavor to 
 
 36 
 
The Pennsylvania System 
 
 improve upon the plans conceived by Pennsyl- 
 vania forefathers ? Should it consent forever to 
 discharge its New York passengers into ferry- 
 boats and land them on the water-line of that 
 city, or should it cross the Hudson River by 
 bridge or tunnel and convey them to the centre 
 of Manhattan Island? The consensus of opin- 
 ion was that the Pennsylvania Road must ulti- 
 mately land its passengers at New York, and 
 without unnecessary ado it is making its Hudson 
 River extension by tunnels; and Pennsylvania 
 management will always stand justified in these 
 immense betterments. , 
 
 In considering Pennsylvania improvements, too, 
 this fact must not be lost sight of: that the Penn- 
 sylvania is a high-class passenger route. Its sys- 
 tem accounts for one-sixth of the whole vast total 
 of passengers carried by all our railroads. Between 
 the seaboard cities of New York, Philadelphia, 
 Baltimore, and Washington, the necessities of 
 this public service cannot be compared with those 
 of any other in this country, because nowhere else 
 is there such passenger traffic. Speed is, in effect, 
 an American demand ; that safety must precede 
 speed as effectively as human ingenuity can con- 
 trive is a Pennsylvania maxim ; hence a million 
 of dollars to remove one danger from a set of 
 running tracks. Every minute of running time 
 
 37 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 between such cities becomes inestimably valu- 
 able ; curvature and grade must be reduced to a 
 minimum to lop off every possible sixty seconds 
 between terminals, when coachload after coach- 
 load and train after train of busy people follow 
 one another. Track elevation through interme- 
 diate cities helps vastly in this ; hence the extraor- 
 dinary work at Newark, Elizabeth, and New 
 Brunswick, the straightened line at Trenton, and 
 the beautiful four-track stone-arch viaducts across 
 the Delaware and the Raritan rivers. These bet- 
 terments afford a steel highway practically level 
 and straight from Broad Street in Philadelphia to 
 Jersey City ; and at Jersey City even the Hudson 
 River will come out of the account on the day 
 when the Pennsylvania passenger steps from his 
 coach in a Pennsylvania station at Seventh Ave- 
 nue and Thirty-third Street in New York City, 
 one block from Herald Square. 
 
 What less may be said of the freight-traffic 
 requirements on the main line of a railroad system 
 which last year carried one-quarter of all freight 
 tonnage moved by railroads in the United States ? 
 In one year these Pennsylvania main line earnings 
 from freight alone exceeded $116,000 a mile, 
 and the total earnings exceeded $150,000 a 
 mile. The present management has been com- 
 pelled to build what is, in effect, a duplicate 
 
 38 
 
The Pennsylvania System 
 
 Pennsylvania road over the Alleghanies. Here, 
 again, certain postulates come into the reckoning. 
 If one is to undertake four-tracking in a moun- 
 tainous country one must be at least sure that 
 his railroad is in its final resting place ; the cost 
 of shifting such an alignment afterward would 
 bankrupt a kingdom. All grades then remaining 
 and all curvature must remain forever. 
 
 To handle this enormous freight traffic double- 
 tracked and low-grade lines have everywhere been 
 built around congested terminals. The big " Tren- 
 ton cut-off," branching from the main line at 
 Trenton with a double, low-grade track, strikes 
 westward, leaving Philadelphia out of its course. 
 Twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia it unites 
 again, like a traffic river, with the main line. Again 
 and again this is done ; at Pittsburg, at Altoona, 
 these lines are skilfully run completely around 
 overloaded yards. Opposite Harrisburg the west 
 bank of the Susquehanna has been pre-empted, and 
 a new Pennsylvania road is being built with a 
 double-track stone-arch bridge, all its own, near 
 Columbia; and from the crest of the Alleghanies 
 it will soon be possible for the Pennsylvania Com- 
 pany to send freight to tide-water against grades no- 
 where heavier than sixteen feet to the mile. Near 
 Harrisburg, Pennsylvania engineering has built 
 to itself a monument that will last with the monu- 
 
 39 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 ments of time. At Rockville, just above the capi- 
 tal city, they have thrown across the Susquehanna 
 a four-track bridge of monolithic stone seven- 
 eighths of a mile long and stepped in graceful 
 arches as enduring as the mountains that look 
 down on the beautiful river. Bridges, like men, 
 have their tables of mortality ; but in the expect- 
 ancy of life accorded to American bridges here is 
 a structure to which no limit of years may be 
 assigned ; it has been built to last forever. 
 
 At Petersburg, up the blue Juniata, the line 
 forks again, and a new double-track road has been 
 built along the route of the early State public 
 works. It follows the old canal to Hollidaysburg 
 and the " Portage " railroad up the eastern slope 
 of the Alleghanies, flowing, so to say, into the 
 main line again at Gallitzin, where a group of 
 double-track and single-track tunnels take the 
 lines across the Alleghany divide. 
 
 From Gallitzin to Pittsburg, down the west 
 slope of the Alleghanies, the original location was 
 considered bold, but the four-tracking has involved 
 work that is gigantic. Where the Conemaugh 
 River bursts through Chestnut Ridge it has cut 
 an exquisite defile known as the Packsaddle. 
 Narrow and forbidding to the construction en- 
 gineer, the Packsaddle stands like a defiance flung 
 by the mountains. Here the Pennsylvania con- 
 
 40 
 
The Pennsylvania System 
 
 tractors have gone in with drills and giant pow- 
 der, and with thousands of men they have liter- 
 ally torn from the cheek of the mountain a shelf 
 wide enough to carry two new running tracks. 
 Before entering Packsaddle, at Bolivar, the lines 
 fork, the low-grade " West Pennsylvania " tracks 
 following the river through Packsaddle to Pitts- 
 burg, while the main line, with its four tracks, 
 rises through Packsaddle and, running across 
 country, strikes the Monongahela River near 
 Braddock's Fields. The traveller then realizes 
 what the Pennsylvania and its engineers have 
 accomplished. Where nature conflicts with the 
 railroad operations it has been conquered; yet, 
 while riding upon a road without a superior in 
 any country, the most inspiring scenery surrounds 
 him. 
 
 However, unparalleled engineering feats are 
 not the greatest chapter in present-day Pennsyl- 
 vania management. When Mr. Cassatt assumed 
 executive control of the Pennsylvania System, he 
 found freight rates from end to end of the United 
 States steeped in discrimination. By traffic man- 
 agers the last pretence of justice in the sale of 
 freight transportation had been abandoned, and Mr. 
 Cassatt, coming in as President of the Pennsylvania, 
 found railroads under the club of the big shippers. 
 The instrument of this rate discrimination has 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 always been the secret rebate : the upbuilding of 
 one shipper's fortunes at the expense of another, 
 the curse of traffic management, and the most try- 
 ing problem in railroad affairs. It has been 
 preached upon, inveighed against, and legislated 
 against, all quite in vain. Like the robber baron 
 of the Rhine, the American industrial baron has 
 long laid under tribute the transportation lines of 
 America; the big buyer of transportation has 
 taken the American road by the throat and forced 
 it to deliver. To make the situation more cheer- 
 ful, the railroad has been held by orators and jurists 
 as responsible for the demoralized situation and 
 for the upbuilding of trusts and monopolies. 
 
 Though railroads have been parties to secret 
 rebates, it would be difficult to show that they 
 have always been willing parties. Escape from a 
 situation confessedly intolerable had been sought 
 for years; but escape seemed impossible. The 
 big shipper dictated his terms, and the small ship- 
 per and the railroad paid the bills. Congress 
 passed laws of no avail. The courts of the 
 United States had been repeatedly appealed to, 
 but while conditions grew steadily worse they sat 
 with folded arms behind the broad conclusion 
 that transportation was a private commodity which 
 might be sold to one man at one price and to his 
 neighbor at another price. 
 
 42 
 
The Pennsylvania System 
 
 It has been denied that such is the case, but 
 there are facts that put clearly on record the atti- 
 tude of American courts during this period of 
 transportation anarchism. In 1879 Mr. Cassatt, 
 then vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad 
 in charge of traffic, testified in the equity suits 
 brought by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 
 known as the Standard Oil Inquiries. He told 
 the court without evasion or reservation the exact 
 relations between the Standard Oil Company and 
 the Pennsylvania Road, and his testimony thus 
 became an official record, subject to the use of 
 every Pennsylvania shipper who might seek in 
 court to recover excessive freight charges made 
 upon his particular shipments. Must it not be 
 inferred that if the attitude of American courts 
 promised relief to the small shipper the Pennsyl- 
 vania Road, with Mr. Cassatt's testimony on 
 record, would have been deluged with suits to 
 recover excessive charges? But were any such 
 suits brought*? Not one. Counsel understood 
 too well the hopelessness in that day of a legal 
 appeal to advise any client to proceed against a 
 railroad on the ground of unjust discrimination. 
 
 Twenty years later Mr. Cassatt, drawn against 
 his strong personal inclination out of his retire- 
 ment, was elected to the presidency of the Penn- 
 sylvania Railroad System ; but whoever else had 
 
 43 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 forgotten Standard Oil and 1879, Mr. Cassatt 
 had not forgotten. He determined that rate dis- 
 crimination in the United States, the impover- 
 ishment of the investor, the ruin of the honest 
 shipper, and the cause of so many railroad receiv- 
 erships should cease, and to the task of putting it 
 down he and his associates addressed themselves ; 
 and after public prints and public speakers had 
 shouted themselves hoarse ; after Congress had 
 failed in solving the problem, as it has always 
 failed ; after the courts of the United States had 
 failed, as they have always failed, this railroad 
 man and his associates took the abuse in hand 
 and stamped it out of American railroading. 
 
 It was the community of interest plan evolved 
 by Mr. Cassatt that did away with secret freight 
 rates and rebates. To accomplish this, the Penn- 
 sylvania, acting with other heavy owners in the 
 railroad field, acquired large interests in the weaker 
 roads, until, with co-operation, courage, and pa- 
 tience the trunk lines, one and all, were brought 
 into a phalanx against the common enemy. 
 
 This is the record of Alexander J. Cassatt. 
 He has made unjust discrimination in railroad 
 traffic a thing of the past. He, largely, has made 
 it possible for the public freight rate to stalk 
 abroad day or night, unarmed anywhere in the 
 United States. The traditional Captain of In- 
 
 44 
 
The Pennsylvania System 
 
 dustry to-day that should attempt to dictate terms 
 to a trunk-line manager would be laughed out of 
 the traffic offices. Mr. Cassatt has fought the 
 fight of the courts, of Congress, of the small ship- 
 per, and of common honesty until it has become 
 possible for an American to ship a single carload 
 of freight as cheaply as a trust can ship a thou- 
 sand; and when the accounts in American rail- 
 road history are made up this fact cannot be 
 overlooked, distorted, or forgotten. 
 
 Out of a rate situation so disastrous and forbid- 
 ding, it will hardly be believed that any good 
 could have come, yet one signal good has come. 
 In reducing the income of American roads, low 
 rates have forced operating departments to ex- 
 haust their ingenuity in railroad economies. 
 With the income painfully curtailed, every con- 
 ceivable retrenchment has been found necessary 
 until saving has become in American railroading 
 a science. In operation it has put the American 
 road ahead of all others in the world, although a 
 comparison with English roads will show that 
 everything the American road buys costs more 
 than the English road pays. A single exception 
 may be thought to occur in the matter of coal. 
 Undoubtedly the Pennsylvania Road has cheaper 
 coal than its English cousins, but the American 
 roads, as a whole, have coal as high in cost as the 
 
 45 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 British. To reflect that our grain to-day is moved 
 at a rate of two and a half mills per ton-mile, that 
 a ton is hauled forty miles for ten cents, is to 
 force the conviction that traffic-rate demoraliza- 
 tion has after all brought some compensation. 
 Without this experience American roads might 
 to-day be on a level in operative cost with Eng- 
 lish roads, doing a much smaller business and not 
 affording our country that industrial advance to 
 which low rates have contributed so much. 
 
THE HARRIMAN LINES 
 
WA S H IN GIT N *C" 
 
 ON 
 
 / 
 
 ""* * >\. ... .-x^" VelLLOwiroH i 
 
 NlATION AL 
 
 THK II A 
 
I D A 
 
 r 
 
 T A 
 
 j 
 
 S 
 
 D A K 
 
 N G 
 
 NEBRASKA 
 
 
 <r I W A 
 
 > COUNCIL BLUFFS 
 
 WORTH 
 
 M EX I C 
 
 LINES. 
 
THE HARRIMAN LINES 
 
 IN the years of his reign Edward H. Harri* 
 man is youngest among American masters of 
 transportation. It is scarcely more than six years 
 February l, 1898 since the reorganization of 
 the Union Pacific was completed and Mr. Harri- 
 man and his friends took final and formal posses- 
 sion of it. Within that time he has risen to the 
 very first rank of the powers in American rail- 
 roading. 
 
 What, however, is of more vital matter, the 
 record is that Harriman railroading has been uni- 
 formly good railroading. It will be difficult to 
 point a case in which, in Mr. Harriman's hands, a 
 railroad or its public has suffered hardship, and 
 the instances are marked in which the immediate 
 benefits of his control have been, to both, enor- 
 mous. 
 
 It is not, then, merely that Mr. Harriman is 
 the owner of seventeen thousand miles of rail- 
 road ; it is, rather, because every mile of road he 
 owns stands for good railroading, that he is worth 
 estimating. He took over the Alton when it 
 had aged like a puff-ball and was ready to dis- 
 
 49 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 solve into dust. For years it had been famed as 
 an earner, and where seven and eight per cent, 
 dividends were treasured as an annual return 
 Alton stock was ranked with things celestial. 
 Unfortunately these really unusual distributions 
 were effected by indefensible economies. Rail- 
 roading should occupy at least as high an indus- 
 trial a plane as farming, and a farmer that should 
 strip his land yearly of its total produce and give 
 nothing back to the soil would hardly rank as a 
 thrifty husbandman. Good farmers keep up their 
 machinery, buildings, and fences; they fertilize 
 occasionally; but the Alton fertilizing was put 
 wholly into dividends, and Mr. Harriman bought 
 a road that had not alone let bridges, tracks, and 
 rolling stock run down, but had sold even terminal 
 rights, while distributing eight per cent, to stock- 
 holders. Without delay or hesitation he set about 
 making of the Alton the best possible road of its 
 class, and its class is the first. He has overhauled 
 the system completely, and put it physically a 
 little in advance of every competitor. To instance : 
 For thirty years the Alton had been strong in a 
 territory possessing the richest coal deposits in 
 Illinois, and not until the Harriman forces took 
 hold of the road had it ever developed a coal 
 business. Not only has the new Alton been 
 equipped with what it never before had, cars and 
 
 50 
 
The Harriman Lines 
 
 motive power to handle this traffic, but its engi- 
 neers in rebuilding the line show the lowest 
 maximum grades from the Illinois coal fields 
 into Chicago. Beginning with nothing, the new 
 owners have within five years developed a coal 
 traffic that already ranks second in volume among 
 the soft-coal roads of its territory. 
 
 While, in a legal sense, a railroad may be 
 quite within its rights in declining to provide for 
 the handling of such traffic, deeming it of small 
 profit, and may legally decline to expend earn- 
 ings in reducing grades and maintaining right of 
 way in a word, in improving its facilities for do- 
 ing business the public dependent on such a road 
 for transportation will feel, rightly or wrongly, 
 that they are entitled to industrial opportunities 
 as good as those enjoyed by more fortunate 
 neighbors : that their railroad should be kept in 
 the front rank just as their homes and streets and 
 farms are kept ; and the attitude has a show 
 of reasonableness. These are points which the 
 new policy of the Alton has sought to meet, and 
 that its local public appreciates the effort is 
 shown by the steady development of industries of 
 every sort along its line. Out of a very heavy 
 passenger traffic on the Alton ninety per cent, 
 originates in its local territory. Under Harriman 
 management bridges have been eliminated, curves 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 cut out, heavy steel rails laid, new car equipment 
 provided, and motive power has been made to 
 conform to the highest standard. Mr. Harriman 
 has made of the Alton practically a speeding 
 track across Illinois and Missouri, and some con- 
 ception of the undertaking may be had when the 
 fact is stated that to do this has cost him $ 1 9,000 
 a mile more money, mile for mile, than has gone 
 into improvements on any other portion of his 
 railroad holdings. What this means to that pub- 
 lic which must depend on the Alton for its rail- 
 road facilities is a part of the Harriman railroad 
 record. Alton shippers can get rates that put their 
 products on an equal basis in competitive markets 
 because the road can do business against all comers. 
 
 But Mr. Harriman controls also the Union 
 Pacific and its tremendously powerful California 
 ally, the Southern Pacific, as well as the Alton 
 and the Kansas City Southern. Whenever freight 
 is to be moved to or from the Pacific Coast, Har- 
 riman lines, from their long intrenchment and 
 their vigorous condition, are first among those to 
 be reckoned with ; and in the big system that Mr. 
 Harriman has built up they all group strategi- 
 cally around that road the very name of which, 
 in the story of the American railroad, is a name 
 to eronjure with the Union Pacific. 
 
 Of all American roads the Union Pacific has 
 52 
 
The Harriman Lines 
 
 traditions the most spectacular. Its undertaking 
 involved the daring of visionary men. The con- 
 ception of such a road was among the earliest of 
 American dreams, and while its working out was 
 a national pride it became also a national scandal. 
 
 For nearly thirty years after being completed 
 the Union Pacific was operated with varying for- 
 tunes. In that sensational period it had shown 
 great earning power but had been at times badly 
 managed. It had played a part never to be for- 
 gotten in the development of the West ; but its 
 strength was bowed under an insupportable bur- 
 den of Government debt and Government domi- 
 nation, and the sins of its builders were visited 
 a thousandfold upon its hapless head. It had 
 opened to settlers vast regions of fertile country 
 and brought a new world into touch with metro- 
 politan centres and markets. In every section 
 traversed by this earliest transcontinental line 
 cities and towns had sprung up and prospered, 
 and prosper to-day. The Union Pacific was the 
 West of our pioneer generation, and neither the 
 misfortunes of the one nor the triumphs of the 
 other can ever be divorced ; indeed, the industrial 
 and intellectual prosperity of the West is bound 
 up in the story of the Union Pacific. 
 
 Taking the historical trail of the explorer, the 
 adventurer, and the Mormon of the early day, the 
 
 53 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 road followed the valley of the Platte, then a 
 sandy waste and now an irrigated garden, far 
 beyond the hundredth meridian, and pre-empted 
 a railroad territory that under supportable con- 
 ditions would have given it a position at all times 
 impregnable. But its changing owners, busied 
 with secondary schemes, allowed valuable local 
 territory to be filched from it by the Burlington 
 and the Northwestern, leaving the Union Pacific 
 to stretch its way from the Missouri without one 
 good feeder where it might have had a dozen. 
 With these changing fortunes, the Southern 
 Pacific, California ally of the Union Pacific and 
 its sole outlit to the coast its absolute depend- 
 ence for through traffic became gradually a 
 covert enemy, and building its own lines to the 
 South, diverted traffic as much as possible from 
 the patient Overland route. Left thus to the 
 barest of its own resources, strong in its geograph- 
 ical position and weak in every support that a 
 railroad ought to count as strength, the Union 
 Pacific struggled on until 1893, anc ^ a receiver- 
 ship closed its first chapter. It was a strange 
 chapter; nothing quite like it in all other Ameri- 
 can railroading. But it is closed, and the men 
 who, leading forlorn hopes, threw their fortunes, 
 their health, their reputations into that thirty years' 
 struggle will never be forgotten. Monuments to 
 
 54 
 
The Harriman Lines 
 
 their heroic enterprise dot the country between 
 the sands of the Missouri and the coast of the 
 Pacific. They laid the foundations of a com- 
 monwealth in a wilderness. 
 
 Perhaps the time had never come in all that 
 period when it was possible to raise this prostrate 
 Western giant to its place among American rail- 
 roads. Many men had contemplated it; great 
 men had at times had the road's management. 
 Possibly, one and all, they shrunk from the hercu- 
 lean task of acquiring the Southern Pacific in 
 order that their property should not be hung up 
 with a Western terminus in the Utah desert ; of a 
 final adjustment of the Government debt; and of 
 the rebuilding of the great road across the Rocky 
 Mountains. At all events, in all of those thirty 
 years no sufficient capitalist, no aggressive rail- 
 road owner did grapple with the difficulties until 
 Mr. Harriman, almost yesterday, laid his hands 
 upon this tremendous property and made it the 
 Prussia of his railroad empire. 
 
 The Union Pacific had at the time sounded 
 the depths of a financial crisis. For five years it 
 had been in the hands of receivers. A lack of 
 funds had cramped its natural effectiveness, and 
 courts had divided its garments among warring 
 creditors until it was reduced to the plight of a 
 strong man stripped of everything. 
 
 55 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 The country, by an unfortunate coincidence, 
 was in a condition almost as deplorable. Its in- 
 dustries lay prostrate under the effects of the most 
 far-reaching panic since 1873. Not a l ne was 
 the monetary stringency acute ; for the first time 
 since the Chicago Haymarket riots men had 
 begun seriously to estimate the symptoms of dis- 
 content among that class of our people most sus- 
 ceptible to the influence of industrial agitators. 
 In the railroad world troops had been called out 
 to curb the violence of mobs ; in the political 
 world new counsellors had arisen with doctrines so 
 sudden and audacious that business men stood 
 confounded. A great political party had sur- 
 rendered completely to a leader who, with some 
 fantastic show of success, urged his own candidacy 
 for the Presidency of the United States on the 
 strength of his explicit pledge that if elected he 
 would do his utmost to debase the national cur- 
 rency. With apprehension the keynote in finan- 
 cial circles, business everywhere in paralysis, 
 capital hiding in secret places, cash hoarded in 
 safe-deposit vaults, and gold already at a colorable 
 premium, Edward H. Harriman planned and laid 
 the foundations for a movement that was almost 
 at once to elevate him to a first place in the rail- 
 road world. 
 
 To reflect that this has all taken place within 
 
 56 
 
The Harriman Lines 
 
 ten years is to cast upon it the shadow of in- 
 credibility. When the hour for such an under- 
 taking was ripe Mr. Harriman had to look but 
 five years ahead for justification of his venture. 
 It is a commonplace that times of depression are 
 the times to buy as those of prosperity are the 
 times to sell. What men lack when the outlook 
 is gloomy is the courage to make their convic- 
 tions operative. It is not that other men do not 
 realize such opportunities or that they do not 
 see during periods of prosperity the coming of 
 that inevitable day when, through monetary stress, 
 good properties may be had for little price ; the 
 difficulty is when the day comes that out of one 
 thousand men who have foreseen it but one has 
 the decision to back his judgment. Mr. Harri- 
 man possessed the decision; that is why to-day, 
 under brighter skies than those of 1896, other 
 men are reading about Mr. Harriman's achieve- 
 ments instead of Mr. Harriman reading about 
 theirs. 
 
 Courageous as the idea was in its conception 
 and execution, when the enormous means neces- 
 sary for buying had been provided Mr. Harri- 
 man's work had but begun. He was possessed 
 of a group of exceedingly valuable properties, 
 but all of them stood in urgent need of rehabilita- 
 tion. He had in the Pacific roads and the Alton 
 
 57 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 the corporate titles, the rights of way, and the 
 opportunities; such incidental acquirements as 
 rails, bridges, and rolling stock could not seriously 
 be counted into the bargain, for they had seen 
 their day. It remained to transfer them quietly 
 but firmly to the railroad back yard and cheer- 
 fully to start anew. Moreover, in railroad prac- 
 tice new standards of track grades and curvature 
 had been set, which must be met in order to 
 compete with the best roads, and those exacting 
 standards were uncommonly expensive. Again, 
 in a crisis equally vital, Mr. Harriman showed 
 the stuff of the unusual man. He decided that 
 his roads must be made good roads, the best of 
 their kind, and for this purpose he made figures. 
 Not all of them can be considered here, but one 
 most interesting estimate was this : 
 
 " For my immediate necessities (so to say) in 
 railroad rebuilding : One hundred millions of 
 dollars." 
 
 This, I take it, above all else in the record of 
 his railroad operations gives the man his rank 
 among really great railroad men the Vander- 
 bilts, A. J. Cassatt, James J. Hill, Huntington, 
 Garrett, Thomas A. Scott, and the Goulds. It 
 must not be forgotten that other able managers 
 and operators have at different times controlled or 
 owned the Union Pacific. Mr. Harriman was 
 
 58 
 
The Harriman Lines 
 
 the first to make of it a road of the highest rank 
 physically a power in the transportation world 
 worthy of standing, conditions allowed for, with 
 the New York Central lines or the Pennsylvania 
 lines. 
 
 He needed, for his immense work of making 
 over these many thousand miles of railroads, con- 
 structionists of the highest order, and these, also, 
 he gathered about him. The Alton he gave to 
 S. M. Felton, the Union Pacific he gave to 
 Horace G. Burt, the Southern Pacific to Julius 
 Kruttschnitt, and the Kansas City Southern to 
 S. R. Knott. It will be observed that all of these 
 men are able constructionists, not only presidents 
 or vice-presidents in the sense of being strong 
 executive officers, but highly trained engineers, 
 capable of doing themselves anything they may 
 order done. They, in turn, chose the most capable 
 men they could find as chief engineers of their 
 various lines to carry out the Harriman plans 
 Baldwin of the Alton, Hood of the Southern 
 Pacific, Berry of the Union Pacific : all men that 
 rank, among men as strong as American engineers 
 are admitted to be, as exceptional and with the 
 money ready each man set about his work to 
 make practically new railroads of the Harriman 
 group. 
 
 Horace G. Burt, then president of the Union 
 59 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Pacific, had already left his impress as an engi- 
 neer on the Chicago and Northwestern Road. On 
 him fell the consideration of the enormous engi- 
 neering difficulties involved in crossing the Rocky 
 Mountain divide. To him must be given credit 
 for the boldness of conception which marks the 
 extraordinary improvements on the new line, and 
 it was his task to convince the new owners of the 
 wisdom of so heavy an outlay. Under his active 
 direction contractors raised an army of laborers to 
 subdue the mountains and assembled an equip- 
 ment of modern machinery much of which was 
 then used for the first time in railroad building. 
 Under Burt these Western men completed in less 
 than two years the work of five, and every day 
 the heavy traffic flowed without interruption over 
 the line they were rebuilding. 
 
 It is not, perhaps, commonly understood that the 
 highest barrier presented to the Union Pacific in 
 its transcontinental run lies immediately west of 
 the plains about Cheyenne, where the line strikes 
 that secondary range of the Rockies known as the 
 Black Hills. What makes the ascent of these hills 
 of especial difficulty is a great elevation coupled 
 with unusually short slopes. Just here, at the out- 
 set almost, the Union Pacific rises to its greatest 
 height above the sea, and here, in the rebuilding, 
 lay the problem before Berry, chief engineer, as 
 
 60 
 
The Harriman Lines 
 
 to how the grade of this granite summit might 
 possibly be reduced. New limits had been set to 
 the gradients of the proposed improvements; but 
 it is one thing in a directors' meeting to adopt a 
 grade over the Rockies of forty-three feet to the 
 mile and quite another to go into the Rockies 
 and run it. The chief engineer had to match his 
 wits against those of engineers who, a generation 
 earlier, had laid out the pioneer line and done 
 their work well ; thirty-five years of reflection, 
 observation, and criticism from the best construc- 
 tionists in the world have failed to develop flaws 
 in this earliest effort of Americans at bridging the 
 Rockies. The Rocky Mountain engineer of 
 that day had command of practically all of the 
 advantages that those of to-day have, save only 
 access to Mr. Harriman's pin-money; even then 
 the difficulties of getting a better grade than the 
 first one across the hills proved enormous. To 
 find the line that Berry determined he must 
 have, he sent good men into the hills only to be 
 told on their return that where he wanted a line 
 there was none. But when they tried to main- 
 tain this, the personal equation, that subtle and 
 incalculable factor in men which in the overcom- 
 ing of difficulties makes the slight difference be- 
 tween success and failure, intervened. The chief 
 engineer, undaunted, refused to abide by the 
 
 61 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 findings. He sent the engineers again ; the sec- 
 ond time they brought the line he knew must be 
 there. 
 
 It involved staggering estimates. The Dale 
 Creek crossing, just beyond Cheyenne, called for 
 a single fill nine hundred feet long and one hun- 
 dred and thirty feet deep. In these granite wastes 
 the engineering figures assumed, at once, unheard- 
 of proportions. Cubic yards went into the calcu- 
 lations in millions instead of thousands. Two 
 creek crossings called for eight hundred thousand 
 yards of embankment. Two miles of new line 
 required the moving of seventeen hundred thou- 
 sand yards of material, and of this three hundred 
 thousand were of solid rock. Two fills within 
 these two miles swallowed a million cubic yards. 
 To eliminate three heavy reverse curves and two 
 bridges a summit cut was required, eighty feet 
 deep and a thousand feet long. The springing 
 charge for a single cone of rock was a thousand 
 pounds of giant powder, and the mountain was 
 hurled into the canon with twenty thousand 
 pounds of black. For these unprecedented level- 
 lings of the continental summit new devices were 
 constantly brought into play. Time was an es- 
 sence of the undertaking, and the American con- 
 tractor, following loyally the American engineer, 
 as he has always followed him, stooped like an 
 
 62 
 
The Harriman Lines 
 
 Atlas and took upon his shoulders the burden of 
 the plans. 
 
 Grading machines and dump wagons were sent 
 into the hills in trainloads. Steam shovels, the 
 leviathans of the railroad camp, crossed the moun- 
 tains in processions. They scooped the borrow 
 pits, cut the shale from the tunnels, dug the Sher- 
 man ballast, and loaded even blasted granite upon 
 cars out of the rock cuts. Track-laying machines 
 flung out rails on one side and ties on the other 
 like sandwiches. At one of the vital points, Chi- 
 cago men, the MacArthurs, took the heavy work, 
 and to make a three-hundred-thousand-yard fill 
 with an embankment of one hundred and thirty- 
 eight feet, Mac Arthur, to complete his contract 
 on time, threw his own temporary suspension 
 bridge across the thousand-foot canon and ran his 
 dump cars out upon his own rails and cables. 
 Track laying, ballasting even, was pushed across 
 the Rockies in midwinter. At the new summit 
 the last hill was drilled and a tunnel eighteen 
 hundred feet long put through primitive granite. 
 Here the Harriman engineers scaled two hundred 
 and forty-seven feet off the highest elevation at 
 which the road had formerly crossed the conti- 
 nent ; then came their task of getting gracefully 
 down the western slope of the hills to the Laramie 
 plains. 
 
 63 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 There is nothing less showy in the rebuilding 
 of the Harriman lines and nothing that is more 
 of a triumph than this feat of Berry's in getting 
 into Laramie. He has used here every trick in 
 his bag, and after moving five millions of cubic 
 yards of earth and rock to accomplish his purpose 
 he comes down into Laramie with a forty-three- 
 foot maximum grade eighteen miles long. So 
 close is the cloth cut for this entire distance that 
 not one rail-length of level track could be con- 
 ceded for stations ; they take their chances on the 
 grade as best they can. Providence may, indeed, 
 some time shift the axis of the granite anticlinal 
 now so skilfully crossed at Sherman, Wyoming, 
 and new dispositions may be called for; but until 
 such an upheaval takes place Berry's Laramie 
 grade is likely to stand. 
 
 The whole road from this eastern approach to 
 the Black Hills, far out to Medicine Bow on the 
 Laramie plains, shows everywhere the chisel and 
 the straight-edge of the Harriman engineers. 
 
 There are but two pieces of track, both very 
 short, on the entire main line where the forty- 
 three-foot grade is exceeded. Curvature has had 
 to go with the heavy grades, and between the 
 Black Hills and the Wasatch Range seven thou- 
 sand degrees within the last five years have grad- 
 ually disappeared. At one point the new line 
 
 64 
 
The Harriman Lines 
 
 within a distance of four miles crosses the old one 
 seven times; the Hanna cut uncovered an eight- 
 foot seam of coal; a Green River cut revealed 
 wide deposits of petrified fish. 
 
 First and last the contractors uncovered a little 
 of everything in the Rockies, from oil pockets to 
 underground rivers, but in the Wasatch Range, 
 in boring a six-thousand-foot tunnel, they struck 
 a mountain that for startling developments broke 
 the records in the annals of American engineering. 
 It was here that the underground stream was en- 
 countered, but this was a mere incident among 
 the possibilities in the mountain. The formation 
 is carboniferous, thrown up in the Aspen Ridge 
 at an angle of twenty-five degrees, and it includes 
 shale, sandstones, oil, and coal. To bore a hole 
 through the mountain at a depth of four hundred 
 and fifty feet from the highest point was not diffi- 
 cult; but the curious thing was that, after being 
 bored, the hole would not stay straight. The 
 mountain, reversing every metaphor and simile 
 of stability, refused to remain in the same position 
 for two days together. It moved forcibly into 
 the bore from the right side, and when remon- 
 strated with stole quietly in from the left; it de- 
 scended on the tunnel with crushing force from 
 above and rose irresistibly up into it from below. 
 The mountain moved from every quarter of the 
 
 65 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 compass and from quarters hardly covered by the 
 compass. Workmen grew superstitious, contract- 
 ors suffered chills, and engineers stood nonplussed. 
 Starting in huge cleavage planes, the shale became 
 at times absolutely uncontrollable. Wall plates 
 well fastened into regular alignment at night 
 looked in the morning as if giants had twisted 
 them ; 12x12 hard-pine timbers laid skin to skin 
 in the tunnel were snapped like matches by this 
 mysterious pressure. Engineers are on record as 
 stating that in the Aspen tunnel such construction 
 timbers were broken in different directions within 
 a length of four feet. An engineer stood one day 
 in the tunnel on a solid floor of these timbers, when 
 under him, and for a distance of two hundred feet 
 ahead of him, the floor rose, straining and crack- 
 ing, three feet up into the air. Before the tunnel 
 could be finished it became necessary to line over 
 700 feet of it with a heavy steel and concrete con- 
 struction. Gases caused frequent explosions and 
 only constant vigilance prevented the most serious 
 disasters to the men. When in Valhalla the heroic 
 spirits of the American section of civil engineers 
 assemble it will be for the shades from the far 
 Rockies to recount the tallest stories. 
 
 Through a more forbidding country, and under 
 difficulties no less formidable, Hood's Southern 
 Pacific corps has made over almost wholly the 
 
 66 
 
The Harriman Lines 
 
 Central Pacific link of the Harriman lines. Across 
 Nevada the men have taken out more than thirteen 
 thousand degrees of curvature and three thousand 
 feet of rise and fall. In a distance of four hun- 
 dred and fifty miles on the old line they have 
 built two hundred miles of entirely new road, 
 bored two miles of tunnels, and put eight million 
 pounds of steel into bridges. To do away once 
 and forever with the terrific grades and curves 
 made in pushing north around the Great Salt 
 Lake, the Southern Pacific engineers have drawn 
 a red line from Ogden straight across the lake 
 and the desert to Lucin, Utah, cutting forty-four 
 miles of track out of a hundred and forty-seven 
 and eliminating four thousand three hundred de- 
 grees of curvature and over fifteen hundred feet 
 of rise and fall. They have run a trestle twenty- 
 three miles long across Salt Lake through water 
 thirty feet deep, taking railroad trains further from 
 land than they have ever yet been run ; and the 
 success of their undertaking arrested for a mo- 
 ment the attention of the railroad men of Amer- 
 ica. 
 
 Wherever the Harriman control has been ex- 
 ercised the policy of physical betterment has been 
 decisive and the results are imposing. Whatever 
 changes in control may come to the Alton, for 
 example, it can never be forgotten that it was 
 
 67 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Harriman who made of it a great railroad. Mr. 
 Harriman has made good roads the characteristic 
 of his system, and the roads have responded 
 strongly to the new impulse. The enormous ex- 
 penditure of above $100,000,000 for improve- 
 ments in a little over three years seems to leave 
 their treasuries overflowing. The Union Pacific 
 now owns its Northwestern link, the Oregon 
 Short Line, and together the Union Pacific and 
 the Short Line own the Oregon Railway and 
 Navigation Company. In addition, the Union 
 Pacific has cemented a kinship with the Southern 
 Pacific by the purchase of the Huntington in- 
 terest of $75,000,000. 
 
 It stands to-day the monetary fortress of the 
 Harriman lines, holding stocks and bonds in its 
 treasury with a par value of $341,000,000, and 
 they group loyally about it North and South and 
 West to compose to-day the most powerful single 
 interest in the transcontinental field. 
 
 68 
 
THE HILL LINES 
 
THE HILL LINES 
 
 CAN anything fresh be said about James J. 
 Hill? What railroad man since, perhaps, the 
 first Vanderbilt or Gould has filled so large a 
 measure of notice ? Have we, indeed, a public 
 man concerning whom anecdotes have been more 
 searchingly recounted, or whose affairs have sup- 
 plied so much material for first-page newspaper 
 stories ? 
 
 Canada gave Mr. Hill to us ; and we, in turn, 
 have been generous with the Dominion, for we 
 gave to her Sir William Van Home. It would 
 be temerity to say which has the best of the ex- 
 change; this thought only may be ventured 
 that neither side has ever suggested trading back. 
 The work of these two men, and what they have 
 accomplished, is much the same. The contrast 
 becomes noticeable only when we consider how 
 the two have been repaid by their adopted coun- 
 tries. They are each railroad builders, organizers, 
 and operators, and of the first order; men whose 
 rank in the Bradstreet of railroad men is AaAaAl. 
 The expatriated American has been led for distin- 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 guished services before a grateful sovereign to 
 kneel and arise a knight of her realm. Mr. Hill's 
 sovereign, the State of Minnesota, has periodically 
 led her greatest son out as a public culprit, with 
 a rope around his neck, to do penance for his ser- 
 vices in helping, more than any other one man, 
 living or dead, to make her all she is in wealth 
 and development to-day. 
 
 Mr. Hill, however, has probably acquired hu- 
 mility; certainly he has long been patient of criti- 
 cism. What is remarkable in his make-up is his 
 boyish loyalty to his adopted country and its peo- 
 ple, and one can speak against Minnesota or Min- 
 nesota people only at the risk of waking Mr Hill 
 up very seriously. Other men, tiring of continued 
 abuse, get angry, slam their suits of project and 
 ambition on the table, and bid good-by to the 
 annoyances of the game; Mr. Hill only smiles, 
 calls for fresh cards, and deals again. 
 
 I have called him patient of criticism. About 
 1873, when still a steamboat man, he had got 
 together $100,000. There was then in Minne- 
 sota a little railroad called the St. Paul and Pacific 
 that had been run probably by the legislators or 
 statesmen of that day ; at all events, it was both 
 bankrupt and six months behind in its pay-roll. 
 To buy it Mr. Hill needed $500,000. No one 
 in Minnesota would lend him so much ; probably 
 
 72 
 
I N I B O I A 
 
 fS W 
 
 Ashland 
 
 \:1 S ^H^ 
 
 Grand Canyon ! 
 
 | SANTA FE 
 
 Ash Fork! X,, 
 
 //Albuquerque 
 
 'N E^W 
 
<> jr.: s 
 
 T T VFQ 
 
The Hill Lines 
 
 no one had so much to lend. He tramped back 
 to Canada and persuaded the Bank of Montreal, 
 somewhat against its inclination, to let him have 
 the needed sum. 
 
 For that loan the directors of the Bank of 
 Montreal were seriously criticised. There were 
 men as far back as 1873 to laugh at Hill's proj- 
 ects. These said that his ridiculous purchase 
 would ruin not only him but his Canadian friends ; 
 that the road never had paid and never could be 
 made to pay. Yet that Jim Crow line of the 
 seventies was the foundation of the Great North- 
 ern System, with its rails spreading across Dakota 
 and Montana and opening on distant Puget Sound 
 the road that has never, from the first years of 
 its organization, failed to pay regular dividends, 
 and whose shares command a market and a pre- 
 mium when good railroad shares go begging. 
 Nor is this all. This great Northern System 
 earned the money that made it possible to make 
 a Hill line of the Burlington, with its tremendous 
 investment of two hundreds of millions, and has 
 made Mr. H'.ll and his friends a dominant interest 
 in Northern Pacific. In this way Mr. Hill repaid 
 not only his Bank of Montreal friends but that 
 timid element among them who feared the loss 
 of their $500,000. He has returned their money 
 and made the men that then stood by him mill- 
 
 73 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 ionaires, and they are millionaires and lords of the 
 British realm to-day. 
 
 After 1873 he moved again decisively. He 
 declared in 1879 that he meant to put the 
 Great Northern across the continent. His friends 
 stood surprised, and again men laughed. Hill, 
 they said, was insane. No transcontinental road 
 had yet been built without milking the Govern- 
 ment; that was the primer of transcontinental 
 railroad effort. Either the United States Treasury 
 must be looted or an enormous grant of public 
 lands coaxed from Congress. Did Mr. Hill, they 
 asked, purpose to build a line with his own money 
 to compete with these subsidized whales ? More- 
 over, did he propose building his line north of the 
 Northern Pacific, which was already so far north 
 that its country would not grow wheat ? From 
 conclusions drawn in this way it remained only to 
 nickname the new venture, and the Great North- 
 ern was dubbed " Hill's Folly " ; but he had set 
 his mind to cross the continent. 
 
 In 1 893, again an ominous date, he put his foot 
 on the Pacific Coast with the only line that ever 
 got there without the aid of a dollar of public 
 money or an acre of public land. 
 
 When he had reached his goal there came the 
 prostration of the country's industries due to the 
 late panic. Railroads everywhere fell into re- 
 
 74 
 
The Hill Lines 
 
 ceivers' hands. Receivers came to the Santa Fe, 
 receivers to the Union Pacific, receivers to the 
 Northern Pacific ; but no receiver to Hill's Folly. 
 Mr. Hill kept his interest paid, and through the 
 panic years made just a little money. He man- 
 aged his road, managed his borrowing, built a 
 little branch once in a while, and so astonished 
 the less fortunate owners of the Northern Pacific 
 that they came from Berlin all the way across the 
 Atlantic to beg the owner of Hill's Folly to take 
 hold of their road and manage it. 
 
 Mr. Hill was not, even then, unknown on the 
 Continent. He does his own financing. If he 
 needs money he goes to London or to Berlin and 
 gets it. He works with bankers as partners in 
 great undertakings, but he needs no syndicates to 
 underwrite his securities and pays none to do so, 
 and he weathered the panic of 1893 with on ^7 
 that loyal band of friends behind him who, per- 
 haps, were more beholden to Mr. Hill than he to 
 them. This steamboat pioneer, who in so many 
 ways suggests that earlier famous steamboat pio- 
 neer, Cornelius Vanderbilt, is not only builder and 
 operator but financier as well. 
 
 Something more than executive ability is need- 
 ed to succeed in fields so widely different, and to 
 his aggressiveness as an operator Mr. Hill adds 
 notable sagacity. His judgment has never been 
 
 75 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 seriously at fault in his undertakings. To a man 
 who knew the North less thoroughly the project 
 of putting a railroad across the continent above 
 the forty-eighth parallel must have proved, as all 
 predicted it would, disastrous. But Mr. Hill 
 knew the country and its limitless possibilities. 
 With his grasp of things he could hardly have 
 failed in any undertaking; he would have made 
 a great farmer or miller or merchant. Long be- 
 fore this man put his road across the Rockies he 
 had tramped on snowshoes over the drifts of the 
 future wheat belt of the world, and ridden for days 
 behind dogs across the white and silent wastes of 
 Canada. It was not on sunny seas nor under 
 summer skies that Mr. Hill sought fortune; but 
 facing the wind, heading for the wilderness, plant- 
 ing outposts of civilization in the teeth of the 
 blizzard and the frost; and, with the North con- 
 quered, there remained one more decisive step 
 to connect it commercially with the corn belt 
 and the manufacturing industries of the United 
 States. 
 
 There never was but a single justification for 
 putting the Great Northern across the continent 
 the timber of the Puget Sound country. Of local 
 business on such a line there could be for many 
 years only a little. But the full horizon of an 
 undertaking does not open at once on the vision 
 
The Hill Lines 
 
 of even the wisest of men. The operating of the 
 Great Northern for a few years developed the im- 
 perative need of some railroad link that should 
 connect it directly with the industrial centres and 
 the farming country of the Middle West. With 
 his big railroad running from St. Paul to Puget 
 Sound, Mr. Hill knew that if he could not haul 
 the Washington and Oregon pine East there was 
 really not much of anything else to haul. Nor 
 would this traffic stand a rate heavy enough to 
 cover bringing it East in a car that must go back 
 to the coast empty. Thus, not only was he forced 
 to provide a market for the Sound lumber, but 
 likewise to provide westbound traffic for the 
 return trip of his freight trains. Mr. Hill faced 
 an exacting situation. 
 
 His own story of the efforts he made to meet 
 this difficulty should be printed as a treatise for 
 young traffic managers. It is impossible for an 
 American to read it without a thrill of industrial 
 pride that such men as this are fellow-countrymen. 
 To discover, to develop, and to create Oriental 
 traffic Mr. Hill sent men to China and to Japan, 
 and maintained them there to investigate trade 
 conditions. He had men in the Orient whose 
 business it was to get a manifest of every ship 
 that cleared a Japanese or a Chinese port ; to find 
 not alone what the exports and the imports of 
 
 77 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 these countries consisted of, but where the exports 
 went. He put a traffic representative in the 
 Orient, and covered the Eastern United States 
 with industrial ants whose work it was to turn 
 traffic to the Great Northern. His agents found 
 out what the factories of New England were 
 making, and in China and Japan his men sought 
 an Oriental market for the stuff. 
 
 Of his traffic department he asked nothing that 
 he could not bring about himself. Distinguished 
 Japanese guests of Mr. Hill's in 1896, building 
 new roads in Japan, were not allowed to leave for 
 Europe to place their orders for Belgian or Eng- 
 lish rails until, after dinner, they had had a little 
 talk with him about it. As they were to spend 
 a day or two in his company he asked if he might 
 see what could be done on American rails. So 
 considerate a host could hardly be denied, and 
 Mr. Hill cabled friends in London for the best 
 quotations on Antwerp and Middleboro rails, and 
 the best charters to Yokohama. He found the 
 foreign rails could be delivered there at about 
 $29 a ton. He telegraphed Chicago and told the 
 steel men that if they would make a price of 
 $19.50 on American rails the Great Northern 
 would lay them in Yokohama for $8 a ton. The 
 Chicago men made the price, and Mr. Hill's rail- 
 roads and steamships landed in Yokohama 15,000 
 
 78 
 
The Hill Lines 
 
 tons of Chicago rails, the first American steel rails 
 ever sold in Japan. 
 
 The transaction was only an incident, but it 
 illustrates Mr. Hill. By this time even Japanese 
 manufacturers had been attracted by the Great 
 Northern policies. Passing across the American 
 continent, a party of them were gently but firmly 
 detained by this master builder of trade, who, fix- 
 ing on them an ancient mariner eye, asked about 
 the poor cotton they were spinning at home the 
 India cotton with the short staple that made the 
 poor yarn. The Japs were disposed to stick to 
 their cheap cotton, but they were not so easily to 
 escape. Rather than let them go, Mr. Hill per- 
 suaded them to try one shipment of American 
 cotton upon his guarantee that if it should not 
 prove profitable to mix our long-staple cotton 
 with the short staple from India he would pay for 
 the trial shipment himself. Such was the begin- 
 ning of a little cotton business with the Orient. 
 Mr. Hill was not called on to pay for the trial 
 shipment, but since then raw-cotton exports to 
 Japan have reached as high as 160,000,000 
 pounds in a single year, and of this quantity 
 Mr. Hill's lines carry three-fourths. The story 
 of cotton piece goods, which go to China, is 
 much the same. When Mr. Hill reached Puget 
 Sound we were exporting 65,000,000 yards; in 
 
 79 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 1902 we exported 335,000,000 yards. To un- 
 derstand his influence in bringing this about look 
 up the percentage of this product that goes by 
 way of Puget Sound. Practically all of this in- 
 crease in cotton traffic came about through the 
 planning of the indefatigable Mr. Hill. 
 
 To appreciate, also, what this particular traffic 
 means, consider where the raw cotton of this 
 country comes from and where Mr. Hill's rail- 
 roads lie, on the Canadian border. Unless he 
 should undertake to export Florida pineapples to 
 Siberia, how could he possibly stir up trade be- 
 tween two corners of the world more remote from 
 his own stamping-ground"? Moreover, a man 
 familiar with railroad conditions in the South, if 
 asked why freight rates on cotton are high, will 
 answer that it is not alone because cotton is haz- 
 ardous as a commodity and represents, pound for 
 pound, ten times the value of corn, but that the 
 market is a limited one; that if all the cotton 
 lands in the State of Mississippi were cultivated 
 they alone would supply the American cotton 
 now used in the world. There is no incentive, 
 unless the market can constantly be enlarged, for 
 Southern roads to carry cotton cheaper. Here, 
 then, comes a railroad man from the far North- 
 west, and single-handed supplies the primary in- 
 centive; and if the trade with the Orient ever 
 
 80 
 
The Hill Lines 
 
 becomes considerable, Southern cotton will be 
 marketed cheaper everywhere because a man 
 whom cotton growers never saw, and whom thou- 
 sands never heard of, is now sending their prod- 
 uct from Galveston and New Orleans, on the 
 Gulf of Mexico, to Yokohama, Japan, by way 
 of Puget Sound. Observe, too, the exceedingly 
 delicate adjustment of traffic conditions; this 
 happens not because there are not equally strong 
 railroads to the coast further south, but because 
 those roads lack the Puget Sound lumber to bring 
 east in the cars that take the cotton west, and it 
 costs practically as much to pull an empty car as 
 a loaded one. The Santa Fe, therefore, prefers 
 delivering Texas cotton to Mr. Hill's Burlington 
 road at St. Louis to hauling it to California. 
 
 But neither a fortuitous shipment of steel rails 
 nor a modestly growing cotton business by any 
 means solve Mr. Hill's traffic problems. It is a 
 question of unceasing effort to build up com- 
 modity business. He carries nails and wire, in 
 great quantities, from Lake Erie to Hongkong 
 for forty-five cents a hundred pounds. A city 
 man can hardly get a keg of nails from a down- 
 town shop to his suburban home for less than 
 Mr. Hill carries a similar keg across a continent 
 and an ocean, ten thousand miles. Such a rate, 
 of course, is very low, and calls for the closest 
 
 81 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 figuring to leave a margin of profit. The Hill 
 lines are compelled, to use his own forcible words, 
 to look for anything and everything that will sup- 
 ply westbound business, whether destined for the 
 Pacific Coast, for Alaska, Honolulu, China, Japan, 
 the Philippines anywhere, if they would keep 
 their freight cars loaded both ways. Moreover, 
 if an international traffic is to be established the 
 first absolute requisite is permanent rates; not 
 merely day in and out, but substantially year in 
 and out; and Mr. Hill found that unless he could 
 make his rates permanent he could not hope to 
 succeed in his huge enterprise. 
 
 Thus a military necessity confronted him : that 
 of freeing himself from the uncertainty of joint 
 rates which might be one thing to-day and a 
 wholly impossible thing to-morrow. He needed 
 access over his own rails to Chicago and St. Louis 
 and to the factories and farms of the corn belt. In 
 a word, he must be able to make his own rate 
 from where the traffic originates to where his 
 shippers market it. Connecting lines whose in- 
 terests might lie to-day in a favorable joint rate to 
 the Orient might to-morrow conclude that there 
 was nothing in the business, and withdraw it. 
 Mr. Hill, in order to hold his ground, saw him- 
 self compelled to extend his lines into the lower 
 Lake country and the Mississippi Valley. 
 
The Hill Lines 
 
 The conclusion forced him into the greatest 
 undertaking of his already remarkable career. To 
 build such a road as he required would be a mat- 
 ter of years ; he needed one ready-to-wear, and he 
 needed a great deal of money to make the pur- 
 chase. This time $500,000 would not do, nor a 
 million, nor several millions ; he needed now hun- 
 dreds of millions; but his credit was still good, 
 and, taking in a reliable partner whose interests 
 coincided with his own, he bought the Burlington 
 Road. 
 
 The story of the Burlington is in itself out of 
 the ordinary. It has always been aggressive in 
 its management and peculiarly successful in its 
 ventures. Any Western railroad man esteems 
 himself fortunate when he can get business away 
 from the Burlington. To take a fall out of the 
 Burlington is a feather in any traffic manager's 
 cap, and it is odds that for some time thereafter 
 he will be kept busy in holding his ground, for, 
 unless a very handy man, he is likely to be thrown 
 on the defensive at once. This curiously strong 
 grip on business has never been advanced by the 
 cutting of rates, but rather by a keen realization 
 of the fact that business, like kissing, goes by 
 favor. The Burlington management has always 
 been characterized by astuteness, and its people 
 have cultivated the art of making friends. Mr. 
 
 83 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Perkins, who made the wonderful road what it 
 is, never liked to have enemies or trouble. His 
 motto was, briefly, eighty per cent, of the busi- 
 ness and peace ; and it is astonishing how closely 
 he approximated his ideal. Somehow, too, the 
 Burlington Road succeeded in creating among its 
 men an esprit de corps^ a loyalty to itself, so that 
 former Burlington officials refer with certain pride 
 to the old road. When one meets, East or West, 
 on American roads a Burlington man he is con- 
 scious, too, of a consideration of the sort that asks, 
 Now, what can I do for you ? rather than, What 
 can you do for me ? And, as I shall note hereafter, 
 so widely have the graduates of the road been 
 distributed in railroad circles that at one time, not 
 many years ago, the executive officers of each of 
 our transcontinental lines were Burlington men. 
 It is not fanciful, then, to assert that, in addition 
 to 8,700 miles of track and equipment in prime 
 condition, Mr. Hill took over in the good-will of 
 the Burlington, a valuable asset in itself. 
 
 Geographically, Mr. Hill found that the road 
 lay precisely fitted to his Northern needs. The 
 Burlington, with a base on the Great Lakes, ex- 
 tends into the Rocky Mountains. It is powerful 
 on the Mississippi River, and on the Missouri 
 it is first. Its mileage in the State of Nebraska 
 alone would give it a trunk line from New York 
 
 84 
 
The Hill Lines 
 
 to Salt Lake City, and its Iowa mileage added 
 would extend such a line to Los Angeles or 
 Puget Sound. One arm of the Burlington con- 
 nects Chicago and Denver ; another, striking from 
 St. Louis and Kansas City, enters Nebraska at its 
 extreme southeastern corner, winds through the 
 Black Hills of Dakota and Wyoming, and crosses 
 the Crow Reservation in Montana to unite with 
 the Northern Pacific. Here its right of way, 
 lying within the shadow of the Big Horn Moun- 
 tains, drops into the valley of the Little Big Horn 
 River and follows the fatal path that Custer and 
 the Seventh Cavalry followed in June, 1876. It 
 is historic ground. Amid the wastes of this far 
 and silent desolation the traveller finds a soldiers' 
 cemetery. A tragic feature marks its headstones ; 
 they are nameless, for here Custer with 260 men, 
 surrounded by the Sioux and Cheyennes, made 
 his last stand, and none survived to tell the story. 
 Where, long after the fight, each skeleton, 
 bleached by the summer's sun, lay on the field, 
 a stake was driven and a stone marks the spot. 
 
 This is the link of the Burlington that connects 
 the Puget Sound roads with the Mississippi Val- 
 ley and the Great Lakes; with the Western 
 smelters at Denver, in the Black Hills, at Kan- 
 sas City and Omaha, and at Aurora, 111. ; with 
 the cotton roads at St. Louis and Kansas City; 
 
 85 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 with the packing-houses at Omaha, St. Joe, Kan- 
 sas City, and Chicago. On the Mississippi River 
 the Burlington taps every town from Minneapo- 
 lis to St. Louis, and it reaches a large percentage 
 of the manufacturing industries of Illinois. 
 
 But of more vital importance than all these 
 things, the Burlington covers the lumber-consum- 
 ing States of the country. It counts 1,400 miles 
 of trackage in Iowa, a State that is not only the 
 greatest consumer of lumber in the Union, but 
 exceeds in its consumption any three States. Mr. 
 Frederick Weyerhauser has said that he would 
 rather have the lumber trade of Iowa than that 
 of any three other States together. Mr. Hill 
 is probably right, then, in saying that for the de- 
 velopment of his natural resources, so to call them, 
 the Burlington is of as much value to him as per- 
 haps all other Western roads combined. 
 
 With Michigan already on the point of con- 
 suming more lumber than it supplies, the signifi- 
 cance of his early foresight in building into the 
 Puget Sound timber country, and later in secur- 
 ing an outlet for its timber through direct entry 
 into the big domestic lumber markets, becomes 
 apparent. Of equal moment is the enormous 
 Oriental traffic Mr. Hill had created in American 
 flour. American flour gets only as far as the Chi- 
 nese ports and along the coast ; local taxation pre- 
 86 
 
The Hill Lines 
 
 vents its reaching the interior of the empire. Even 
 on the coast it is used rather as a confection than 
 as a staple for bread; still, last year Puget Sound 
 exported 2,000,000 barrels of flour to the Orient. 
 Ten years ago Mr. Hill found Puget Sound 
 wheat going to Liverpool by way of Cape Horn. 
 To-day it is practically all ground at home into 
 flour which his boats carry to China. These 
 Sound exports of flour have in ten years increased 
 617 per cent. The Hill roads are putting into 
 commission a line of new steamships for Ori- 
 ental traffic, two of which, taken together, exceed 
 in capacity the combined tonnage of the entire 
 Canadian Pacific fleet from Vancouver. Land- 
 ing, as he is, then, American flour and nails in 
 Hongkong and, save for the present hostilities, 
 American cotton and rails in Yokohama, bring- 
 ing the forests of Washington to the prairie farms 
 of Iowa, stirring up trade in every port of the 
 Far East and in credit among the most careful 
 bankers in Europe whose money he is borrowing 
 on his own notes to develop the Northwest, is it 
 possible that a charge of plotting in restraint of 
 trade can successfully be maintained against this 
 man ? Has Mr. Hill burned any one's refineries, 
 blown up any rival railroad bridges, bought any 
 lines to dismantle them, driven other railroads out 
 of business, or wrecked them to freeze out stock- 
 
 87 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 holders and bondholders? It would be compe- 
 tent, conceivably, for the managers of other rail- 
 roads, the Canadian Pacific, for instance, to ask 
 that Mr. Hill be restrained from further attempts 
 at getting their trade. That which will be incred- 
 ible to men fifty years from now is that he should 
 have been assailed as he has been in the Merger 
 Case by the circumstance and dignity of the 
 United States as an industrial wrong-doer. 
 
 It should console Mr. Hill, however, to reflect 
 that in the canonization of really great men the 
 first appropriation of public moneys is for fagots, 
 the quarrying of the marble usually being left to 
 the third and fourth generations. Perspective is 
 needed for the right estimate of extraordinary 
 men, and it is supplied by time ; our mental mir- 
 rors are fitted to reflect the ordinary sort of mortals 
 others blur on them. We call Mr. Hill, freely, 
 Jim Hill, as the Genoese, perhaps, referred collo- 
 quially to Chris Columbus. Chris was at too close 
 range for them quite to comprehend. Spain 
 doubtless at that day was filled with bigger men 
 than the Italian adventurer; yet history, forget- 
 ting their names, writes his in full. 
 
 How can the story of the Northwest ever be 
 written without the story of Hill? When he 
 put his road across the continent he stood on end 
 the railroad egg of the North and showed men 
 
The Hill Lines 
 
 how simple and easy it was, after all. Napoleon's 
 first question was, What has he done? That 
 question must always be answered in attempting 
 fairly to place Mr. Hill among the men who have 
 developed and created American trade and indus- 
 try. He is the last of our great railroad pioneers. 
 We cannot hope for more men to fill such niches 
 in our history because there are no more such 
 niches to be filled. There are no longer within 
 our borders railroad wildernesses to be explored ; 
 of these Mr. Hill has thrown open the last. 
 
 89 
 
THE FIGHT FOR PITTSBURG 
 
UNP 
 
 THE FIGHT FOR PITTSBURG 
 
 DURING the closing days of the final session of 
 the Fifty-sixth Congress, William McKinley be- 
 ing President of the United States and Joseph 
 Ramsey, Jr., president of the Wabash Railroad, a 
 Senator from the State of Pennsylvania and a 
 Representative from the Pittsburg district intro- 
 duced, by request, into their respective houses 
 some sort of a bill or joint resolution. Couched 
 in a few words, it provided for the revival of a 
 bill by which Congress had once authorized the 
 building of a railroad bridge across the Mononga- 
 hela River into the city of Pittsburg. No attempt 
 had been made by the original applicants for the 
 privilege to avail themselves of it, and their per- 
 mission had lapsed by limitation. Granted origi- 
 nally for the construction of a steam railroad bridge, 
 a renewal of the right was now desired on behalf 
 of a projected trolley line. 
 
 Trolley lines are everywhere and ever-ready, 
 and resolutions in their behalf are a necessary part 
 of current legislation. Trolley lines are more or 
 less clamorous among the constituents of every 
 
 93 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Congressman, and by resolutions of one sort or 
 another they are usually appeased. Moreover, 
 the introduction of a measure by request costs 
 little. Not one joint Congressional resolution in 
 a hundred passes ; when one does pass it is rarely 
 heard of again. 
 
 This particular measure, however, was peculiar; 
 peculiar in the innocence of its wording and pe- 
 culiar in the tremendous sting in its tail. 
 
 It is no exaggeration to say that there was not 
 one chance in a thousand for it to get through 
 both houses of Congress. The whirl, the confu- 
 sion, and the rush of the closing of the session 
 were all against it. Moreover, there are a dozen 
 Senators and Representatives whose very business 
 in the Congress of the United States is to defeat 
 the objects sought under cover of precisely such 
 bills genuine Congressional sleuths who, while 
 raising their voices occasionally in behalf of the 
 people that send them to Washington, are sleep- 
 lessly vigilant in behalf of the friendly " interests " 
 which they represent. 
 
 A single objection raised against the waif by 
 any stray malcontent in either house any mem- 
 ber with a digestion temporarily disordered 
 would have been fatal ; yet, with its purpose un- 
 dreamed of by its legislative fathers, and in a 
 crush in which a thousand well directed and fer- 
 
 94 
 
The Fight for Pittsburg 
 
 vently urged measures always do fail, this tramp 
 bill slipped successfully past every peril of the 
 closing hours of the turbulent session. It passed ; 
 and its innocent words divided a railroad empire 
 the long, hard fight of the Wabash to get into 
 Pittsburg was won. 
 
 The white light of publicity is supposed to 
 burn upon all important legislation at Washing- 
 ton, and the appetite of the press for news of this 
 sort approaches the ferocious. Yet here was a 
 business calculated to shake the railroad world to 
 its very centre, and loose its bitter dogs of war 
 from the Atlantic seaboard to the wastes of the 
 Missouri River, done so quietly that mention 
 of it never crept into a Washington despatch. 
 More singular still, it must be remembered that 
 its very introduction had depended on the good 
 offices of a Pennsylvania Senator and a Pittsburg 
 Congressman, both of whom were guiltless of the 
 remotest intention of helping out the Wabash in 
 its uphill encounter with the Pennsylvania Rail- 
 road for a Pittsburg terminal. 
 
 A century hence, when the curious traveller asks 
 to see a monument that commemorates our labo- 
 riously planned and jealously guarded protective 
 policy he will, without doubt, be pointed to Pitts- 
 burg. Pittsburg is our traffic gold mine. When 
 it is said that Pittsburg and its district originate 
 
 95 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 the largest freight tonnage of any city in this 
 country, or for that matter in the world, the pub- 
 lic mind grasps the statement fairly well and the 
 result is some respect for Pittsburg ; it was news 
 to many when announced, but it was accepted 
 calmly. There is, however, more than this to the 
 statement. Pittsburg originates not only more 
 freight tonnage than any one of our cities, but 
 more than our three greatest cities, New York, 
 Philadelphia, and Chicago combined. 
 
 A business man can digest even this extraordi- 
 nary fact, but how can he keep clear-headed when 
 told that this traffic in the Pittsburg district, taking 
 no account of what merely passes through Pitts- 
 burg, reaches the stupendous total of 75,000,000 
 tons in a single year ? Or, again, can he really 
 grasp what is contained in the bare statement that 
 the Pennsylvania Railroad east of Pittsburg 
 handles 75,000 tons of freight daily for each mile 
 of its main line, and that in one year the earnings 
 of that portion of the system exceeded $150,000 
 a mile ? 
 
 These figures are not in any sense news. They 
 may be derived from official reports. But the 
 public does not read railroad reports, and it is no 
 reflection on its intelligence to say that it would 
 not understand them if it did. Not even business 
 men, in fact, understand the report of one railroad 
 
 96 
 
W I \S CON 
 
 THE 
 
The Fight for Pittsburg 
 
 quite so well as the executive officers of a com- 
 peting line. 
 
 This showing affords an inkling of what Pitts- 
 burg and the Pennsylvania road mean in the rail- 
 road world; a suggestion of the prize that had 
 long hung suspended before the Wabash eyes. 
 Is it any wonder that George Gould, owning the 
 Wabash road, determined to put $25,000,000 
 into an effort to secure a terminal that would open 
 the doors of such a storehouse ? 
 
 Let there be frankly conceded the worst that 
 can be said and harsh railroad things have been 
 said of Mr. Gould ; for example, that he is invad- 
 ing a territory where he does not expect to de- 
 velop one dollar's worth of new traffic yet it 
 comes in the end to this : that, placed owner of 
 the Wabash system, as he was, by the combina- 
 tions going forward five years ago, if he had 
 allowed himself to be bottled up at Toledo, at 
 Detroit, or even at Buffalo, with Pittsburg in his 
 grasp, he would not really have been quite so 
 aggressive as big American railroad operators of 
 stern necessity are. 
 
 It is hardly more than five years ago that it 
 became apparent to the Gould interests that a 
 Pittsburg terminal would become, in truth, a 
 strategic necessity. When, in 1 895, Joseph Ram- 
 sey, Jr., was made vice-president of the Wabash 
 
 97 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 its Eastern terminals were Toledo and Detroit. 
 In the meantime the various combinations of the 
 Pennsylvania Railroad and those of the Vander- 
 bilt lines were taking shape. Every day empha- 
 sized the purpose of each railway power in the 
 country to acquire feeders for itself and make 
 impregnable a control that would take care of 
 irresponsible competition. The Wabash could 
 not at that time land freight even in Buffalo save 
 over a hostile connection. Gradually it was being 
 cut out of a feeder here and a feeder there until 
 action did become imperative, and the Wabash 
 was pushed to Buffalo. A Buffalo terminal was 
 a bold move ; but with Buffalo once made the 
 Gould people looked again from Toledo for new 
 conquests, and Pittsburg, like a mirage thrown 
 suddenly into the railroad sky, loomed upon the 
 Wabash horizon. 
 
 The railway world of the United States was in 
 that moment at the height of an activity such as 
 it had never known and never again within cen- 
 turies can know. Territory was being pre- 
 empted that never again will be open to a railroad 
 settler ; combinations were daily being made that 
 will govern a thousand years from now, and 
 leases were being executed that will not terminate 
 within thirty generations of men. What may at 
 that time happen to these coveted properties can 
 
 98 
 
The Fight for Pittsburg 
 
 scarcely be expected to interest the powers of the 
 present generation. But five years ago it meant 
 that the man who wanted control of a road or 
 needed a railroad footing in a contiguous territory 
 must act, or for nine hundred and ninety-nine 
 years thereafter hold his peace; Gould decided to 
 enter Pittsburg. 
 
 He had on his operating staff a man fitted for 
 the difficult venture. Joseph Ramsey, Jr., had 
 been for three years vice-president and general 
 manager of the Wabash. He had entered the en- 
 gineering corps of the Pan Handle road thirty 
 years earlier. Within a year thereafter he had been 
 transferred to the Dresden cut-off, and while still 
 hardly more than a boy had, as assistant engineer, 
 located the Bell's Gap road, a circuitous route 
 winding about within the very heart of the Alle- 
 ghany Mountains. His movements were as rapid 
 as his promotions. A Pittsburger born and 
 brought up, the Alleghanies were this man's 
 birthright, and his early life was spent as engi- 
 neer, superintendent, chief engineer, from division 
 to division and from road to road, in and out of 
 and around Pittsburg. At thirty-three, and a 
 general manager, he had mastered as engineer 
 and operator every problem put before him in 
 mountain railroading, and he knew his mountains 
 in the Pittsburg district as well as he knew his 
 
 99 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 trigonometry. Turning to Ohio, his activities as 
 the chief engineer, the general manager, and the 
 operating vice-president of various roads took him 
 from end to end of the State, and familiarized him 
 thoroughly with the territory from which he was 
 destined ten years later to lead his greatest under- 
 taking : 1898 brought him face to face with it. 
 
 From any point of view the problem of getting 
 a railroad into Pittsburg is a staggering one. The 
 physical obstacles alone are overwhelming; but 
 these difficulties are incalculably increased by the 
 extraordinary intrenchment of the Pennsylvania 
 road in its own peculiar stronghold. Financially, 
 physically, and politically, the principal fortress 
 of the great road is well-nigh unassailable. In- 
 stinctively alert, and representing, as they always 
 have represented, the highest astuteness in railway 
 management, the Pennsylvania people had closed 
 avenue after avenue toward their centre. The ab- 
 sorption of small lines that might offer temptation 
 to an invader had been carried on until railroad 
 maps were changed faster than new ones could 
 be printed. Nevertheless, the Wabash forces or- 
 ganized for attack. 
 
 From Toledo a single loophole left unguarded 
 made possible a long march toward the coveted 
 territory. In leaving Toledo eastbound travel- 
 lers on the limited trains of the Lake Shore 
 
 100 
 
The Fight for Pittsburg ;u,Tj 
 
 road see for some distance on the right a single- 
 track railroad often mistaken for the Nickel Plate. 
 It is a modest coal road known as the Wheeling 
 and Lake Erie, and it runs across Ohio from 
 Toledo quite to the eastern boundary of the State. 
 The Wheeling and Lake Erie was owned by 
 Cleveland people Myron T. Herrick and his 
 friends and was then for sale. A gap of some 
 sixty miles from Jewett, Ohio, would extend that 
 meandering and very quiet coal road to Pittsburg, 
 and George Gould determined to buy the Wheel- 
 ing and Lake Erie. 
 
 It is said that the property had once been of- 
 fered to the Pennsylvania people. Whether true 
 or not, nothing could better illustrate the sharp, 
 fast moves of the game then already on than the 
 story of the purchase of the Wheeling and Lake 
 Erie. So alive were all parties at interest in the 
 matter, the besiegers and the besieged, that in the 
 short interval between the time Mr. Gould deter- 
 mined to buy the road and the consummation of 
 his purchase he was compelled to pay more for a 
 controlling interest in the stock than the whole 
 road and all of its securities had originally been 
 offered for. But with the purchase of the Wheel- 
 ing and Lake Erie the mask, so far as ultimate 
 intentions are concerned, was thrown off and war 
 began. 
 
 101 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 No one will say that it has ever been other than 
 a gentlemen's fight. The conditions of the inva- 
 sion were well understood, and quarter was neither 
 asked nor given; but the diplomacy, the fine 
 moving, the gloving of the hand, and the iron 
 shock of all the secret complications of the con- 
 test cannot be and never will be written: they 
 belong to the stories that never are told. The 
 State of Pennsylvania is celebrated not alone as 
 the home of one of the greatest railroads in the 
 world but as the State with the most astonishing 
 railroad laws, this being one of them : the direc- 
 tors of a railroad may in session " adopt," with- 
 out restriction, any route in the State of which 
 they choose to make a survey, and, without doing 
 a dollar's worth of work, they may hold it abso- 
 lutely for a period of two years. Their record 
 of their plans is their own privileged secret. 
 They may meet in publicity or in seclusion and 
 " adopt " any part of the Alleghanies they fancy, 
 but they cannot be dislodged within two years 
 under any circumstances, and, should they care to 
 proceed, not then. 
 
 This peculiar statute makes an attempt to 
 enter Pennsylvania with a new railroad somewhat 
 confusing, especially if there be powerful interests 
 to oppose. However, the rule that works one 
 way works the other, and the moves between Mr. 
 
 1 02 
 
The Fight for Pittsburg 
 
 Cassatt's forces and Mr. Gould's became those of 
 experts at chess, with the Pennsylvania Railroad at 
 times most unexpectedly calling check and the 
 Wabash retorting with counter-check. 
 
 Naturally, that which makes a leadership effec- 
 tive in a battle under cover such as the Wabash 
 was compelled to wage is a thorough acquaint- 
 ance with all the factors in the contest. Ramsey, 
 Gould's chief in the struggle, has been called, as 
 Grant was called, a bulldog, and it is true that 
 the two men have, in common with Americans 
 of their peculiarly emotionless type, those quiet 
 and impassive qualities of persistence that go 
 to make up really dangerous antagonists. To 
 men such as these an obstacle interposed means 
 only that it is something to be crawled over, or 
 burrowed under, or turned by the right flank or 
 turned by the left, and as Grant hurled his men 
 against the Wilderness lines so Ramsey hurled 
 the Gould millions against the Pittsburg defences. 
 In that remarkable city alone five million dollars 
 were spent in acquiring terminal property, and 
 those sixty miles of Jewett track that Ramsey 
 built are sown from end to end with gold. A 
 single tunnel called for a million dollars ; a second 
 one for nearly as much. Within a distance of 
 twenty miles there are eight large tunnels, several 
 concrete arches with fifty-feet spans and fifty 
 
 103 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 heavy fills, one of them 3,500 feet long, built of 
 1,000,000 cubic yards of earth. In all the United 
 States there is nothing in railroads like this sixty- 
 mile track. When railroad men are told that 
 James W. Patterson, Ramsey's chief engineer, has 
 crossed the Ohio Valley with a maximum grade 
 of seven-tenths per cent, and a maximum curv- 
 ature of three degrees, they are first to express 
 admiration for his achievement ; and through the 
 most adverse topography and this low rate of the 
 curves he has managed to preserve sixty-one per 
 cent, of straight track. To be of value to its 
 builders the line needed to be equipped for high 
 tonnage. The very necessities called for a light- 
 grade road with easy curves, and the engineers 
 made their surveys to fit the requirements. 
 
 A comparison with standard lines in the same 
 territory will show how in 1903 railroad construc- 
 tion has advanced over the best construction of 
 earlier years. The Pan Handle leaving the Ohio 
 River at Steubenville for Pittsburg, as the Wa- 
 bash extension leaves it at Mingo, has two prom- 
 inent summits on its line as against one on the 
 Wabash. The heaviest grade on the Wabash is 
 less than thirty-seven feet to the mile, against 
 something like sixty in the first construction of 
 the Pan Handle. In all, these forty miles of 
 Gould track have but fifty-six curves, and so 
 
 104 
 
The Fight for Pittsburg 
 
 straight has the line been made that one may 
 stand at the west end of the first Ohio tunnel and 
 look through it across the trestles, over the Mingo 
 bridge and through the tunnel in the West Vir- 
 ginia hill. Country roads were abandoned and 
 new ones built by the engineers; viaducts were 
 thrown across farms and mountain streams torn 
 from their courses to make the Jewett track. At 
 the foot of Chapel Hill Mr. Patterson has pro- 
 vided a fifty- feet span arch with a "barrel" 180 
 feet long containing the largest single mass of 
 concrete in the form of an arch in the world. For 
 miles through the mountains the track springs 
 from height to height over enormous fills that 
 often exceed a hundred feet in depth. 
 
 It will not be supposed that these results 
 have been reached without strenuous effort nor 
 without occasional subtle entanglement for the 
 Wabash constructionists. But they never fal- 
 tered. Out-manoeuvred at one point, they sought 
 another; checked at a gap, they bored a moun- 
 tain. The most unexpected natural obstacles 
 interposed themselves even when foresight had 
 provided for those of human agency. Under- 
 neath the million-dollar Green-tree tunnel a coal 
 vein, without the knowledge of the owners of the 
 land, had been stripped. One night a section of 
 the tunnel floor dropped eighteen inches. It was 
 
 105 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 not that it cost forty thousand dollars to make 
 good the settling; what hurt most was that it 
 took six months' time. Bridges were called for 
 till steel mills threw up their hands. There are 
 on this short line without numbering either the 
 great Mingo bridge across the Ohio with a seven- 
 hundred-foot cantilever span or the tremendous 
 Monongahela cantilever at Pittsburg more 
 bridges than there are miles of track. The Mo- 
 nongahela bridge, scene of a tragic accident dur- 
 ing its building, is in itself most unusual. Like 
 the Mingo bridge it provides for a double track 
 and is built with thirty-two feet between truss 
 centres. It stands on a one-per-cent. grade, and 
 rises, at the low end, a clear seventy feet above 
 full pool in the Monongahela River. The weight 
 of this singular and enormous structure is above 
 7,000 tons. A mate to it, indeed, is not to be 
 found on this side the ocean. For its only bigger 
 brother one must go to Queensferry, Scotland, 
 where years ago the North British Railway Com- 
 pany flung across the estuary of the Forth River 
 the world-famed cantilevers that are united in 
 spans 1,710 feet long; but even this unexampled 
 undertaking leaves the Wabash bridge, at 812 
 feet in a clear span from centre to centre of 
 towers, the second longest cantilever bridge in 
 the world ; and this is the bridge whose very per- 
 
 106 
 
The Fight for Pittsburg 
 
 mission to be, slipped past the Pennsylvania 
 watchdogs in Congress as modestly as a mouse 
 could slip through a hole in a barn floor. 
 
 In a railroad fight, however, there is no fatal- 
 ism, and it should not be inferred that if the Wa- 
 bash had not won at that particular time at Wash- 
 ington the fight would not have been fought out 
 again there or elsewhere. The Washington blow, 
 though a serious one to the defenders, left them 
 undaunted, and in the Pittsburg councils they 
 repeatedly prevented the passage of an ordinance 
 giving to the Wabash permission to enter the 
 city. While the battle raged in the city councils 
 the Wabash people went ahead with their big 
 Monongahela bridge, which without an ordinance 
 to cross Pittsburg streets with their elevated 
 structure must have proved valueless. 
 
 Pittsburg looked on amazed at their apparent 
 recklessness. Hostile city officials sought to en- 
 join Joseph Ramsey and his cohorts from wasting 
 their money on a structure across the river when 
 they could never get into the town ; but in court 
 the Wabash counsel pleaded the sovereign 
 authority of Congress for its license to cross a 
 navigable stream, and the court decided an in- 
 junction could not issue. Appealed to the Su- 
 preme Court, the decision in the case below 
 was reversed, but work had been going steadily 
 
 107 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 on and the city of Pittsburg itself had been mean- 
 time waking up. The tide of unprecedented 
 prosperity which spread over the United States 
 and reached its climax in 1901-02 swept even so 
 highly organized and perfectly disciplined a rail- 
 road system as the Pennsylvania for a moment 
 completely off its feet. Traffic in ever-increasing 
 volume overpowered its heavy equipment, and, 
 worst of all, congested its freight yards. 
 
 Pittsburg became an absolute storm centre, 
 and loaded cars at the Pittsburg yards could not 
 be got in or out; the situation became a traffic 
 tragedy, resulting in the most strenuous personal 
 effort on the part of high executive officials of 
 the great road to bring order out of the ter- 
 minal chaos at Pittsburg. This freight block- 
 ade came at a time when business men were 
 least willing to bear it. To plead that no other 
 road under similar difficulties could do half so 
 well availed nothing. The Wabash, gently fan- 
 ning the flame of local discontent, appealed to the 
 business interests of Pittsburg to bring competi- 
 tion into the city. The Wabash issue was made 
 of a sudden a fierce political one, and Mr. Ramsey, 
 who probably never for a moment had doubted 
 that, when he had once clearly demonstrated 
 to a suspicious public that the Wabash wa& 
 making a good-faith attempt to bring a compet 
 
 108 
 
The Fight for Pittsburg 
 
 ing line into the town, public opinion itself would 
 force the passage of an enabling ordinance, found 
 himself again in luck. For two years the fight 
 had raged with greater or less fury among the 
 aldermen; at last they began to waver. Where 
 the Wabash had had its enemies it began to 
 find friends, and the adverse Supreme Court de- 
 cision had hardly cooled before a change in the 
 Pittsburg councils' complexion gave the Wabash 
 its ordinance so long and stubbornly held up, and 
 the last legislative bridge was crossed. 
 
 It was by no means the first time that encour- 
 agement had been extended to the invaders by 
 large Pittsburg interests. In the incipiency of 
 the fray substantial promises of business had been 
 made by various Pittsburg shippers. The very 
 moment the news of the Gould plans to enter the 
 city became public, rumor asserted that the Car- 
 negie Steel Company had already contracted to 
 give the Wabash twenty-five per cent, of its 
 Western tonnage. The assertion has repeatedly 
 been made and has been repeatedly denied, but 
 it is definitely known that such a contract does 
 exist, though perhaps its importance in the public 
 mind is somewhat exaggerated. It has been 
 averred that the interests in control of United 
 States Steel will not abide by such an agreement ; 
 though it is difficult to see how the most hostile 
 
 109 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 management could avoid it after Gould has ex- 
 pended $25,000,000 to make good his end of the 
 compact courts are somewhat jealous in guarding 
 questions of consideration. Again, it is hardly 
 safe to say who really is in control of United 
 States Steel; but aside from all question of steel 
 control, the strategy of a game of this size is infi- 
 nitely bigger. It must be considered that if no 
 contract existed, on the day that Mr. Gould opens 
 the doors of his freight houses in Pittsburg for 
 business there lie behind them fifteen thousand 
 miles of his own rails, and that the Wabash will 
 call for a reasonable proportion of Pittsburg ton- 
 nage and command it. A disturbance of rates in 
 the Pittsburg district is not calmly to be thought 
 of in the railroad world ; it would disturb Holland 
 more than a tidal wave. Naturally the Penn- 
 sylvania Railroad continues to tie up every pos- 
 sible source of business, but when the Wabash 
 connects with the Union Railway the Carnegie 
 local line to various industries in the district it 
 alone will open up a share of traffic that amounts, 
 in what were the Carnegie industries, to 16,000,000 
 tons annually, while the other industries the local 
 line reaches contribute enough business to swell 
 the figures to 40,000,000 tons. 
 
 With the Wabash in the Pittsburg territory 
 the railroad control of all this enormous business 
 
 no 
 
The Fight for Pittsburg 
 
 and the division of richest railroad territory in the 
 United States becomes triangular. The Vander- 
 bilts, the Pennsylvania, and George Gould now 
 dominate and will dominate in New York, Penn- 
 sylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, and West 
 Virginia, with powerful arms reaching to the 
 Mississippi Valley and north and east into New 
 England. It may mean the closing of the map 
 for centuries; certainly in our day the present 
 control is likely to remain undisturbed. 
 
 in 
 
THE GOULD LINES 
 
THE GOULD LINES 
 
 IF there has been during the opening years 
 of the present century a sensitive spot anywhere 
 in the railroad situation of the United States, it 
 may properly be termed the Gould lines. 
 
 Not a deep study of railroad affairs is needed 
 to explain why. The Gould lines are young, 
 vigorous, and aggressive. The head of the Gould 
 lines is said to work much of the time with his 
 coat off; he is young himself and not afraid of 
 draughts. His roads, then, may be said to take 
 their cue from their owner; in the railway world 
 the Gould lines work in their shirt sleeves, and 
 every once in a while the question bobs up, What 
 will they do next *? 
 
 Those that picture the railroad magnate a man 
 of elegant leisure or of luxurious ease should 
 follow the owner of the Gould lines through a 
 week's work at his New York desk, or note the 
 size of the bag of papers he takes every Friday 
 night to his country home, or count the tele- 
 grams that he throws to an operator on each 
 Monday morning for transmission at the various 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 operating headquarters on his fifteen thousand 
 miles of railroad. Every road in his system he 
 knows intimately; steel rails were his business 
 cradle ; he began railway management when he 
 was fifteen years old. 
 
 The hive of the Gould lines' activity is the 
 old building on lower Broadway that has housed 
 the Western Union for so many years. Number 
 195 Broadway may not stand for much among 
 modern office buildings, but it stands for a great 
 deal in the railway world, and, to follow the figure 
 of the hive, it gives at times uneasy moments to 
 railway neighbors, particularly when they find 
 Gould bees swarming in their back yards. What, 
 then, are the Gould lines? And what do they 
 stand for*? 
 
 No railway combination in the United States 
 is so loaded with possibilities. A glance at its 
 map shows its stronghold; it lies west of the 
 Mississippi. In the corn belt the Wabash ex- 
 tends as far north as Des Moines and Council 
 Bluffs in Iowa. The Missouri Pacific, though it 
 pushes into only one corner of Nebraska, pushes 
 into the best corner; and in Kansas it doubles 
 and branches from end to end of the State until 
 its map becomes, in a railway sense, paramount. 
 To the Eastern public the Gould lines are hardly 
 known. Even in Chicago they are known only 
 
 116 
 
The Gould Lines 
 
 at a distance ; it is when one reaches St. Louis 
 that the Gould lines are felt; in St. Louis they 
 are very distinctly in the railway air. The Wa- 
 bash shows strength in Illinois, and the Missouri 
 Pacific meets it at the Mississippi with almost a 
 dominant power in Missouri. From St. Louis, 
 Gould lines run everywhere south and west. 
 They thread the valleys of Arkansas, throw arms 
 like rivers from side to side of the State of Louisi- 
 ana, and spread in a teeming delta far out upon 
 the plateaus of Texas. They lie under the snows 
 of the forests of Michigan and they skirt the 
 parching heat of the Staked Plain. The Mis- 
 souri Pacific stretching across Kansas to Colorado 
 meets the Denver and Rio Grande at Pueblo, 
 and crossing the Rockies the Gould lines await 
 the products of the irrigated valleys and climb 
 high into the mining camps of Colorado and 
 Utah. 
 
 From even so inadequate a sketch of their 
 Western strength some idea may be had of what 
 comes behind George Gould when he brings his 
 lines into Pittsburg, for example. No other rail- 
 road power in the United States that looks to the 
 Atlantic seaboard has, up to this time, crossed the 
 watershed of the Rockies; but George Gould is 
 already at the Great Salt Lake, and water drip- 
 ping from his rails finds its way into the Gulf 
 
 117 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 of California. He is at Leadville above the Ar- 
 kansas, and his roads track the big river clear to 
 its mouth and follow its waters to New Orleans. 
 From Omaha he tabs the Missouri River every 
 traffic mile of the way till it mingles with the 
 Mississippi ; and the Mississippi, all the way from 
 Keokuk in Iowa to its mouth, is hedged with 
 Gould roads. 
 
 This is what gives the backing to the Gould 
 system. Its mileage does not mean the densest 
 traffic, for a division between New York and 
 Philadelphia may stand for more business than a 
 whole stretch of track across the State of Texas. 
 But the history of the Eastern systems of railroads 
 is made ; that of the Gould roads is in the making. 
 The territory that the Eastern roads cover is de- 
 veloped; the stronghold of the Gould lines is in 
 its infancy. What, in another generation and in 
 the hands of an equally able successor, may the 
 Gould lines mean, when to-day in farthest Texas 
 they strike, with the Texas and Pacific, the waters 
 of the Rio Grande at El Paso, find a powerful 
 Gulf outlet at Galveston, and spreading thence 
 north and east, not in a single track but in doub- 
 lings and battalions of tracks, find a harbor at 
 Buffalo and a terminal at Pittsburgh 
 
 Nor is the Western end of their territory at 
 present the most distinctive. As far as trunk 
 
 118 
 
The Gould Lines 
 
 lines from the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic 
 seaboard are concerned the situation is so in hand, 
 the community of interests between Mr. Morgan, 
 the Vanderbilts, and the Pennsylvania so perfect, 
 and the territory so covered, that new ventures in 
 that field are to-day, with one exception, incon- 
 ceivable. 
 
 The exception is the Gould lines. Far down 
 in the western extremity of Maryland and among 
 the northern passes of the Alleghanies in 'West 
 Virginia little lines may be seen breaking out 
 like mild eruptions, so to say, on the railway map. 
 They spring up in red streaks and patches after 
 morning telegrams in the New York papers 
 noting changes in control, sales of short and 
 unimportant lines in that territory, and in con- 
 struction news concerning the leasing of coal 
 lands. The despatches are fugitive and scattered, 
 but they have a common significance ; they stand 
 for Gould blazing his trail to the Atlantic sea- 
 board. From Pittsburg he is filling in the 
 gaps that will put the Wabash into Baltimore. 
 No cheap railroad there will serve ; such a line, 
 like the Pittsburg extension, must be of the best 
 twentieth-century railroad construction, for the 
 competition he then pits himself against is like 
 the white heat of steel and as pitiless. Leaving 
 out possibilities not yet to be discussed below the 
 
 119 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 fifth floor of 195 Broadway consider where this 
 definitely, and almost to-day, puts the Gould lines : 
 At the Atlantic seaboard with a Baltimore termi- 
 nal; at the Canadian boundary with a Buffalo 
 terminal ; at the traffic heart of the United States 
 in Pittsburg; in the Lake Superior country with 
 the Toledo and Ann Arbor, where Gould car- 
 ferries await grain from the valley of the Red 
 River of the North and command traffic in the 
 iron and copper countries; then in one tremen- 
 dous sweep past New Orleans to Galveston on 
 the Gulf of Mexico; still farther to the very 
 southernmost terminal in the United States, La- 
 redo, Tex.; and from there to within striking 
 distance, at El Paso in Texas and at Ogden in 
 Utah, of the Pacific Ocean. 
 
 Certainly, for those that cherish the thought of 
 a day that will see one transcontinental trunk 
 line, unbroken in control, from the Atlantic 
 Ocean to the Pacific, here is material for dreams. 
 On the other hand, the timorous, who look with 
 alarm on the prospect of one-man control in 
 American railroads, will find compensation in the 
 fact that for Mr. Gould working-days cannot pos- 
 sibly grow forty-eight hours long, and that Mr. 
 Rockefeller, his partner, is advanced in years. 
 
 But the Gould lines to-day stand actually for 
 so much that speculation as to their future may 
 
 1 20 
 
MENOMINEE^ 
 
The Gould Lines 
 
 be spared. They stand for a line from Buffalo to 
 Kansas City and from Omaha to New Orleans. 
 They stand for a line from St. Louis to Ogden 
 and from Pittsburg to El Paso. They stand for 
 a line, with the Mexican National, from Chicago 
 to the City of Mexico and that the shortest line. 
 They stand for a line from Denver to Pueblo, 
 across Kansas, through the Indian Territory, with 
 a wholly rebuilt, low-grade line down the Arkan- 
 sas River and Valley to the Gulf ports. Gould 
 lines are so thick from St. Louis to the mouth of 
 the Mississippi that, where in the wisdom of rural 
 legislators lines in competitive territory may not 
 be officered by the same people, it is necessary to 
 call in outside talent to man the executive staffs, 
 and to the natives the sanguinary railroad spec- 
 tacle is presented of Mr. Edwin Gould heading 
 one line while Mr. George Gould manages the 
 destinies of a fierce competitor. 
 
 Here, then, is a system of railways with traffic 
 possibilities as big almost as the country itself. 
 It is not ideal as to composition; no system that 
 has been built up line by line as opportunity 
 of purchase or lease offered can be. It certainly 
 is in many portions far from anyone's ideal as 
 to physical condition; these are the accidents 
 of empire-building without unlimited resources. 
 What should be marked is that the later addi- 
 
 121 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 tions to the Gould system are of a class wholly 
 different from the older lines. In order to get 
 something he does need in the way of a link 
 or a feeder, a railroad operator in building up 
 often finds it necessary to buy something he 
 does not in the least need. There are always 
 branches in a railroad group that are hard to fit in 
 anywhere as earners, and on which it seems like 
 letting blood to spend money, and though with 
 every tide of business prosperity in the country 
 the railroads all get a lift, the day for picking up 
 good things on the railroad bargain counter has 
 largely gone by, and the big operators to-day are 
 busy dusting up and polishing their antiques. 
 What they need now is usually something that 
 cannot be bought lines to round out adequately 
 their present holdings and to increase their earn- 
 ing power. Such needs are too definite to be 
 served by picking up stray pieces of track, could 
 they be had. The time has come when for these 
 purposes links or extensions must be built, and 
 any railroad built to-day must be built within 
 certain definite limits as to grades and curves, 
 or it cannot earn money. The example of what 
 George Gould has done in modern construction 
 in getting into Pittsburg has been widely dis- 
 cussed. In Pittsburg last year his chief of con- 
 struction checked out $12,000,000 of Gould 
 
 122 
 
The Gould Lines 
 
 money, placed to his private credit, so fast that 
 he felt a personal shock in the celerity of the 
 operation. While this was going on, Gould funds 
 were being poured out in a stream west of the 
 Mississippi. To avoid the terminal crush at St. 
 Louis, Gould is completing from East St. Louis 
 a new line to the Gulf with maximum grades of 
 three-tenths per cent., easy curves, and an eighty- 
 five-pound rail. This means St. Louis to New 
 Orleans and Galveston, and with the strongest 
 line in the field. 
 
 Down the valley of the Arkansas, millions of 
 dollars have been spent in rebuilding completely 
 the track in the Little Rock and Fort Smith terri- 
 tory, making it low-grade and equipping it for 
 the exactions of heavy tonnage to strengthen the 
 big links from the Rockies to the Gulf. From 
 the Ozarks in Missouri, Mr. Gould is building 
 down the White River another low-grade line 
 that will not only supply the shortest line from 
 Kansas City and Missouri River points to Mem- 
 phis and New Orleans but will open up a new 
 territory described as "magnificent." 
 
 In the building up of any great system of rail- 
 ways ambition may to a certain point be the chief 
 factor; beyond that it becomes self-preservation. 
 The acquiring of additional lines is in the end a 
 necessity to provide outlets for traffic originating 
 
 123 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 in one's own territory or to secure feeders that will 
 supply material needed by the territory's industries. 
 Railroad operators are forced at times to take over 
 competing lines that assume the attitude of black- 
 mailers ; roads have been built with precisely such 
 ends in view. In this way any system is liable to 
 acquire more or less dead wood, the only salvation 
 for such investments lying in the ever-growing 
 needs of the country for transportation facilities, 
 so that ultimately the least useful division takes 
 its place acceptably in the activities of the system. 
 
 In this way, too, it is a fact, and at times a 
 serious one, that there comes about in railroad 
 consolidation a wasteful competition between dif- 
 ferent lines belonging to the same interests. The 
 view here taken assumes nothing more than that 
 public interests require not only reasonable rates 
 but stable rates, and when, whether through secret 
 rebates or the reduction of an open tariff to a point 
 below a legitimate operating profit, a road cannot 
 make money, it is in the end the public that suf- 
 fers. 
 
 Of equal disadvantage to public interests is the 
 policy sometimes followed by the traffic manager 
 of a small line in a system, who, in order to make 
 a showing for his own road, so refuses to inter- 
 change traffic with foreign lines as to be in a state 
 of war with his neighbors. He may, for instance, 
 
 124 
 
The Gould Lines 
 
 refuse to let traffic go off his line save by the 
 longest way, making prohibitive rates the short 
 way, thus delaying traffic movement if nothing 
 worse. He may in this manner make the whole 
 system of which he is a small part suffer even 
 in the interchange of traffic between component 
 lines. Few systems have not felt the waste and 
 disadvantage caused by the tendency of each 
 manager to consult his own interests and let the 
 system look out for itself. A system so situated 
 becomes a house divided against itself; stock- 
 holders suffer in earnings and shippers' interests 
 suffer through neglect, because every economy in 
 operating expense and in time tends ultimately 
 to benefit the public. 
 
 To meet this difficulty and to insure internal 
 harmony in the affairs of the different American 
 railroad combinations a new American railroad 
 official has been called into being. He is so new 
 that as yet no quite satisfactory title has been 
 found for him, but such men may be termed chief 
 traffic officers; in this capacity Mr. Bird serves 
 the Gould lines, Mr. Darius Miller, the Hill lines, 
 Mr. Stubbs, the Harriman lines. Their official 
 titles may vary somewhat ; Mr. Bird is vice-pres- 
 ident of the Gould lines, Mr. Miller is vice- 
 president of the Burlington road, and Mr. Stubbs 
 is traffic director of the Harriman lines. 
 
 125 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Heading the departments of traffic, they may all 
 be termed traffic directors. As to their authority, 
 they are actually traffic presidents, in that their 
 powers, as arbiters of traffic between the various 
 lines in their combinations as well as over all, are 
 plenary. In the judicial aspect of their railroad 
 systems they are traffic supreme courts, umpires 
 from whose word there lies practically no appeal, 
 or from whom an appeal if lodged must lie 
 directly with Mr. Gould, Mr. Harriman, or Mr. 
 Hill. ' 
 
 The authority of a man so placed is of extra- 
 ordinary scope. Upon his dictates depends the 
 entire income of his system. Nor is his system 
 the only party with vital interests lodged in his 
 hands, for it comes almost as a shock to reflect 
 that to-day if we include the traffic officers of the 
 Santa Fe and of the Rock Island lines it may be 
 said that in the whole vast territory west of the 
 Missouri River the making and unmaking of 
 every rate is in the hands of five men. Consid- 
 ered rightly, however, rather than being an occa- 
 sion for alarm, this is a substantial guarantee to the 
 shipping interests of that territory that not only 
 reasonable but stable rates will prevail. With 
 this nearest approach to one-man power in trans- 
 Missouri territory that will probably be seen in 
 this generation there still remains so great a diver- 
 
 126 
 
The Gould Lines 
 
 sity of interests between the roads themselves, as 
 well as the territories they serve, that very keen 
 though conservative and businesslike competition 
 must long continue to exist as it does to-day; 
 and people of Washington and Oregon will know 
 that they have in Mr. Hill a vigilant railroad 
 operator to look out for their traffic development, 
 while Southern California will realize that the 
 Santa Fe and the Gould and the Harriman lines 
 will not let them suffer in the struggle to secure 
 their share of national commerce. Shippers under 
 such a congress of traffic chiefs are safer than they 
 would be under twenty-five traffic managers oper- 
 ating for periods by means of secret manipulations 
 and breaking at other times into open rate wars. 
 
 In the work of these traffic officers, lie require- 
 ments of the highest intelligence, the widest ac- 
 quaintance with public need, and the broadest 
 views on questions of transportation and the de- 
 velopment of local industries. To the traffic 
 chief his system must look for elimination of 
 waste, whether of time in the best routing of traf- 
 fic or of money in unnecessary transfers and re- 
 handling. He must determine when a rate re- 
 duction becomes profitable and when an advance 
 becomes necessary. Before him must be adjusted 
 the rival contentions of subordinate managers in 
 his own railway family, and he must keep his 
 
 127 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 group of roads as a unit on terms of fair dealing 
 with foreign roads. 
 
 The results already shown in this idea of unify- 
 ing traffic management are material. In the mat- 
 ter of interchange of loaded cars alone, between 
 connecting lines of a system, the new plan of 
 management has more than justified itself. When 
 a road in a system allows its loaded cars to go unre- 
 servedly to other roads under the same ownership 
 the record is usually that they go to a " grave- 
 yard." On the Gould lines the Missouri Pacific, 
 under the old traffic conditions, unloaded its east- 
 bound cars as a measure of self-defence at its St. 
 Louis terminal and the Wabash reloaded the 
 through freight there into its own cars. This 
 entailed an expense of $2 on every car of freight 
 rehandled. It is frequently assumed that because 
 such a charge is absorbed by the railways this 
 costs the shipper nothing; this is not true, but 
 of greater consequence is the delay that the re- 
 handling involves at overcrowded terminals. This 
 and like wastes of time, labor, and money it is the 
 business of a traffic chief to do away with. 
 
 To take an example, not because especially 
 noteworthy in magnitude or novelty but because 
 it is explicit in the interchange of traffic on one 
 railway system, the two roads last named inter- 
 changed on the twelfth of November, 1903, 1,277 
 
 128 
 
The Gould Lines 
 
 loaded cars. The transferring of the freight being 
 done away with, those 1,277 loads wholly escaped 
 the deadly delays of terminal warehouse handling 
 and were sent by a belt line as originally loaded 
 from the one road to the other. Nor did the car 
 equipment of either road suffer in the operation. 
 By the simple clearing-house expedient of com- 
 pelling each road to make good every day its 
 debit balance of cars, loaded or empty, the equip- 
 ment of each is kept at all times unimpaired. If 
 the Wabash receives a thousand loaded cars from 
 the Missouri Pacific it must surrender that day in 
 return one thousand loads or empties. On the day 
 instanced the transfer of 1,277 cars between only 
 two lines of one system saved an unnecessary re- 
 loading expense of $2,554. Applied to one day's 
 freight transfers over all the United States the 
 sum involved would be enormous; but this is 
 only one of many ways in which a director of 
 traffic makes himself felt. He sometimes finds 
 one of his small lines routing freight in a round- 
 about and slow way in order to get the whole 
 haul; but a chief traffic officer with more judg- 
 ment requires that freight shall go by the quick- 
 est route and, in not unknown instances, even 
 when this means that a portion of the haul must 
 be given to a foreign line. Prompt service is put 
 first. 
 
 1129 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Such instances afford a glimpse of a broader 
 viewpoint in railway management a viewpoint 
 better in the end for stockholders and owners as 
 well as for public interests that is making itself 
 everywhere felt in railway affairs in this country. 
 The evolution of good railway management has 
 seemed slow and has been attended by many 
 abuses though not more than have accompanied 
 the development of any great modem institution, 
 industrial or political. To-day there is less abuse 
 in railway management than there has been in 
 the history of railroading, and the elimination of 
 much of it has been made possible only by mak- 
 ing the systems bigger as the country grows big- 
 ger. Railway men realise that their properties 
 are always at the mercy of the people. Public 
 interests may always be safeguarded at Washing- 
 ton by intelligent Federal legislation ; all that rail- 
 road men ask is that it be intelligent. At present 
 the traffic officer who makes the rates finds himself 
 hampered by enactments, State and Federal, so 
 contradictory that they make it difficult to do jus- 
 tice to any interest. 
 
 It is not always, it should be marked, the rais- 
 ing of a rate that makes trouble ; the lowering of 
 one is frequently productive, in disturbing the 
 delicate adjustment of traffic movement, of no 
 end of trouble. Shippers, however, are getting 
 
 130 
 
The Gould Lines 
 
 closer to railways in reconciling differences of 
 opinion between them; they are learning that 
 nothing is less satisfactory than a traffic lawsuit. 
 Between the man that sells transportation and 
 the man that buys there will naturally arise differ- 
 ences in view. The railways in the Northwest at 
 one time reduced the seaboard rates on grain 
 till Northwestern millers saw the ruin of their 
 flour business impending. They determined to 
 fight for their existence as millers and appealed 
 to a great traffic expert on the Vanderbilt lines, 
 Grammer, of the Lake Shore, to help them get up 
 their case for the Interstate Commerce Commis- 
 sion. Captain Grammer heard attentively and 
 answered with a suggestion. He instanced the 
 famous hay cases before the Commission, the un- 
 ending wrangle and delay, and said : " Why not 
 prepare your case and appeal with it not to a Fed- 
 eral tribunal but directly to your railroads them- 
 selves? And I will help you to draw your 
 briefs." They saw the advice was good and took 
 it, and were rewarded with a satisfactory adjust- 
 ment of their difficulties. 
 
 The matter, too, of raising a traffic rate, even 
 when circumstances equitably and justly call for 
 such action, has become well-nigh impracticable, 
 and the Interstate Commerce Commission has 
 come to believe that the sole reason for its exist- 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 ence is to lower rates. Under such conditions a 
 traffic officer will not undertake the responsibility 
 of lowering a rate, even when he feels it might 
 safely be done, because he knows that once put 
 down to relieve a situation or develop a new in- 
 dustry he should never be able to restore it. 
 
 In the face of such conditions everything that 
 railways buy, whether of labour or equipment, has 
 within five years materially increased in cost, 
 while rates have not kept pace with the ad- 
 vances. All ingenuity in traffic management is 
 thus reduced to economy in distributing and col- 
 lecting commodity movement. 
 
 However, the very difficulties with which rail- 
 ways are to-day beset serve, it would appear, to 
 bring out capability, ingenuity, and resource, and 
 in all the activities of the every-day movement to 
 these ends the Gould lines, in their shirt-sleeves, 
 are markedly busy. 
 
THE ROCK ISLAND SYSTEM 
 
THE ROCK ISLAND SYSTEM 
 
 WHEN the United States is reproached for 
 shutting out foreign trade with a tariff wall, pro- 
 tectionists reply that, since the country contains 
 in itself all natural resources, it needs no foreign 
 trade. Whatever may be thought of the argu- 
 ment it must be conceded that a nation so situ- 
 ated is uncommonly lucky. 
 
 The Rock Island System, including, as it 
 does, the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Road and 
 the 'Frisco System, may be said to constitute 
 with its territory a railroad principality, and one 
 which actually does somewhat approach the in- 
 dustrial independence claimed for the nation. 
 
 The Rock Island, for instance, serves more towns 
 of 25,000 people than any other Western road, 
 and this gives it an urban standing. It might 
 easily pose, too, as an agricultural road. A road 
 strong in a wheat belt is said to be well in- 
 trenched. But what shall be said of a road 
 whose wheat belt is bounded on the north by 
 Canada, on the south by Mexico, on the west by 
 the Rocky Mountains, and on the east by Ohio *? 
 
 135 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 In the United States lies a pretty strictly de- 
 fined corn belt. It is known as one of the richest 
 agricultural regions in the world. Every railroad 
 within the corn belt is rich, and the Rock Island 
 lines are in the heart of it. That group of rail- 
 roads in the Middle Northwest known before 
 recent consolidations as the Granger lines has 
 long been uniformly prosperous; but to-day, of 
 all that group, only the Rock Island is able to 
 carry export corn and wheat either to the Gulf 
 over its own rails, or to the Atlantic seaboard 
 through its Chicago gateway; it is at Chicago 
 and within striking distance of Galveston. A 
 third field product of primary importance remains 
 cotton; and the Rock Island is a cotton road. 
 Fourteen States share in the production of this 
 crop, which ranks second among all of our agri- 
 cultural resources. Of these States, nine are served 
 by the Rock Island lines. 
 
 What is still more unusual, one traffic territory 
 served by the Rock Island, and somewhat vaguely 
 termed the new Southwest, depends neither on 
 corn, nor wheat, nor cotton alone. It enjoys a 
 climate and a soil so patient of all of these crops 
 that the farmer may plant, indifferently, which 
 he pleases : cotton, or corn, or wheat. 
 
 The strength of a road drawing its traffic from 
 all of our great agricultural districts is obvious. 
 
 136 
 
The Rock Island System 
 
 Railroads of the farther Northwest depend on a 
 wheat crop. But the Rock Island may view with 
 less alarm the failure of a wheat crop, or of any 
 one of our three greatest crops, because it still has 
 the other two to depend on. 
 
 Last year seventy per cent, of the total grain 
 crop of the country was raised in Rock Island 
 System States. Sixty per cent., or 2,000,000 car- 
 loads, was raised in eleven States shipping largely 
 by Rock Island lines. Fifty-five per cent, was 
 raised west of the Mississippi River. 
 
 The Rock Island brings cattle from the farms 
 and ranges of its own territory to the packing 
 centres of the country, reaching all of them, and 
 when it markets the cotton of its Southern farmer 
 it brings to him his meat grown and packed on 
 its own lines. This very packing-house product 
 is crated and boxed in wood cut on Rock Island 
 lines and carried north by the Rock Island. The 
 system reaches the only considerable timber sup- 
 ply, save that on the Pacific Coast, now left in 
 the United States. It penetrates not alone the 
 Southern pine districts, but reaches the magnif- 
 icent hardwood reserves of the Southwest, in- 
 cluding the oak of Arkansas and the walnut of 
 the Indian Territory. Texas does not pose as a 
 timber country, yet the timber lands of this State 
 cover an area larger than the State of Indiana. 
 
 137 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 In Alabama the Rock Island is at Birmingham, 
 which means a terminal in an American iron and 
 steel district second only to Pittsburg. As to 
 precious metals, Rock Island lines are in Colo- 
 rado, and they reach the smelters of Denver, 
 Pueblo, Omaha, Kansas City, and El Paso. In 
 lead the Rock Island is even more fortunate, 
 for, with its 'Frisco System, it is, in the Joplin, 
 Mo., district, paramount. 
 
 These are certainly claims to distinction, but 
 they do not exhaust the Rock Island list. It not 
 only reaches and supplies all great manufactur- 
 ing centres of the Middle West with raw ma- 
 terial, but it distributes their wares over 15,000 
 miles of railroad in consuming territory. At 
 Moline and at Rock Island, 111., are manu- 
 factories of agricultural implements among the 
 most extensive in the country ; they are very 
 particularly Rock Island System industries. Kan- 
 sas City, on the other hand, is the greatest dis- 
 tributing centre for agricultural implements in 
 the whole world, and it is a principal terminal of 
 both the big roads of the Rock Island System. 
 In the southwestern part of Missouri and the 
 northwestern part of Arkansas lies a region espe- 
 cially favoured by Providence in the temper of 
 its soil and climate. It is known as the Ozark 
 Plateau. Fruit should not ordinarily be expected, 
 
 138 
 
The Rock Island System 
 
 outside California, to interest a large railroad 
 system. But Missouri is the home of the big, 
 red apple, and of these it supplies thousands of 
 car-loads to the Rock Island. Niagara County, 
 N. Y., boasts 924,086 apple-trees, and in the 
 whole United States there is no record to ap- 
 proach this except in Washington County, Ark., 
 where there were at the same time 1900 
 1,555,000 apple-trees; and Washington County 
 has planted half a million apple-trees since then. 
 The lesser fruits figure more in the traffic of the 
 express companies, but peaches from the Ozark 
 Plateau supply more than one thousand cars of 
 freight every year to this railroad. The modest 
 strawberry reddens in the winter sun at the south- 
 ernmost corner of this delightful district. Begin- 
 ning there, the Rock Island picks it up as the 
 season advances, all the way up the line for the 
 northern markets, and, incredible as it may seem, 
 the Ozark strawberry, in addition to an enor- 
 mous express business, supplies annually hundreds 
 of carloads as freight. 
 
 A last natural product vital to the prosperity 
 of an American railroad remains, and to its abun- 
 dance of riches the Rock Island adds a wealth of 
 coal territory which, in extent and distribution, is 
 unusual. One of its new lines, the Chicago and 
 Eastern Illinois, is distinctively a coal road, and 
 
 139 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 when it is considered that the coal fields of Colo- 
 rado, Kansas, Missouri, the Indian Territory, 
 and Alabama are all reached by the Rock Is- 
 land, a strong position in coal resources will be 
 granted it. 
 
 Considered, then, as a combination of railroads 
 joined into one system for industrial independence, 
 the Rock Island lines present a front that is 
 formidable. A traffic pre-eminence can hardly 
 be denied to so considerable a factor among 
 Western railroads when once its plans are realised. 
 It is to-day that these are being shaped. The 
 Rock Island is an infant among American rail- 
 way systems, but it is regarded as a fairly vigor- 
 ous one, and, with its career worked out under 
 wise counsels, no traffic property in the country 
 should have a more enviable future. It is only 
 fair to say that the promise of this already shows 
 forth in the dispositions made for executive au- 
 thority. The Rock Island is purely a Western 
 road, if by this may be understood that it is a 
 Southwestern, a Northwestern, and a Southern 
 road. It is Western as opposed to lines within 
 its territory that seek for, or enjoy, an Atlantic 
 seaboard terminal. The Eastern terminal horizon 
 of the Rock Island is definitely bounded by 
 Chicago, where it maintains relations with all 
 Eastern trunk lines. West of Chicago, however, 
 
 140 
 
The Rock Island System 
 
 the Rock Island is practically everywhere east of 
 Wyoming and the Rio Grande River. As if to 
 emphasise its Western completeness it is building 
 now into New Orleans, spending there $2,000,- 
 ooo for terminals, and in these providing not alone 
 for city business but, what is of more importance, 
 for imports and exports. Anticipating the needs 
 of five hundred years, it has acquired three miles 
 of river frontage for its docks and warehouses, 
 but of this abundant holding six thousand feet 
 will take care of the needs of the present genera- 
 tion of traffic managers, who will direct Rock 
 Island traffic to Galveston, New Orleans, or Chi- 
 cago as conditions imply. The completion, too, 
 of the 'Frisco line from St. Louis into New Or- 
 Jeans will witness the completion of the longest 
 low-grade railroad line in the United States, being 
 nowhere above eleven feet to the mile. 
 
 A road so Western in its territorial strategy is 
 naturally managed wholly in the West. West- 
 ern railroad men are in themselves a tower of 
 strength. They stand for decision, action, and 
 organisation. They are indefatigable, construc- 
 tive, and, above all, resourceful, and to them 
 America owes so much of its present excellence, 
 notable the world over, in affairs of transportation, 
 that the only danger in paying them too strong a 
 tribute is lest it should seem to rob Eastern rail- 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 road men somewhat of their own high due. It 
 is, however, undoubtedly true that poverty of ma- 
 terial resources aids in the overcoming of difficul- 
 ties. It stimulates mental ingenuity, and the 
 Western railroad man has had the inestimable 
 advantage of a stern frontier school. The oper- 
 ating and executive staff of the Rock Island is as 
 markedly Western as its lines. Mr. Winchell, 
 the president of the Chicago, Rock Island, and 
 Pacific Railway, who finds himself at less than 
 forty-six under so particular an executive re- 
 sponsibility, has behind him a Western record 
 as continuous and rounded as that of most railroad 
 veterans of sixty. Outside the motive power it 
 would be difficult to name a single department of 
 the road of which he is chief into which he could 
 not step and perform with ease the duties of the 
 head. Neither the auditing, the passenger de- 
 partment, the freight traffic, nor the operating 
 would present serious difficulties to the president, 
 since he has built up each of such branches on 
 several different Western roads, and the most im- 
 portant of them on the system he now heads. 
 
 Within only the last ten years he has been gen- 
 eral passenger and ticket agent of the Union 
 Pacific, Denver and Gulf, and of the 'Frisco road 
 as well, vice-president and traffic manager of the 
 Colorado and Southern, president of the Kansas 
 
 142 
 
The Rock Island System 
 
 City, Fort Scott and Memphis, vice-president of 
 the 'Frisco System, and lastly and at once, first 
 vice-president of the 'Frisco, of the Chicago and 
 Eastern Illinois, the Evansville and Terre Haute, 
 and third vice-president of the Chicago, Rock 
 Island and Pacific Railway, in charge both of the 
 operating and the traffic. 
 
 To carry the load implied in positions so ex- 
 acting as these indicates extraordinary facility in 
 despatching work, and the men Mr. Winchell is 
 drawing around him are much of this type : men 
 neither young nor old, but at the best of their ex- 
 ecutive power. Thus, one of the heads of Mr. 
 Winchell's staff is a little younger than himself; 
 a second has just turned forty, while the general 
 superintendents are in their prime. 
 
 On these men falls the responsibility for the 
 building up of the Rock Island System, and no 
 railroad work, in all of the newer dispositions of 
 railroad management and control, will involve 
 more hard thinking or call for a heavier expendi- 
 ture of vital energy on the part of a few men. 
 
 In the first place, the operating problems are 
 momentous. A curious statistician has figured 
 out that a union labour president of the Rock 
 Island System travelling eight hours a day on a 
 fast train would need all of sixty days to ride over 
 his road, not to consider stopping for inspection ; 
 
 143 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 but railroad presidents, not yet having formed a 
 union, work sixteen hours a day, and could, there- 
 fore, make the trip in less. However, it would 
 be obviously impossible for any single set of oper- 
 ating officials to get the best results in handling 
 so extended a mileage, and the two chief constit- 
 uent lines of the system, that is to say, the 
 Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway and 
 the 'Frisco System, are likely to be co-ordinated 
 in operating rather than merged. In the hand- 
 ling of large properties railroad practice has al- 
 ready found the limit beyond which it is not wise 
 to extend the work of a single executive staff. 
 If the seat of an authority be too many miles from 
 the point of appeal on questions that call for 
 prompt answer, efficiency becomes impaired. The 
 railroad is no longer sensitively in touch with its 
 customers ; the opportunity to make the road re- 
 spond to every profitable suggestion from shipper 
 or superintendent is lost, and with it the highest 
 development of local traffic. 
 
 But in this co-ordinating, this unifying, this 
 assembling into a working machine of the crude 
 materials of a railroad system lies a labour of in- 
 finite pains. It is not like the building of one 
 engine after the pattern of another, for each rail- 
 road system presents, in forming, unique difficul- 
 ties, and the builders of the newer can only choose 
 
 144 
 
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 W Y O M I N G 
 
 NEBRASKA 
 
 THK ROCK. 
 
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 k**^W* I S C O N S I/N 
 
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 ^ 
 
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 ^WPiD^Ot* ' 
 
 w 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 rlmi 
 
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 errf- ( 
 
 K V 
 
 MEMPHIS 
 
 
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 ^ 
 
 BIRM 
 
 <o 
 
 L & U \ 5 I /\ N ^ 
 
 ! M) SYSTEM. 
 
The Rock Island System 
 
 from the experience of the earlier what they deem 
 suited to their peculiar needs. 
 
 The older Rock Island lines present work for 
 the engineering department. No road represent- 
 ing physically the average conditions of a few 
 years ago can hope for a place in the first rank of 
 traffic to-day, and that the new Rock Island peo- 
 ple understand this is shown in their moves toward 
 betterment. These necessities, however, must be 
 met gradually, and here, too, a nice judgment is 
 needed. What may be taken by the Rock Island 
 public as a token of the present policy is best 
 shown in the new construction. The system is 
 now filling in two links between important ter- 
 minals, one from Chicago to St. Louis and one 
 from St. Louis to Kansas City. The Chicago- 
 St. Louis line is to be double-tracked eighty per 
 cent, of the way, and though the St. Louis-Kansas 
 City line runs through a rougher country than any 
 road between the points named, it shows lighter 
 grades and curvature than any existing line. In 
 this new track-building, wood, with the exception 
 of ties, has been completely eliminated. Bridges 
 and culverts are of steel and concrete, the aim 
 being to put the new road at once in advance of 
 any present competition. 
 
 This much of the parent line. As to the 
 'Frisco, it being, in a way, a Southern road, one 
 
 145 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 expects less of it; yet it shows, somewhat as a 
 surprise, in the getting of traffic, in immigration 
 seeking, and in public service, an aggressiveness 
 which older lines may be glad to follow. The 
 'Frisco runs fully equipped passenger trains be- 
 tween St. Louis and Fort Worth and between 
 Kansas City and Birmingham such as need fear 
 no comparison with the limited trains of the 
 North. They are really years ahead of the neces- 
 sities, but they are substantial aids toward the 
 good will of the public that the road serves. 
 
 As to the system as a whole, the injecting of 
 so much fresh blood into it within two years has 
 naturally resulted in all manner of experiments. 
 Not all of these represent final excellence ; it is a 
 matter of selection and rejection. But in the main 
 they present the spectacle of the most conserva- 
 tive road in the West, so conservative that it has 
 borne the reproach of being old-fashioned, being 
 transformed into a road thoroughly up to date in 
 its methods of securing and handling traffic. Not 
 the least interesting point in these advanced ideas, 
 and one that shows extraordinary results in the 
 building of new States and Territories, is the 
 wholly new method in the passenger department 
 for attracting travel and immigration. 
 
 The department in the beginning stimulates 
 inquiry by entering the lists as an advertiser, and 
 
 146 
 
The Rock Island System 
 
 not as a conventional advertiser but as a bold and 
 striking one. It makes its own every resource in 
 the Yankee art of publicity, and, having attracted 
 its audience, handles it with the tact of a mail- 
 order house. It establishes, in fact, a mail-order 
 branch in railroad administration. The old rail- 
 road way of sending to an inquirer merely adver- 
 tising matter or a letter has been supplanted by 
 the " follow-up " idea, and the Rock Island plans 
 for getting results are almost as exact as the cost 
 sheets of a manufacturer turning out a large prod- 
 uct on a narrow margin of profit. Such a plan 
 costs more, but it brings extraordinary results, and 
 it is not too much to say that, at the moment, the 
 Rock Island sets a pace in publicity efforts for 
 every railroad that has need to build up its terri- 
 tory with families and farms and towns. To 
 direct the tide of immigration in this country 
 toward any particular section of it is an under- 
 taking calling for much time and money; and 
 that a single railroad system should have suc- 
 ceeded in attracting within less than a year so 
 much attention to the Southwest must be gratify- 
 ing to every road in that territory, since all share, 
 more or less, in the prosperity that attends the 
 building up of the States they enter. 
 
 In general, no feature of Western railroading is 
 more active and efficient than the Immigration 
 
 147 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Bureau. The Immigration Bureau is a territo- 
 rial and social clearing-house through which the 
 romance t, the struggles, and the ambitions of 
 primitiv : American homeseekers pass daily like 
 bank cfeecks. The Immigration Bureau is the 
 buildef of new settlements, new communities, 
 and n*w States. It deals with the class of 
 American citizens nearest the simple life, people 
 wholly in earnest, tillers of the soil and small 
 tradespeople who minister directly to their needs. 
 This is the sturdy, industrial class that raises the 
 crops, saves its money, talks no strange political 
 doctrine, multiplies refreshingly, and attends 
 strictly to its own business, and is the comfort 
 of the sociologist that knows his business. The 
 Immigration Bureau professes no politics and no 
 one religious belief to the prejudice of another. 
 It works industriously with the adherent of the 
 older faith and the follower of the new. On the 
 plains of the Dakotas, or of the Texas Panhan- 
 dle, or in the far counties of what is now Okla- 
 homa but was a few years ago No Man's Land, 
 it plants within gunshot of each other colonies of 
 Dunkards, Mennonites, Baptist Brethren, Luther- 
 ans, and Catholics. The best of these pioneers 
 are to-day, as our forefathers were, people of 
 strong and simple religious faith, and when an 
 immigration agent asks a concession in behalf of 
 
 148 
 
The Rock Island System 
 
 such a prospective colony he urges naively that 
 " a settlement of Dunkards or Mennonites means 
 more settlers in the future." Race suicide makes 
 no inroads upon these frontier colonies. The 
 head of the family may trim his whiskers with a 
 scythe and shape his hat over a coffee-pot, but he 
 pays off his mortgage notes and has wheat in his 
 barn. 
 
 The rapidity with which these thrifty folk accu- 
 mulate is astonishing. Twenty-eight small towns, 
 and, necessarily, all new towns, in northern Okla- 
 homa, in 1903 showed fifty-seven banks with 
 deposits of $3,957,000. The town of Ana- 
 darko returned to the Rock Island in freight re- 
 ceipts in 1900, $62,000; in 1901, $172,000. 
 Hobart, in 1900, returned $28,878; in 1902, 
 $309,168. Hobart ticket sales, which in 1900 
 were $877.37, were, in 1902, $42,833.71. Law- 
 ton, in a year, ran up from $138,000 to $352,000 
 in freight earnings. El Reno, in passenger earn- 
 ings, rose in a year from $63,000 to $195,000. 
 
 The figures, to those who have not noted the 
 development of our Southwestern frontier, are 
 astonishing. The older portions of Oklahoma 
 are already so well settled and improved farms 
 are held so high $30 an acre that the alert 
 Immigration Bureau is already preparing to 
 divert the Oklahoma overflow to the newer lines 
 
 149 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 in the Texas Panhandle and New Mexico, 
 where large cattle ranges are being thrown open 
 to small farmers. 
 
 It seems more extraordinary still that so old a 
 State as Missouri should be fertile ground for an 
 Immigration Bureau. Though Missouri was ad- 
 mitted to the Union years before Iowa, it has fewer 
 school-houses and fewer school-teachers than the 
 younger State, and there are still whole counties 
 in Missouri without a railroad. 
 
 Yet Missouri, in profusion of natural riches, is 
 without a parallel in the United States. The 
 operating officer of one of the greatest railroad 
 systems in this country, a man of wide executive 
 experience, riding down the beautiful Mohawk 
 Valley one evening in his car, declared that if 
 obliged to choose from all the Union a single 
 State, and build a wall around it that he was 
 never again to pass, he would choose Missouri ; 
 and the adage is one to which all Missourians are 
 loyal. 
 
 The resources along the new Rock Island line 
 recently built across the State, putting aside an 
 unrivalled climate and agricultural possibilities of 
 every sort, are described by an immigration scout 
 as comprising great ledges and hills of iron ore, 
 all manner of mineral wealth, coal veins twenty to 
 eighty feet thick, timbered tracts of the highest 
 
 150 
 
The Rock Island System 
 
 class and quantity, and large areas of farming 
 lands, cultivated and uncultivated. Why, one 
 would ask, build railroads in Alaska? Indeed, 
 his report, fully read, at once brings up the ques- 
 tion, Why does not everyone live in Missouri? 
 
 Yet the people seem open to other convictions. 
 In Oklahoma 40,000 settlers have been placed 
 along the new Rock Island lines alone. Within 
 the year Oklahoma City has increased 10,000 
 people, a second town 6,000, and a third 3,000. 
 Where Government lands are open for settlement 
 filings are running 600 a day. New Mexico 
 towns, too, are doubling up in a twelvemonth 
 under the stimulus of the railroad work. Towns 
 rejoicing in names such as Alamogordo and Tu- 
 cumcari support jobbing houses. And more 
 consoling instances remain. Eastern Colorado 
 will commonly be acknowledged as being, from 
 the car window, quite hopeless; yet farmers 
 there make good livings without irrigation by 
 raising Irish potatoes. The country is the 
 paradise of the sick man, and again the immigra- 
 tion scout comes in with a specific instance of 
 a man whose name, I have pleasure in recording, 
 is Syke. Syke started from Ohio fourteen years 
 ago and is described as reaching eastern Colorado 
 with poor lungs, haemorrhages, and cash $2.50. 
 He homesteaded 160 acres, and his neighbours 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 "broke out" a portion of it for him the first 
 year. On October 13, 1903, Syke, as hardy as 
 an oak, and ploughing potatoes in his shirt- 
 sleeves, owned the whole section of 640 acres, 
 was feeding fifty head of stock, and whispered 
 to the railroad emissary of money in the bank. 
 Who for fourteen years can better the record of 
 Syke 4 ? 
 
 The Western railroad does not stop at colonisa- 
 tion ; it is equally a bureau of agriculture. The 
 Government conducts such a department, but it 
 is the railroad that spreads the information sup- 
 plied by the Government and supplements its 
 work by local experiment stations, the distribu- 
 tion of literature and seeds, and that close-at-hand 
 urging that gradually compels action among cau- 
 tious farmers. In this the work becomes one of 
 the greatest prudence. The railroad must know 
 precisely what it has to offer in the way of climate, 
 soil, natural resources, and business chances or 
 opportunities for investments. These are its at- 
 tractions, and they must be put before the inquirer 
 with definite understanding of his needs and how 
 they may be filled. The Burlington for years 
 maintained an experiment farm to demonstrate to 
 farmers of the semi-arid region methods of subsoil 
 culture. The Rock Island lines have taken up a 
 peculiarly hard Russian wheat known as durum 
 
 152 
 
The Rock Island System 
 
 or macaroni wheat, and have found in it a grain 
 clearly adapted to the dry, hot climate of our table- 
 lands west of the one hundredth meridian. Russia 
 exports 40,000,000 bushels of this wheat a year, 
 and the Volga district which produces it receives 
 a smaller rainfall than our own Western plains 
 and a very similar distribution. The Department 
 of Agriculture has known of this grain for forty 
 years, but the practical difficulties in the way of its 
 culture have been enormous. There has been thus 
 far no developed domestic market for this valuable 
 product. Millers have refused to buy it because 
 its extreme hardness makes it expensive for milling, 
 and it will not mix with other hard native wheats. 
 Yet such a grain is the wheat salvation of an agri- 
 cultural region covering thousands of miles of 
 rich soil under a low rainfall, a dry atmosphere, 
 and an intense summer heat 
 
 Here the railroad takes hold. Its industrial 
 bureau not only arranges with Minneapolis millers 
 for milling facilities for the hard wheat, but also 
 investigates export markets. In this way the 
 Rock Island has learned that grain brokers at 
 Marseilles and other Mediterranean ports stand 
 ready to handle all the macaroni wheat that is 
 offered, and it "follows up" by investigating 
 freight rates from Russian competitive points and 
 making a rate across the world that will put its 
 
 153 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 local farmer for an export basis on a parity with 
 the Volga moujik. 
 
 The whole process strikingly suggests Mr. Hill's 
 industrial work in a wholly different direction, but 
 both are instances of what the Western road 
 is doing in building up new territories and new 
 markets. Some of these roads have lands to sell; 
 others, as the Rock Island, have none. But they 
 all understand that their prosperity is bound up in 
 the development of local territory ; that the great- 
 est care is needed to avoid deception or misunder- 
 standing in their advice to inquirers, and that there 
 is, after all, no friend so vital to the prosperity of 
 the Western railroad as the contented settler. 
 
 154 
 
THE ATCHISON 
 
THE ATCHISON 
 
 ON the careers of many Western roads lights 
 and shadows have fallen sharply within the last 
 ten years, but on none with so striking a contrast 
 of good fortune and bad as on the Santa Fe. 
 
 There have been periods, and those almost re- 
 cent, when it seemed as if all of the railroad dis- 
 asters of the West, whether of hard times, of crop 
 failures, or of unfriendly legislation, had camped 
 together on the trail of the Santa Fe. In 1896 
 many bad men came out of the West; but of 
 those that rode over the railroad pike no discour- 
 aged miner, no burnt-out farmer, no starved-out 
 cattleman had more of a hard-luck story than the 
 Santa Fe Railroad. Indeed, it may be pictured 
 about 1896 as a lone frontiersman heaving in 
 sight under the sorriest of hats and on the leanest 
 of ponies, with mustaches sweeping his chin at 
 half-mast. 
 
 In matter of fact, every wind that blew from 
 1890 to 1895 blew bad luck to the Santa Fe. 
 Dividends had become in the treasurer's office a 
 
 157 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 mere tradition; the defaulting of interest was 
 more regular than the train service. The com- 
 pany, both physically and financially, was discred- 
 ited. Many of its obligations toward the shipping 
 public had been repudiated; it had no standing 
 among bankers, no character among engineers, no 
 friends among customers, no respect among com- 
 petitors ; contempt it found everywhere, counte- 
 nance nowhere. 
 
 What makes the Santa Fe's experience so ex- 
 traordinary is that within five years thereafter it 
 had been lifted completely out of this railroad 
 slough of despond, and, the vane of its fortune re- 
 sponding to wholly new influences, the great road 
 saw restored to itself all the prestige it had once 
 enjoyed, based on an incomparably wider and 
 deeper foundation than it had ever before rested on. 
 More singularly still, this unusual rehabilitation 
 has been brought about entirely by the manage- 
 ment of the road itself and not through its being 
 absorbed by any strong banking house or big rail- 
 road magnate. The Santa Fe has not been " ab- 
 sorbed " by anybody. Even among independent 
 railroads it stands with especial distinctness out- 
 side any combination or sphere of influence. 
 There are independent roads in plenty that are 
 still Morgan roads, or Kuhn-Loeb roads, or that 
 take suggestions from some one of the half-dozen 
 
 158 
 
The Atchison 
 
 powers in the railroad world. The Santa Fe takes 
 orders neither from bankers nor syndicates. It is 
 a Western road run entirely by its own official 
 staff of young Western railroad merchants, and 
 what makes its story of especial interest is that 
 it is in reality the story of a railroad man 
 Edward P. Ripley. 
 
 When Mr. Ripley, in 1896, took hold of the 
 Santa Fe as its president he did so greatly aaainst 
 the advice of his friends. His own record was 
 one of success, that of the road one of failure ; and 
 for him to ally himself with an institution of so 
 doubtful a name and record was a matter of con- 
 cern to his well-wishers. He assured himself, 
 however, of one thing to start with : a good cor- 
 ner to work from. Of all reorganisations after 
 the panic of 1 893 none was more drastic than that 
 laid out for the Santa Fe. The fixed charges of 
 the company were cut squarely in two, and in 
 order to keep the sheriff afterward out of oper- 
 ating headquarters, it was necessary for the com- 
 pany to earn only half as much as the old com- 
 pany had earned. Starting under Mr. Ripley's 
 management on that basis, the road has never 
 since left solid ground. It has earned not only 
 its dollar of fixed charges, but within the seven 
 years just passed has more than doubled its gross 
 earnings ; and while increasing its mileage in that 
 
 159 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 time less than one-fourth it has increased its earn- 
 ings per mile more than two-thirds. 
 
 Chance will hardly account for such a showing : 
 gross earnings of $68,000,000 last year, against 
 $30,000,000 in 1897, and $8,300 a mile, against 
 $4,750 seven years earlier. It has been done 
 without spectacular display. In the Santa Fe man- 
 agement pyrotechnics have been wholly lacking. 
 What, then, are the methods by which this road 
 has been placed in so short a time in the very first 
 rank of American railroads ? 
 
 The Santa Fe has in its president a man who is 
 by nature of a judicial temperament. He has the 
 characteristics of a judge well poised, and had his 
 fortunes inclined to the law, Mr. Ripley would 
 have been eminent as a jurist. He is a man ap- 
 parently unconscious of his strength. He is 
 wholly unpretentious, yet in the struggles that 
 Western roads have of late years made for better 
 railroad practice he has always been foremost, and 
 that notwithstanding the fact that the taking of 
 advanced ground has at times been to the disad- 
 vantage temporarily of the Santa Fe. Indeed, 
 what the railroads of the whole country owe to 
 the fight this man and his like have made for 
 proper methods and good practice among West- 
 ern railroads it is difficult to estimate. Without 
 the effort to this end in which the best Western 
 
 160 
 
THE ATCHISON, TOPEKA 
 
7A FE RAILWAY SYSTEM. 
 
The Atchison 
 
 men have stood firmly together, the transportation 
 business of the country to-day could hardly have 
 been brought to the position into which Mr. Cassatt 
 has worked^so hard to put it. 
 
 The head of the Santa Fe in this way has com- 
 manded both the respect of railroad men and the 
 confidence of his associates. He has stood among 
 competitors as prudent and dependable, and his 
 straightforwardness has won the loyalty of his 
 subordinates. Though incurring at times the dis- 
 pleasure of autocratic shippers who, desirous of 
 buying transportation in large blocks, have found 
 that Mr. Ripley was opposed to preferential rates 
 and rebates, he has in the end forced even them 
 to recognise the justice of his position. 
 
 Put such a man at the head of an army of 
 30,000 men and he becomes a figure in the rail- 
 road world ; and with this light on his character 
 an understanding may be had of how it comes 
 about that an American railroad, merely by the 
 application to its management of sound business 
 principles, may attain the most enviable success. 
 
 Railroad combinations, it is true, within five 
 years have done more to centralise control than 
 had been done previously in two generations, yet 
 the fact must not be lost sight of that, with prac- 
 tically all done in this direction that can be done 
 until a new generation of railroad men and wholly 
 
 161 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 new powers in finance arise, competition still ex- 
 ists everywhere. At the beginning of 1905 every 
 railroad point in the United States is a competi- 
 tive point. 
 
 The Santa Fe makes its headquarters in Chi- 
 cago. In railroad control, indeed, Chicago may 
 be called the continental divide. Many roads run 
 into Chicago but practically none run through it ; 
 it is a case of change cars for everybody. In Chi- 
 cago, therefore, railroad activity is to be looked 
 for, and there it is found. The position of the 
 city, unique in several ways in the railroad world, 
 makes it a point at which in railway matters steam 
 is always " up." In Chicago may be found the 
 operating and the traffic officers of the most pow- 
 erful railroads in the country. There are in Chi- 
 cago half a dozen private offices where one may 
 find maps that pieced together would make a very 
 respectable supply of railroads for the United 
 States if all other roads were done wholly away 
 with; and these maps, drawn on unusual scale 
 and precise as the field plans of an army corps, 
 represent only the lines controlled by the half- 
 dozen officials for whose use they have been 
 made. 
 
 As to the West, all of its railroad destinies are 
 shaped in these Chicago offices. In Chicago one 
 man sitting at his desk makes a rate with his pen- 
 
 162 
 
The Atchison 
 
 cil from his Chicago terminals over his own rails 
 to his terminals in San Francisco but by no 
 other man in the United States can this be done. 
 The five men who in authority that is absolute 
 are traffic directors of two-thirds of the United 
 States may be found almost every day within a 
 few moments' walk of each other in Chicago. 
 
 Showing as it does in this way the rather start- 
 ling possibilities of the day in railroad control, 
 Chicago is likewise the place to look for some of 
 the impossibilities, for above all other railroad 
 terminal points it exemplifies them. It is the 
 very head centre of the independent road of this 
 day. In Chicago one is brought to realise that 
 the forging of new links in railroad chains is a 
 good thing for the country just as long as it is 
 good business for the men that attempt it and no 
 longer. Chicago, too, forces in the end the con- 
 viction that the situation is so much bigger than 
 any one man that the country develops so much 
 faster than any one man in it, even a fabled 
 Rockefeller, that a monopoly of railroad control, 
 so far as immediate generations are concerned, is 
 the spectre of a dream. 
 
 The widest possible differences in theories of 
 railroad management exist side by side in Chi- 
 cago. One great operator looks first and always 
 to a particular feature of his reports : the expense 
 
 (163 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 account. Another operator, equally powerful and 
 equally able, holds that a low expense account 
 does not necessarily make for the quickest devel- 
 opment of his territory and not, therefore, for 
 the best interests of his road. The first, acting on 
 his theories of management, holds the car of 
 wheat of his farmer on the siding until he can in- 
 clude it in a freight train heavy enough for the 
 full capacity of the locomotive assigned to pull it. 
 The other operator holds that the farmer's grain 
 must be marketed at once. He maintains that 
 he cannot afford to leave wheat on the sidings or 
 in the yards till he gets the maximum tonnage for 
 an engine. Move the grain; time is money. 
 The farmer's capital is tied up, the argument 
 runs; release it promptly and begin over again. 
 It will cost more for the train-mile, but not 
 enough to warrant holding back the movement ; 
 the American way is to look for quick returns 
 and more business. Apply these ideas to the 
 whole field of railway management, and the 
 germs of quite different philosophies are seen. A 
 larger expense account may not necessarily mean 
 a loss; it may stand for a stimulation of traffic 
 that will develop more and stronger shippers and 
 bigger dividends. 
 
 In Chicago those that like to see large rail- 
 roads merged in control and well operated and 
 
The Atchison 
 
 no road can be well operated without benefiting 
 the territory it serves may find them ; and those 
 observers who fear that against such combinations 
 independent lines no longer have a chance for 
 their existence may see them in Chicago abso- 
 lutely the peers of the most powerful competitors. 
 
 This, then, is the atmosphere in which the 
 Santa Fe thrives. Untrammelled by any connec- 
 tion that can swerve it to the right or to the left 
 in railroad affairs, it maintains friendly relations 
 with all of its neighbours and contracts entangling 
 alliances with none. It is the one big, red apple 
 still left on the railroad tree, hanging so high that 
 thus far no magnate's pole has been able to reach 
 it, although George Gould, J. J. Hill, and E. H. 
 Harriman have cast longing eyes in its direction. 
 Surrounded by railroad groups and rumours of 
 groups, the aloofness of the Santa Fe is as refresh- 
 ing as an inspiration, and to the man looking for 
 an example of an independent road ruddy with 
 prosperity it is an oasis in the combination desert. 
 
 In the big national railroad game in which by 
 reason of its size and strength it plays every day, 
 the Santa Fe strategy is characterised by its blunt 
 candour. There are roads that jealously hold up 
 their cards, that assume a mysterious air and 
 negotiate from behind a mask. The Santa Fe's 
 tactics are as open as its strength. It throws 
 
 165 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 down its cards frankly : Here is what we have ; 
 what have you*? Business may be done with 
 such a road if one talks concisely and to the 
 point; but when it knows its own strength and 
 has a pretty shrewd idea of all that is out against 
 it, bluffing is futile. 
 
 Management of such a sort will succeed out- 
 side a combination quite as well as within one. 
 The Santa Fe men are young men in the sense 
 that they are particularly alive, and they come 
 from a good railroad school. In 1878 Mr. Rip- 
 ley was general freight agent of the Burlington, 
 and Mr. Paul Morton, now Secretary of the Navy, 
 was a clerk in his office. Just why the Burling- 
 ton has graduated so many more big railroad 
 men than its natural share no one seems clearly 
 to have determined. But Burlington men are as 
 widely prominent throughout the United States 
 in railway management as Ohio men are in public 
 offices. Notwithstanding the fact that the Bur- 
 lington was some time ago absorbed by the 
 Northern Pacific, the Burlington Howard Elliot 
 appears already to have absorbed the Northern 
 Pacific presidency. The New York Central and 
 the Lake Shore roads are operated by a Burling- 
 ton man, William C. Brown, and two men from 
 the Burlington have managed very largely the 
 destinies of the new Santa Fe. 
 
 166 
 
The Atchison 
 
 What the Santa Fe stands for that is unique 
 among American roads is the present position 
 and unusual length of its main line. No other 
 road that owns a Chicago terminal can boast a 
 straightaway line into San Francisco Bay. 
 
 Geographically, then, the road is of especial in- 
 terest; but it stands also on the most debatable 
 railroad ground in the country. Not only is its 
 competition widely distributed but of a character 
 the most intense and incalculable. The Santa 
 Fe from Chicago strikes straight into the heart of 
 the Gould lines territory. At the Missouri River 
 it meets practically all comers Hill's pet, the 
 dangerous Burlington; Harriman's crack line, the 
 superb Alton ; the always powerful St. Paul and 
 the new Rock Island ; besides the liveliest of the 
 Gould lines, the Wabash and the Missouri Pa- 
 cific. The Santa Fe from Twelfth Street to Kan- 
 sas City lies in a blaze of competition that would 
 melt ordinary railroad abilities, and west of the 
 Missouri River the map broadens into the Colo- 
 rado territory. The St. Paul, then, has dropped 
 out, the Wabash is out, the Alton is out, but 
 Harriman is there with the great Union Pacific, 
 and Chicago competition is again added by way 
 of the keen and far-reaching Chicago and North- 
 western. Hill remains with the Burlington, and 
 the new Rock Island is there, as it is again on the 
 
 167 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Gulf of Mexico, where the Santa Fe must also 
 lock horns with George Gould on his stamping- 
 ground and with Harriman again in the Southern 
 Pacific. This is surely business enough ; but the 
 Santa Fe, with a jump that leaves all but the very 
 giants of the Western world behind, crossing the 
 desert wastes and the continental divide, opens its 
 freight-house doors on San Francisco Bay. Here 
 the competition again takes on new features. It 
 is not alone the powerful competition of its own 
 territory the Southern Pacific intrenched behind 
 an unbroken monopoly of thirty years in its own 
 stronghold that must be reckoned with now it 
 is also Vancouver, Puget Sound, and the Canadian 
 roads competing for the traffic of the Orient. 
 
 Thus the combinations that engage the Santa 
 Fe management are as wide as the continent, and 
 what the odds are against the Santa Fe may 
 now be reckoned. It is practically the Santa Fe 
 against the field. The first great move that Mr. 
 Ripley made to give the Santa Fe absolute inde- 
 pendence was properly to open his California out- 
 let. He found the Santa Fe unable to land its 
 freight in San Francisco save over a hostile con- 
 nection, and he severed the cord that was stran- 
 gling it by acquiring his own rails into northern 
 California. With his terminals thus firmly fixed 
 at Chicago and San Francisco he has rested con- 
 
 168 
 
The Atchison 
 
 tent in his own territory. Beyond the fight he 
 has made for proper rate conditions and due rec- 
 ognition he cannot be said to have indulged in 
 offensive measures. His energies and those of his 
 staff are turned at all times in the direction of 
 developing their local territory, and in this the 
 success of the road has been almost phenomenal. 
 In oil alone, which it uses everywhere in western 
 Arizona and California on its locomotives, the 
 Santa Fe carries ten thousand cars a year where 
 formerly it carried none locally in California or 
 Texas. 
 
 Though meeting in the most liberal way mine 
 owners and people interested in developing the 
 Southwest, and adopting a policy of not charging 
 locally more than the traffic will bear, the Santa 
 Fe has been largely instrumental in preventing 
 preferential rates to the owners of private line 
 refrigerator cars, and has eliminated them entirely 
 from its own traffic problems; and this sturdy 
 determination to put all shippers on a just and 
 equal footing, to maintain open and even rates, is 
 the note of Mr. Ripley's successful strategy. Like 
 all men that achieve unusual success, the head of 
 the Santa Fe is studied curiously by the world, 
 eager to get at the secret of how such things have 
 been done. When the facts are known the world 
 stands surprised. Instead of a cabalistic formula 
 
 169 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 for getting on, the curious inquirer has found 
 merely the simplest, oldest principles of doing 
 business common-sense in generous quantities, 
 well grounded in common honesty. 
 
 The work of the Santa Fe to-day is that which 
 must for fifty years to come absorb the attention 
 of every Western road the colonising of local 
 territory, the planting of a family where only a 
 cactus grew before. To this end its people preach 
 the gospel of irrigation and spend extraordinary 
 sums in advertising the resources of the West. 
 
 The steady growth made by it in mileage and 
 in earnings throws a curious sidelight on one feat- 
 ure of American prosperity directly attributable 
 to this pioneer work, and one which within seven 
 years has become so pronounced as to take on the 
 proportions of a mystery. In the disastrous stock 
 panic of 1903 the East, frightened at the bursting 
 of its own prodigious bubble, looked for a national 
 panic. London and the Continent shared the ap- 
 prehensions of New York. But the panic did 
 not materialise; Wall Street's poor relations, the 
 Missouri and the Iowa farmer and the Kansas and 
 the Nebraska homesteader, came to the rescue of 
 the country with their blue jeans bursting with 
 cash. Credit has been frankly accorded to the 
 West for its aid, but Wall Street hardly under- 
 stands yet where the money came from, and 
 
 170 
 
The Atchison 
 
 that a portion of the glory is the due of the 
 railroads. 
 
 In the early days the Western farmer, having 
 no money to buy cattle or hogs, marketed his 
 corn frequently without its being even shelled. 
 To-day he owns his own feed lots, his cattle, and 
 his hogs. Five carloads of corn feed one carload 
 of steers and one of hogs. But the corn, if mar- 
 keted instead of being fed, would pay a higher 
 rate per car owing to its greater weight than 
 an average car either of hogs or of cattle. Instead 
 of paying freight on five carloads, then, as he paid 
 ten years ago, he now pays freight on but two car- 
 loads a reduction in freight expense of three- 
 fifths. Moreover, at Kansas City, or some other 
 Missouri River point, two cars of his steers are 
 made into one car of dressed beef, and this is 
 hauled to Chicago at about the same rate the car- 
 load of corn pays. Here, again, the amount paid 
 for freight charges is cut in two, and the farmer 
 directly benefits by it. As a result, the farmers 
 have been getting thirty-five to forty cents for corn 
 they used to sell at ten and fifteen cents a bushel 
 to be cribbed. In addition to this it may be esti- 
 mated that they realize at least fifty per cent, more 
 for the corn they feed to stock. The situation, 
 then, to-day is that the farmer, who at one time had 
 to lose all but the producer's profit in raising corn, 
 
 171 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 has added to his balance-sheet the manufacturer's 
 profit of changing corn into pork and beef. Small 
 wonder that he has an occasional surplus to lend 
 in Wall Street; and his prosperity has been no 
 slight factor in the remarkable showing of the 
 Santa Fe. 
 
 Standing as it does, directly out in the spotlight 
 of the railroad stage and still absolutely unaffili- 
 ated, the great road engages in turn the interest 
 of each of its powerful rivals. A combination of 
 the highest strategical importance to it would lie 
 in a tie-up with the Rock Island. The Santa Fe 
 would, in that event, stand west of Albuquerque 
 as an exclusive ally for the Moores to the Pacific 
 Coast. Under such a combination an exchange 
 of trackage east of Albuquerque to form the 
 shortest possiblejiftc"-v^ould result in an extraor- 
 dinary shortening of the distance between Chi- 
 cago, St. Louis, and Kansas City and Los Ange- 
 les and San Francisco. It would even be possible 
 for a contract to be entered into between the two 
 companies as they now stand highly advantageous 
 to both. 
 
 But more tremendous in consequence and of a 
 nature that might mean the recasting of every 
 American railroad plan existing to-day would be 
 the absorption of this youngest of the Western 
 transcontinental giants by the Pennsylvania lines. 
 
 172 
 
The Atchison 
 
 In such a move would lie possibilities calculated 
 to keep the railroad world sleepless for long nights 
 
 to come. If in retaliation for the invasion of its 
 
 
 
 territory by the Gould lines, whose transits already 
 bear on Baltimore, the Pennsylvania should buy 
 the Santa Fe it would at a single step cross the 
 Rockies and run its engines from ocean to ocean. 
 
THE CHICAGO, MILWAUKEE AND 
 ST. PAUL RAILWAY 
 
THE CHICAGO, MILWAUKEE AND 
 ST. PAUL 
 
 THIRTY years ago the farmers of the North- 
 west set vigorously about reforming the railroads. 
 Over Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa ran an 
 epidemic of railroad legislation as lively as a prairie 
 fire, and the movement took on a political activity 
 that surprised the country. The organization 
 through which the farmers worked was a fraternal 
 association known as the Grange, and the move- 
 ment became famous as the Granger movement. 
 
 The Grange has gone the way of all orders po- 
 litical ; its legislation lies forgotten on the statute 
 books. But the movement left those railroads 
 lying within reach of the Granger laws a name 
 that survives; Wall Street dubbed the North- 
 west roads The Granger Lines, and prominent in 
 the group, then as now, is the Chicago, Milwau- 
 kee and St. Paul Railway. 
 
 In this system lies the story of the first railroad 
 built in the State of Wisconsin. This was the 
 first road to give an Eastern outlet by rail to the 
 cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, and one of the 
 
 177 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 very first roads to adopt the system of shipping 
 grain in bulk, which marked the beginning of 
 the modern grain elevator. The St. Paul Road is 
 essentially a Wisconsin road in its beginnings 
 the work of Wisconsin men and a product of 
 Wisconsin planning. It is founded on three lit- 
 tle railroads, one of which was planned within 
 ten years after the definite settlement of Milwau- 
 kee and Wisconsin, in 1836. The story divides 
 itself very clearly into two periods : the first before 
 1887, when Wall Street influences controlled the 
 road's possibilities; the second after 1887, wnen 
 the St. Paul shook off speculative control and 
 became a railroad in the true sense. The year 
 1887 marks the real turning point in St. Paul 
 fortunes ; after that no more fancy branches, no 
 more speculative rigging, but straightaway rail- 
 roading; and such it has been ever since. From 
 beginnings that were random a system has been 
 built up so unified now that each of its constituent 
 lines has been merged even as to corporate organ- 
 ization in the big parent company. The St. Paul 
 controls no subordinate lines; it absorbs them, 
 makes them a part of itself, and their identity 
 becomes merged absolutely into the strength of 
 the whole system. To-day it has no corporate 
 creature permanently within its fold. 
 
 This policy is by no means accidental. It is a 
 
The St. Paul 
 
 policy of individuality, so to say, the result of a 
 well-defined plan of the real St. Paul founders, 
 and it will be interesting to watch its develop- 
 ment to the minute details of management. For 
 twenty years the system has adhered to a clearly 
 marked course. It has acquired distinct policies 
 and they have become a code. It is almost a St. 
 Paul maxim, for example, that the worst use you 
 can put a man to is to discharge him. St. Paul 
 men have come from the operator's key through 
 all of the intermediate steps even to the presi- 
 dent's table, and the acumen, administrative abil- 
 ity, and strengthening judgment of men distinctly 
 St. Paul bred have been recognized in the whole 
 American railroad world. The St. Paul, like the 
 Burlington, has become recognized as a railroad 
 training-school of the first order. 
 
 Of the territory in which these St. Paul lines 
 were originally projected there has never been but 
 one opinion : State for State it has probably no 
 industrial equal in the world. Minnesota alone 
 raised last year one-ninth of the spring wheat 
 crop of the United States. Illinois produced one- 
 tenth of all the grain raised in the country, and 
 Iowa one-tenth of all the corn. Iowa's entire 
 grain crop amounted to 300,000 carloads. North 
 Dakota contains 76,000 square miles, and practi- 
 cally every acre of this land is tillable. South Da- 
 
 179 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 kota is even larger, with 86,000 square miles, and 
 outside the mineral wealth of the Black Hills, is 
 given wholly to agriculture, dairying, and stock- 
 raising. The Dakotas are, in effect, vast national 
 granaries and meat preserves, and the St. Paul 
 counts 1,200 miles of track in the Dakotas and 
 1,800 miles in Iowa. 
 
 Wisconsin in resources is a nation in itself. It 
 is the most cosmopolitan of our States, and three- 
 fourths of its people are of foreign birth or par- 
 entage. Wisconsin counts 100 grasses, and, if 
 nature has denied to it coal, it has given to it sixty 
 forest trees. Swept by glaciers ages ago, the land- 
 scape hollows of this early moraine present an 
 unending variety of lakes : it is the land of lakes ; 
 there are some two thousand scattered over the 
 State, and they are notable for every charm 
 of the forest landscape. They lie in a climate 
 more rarely favored than any of our national 
 playgrounds. They have the seclusion and the 
 charm of the English lake and the sun and the 
 air of Switzerland. Their elevation, even, is a 
 surprise. One of these landscape mirrors, Trout 
 Lake, lies more than one thousand five hundred 
 feet above the level of the sea almost a thou- 
 sand feet above Lake Michigan, close beside it. 
 In Wisconsin's forests are the spruce, the pines, 
 and the larch and the arbutus springs from under 
 
 180 
 
Ul 1 H 
 
 REDFIELD 
 
 THE CHICAGO, M1LWA 
 
The St. Paul 
 
 the snow; the yew is there and the birches, the 
 wild iris and the violet, the bluebell, the clematis, 
 and the brier rose. 
 
 Into this rich territory have come people from 
 every State in Europe save Turkey. They have 
 made their own settlements, preserved in many 
 interesting instances the best of their native cus- 
 toms, clung tenaciously to their religious faiths, 
 worked unceasingly and prospered. Wisconsin 
 as a commonwealth is a study in industrial con- 
 tentment. To the whole Northwest this admix- 
 ture of foreign peoples in Wisconsin has shown 
 the remarkable industrial possibilities in dairying. 
 The abounding springs, the rushing waters of the 
 rivers, and the cool of the clear, deep lakes in 
 Wisconsin all suggest the dairy, and native grasses 
 afford the richest of grazing for the herd. On 
 the wild beaver meadows of northern Wisconsin 
 the prairie blue-stem is found, the bunch grass of 
 the plains, the grama and the buffalo grass. The 
 baled hay brought years ago into the logging 
 camps has fertilized the lands left desolate by the 
 lumbermen. And not alone have cattle a first 
 place on these cut-over lands ; sheep are brought 
 from the Wyoming and Colorado ranges, sum- 
 mered on Wisconsin herbage, and brought in the 
 fall to the Chicago market as grass-fed mutton. 
 On the raw brush land the Angora goat thrives, 
 
 181 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 and hot only civilizes, but fertilizes, the soil 
 where it browses. A flock of a hundred Angoras 
 is equal, it is said, to the best woodsman in 
 clearing cut-over brush lands. 
 
 In Minnesota white men found the buffalo and 
 the wild horse. Old Jonathan Carver, writing 
 more than a hundred and thirty years ago, de- 
 scribes the flow of the river St. Pierre through a 
 region where trees bend under their weight of 
 fruits, where meadows are green with the vine of 
 the hop, and the waters teem with celery and wild 
 rice ; where the earth is stored with useful roots, 
 with angelica and spikenard; where bluffs rise 
 boldly and are crowned with hickory and maple. 
 Carver tells of the wild duck and the swan, of the 
 brant and the goose and the partridge and the 
 wild turkey. This is Minnesota : its beauty, fer- 
 tility, and lasting charm have stirred red men 
 and white. Into this land have flowed for the last 
 fifty years the hardiest strains of the blood of 
 Northern Europe, the big, light-haired, blue-eyed 
 people who rejoice in the work of the field and 
 glory in the chill, bright sun of winter. In Min- 
 nesota there are dainty cataracts, lakes that lie 
 in chains, and forests not yet wholly sacrificed to 
 American haste and waste. 
 
 To railroads it would be hard to present a 
 more tempting field, and the growth of the rail- 
 
 182 
 
The St. Paul 
 
 road in such a territory is an easy and natural fol- 
 lowing of the territory's development under the 
 aids of industry and transportation. To put the 
 matter very simply, the story of the railroad in 
 the Northwest is the story of the wheat-field. 
 There were lesser interests, of course, as when a 
 road was built into a timbered country for the 
 lumber traffic. Grain, however, in the beginning 
 was the chief matter. What is most unexpected 
 in the growth of Northwest traffic is the way in 
 which, on the Granger lines, grain as a traffic king 
 has been dethroned. The explanation, too, has 
 its peculiar interest in this : that the wheat-field 
 is continually being pushed further West. This 
 has always been so ; with the vanguard of civiliza- 
 tion the wheat-field has followed the frontier. It 
 has been driven in earlier generations from Illi- 
 nois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. It lies now west of 
 the Missouri River and north in Minnesota and 
 the Dakotas. Oddly enough, too, checked on the 
 west by the Rockies, it has turned north, and to 
 the north it is receding with a swiftness that 
 is startling beyond our national boundary line. 
 When our first transcontinental railroad was built, 
 men attempted by isothermal demonstration to 
 prove that wheat could not profitably be grown 
 north of where the road was projected ; but the 
 real granary of the world lies up to three hundred 
 
 183 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 miles north of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and 
 the day is not indefinitely distant when the United 
 States will knock at the doors of Canada for its 
 bread. Railroad men see such a day; it may be 
 hoped that statesmen also will see it and arrange 
 their reciprocities while they may do so gracefully. 
 Americans already have swarmed into that far 
 country and to a degree have taken the American 
 wheat-field with them. Despite the fact that for 
 years a little Dakota station on the St. Paul Road 
 Eureka held the distinction of being the 
 largest primary grain market in the world, the 
 Dakotas and Minnesota will one day yield their 
 palm to Saskatchewan. 
 
 The St. Paul, then, being a Granger line, began 
 with the wheat-field. Within the ten years since 
 1 894 the shifting importance of the grain move- 
 ment is told in the traffic reports. In 1894 grain 
 made up thirty-two per cent, of St. Paul traffic; 
 in 1903 it made up only twenty-three per cent, 
 yet the St. Paul System carried twice as much 
 grain in 1903 as in 1894. In spite, therefore, of 
 a constantly increasing grain traffic the growth of 
 other traffic in St. Paul territory has in one decade 
 crowded the grain percentage down almost ten 
 per cent, in the totals. The explanation is di- 
 versified farming, manufacturing, and that increase 
 in miscellaneous traffic that follows growing 
 
 184 
 
The St. Paul 
 
 wealth in a community. Diversified farming has 
 taken possession of the Granger lines territory. 
 The old-time hazard of a single crop is quite a 
 thing of the past in Iowa, Minnesota, and, to a 
 great extent, in the Dakotas, where, in the begin- 
 ning, only wheat was raised. The St. Paul goes 
 back to the day when wheat was shipped in bags. 
 The receiver of one of the early roads merged into 
 the St. Paul asked for a court order authorizing 
 him to build a grain elevator at La Crosse, Wis., 
 for the purpose of handling shipments of grain in 
 bulk. Grain came down the river then in barges, 
 and the St. Paul Road began shipping bulk grain 
 over its rails from Prairie du Chien, and the St. 
 Paul, growing in prosperity, has lived to see the 
 wheat-field, like the Indian, constantly recede, and 
 to see the decline, through changing conditions 
 in transportation, of that grain-elevator system 
 which for one American generation was a supreme 
 industrial achievement. 
 
 As early as 1870 the Milwaukee and St. Paul 
 Road had become important in Northwestern 
 activities, but Milwaukee, at one time the greatest 
 grain market of the world, was then being passed 
 by Chicago. A Chicago terminal had become 
 for any road in the Northwest an absolute neces- 
 sity, and the St. Paul built to Chicago and added 
 Chicago to its name. The movement was a 
 
 185 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 blow dreaded by Milwaukee, but as is often the 
 unexpected issue, the growth of its original rail- 
 road has resulted in strengthening Milwaukee 
 itself. Built by Wisconsin men, the system for 
 many years was manned by Wisconsin men, but 
 outside blood was good for the road as it grew. 
 When Sir William Van Home came to the St. 
 Paul from the Alton as general superintendent, 
 he felt so quickly this atmosphere of solidarity 
 among the employees that he said if a man were 
 kicked in Milwaukee he protested on the Mis- 
 souri River. 
 
 For transcontinental traffic, then shaping its 
 way through Chicago, an Omaha line had, even 
 in 1870, become logical, and fitted easily into the 
 growing extensions in Iowa and Dakota. Some- 
 times a war measure became a feature of St. Paul 
 extension, as when the Burlington built up the 
 Mississippi River to St. Paul and Minneapolis, 
 and the St. Paul flung an anchor to leeward in 
 the shape of a line to Kansas City ; but the true 
 importance of this Southwestern outlet, built as a 
 retaliatory measure, was not apparent when it was 
 planned. As some of the early branches built by 
 Wall Street speculators were builded better than 
 they knew, so the Southwestern extension of the 
 St. Paul has in late years taken on a wholly new 
 significance. 
 
 186 
 
The St. Paul 
 
 When the attempt was first made to export 
 grain to Europe by way of the Gulf of Mexico, 
 it was found that the cargoes lay so long in sail- 
 ing vessel holds in the heated Southern waters as 
 to suffer damage. The big, swift tramp steamer, 
 however, has changed this and carries Gulf grain 
 to Liverpool in safety. As a consequence the 
 Gulf is a constantly growing factor in the export 
 of grain, and the Atlantic seaboard a correspond- 
 ingly declining factor. Such a shifting of traffic 
 puts new and rather grave problems before a 
 Granger line. It is the men watching these con- 
 stantly moving industrial tides who alone can 
 estimate their force. In private offices like those 
 of Chicago traffic managers this Gulf tide rising 
 year after year has been steadily watched, quietly 
 but with no feature of its significance overlooked, 
 and when it comes too high into the North the 
 Granger lines will buy or build to the Gulf, and 
 with the longer haul afforded them will make 
 more money than at present on their grain. 
 What the St. Paul may do in a southern direction 
 it would be hazardous to predict as it would be to 
 say what it may some time do in a northern. This 
 much is obvious: the Granger line began with 
 the wheat-field and has followed it closely into 
 Minnesota and the Dakotas ; if it moves into and 
 up the valley of the Red River of the North, such 
 
 187 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 a step could occasion no surprise, and it will 
 naturally seek to carry the grain as close to tide- 
 water as its competitors carry it. 
 
 George B. Roberts of the Pennsylvania once 
 paraphrased an aphorism to the effect that when a 
 railroad ceases to be aggressive it is the beginning 
 of decay. In the sense that all live roads must 
 be, the St. Paul is aggressive. Beginning with 
 wheat it became an ore road and a lumber road. 
 Its northern development drew it naturally to the 
 Lake Superior country and resulted, through the 
 lumber traffic, in establishing further south an 
 army of manufacturers ~on its lines. In mineral 
 traffic it has not only a strong footing in the iron 
 and copper countries of Lake Superior, but it has 
 the lead traffic of southwestern Wisconsin. The 
 building of the first lines into the Lake Superior 
 country now makes necessary new dispositions to 
 meet changing conditions. 
 
 Northern Wisconsin settlement began with the 
 felling of its timber. Wisconsin and Illinois 
 have in consequence grown to be vast manufac- 
 turing plants, but with the cutting away of the 
 timber the factories are casting about for new 
 fields of supply in raw material. North of Lake 
 Superior in a belt two hundred miles wide and 
 three thousand miles long lies one of the last of 
 the great North American forests. To this region 
 
 188 
 
The St. Paul 
 
 of the Northwest the factories are turning for 
 their lumber, and the St. Paul must prepare on 
 the south shore of Lake Superior to transship this 
 material which will come across from Canada, 
 and carry it to its manufacturers as far to the 
 south as Rock Island. 
 
 I have spoken of the individuality of the St. 
 Paul Road. It is too marked to overlook. From 
 its men it has long enjoyed a quality of loyalty 
 that is exceptional. In the days of the great 
 railroad strike of 1894 there were whole divisions 
 on the system where the disturbance was never 
 felt. It is a saying that a man who once works 
 for the St. Paul always works for it, and so strong 
 is this sentiment among the older men that even 
 in these days of rampant and disordered trades- 
 unionism there is a leaven of loyalty among St. 
 Paul employees that amounts almost to a com- 
 pany asset. To-day there is no problem more 
 grave in American railroad management than that 
 of enlisting the faithful endeavor of the em- 
 ployees ; and this despite the fact that the older 
 men in the railroad service set a remarkable ex- 
 ample of fidelity to their work. To continue 
 to-day to secure the results effected by the railroad 
 employee of fifteen years ago is rightly esteemed 
 a triumph of management, and one to which the 
 St. Paul may pretty fairly lay claim. A general 
 
 189 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 officer of the St. Paul leaving the system ten 
 years ago would return to-day to find himself 
 known by name to men, on outlying divisions, 
 whom he had never heard of. The old-fashioned 
 railroad had this brotherhood feeling from top to 
 bottom, and it is something we have lost in the 
 enormous growth of the various systems. The 
 spirit when, for example, the Rock Island was a 
 sort of Cable family road when if a member of 
 President Cable's family in Chicago was ill men 
 in Kansas asked for news from the sick room is 
 perhaps lost forever from American railroading; 
 but it counted in the traffic results just the same, 
 and any road that preserves a spirit of such per- 
 sonal interest in its management is fortunate. 
 
 To this clan-like following of the men may be 
 added a second and very different characteristic of 
 the St. Paul Road, namely, a jealousy of outside 
 domination in its affairs. The St. Paul carries 
 this to an extent unexampled in American rail- 
 roading. It is the only considerable American 
 railroad that runs its own sleeping-cars an inde- 
 pendence that is not only interesting, but to the 
 seasoned traveller appealing. Whether it is the 
 perverseness 01 the public, or the one-company 
 power in American sleeping-car arrangements, 
 there is an undeniable absence of sympathy be- 
 tween the average traveller and the management 
 
 190 
 
The St. Paul 
 
 of his sleeping-car. He still endures restrictions 
 that once heated even old John Sherman to the 
 point of rebellion in the United States Senate. 
 The St. Paul Road, running its own sleeping-cars, 
 makes its own regulations strictly, and has been 
 known to discipline a porter for taking a whisk 
 broom instead of a hat brush to a traveller's felt 
 hat : the incident suggests an attention to details 
 that is certainly hopeful. 
 
 It cannot be denied that this keeping of all the 
 authority at home affords unlooked-for advantages 
 when aggressive methods became necessary. To 
 get a place in Kansas City and Chicago passenger 
 traffic the St. Paul made a very extensive cam- 
 paign beginning with the building of an expen- 
 sive cut-off to get a short line. Advertising, of 
 course, was not overlooked: in newspapers, full 
 back-page advertisements in colors began to ap- 
 pear and the territory was billed fa* and wide with 
 circus-like energy. Oddly enough, however, the 
 great stroke of the campaign came after these con- 
 ventional methods had been exhausted. Taking 
 advantage of its own control of its sleeping-cars, 
 the St. Paul, the first summer these trains were run, 
 ordered the usual heavy blankets removed from 
 the sleeping-car berths and white counterpanes 
 substituted. The mere announcement seemed 
 refreshing to summer travellers, and was enough 
 
 191 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 to gain the coveted prestige ; further efforts at 
 publicity have seemed unnecessary. 
 
 In like manner the St. Paul keeps its manufac- 
 turing at home by building all of its locomotives 
 and freight cars, the policy being to call out new 
 ideas in motive power and rolling stock suited to 
 the road's needs. Readiness to encourage experi- 
 ments is shown in a struggle, extending now over 
 sixteen years, to perfect the lighting of passenger 
 trains by electricity. Only railroad managers who 
 have undertaken advances of this sort know the 
 record of expense and failure before success is at- 
 tained. The St. Paul has been not only the first 
 railroad to apply electricity to train-lighting, but 
 the first to bring it to a successful issue, with the 
 result that it now leads all American roads with 
 some three hundred electrically lighted cars: it 
 was also the first Western road to adopt the ves- 
 tibule car. 
 
 There is nothing more indicative of the whole 
 spirit of the Northwest than this aggressive char- 
 acter of Granger railroading. It is, after all, the 
 public which is behind progress, and the advances 
 that are planned daily in Granger line operating 
 departments could never mature were it not for 
 the quick, ambitious people who make the luxu- 
 ries of other nations their own necessities. The 
 people who live in this Northwest are perhaps the 
 
 192 
 
The St. Paul 
 
 most alert in our country. Nowhere else are 
 schools both high and primary so jealously ad- 
 vanced ; nowhere else is the literature of the day 
 devoured with such zest. Climate and the blend- 
 ing of many bloods seem to have developed extra- 
 ordinarily the faculties that make for material 
 progress; and transportation in the Northwest is 
 but one instance in which this is surprising. East- 
 ern people are never quite reconciled to the excel- 
 lence of passenger train equipment that greets 
 them on every strong line beyond Chicago, though 
 there are men who foresaw it a generation ago. 
 When the St. Paul, for example, put on its 
 through service to the Pacific Coast, it recalled to 
 the veteran passenger traffic manager, George H. 
 Daniels, a prophecy he had made concerning this 
 very thing thirty years earlier, and the advance 
 drew from a critic so exacting as himself a tribute 
 of praise. 
 
 But the Granger line railroad exploits not only 
 itself but its country. The St. Paul has exploited 
 South Dakota so long and so earnestly that it has 
 come to be looked on by the State administration 
 as a sort of advertising adjunct of its own and is 
 accorded, after a manner, official recognition. Nor 
 are the efforts of railroads in exploiting new coun- 
 try anywhere to be despised. The Rosebud Res- 
 ervation when thrown open in Dakota offered 
 
 193 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 2,400 quarter-section farms to homesteaders. In- 
 credible as it may seem, 106,000 applications 
 were registered for these farms, and the applicants, 
 being in most instances heads of families, repre- 
 sented perhaps half a million people ; one hun- 
 dred thousand who did not secure farms in the 
 allotment were thus taken into Dakota and made 
 familiar with its resources. Many of these people 
 were drawn from crowded cities and from an un- 
 equal struggle for life in the East to a breath of 
 the fresh air and sunshine of the West, and thou- 
 sands of them, not drawing farms on the reserva- 
 tion, bought other farms. 
 
 In this rapid industrial and social movement of 
 the Northwest the St. Paul has its recognized 
 place. It is one of the few big systems that has 
 kept absolutely aloof from all the big railroad 
 combinations of the last six years; it has not 
 played railroad checkers in any of the games that 
 have been offered to it. Beyond the Missouri 
 River there is much for the St. Paul to think 
 about. The Gulf and the Red River of the 
 North are already within the field of its vision. 
 What it will do in meeting the situations 
 brought about in the Northwest by the new 
 dispositions in railroad control cannot be said 
 beyond this, that where the traffic is there the 
 St. Paul will be also. 
 
THE CHICAGO AND NORTH- 
 WESTERN 
 
THE CHICAGO AND NORTH- 
 WESTERN 
 
 A CONSIDERATION of the unusual strength of the 
 Northwestern involves surprises even to American 
 railroad men themselves. 
 
 It is said that a Pennsylvania engineer, fishing 
 one summer in the wilds of upper Michigan, 
 strayed from his stream and his guide and lost him- 
 self in the woods. It was only after hours of 
 wandering through a trackless wilderness that he 
 emerged, to his amazement, on a railroad right-of- 
 way equipped with heavy double tracks that sug- 
 gested his own division between Altoona and 
 Pittsburg. 
 
 From the depths of a forest never touched 
 by the hand of man he looked on a succes- 
 sion of ore trains thundering past as fast as 
 despatchers could handle them. The roadbed 
 and motive power, showing a physical excel- 
 lence that he had not dreamed could exist west 
 of the Alleghanies, only increased his bewilder- 
 ment ; nor was his balance restored until assured 
 that what he saw was not an illusion but the 
 
 197 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Peninsular Division of the Chicago and North- 
 western Railway. 
 
 The story is well told for under these condi- 
 tions the heavy Northwestern ore trains are run 
 from the Menominee and the Gogebic iron ranges 
 through Michigan forests to the ports of the Great 
 Lakes; and to one unfamiliar with the volume 
 of this extraordinary traffic a sight of it comes 
 with the force of a revelation. 
 
 It must not be assumed, however, that iron ore 
 is the backbone of Northwestern traffic : it is a 
 feature, and an important one ; but it serves in the 
 Northwestern story chiefly to illustrate the unusual 
 variety of traffic resources enjoyed by a road strong 
 in many directions. 
 
 In the country of the Great Lakes lies a land 
 of singular beauty known on the maps of a cen- 
 tury ago as the Northwest Territory. It stretches 
 on the north to the Lake of the Woods and the 
 sources of the Mississippi, and, by extension, what 
 is now known as the Northwest includes the States 
 of the fertile western tributaries of the upper Mis- 
 sissippi River. 
 
 In the Northwest a climate temperate in its 
 vigour unites with a soil well-nigh inexhaustible 
 in vitality. The north wind sweeps prairies that 
 spread from horizon to horizon and lie like glades 
 among forests so plentiful and so rich that in the 
 
The Northwestern 
 
 useful woods they have hardly an equal in the 
 service of man. The Northwest is a land of sun- 
 shine and green fields, where fulfilment waits un- 
 failingly on promise ; it is the home of the white 
 pine and the hard maple, of the basswood and the 
 elm and the oak, of the corn and the wheat and 
 the barley, of the clover and the timothy grass ; 
 its rivers, deep and clear, run between high banks ; 
 groves shade its summer landscapes, and in the 
 autumn the juices of brown leaves store riches in 
 the soil and stain to wine the cold, swift waters of 
 its brooks. 
 
 Frenchmen, three hundred years ago, before 
 other white men had seen it, mapped this vast 
 country to the south and west of what is now 
 called Lake Superior. French explorers were the 
 first to thread its waterways, and French Jesuits 
 under its forest arches set up their altars of boughs, 
 and taught to the Algonquins and the Sioux the 
 faith that Paul preached at Antioch and Augus- 
 tine brought to Britain. 
 
 Where Jacques Marquette baptized the Illinois 
 the tribes are scattered ; where the shores of their 
 lake felt the benediction of his tread have arisen 
 great cities the neophyte and the missionary sur- 
 vive only in statues of bronze. But history, 
 kinder than progress, has preserved in river and 
 lake and strait and bay, in the cities and States of 
 
 199 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 the Northwest, the names and memories of the 
 blackrobe, the chevalier, and the Indian. 
 
 La Salle was at the mouth of the Chicago 
 River in 1679, and eleven years later an English 
 ambassador had reached Wisconsin seeking an 
 alliance with the Miami. In 1682 the great 
 Frenchman set up on the Mississippi the standard 
 of France, and six years afterward Perrot had 
 raised the cross and the lilies on the soil of Min- 
 nesota. 
 
 But the Hudson Bay Fur Company had already 
 been chartered, and for a hundred years the two 
 most highly civilised nations of Europe bribed, 
 goaded, debauched, and cheated the unfortunate 
 savages of North America in their efforts to obtain 
 the sovereignty of this Northwest empire. In 
 the end the long arm of England prevailed, and 
 the destinies of the Northwest were shaped for a 
 thousand years. 
 
 In all of the surprises worked since 1690 in this 
 Northwest wilderness none is more remarkable 
 than that on the least promising site to be selected 
 the industrial capital of the Northwest should be 
 built. The little Chicago River as an Indian 
 waterway seems always to have had part in North- 
 west history. In 1773, William Murray bought 
 from the Illini Indians a farm that included the 
 stream. Indeed, for five shillings and some mer- 
 
 200 
 
The Northwestern 
 
 chandise, William purchased a strip of land ex- 
 tending from Chicago to the Mississippi. A small 
 portion of this five-shilling farm would now be 
 worth several billions of dollars. 
 
 Murray failed, however, to make good his title, 
 and it was not till 1833 that the United Nation 
 Indians ceded to the United States the last of their 
 lands east of the Mississippi and opened the North- 
 west definitely to the settlement of whites. So 
 fast did events crowd on one another that only 
 twenty months after the Senate of the United 
 States had ratified this treaty the first railroad 
 the parent stem of the Chicago and Northwestern 
 was chartered out of Chicago. Transportation, 
 indeed, was destined to change faster than any 
 other agency the character of the new territory. 
 This Galena and Chicago Union Railroad project 
 languished for ten years, but in 1848 ten miles of 
 the road were actually built, and even so small a 
 beginning brought its significant sequel. The 
 first trip was made over the ten-mile division by 
 the directors and stockholders of the pioneer road 
 November 20. On their return trip to the city 
 they met a farmer hauling to Chicago a load of 
 wheat. What rate the directors made on his 
 business does not appear, but they came somehow 
 to terms, for the wheat was transferred to the ob- 
 servation car and became the first grain ever car- 
 
 201 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 ried by rail to what was afterward the largest grain 
 market in the world. In the same year the first 
 telegram reached Chicago. 
 
 This wagon-load of grain indicated the future 
 basis of the prosperity of the Granger lines. Grain 
 has made the Northwest and its railroads famous, 
 and of the many vigorous transportation systems 
 none has chosen a name more happily appropriate 
 to the territory they serve than the Chicago and 
 Northwestern. Ingenuity can find nothing to add 
 to or take from this title in expressing the idea 
 of the territorial grain empire of the United States, 
 and its industrial capital. 
 
 The historical railroad development of the ter- 
 ritory follows with simplicity the natural high- 
 ways of traffic, and these in an early day, even 
 more than at present, converged at Chicago. In 
 consequence, Chicago's first ten miles of railroad 
 ran straight west. A map made in 1861 would 
 show such a line extended across the Mississippi 
 with a system in embryo already shown in addi- 
 tional lines of eighty and one hundred miles run- 
 ning north into Wisconsin. Here already may 
 be seen the bone and essence of the Northwestern 
 system a trunk line north and a trunk line west ; 
 Cedar Rapids a western terminus, Oshkosh a 
 northern. There were at every moment of ad- 
 vancement two objective points in the strategy of 
 
 202 
 
The Northwestern 
 
 the Northwestern one, the west, with the Mis- 
 souri River as an objective point; the other, the 
 north, with the iron and the copper country as a 
 goal and 1870 found the system with both aims 
 achieved. The Northwestern was the first rail- 
 road from the south to reach the rich mineral belt 
 of upper Michigan, and its first seventy miles of 
 track to the Wisconsin State line, built on a gauge 
 six feet wide, makes the effort seem a very early 
 one. 
 
 More then two hundred and fifty years ago 
 Jesuit missionaries reported copper on Lake Supe- 
 rior, and the most alert prospecting the world over 
 from that day to this has never uncovered beds 
 of native copper approaching in richness and ex- 
 tent the Lake Superior deposits; nor have min- 
 eralogists satisfactorily determined why Nature 
 made there the immense deposits so geologically 
 unique. Though Montana and Arizona have 
 become immense producers of copper, their min- 
 eral, being in the usual form of copper ore, re- 
 quires for reduction an intricate and long-drawn 
 treatment. Lake Superior copper is not only 
 simply mined but it is noted for its toughness and 
 its exceptional conductivity. For electric currents 
 it is invaluable, and it lies under Lake Superior 
 rock in sheets as thinly drawn as gold-leaf and in 
 masses weighing 500 tons that go piecemeal to 
 
 203 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 the smelters and never pass through the stamp 
 mill at all. The elder Agassiz early directed at- 
 tention to the unexampled richness of Lake Supe- 
 rior copper deposits. So closely was he engaged 
 in the early modern development of these fields, 
 and so intimate are the association of discovery 
 and the business instinct in America, that the 
 great mine of the north country, the Calu- 
 met and Hecla, which boasts a shaft 4,900 feet 
 deep and the finest mining machinery in the 
 world, has always been largely owned by Boston 
 investors. 
 
 Iron, however, from a traffic viewpoint, is in- 
 comparably more valuable to the railroad than 
 copper, and the Lake Superior iron mines are the 
 richest in the world ; not alone because their ores 
 are lowest in refractory elements and highest in 
 metallic iron, but because nowhere else in the 
 world have such large beds of merchantable ores 
 been exposed. To these advantages the Lake 
 Superior country adds a climate that allows the 
 continuous operation of all mines with under- 
 ground workings. Less than this would have 
 made Lake Superior strong as a mineral region in 
 the useful metals ; as it is, it stands pre-eminent ; 
 nowhere has it even an approaching rival. The 
 first bar of Lake Superior iron was drawn through 
 a blacksmith's forge so late as 1846, and at 
 
 204 
 
A X O 
 
 A K T 
 
 NC. 
 
 Sujoerior 
 
 THE CHICAGO AND 
 
M I N 
 
 WESTERN RAILWAY. 
 

The Northwestern 
 
 Carp River blooms were made a little later, 
 but the first real shipments of ore were started 
 for the lower lake ports in 1856. Last year 
 the Lake Superior country produced 24,000,000 
 tons of iron ore ; indeed, the production of the 
 Lake Superior region is one-third that of all the 
 world. 
 
 In this territory lies one of the strongest arms 
 of the Northwestern system. First in the field, 
 the railroad has intrenched itself in a way that 
 astonishes those not familiar with the enormous 
 traffic possibilities of the Peninsular Division. 
 The Escanaba ore docks are the largest in exist- 
 ence, and at Ashland the Northwestern has a 
 record of having loaded 5,000 tons of iron ore into 
 a steamer in one hour. The experience of the 
 company in reaching this country has been one 
 of especial good fortune. Here were no long and 
 profitless desert wastes to cross to reach a traffic 
 goal. Local business from the start has been of 
 good volume. Wisconsin is a portion of that 
 paradise that Frenchmen discovered when they 
 penetrated the Green Bay. Fishermen and hunt- 
 ers still flock to Wisconsin, which, together with 
 Minnesota, is in effect a national game reserve. 
 Wisconsin is the land of barley, small grain, and 
 the dairy. Its butter and cheese help to feed 
 Europe. Divided by an east and west line, the 
 
 205 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 north half of the State has for half a century been 
 a reserve of timber which even yet is not wholly 
 exhausted, and its store of hard woods is still large. 
 Men have said that with its timber exhausted 
 Northern Wisconsin would be worthless, but those 
 who know Wisconsin best predict that within fifty 
 years Northern Wisconsin will be the more valu- 
 able half of the State. Where the pine stood the 
 farmer has gone in. The tamarack swamps are 
 drained, and the dry, hardwood regions are being 
 cleared; steers have been turned into the brush 
 and the clearings, and the dairyman has discovered 
 in Northern Wisconsin an unsurpassed field for 
 his business. It has been pointed out to him that 
 the most nutritious of grasses, the coolest of waters, 
 and the most temperate of summer suns essen- 
 tials for the production of milks that are the base of 
 fine flavoured cheeses are the heritage of North- 
 ern Wisconsin, and the Dean of the College of 
 Agriculture at Madison has reminded Wisconsin 
 farmers that solely in these climatic conditions 
 they have a possession as precious as the gold of 
 Colorado or the coal of Pennsylvania. Wiscon- 
 sin is like a mine from which new treasures are 
 continually drawn. 
 
 In 1867 the Union Pacific, after overcoming 
 stupendous difficulties of construction, had reached 
 Cheyenne and was ready to begin its crowning 
 
 1206 
 
The Northwestern 
 
 task of scaling the Rockies. The Northwestern 
 pushed its rails, in November, 1867, into Council 
 Bluffs and began pouring material into the Union 
 Pacific yards. Eighteen months later, under the 
 impulse of quickened construction, the Central 
 and the Union track-layers met at Promontory, 
 Utah, and the Overland railroad line from New 
 York to San Francisco was made complete. 
 
 The results to Chicago and the Northwest were 
 immediate. The current of transcontinental travel 
 set across the territory to the fast growing city on 
 the shores of Lake Michigan. Iowa, already 
 touched by the magic of railroad enterprise, grew 
 with astonishing rapidity. Indeed, the develop- 
 ment of the upper Mississippi Valley and the 
 opening of the wheat fields and the corn belt be- 
 tween 1865 and 1875 have hardly a parallel in 
 the story of the nation. 
 
 The Chicago and Northwestern, however, with 
 its early aims achieved, found itself only on the 
 threshold of the anxieties of its career. Lying 
 immediately west of the Northwestern lines at the 
 Missouri River was a State whose traffic possibil- 
 ities could no longer be ignored. Nebraska is 
 remarkable in many ways. Much larger than 
 England and Wales, and larger than all New 
 England, Nebraska has not only a million people 
 but a million of cows, and the cows are increasing 
 
 207 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 rather faster than the people. Moreover, in Ne- 
 braska every one farms. Railroad managers, as 
 well as railroad lawyers, farm. Bankers farm and 
 physicians farm. By far the greatest man that 
 Nebraska has ever numbered among her sons, J. 
 Sterling Morton, farmed. Even her politicians 
 not only farm but from the pleasant leisure of 
 successful retirement find time like Temple to 
 write thoughtful essays on the attractions of coun- 
 try life. An abundance of nutritious grasses that 
 cure on the ground cover the plains of Nebraska, 
 and, together with a climate that has few draw- 
 backs and many advantages, make Nebraska a 
 great stock-raising country. Dairying naturally 
 follows. Nebraska lays a claim to the greatest 
 number of native pasture and hay grasses of any 
 State, and proves its assertions, in part, by produc- 
 ing the finest feeding cattle. In the eastern por- 
 tion of the State are 20,000,000 acres of high-class 
 farm lands, while in the western are 29,000,000 
 acres of grazing and hay lands. Again, it is dif- 
 ficult to say precisely where the line divides, for 
 down in the southwest corner of the State, in the 
 winter wheat country, the banner wheat station 
 on the Burlington road lies on the one hundredth 
 meridian. Due north of this, 200 miles, a little 
 northwestern town, Newport, ships more hay than 
 is marketed from any one other point in the world. 
 
 208 
 
The Northwestern 
 
 Nebraska, too, though young in dairying, has the 
 largest creamery in the world, as well as the ter- 
 minals and headquarters of twenty railroad sys- 
 tems. Nebraska is proud among sister States of 
 its smallest percentage of illiteracy, and its soil 
 will grow everything from alfalfa and the sugar 
 beet to chicory and corn. The small grains, not- 
 ably winter wheat, are Nebraskan products ; but 
 her most valuable possession is the soil and climate 
 that have yielded in a single year 250,000,000 
 bushels of corn. 
 
 In the support of human and animal life no 
 cereal crop is so valuable to mankind as corn, 
 and those scientists who place at 1,000 the total 
 worth of cereals to the world, accord to corn 
 266 points, or more than one quarter of the whole 
 percentage. 
 
 Moreover, the lands of Nebraska lie in a belt 
 that has almost a natural monopoly in corn-raising. 
 New small grain districts are continually being 
 discovered the world over. Corn can be raised in 
 this district only, famous as the corn belt of the 
 United States, and the prosperity of a territory such 
 as this is indicated in the single statement that one 
 of its States, Iowa, has more banks than any State 
 in the Union. Nebraska reflects its extraordinary 
 corn strength in stock-feeding ; besides its milch 
 cows, it counted, on January ist, nearly two and 
 
 209 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 one-half million head of other cattle. The State 
 has, too, the most unlooked-for and pleasant side- 
 lines of activity. Besides its creditable Beet Sugar 
 industry Nebraska is an unrivalled seed State : it 
 supplies Georgia with its famed water-melon seed 
 and Maine with the seed for its sugar corn. Of 
 the vine and sweet-corn seeds, Nebraska supplies 
 more than all other States combined. 
 
 This great trans-Missouri State was, in a word, 
 one which in Northwestern territorial strategy 
 could not be overlooked ; and beyond Nebraska 
 there were further prizes. On the extreme west- 
 ern boundary of South Dakota lies a strange 
 geological upheaval known as the Black Hills. 
 It is one of the three great gold districts of the 
 country. The Black Hills, indeed, have taken to 
 themselves, seemingly without dispute, the title 
 of being the richest hundred miles square on the 
 face of the earth. They can already lay claim to 
 the largest existing gold mine, and in reality only 
 a beginning has been made in exposing their 
 mineral wealth. Estimates based on Government 
 reports and surveys place the value of the un- 
 mined gold and silver at a billion of dollars. The 
 ores of the Homestake mine lie in bodies so large 
 that a century will hardly suffice to work them 
 out, and the Homestake has already sent to the 
 mints $90,000,000 in gold bullion. It crushes 
 
 210 
 
The Northwestern 
 
 3,000 tons of ore every twenty-four hours, and its 
 working, together with that of other gold proper- 
 ties, supports two large and wealthy cities Dead- 
 wood and Lead in the most picturesque corner 
 of the United States. In this far Northwest the 
 Black Hills offer a climate so tempting that many 
 people live there for its excellence, and the Hot 
 Springs of the Black Hills draw visitors from 
 every quarter. 
 
 Skirting the Black Hills again on the south the 
 extreme western terminus of the Northwestern 
 penetrates Wyoming, a mountain country with 
 all the rugged strength of the American Rockies. 
 From Wyoming and Montana come the range 
 cattle and the mountain valleys are filled with 
 sheep. Montana supplies a tenth of our wool and 
 Wyoming follows very closely in production. 
 Along highways that stretch hundreds of miles 
 and are strung with telephone wires, cattle on 
 hoof are driven to Casper and shipped to the 
 packing centres. The country is most interest- 
 ing. Here are the fountain-heads of the great 
 Missouri River, and beyond, the natural wonders 
 of the landscape have been preserved by the Gov- 
 ernment in its National park. Across Wyoming 
 to the sources of the Wind River, over the con- 
 tinental divide and down to Jackson Lake, one 
 may ride a bicycle or a pony for 300 miles into 
 
 211 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 the valley of the Yellowstone. The Wyoming 
 sky is never clouded nor is its summer ever 
 oppressive. In this thin, clear mountain air rest 
 knits into vigour the sinews of the jaded city 
 man and charges his storage batteries with sun- 
 shine. 
 
 The map of recent railroad development the 
 Northwestern has built 1,300 miles of track west 
 of the Missouri River follows clearly the very 
 earliest movement of Western railroading, and in 
 this transcontinental advance the Granger lines 
 have kept their link one of the strongest in the 
 chain. When the Northwestern opened the first 
 double-tracked gateway from Chicago to the Mis- 
 souri River it was providing, as every prudent 
 management must, not alone for present but for 
 future needs. A system able to count among its 
 traffic mines cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, 
 Duluth, Superior, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Sioux 
 City, Des Moines, Omaha, Lincoln, Deadwood, 
 and Lead is fortunate, but must always be alert. 
 Northwestern management has never, since the 
 system really found itself, failed to meet the needs 
 of its territory. If it is closely in touch with its 
 own people the shippers along its lines it is 
 because no cause has ever been given them to 
 feel that their interests were last to be considered 
 in the Northwestern councils. 
 
 212 
 
THE REBUILDING OF AN AMERICAN 
 RAILROAD 
 
<HiIcarg 0j 
 
 Jefferson City 
 
 RAlton 
 St. LouisVlE-St. Louis 
 
 THE CHICAGO AND ALTON RAILWAY 
 
THE REBUILDING OF AN AMERICAN 
 RAILROAD 
 
 IN American railroad management there is one 
 phase of railroad building of which little, save in 
 a general way, is known the phase in which a 
 successful railroad operator observing neglected 
 possibilities in another line, acquires it, rips it to 
 pieces, and from the fragments builds up what is 
 practically a new railroad. 
 
 An Eastern proverb tells us that many pass; 
 one sees. The seeing man, in such an instance, is 
 the man that knows, just a bit better than his fel- 
 lows, railroad possibilities. This man, finding the 
 opportunity, enlists the capital, buys a railroad at 
 what may seem to the owners and to the public 
 a very high price, and proceeds to demonstrate 
 that the price is in reality a low one, in this : that 
 where the property had with difficulty earned one 
 dollar it could readily be made to earn two. 
 
 In this demonstration the buyer of the railroad 
 faces his real problem that of developing in his 
 purchase a greater earning power than it has thus 
 far shown, and the work is not unlike that of a 
 
 215 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 man who buys an armory built for the manufac- 
 ture of the Springfield musket, and undertakes to 
 transform it into a plant capable of turning out a 
 modern rapid-fire gun. 
 
 As an example in an extraordinary degree of 
 what may be done in the rebuilding of an Amer- 
 ican railroad I have chosen the story of a line, 
 the Chicago and Alton Railway, with terminals in 
 three great inland American cities cities that 
 show every characteristic of the national activity 
 and achievement. 
 
 There are other reasons for citing this partic- 
 ular example of the possibilities in railroad re- 
 building. The case is one which affords in the 
 first place very sharp contrasts between the old 
 condition and the new. Moreover, being a fast 
 passenger line, the reconstruction has called for 
 the very highest refinements in track excellence 
 and equipment; and as a competitor for a heavy 
 freight traffic, in a territory where American rail- 
 roads have for a long time put forth the most 
 efficient efforts to do business inexpensively, this 
 road required the highest order of resource in 
 management to put it ahead of its neighbours. 
 
 For many years the road has enjoyed a great 
 reputation. The railroad world as well as the 
 travelling public believed in it. The duty of in- 
 forming the surprised operating department that 
 
 216 
 
Rebuilding of an American Railroad 
 
 they had, in point of fact, no road at all, fell upon 
 the new president whose task was to make the 
 railroad wholly over. The old staff then learned 
 to their consternation that their track was an 
 excuse, their motive power hardly more than a 
 reminiscence, their equipment a curio, and their 
 reputation a fiction. 
 
 The road, one of the first built out of Chicago, 
 was one embodying the most interesting historical 
 association ; it had run the first sleeping-car ever 
 offered to the public in the world ; it had run the 
 first chair-car ever built and the first dining-car. 
 
 But in meeting competition, history is not re- 
 source. The tracks, built in an early day, fol- 
 lowed closely the configuration of the country. 
 If a plough was used on the original right-of-way, it 
 was beyond doubt a shallow plough, and the grades 
 reflected very faithfully the hills and the hollows of 
 the prairie. The bridges and the culverts were 
 chiefly of wood, and such ballast as had been used 
 was the spoil of convenient gravel banks : a little 
 stone, some slag all worn in the service. One 
 pet the road had : a graceful steel bridge of enor- 
 mous proportions, costing half a million dollars 
 and spanning the Missouri River. This, again, 
 was of rare historic interest, for it must always bear 
 the distinction of having been the first steel bridge 
 ever built in the world. But in the rebuilding of 
 
 217 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 the system, so unique a claim to distinction could 
 not save it, and to the horror of the operating de- 
 partment the five-hundred-thousand-dollar bridge 
 went to the scrap. The fact is, all these pictu- 
 resque features of the pioneer line had had their 
 day. That which yesterday was a railroad mar- 
 vel becomes to-morrow a curiosity. 
 
 The first order to the engineering department 
 of the division where the traffic converges toward 
 Chicago called for a maximum of -f^ per cent, 
 grades sixteen feet to the mile. Seventy-pound 
 rails went to branches and to passing tracks, and 
 on the main line eighty-pound rails were called 
 for from end to end of the system. While steam 
 shovels were tearing down the Illinois hills, bridge 
 engineers were ripping out trestles and culverts, 
 and the false work was going in at the Missouri 
 River for the new bridge, a million-dollar steel 
 bridge, capable of carrying the huge locomotives 
 and the fifty-five-ton capacity cars that were being 
 built for the new owners. To eliminate curvature 
 and reduce gradients the original right-of-way was 
 in places wholly abandoned. 
 
 All this was done, of necessity, without sus- 
 pending regular traffic. While the bridges were 
 being rebuilt the new motive power and car-equip- 
 ment were under way. The heaviest freight en- 
 gines previously owned had been of fifty-five tons 
 
 218 
 
Rebuilding of an American Railroad 
 
 and were capable, in condition, of hauling thirty 
 cars of twenty-five tons each ; but the engines 
 had been allowed to deteriorate until not above 
 eighty per cent, of that capacity could be obtained. 
 The new engines of the consolidation type for 
 freight traffic weigh one hundred and sixty-five 
 tons and haul one hundred freight cars. The 
 passenger power consisted of forty to fifty ton 
 engines capable of hauling five to seven of the 
 coaches of their day at high speed. Such engines 
 have been replaced by modern engines of one 
 hundred and thirty-five tons, while for especially 
 heavy passenger service, of which the road has 
 more than any line in this territory, exceptionally 
 large engines have been provided, recent addi- 
 tions including the two most powerful express 
 passenger engines in the world. The largest pas- 
 senger engine in use on the Alton during the 
 World's Fair in Chicago, caught by a photog- 
 rapher beside one of the engines used during the 
 St. Louis World's Fair, would show strikingly 
 the advance in motive power during the interval 
 that has elapsed between two international expo- 
 sitions. 
 
 In freight-car equipment, twenty and twenty- 
 five ton capacity wooden gondola cars were re- 
 placed by fifty-five-ton capacity steel gondolas, 
 and the proportion of the weight of car to load 
 
 219 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 was reduced one-third at a stroke. Moreover, 
 the use of so high-capacity cars has reduced train 
 friction to an equal degree. Acquiring a line 
 that had always enjoyed a heavy passenger traffic, 
 the new owners, where they had found fifty-feet 
 coaches, built coaches seventy feet long, and by 
 ingeniously installing seats of a modern type as 
 well as more comfortable than those of earlier 
 models, they have succeeded in accommodating 
 in the new cars twice the number of passengers 
 provided for ;n the old. In the cars of to-day 
 every feature of equipment helps to minimise the 
 fatigue of travel. Even local travel is tempted 
 by all the comforts that can be offered to invite a 
 day's shopping in the city; wide vestibules have 
 been provided for even the least ostentatious of 
 the daily trains, and so rigid are the present rules 
 that the operating department will not receive 
 from any foreign line a passenger car without 
 vestibules. New ideas, too, have been so far en- 
 couraged that the road which ran the first dining- 
 car in the world clings to its prestige of offering 
 not only every variety of dining and cafe cars, 
 but has recently evolved a grill-room car, the very 
 name of which appeals seductively to luxury- 
 loving Americans. 
 
 Of the important problems, however, that con- 
 front the railway traffic manager, the most serious 
 
 220 
 
Rebuilding of an American Railroad 
 
 are those concerned with terminal facilities, and 
 if these are serious for passenger business, for 
 freight traffic they are vital; the railroads that 
 are first to enter and to secure terminals in a great 
 city are the envy and despair of all newcomers. 
 
 With every year the position of the roads hav- 
 ing the oldest, which usually means the best, ter- 
 minals becomes more nearly impregnable, and the 
 instances are many in which one road holds by a 
 grip stronger than that of the most conceivably 
 powerful monetary combination the traffic of a 
 given district in a large city at times of an entire 
 city, as has been seen in Pittsburg, for example, or 
 in San Francisco. If its siding tracks are in, its 
 yards established, and public streets afterward cut 
 off all possibilities of new roads entering, the older 
 road has the most complete of monopolies. No 
 more impressive lesson in the science of American 
 railroading has ever been supplied than in a con- 
 sideration of the policy pursued by the early 
 owners of the railroad here discussed. Questioned 
 as to what most struck them in the conditions 
 prevailing on the system they had determined to 
 acquire, the rebuilders replied, as one man and in 
 precisely these words : " An absolute lack of ter- 
 minal facilities." The answer illustrated better 
 than pages of comment the difference between 
 new and old ideas in American railway manage- 
 
 221 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 ment. It is hardly enough to say that in this in- 
 stance the old management was a capable and a 
 brainy one. It was noted in the whole railway 
 world for its clear-cut, unswerving, money-mak- 
 ing ability. The policy of keeping out of debt 
 was closely followed, and the earnings went in 
 an ever-swelling stream straight to the dividend 
 account. 
 
 It was not until the revolution that has marked 
 the last ten years in American railroading took 
 place, and not until buyers began to look over 
 the railroad field for new opportunities, that the 
 lack of foresight in such methods of management 
 became apparent. This road, enjoying one of the 
 earliest entrances into Chicago, had had its pick 
 of terminal facilities such as would now be pre- 
 cious beyond dreams. 
 
 Not the offer to any railroad of unlimited traffic 
 tonnage, nor the possession of the most perfect 
 possible equipment to handle it, could equal in 
 value to-day really adequate Chicago terminals. 
 Yet, twenty-five years ago so slight was the value 
 set even by prudent managers on such facilities 
 that the first owners of this road sold a one-half 
 interest in their Chicago terminals to a powerful 
 Eastern connection and, more incredible still, sur- 
 rendered in the transfer their own control of them. 
 We have biblical authority for the story that Esau 
 
 222 
 
Rebuilding of an American Railroad 
 
 sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. But 
 Esau could, at least, have pleaded urgency he 
 needed the soup ; the folly of a railroad's parting 
 with its birthright in the very best of Chicago 
 terminals, to distribute among stockholders their 
 price in seven and eight per cent, dividends, was 
 reserved for our own day and generation. 
 
 In the next most important city on the system, 
 St. Louis, the road never took title to a foot of 
 terminals, its facilities being wholly rented ; worse 
 still, it acquired no interest in the company con- 
 trolling them. In the third great commercial 
 centre entered, Kansas City, terminals ordinarily 
 good when acquired were found to be for to-day 
 not only insufficient but unconnected by owner- 
 ship with the main line. What such mistakes on 
 the system have since cost, the financial interests 
 now in control do not state ; it is enough that they 
 have been corrected. The truth is, the buyers 
 in such a case have no ground to complain. 
 But there is a third great and undefined party 
 to all questions of railroad management, namely, 
 the public, or that portion of the public which 
 is dependent on a particular road for its transpor- 
 tation facilities. 
 
 The Alton being once acquired, it became the 
 policy of the new owners to increase the facilities 
 of the public along their line for doing business. 
 
 223 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 A single instance of what has been accomplished 
 in this line is so striking that it will serve for all 
 comment on the point. Five years ago this road 
 had no coal traffic. Its tracks have always covered 
 the richest coal-fields in the West ; yet it hauled 
 no coal. To ride over the road to-day and to 
 pass, at the car windows, hundreds and hundreds 
 of huge, steel gondola cars loaded with bright, 
 newly mined coal in lump and block and to see 
 other hundreds of such cars lying about division 
 and terminal yards would make the statement 
 difficult to credit. Yet this enormous and really 
 extraordinary development of freight traffic in so 
 few years has been the immediate result of merely 
 providing the road with adequate cars, engines, 
 and yards to care for the traffic, and the reducing 
 of grades and curvature sufficiently to enable the 
 road to make a rate on the business that would 
 protect the local shipper of coal in competitive 
 markets. So rapid and so constant has been the 
 success of endeavours in this one direction that 
 on this road during the present year two of the 
 largest mines in Illinois are being opened mines 
 equipped with modern washeries and with a pro- 
 ducing capacity each of two thousand tons a day. 
 In five years this railroad, beginning with nothing, 
 has come to take second place in tonnage records 
 from Western coal-fields, and during the great 
 
 224 
 
Rebuilding of an American Railroad 
 
 hard-coal strike its daily contribution of two hun- 
 dred cars of soft coal to Chicago helped to avert 
 an actual famine in the great manufacturing centre. 
 Another decisive feature of management obtains 
 in the care of this newly fostered coal traffic. 
 The road has made it a policy to open no mines 
 of its own, and when there is a shortage of cars the 
 suspicious shipper knows, at least, that the railroad 
 he is dependent on for his daily bread is not pro- 
 viding its own mines with equipment when he 
 himself is unable to get what he needs. The 
 point is a slight one, but good management rests 
 on details ; it rests also, not alone in keeping faith 
 with the public, but in seeming to keep faith. 
 
 What it means to make over a railroad for 
 such modern traffic requirements is reflected 
 sharply in the work put upon the construction 
 department. Working out of Chicago, track 
 elevation was pushed until every railroad grade 
 crossing from the terminal station to the suburban 
 yards has been eliminated. The grades receiving 
 the heaviest of the traffic as it centred toward 
 Chicago were reduced until they gave the rebuilt 
 road the lowest maximum grade of any road en- 
 tering Chicago from the Western coal-fields. At 
 the very outset the* work of double-tracking was 
 begun; to provide for heavy cars and engines, 
 heavier rails have been spread south and west, 
 
 225 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 until today over one-half the total mileage of the 
 entire system shows new steel. The work falling 
 on the bridge department was continuous and 
 exacting. While shops were being enlarged, en- 
 gine-houses rebuilt, and turn-tables lengthened, the 
 track elevation at Chicago called unceasingly for 
 viaducts, and the traffic conditions everywhere on 
 the system demanded new bridges for the motive 
 power. Yet, so well does American engineering 
 meet American exactions that a heavy traffic was 
 maintained without serious interruption while on 
 the system practically all new bridges were being 
 put in. Better conception of the undertaking 
 may be had when it is considered that on less 
 than a thousand miles of trackage three hundred 
 and eighteen bridges were replaced within four 
 years. Of these, one hundred and fourteen bridges 
 were wholly done away with by the cast-iron pipe 
 and the concrete arch the progress in the use of 
 concrete work being one of the most striking 
 features of recent bridge construction. But be- 
 sides the great bridge across the Missouri and 
 four solid-floor creosoted trestles, one hundred 
 and twenty-two steel bridges also were installed. 
 
 The elimination of curvature, pushed till the 
 maximum had been reduced to four degrees, is 
 still in progress, and so far has bad curvature 
 been taken care of that an engineman familiar 
 
 226 
 
Rebuilding of an American Railroad 
 
 with a division five years ago would hardly 
 recognise the right-of-way in daylight. Long 
 restful stretches of straight track have been devel- 
 oped until there are now on the system many 
 tangents of from fifteen to twenty miles ; there is 
 at least one tangent of twenty-nine miles and one 
 extraordinary stretch of forty-five miles of track, 
 straight as an arrow's flight. Even when the 
 curve is reached, the traveller in the Pullman is 
 deceived. The track dip, or superelevation, at a 
 curve is for speed purposes always a compromise. 
 Passenger trains take curves at a speed of from 
 seventy to eighty miles an hour, but to elevate 
 for such a speed would mean too much resistance 
 for the heavy freight trains taking the same 
 curves at twenty miles an hour. Curves are 
 therefore elevated for a speed of sixty miles an 
 hour, and a higher speed means a slight shock to 
 a Pullman train. 
 
 So clever, however, have the construction 
 engineers become that even this difficulty has 
 been obviated. Ingenious easement curves, or 
 " spirals," have been introduced, and they heel a 
 fast train so gradually to the dip needed for the 
 radius that the lurching is wholly avoided, and 
 the traveller can be sent around a curve without 
 knowing it, the effect being like riding a con- 
 tinuous tangent. Such devices for the making 
 
 227 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 of passenger travel safe and easy are within the 
 reach of any railroad ; it is their expense that 
 keeps them from being generally adopted. Un- 
 less a road caters to a large passenger traffic the 
 management will not stand for such estimates. 
 
 In doing away in modern construction with 
 curves a more notable instance of what is possible 
 than that shown in alignment near Streator, Il- 
 linois, would be hard to find. Here, directly be- 
 side the new stretch of straight track, the old 
 roundabout track, the long fill, and a spindling 
 steel bridge, such as many roads would be proud 
 of, may be seen lying wholly abandoned. With- 
 in half a mile a perfect succession of reverse 
 curves have been eliminated, and to-day the new 
 line has resolved itself very simply into a long 
 tangent with a curve at each end. 
 
 The initial cost often deters railroads from 
 radical efforts to rid themselves of expensive blun- 
 ders such as these in original construction. There 
 are, however, unexpected compensations. In this 
 instance, hardly had the change of track been 
 made before negotiations were under way to sell 
 intact to a trolley-line, building hard by, the 
 abandoned right-of-way, the big fill, and the long 
 bridge. The buying and selling of second-hand 
 locomotives, second-hand cars, and second-hand 
 rails is a profitable business among jobbers in rail- 
 
 228 
 
Rebuilding of an American Railroad 
 
 road junk; worn-out rock ballast even now finds 
 ready purchasers among trolley-lines ; and we may 
 yet see among enterprising scrap-dealers announce- 
 ments of special sales of discarded steel bridges 
 and bargain days in second-hand curves. 
 
 Mention has been made of ballast-floor bridges, 
 and the phrase is attractive. It is hard to believe 
 that the idea is quite new, and to realise how 
 much the ballast-floor bridge contributes in com- 
 fort and safety to railway travel. The ballast- 
 floor carries the through train noiselessly over the 
 long, heavy plate-girder bridge and subdues the 
 roaring viaduct into a span of peace and quiet for 
 the nerve-worn suburbanite. 
 
 The construction is really so simple and the 
 results so extraordinary that it is a mystery the 
 ballast-floor bridge should not have been used 
 long ago. Yet, the railroad whose rebuilding we 
 have followed was the first steam railroad to ap- 
 ply a ballast-floor to steel bridges and to regular 
 track-work. The two great merits of the idea are, 
 first, safety ; if a train leaves the track the bridge 
 ties bedded in standard rock-ballast cannot be 
 bunched. Bunching the ties under the wheels 
 of a derailed engine means the weakening of the 
 bridge structure, indeed, its possible collapse un- 
 der a wreck. More than this, the ballast-floor 
 does entirely away with the booming vibration 
 
 229 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 under the passenger car, and the commuter whose 
 nerves are still racked night and morning by 
 viaducts may know that his railroad has not 
 reached the ballast-floor stage and may protest ac- 
 cordingly. A creosoted pine floor of 8 x 8 tim- 
 bers is laid on the steel girders of any bridge 
 structure and on this rock-ballast is dumped, the 
 ties being laid in the ballast in the usual way. 
 Neither above nor below the bridge is there any 
 material vibration, and the resounding terrors of 
 a steel-plate floor are no more ; applied to the sys- 
 tems of elevated roads in city streets the ballast- 
 floor would solve the terrible noise problem at 
 once. The thorough ballasting of a railroad is 
 in itself a serious undertaking and on the Alton 
 a system of regular inspection, supplemented by 
 annual competitive prizes for excellence in main- 
 tenance, keeps alive at all times a keen interest 
 in the work among section foremen and track 
 supervisors. 
 
 With the engineering department thus busy, 
 the operating department found itself over- 
 whelmed with problems of transportation. The 
 mere change of train-running on the double track 
 from the old-fashioned left-hand way to the new 
 right-hand way, meant the changing of every 
 switch to secure trailing instead of facing points 
 and the rebuilding of all interlocking plants. To 
 
 230 
 
Rebuilding of an American Railroad 
 
 strengthen the work of the operating department, 
 the railroad world has been drawn upon for the 
 most effective safety devices in the operation of 
 trains. Long stretches of track, in one instance 
 covering a distance of sixty-five miles, are pro- 
 vided with continuous electric signals which pro- 
 tect moving trains, stations, grades, and curves. 
 Previously to the rebuilding there were compar- 
 atively few interlocking signals on the whole line 
 to protect railroad grade crossings. 
 
 The greatest obstacle found by the rebuilders 
 in the economical operating of the motive power 
 was a uniformly bad water-supply. Hard water 
 continually ruined the boilers. With the deter- 
 mination to check this enormous waste of main- 
 tenance, pumping stations were installed, reser- 
 voirs impounded, and soft water secured at all costs 
 for the boilers. But to the public the most inter- 
 esting feature about such efforts is to learn of the 
 sometimes unexpected results that follow them. 
 A large reservoir impounded for water-supply, 
 near a prosperous Illinois town, incidentally trans- 
 formed a series of gullies and hollows into a beau- 
 tiful lake. The townspeople were quick to note 
 the change in a landscape that had been for gen- 
 erations commonplace and uninteresting. They 
 asked permission to stock the new sheet of water 
 with black bass, and when they had fish in plenty 
 
 231 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 they wanted a country club. The railroad people 
 gave them a lease of the lands surrounding the 
 lake, and to-day the entire tract has been made 
 into a park with the lake for its centre; from a 
 knoll a shady club-house overlooks the water. 
 It would be difficult to convince the people of 
 this town that primitive ideas in railroading 
 should be adhered to; they have become believ- 
 ers in progress. 
 
 Side by side with the reduction of waste in en- 
 gine maintenance has gone effort along every line 
 in the reduction of operating expenses. Feeding 
 the engine, for example, has been reduced to so 
 fine a point that a locomotive may take water, 
 coal, and sand all at the same moment. Below the 
 engine as it stands the cinders may be dumped 
 into steel buggies. From these they are dumped 
 in turn, automatically, into conveyers that load 
 them on dump cars, and the cars spread them 
 where wanted on the track; not once are they 
 touched by manual labour. Such a coaling sta- 
 tion, supporting a seventy-ton bin over a scale 
 and handling every day two hundred tons of coal 
 and one hundred and fifty thousand gallons of 
 water, besides sand and cinders, is operated by 
 only two men, one for day and one for night. 
 
 To secure the working force for the operation 
 of the road, employment bureaus are maintained 
 
 232 
 
Rebuilding of an American Railroad 
 
 which draw from the sons of farmers and shippers 
 along the line. It is a pioneer idea among rail- 
 roads, but its wisdom is obvious. Of equal im- 
 portance, and also unique, is a railway instruction 
 school conducted on cars fitted for the purpose. 
 In this school every switchman, operator, train- 
 man, and engineman takes a course. There are 
 classes in rules, in orders, and in signals, and, while 
 working to higher positions in the service, subor- 
 dinates attend them, final examinations being 
 held for promotion. By means of the stereop- 
 ticon, signals are shown in the car, and the pic- 
 tures include a complete panorama of trains of 
 every class, of trackage of every description, and 
 of the semaphore and interlocking plants of the 
 entire system. Photography, indeed, has become 
 so important an adjunct in the work of the new 
 kind of railway management that an official pho- 
 tographer is a part of the operating department 
 of the new road. 
 
 Photography of this systematised description 
 serves admirably to supply newspaper editors 
 with timely illustrations and affords material for 
 write-ups. As a means of adjustment in cases of 
 accident and personal injury the photograph is of 
 especial value. If at any time an officer is too 
 busy to go out in person to see any feature of 
 a road, he may send the photographer for a view 
 
 233 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 of it. For personal injuries, surgical aids have 
 not been overlooked, and every train is provided 
 with a chest that includes the chief medicines 
 and certain instruments for use in accidents; in 
 addition, each car has its first-aid packet. 
 
 The entire point of view is, in railway affairs, 
 quite modern; It is not that these ideas are all 
 of them novel, but that together they represent 
 that which is good in the best railroad manage- 
 ment of to-day. 
 
 234 
 
THE FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL 
 RAILROAD 
 
THE FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL 
 RAILROAD 
 
 \y 
 IN history we have the record of every day but 
 
 yesterday, and of every generation but the last. 
 Our first transcontinental railroad was begun only 
 forty years ago ; yet as compared with what we 
 know of its story our information concerning the 
 Boston Tea Party is precise. Possibly this is a 
 tribute to the moral over the material; possibly 
 the blinding aurora of the Civil War still so plays 
 on the retina of our memories as to obscure all 
 lesser events on that horizon ; at all events, when 
 recently an American public man was asked for 
 literature concerning the history of this railroad 
 building he was at a loss v satisfactorily to refer to 
 any. x ' 
 
 Even in looking back into *he story, It is diffi- } 
 cult to realise that the building" of a railroad to 
 the Pacific Coast had been publicly proposed be- ^v 
 fore New England had a mile of railroad ; and 
 that as far back as 1 840 the Pacific Railroad proj- / 
 ect had already become popular and was timely I 
 matter with newspaper and magazine editors. 
 
 237 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 But by 1845 tne subject had taken so firm a 
 hold on popular fancy that an ingenious memo- 
 rialist of Congress, Robert Mills, in advocating the 
 building of a transcontinental highway for auto- 
 mobiles " steam-carriages," he termed them 
 modestly claimed to have advanced the idea of a 
 Pacific Railroad in 1819. This the historians 
 will not allow ; * it is certain, however, that in 
 1840 dispute had already arisen as to the honour 
 of having first proposed a transcontinental line. 
 
 The seeds thus sown in the thirties ripened in 
 the succeeding decade into an agitation that be' 
 came national. * A New York merchant surren- 
 dered so completely to the fascination of the 
 Pacific Road idea that he gave his life and his 
 fortune to efforts to arouse public opinion on the 
 subject and to move Congress to action. It was 
 not that he had aim of personal aggrandisement, 
 for he proposed to assume the construction and 
 general superintendence of the road at a salary 
 so nominal as $4,000 a year ; he was primarily 
 moved by the glorious national possibilities of his 
 enterprise, and it must still move the reader of 
 j the long and somewhat tedious story of the 
 / Pacific Road project to picture Asa Whitney, 
 towering in breadth and strength above all early 
 
 * The Union Pacific Railway, John P. Davis, Chicago, 
 1894. 
 
 238 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 promoters, his illusions still unshattered, but the 
 span of his life exhausted, keeping a dairy in the 
 city of Washington, and selling milk to mitigate 
 the poverty of his declining years. 
 
 Thomas H. Benton, in a burst of public elo- 
 quence, proposed in 1849 tnat ^ e Faciftc line 
 when built be adorned with a statue of Columbus 
 hewn from a granite peak of the Rockies, the 
 mountain itself its massive pedestal, with an out- 
 stretched arm pointing India to the westbound 
 passenger. Benton's idea was never carried out, 
 but in the Black Hills, more than eight thousand 
 feet above the level of the sea, stands a great cairn 
 overlooking the highest point at which the first 
 transcontinental road crosses the Rockies. A 
 newer track alignment has left this early monu- 
 ment at some distance from the present route, 
 and though at one point a glimpse of it may still 
 be had from the car window, it is now some hun- 
 dreds of feet above the railroad summit. It com. 
 memorates the energy and perseverance of two 
 men to whom chiefly is due the credit for the 
 building of the Union Pacific. Some time, per- 
 haps, beside the monument to Oakes and Oliver 
 Ames a more modest memorial may rise to the 
 memory of poor Asa Whitney, who surrendered 
 his life and fortune to an idea because to him it 
 was a national and a glorious one. 
 
 239 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 In truth, there never has been in American in- 
 dustrial achievement, and there never again can 
 be so widespread and stirring a public sentiment 
 as that which called for the building of a Pacific 
 Railroad. We can never again be poor ; we can 
 never again be only vaguely conscious of a Sam- 
 son-like national strength and youthfully im- 
 patient to test it. We have tested our strength 
 since then in too many ways; possibly we are 
 not quite proud of all of them. Nor can we ever 
 return to a public sentiment that knows no 
 jealousy of extraordinary riches, and as to indus- 
 trial enterprises we have been surfeited; every 
 day we taste of new ones with palates more jaded. 
 It was otherwise then. The great plains were 
 the home of the Indian and the buffalo. Pike's 
 Peak was a watchword, the Rocky Mountains 
 a dream, and California a fever when national 
 thought crystallised into a demand for the first 
 Pacific Road. The idea took hold of men as 
 powerful as Webster, as sagacious as Lincoln, as 
 cold as Jefferson Davis, as dramatic as Sumner, 
 and as politic as Buchanan. Douglas and Benton 
 " in their day lent to it their eloquence. The ten 
 years that led up to the Civil War saw the proj- 
 ^ ect discussed by each succeeding Congress with 
 / an earnestness .and attention second only to that 
 ( expended on the slavery question. Indeed, the 
 
 240 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 railroad matter as soon as it became tangible 
 became political, and divided men into alignment 
 of suspicion and resentment, as the Missouri 
 Compromise divided them. But it forced recom- 
 mendations from succeeding Presidents in annual 
 messages for years, and when the young Repub- 
 lican Party found itself for the first time in power 
 the Pacific Road project enlisted the aggressive- 
 ness of men so resourceful and dominating as 
 Thaddeus Stevens, John Sherman, and Henry 
 Winter Davis. J The matter got before the 
 Twenty-eighth Congress in 1845 in the form of 
 Asa Whitney's memorial, and from that time forth 
 for fifty years it engaged Congressional attention 
 in some form during nearly every session. Davis," 
 the historian of the Union Pacific, notes that ten I 
 years before a Pacific Road bill was finally passed, / 
 the Senate of the Thirty-second Congress was \ 
 giving more time to the subject than to any other j 
 topic of legislation. In 1853 tne P r ject g ot into/ 
 its first Presidential message; the Thirty-second 
 Congress gave it its first special committee, and 
 national appropriations already made put into 
 the field corps of engineers whose survey reports 
 filled eleven large volumes. 
 
 During all these years of the early agitation and ) 
 up to 1861 there was no real cjiance for a Pacific A 
 Railway bill to pass Congress. ' All parties agreed J 
 
 241 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 / that such a road should be built, but where? 
 The South wanted a southern route, and the 
 North a northern route, and these greater interests 
 
 I were in turn split into minor interests. There 
 
 / were at different periods a New York-Chicago 
 
 interest indorsed by Seward, a St. Louis interest 
 
 championed by Benton, a Memphis interest 
 
 backed by Arkansas and Tennessee, a Charleston 
 
 interest urged by Gadsden, and a nominal Texas 
 
 interest upheld by Sam Houston. The struggle 
 
 over the eastern terminus or termini of the road 
 
 /{ for compromise measures at times proposed no 
 
 / fewer than three lines with six termini might 
 have gone on another twenty years had not the 
 
 J guns at Sumter relieved the situation of its most 
 
 ( serious complications, v 
 
 ^ The Republican Party had, in its first national 
 platform, committed itself to Pacific Railway 
 legislation, and the Democratic platforms of 1856 
 and 1860 echoed pledges of friendliness to the 
 project. But when Congress assembled in July, 
 1861, there were many vacant seats. The small 
 but alert Southern element that had opposed Pa- 
 cific legislation in every form was absent, as well 
 as those larger Southern interests that had fought 
 ^ for a Pacific Road south of the thirty-fifth parallel. 
 The shock and stress of the Civil War had incalcu- 
 lably strengthened the chances for Federal action, 
 
 242 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 and the discussion in the war Congress lost at once 
 its wordy aspect of earlier years. That form of 
 legislative inactivity known as side-stepping was 
 plainly at an end. There were left but two strong 
 Pacific Railway interests, and of these the more 
 powerful was backed by New York, New Eng- 
 land, and Chicago interests, which stood for a line 
 on the forty-first parallel. Seward, indeed, had 
 said in debate ten years before, "Make a route 
 across the continent wherever you please, there 
 will be but two terminals to that road, one at New 
 York, the other at San Francisco." Moreover, 
 Chicago was already pushing west with its roads 
 to the Missouri River, and William B. Ogden, 
 the founder of the Chicago and Northwestern 
 System, stood with the New York interests against 
 a Northern Pacific route. He was already build- 
 ing the" Northwestern westward from Chicago, 
 and when the Pacific Railroad bill of 1862 passed 
 Congress, the contest between Chicago and St. 
 Louis as to which should secure the main line 
 had been won by the former in the provision that 
 the initial eastern point of the new line should be 
 at a point on the looth meridian, " between the 
 south margin of the valley of the Republican 
 River and the north margin of the valley of the 
 Platte River, in the Territory of Nebraska"; and 
 the final bill of 1864 confirmed this location. 
 
 243 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 f The principal eastern terminus was given to 
 ( Omaha, in a provision that, of several branches 
 I provided for east of this point, the Iowa branch 
 / should be built to the initial point on the looth 
 meridian, from " a point on the western boundary 
 of the State of Iowa to be fixed by the President of 
 the United States"; and Abraham Lincoln fixed 
 the point within the limits of the township in 
 Iowa opposite the town of Omaha, in Nebraska, 
 and afterward, " east of, and opposite to, the East 
 Line of Section Ten." In the end the legal ter- 
 minus was fixed by the Supreme Court of the 
 United States on the Iowa side of the Missouri 
 River, where, west of Council Bluffs, the traveller 
 finds to-day what is known as the Transfer Sta- 
 tion, though this is, in matter of fact, some dis- 
 tance south of Section Ten. 
 
 General Grenville M. Dodge, who was chief 
 engineer of the Union Pacific, and in charge of 
 construction during 1866 and thereafter, still sur- 
 vives, a Nestor in the honourable company of 
 American construction engineers, and his name 
 will always be coupled with the work of putting 
 the first railroad across the Rockies. His remi- 
 niscences throw a pretty side-light on this decision 
 of Lincoln's concerning the eastern terminus. In 
 I 1858 General Dodge assigning the date from 
 recollection after a summer of engineering recon- 
 
 244 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 noissances west of the Missouri, camped with his 
 party at Council Bluffs. Abraham Lincoln at 
 that time was visiting the Bluffs. He heard of 
 General Dodge's return and of his surveys, and 
 sought him out. Sitting with the mountain en- 
 gineer on the porch of the hotel, Lincoln held 
 him for two hours or more, and drew from him 
 the facts he had obtained and his opinion as to 
 the best route for a railroad across the continent 
 and the possibility of building one. 
 
 In 1862, while in command of the District 
 of Corinth, Miss., General Dodge was ordered 
 by Grant to proceed to Washington to report to 
 the President ; Lincoln had remembered the talk 
 of 1858 on the hotel porch of Council Bluffs. 
 The question of the eastern terminus for the 
 newly authorised railroad was then a national 
 question. In General Dodge's opinion there was, 
 from an engineering viewpoint, but one natural 
 route for a railroad to cross Iowa, the Missouri 
 River, and the great plains. The route proposed 
 by him was that along which the Union Pacific 
 was afterward built. It offered the advantage of 
 a great open road from Omaha to Salt Lake, 600 
 miles of it up a single valley that of the Platte. 
 This, in turn, led to the natural pass over the 
 Rockies, the lowest in all the range, and to the 
 continental divide at a point where it lay in a 
 
 245 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 basin 500 feet below the general level instead of 
 on a mountain summit. Any engineer, in General 
 Dodge's opinion, who should fail to avail himself 
 of rich possibilities should have his diploma taken 
 from him. Lincoln acted on these views in desig- 
 nating Omaha as the Missouri River terminus. 
 
 In its political aspect the extending of Govern- 
 ment aid in the building of the first transconti- 
 nental railroad must always remain an extraordi- 
 nary enactment in our national legislation. The 
 Civil War alone made such a step possible. The 
 period had rudely brushed away constitutional 
 and laissez faire legislators and reasoning, and the 
 men who stood in Congress for action went in this 
 case to the other extreme. The building of a 
 ^Pacific Road had every war argument in its favour. 
 Such a line, it was urged, would bind California 
 / more closely to the Northern interest, and would 
 V enable the United States more promptly to repel 
 I any attack on the coast ports. Moreover, it would 
 / enable the Government more easily to control 
 \ Indian outbreaks among those tribes still unrea- 
 \ sonable enough to object to being exterminated. ? 
 It must not be forgotten, however, that during 
 the gloomy days of the Civil War Indian out- 
 breaks, whether justifiable or not, were serious 
 matters to a Government struggling to maintain 
 itself; and an argument seeming trivial now might 
 
 246 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 have been serious when people were excited or 
 depressed by every rumour and portent. As a final 
 argument it was urged that the building of the 
 Pacific Road would put an end to the Mormon 
 question, and the completion of it was the real 
 beginning of the end. 
 
 The very name used by Congress in creating 
 the corporation, " The Union Pacific Railroad 
 Company," implies a reflection of the Union sen- 
 timent of the Civil War period. Y The use of the 
 word has been ascribed to the " union " of various 
 corporations and plans in the project. But there 
 is undoubtedly more than this to it. By far the j 
 most powerful arguments in favour of the road^L 
 were the war needs of the Government. The j 
 word " Union " was everywhere foremost in the 
 thought and speech of that day, and Federal action 
 was meant to come as a final answer to the de- 
 mand of nearly twenty years for national legisla- 
 tion on the Pacific Road subject ; to the foes of the 
 Union it was flung as an evidence of confidence 
 and strength on the part of the Republican Party 
 and its Union administration. But of the burdens 
 carried during those days by Abraham Lincoln 
 there is no more pathetic glimpse than this, that 
 in the midst of the profound anxieties of his 
 struggle to preserve the nation he was required 
 by Congress to determine the detail of the proper 
 
 247 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 track-gauge for the Pacific Railroad. Nor wiK 
 it surprise any one conversant with the legislative 
 spirit of the war period that, after President Lin- 
 coln had long and painstakingly considered the 
 subject and decided on a track-gauge of five feet, 
 Congress cheerfully and at once passed a law 
 changing the gauge to four feet eight and one- 
 half inches. 
 
 The act of 1862 was supplemented by a sec- 
 ond act in 1864 containing more liberal subsidy 
 provisions, and under this charter the Union and 
 Central Pacific Railroads were built. The coterie 
 of capitalists who undertook the enterprise be- 
 lieved that their major profits would come from 
 the construction rather than from the railroad as 
 an investment, and in order to insure these to 
 themselves they acquired the charter of the 
 Pennsylvania Fiscal Agency, a name afterward 
 changed by the Legislature of Pennsylvania at 
 the instance of George Francis Train to " The 
 Credit Mobilier of America," and the Credit 
 Mobilier not only constructed the Union Pacific 
 but made for itself and for a number of American 
 statesmen the most sensational record of a long 
 \ and exciting day of plots and counter-plots in 
 Pacific Railroad history. For the beginning of 
 construction much work had already been done. 
 General Dodge had crossed the Missouri River as 
 
 248! 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 early as 1853 m t ^ ie i nterest of projected Iowa 
 railroads which sought to ascertain where a Pacific 
 Road would be likely to fix a Missouri River 
 terminus. Until the Civil War General Dodge 
 was busy with reconnoissances and surveys. 
 When he entered the service, Peter A. Dey 
 took it up, and in 1862 put regular parties in 
 the field on the first range of the Rockies, 
 and over the Wasatch range under a son of 
 Brigham Young. These surveys extended from 
 the Missouri River to the California State line 
 and included twenty-five thousand miles of re- 
 connoissances and over fifteen thousand miles 
 of instrumental surveys. They were made al- 
 most entirely under army protection, but despite 
 all precautions many men were scalped by In- 
 dians. Ground for construction was broken at 
 Omaha with a florid speech by George Francis 
 Train, December 2, 1863, and actual construction 
 Began on the Union Pacific very early in 1864. 
 Leland Stanford, on January 8, 1863, had turned 
 the first shovelful of earth for the California end of 
 the undertaking at Sacramento. In nine months 
 the Omaha enthusiasts had completed the first 
 eleven miles of one end of the transcontinental 
 line. The Californians had come to a standstill 
 with thirty-one miles. Thus the race started 
 slowly ; but at its close there were days when Jack 
 
 249 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 Casement laid six and seven miles of Union 
 Pacific track between sun and sun. 
 
 The route the new road followed from the 
 Missouri River had long been famous on the 
 frontier. Spaniards had probably reached what is 
 now Nebraska as early as 1541, but it was more 
 than a hundred years later when Indians on the 
 Mississippi described to Father Marquette the 
 course of the Missouri, and his map showing the 
 Platte flowing into the Missouri is still preserved. 
 White men in 1 739 had explored the Platte as far 
 as the present village of North Platte in Nebras- 
 ka, and French traders made a highway of the river 
 for more than a hundred years afterward. The 
 expeditions of Lewis and Clarke, close upon the 
 Louisiana purchase, opened the country to Amer- 
 ican influence, and St. Louis became the great 
 outfitting point for the adventurers and traders 
 who penetrated to the remote regions of the 
 Northwest. In 1812 young Robert Stuart, bound 
 overland from the mouth of the Columbia River 
 with despatches for John Jacob Astor, found him- 
 self unhorsed among mountain wastes in what is 
 now Wyoming. The little party, groping, half- 
 famished, toward the head waters of the Missouri, 
 stumbled on the north fork of the Platte River, 
 followed it through the Black Hills, wintered un- 
 der its cottonwoods on the Nebraska bottoms, and 
 
 250 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 in the spring brought to St. Louis the first definite 
 story of a trip down the line of the future Pacific 
 Railroad. In 1825 trappers of the American Fur 
 Company had made headquarters as far west as 
 the Beaver Valley in Wyoming and Jim Bridger 
 had already tasted of the waters of the Great Salt 
 Lake. In 1 820 Jacques Laramie, murdered on the 
 bank of a Wyoming tributary of the Platte, had left 
 his name not alone to that river but to the plains, 
 the mountains, the peak, the county, the city, and 
 the fort that still bear it. Trappers headed by Mil- 
 ton Sublette and Bridger bought Fort Laramie in 
 1835, and it became the rendezvous of a genera- 
 tion of men that has passed and whose like we 
 can never see again. Fremont was there in 1842, 
 and Parkman, following the Platte trail in 1846, 
 has left the story of his trip up the valley that 
 General Dodge was to follow with his surveyors 
 for the overland route. 
 
 In 1832 Captain Bonne ville camped under 
 Chimney Rock and, penetrating Wyoming, skirted 
 the Wind River Mountains and fished trout from 
 a tributary of the Green River. He was the first 
 white man to take a wagon across the continental 
 divide on the line of the future railroad. Here 
 the Mormon pioneers began their long journey to 
 their unknown home beyond the mountains, for 
 Fremont's narrative had decided Brigham Young 
 
 251 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 upon his great undertaking. Along the Platte 
 year after year were strung the wagons of the 
 Forty-niners, and in a calm made sweet by the 
 blossom of the wild plum and a sunset brought 
 near by the thin, clear air of the mountains rose the 
 camp-fires of the patient homeseekers following 
 the overland trail. 
 
 But the valley scenes changed when the rail- 
 road contracts were let. The grading camp made 
 a rough companion to the quiet outfit of the immi- 
 grant. Civilisation, now really coming, advanced 
 in its mask of vice, the characteristic of its rise 
 and its decline. The grader, the gambler, the 
 criminal, and the adventurer moved together across 
 the plains with the tough town, the outlaw, and 
 the vigilance committee. The forks of the Platte 
 were reached by the tracklayers at the close of the 
 second season's building, 1866. But before these 
 first 246 miles were completed some conception 
 of the enormous difficulties of the undertaking 
 had dawned on the promoters. 
 
 The Union Pacific was building across a desert 
 with a base at Omaha that was likewise beyond a 
 railroad connection. The engine for the Omaha 
 railroad shops was dragged across country from 
 Des Moines. The Central Pacific, building from 
 the western coast, was compelled to get everything 
 except ties by ship, around the Horn or by way 
 
 252 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 of Panama. Marine insurance was on a war basis, 
 and the capital of the Californians was eaten into 
 by indemnity tolls. The Union Pacific lacked 
 even the tie supply afforded the Californians by 
 the Sierra Nevadas, and was compelled to skirmish 
 hundreds of miles up and down the Missouri River 
 for ties and bridge timbers. Moreover, the In- 
 dians of the plains had already filed their protests 
 against the novel invasion. Before the rails had 
 been laid two hundred miles from the Missouri 
 River, Turkey Leg and his Cheyennes swooped 
 down on Plum Creek, scalped a hand-car pilot, 
 derailed the freight train following, and with the 
 engineman and fireman burning in the wreckage 
 plundered the box-cars and made away heavy 
 with booty. 
 
 It happened that General Dodge in his car, a 
 travelling arsenal, was on his way down from the 
 "front" when news of the capture reached Plum 
 Creek Station. On his train were twenty-odd men, 
 in part the crews, some discharged men and some 
 adventurers bound for the rear all of them stran- 
 gers to the chief engineer. The reports coming 
 in by telegraph brought every one to the little 
 station platform. General Dodge called on the 
 men about him to fall in and go forward to recap- 
 ture the freight train. Every man within hearing 
 went into line and by his bearing showed he was a 
 
 253 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 soldier ; and when, reaching the scene, the chief 
 gave the order to deploy as skirmishers these 
 frontiersmen advanced as steadily and in as good 
 order as the veterans that climbed the face of 
 Kenesaw. 
 
 X^In truth every contractor's camp had a military 
 ( front. Engineering parties were always guarded 
 / by detachments of United States troops, and a 
 \ little station in Wyoming still bears the name 
 of Percy, for Engineer Percy T. Brown, killed 
 by Indians. "Engineers reconnoitred, surveyed, 
 ocated, and built inside picket lines. Men 
 marched to work at the tap of the drum," says 
 General Dodge. "They stacked their arms on 
 the dump and were ready at a moment's warning 
 to fall in and fight for their territory. General 
 Casement's track-train could arm a thousand men 
 at a word, and from him, as its head, down to its 
 chief spiker such a battalion could be commanded 
 by experienced officers of every rank from general 
 \J:o captain." 
 
 Amid these difficulties construction proceeded 
 with such materials as could be brought up from 
 St. Louis and St. Joseph during three months of 
 water transportation; but on November 7, 1867, 
 the last railroad link in the transcontinental line 
 east of the Missouri was completed. William B. 
 Ogden had pushed the Chicago and Northwest- 
 
 254 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 ern Railway into Council Bluffs, and that road, 
 then, as now, a powerful ally of the Union Pacific, 
 began pouring track material into the Council 
 Bluffs yards, giving the latter road an actual railroad 
 base for its supplies. 
 
 It was needed. The Central Pacific party, 
 taking advantage of the law of 1866, which 
 opened the continent to a race between the east 
 and west builders, were bending every effort to get 
 to Salt Lake ahead of their eastern competitor. 
 Each of the two parties at interest was determined 
 to secure to itself the greatest possible mileage 
 because every mile built meant round profits in 
 lands and in bonds. The two companies instead 
 of being co-partners became bitter rivals, and up 
 to the last moment in which a junction of the two 
 roads was effected made every possible effort to 
 overreach one another. During 1867 General 
 Dodge had already pushed the Union Pacific to 
 Cheyenne in Wyoming, which after November 
 14th became the winter terminus. 
 
 The whole country now awoke to the contest 
 that the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific 
 were entering upon. Which should reach Salt 
 Lake first, and which should win the big Govern- 
 ment subsidies ranging through the mountains 
 from $64,000 to $96,000 a mile 1 ? 
 
 The Union Pacific chief engineer after a New 
 
 255 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 York conference during the winter of 1867-68 re- 
 turned to Omaha, called his staff around him, and 
 laid out his plans. These centred upon Ogden, 
 Utah, 502 miles west of the end of the track, 
 as the objective point for 1868, and Humboldt 
 Wells, 216 miles west of Ogden, for the spring 
 of 1869. Preliminary lines had been run but no 
 final location had been made west of Laramie 
 City, where town lots were sold in April, 1868. 
 General Dodge had already solved the vital prob- 
 lem of the pass across the Rockies by getting lost 
 one afternoon in the Black Hills, if it is fair so to 
 describe the accident which led to the remarka- 
 ble discovery. For over two years all explora- 
 tions had failed to reveal a satisfactory crossing 
 of this secondary range of the Rockies, known as 
 the Black Hills, which on account of its short 
 slope and its great height is the most difficult 
 of all the ranges to get over. On this occasion 
 General Dodge, returning from a Powder River 
 campaign, leaving his troops, with a scout and a few 
 men, rode up Lodge Pole Creek, along the over- 
 land trail, and struck south along the crest of the 
 mountains. Indians beset the little party before 
 noon and got between them and their trains. 
 Holding the Indians at bay with their rifles, they 
 retreated. It was nearly night when they finally 
 escaped the enemy, and meantime they had ridden 
 
 256 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 down an unknown ridge that led out of the 
 hills and clear to the plains without a break. 
 That night General Dodge told his guide that 
 if they saved their scalps he believed they 
 had found the crossing of the Black Hills ; over 
 this pass the trains of the Union Pacific run 
 to-day. 
 
 This engineering work of running the lines 
 through the Black Hills, then, had, in 1867, al- 
 ready been done ; but beyond that point absolutely 
 everything was yet to be done. Engineering 
 parties were distributed during the winter months, 
 to be on the ground when spring opened, and 
 those destined for Utah crossed the Wasatch 
 Mountains on sledges with the snow over the tops 
 of the telegraph poles. The track was laid across 
 the Black Hills, and this gave the opportunity 
 to run ties down the mountain streams instead 
 of bringing them 800 miles from the Missouri 
 River. Even after the builders had reached 
 the Hills the country afforded nothing but the 
 roadbed and ties, and it took forty carloads of 
 material a day to supply "the front." In April, 
 graders were at Laramie, working from daylight 
 till dark, and the construction crews worked 
 every day without an hour's loss of time from 
 the start to the season's finish. Every man, from 
 the chief of construction to the water carriers, 
 
 257 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 seemed bitted for a finish heat, and that season 
 they actually pushed their grade to Green River, 
 to Ogden, to Salt Lake, and to far Humboldt 
 Wells. 
 
 ^Winter caught the builders at the foot of the 
 Wasatch range, but it no longer stayed them. 
 The spirit of the fight had got beyond that, and 
 the frozen earth was dynamited like rock. Track 
 was laid across the Wasatch on a bed covered 
 with snow and ice, and one of General Casement's 
 track-laying trains slid, track and all, off the ice 
 bodily into the ditch ! Even the Mormons 
 roused themselves, and under Brigham Young's 
 exhortation turned mightily into the race. In 
 railroading then, as in politics later, the watch- 
 word was "Claim everything," and the Central 
 Pacific people astonished the eastern builders by 
 filing a map and plans for building as far east as 
 , Echo, some distance east of Ogden. 
 
 The two companies had 20,000 men at work. 
 The Casement brothers of the Union Pacific con- 
 struction forces rose to the occasion. Eastern news- 
 papers were carrying daily headlines, "The 
 
 Union Pacific built miles to-day." In the 
 
 beginning a mile a day was considered good 
 work, but the Casements had long been laying two 
 miles a day, and now were working seven days in 
 the week, and every hour the light gave them, and 
 
 258 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 they crowned their supreme efforts by laying in. 
 one day nearly eight miles of track between day- 
 light and dark. 
 
 The Central Pacific meantime stayed not for 
 stake and stopped not for stone. They had four- 
 teen tunnels to build, but they did not wait to 
 finish them. Supplies, even to engines, were 
 hauled over the Sierras, and the work was pushed 
 until, in the spring of 1869 the opposing track- 
 layers finally met at Promontory, Utah; the mo- 
 ment at which the law had declared a junction 
 must be made had arrived. 
 
 On May loth Leland Stanford, Governor of 
 California and president of the Central Pacific, 
 and Durant, Duff, and Sidney Dillon, of the 
 Union Pacific, assembled with their friends to 
 drive the spike that was to signalise the comple- 
 tion of the great undertaking. A little company 
 of regular soldiers with a garrison band from Fort 
 Douglas preserved the military atmosphere of the 
 long struggle. The Mormons who had helped so 
 faithfully with the roadbed were there, and the 
 coolies from San Francisco and the Irish track- 
 layers from the Atlantic seaboard faced each 
 other. Strawbridge and Reed, the rival superin- 
 tendents of construction, placed under the rails 
 the last tie of California laurel. Spikes of silver 
 and of gold from Montana, Idaho, and Nevada 
 
 259 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 were presented and driven into it, and Dr. Hark- 
 ness, on behalf of the greatest Pacific State, 
 presented the last spike wrought of California 
 gold. 
 
 It is all very pretty to read the florid accounts 
 of this final scene. The country was waiting for 
 the coming moment. Telegraph wires every- 
 where had been silenced to repeat the final 
 blows of this silver maul which were to ring 
 from the little valley in the Sierras to end 
 and end of the United States. The first engine 
 from the Pacific faced the first from the At- 
 lantic, and amid the silence of uncovered heads 
 the Governor of California and Vice-President 
 Durant, of the Union Pacific, drove the last 
 spike. 
 
 No such story is written anywhere on the rec- 
 ords of our railroads. The days when Dodge 
 ran the line, Jack Casement laid the rail, Leland 
 Stanford drove the spike, and Bret Harte supplied 
 the poem can never come back. Literature and 
 the railroad had not become wholly divorced 
 when the California poet wrote " What the En- 
 gines Said." \J Public sympathy and the railroad 
 had not yet completely parted company when from 
 the stages of theatres and on the first pages of 
 newspapers particular announcement was made 
 of the celebration to come on the next day. The 
 
 260 
 
The First Transcontinental Road 
 
 rejoicing in San Francisco reached the extrava- 
 gance of a kermess. In the bay the shipping 
 was bright with bunting, and between gaily deco- 
 rated buildings processions of jubilant citizens 
 marched all day. What matters it that we know 
 now that the electric current suffered stage fright, 
 and that the ring of the sledge on the last spike 
 could not be made to repeat beyond Omaha*? 
 Is it not enough that the chief operator was 
 equal to the occasion and drove the heavy blows 
 in dignified clicks at the telegraph office on the 
 Missouri River? What is of consequence is 
 the way in which the clicks were received, the 
 blows repeated at San Francisco on the great 
 bell of the City Hall, and cannon booming with 
 the last stroke off Fort Point, and on Capitol 
 Hill in Omaha a hundred guns following the 
 explosion of bombs and the screaming of steam- 
 whistles. 
 
 It was the rejoicing of our crude days. Capi- 
 talists, prominent citizens, volunteer firemen, and 
 horseshoers could still walk happily in one tire- 
 less procession when the last Pacific Railroad 
 spike was driven. Grant took the news in the 
 White House, Chicago turned out a parade four 
 miles long, New York City was saluting the 
 Pacific Coast with salvoes of artillery, Trinity 
 chimes were ringing " Old Hundred," and Trinity 
 
 261 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 voices were chanting " Te Deum " when the 
 earliest transcontinental line was finished ; and in 
 Philadelphia the old bells were ringing in Inde- 
 pendence Hall. For American railroading surely 
 those were the golden days. 
 
 262 
 
THE EARLY DAY IN RAILROADING 
 
THE EARLY DAY IN RAILROADING 
 
 NOTHING in early American railroading is really 
 so impressive as the feats that railroad men have ac- 
 complished with the scanty means they had to do 
 with. To recall now that an early Kentucky road 
 used rails made of grooved stone and faced with 
 a strap of iron seems like looking back 600 years 
 instead of sixty. Early-day railroad stories, too, 
 often have a humourous turn because the contrasts 
 are so striking. It is difficult to picture an infancy 
 of railroad affairs in which railroad directors elect- 
 ed train conductors; yet an early board of Michi- 
 gan Southern directors passed resolutions on such 
 matters, balloted for captains of trains, and took 
 the radical step of declaring that no credit be 
 given for railroad passage. 
 
 Railroad travel in America goes back even 
 of conductors. Under the earliest plan the train 
 engineer collected the fares and the fireman handled 
 the baggage and freight. Nor was there in the 
 beginning that urbanity between rival railroad 
 managements which is now universal. Railroad 
 accidents, for example, are so delicate a matter 
 
 265 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 that to refer in an advertisement to the mishaps of 
 another line would to-day be thought monstrous ; 
 but in 1837 a Michigan superintendent announced 
 that "Great care is taken in keeping this road 
 in repair, thus avoiding accidents similar to those 
 occurring on other roads, daily jeopardising life and 
 limb." When such a handbill made its appear- 
 ance, can the rage in a rival superintendent's office 
 be imagined ? Or can a railroad executive of to- 
 day conceive the gnawing pains under an early-day 
 president's belt when having but two locomotives 
 in the world, he found himself forced to sell one to 
 a hated competitor in order to pay his taxes? 
 Worse than that, because infringing on a dig- 
 nity that should be the highest that of a direc- 
 torate there was a time in American railroading 
 when, the sheriff having levied on all the furniture, 
 the directors of the Michigan Southern Railroad, 
 meeting in their New York rooms, had to borrow 
 chairs from neighbouring offices to deliberate in. 
 
 The fact is that American railroad building in 
 its beginning afforded an opening for the specula- 
 tive mania that always has sought outlet in one 
 or another form of American industrial activity. 
 When American railroad building first began, 
 every community wanted its road in order to get 
 its share of immediate advancement. In conse- 
 quence, everybody preachers, farmers, lawyers, 
 
 266 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 and doctors built railroads. Nearly all of the 
 first ventures failed. The initial cost usually 
 swamped the road by the time it was ready to run 
 cars. The few lines which, under exceptional 
 conditions, made money fast inflamed the country 
 with railroad building as it has been inflamed at 
 times by mining crazes and oil crazes or real-estate 
 booms. 
 
 In instances these first railroads were given bank- 
 ing powers, and issued wildcat currency, forerunner, 
 perhaps, of watered stocks, which were an after- 
 thought. Industrial conditions were at the outset 
 so crude that railroads which in 1837 paid thirty 
 per cent, dividends went into bankruptcy in 1840. 
 The idea of putting a part of the earnings into a 
 surplus or reserve fund had not then been thought 
 of. A few carefully managed and conservative 
 lines succeeded from the start. Most of these were 
 built, as the Pennsylvania, on the wrecks of earlier 
 ventures, but a remarkable exception was a little 
 Cleveland road, begun with many misgivings in 
 1850. It opened for business in November, 1852, 
 and in July, 1853, P a ^ * ts nrst semi-annual div- 
 idend of five per cent This was not unusual. 
 What is unusual is that this road never thereafter 
 failed to pay regular dividends. It made its stock- 
 holders rich, and a small block of its shares, taken 
 reluctantly by the city of Cleveland, was the basis 
 
 267 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 of the Cleveland municipal sinking fund that has 
 since become world-famous. A more extraordi- 
 nary municipal railroad experience, however, has 
 been that of Cincinnati. Cincinnati enjoys a pe- 
 culiar distinction in that it has been the only 
 American municipality, possibly the only one in 
 the world, that has ever built a railroad and in 
 this instance a very big and successful railroad. 
 
 In 1836 the project of a railroad from Cincin- 
 nati to the South was agitated. The usual 
 speeches, illuminations, and conferences, however, 
 resulted in nothing. The Ohio River traffic had 
 made Cincinnati. At one time this traffic extend- 
 ed to the Western frontier, and the steamboat 
 trade with St. Louis, Memphis, Vicksburg, and 
 New Orleans was of first importance. When the 
 railroads came this was cut off. Three lines of 
 railroad from the Atlantic seaboard had put New 
 York, Philadelphia, and Boston in touch with the 
 West, and the old route through Pittsburg and 
 down the Ohio River to Cincinnati had been al- 
 most abandoned. To the South the situation 
 was even more serious. In 1859 tne Louisville 
 and Nashville, completed to Nashville, had, with 
 its connections, cut off from Cincinnati every 
 Southern city. Meantime the Civil War opened. 
 General Burnside, during his East Tennessee cam- 
 paign, had written President Lincoln, it is said, 
 
 268 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 urging the building of a railroad from Cincinnati 
 to Knoxville as a line of communication; but 
 Lincoln, with his great common-sense, realised 
 that such a step transcended the proportions of 
 Burnside's campaign, and, in answering, diplomat- 
 ically confined himself to the observation that it 
 was quite proper for a general in the field to make 
 any expenditures required by military necessity. 
 Accordingly, Burnside went ahead with some val- 
 uable and thorough surveys and ended with 
 them. 
 
 But these military surveys, though coming to 
 nothing for the campaign, were to bear good fruit 
 long afterward. Cincinnati realised that the ques- 
 tion of a railroad to the South was a question of her 
 very existence as a city. The laws of Ohio, based 
 on early and disastrous experiences, forbade the 
 issuing of bonds or the granting of aid to a rail- 
 road on the part of any municipality, county, or of 
 the State itself. Pennsylvania and Michigan had 
 already suffered severely in railroad ventures. At 
 this deadlock matters stood when a young Cin- 
 cinnati lawyer, E. A. Furgeson, concluded that 
 although the perplexed city could not aid a rail- 
 road she could build one herself. He made public 
 the novel proposition, and it won attention. After 
 a protracted struggle the Legislature of Ohio 
 passed the enabling bill, and, though peculiarly 
 
 269 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 drawn, the act has stood the test of thirty-five years 
 of continual litigation. 
 
 Louisville rose in arms when the project as- 
 sumed definite shape. The Legislature of Ken- 
 tucky passed a bill endeavouring to kill the road 
 by taxation, but Cincinnati overcame all obstacles, 
 the road was built to Chattanooga and leased 
 shortly afterward to the Cincinnati, New Orleans 
 and Texas Pacific Railway. The most interesting 
 feature of this unique undertaking is that the road 
 was well built. The numerous and thorough 
 surveys made first by the military and afterward 
 by the city were followed by careful construction. 
 During the last decade American railroad systems 
 have been relocating and rebuilding large portions 
 of their lines, but no such work has been found 
 necessary on this admirably built road. Its bridge 
 across the Kentucky River was the first cantilever 
 built in America, and was, when erected, the high- 
 est span in the New World. The Ohio River 
 bridge, with a channel span of 515 feet, was said 
 when built to be the longest truss span in exist- 
 ence. Lavoinne, the French engineer, in his work 
 on American railways, describes the Kentucky 
 River structure as the most remarkable viaduct 
 in America, both in proportions and plan of con- 
 struction. Cincinnati put $18,000,000 into her 
 venture, but she has never lost one dollar of her 
 
 270 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 rentals. Her income to-day exceeds $1,000,000 
 a year, and the scale increases from year to year. 
 She paid 7.3 per cent, interest on the bonds issued 
 for the construction of the road, and there were 
 times when she had to turn out her street lamps 
 on moonlight nights to pay her interest; but her 
 reward is now coming, not alone in her traffic 
 supremacy, but on her actual investment. The 
 story of the struggle for and against the under- 
 taking, extending over a generation, reads like 
 romance, but the railroad was needed, and its 
 building was good business, even though hazardous 
 in the extreme. 
 
 There were, on the other hand, many railroads 
 undertaken where they never could be made to 
 pay ; but failure was no deterrent to the American 
 people. They blundered on, learning all the 
 time, and in an early moment, when despair had 
 overtaken the whole country as to its railroad un- 
 dertakings, some monetary genius suggested the 
 bond and mortgage as a means of providing money 
 to build railroads, and moderh railroad building 
 was accomplished. By this expedient the initial 
 cost of construction was funded, the railroad found 
 a chance to breathe while getting a traffic foothold, 
 and in spite of many abuses in which the money 
 of investors has been filched in these securities, the 
 plan has opened, next to Government securities, 
 
 271 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 the greatest investment field in modern finance. 
 It alone has made possible our national railway 
 development as it exists to-day. 
 
 The tremendous efforts made by towns and coun- 
 ties and States to secure these early lines of trans- 
 portation are quite forgotten. They were on a par 
 with all pioneer hardships, and, considered now, 
 '^ are often pathetic. Ten years after Michigan roads 
 had begun advertising that emigrants for Indiana, 
 
 \ Illinois, and Wisconsin Territory could save two 
 days by taking their route, Illinois women, in 
 
 / order to encourage railroad building, were selling 
 their butter, eggs, chickens, and cheese to pay 
 for railroad stock that they had subscribed for 
 depriving themselves of the scant luxuries of 
 pioneer women, and often using means they had 
 put aside for the education of their children to get 
 railroads. Communities bonded themselves to 
 give aid to railroads until they found their gener- 
 ous impulses had bankrupted them. Another side 
 of the picture is even more painful. In repeated 
 instances dishonest promoters secured the bonds 
 thus voted and never built the roads for which they 
 had been given. With their money stolen, such 
 communities refused to pay their bonds, and lit- 
 igation over them filled the courts. Among many 
 others, the city of Watertown, Wisconsin, defraud- 
 ed in this way, repudiated its railroad bonds, and 
 
 272 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 fought judgments against the municipality for a 
 generation. 
 
 To avoid the United States Court processes 
 that would have compelled the levying of taxes, 
 Watertown ran its local affairs for years without 
 a visible mayor, council, or any municipal official 
 on whom a court paper could legally be served, 
 and local humourists still show the dam across the 
 Rock River under which the mayor and council 
 were said to have met for many years in clan- 
 destine sessions. Wisconsin farmers, to secure 
 railroads, gave notes for their stock subscriptions, 
 and secured them by mortgages on their farms. 
 Needless to say, the roads failed, and the farmers 
 lost their farms through their efforts to secure 
 transportation facilities. It is small wonder that 
 a legacy of distrust and hatred is still in some 
 communities a portion against all railroads. 
 
 In physical obstacles the river was the great 
 stumbling-block of the early railroad. Terminals 
 were often fixed at the Mississippi and the Mis- 
 souri rivers because of the enormous expense in- 
 volved in crossing such streams. Ferries served 
 in these cases to fill the industrial gaps, and, in 
 some instances, pontoon bridges, a famous one 
 being that of John Lawler, at Prairie du Chien, on 
 the Mississippi. Here was a case in which cor- 
 porate enterprise waited on individual initiative. 
 
 273 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 John Lawler at that point began transferring 
 freight and passengers across the river by steam- 
 boat to connecting railroads. He then conceived 
 the idea of a pontoon bridge that should carry 
 trains across the Mississippi intact, and so ar- 
 ranged, of course, as to provide a draw for river 
 traffic. With this venture he succeeded so well 
 that the railroad companies renewed his contract 
 on favourable terms, and he put in a pile bridge 
 with float draws. The boat interests of the rivers 
 were then so much more powerful than the rail- 
 roads that it was often difficult to get permission 
 to bridge a navigable stream. The first railroad 
 bridge to cross the Mississippi was built at Rock 
 Island, Illinois, in 1856. William C. Brown, 
 in a recent address before an association of Il- 
 linois manufacturers, presented a curious story of 
 the history of this first industrial highway across 
 the most fertile valley in the world. No sooner 
 was the bridge completed, at an enormous ex- 
 pense, and after the most herculean pioneer rail- 
 road effort, than St. Louis steamboat interests 
 demanded its removal as a nuisance and an ob- 
 struction to navigation; and in a bill filed by 
 James Ward, a citizen of St. Louis, in the United 
 States District Court for the district of Iowa, 
 he prayed that it be so adjudged, and that it be 
 "abated and removed, and said river be restored 
 
 274 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 to its original capacity for all purposes of navi- 
 gation." 
 
 On the third day of April, 1860, this court ad- 
 judged that this first railroad bridge crossing the 
 Mississippi River was a " material obstruction 
 and a nuisance," and ordered the defendant " to 
 abate and remove all the said piers, together with 
 the superstructure thereon," within six months. 
 Judge Love, presiding, stated very carefully in 
 his decree the reasons for his decision. "If one 
 road transport freight and passengers to the east 
 and west without the delay and expense of 
 changing at the river, a financial necessity will 
 compel competing roads to provide themselves 
 with the same facilities." From this, Judge Love, 
 who died recently in Iowa, foresaw that if this 
 obstruction were allowed to stand there would be 
 railroad bridges across the Mississippi every forty 
 or fifty miles, thus interfering with river traffic so 
 as to do great and serious mischief. 
 
 But Abraham Lincoln, who, fortunately, was 
 counsel for the bridge company, could not see it 
 in that way, and he appealed to the Supreme 
 Court of the United States. Lincoln, with that 
 tremendous grasp of things as they are that 
 marks the difference between the big man and 
 ordinary men, conceded that the bridge was an 
 obstruction but held it to be not an unreasonable 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 one. He argued that rivers and railroads were 
 both great highways for the people, and that trav- 
 ellers by the one were entitled to as much consid- 
 eration as travellers by the other. He even ven- 
 tured the prediction that the time would come 
 when the number of passengers crossing the river 
 by railroad would equal and perhaps exceed those 
 travelling up and down the river in boats. Mean- 
 time, repeated attempts were made to burn the 
 bridge, and two employees of the Chamber of 
 Commerce of St. Louis were arrested and tried 
 for conspiracy to destroy the bridge by fire. A 
 decision at Washington finally reversed the Cir- 
 cuit Court: the bridge stood; but even in the 
 Supreme Court it won by a narrow margin. 
 Three distinguished justices dissented from the 
 majority and put themselves on record with an 
 opinion that would, had it prevailed till now, 
 make it unlawful to put a railroad bridge across 
 the Mississippi River. 
 
 The obstacles of the law were frequently in- 
 voked to stop the progress of the railroads across 
 rivers, and in cases where permission was grudg- 
 ingly given to build drawbridges, it was provided 
 that these must stand open at all times save when 
 a train was crossing. The structural problems of 
 big railroad bridges were solved when General 
 William Sooy Smith built the first steel railroad 
 
 276 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 bridge in the world for the Chicago and Alton 
 road across the Missouri River at Glasgow, Mis- 
 souri, in 1879. To-day these huge steel bridges 
 are everywhere across American inland water- 
 ways, and good bridges of ten years ago are being 
 taken down every day to be replaced by structures 
 heavy enough to take care of bigger engines than 
 were dreamed of at that time. 
 
 Consolidation of railroad lines was fought fifty 
 years ago quite as vigorously as it; is now, and 
 of necessity quite as ineffectively. J When Van- 
 derbilt was knitting together the strands of the 
 New York Central system, passengers by rail 
 were required to make four changes of cars, trans- 
 fer their baggage each time, and buy tickets over 
 the four separate roads that covered the distance 
 of 197 miles between Albany and Buffalo. When 
 it was proposed to consolidate these four little rail- 
 roads a furious opposition arose, and it required 
 three years of continuous effort to bring about the 
 result. From Buffalo to Cleveland two changes 
 of cars were made in those days one at Dunkirk 
 and one at Erie and when it was decided to 
 change the track-gauge of the roads meeting 
 at Erie, so that passengers might ride from Buf- 
 falo to Cleveland through Erie without changing 
 cars, a local war ensued that has never any- 
 where in our community histories been paral- 
 
 277 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 leled. The facts are so little known as to justify 
 details. 
 
 On the morning 01 December 7, 1853, a v * " 
 lent ringing of the court-house bell roused the 
 people of Erie from their beds, and the men of 
 the town hurried, village fashion, to the point of 
 alarm. Speech-making was under way before a 
 dozen villagers had gathered. Alert citizens had 
 called together their fellow-townsmen to make a 
 final defence of their local rights against an out- 
 rage threatened by the railroads. It had for some 
 time been known that the two railroads purposed 
 changing the track-gauge to run trains through 
 the town, and great indignation had been felt 
 among Erie people. As the crowd grew the 
 excitement heightened, and the streets became 
 packed with men ordinarily peaceful but now in- 
 flamed by harangues from the court-house steps 
 into a fury. An attempt at organising the crowd 
 for action resulted in a sort of disorderly proces- 
 sion, the mayor being called upon to head it, and 
 the mob started for the railroad bridge at State 
 Street. 
 
 It was the beginning of actual hostilities in the 
 afterward famous Erie war. Few even well-in- 
 formed men have ever heard of this early-day 
 railroad fight. If a question concerning the oc- 
 currence were raised, most men of to-day would 
 
 278 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 try vaguely to connect the phrase with shadowy 
 recollections of the Gould-Fisk struggle to con- 
 trol the Erie Railroad. But the Erie war, so- 
 called, has no connection with the railroad known 
 as the Erie : it takes title from the pretty Penn- 
 sylvania town where it occurred half a century 
 ago. At that time when what may be termed 
 the pioneer railroad merger was attempted at 
 Erie, Pennsylvania, it resulted in an uprising 
 and a subsequent local feeling so intense that 
 even yet in Erie the echoes have scarcely died. 
 Indeed, it may be doubted whether any Ameri- 
 can community has ever sustained a feud so vio- 
 lent and lasting. To-day, it is true, the matter 
 may safely be spoken of, but so serious has its 
 aspect always been considered that in the com- 
 munity where it occurred never until September 
 6, 1903, had an account of the affair been printed 
 in a newspaper; and I only follow Mr. John 
 Miller, the painstaking local historian of the feud, 
 in saying that this Erie war resulted in more 
 acute bitterness, in deeper animosities between 
 former friends, more painful differences in fami- 
 lies, and more lasting injuries to local interests 
 and to society than any community, North or 
 South, can show as the result of the Civil War. 
 
 Naturally, the only question that now arouses 
 interest is, What was it all about ? And the an- 
 
 279 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 swer only increases the mystification. Two rail- 
 roads at that time ran into Erie, one from the east 
 with a track-gauge of six feet, and one from the 
 west with a track-gauge of four feet ten inches. 
 The two roads were distinct in ownership and 
 management ; each had its own rolling-stock and 
 locomotives, and each its little roundhouse ; these 
 two roundhouses may still be seen standing in 
 the city of Erie. The difference in track-gauge 
 made it impossible to transfer freight in carloads 
 from one road to the other, and passengers from 
 Buffalo for Cleveland were compelled to leave 
 the cars at Erie, ride across the town in 'busses, or 
 walk a mile to the other railroad station, and en- 
 dure the attendant inconveniences. 'Bus men, 
 baggage transfer men and local hotel men, having 
 common interests, worked together, and, if con- 
 nections could be made to fail, a night at an Erie 
 hotel was a part of the long journey from Buffalo 
 to Cleveland. 
 
 This annoyance was what some railroad Jim 
 Hill of that day conceived a plan for doing away 
 with. His plan was radical, revolutionary even, 
 and so expensive as to make it difficult to carry 
 out, but he carried it. Owning the stock of one 
 road, he set about acquiring the stock of the 
 other, and announced that the six-feet-track- 
 gauge was to be changed to conform to the four- 
 
 280 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 feet-ten gauge, in order that trains might be run 
 from one road over the other, and passengers car- 
 ried from Cleveland to Buffalo and through Erie 
 without change of cars ! 
 
 The townspeople of Erie flew to arms. Erie 
 was to be trodden on, ignored, made a way sta- 
 tion, its hotel business ruined and its 'busses put 
 out of business. One intelligent citizen, described 
 as a prominent man in the town and a public edu- 
 cator, urged that the transfer of passengers at Erie 
 meant a great gain to Erie because travellers had 
 to get their meals there ; the transfer of live-stock, 
 he argued, involved the expenditure of money for 
 feeding; the reloading of freight gave employ- 
 ment to a large force of freight handlers and on 
 arguments such as these men were urged to arms. 
 The gathering on the December morning in 1853 
 was the climax of all the talk. Goaded by frantic 
 appeals, the men of the town followed their mayor 
 in a noisy mob to the long wooden railroad bridge. 
 It was guarded by a force of railroad employees 
 because the agitation had for some time promised 
 trouble. A shower of rotten eggs and missiles 
 soon dispersed the guard. The mob attacked the 
 bridge, and with shouts and cheers tore it timber 
 from timber, and when the destruction was com- 
 plete set guards over the ruins and marched vic- 
 torious back to town. From that time until Feb- 
 
 281 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 ruary i, 1854, when the railroad succeeded in 
 getting a train through, Erie was in the hands of 
 a mob. 
 
 Few of the men that wreaked so summary a 
 vengeance on the railroad bridge had a clear idea 
 as to what their grievance actually was. They 
 knew only that they were " for Erie." While the 
 Erie bridge was being wrecked, a second mob at 
 Harbor Creek tore up the railroad track where it 
 crossed the Buffalo highway. Trains were stopped 
 there under compulsion; a guard was maintained 
 night and day, and the railroad company was not 
 allowed to repair the damage done. For a long 
 time the management was compelled to transfer 
 its freight and passengers to Erie by wagon. 
 
 These overt acts, as the lawyers love to call 
 them, keyed little Erie up to a true war spirit. 
 Men moved about with grave faces, and the 
 whole community perforce took sides in the fight. 
 The great majority stood with the rioters, or Rip- 
 pers, so-called, and the few railroad sympathisers 
 were contemptuously dubbed Shanghais. Every 
 effort made by the railroad company to accom- 
 plish its design was watched. The townspeople 
 slept on their arms, and to call the defenders to- 
 gether the court-house bell rang wildly at the 
 the most unseasonable hours. Rumours flew far 
 and wide. One bitter winter morning the alarm 
 
 282 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 was sounded that a railroad employee at Harbor 
 Creek had driven a pick through a Ripper's skull. 
 Forthwith the men of Erie took to their bob- 
 sleighs and cutters, and with their muskets raced 
 madly to Harbor Creek. The rumour proved 
 false ; an altercation had taken place, a pistol had 
 been drawn, and a man wounded, but there had 
 been no murder. Occasionally the ludicrous con- 
 trasted with the serious. Emboldened by their 
 success in destroying railroad property, the Har- 
 bor Creek Rippers decided one day to capture a 
 train. They charged the cars and took posses- 
 sion, but the engineer opened his throttle and 
 headed with speed for New York State. The 
 frightened Rippers one by one dropped off the 
 hind end until only one "Bill" Cooper re- 
 mained. The trainmen seized " Bill," now badly 
 frightened, and carrying him well into New York 
 State, stopped the train, threw him off, and kicked 
 him all the way back into Pennsylvania, where 
 for many years he exhibited his wounds to sym- 
 pathising friends. 
 
 Meantime, the militia had been called out by 
 the mayor to preserve the peace. The general 
 of the militia chanced to be a leading Ripper 
 named Kilpatrick. He responded eagerly to the 
 call, and with two cannon and a boisterous force of 
 sympathisers he went duly into camp to preserve 
 
 283 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 the peace from his viewpoint. A large number 
 of special constables were also called into service, 
 their duties being to see that the railroad com- 
 panies made no repairs and moved no cars. The 
 company appealed to the courts, but the sheriff 
 was powerless to perform his duties, and his 
 deputies were rotten-egged. A United States 
 marshal arrived from Pittsburg to serve an in- 
 junction on the rioters, who were interfering with 
 the mails. The Ripper leader stamped the process 
 under his heel, and the marshal was glad to get 
 away with a whole skin. A local editor at Erie, 
 publishing a paper named the Constitution, was 
 also attorney for the railroad. He was attacked 
 in his newspaper office and embroiled with his 
 friends in a bloody fight. In 1856, following 
 another outbreak, the office of the Constitution was 
 gutted one night by the Rippers, the books 
 were burned in the street, and the building was 
 razed. The mob then visited the editor and the 
 railroad attorneys at their homes, and bombarded 
 the houses with stones; but, as the houses of 
 railroad sympathisers had long been in a state of 
 siege, the shutters were up, and no harm was 
 done beyond the slight uneasiness such an expe- 
 rience might awaken in a sensitive editor's breast. 
 A war of pamphlets began, and one curious old 
 Ripper, a Major Fitch, developed a wonderful 
 
 284 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 talent for rhyming, and his poetry became one of 
 the features that kept the fight alive. 
 
 This period of hostilities lasted for three years. 
 An alarm from the court-house bell, rung with 
 the wildness of a panic, could be looked for at 
 any moment, day or night. Wherever the alarm 
 caught an Erie citizen, or whatever his occupa- 
 tion, he dropped his tools, his knife and fork, or 
 his cup of coffee, and rushed to the court-house. 
 Weddings were stopped, funerals delayed, and 
 doctors left their patients when the court-house 
 bell rang. Frequently men were roused from 
 their beds to assemble at the court-house where 
 rumour had reached the watchers that the rail- 
 road was plotting mischief. In 1855, the railroad 
 company having restored the old wooden bridge 
 torn down two years earlier, the Rippers again 
 marshalled a mob. The railroad guards were 
 driven from their posts, the bridge was torn 
 down, and this time, to make the job complete, 
 it was burned. The tension in the town all this 
 time and for years thereafter was such that the 
 railroad war could not safely be discussed. It 
 was a cannon cracker that might be depended on 
 to explode wherever handled among friends. 
 
 The most peaceable citizens fell to blows over 
 the railroad question, and special constables were 
 appointed in the town to enforce an order forbid- 
 
 285 
 
The Strategy of Great Railroads 
 
 ding, under pains and penalties, the discussion of 
 the subject. The townswomen became infected 
 with the rancour. The leading dry-goods merchant 
 of Erie, who was trying only to sell his wares and 
 keep out of trouble, became an object of suspicion* 
 and certain other merchants were classed with 
 him as railroad sympathisers. A meeting of the 
 townswomen was called at a Presbyterian church, 
 and it was largely attended. The merchants 
 designated as Shanghais were banned by name, 
 and a vote to refuse to trade with them was car- 
 ried with enthusiasm. Here was boycotting in 
 an early day. The ministers found it impossible 
 to keep clear of the fray, and the Erie historian 
 records instances of how the Erie war coloured 
 the sermons and cropped out in the prayers- 
 From the pulpit pointed allusions were made to 
 the oppressor, to the rich and to the powerful, 
 who were selling their birthrights and oppressing 
 the poor. A faction of the members of one 
 church in consequence of these insinuations with- 
 drew in a body, and founded a church which still 
 stands in Erie, and was known for many years as 
 the Shanghai church. In politics the Rippers 
 were supreme, and they elected legislators and 
 sheriffs year after year. The courts, however, 
 finally disposed of the matters at issue. Conces- 
 sions were made to Erie interests, but the track- 
 
 286 
 
The Early Day in Railroading 
 
 gauge was changed, the final compromise being 
 at the present standard of four feet eight and 
 one-half inches, and the consolidated roads, which 
 now constitute a part of the Lake Shore and 
 Michigan Southern, succeeded in running trains 
 through Erie without transferring passengers by 
 'bus. 
 
 The fight for industrial progress has thus been 
 a singularly fierce one, even among so progressive 
 a people as our own. On the question of consol- 
 idations intelligent people differ quite as strongly 
 as they did in the days of the Erie war; but 
 consolidations are likely to go successfully on, as 
 they went then, just as long as the industrial situ- 
 ation calls for them. 
 
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