Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

130 ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. IN THE PRAIRIES, UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD. rugged steeps of the Rockies It is said that . Gold Dis- thousand souls covered in , J .. . California. de8ert tra11 land Route, as it Dorado. Thousands of gold-seekers rounded the Horn, crossed the isthmus, and pushed across the great American desert and the md Sierras. ne hundred sed the old —the Over- came to be called. Towns sprang up on the line of march of the long wagon trains of emi- grants ; coach services were run more or less to schedule ; the Pony Express was established. Those were spacious times, replete with stories of the outlaw’s gun and the Indian’s scalping knife, of terrible hardships cheerfully undergone by enthusiasts, who saw the glitter of gold in every grain of sand, or a wealth of agricul- tural productiveness in every sheltered valley. The Overland Route and? the Pony Express were not sufficient to meet the requirements of the travelling public. In 1855 the Panama Isthmus Railroad was opened, and yielded a golden harvest to the promoters. It deflected much of the desert traffic. Meanwhile the Government was waking up to the need for a means of reliable and quick communication with California, the ’fifties, while the tumult of pro- and anti-slavery feeling was creating a turmoil in the settled sections of the country, scouts and engineers searched the mountains for passes that should make the building of a railroad a possibility. This was done not only by the Government and the men inter- The Panama Railroad. All through Surveys across the Continent.