Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

FIRST AMERICAN TRANS-CONTINENTAL RAILROAD. 147 CONSTRUCTION WORK BETWEEN SUMMIT AND BLUE CANON, CALIFORNIA. which has become important as the junction for Salt Lake City. The increase of popula- tion in Utah has made the wilderness blossom, and discovered the enormous mineral wealth of the hills. Salt Lake City is now probably the greatest smelting centre of the world, and the once-naméd “ Great American Desert ” ■—marked in maps of 1850 as “unexplored territory ”—laughs with harvests. So into the Sierras, passing right and left thriving mining centres, to Truckee, where the Government has invested several million . dollars in irrigation works, and Conclusion. won many thousand acres from ba.rrenness. Higher up we enter the snow region, and presently drop towards the Pacific, through marvellous scenery, into the Sacra- mento Valley, the land of sunshine and orchards, and reach the capital town, where the Central Pacific scheme was hatched. From Sacramento we have a choice of routes to the great gateway of the west, San Francisco, where our journey ends, and with it this brief narrative. The Overland Route is no longer the only highway between the Eastern and Western States. Since that May day of 1869 other trans-continental lines have been com- pleted. But none of them equals in daring and in interest the first iron road, which showed the way to others, and remains as a monument to the enterprise and tenacity of its promoters.