Francisco, with the leading cities of the Atlantic seaboard.

A railroad in building across a country considers first the two
uttermost cities (its principal terminals), or those two portions of
the country which it seeks to connect for the interchange of traffic.

The Union Pacific and its companion road, the Central Pacific,
afforded, too, the first and last instance of the United States
Government's becoming responsible for the building of a railroad.
Although the project of aiding a railroad to be built somewhere
between and connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean ports had been
discussed by Congress for thirty years before the fall of Fort Sumter,
the extraordinary feeling caused by the Civil War alone made possible
so unusual an undertaking. President Lincoln himself had given the
subject careful thought, and when, after much controversy and
discouraging political intrigue, the Union and Central Pacific
Railroad bills were ready to pass Congress, Abraham Lincoln was
appealed to to decide a long-standing controversy concerning the
gauge, or width of track, for the new lines.

After painstaking consideration, he decided on a gauge of five feet,
but the promoters of the line then persuaded Congress to reduce the
figures to four feet eight and one-half inches, and that gauge is now
the standard gauge for all American railroads. It would have been
better if the railroad builders had followed Lincoln's suggestion,
since the traffic of American railroads has outgrown the possibilities
of their gauges. And within a few years one of the greatest of
present-day railroad builders has declared with emphasis that a
six-foot gauge must one day come to provide our railroads with the
necessary facilities for handling the enormous and constantly
expanding volume of American railroad traffic.

The young operator, who, in spite of his efforts to conceal his hurt,
now limped a little as he walked up the street of the new railroad
town might well look with curiosity and amazement on what he saw. The
street he walked in was no more than a long assemblage of saloons,
restaurants, boarding-houses, gambling-houses, dance-halls and shops.
Nearer the station and fronting on the open square, there were
barber-shops and so-called hotels. Up and down the side streets he saw
livery-stables and roughly built warehouses for contractors' supplies,
army supplies, and stage-line depots.

The main street was alive with strange-looking frontier