a plentiful supply for its
necessities. Water also is obtained in sufficient quantities by digging
from ten to twenty feet down, to the sand which filters the waters of
the Platte.

Shortly after the Nebraska Company had thrown off the drag-weight of
local embarrassment, the Kansas line began to disentangle itself from
legal complications; and on July 1, 1865, the enterprise passed into the
hands of a management which, if powerless to retrieve the past, was at
least determined to make the future secure. At the head of this new
organization was John D. Perry of St Louis; and associated with him were
a body of capitalists in Missouri and Pennsylvania whose financial
ability was unquestioned, and who have since evinced a vigor and
commercial prescience which elevate them to the level of their Eastern
rivals. Perceiving that the miserable Fremont-Hallet quarrel had
effectually frustrated all rivalry in the construction of a track to the
one hundredth meridian, they made application to Congress for an
extension of their line to Denver, by the Smoky Hill Fork, with the
privilege of connecting at that point with the Union Pacific. The
request was readily granted, and the usual land gift of twelve thousand
eight hundred acres per mile accorded for the entire route. No further
issue of government bonds was allowed; but as the company was now
possessed of adequate capital, and as the loans to the other companies
must all eventually be paid back, there was really very little
difference in financial advantage on the side of the Nebraska line.
Moreover, the slight balance against the Kansas route was quite made up
in the greater fertility of the soil which it would traverse, and the
large preponderance of its local business, the population along the line
being treble that of the upper road. These considerations gave an
elasticity to the Kansas project, and under the new management the work
of construction has gone on rapidly. The present year will probably find
the road halting at not less than three hundred and fifty miles west of
Wyandotte, now the junction-point of the Union Pacific, Eastern
Division, with the Missouri Pacific Railroad. But this company is not
satisfied with a simple connection with the Nebraska road. It proposes,
after making this connection, to continue its main line to San Francisco
by an extensive detour southward, avoiding the difficult mountain
systems between Denver and Sacramento, and at the same time ava