inhabitants; Indiana over 300,000; Michigan nearly 350,000; Wisconsin 275,000; Iowa 150,000; Missouri almost 300,000; Arkansas 100,000; Louisiana 235,000; Mississippi 370,000; Alabama about 280,000; Texas 100,000 or more. Ohio beat them all, gaining 470,000. Kentucky people had a fancy for emigrating, to "grow up with a new country," and gained but 90,000. Tennessee increased by 140,000. These were vast changes to take place so suddenly. In a single generation a wilderness had become an empire. Many a man who had fought the Indians in Kentucky and Ohio in his youth lived to see the Valley under the aspect of an old country, himself as lost amid its busy and thriving millions as he had often found himself, in early life, among the pathless forests. Cities and towns had sprung up, as if by magic, along the rivers and lakes. Canals, whose united length might almost span the continent, were channels of busy activity, and many hundreds of steamers constantly vexed the waters of the great rivers.

Yet, this was only preliminary to the greater growth that was to follow. The cotton of the southern Valley and the grain of the northern could not get to the seaboard fast enough, with all these outlets. Inexhaustible fertility supplied so large a surplus that food was cheap and it would not pay to cultivate land away from the rivers, and the spaces were so vast that ten millions of people could only skirt the streams and cover the more accessible prairies. A new carrying agent, of greater compass and speed, was required. But neither nature nor circumstances seemed willing to deny anything to the Beautiful Valley, and what it required was forthcoming. With 1850 commenced the great development of the Railway System.

CHAPTER XI.

THE RAILROAD ERA.

The floating commerce of the West had reached the value of $500,000,000 before 1850, the number of steamboats rising to 1,190 as early as 1847; and yet the increasing abundance of the products of the soil kept all the channels of exit glutted, or, if they were not, it was only that the requisite cheapness of transport failed, and that it was unprofitable to raise all that the Valley so bountifully offered to the labor of its favored possessors. The situation and aims of southern agriculturists confined them to their special staples and prevented a general development of all the resources of their section; they fell behind the North in various lines of progress, and both foreign and domestic markets were to be sought through the commercial and manufacturing cities on or near the coast of the North Atlantic. Steamboats could not reach these markets directly east, the canals were not adequate to the immense business from Lake Erie; the roundabout transport by New Orleans from the upper Valley, with the hot tropical seas, and the dangers of the South Atlantic coast, made it objectionable as a route for the transport of grain to the northern cities, or, as it was thought, to Europe. The steamboat had done much for the Valley, but it had its limits of usefulness. These difficulties might possibly be put up with if development were to be arrested, or to proceed with a more measured step; but the rate of development had been acquired and it must proceed with ever-increasing rapidity.

The means of overcoming this difficulty had been foreseen for twenty years; a new application of steam had begun to aid in solving the problem. By 1830 the success of railways in the East was fairly assured. Their progress was attentively

observed from the West, and it was very soon decided that this was the special instrument needed for the development of the upper Valley. The interiors of the prairie states and territories were unprofitable for settlement from the inadequate supply of lumber, the expense of reaching markets and the low price of agricultural products. By the winter of 1835-6 the great progress made in ten years and the general prosperity of the country led the people of the West to feel that nothing was impossible to them. They proposed to cover the prairies with railroads and do precisely that which has been done in later years. The courage, the self-reliance, the sense of power, which had brought them successfully through the Heroic Period, through the immense difficulties of the following twenty-five years, and had then developed the internal commerce of the country to such vast proportions, by the steamboat, filled them with buoyant exultation. They had surmounted formidable difficulties with a pertinacious energy that certainly gave them the right to feel proudly confident.

Western Legislatures seemed to fully comprehend the meaning of the railroad; they saw at once that the results would be what they have since become. Young America, in this region of boundless opportunities, showed a quickness of apprehension and a courage of endeavor equal to the occasion. At this time (1836) the Legislature of Illinois incorporated companies for building railroads whose contemplated length was three thousand, two hundred and eighty-seven miles. The Legislature of Missouri incorporated one and contemplated another. Such was the spirited feeling of the men of the West! But they had not counted the cost, had not yet bargained with capital, nor taken possible disasters into the account. The country had been growing prosperous beyond any similar experience of mankind; grave business men and statesmen lost their mental equilibrium with the sight of a growth so rapid, and, evidently, so solid; the national debt was extinguished except a few hundred thousand dollars, which could not be paid,

EFFECTS OF THE FINANCIAL PANIC OF 1837. 259

though it might have been done ten times over with funds at hand; with a large surplus income it determined to lend to the states, and the West felt itself thoroughly prosperous.

With such fair prospects everybody made haste to be rich, and credit was almost unlimited; the future was judged by the immediate past, and its growth freely pledged for loans that were expected to multiply results indefinitely. But they now received a sad lesson on the evils of over-confidence and over-haste. Credit had gone too far and assumed too much. An attempt to rectify itself resulted in panic and a hasty attempt of lenders to recover from creditors; this could not be done at once nor at all without the expected help of the future. A sudden fall of values was the result. This created great distress, especially in the Valley, where so much had been invested which could not make returns for years. Railroad projects were therefore mostly abandoned until better times and the people of the Valley set themselves to the work of repairing the injuries of the storm of disaster. The few railways that went on proceeded very slowly. Young America must learn to be patient as well as courageous.

Railroads were steadily pressed forward in the East, however, so that, in 1850, there were 8,600 miles of road in use. Only a few hundred of these were in the Valley; but those in the East, were, in many cases, lines, or parts of lines, built from the seaboard cities toward it. Some of them had reached its borders. Boston was joined to New York and that city with Lake Erie; Chicago was connected with Detroit near Lake Erie; and the upper Ohio was about to be joined to Philadelphia and Baltimore by two routes. The East was as eager to tap the streams of wealth in the Valley, for its own benefit, as the West was to open larger channels for the outflow of its abundance for the sake of sale.

The difficulty was in a deficiency of capital. Hundreds of millions of dollars required to be withdrawn from immediately productive pursuits, large returns must be deferred for

some years, and some uncertainty must be allowed in many of the ventures. In the earlier days this capital could not be at once spared. The beginnings already made had exhausted the accumulations seeking investment; there must be time for fresh accumulations. This point was suddenly gained by the discovery of gold in California. The amount was so large and continued to flow so long that capital at once became abundant, and by various channels found its way to investment in the railroad system of the Valley that had been so liberally projected fifteen years before. Some hundreds of millions of gold were supplied to the floating, or cash, capital of the country when it was most needed. The railroad system already united with steamboat navigation to connect the lakes and the upper Ohio with the northern Atlantic; now a new impulse was given to constuction; the omissions in the chain were filled in; various roads soon crossed the Valley, extended down the rivers and along the lakes, to compete with the steamboat; the interiors were connected with the commercial centers, and any section it was desired to completely open up to settlement was supplied with a railroad.

The great destiny of the Northwest had already become apparent, but it had been embarrassed by the difficulties attending the settlement of an interior prairie region, by the ice and storms of winter, and by the difficulty of navigating the rivers during the low water of summer. Chicago now became a great railroad center as well as port for shipping; lines of railway radiated from it in all directions. In 1842 Illinois had but forty-two miles of railroad and in 1852 but one hundred and forty-eight; in 1860 it had 2,811, Wisconsin nearly 1,000, and the system had already begun to expand west of the Mississippi. Missouri had two lines, begun early in the decade. The great lumber regions of Wisconsin and Minnesota now furnished building material in cheap abundance, which was distributed where most needed-on the prairiesby the railroads.