ies. In
1864 a Northern Pacific, to connect Lake Superior and Puget Sound, made
its appearance. In 1866 the Atlantic & Pacific was given the right to
run from a southwestern terminal at Springfield, Missouri, to southern
California. In 1871 the Texas Pacific was designed to connect the head
of navigation on the Red River, near Shreveport and Texarkana, with Fort
Yuma and San Diego. Additional lines with continental possibilities
received charters from the Western States,--the Denver & Rio Grande, the
Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe,--and
received indirectly a share of the public domain as an inducement to
build. Congress stopped making land grants for this purpose in 1871, but
not until more lines than could be used for twenty years had been
allowed.

All the continental railways were begun before 1873, were checked by the
five years of depression, and were revived about 1878. When they began
again to build there was associated with them a new project for an old
continental route.

The interoceanic canal had been foreseen ever since the first white man
stood on the Isthmus and gazed at the Pacific. Its construction had been
stimulated by the gold discoveries and the California emigration of
1848-49, and had been arranged for in a treaty signed with Great Britain
in 1850. No means to build the canal were found, however, and the
project drifted along until De Lesseps finished his canal at Suez, and
the new interest in continental communication in America resuscitated
the canal at Panama. In 1878 a French company, with De Lesseps at its
head, obtained a concession from Colombia. It began work in 1880, at
once arousing the jealousy of the United States which was shown in the
efforts of Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer
Treaty and procure for the United States a free hand at the Isthmus.
Cleveland reverted to the policy of a neutralized canal in 1885, but
interest on either side was premature, since no canal was built for
thirty years.

The continental railways aroused keen interest in problems of
transportation by their completion between 1881 and 1885. The Northern
Pacific was finished under the direction of Henry Villard, a German
journalist who had been a correspondent in the Civil War and had managed
the interests of foreign investors after 1873. He gained control of the
partly finished Northern Pacific and the local lines of Oregon through a
holding company