to the natural roll of the country, ultimately resulted in a waste of
from five to ten million dollars. Extraordinary costs such as these,
combined with the extravagant methods of construction and financing,
brought the total cost of the property up to what was in those days
a fabulous sum of money. The records indicate that the profits
which accrued through the Credit Mobilier and in other ways in the
construction up to the time of the opening in 1869 exceeded fifty
millions of dollars.

While the Union Pacific was being built, from 1862 to 1869, other
railroads were not idle, and many were rapidly reaching out into the
Central West. Not only had the Chicago and North Western reached Omaha
and made connection with the Union Pacific, but the Kansas Pacific had
penetrated as far west as Denver and had joined the Union Pacific at
Cheyenne.

The close relationship between railroad expansion and the general
development and prosperity of the country is nowhere brought more
distinctly into relief than in connection with the construction of the
Pacific railroads. With the opening of a transcontinental line the vast
El Dorado of the West was laid practically at the doorstep of Eastern
capital. Not only did American pioneers turn definitely toward the
West, but foreign emigrants bent their steps in vast numbers in that
direction, and capital in steadily increasing amounts made its way
there. Towns sprang up everywhere and soon developed into busy centers
of trade and commerce. Caravan trains, which a few years before had
followed a single westward line, now started from points along the
railroad artery and penetrated far to the north and south. The settlers
knew that the time was not far distant when all the vast territory west
of the Missouri, from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande, would
be reached by the rapid spread of the railroad. In the sixties and
seventies there sprang up and rapidly developed in size and importance
such centers as Kansas City, Sioux City, Denver, Salt Lake City,
Cheyenne, Atchison, Topeka, Helena, Portland, Seattle, Duluth, St. Paul,
Minneapolis, and scores of smaller places. The entire Pacific slope was
soon dotted with towns and cities, and even the great arid plains of the
West--as well as the "Great American Desert" covering Utah, Arizona, New
Mexico, and parts of Nevada--began to take on signs of life which had
not been dreamed of a decade before.

But the development of this great sectio