vast expansion of competitive lines had been going on far
southward of the Union Pacific. Under the guiding genius of Collis P.
Huntington, the Southern Pacific Company in 1884 had consolidated and
solidified a gigantic system of railways extending from New Orleans to
the Pacific and throughout the entire State of California to Portland,
Oregon, with branch lines radiating through Texas and making close
connection with roads entering St. Louis. In addition to these
railroads, Huntington acquired control of a steamship line operating
from New York to New Orleans and Galveston, and subsequently of the
Pacific Mail Steamship Company, operating along the coast from Oregon
south to the Isthmus of Panama and across the Pacific Ocean.
The ever-growing effects of this powerful and well-managed
competitor--combined with the large development of the Santa Fe system
during these years, the competition of the completed Northern Pacific,
and the possibilities of the new Great Northern Railway or Hill line,
now completing its main artery to the Pacific--were far-reaching enough
in themselves to bring the Union Pacific upon evil days. Consequently
few were surprised when, under the great pressure of the panic of 1893,
the property was forced to confess insolvency. The Union Pacific had
simply repeated the story of most American railroads; it had been
constructed in advance of population and had to pay the penalty. Yet it
had more than justified the hopes of the daring spirits who projected
it. It may have made individuals bankrupt, but it magnificently
fulfilled the part which it was expected to play. It had opened up
millions of acres to cultivation, given homesteads to millions of
people, many of whom were immigrants from Europe, developed mineral
lands of incalculable value, created several new great States, and made
the American nation a unified whole. Its subsequent history belongs to
another chapter of this story--a history that is richer than the first
in the matter of financial success but that can never surpass the early
pioneering years in real and permanent achievement.

CHAPTER VII. PENETRATING THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

It is only when one reads such a book as Francis Parkman's "Oregon
Trail" that one fully realizes the vast transformation which has taken
place within little more than half a century in the great Northwestern
territory beyond the Mississippi and the Missouri. In that fascinating
history we read of the ro