o hotel lobbies men and women passed and repassed one another
dressed in Eastern fashions--some months late, but Eastern fashions
none the less. Newspapers proclaimed the latest tidings from the East
in large type. Men were falling out over the same political issues
which embroiled men by the Atlantic seaboard; they were embarking in
the same sort of business ventures.

But two thousand miles of wilderness separated these two portions of
the nation. That vast expanse of prairies as level as the sea, of
sage-brush plains, of snow-capped mountains and silent, deadly
deserts, was made more difficult by bands of hostile Indians.

In Europe such an interval would have remained for centuries, to be
spanned by the slow migration of those whom ill-fortune and bad
government had driven from the more crowded communities on each side.
During that time these two civilizations would have gone on in their
own ways developing their own distinct customs, until in the end they
would have become separate countries.

But the people east of the Mississippi and the people west of the
Sierras were Americans, and the desire for a close union was strong
within them. Their business habits were such that they could not
carry on commercial affairs without it. Their political beliefs and
their social tendencies kept them chafing for it. And furthermore it
was their characteristic not to acknowledge nature's obstacles as
permanent. Two thousand miles of wild prairie, mountain ranges, and
deserts simply meant a task, the more blithely to be undertaken
because it was made hazardous by the presence of hostile savages.

So now the East began to cry to the West and the West to the East,
each voicing a desire for quicker communication, and to get letters
from New York to San Francisco in fast time became one of the problems
of the day.

The first step toward solution was the choice of a route, and while
this was up to Washington, the proof on which it rested was up to
the men of wealth and the men of action. Immediately two rival
groups began striving, each to prove that its route was the
quickest. Russel, Majors & Waddel, who held large freighting
contracts on the northern road, from Independence, Missouri, via Salt
Lake to Sacramento, bent their energies to demonstrating its
practicability; the Wells-Butterfield coterie of stage and express
men undertook to show that the longer pathway from St. Louis by
way of the Southwestern territories to San