id not yet understand that--this trade was to become
national. It was well on in the forties before the Galena lead mines,
for instance, were given up as the terminal of the Illinois Central
Railroad and the main line was directed to Chicago. The middle of the
century was reached before the Lake Shore was considered at Cleveland or
Chicago as important commercially as the neighboring portage paths
which by the Ordinance of 1787 had been created "common highways forever
free." The idea of joining Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago with the
interior--an idea as old as the Indian trails thither--still dominated
men's minds even in the early part of the railroad epoch. Chicago
desired to be connected with Cairo, the ice-free port on the
Mississippi; and Cleveland was eager to be joined to Columbus and
Cincinnati. The enthusiastic railway promoters of Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois drew splendid plans for uniting all parts of those States
by railway lines; but the strategic position of the cities on the
continental alignment from New York to the Pacific by way of South Pass
never came within their horizon. The ten million dollar Illinois scheme
did not even contemplate a railway running eastward from Chicago. But
the future of the commerce of the Great Lakes depended absolutely upon
this development. There was no hope of any canals being able to handle
the traffic of the mighty empire which was now awake and fully conscious
of its power. The solution lay in joining the cities to each other and
to the Atlantic world markets by iron rails running east and west.

This railroad expansion is what makes the last decade before the Civil
War such a remarkable series of years in the West. In the half decade,
1850-55, the Baltimore and Ohio and Pennsylvania railways reached the
Ohio River; the links of the present Lake Shore system between Buffalo
and Chicago by way of Cleveland and Toledo were constructed; and the
Pennsylvania line was put through from Pittsburgh to Chicago. The
place of the lake country on the continental alignment and the imperial
situation of Chicago, and later of Omaha, came to be realized. The new
view transformed men's conceptions of every port on the Great Lakes in
the chain from Buffalo to Chicago. At a dozen southern ports on Ontario,
Erie, Huron, and Michigan, commerce now touched the swiftest and
most economical means of transcontinental traffic. This development
culminated in the miracle we call Chicago. In 1847