The North had its way during the war.  Congress, by legislation initiated in 1862, provided for the immediate organization of companies to build a line from the Missouri River to California and made grants of land and loans of money to aid in the enterprise.  The Western end, the Central Pacific, was laid out under the supervision of Leland Stanford.  It was heavily financed by the Mormons of Utah and also by the state government, the ranchmen, miners, and business men of California; and it was built principally by Chinese labor.  The Eastern end, the Union Pacific, starting at Omaha, was constructed mainly by veterans of the Civil War and immigrants from Ireland and Germany.  In 1869 the two companies met near Ogden in Utah and the driving of the last spike, uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific, was the occasion of a great demonstration.

Other lines to the Pacific were projected at the same time; but the panic of 1873 checked railway enterprise for a while.  With the revival of prosperity at the end of that decade, construction was renewed with vigor and the year 1883 marked a series of railway triumphs.  In February trains were running from New Orleans through Houston, San Antonio, and Yuma to San Francisco, as a result of a union of the Texas Pacific with the Southern Pacific and its subsidiary corporations.  In September the last spike was driven in the Northern Pacific at Helena, Montana.  Lake Superior was connected with Puget Sound.  The waters explored by Joliet and Marquette were joined to the waters plowed by Sir Francis Drake while he was searching for a route around the world.  That same year also a third line was opened to the Pacific by way of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, making connections through Albuquerque and Needles with San Francisco.  The fondest hopes of railway promoters seemed to be realized.

[Illustration:  UNITED STATES IN 1870]

=Western Railways Precede Settlement.=—­In the Old World and on our Atlantic seaboard, railways followed population and markets.  In the Far West, railways usually preceded the people.  Railway builders planned cities on paper before they laid tracks connecting them.  They sent missionaries to spread the gospel of “Western opportunity” to people in the Middle West, in the Eastern cities, and in Southern states.  Then they carried their enthusiastic converts bag and baggage in long trains to the distant Dakotas and still farther afield.  So the development of the Far West was not left to the tedious processes of time.  It was pushed by men of imagination—­adventurers who made a romance of money-making and who had dreams of empire unequaled by many kings of the past.