to us.  Their troops guarded us, and we reconnoitred, surveyed, located, and built inside of their picket-line.  We marched to work by the tap of the drum with our men armed.  They stacked their arms on the dump, and were ready at a moment’s warning to fall in and fight for their territory.

General Casement’s track-train could arm a thousand men at a word; and from him, as a head, down to his chief spiker, it could be commanded by experienced officers of every rank, from general to captain.  They had served five years at the front, and over half of the men had shouldered a musket in many battles.  An illustration of this came to me after our track had passed Plum Creek, two hundred miles west of the Missouri River.  The Indians had captured a freight-train and were in possession of it and its crews.  It so happened that I was coming down from the front with my car, which was a travelling arsenal.  At Plum Creek Station word came of this capture and stopped us.  On my train were perhaps twenty men, some a portion of the crew, some who had been discharged and sought passage to the rear.  Nearly all were strangers to me.  The excitement of the capture and the reports coming by telegraph of the burning train brought all the men to the platform, and when I called upon them to fall in, to go forward and retake the train, every man on the train went into line, and by his position showed that he was a soldier.  We ran down slowly until we came in sight of the train.  I gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, and at the command they went forward as steadily and in as good order as we had seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire.

        Less than ten years before, General Sherman had suggested
        a different method of dispensing with the Indian.  Writing to
        his brother, he said:—­

“No particular danger need be apprehended from Indians.  They will no doubt pilfer and rob, and may occasionally attack and kill stragglers; but the grading of the road will require strong parties, capable of defending themselves; and the supplies for the road and maintenance of the workmen will be carried in large trains of wagons, such as went last year to Salt Lake, none of which were molested by the Indians.  So large a number of workmen distributed along the line will introduce enough whiskey to kill off all the Indians within three hundred miles of the road.”

In speaking of the climatic changes incident to the building of transcontinental lines of railroad, General Dodge also says:—­

The building of the Pacific roads has changed the climate between the Missouri River and the Sierra Nevada.  In the extreme West it is not felt so much as between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains.  Before settlement had developed it, the country west of the Missouri River could raise little of the main crops, except by irrigation.  From April