to the marvellous chemistry of the little instrument that
        is of such inestimable value, and yet remained so long unknown. 
        The youngster of to-day steps into a luxurious coach at
        New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, eats, sleeps, surveys
        romantic scenery from the window during a few days, and
        alights in Portland or San Francisco without any just
        appreciation of the fact that a few decades since it would
        have required weeks of toilsome travel to go over the same
        ground, during which he would have run the risk of starvation,
        of being lost in the wilderness, plundered by robbers, or
        killed by savages.  The most beneficent function of the
        railway is that of a carrier of freight.  What would it cost
        a man to carry a ton of wheat one mile?  What would it cost
        for a horse to do the same?  The railway does it at a cost of
        less than a cent.  This brings Dakota and Minnesota into
        direct relation with hungry and opulent Liverpool, and makes
        subsistence easier and cheaper throughout the civilized world. 
        The world should, therefore, thank the railway for the
        opportunity to buy wheat, but none the less should the West
        thank the railway for the opportunity to sell wheat.

Nothing now marks the spot at Promontory Point where the formal ceremony of driving in the last spike took place on May 10, 1869, and even the small station known as Promontory is at some distance from that point where the connection between the two transcontinental roads was originally made.  The whole aspect of the country, from the Missouri River to Salt Lake, has marvellously changed.  Where then were only tents, there are now well-built, substantial, and prosperous towns; and instead of the great desert wastes, supposed to be beyond reach of cultivation, one may now see an almost unbroken stretch of corn-fields and cultivated lands.

The five or six hundred men who saw the junction made at Promontory Point were strongly impressed with the conviction that the event was of great national importance; but they connected it with the development of transcontinental communication, and trade with China and Japan, rather than with internal development, or what railroad men call local traffic.  They were somewhat visionary, no doubt, but none of them dreamed that the future of the Pacific road depended more on the business that would grow out of the peopling of the deserts it traversed than upon the through traffic.

It is not too much to say that the opening of the Pacific road, viewed simply in its relation to the spread of population, development of resources, and actual advance of civilization, was an event to be ranked in far-reaching results with the landing of the Pilgrims, or perhaps the voyage of Columbus.