National expansion has given us some twenty thousand more miles of railway track than all Europe with her three hundred and eighty millions of people; and while the tractive power and freightcarrying capacity of our three hundred and thirteen railways have just doubled within ten years, those of the Great Northern and of the Northern Pacific have nearly doubled within five years. Wherever you go over the heavy steels that a groaning, incessant traffic keeps polished to a gleaming silver, you see gangs of workmen laying sidings and switches and extra tracks, while the vast square yards broaden interminably. Every freight-car and engine factory is choked with work for months ahead. In the glare of a headlight I heard again the old repeated complaint: "We've one hundred and eighty-five locomotives on order, but we can't get 'em." And roundhouse philosophy added: "You've got to wait your turn same as in a barber shop." Railway-building with us is at the end of its great era. There will be renewed stress of construction, for by the tens of thousands of miles we must still have double tracks, spurs, and strategic lines; and we must have multiplied terminals. But the heaviest tasks are about over, and the great feats will soon be things of legend. Now, as always, an armylike spirit and organization drive forward the work; an intricate but easy-running system, intense staff loyalty in killing toil, breakneck obedience. Its routine is almost automatic; its methods invariable. Once the lure of through traffic, the challenge of competition, or the tempting natural wealth of a district decrees the building, the trusted locating engineer runs his tentative line. This is studied in detail with enormous calculation of elevations, cuttings, fillings, curves, and tangents. Over and over again the problem is worked out, modified, checked for errors. At the earliest possible moment after the route has been exactly mapped, the right of way is bought with skillful secrecy, for five-dollar-an-acre land jumps instantly to a trebled value at the simple announcement that the railway is coming. There are preliminaries beyond preliminaries, and it takes weeks and months of pushing work before the bridges are built and the grading contractors with their hundreds of cluttering, swarming teams are out of the way and all is ready for the construction train. We make no such speed nowadays in laying ties and rails as they did when the Great Northern was being rushed from Minct in North Dakota to Helena, Montana, and made the world's record of eight miles eighteen hundred and sixty feet in a single day. Ten miles of complete equipment in material were then constantly rolling forward to the builders. The supply train was unloaded in a drilled confusion of mad haste near the end of the track. Ties and rails were seized on as soon as they touched the ground and were hurled to the front by galloping horses; and the system was so elaborately studied that each spiker's five hundred and seventy blows an hour were an exacted standard of perform ance. The scarce and costly labor of our day has forced the abandonment of this old flying hand work of the eighties, and necessity has invented a cumbrous, economical, but misnamed track-laying machine, that does well indeed if it shows for a season's average two miles of completed track each day. As you come at it head on over the roll of the prairie, an old illusion returns mightily, and for the thousandth time you seem on the ocean. A scaffolded bridge and a signal flag, some spars of framework and a swinging crane, with the smoke hanging low in the background, banked and ragged, give the image of an English tramp on the tumbled swell of the high seas. It is a train of a dozen cars, with the engine sandwiched at its middle, moving steadily forward over the very track it is building at the rate of a thirtyfoot jolt a rail's length-every two minutes or less. First of all comes the CARRYING THIRTY TONS OF POWDER INTO The men who handle the powder within the tunnel have sacking wound around their shoes to avoid the danger of striking a chance spark it comes towards you with such deceiving spurts, that, with the riot and vague danger of it, you can make nothing of what is going on until you climb upon the prow of the car and the work lies clear before you. On either edge of the low, flat car there are stout wooden sluiceways lined with rollers, and down these come rumbling, on the right, the rough-hewn ties; on the left, the eighty-five-pounds-to-theyard rails, ringing and crashing until you are deafened. There must always be two men ready to catch each tie as it falls; there must always be the twelve men in line to grasp the rail as it booms forward; and, a perilous task, the man who bolts the rails together must always complete the last clanking turn of his wrench and step clear before the train lurches forward another thirty feet. You go aft-nautical terms are inevitable on the prairie-over low-piled cars of rails which are being flipped into their runways. Behind these are cars of stacked ties which are being tumbled upon their rollers and then poled forward. You jump off, and, with your ears full of the blasting hiss and purr of the standing engine, passing four or five more cars of supplies, you come upon men with huge wrenches completing the bolting; there are gangs crowding in extra ties; heavy fellows in couples, with great hammers driving. home the spikes; and beyond them others again, half a mile in the rear, lining up" the track and tamping the ties. And when all this, and more, is done as perfectly as possible, and the ground has been gone over for the two hundred and fiftieth time-a foreman's feverish estimate by engineers and inspectors of every kind, carrying their rolls of blue-printed profile drawings that they handle as dexterously as a rabbi does a Torah, the road is still unfinished. It must be well settled in gravel, and used and tamped and retamped for months before it will give perfect riding. Few skilled laborers are needed for any of this work, and within two or three days raw recruits become efficient members of the guild of rough and ready railway-builders. A large number of the men in Western construction camps are roving ne'er-do-weels with a hatred for long jobs, whose sole anxiety is to save a "grub stake" of thirty dollars or so, and then to be on the move again, at once and no matter whither, if only in the end they can "hit the main steel trail." Their evenings, as they huddled around the fire in their sleeping-cars, were given to meditative chewing and smoking, and were enlivened by tales of tramp travel in every corner of this great land of ours. They had their own trade patter. The commissary is the "wahnegin -an Indian word, they say, stolen from the old voyageurs; the assistant foreman is the "straw-boss;" the waiters in the boarding-cars, "flunkies." Many of the men were named after the State in which they claimed nativity. The "bull cook "- tender of fires-was the torpid "Indiana." They were good fellows all, as long as the foreman's rough threats kept away the sneaking "boot"bootlegger" peddler of whisky. This work, driving, relentless, exhausting-work that never rests for a minute until darkness comes and it has the last ounce of a man's strength-is all for the end of supplying profitably the primitive needs of transport that have been ever since the day when the first load was slung over a shoulder. But the giant machine that it creates has become endowed with powers far beyond the simple hauling of passengers and freight, and a varying industrial control. Unsuspected, this every-day business monopoly of ours has exercised many of the functions of an autocratic and paternal government. With authority deciding a thousand details important to the whole Nation, it has opened and peopled the Northwest; and it has had a great part in organizing the new life and directing in their ways the destinies of coming generations. In its thrifty pioneering the railway carefully marks the richest lands for its lines. It catalogues the capabilities of the soil and advertises its new venture by attractive folders and maps, by illustrated letters of satisfaction from settled farmers, and by the crowded and eager home-seekers' trips. In the spring and fall the resulting rush of population to the vacant lands and to the new towns is so great that I have counted thirty-five loaded Northern Pacific coaches leaving St. Paul of a single night. They contained twelve hundred home-seekers and settlers. The free lands that are fertile and accessible have now been seized to almost the last acre, and the new "feeders "bring settlers who are more prosperous and revenue-producing than the original homesteaders-experienced men who have an average cash capital of perhaps one thousand dollars, and a car-load of effects. Once settled, so enormously important is the farmer's prosperity to the railway, elaborate local reports of crops are prepared for every part of its territory with the clerkly minuteness of government tabulation. And the railway not only watches. It assists progress by the traveling lectures of the institutes, by farmers' excursions, the distribution of "literature," a growing system of experiment stations, and the BORING THROUGH A TUNNEL IN A HILL OF BASALT TRACK-LAYING ON RAILWAY AT MIDWAY, BRITISH COLUMBIA diligent personal work of its Industrial And the town is a thing of sudden creation. Time and again a branch line has been planned in April to carry wheat already growing. Once planned, lands along the projected extension are widely boomed by every megaphonic device of modern advertising; and the location of the needed towns, with the inevitable questions of water supply, healthfulness, and a dozen and one vital matters, is again for the decision of the railway. Then the sites are named by its engineering department— -a bankrupt office invention may commit such hasty outrages of labeling as Pekin or "Tokio"-and the work of development becomes the tieth-century American civilization, and a thousand years of the world's progress are crowded into one day's building. For an example of this wonderful civic organization that is going on all over the Northwest, take the case of Warwick, in North Dakota, on the Aneta Extension of the Great Northern. Its history began on a forgotten day last July when a French Canadian, with a deed to a lot, appeared with his wife on the site of the paper town, erected a tent, put up a stove, threw together a rough board table, and prepared to supply meals to the coming store-builders. Early next morning came a young man with a load of lumber to start work on a general store. Within a couple of days, though the railway was still forty miles away, a dozen others straggled in. For a while people slept in wagons and under wagons. Twice the tent of the " Warwick Restaurant was blown away by a Dakota gale, and the tin plates went kiting over the prairie. Within a fortnight Warwick, like a half-dozen other towns up and down the line, could boast thirty-five or forty inhabitants-every one of them recruited by the railway's Industrial Agent and by railway and town site advertising. It had in embryo two lumber-yards; a bank which obligingly acted as postoffice; a blacksmith, a second general store, a hardware store, and a livery stable. Nine or ten buildings were going up on Main Street with a prodig ious uproar of saw, hammer, and plane their owners all turned carpenters and working from sunrise until long after sunset. The only idling spectators were two Sioux chiefs-both to become traditions of terror to successive generations of young Warwickites: White Dog, for his seven scalps of palefaces; Blue Shield, for his desperate losing battle with the liveryman, when by the ancient stealth of his tribe he tried to recover a horse that he had sold long days before. Next came an editor and a printingpress, attracted by a direct offer of a $350 lot at half price; and early in August appeared the first issue of the Warwick Weekly Sentinel. The beginnings of political life were immediate. The editor became a Justice of the Peace; an ambitious storekeeper with influential friends was appointed Deputy Sheriff ; and it was rumored about that an Italian was intriguing for the position of Postmaster. A Norse farmer with three children began to agitate the question of schools, earnestly telling his neighbors that Warwick was entitled to $350 from the State apportionment, and that the district could raise another $150. By the first of November the population had doubled. doubled. The Town Site Company's bank had $22,000 on deposit, mostly the proceeds of the first crop raised on the land immediately about the town. There was another livery, a butcher's, a confectionery and pool-room, a second restaurant, and a barber. With the spring a rival bank has come, a harness shop, a doctor, a drug-store, and a milliner's. The five elevators, that were planned before a lot was sold, are being built, and " fifty" residences. By fall there will be a school-house. In matter of municipal morals Warwick stands midway between Tolna-disgraced even in its infancy by the Dakota variety of illicit saloon called a "blind pig "—and Macville, peopled by sober and worthy Scots, whose Presbyterian minister, when I passed by, was zealously hauling stone for a church foundation. Warwick may now have, for a conservative guess, a population of one hundred. It has a Commercial Club; an orchestra, which welcomed the arrival of the construction train with joyful and emphatic music; a baseball team; two secret societies; and some $200 laid by for the building of a Lutheran church. The Town Site Company's banker-always a leading citizen-is proposing telephone service for the farmers. There is talk of a six-story hotel and a boulevard around Shinbone Lake. The town motto is, "Warwick First, Last, and All the Time," and the only social outcast is the man who does not patronize the local merchant, but buys his supplies from a Chicago mail order house. There are here none of the great wonders of a boom town. Warwick, for all its heroic enterprise and enthusiasm, does not yet definitely hope to become "the great metropolis of the Northwest." But the story of its beginnings is important because, as a clear type, it unfolds |