The Pacific telegraph assumed tangible form through the unquenchable energies of Edward Creighton. Still in the prime of sturdy manhood, invigorated by the Irish blood inherited from his ancestry, Creighton had come to Omaha in 1856 to visit his brothers, engaging for a time in the lumber business. In 1860 he built the Missouri & Western line from St. Louis to Omaha, but already a year before had evolved a plan for a telegraph from the Missouri River to the Pacific coast. With the encouragement and material assistance of men like Jeptha H. Wade, Ezra Cornell, and Hiram Sibley, whose confidence he earned and kept, his idea, originally received as a weird fancy, took shape in surveys, contracts, and actual construction, the first message transmission occurring in October, 1861, speeding on in an hour by electric current intelligence that would previously have required weeks and months to journey. The fortune sprung from this venturesome undertaking has given the name of Creighton a foundation lasting to the end of time. Edward Creighton died in 1874, leaving $1,500,000 to be bestowed eventually for educational and charitable purposes. The good work he began has been carried further by his brother, John A. Creighton, and the Creighton College, the Creighton Medical School, and the Creighton Memorial Hospital, not to enumerate smaller benefactions, all attest as enduring monuments the activity and foresight that paved the way for the electric fluid to flow unchecked from ocean to ocean. [Illustration CITY HALL.] The telegraph was but the forerunner of the railroad. With Omaha the initial point of the Pacific telegraph lines, it enjoyed a marked advantage in the competition for the eastern terminus of the Pacific Railway. Up to that time, all transportation had been by steamboat up the Missouri River or in wagon and coach overland. The race of the iron horse across Iowa had been interrupted, first by the financial crash of 1857, and then by the war of 1861, so that the first locomotive to carry its train to the Missouri River arrived January 17, 1867, bearing the escutcheon of the Chicago & Northwestern. Within two years four railroads converged at the river opposite Omaha eager to share the through transcontinental traffic already in sight. The history of Omaha and of the Union Pacific is inseparably linked. It is not necessary to weigh the conflicting claims to credit for suggesting the railroad to the Pacific slope. The war demonstrated the military necessity of a rail connection with the coast States and forced Congress to take the steps that made its immediate construction possible. Without the subsidy offered in the Acts of 1862 and 1863 the road certainly would not have been built for years, and the development of the whole western country would have been long retarded.