"Mr. Train owned personally about five hundred acres in Omaha, which cost him only one hundred and seventy-five dollars per acre--a most promising investment. He is a noticeable, original American, who has crowded wonderful and varied experiences into his short life. An orphan boy, employed to sweep the counting-room, he rose to the head of a great Boston shipping house; then established a branch in Liverpool; next organized and conducted a heavy commission business in Australia, and astonished his neighbors in that era of fabulous prices, with Brussels carpets, and marble counters, and a free champagne luncheon daily in his business office. Afterward he made the circuit of the world, wrote books of travel, fought British prejudices against street-railways, occupying his leisure time by fiery and audacious American war speeches to our island cousins, until he spent a fortune, and enjoyed the delights of a month in a British prison. "Thence he returned to America; lectured everywhere; and now he is trying to build a belt of cities across the continent. At least a magnificent project. Curiously combining keen sagacity with wild enthusiasm, a man who might have built the pyramids, or been confined in a strait-jacket for eccentricities, according to the age he lived in, he observes dryly that since he began to make money, people no longer pronounce him crazy! He drinks no spirits, uses no tobacco, talks on the stump like an embodied Niagara, composes songs to order by the hour as fast as he can sing them, like an Italian improvisatore, remembers every droll story from Joe Miller to Artemus Ward, is a born actor, is intensely in earnest, and has the most absolute and outspoken faith in himself and his future." [At the time Richardson saw me at Omaha, in '64, another noted journalist, William Hepworth Dixon, editor of the London Athenæum, called on me, traveling with Sir Charles Dilke, who was writing Greater Britain. I introduced him to Richardson.--G. F. T.] CHAPTER XXIV THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FAR WEST 1863-1870 Very much of my work that has aided most in the development of this country was done in the great region of the Northwest, then a wild country, trackless and uninhabited except by savages. Of course, the chief achievement in the West was the building of the Union Pacific Railway, which led up to the inception and construction of other railways and to the present prosperity of the entire section.