But this not all, nor the best. The old Congress, among its many wise and beneficent measures, enacted that the government should aid whatever company would for the lowest annual stipend establish and maintain a line of Electric Telegraph from Missouri or Iowa to California. A contract was accordingly made with the Western Union Telegraph Company, under which active operations were commenced last spring, under surveys previously made. The grand train of four hundred men, one hundred great prairie wagons, and six or eight hundred mules or oxen,--a portion of the cattle for the subsistence of the party,--started westward from Omaha, Nebraska, in June last, and on the 4th of July commenced pushing on the construction at the point which it had already reached, some two or three hundred miles further west in the valley of the Platte. It may give to some an idea of the destitution of timber on the great American Desert, to know that the greatest distance over which poles had to be drawn for the elevation of the wires of this telegraph was _only_ 240 miles! Fresh teams were from time to time dispatched on the track of the working carts with additional supplies, and the line was pushed through to Salt Lake City by the 18th of October. Six days afterward, that point was reached by a like party, working eastward from Carson Valley, on behalf of the United Telegraph Companies of California, and the young Hercules by the Pacific vied with the infantile but vigorous territories this side of her in flashing to Washington and New York assurances of their invincible devotion to the indivisible American Union. So great and difficult an enterprise was probably never before so expeditiously and happily achieved in the experience of mankind.