The eastern end started nearer to a base of supplies than did the California terminus, yet until 1867 no railroad from the East reached Council Bluffs, where the President had determined that the Union Pacific should begin. There had been railway connection to the Missouri River at St. Joseph since 1859, and various lines were hurrying across Iowa in the sixties, but for more than two years of construction the Union Pacific had to get rolling stock and iron from the Missouri steamers or the laborious prairie schooners. Until its railway connection was established its difficulty in this respect was only less great than that of the Central Pacific. The compensation of the Union Pacific came, however, in its roadbed. Following the old Platte trail, flat and smooth as the best highways, its construction gangs could do the light grading as rapidly as the finished single track could deliver the rails at its growing end. But for the needful culverts and trestles there was little material at hand. The willows and Cottonwood lining the river would not do. The Central Pacific could cut its wood as it needed it, often within sight of its track. The Union Pacific had to haul much of its wood and stone, like its iron, from its eastern terminus. The labor problem of the Union Pacific was intimately connected with the solution of its Indian problem. The Central Pacific had almost no trouble with the decadent tribes through whom it ran, but the Union Pacific was built during the very years when the great plains were most disturbed and hostile forays were most frequent. Its employees contained large elements of the newly arrived Irish and of the recently discharged veterans of the Civil War. General Dodge, who was its chief engineer, has described not only the military guards who "stacked their arms on the dump and were ready at a moment's warning to fall in and fight," but the military capacity of the construction gangs themselves. The "track train could arm a thousand men at a word," and from chief constructor down to chief spiker "could be commanded by experienced officers of every rank, from general to a captain. They had served five years at the front, and over half of the men had shouldered a musket in many battles. An illustration of this came to me after our track had passed Plum Creek, 200 miles west of the Missouri River. The Indians had captured a freight train and were in possession of it and its crews." Dodge came to the rescue in his car, "a travelling arsenal," with twenty-odd men, most of whom were strangers to him; yet "when I called upon them to fall in, to go forward and retake the train, every man on the train went into line, and by his position showed that he was a soldier.... I gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, and at the command they went forward as steadily and in as good order as we had seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire."