Handling, housing, and feeding the thousands of laborers who built the road was no mean problem. Ten years earlier the builders of the Illinois Central had complained because their road from Galena and Chicago to Cairo ran generally through an uninhabited country upon which they could not live as they went along. Much more the continental railways, building rapidly away from the settlements, were forced to carry their dwellings with them. Their commissariat was as important as their general offices. An acquaintance of Bell told of standing where Cheyenne now is and seeing a long freight train arrive "laden with frame houses, boards, furniture, palings, old tents, and all the rubbish" of a mushroom city. "The guard jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on the platform, called out with a flourish, 'Gentlemen, here's Julesburg.'" The head of the serpentine track, sometimes indeed "crookeder than the horn that was blown around the walls of Jericho," was the terminal town; its tongue was the stretch of track thrust a few miles in advance of the head; repeatedly as the tongue darted out the head followed, leaving across the plains a series of scars, marking the spots where it had rested for a time. Every few weeks the town was packed upon a freight train and moved fifty or sixty miles to the new end of the track. Its vagrant population followed it. It was at Julesburg early in 1867; at Cheyenne in the end of the year; at Laramie City the following spring. Always it was the most disreputably picturesque spot on the anatomy of the railroad. In the fall of 1868 "Hell on Wheels," as Samuel Bowles, editor of the _Springfield Republican_, appropriately designated the terminal town, was at Benton, Wyoming, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from Omaha and near the military reservation at Fort Steele. In the very midst of the gray desert, with sand ankle-deep in its streets, the town stood dusty white--"a new arrival with black clothes looked like nothing so much as a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel." A less promising location could hardly have been found, yet within two weeks there had sprung up a city of three thousand people with ordinances and government suited to its size, and facilities for vice ample for all. The needs of the road accounted for it: to the east the road was operating for passengers and freight; to the west it was yet constructing track. Here was the end of rail travel and the beginning of the stage routes to the coast and the mines. Two years earlier the similar point had been at Fort Kearney, Nebraska.