The city of tents and shacks contained, according to the count of John H. Beadle, a peripatetic journalist, twenty-three saloons and five dance houses. It had all the worst details of the mining camp. Gambling and rowdyism were the order of day and night. Its great institution was the "'Big Tent,' sometimes, with equal truth but less politeness, called the 'Gamblers' Tent.'" This resort was a hundred feet long by forty wide, well floored, and given over to drinking, dancing, and gambling. The sumptuous bar provided refreshment much desired in a dry alkali country; all the games known to the professional gambler were in full blast; women, often fair and well-dressed, were there to gather in what the bartender and faro-dealer missed. Whence came these people, and how they learned their trade, was a mystery to Bowles. "Hell would appear to have been raked to furnish them," he said, "and to it they must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its highest seats and most diabolical service." Behind the terminal town real estate disappointments, like beads, were strung along the cord of rails. In advance of the construction gangs land companies would commonly survey town sites in preparation for a boom. Brisk speculation in corner lots was a form of gambling in which real money was often lost and honest hopes were regularly shattered. Each town had its advocates who believed it was to be the great emporium of the West. Yet generally, as the railroad moved on, the town relapsed into a condition of deserted prairie, with only the street lines and débris to remind it of its past. Omaha, though Beadle thought in 1868 that no other "place in America had been so well lied about," and Council Bluffs retained a share of greatness because of their strategic position at the commencement of the main line. Tied together in 1872 by the great iron bridge of the Union Pacific, their relations were as harmonious as those of the cats of Kilkenny, as they quarrelled over the claims of each to be the real terminus. But the future of both was assured when the eastern roads began to run in to get connections with the West. Cheyenne, too, remained a city of some consequence because the Denver Pacific branched off at this point to serve the Pike's Peak region. But the names of most of the other one-time terminal towns were writ in sand.