"'You brag of the East! _You_ do? Why, _I_ bring the East to _you_! All the Orient, all Cathay, Find through me the shortest way; And the sun you follow here Rises in my hemisphere. Really,--if one must be rude,-- Length, my friend, ain't longitude.'" The oriental trade of Whitney and Benton yet dazzled the eyes of the men who built the road, blinding them to the prosaic millions lying beneath their feet. The East and West were indeed united; but, more important, the intervening frontier was ceasing to divide. When the road was undertaken, men thought naturally of the East and the Pacific Coast, unhappily separated by the waste of the mountains and the desert and the Indian Country. The mining flurries of the early sixties raised a hope that this intervening land might not all be waste. As the railway had advanced, settlement had marched with it, the two treading upon the heels of the Peace Commissioners sent out to lure away the Indians. With the opening of the road the new period of national assimilation of the continent had begun. In fifteen years more, as other roads followed, there had ceased to be any unbridgeable gap between the East and West, and the frontier had disappeared. CHAPTER XX THE NEW INDIAN POLICY Through the negotiations of the Peace Commissioners of 1867 and 1868, and the opening of the Pacific railway in 1869, the Indians of the plains had been cleanly split into two main groups which had their centres in the Sioux reserve in southwest Dakota and the old Indian Territory. The advance of a new wave of population had followed along the road thus opened, pushing settlements into central Nebraska and Kansas. Through the latter state the Union Pacific, Eastern Division, better known as the Kansas Pacific, had been thrust west to Denver, where it arrived before 1870 was over. With this advance of civilized life upon the plains it became clear that the old Indian policy was gone for good, and that the idea of a permanent country, where the tribes, free from white contact, could continue their nomadic existence, had broken down. The old Indian policy had been based upon the permanence of this condition, but with the white advance troops for police had been added, while the loud bickerings between the military authorities, thus superimposed, and the Indian Office, which regarded itself as the rightful custodian of the problem, proved to be the overture to a new policy. Said Grant, in his first annual message in 1869: "No matter what ought to be the relations between such [civilized] settlements and the aborigines, the fact is they do not harmonize well, and one or the other has to give way in the end. A situation which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all Christendom and engendering in the citizen a disregard for human life and the rights of others, dangerous to society. I see no substitute for