The making of traffic is the most recent and the most highly developed branch of the science of railroading. The first of this specialized business-getting began just before the Civil War. Some of the railroads had put their lines back a little way from the western portion of the Great Lakes along in the late fifties, and they needed folks to live along those lines. It goes without saying that a railroad going into an unpopulated country would never be any great "shakes" of a railroad until people came to dwell along its lines. So the railroad from Galena to Chicago--afterwards the foundation stone for the mighty Northwestern--the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, and one or two others started emigration bureaus. Then men who owned those early railroads knew the possibilities of the virgin lands into which they stretched their rails. The proposition that confronted them was to let the folk who lived in the East and even those who were herded in the crowded lands across the Atlantic, know these same possibilities. By means of their first emigration bureaus they accomplished their proposition. Advertising was a crude science in those days, but advertising helped. Throughout the troublous years of the war the men from the East who had read of the glories of the Middle West, who had listened to the tales of the agents of the railroad and coupled them with those of returning travellers, began pouring over the new and struggling railroads. They carried their goods and chattels with them; and so the railroad men knew that they were not going back to the old homes again. At the close of the war these tides rose to flood. The railroads no longer struggled. There was a steady flow of traffic over their rails, and they were able because of it to engage capital to stretch their rails a little farther west. After they had moved another stretch, the tides of emigration still flowed. That process might have gone ahead in orderly fashion until the Pacific had been reached, if the scheme had not been upset. They built too many railroads, they overworked their idea. In the broad reaches of the Middle West, lines of steel crumbled into rust, and cross-roads dreamed vainly that they would become villages. Many a struggling village failed to become the city that her enthusiastic residents had fancied. They had the big boom in Kansas, and the bigger collapse that followed. After that, folk stayed East for a while, and the business of making traffic in that territory became an advanced science.