Of course with the railroad pushing its way westward all the while (the Rock Island in April, 1859, was the first to span the Mississippi with a bridge), it was only a question of time when some adventurous soul should seek to reach the Pacific coast. Indeed it was away back in 1832, while there was still less than a hundred miles of track in the United States, that Judge Dexter of Ann Arbor, Michigan, proposed a railroad through to the Pacific Ocean, through thousands of miles of untrodden forest. Six years later, a Welsh engineer, John Plumbe, held a convention at Dubuque, Iowa, for the same purpose. The idea would not down. Hardly had Plumbe and his convention disappeared from the public notice when Asa Whitney, a New York merchant of considerable reputation, began to agitate the Pacific railroad. Whitney was a good deal of a theorist and a dreamer; but he was a shrewd publicity man, and he held widely attended meetings for the propagation of his idea, in all the Eastern cities. Eventually, like Judge Dexter and John Plumbe, he was doomed to disappointment. After Whitney had died broken-hearted and bankrupt because of his devotion to an idea, came Josiah Perham, of Boston. Josiah Perham was the Raymond & Whitcomb of the fifties. He began by organizing excursions for New England folk to come to Boston to see the Boston Museum and the panoramas, which were the gay diversion of that day. In one year he brought two hundred thousand folk into that sacred Massachusetts town, and he began to be rated as a rich man. He absorbed the Pacific railroad idea and freely spent his money in its propagation. He organized the People's Pacific Railroad,--and a part of his scheme formed the foundation of the Northern Pacific. Perham, like the others, spent his money and failed to see the fruition of his plan. There seemed to be something ill-fated about that plan of a railroad to the Pacific. Even the citizens of St. Louis, who had gathered on the Fourth of July, 1851, to see soil broken for the first real transcontinental railroad, found that it could only manage to reach Kansas City by 1856. That particular railroad--the Missouri Pacific--through its western connection, the Western Pacific, only succeeded in reaching the coast within the past year.