Like the Union Pacific charter, that of the Northern Pacific also contained an extensive land grant. From the modern viewpoint, such land grants look colossal, but in those days the general opening up and development of the Western country had progressed to so slight an extent that the significance of giving away millions of acres of the public lands to encourage a precarious railroad enterprise was then no more than the passing over to capitalists today of exclusive rights in extensive tracts of territory in Brazil and the other South American Republics. Even these great opportunities to acquire almost an empire of fertile lands or rich forests were not as a rule looked upon as attractive enough to tempt capital into the wilderness. The old saying that capital is the most timid thing in the world and does not like pioneering is strongly emphasized by such instances as this, and no doubt in 1864 the enormous grants of free land made by Congress did not appear especially attractive to the man who had money to invest. Whatever the public attitude may have been, the Act of Congress of July 2, 1864, creating the Northern Pacific Railroad, gave that Company the right to construct a line from some point on Lake Superior, either in Minnesota or in Wisconsin, westward and north of latitude 45 degrees, to or near Portland, Oregon. The land grant consisted of forty alternate sections of public land for each mile within the Territories penetrated and twenty alternate sections within the States through which the railroad might pass. The hazardous character of this undertaking will be realized when it is remembered that at this time no railroad had yet penetrated the Rocky Mountains; that the entire railroad system of the United States was less than 40,000 miles; and that west of the Mississippi there was no mileage worth mentioning. It was still less than a generation since Parkman and his companions had made their four months' journey from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River, and between the fringe of civilization along the Pacific slope and the region about Chicago and St. Louis lay almost a third of the continent uninhabited, undeveloped, and unknown. The scheme languished for several years until finally, in 1869, the firm of Jay Cooke and Company of Philadelphia undertook to raise the necessary capital.