It can not be within the present purpose to particularize as to the railroad development of the West, nor to attempt the unimportant chronological record of first one and then another of the multiplying railways that early began to crowd out into the West from the Eastern centers. The important thing is the tremendous expansion of population that now ensued for the Western states, the blackening of the census maps in spaces once barren, the crossing and interweaving of the Northern and Southern populations, which now occurred as both sections pressed out into the West. There were grandfathers in Virginia now, grandfathers in New England. The subdivided farms were not so large. There were more shops in the villages. There was demand for expansion of the commerce of that day. The little products must find their market, and that market might still be American. The raw stuff might still be American, the producer of it might still be American. So these busy, thrifty, ambitious men came up and stood back of the vanguard that held the flexible frontier. Silently men stole out yet farther into what West there was left; but they always looked back over the shoulder at this new thing that had come upon the land. Thinking men knew, half a century ago, that there must be an iron way across the United States, though they knew this only in general terms, and were only guessing at the changes that such a road must bring to the country at large. Some of these guesses make interesting reading to-day. Thus, in 1855 it was announced as a settled thing that the continental route could not lie across the Northern Rockies, because in that region the heavy snowfall would block all railway travel. It was concluded that there were only four points on the Pacific coast to which the railway might address itself: San Diego, San Francisco, “some spot to be chosen on the navigable waters of the Columbia,” and another “on the borders of the Strait of De Fuca, in the new Territory of Washington.” The government of the country was so slow in developing this railway project that some capitalists were for building at once a road of their own, and they chose the route from Charleston to San Diego. What would it have meant to this country had this been the first and only railway across the continent? As to the route up the Platte valley and over the mid-Rockies, that was dismissed as quite impracticable. “The absence of timber on most of this route would prove an insuperable objection to its selection, even were it not ineligible from other considerations,” comments one writer of the day. The same writer[51] says that the route from San Francisco to St. Louis would be geographically preferable, but admits that the “formation of the intermediate country, and the character of the mountain-ranges to be crossed, are deemed to present insuperable difficulties to its construction.”