It is the part of the great captains of transportation to live strenuous lives, to work out great problems faithfully and patiently, to accomplish great results mysteriously, to live, to die, and to be forgotten. The heroes of the hustings, the heroes of our wars, are remembered and immortalized. The man that makes possible their triumphs finds no record on the page of time. His obituary is only the passing chronicle of the daily press, feverishly concerned with what is known as news. To-day James F. Joy, the father of the Michigan Central Railroad, is little known by the general public, though his was a far greater work than that of seeking public office. John Murray Forbes, father of the great Burlington and Quincy system, is a man too much forgotten. As these lines are written comes the news of the death of Henry Villard, the man that solved so many problems for the Northern Pacific. Dropped for the time out of sight, he will now shortly follow the fate of his compeers, and soon be dropped forever. William Henry Osborn died only a few years ago, yet there are many who make the winter trip to the Gulf coast that do not know who planned the flight of rails that runs from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. It is a duty and a pleasure to mention the names of such great and useful men, if only to ask that their work be held in understanding memory. Especially significant now is the memory of Mr. Osborn, and we might well speak of him as assistant and coadjutor of such men as Lincoln and Grant, and the statesmen who since the war have sought to unite North and South. As we find that it was the South that first marched westward, and a Southern man who first planned a great highway of iron into the West, we may state with equal pleasure and confidence that it was the East, and an Eastern man, that made the South a portion of the West, and both a part of a united America. William H. Osborn was a native of Massachusetts, and was by birth of no exalted position in the world. His chief capital was a clear brain and an unclouded purpose, which later ripened into a farsightedness in large affairs that has rarely been equaled in the ranks of practical American men. Sent to the East Indies as the representative of a New York firm, he got a good insight into the trade in spices, and was successful in its operation. Later he married the second daughter of that sterling American merchant, Jonathan Sturges of New York, whose first daughter was the first wife of J. Pierpont Morgan. Mr. Sturges was heavily interested in the young Illinois Central Railroad, the first of the land-grant railways, the original seven hundred and five miles of which were intended to develop the agricultural lands of the great prairie state of Illinois, and to bear the products of that state up to the water-transport of the Great Lakes, which then carried most of the long-haul business from the West to the East.