The Plains proper and the first day’s ride end at Cheyenne, five hundred and sixteen miles from Omaha. Here a branch road goes off south a hundred miles to Denver, where it connects with the St. Louis or Eastern Division of the Pacific road. Cheyenne is also a great railroad work and supply shop, as becomes its location adjoining the mountain and winter-exposed section of the road. He continued on across Wyoming to the end of the line, which then was crossing the high, arid tablelands near Rawlins. He saw the track laid over the Continental Divide and marveled at the speed with which the job was being accomplished. By the next May the construction crews had laid another 250 miles of track to complete the work. Within this desert of the mountains, the divide of the continent occurs both on the old stage road and the new Railroad line; and here, in the summer of 1868, we witnessed the building of the track over the parting of the waters. The last rail on the Atlantic slope and the first on the Pacific were laid in our presence; and Governor Bross pinned them down with stalwart blows upon their spikes. As yet, still, no mountains appear in the path of the track, and it winds easily along through these rolling sand-hills, occasionally helped over a deep dry gulch, and spanning a feeble or possible river. But the whole section is mountainously high, from seven thousand to eight thousand feet above the sea level. We witnessed here the fabulous speed with which the Railroad was built. Through the two or three hundred miles beyond were scattered ten to fifteen thousand men in great gangs preparing the road bed; plows, scrapers, shovels, picks and carts; and, among the rocks, drills and powder were doing the grading as rapidly as men could stand and move with their tools. Long trains brought up to the end of the completed track loads of ties and rails; the former were transferred to teams, sent one or two miles ahead, and put in place upon the grade. Then rails and spikes were reloaded on platform cars, these pushed up to the last previously laid rail, and with an automatic movement and a celerity that were wonderful, practiced hands dropped the fresh rails one after another on the ties exactly in line, huge sledges sent the spikes home, the car rolled on, and the operation was repeated; while every few minutes the long heavy train behind sent out a puff from its locomotive, and caught up with its load of material the advancing work. The only limit, inside of eight miles in twenty-four hours, to the rapidity with which the track could thus be laid, was the power of the road behind to bring forward the materials.