" He expected a canal to erase the mountains, but
the railroad accomplished this gigantic task with but slight aid of water.
And as the railroad tied the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic coast, so
in time, aided of a government that had every reason to be grateful, it
reached across the uninhabited plains, over the Rocky Mountains, which
even the western statesmen said were the divinely appointed barriers, and
across the desert beyond to the Pacific slope and tied it to a capital
which is now nearer to San Francisco than once it was to Boston. A man
from Missouri is speaker of the house in which Josiah Quincy spoke his
provincial fears. A man from the mouth of the Mississippi, the highest
authority in America on the French code, was but a little time ago
appointed as the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
by a President who was born on the banks of the Ohio; that is, the highest
office in each of the three independent branches of government (the
executive, the legislative, and the judicial) have at one time been filled
by men of the western waters.
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