long lifetime. He died too soon to see the full apotheosis of the squatter, who gradually developed, in point of law, from the criminal stealing the public land to the public-spirited pioneer in whose interest a wise Congress ought to shape its laws. Under the influence of this new Homestead Law, aided by the Preëmption Law, which remained in force, land titles were established in the Mountain States as rapidly as the Indians could be removed.

The frontier mining territories were loud in demanding that Congress should give them more land, remove the Indians, extend police protection, and give them mails and railroads. The miner disliked the isolation which his speculations brought upon him, and Congress unfolded new powers to remove it for him. In 1858 it organized the great overland mail that ran coaches to California in less than twenty-five days. The pony express provided faster service in 1860-61. And after private money had built the telegraph line to the Pacific, both Congress and the West took up the subject of a continental railway.

In the summer of 1862 a group of railroad companies was authorized to build a track from the Missouri River (which had already been reached at St. Joseph by a railway from the East) to California. As modified by law in 1864 the contract provided for extensive government aid in the speculation: twenty sections of land for every mile of track, and a loan of United States bonds at the rate of at least $16,000 per mile. But the West had little capital, and the prosperous East had better investments at home, so that money could hardly be got into this scheme on any terms. The Western promoters were driven to shifty extremes before they overcame the Eastern belief that no continental railroad could pay. Not until 1866 was the construction work begun in earnest.

THE WESTERN RAILWAY LANDGRANTS, 1850-1871
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Between 1866 and 1869 the building of the Union Pacific was the most picturesque enterprise in America. Across the great plains, the desert, and the mountains, from Council Bluffs to Sacramento, it was pushed. In the West, Stanford and his group of California visionaries carried the burden. The eastern end brought out no single great promoter. Both ends fought the problem of timber and stone and railroad iron, but most of all of labor. Stanford finally imported the Chinese coolie for the job. Civil War veterans and new immigrants did most of the work on the eastern end. And along the eastern stretches the Indian tribes of the plains watched the work with jealous eyes. The Pawnee, the Sioux, the Arapaho, and the Cheyenne saw in the new road the end of a tribal life based upon wild game.

Severe Indian outbreaks accompanied the construction of the railroad, as the tribes made their last stand in Wyoming, Colorado, and the Indian Territory. Before the line was done, the tribes of the plains were under control in two great concentration camps, in South Dakota and Indian Territory, and the worst of the Indian fighting in the West was over.

In the spring of 1869 the railroad was finished and a spectacular celebration was held near Ogden, in Utah Territory. The finishing stroke was everywhere regarded as national, since not only had Congress given aid, but the union of the oceans was an object of national ambition. With the completion, the problem shifted from the exciting risks of construction and finance to the prosaic duties of paying the bills, and with the shift came a natural falling-off in enthusiasm.

The Union Pacific was the longest railroad of the sixties, and aroused the greatest interest. In an economic way it is merely typical of the speculative expansion of the North that began early in the Civil War and continued increasingly thereafter. The United States was engaged in a period of hopeful growth such as has followed every panic. After a few years of depression, stagnation, and enforced economy, business had revived about 1861. Confidence had increased, loans had been made more freely, and capital had taken up again its search for profitable investment. In the newer regions, where permanent improvements were least numerous, the field for exploitation had been great. The climax of exploitation was reached throughout the West.

As had been true at all the stages of the westward movement, the West was heavily in debt, and upon a forced balance would generally have shown an excess of liabilities over assets. Borrowed money paid much of the cost of emigration. During the first year the pioneer often raised no crops and lived upon his savings or his borrowings. He and his local merchant and his bank and his new railroad had borrowed all they could, while the creditor, living necessarily in the older communities where saving had created a surplus for investment, lived in the East, or even in Europe. The necessary conditions of settlement and development had prepared the way for a new sectional alignment of business interests, those of the Far West and the Northwest taking their tone from the interests of a debtor class, while those of the East represented those of the creditor. The possible cleavage was revealed as real when the United States Treasury Department, in its work toward financial reconstruction, approached the subject of the greenbacks.

The legal-tender greenbacks, which were in circulation to the extent of $433,000,000 in 1865, constituted not only a part of the debt of the war, but the foundation of the currency in circulation. Throughout most of the war they were supplemented by the notes of state banks, local token-money, and fractional currency, or "shinplasters," of the United States. Coin ceased to circulate in 1862 and was used only by those whose contracts obliged them to pay in gold or silver. In 1863 Secretary Chase inaugurated a system of national banks, to circulate a uniform currency, secured by United States bonds, but these did not become a factor in business until the state bank notes had been taxed out of existence in 1865. After this time national banks were formed in large numbers, replacing the uncertain notes of the state banks with their own notes, which were quite as good as greenbacks. But all paper money was below par in 1865, and gold remained out of circulation, at a premium, until the end of 1878.

The depreciation of the greenbacks reflected a popular doubt as to the outcome of the Civil War. They entailed hardship upon all who received them as dollars, since their purchasing value was below the standard of one hundred cents in gold. When the Government, desperate in war time, forced its creditors to accept them at par, it did an injustice which it