They
each have prairies to pass, with long straight lines and horizons which
seem ever vanishing and never reached; mountain ranges of vast
altitudes to cross, alkaline lands, hitherto uncultivable, hot sulphur
springs, prairie-dogs, gophyrs, and other animals not usually seen. The
buffalo has retired from the neighbourhood of these iron-roads and of
the "fire-wagons," as the Indians call the locomotives. Here and there
on all the prairies on all the lines, heaps of whitened bones, of
buffalo, elk, and stag, are piled up at stations, to be taken away for
agricultural purposes. The railways resemble each other in their
ambitious extensions. The Canadian Pacific Railway, from Quebec to Port
Moody, is above 3,000 miles in length, but the total mileage of the
Company is already 4,600 miles, and no one knows where it is to stop,
while Messrs. Baring and Glyn will, and can, raise money from English
people; the Union Pacific possesses 4,500 miles in the United States;
the Southern Pacific nearly 5,000; and the newest of the three, the
Northern Pacific, has about 3,000 miles, and is "marching on" to a
junction with Grand Trunk extensions at the southern end of Lake
Superior, in order to complete a second Atlantic and Pacific route,
through favoured Canada.
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