Morning journal and courier., 1881-05-21
Saturday Morning, May 21, 1881. :.
HEADLoaG ,I RAILROAD BUILDING.

The people of the United States have passed through one very unpleasant period of depression and disaster immediately brought about hy headIong railroad building. But no one seems to have learned much from the bitter experience and the railroad build CTS are at it again, carrying out plans which are certainly magnificent, if they are not destined to be productive Ia
 The popular idea is that railroads are need ed all over the West and that there can hard Fly be too many of them, This idea is yigor- ously and intelligently, lcombated by Color sado correspondent of the New York EUenSng Post, who sounds 8 needed note of warning to those who are inclined to be reckless in in- vesting their money in western railroad schemes! He points out that among persons who have never been in the far West there is a very, general nisapprehension as to the capabilities and natural wealth of the vast and sparseIy populated region which begins with the dry plains of western Kansas, Ne braska and Dakota, and extends to the Cal ifornian mountains. All men have heard of the great and sudden fortunes which have been made in the mines of Colorado Nevada Utah and Montana, and in the herds on the dry grazing belt lying east of the Rocky Mountains. It seems to have creat the inn pression in many minds that this is to. be- come the richest part of the United States i; in reality it is the poorest. It may be the richest region on the earth in mines of gold and silver, and yet be poor as compared with the agricultural States of the Mississippi The homely wealth of corn and wheat and potatoes, more important and more to be de- sired for country than mines of gold. gives power to those States; but it is a kind of wealth in which this great interior region will always be lacking. This tract, not be- ing generally arabic, can never support dense populations, and without dense populations there cannot be many paying railroads.
 But the railroad builders do not seem to mind these obstacles. They go on stretching their lines across the plains just as if they were all needed The Northern Pacific will reach the Yellowstone in Montana in a few months; the Chicago and Northwestern is fast approaching the border of Wyoming, and two new lines are expected soon to con- nect New Mexico with the East, making in
 
 Rocky Mountains and one to the Black Hills And the schemes for railroads to cross the continent are not much less numerous than those to the Rocky Mountains. It is now expected that in few years six lines of railroad will stretch across the widest part of the North American continent In competition with these roads there will be steamship lines connecting with the road to be built across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and with the Panama railroad, and if the inter-oceanic canal is built it will be formidable rival The correspondent concludes his letter with the following pertinent remarks: ''Af- ter thirty-two years of development the enormous State of California with it's unri- vailed mineral wealth, it's productive soil and it's foreign commerce, has about half the pop ulation of the little barren State of Massa- chusetts yet it is much the richest and most popuIous part of the Pacific slope. How many years must it be before six or eight of the longest railroad lines in the world, aggre- gating many thousands of miles of track, traversing many wide tracts of almost upin- habitable land, can earn living from the traffic of the Pacific coast ?'' It behooves people who have money to invest in railroads to put it in those that are likely to pay within fifty years at least.