organized state beyond the Rocky Mountains, but a steamboat and railroad communication from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River? . . . With railroad and steamboat communication from New York to St. Louis, and from thence to the Columbia River, the vi^hole distance may be traversed in twenty days, and thus open a direct communication with China." In 1839 another New York man wrote: "Figure to yourself a large city near the mouth of the Columbia, with a railway across the mountains, and a canal around the falls and rapids." About the same time a plan for a railroad to Oregon was said to be under discussion at Dubuque, Iowa. This plan the editor of the Oregonian, of Lynn, Mass., ridiculed as a visionary, impracticable scheme. He saw overwhelming difficulties in the way, and even if the construction were possible, the cost would be prohibitive—from thirty to fifty millions—and besides it would he dangerous to run cars through the Indian country!
Asa Whitney's Plan. When, a few years later, the man appeared who had a definite practicable plan for getting a Pacific railway built, the driving motive was still the age-old idea of a trade with China. This man was Asa Whitney, who had travelled in the Orient and gained the idea that a transcontinental railway, which would control the Chinese trade, would give the United States a stupendous commercial advantage over European countries; and he naturally believed that those who would supply this railway link would themselves profit enormously from the new de
