several disconnected stretches of railroad. It was not until
1836, when work was begun on the Erie Railroad, that a plan was
adopted for a single line reaching several hundred miles from an
obvious point, such as New York, to an obvious destination, such
as Lake Erie. Even then a few farsighted men could foresee the
day when the railroad train would cross the plains and the
Rockies and link the Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet, in 1850
nearly all the railroads in the United States lay east of the
Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they were
physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned
and separately managed.

Successful as many of the railroads were, they had hardly yet
established themselves as the one preeminent means of
transportation. The canal had lost in the struggle for supremacy,
but certain of these constructed waterways, particularly the
Erie, were flourishing with little diminished vigor. The river
steamboat had enjoyed a development in the first few decades of
the nineteenth century almost as great as that of the railroad
itself. The Mississippi River was the great natural highway for
the products and the passenger traffic of the South Central
States; it had made New Orleans one of the largest and most
flourishing cities in the country; and certainly the rich cotton
planter of the fifties would have smiled at any suggestion that
the "floating palaces" which plied this mighty stream would ever
surrender their preeminence to the rusty and struggling railroads
which wound along its banks.

This period, which may be taken as the first in American railroad
development, ended about the middle of the century. It was an age