BEGINNINGS OF ECONOMIC GEOLOGY 
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forty-first parallel proved commercially the most feasable and 
attractive of all, and it received first financial consideration from 
private interests when it came to actual construction operations. 
Despite the obstacles which appear to have been put in its way by 
the War Department of the Government, the plan of building 
steadily matured. A northern road accomplished first what the 
South had designed to reserve exclusively for herself, to open up 
vast virgin expanses in which slavery had no place. Thus, there 
was a distinct commercial setting to squatter sovereignty in the 
years immediately preceeding war times. 
Relation of the contest of putting the railroad planks in the 
national political platforms of 1860 is a long and lurid tale. How 
it proved to be a rock upon which the Charleston convention split, 
the one thing which gained the presidential nomination for Abra¬ 
ham Lincoln, and the background for Rebellion is another story. 
What the Government could not do, or would not do under 
Jefferson Davis’ guidance, private enterprises now did. The 
'Pacific Railroad Reports were hardly off the press before the 
engineers of the Mississippi River and Missouri River railroad, 
now the Rock Island line, then building across Iowa, started a 
reconnaissance survey from the Missouri River where Omaha now 
stands to the Ocean at San Francisco. This preliminary survey 
was completed, and the plans for construction well along when 
the war storm burst full upon the land. Before the war was 
ended General G. M. Dodge, who was the chief engineer of the 
Union Pacific road, had looked up some of the discharged mem¬ 
bers of the old Northern Pacific Railroad corps. One in par¬ 
ticular, Frederick W. Lander, who had been with the Stevens 
Party over the Great Northern route, had returned from Portland 
by way of the Snake and Platte rivers. He gave Dodge a full 
account of the resources and advantages of this traverse and con¬ 
vinced him that it was a very much better route than that with 
which he had so recently been officially connected. 
A little later Dodge got hold of one David Van Lennep, who 
was reputed to be something of a geologist, to investigate and 
report upon the commercial prospects of the mineral deposits ac¬ 
cessible to the railroad line. Just what position Van Lennep held 
on the Pacific Railroad surveys, or whether he ever held any post, 
is not, at this distant day, known. At any rate. Van Lennep 
