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Show THE JOURNEY TO UTAH. 51 lye and sand, then dried to the consistency of hard soap, with glisten-ing surface, tormenting alike to eye and sense. Yet here had sprung up in two weeks as if by the touch of Alad-din's Lamp a city of three thousand people; there were regular squares arranged into five wards, a city government of mayor and aldermen, a daily paper, and a volume of municipal ordinances. It was the end of the freight and passenger, and beginning of the con-struction division; twice every day immense trains arrived and de-parted, and stages left for Utah, Montana and Idaho. All the goods formerly hauled across the plains came here by rail, and were reship-ped, and for ten hours daily the streets were thronged with motley crowds of railroad men, Mexicans and Indians, gamblers, " cappers," and saloon- keepers, merchants, miners, and mule- whackers. The streets were eight inches deep in white dust as I entered the city of canvas tents and pole- houses ; the suburbs appeared as banks of dirty white lime, and a new arrival with black clothes looked like nothing so much as a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel. " ONLY A MEMORY." Benton is only a memory now. A section house by the road- side, a few piles of adobes, tin cans and other debris mark the site where sales to the amount of millions were made in two months. The genesis and evolution of these evanescent railroad cities was from the overland trade. Two hundred thousand people in Colorado, Utah, Montana and Idaho had to be supplied from the States, and every ounce of freight sent them was formerly hauled from six to sixteen hundred miles. This trade successively built up Independence, Westport, Kansas City, Atch-ison, Leavenworth and Omaha ; but as soon as the Union Pacific was started it took that route. Hence those " roaring towns" at the suc-cessive termini, which sprang up like Jonah's gourd, and in most cases withered away as suddenly when the road passed on. First on the list was Columbus, Nebraska, and then Fort Kearney, where George Francis Train confidently located the geographical center of the United States, and future capital, and invested his money and his hopes. Kearney is now a prosperous country village and Train a harmless lunatic. North Platte suddenly rose from a bare sand bank to a city of 4,000 people, with banks, insurance offices and city government, an |
