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9 The Best of Everything W illiam Ogden was not directly involved in the railroad business during the years immediately following his resignation from the Galena. He observed the railroad from afar or through friends who remained on the board, and he allowed his partners to run the bulk of his real estate business. But he had a number of grand plans that were slowly germinating, plans that would ultimately make him wealthier and more powerful than ever. One event he did attend in 1850 was the National Pacific Railway Convention in Philadelphia. By this time, Ogden was so well known nationally for his vision for railroads and their expansion across the entire country that the delegates elected him presiding officer. It was an exhilarating four days for attendees. Most were ardent railroad supporters, but there were also a few detractors. The convention’s main agenda, like that of similar meetings that had been held in both Eastern and Western cities, was to propose routes to the West and promote a transcontinental railway bill in Congress. Ogden issued a follow-up report on that meeting to Congress, which Secretary of War Robert T. Lincoln referred to many years later in his own report to Congress on the history of the transcontinental railroad movement: “In 1850 William B. Ogden of Chicago, convinced of the practicability of a transcontinental railway, gave the aid of his powerful influence to the agitation of the measure.”1 Laying more than two thousand miles of track across rugged wilderness and through mountains of granite was beyond the ability of private enterprise to finance. Heavy federal subsidy would be required if the dream were to be realized . But so far, provincial rivalries over which route the railroad should take had kept the project from finding majority support in Congress. The first ray of hope peeked through late in 1850. In the fall, President Millard Fillmore signed the first railroad land-grant bill. The law, proposed by Illinois’s Stephen A. Douglas, gave more than 2.5 million acres of right-of-way to two railroads. The Illinois Central Railroad planned to go from Chicago to Cairo, Illinois, at 142 the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, while the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, operating in Mississippi and Alabama, would go from Columbus, Kentucky (across the river from Cairo), all the way to Mobile on the Gulf of Mexico. The two companies would thus provide a continuous rail link from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. Although the railroad land-grant program would lead to a number of abuses, in theory it was well designed. By giving away public land along a railroad’s right-of-way in a checkerboard pattern, the U.S. government immeasurably increased the value of that half of the land that it retained. The idea was that the railroad would sell their half of the land in the checkerboard to pay for building the road, and the government would hold its half until settlement increased its value. The land-grant program proved to be the kick-start to develop a transcontinental railroad, although its realization was still many years in the future. After attending the National Pacific Railway Convention, Ogden spent the remainder of the early 1850s traveling. He spent eighteen months touring Europe with his family, and undoubtedly he visited every European railroad executive he could find along the way. Upon his return, he repacked his grips and headed out again, this time with serious business in mind. Traveling alone aboard boats and trains, in buggies and on horseback, Ogden visited every corner of the nation’s heartland, through the vast Midwest and into the Great Plains, probing, scrutinizing, and thinking.2 He visited the rich iron and copper region at the farthest stretches of upper Michigan. He drank dark lager beer with mine owners and talked with them about the problems they faced being so far removed from the rest of American society. He went back to central and northern Wisconsin, waded through tamarack swamps, admired vast pine and hardwood forests, and talked with sawmill operators about getting their lumber to market. Astride a fine horse, he marveled at Iowa’s tallgrass prairie, and he chatted with farmers in their rude sod houses after visiting their waving fields of wheat, corn, and barley. In Nebraska Territory he waded calf-deep in the foul-smelling muck of a pig farm, and he saw sweetgrass curing on the ground that provided hay for...
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