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Show j OLD WESTERN TRAILS. Railways Now Run Over the Paths of Early Pioneers and Explorers. (New York Tribune.) The early explorers and pioneers of the western part of the United States made the paths that are now' the great railway highways of commerce. The old trails of. the plains, deserts and mountains and the routes of the present pres-ent transcontinental railways are closely associated, as in the greater number of cases the big western railroad rail-road tracks followed the course of the wagon tracks of fifty years ago. When the American colonies were declaring their independence of Great Britain the "old Spanish trail" was being laid out by a party under the command of Francisco Silvester Velez Escalante, in the interest of the Spanish missions in California. This expedition left Santa Fe in July, .1776, and after traveling over what is known as the San Juan country, coun-try, reached a spot where Grand Junction, Junc-tion, Colo., an important present day railwav center, is located. From there the party "trailed" to Salt Lake, and from there to Los Angeles, Cal. The new Denver & Northwestern railroad and the Salt Lake-Los Angeles line will closely follow much of this old Spanish trail. The Union Pacific railroad runs over the old Platte-Overland route from Omaha to Ogden, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe follows for many hundreds of miles the old Santa Fe trail, while in Arizona the same road touches at many points the southern overland trail. The Santa Fe trail runs through the Raton mountains (southern spurs of the Rocky moun-mountains moun-mountains in New Mexico), and the engineers who built the Santa Fe railroad rail-road found many problems solved in the way of mountain railway construction con-struction by simply following the trail of the Spaniards of many years ago. There are still to be seen along this trail Spanish houses that were built in the time when that part of the country was within Mexican territory, while there are also many road houses that fifty years ago dispensed cheer and comfort to the weary travelers who crossed the plains and mountains for the precious yellow metal. The Rio Grande system follows the trails made by Gunnison in 1S53-54. The Colorado Southern, from Fort Collins to Trinidad, Colo., .runs along the trail between Fort Laramie and Fort Union, and the Oregon Short Line is built along the Oregon trail from Salt Lake to Columbia. The Central Pacific, now owned by the Southern Pacific, runs from Ogden to San Francisco by a route that many years ago was traveled trav-eled by Spaniards and Indians, across the northern end of the great American desert, and through the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains. Frcm the snow-capped summit of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the green fields around San Francisco is a mat- ter of eight hours by the fast overland limited on the Southern Pacific, and along this route may still be seen the path or trail that, years ago, required , . ouc nf work and danger suc cessfully to traverse. From Denver to Salt Lake City the Denver & Rio Grande railroad follows old trails, and the Grand river along which the wandering wan-dering Mormons plodded on their way to the hoped-for haven of rest. Both the Rock Island and Union Pacific follow fol-low ancient trails, and the big Rock Island bridge, at Omaha, crosses the Missouri river from Council Bluffs at a point where the wealth-seekers from I the east, with their families, livestock and prairie schooners, used to ford the muddy stream. |
