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247

Of all the astonishing sights in this land of surprises none takes the more by surprise than the town of Omaha. At home we have been taught to regard Chicago as the extremity of civilization, & therefore as one of the wonders of the world. But when you have turned your back on Chicago, & been borne away into the western Prairie by the locomotive for five hundred miles, you find that you have reached a thriving town, of brick buildings & large Hotels, containing now sixteen thousand inhabitants, & which is destined to become, probably in a very few years, a second Chicago. For being on the Pacific Railway, the grandest of all railways, as well as on that grandest of all arterial lines of water communication, the Missouri, which is navigable for a thousand miles beyond the town, for the same steamer that might have ascended the stream from New Orleans, it must soon become the depot for the two greatest lines of American traffic - that between the East & the West, & that between the North & the South, which all? will? cross here. It does not appear possible that any thing can arise to prevent its becoming, with a rapidity unexampled? even here, one of the great commercial centers of this vast & rich Continent.

During the summer the Missouri had been crossed by a unclear ferry. But to save a little time in the transit, & the trouble of keeping a passage for the ferry free from ice during the winter, the railway had been carried across the river, as soon as the frost? became