The line from Omaha to California shows that for nine hundred miles the road has an average height above the sea of over five thousand feet, the lowest point in that stretch being over four thousand; while the corresponding distance, embracing the mountain ranges, along this Northern Pacific line, is near two thousand feet lower than the other, giving, in this difference in elevation, according to the usual estimate, over nine degrees advantage in temperature.  This becomes important in an agricultural view, as well as in the immediate and constant benefit in the increased facility for operating a railway.

In addition, the curvature of the thermal lines of the continent bear away to the northward of the surveyed route of this great enterprise, insuring almost entire freedom from snow obstructions other than is common to any of the principal railway lines in the States themselves.

The extent of country tributary to this road is entirely unparalleled by that of any other.  Along the present finished continental line an uninhabitable alkaline desert stands across and along its pathway for many miles, while the Northern line leaps from valley to valley, all more or less productive, and in which large supplies of coal and timber are found sufficient for ages to come.

Of this region, and the general line of this road, the Hon. Schuyler Colfax writes as follows:—­

“Along the line of the Northern Pacific Railroad, as it follows up the water-courses, the Missouri and the Yellowstone on this side, and descends by the Valley of the Columbia on the other, a vast body of agricultural land is waiting for the plow, with a climate almost exactly the same as that of New York, except that, with less snow, cattle in the larger portion of it can subsist on the open range in winter.  Here, if climate and fertility of soil produce their natural result, when railroad facilities open this now isolated region to settlement, will soon be seen waving grain-fields, and happy homes, and growing towns, while ultimately a cordon of prosperous States, teeming with population, and rich in industry and consequent wealth, will occupy that now undeveloped and almost inaccessible portion of our continental area.

“But this road is also fortunate in its pathway across the two ranges of mountains which tested so severely the Pacific Railroads built on the central line, and the overcoming of which reflected such well-deserved honor on their energetic builders.  At the Deer Lodge Pass, in Montana, where it crosses the Rocky Mountains, its altitude above the sea is three thousand five hundred feet less than the Union Pacific Railroad at Sherman, which is said to be the highest point at which a locomotive can be found in the world.  And on the Pacific side of the continent it is even more fortunate.  From Arizona up to the Arctic Circle the Columbia is the only river which, has torn its way through that mighty range, the Andes of North