visit. In pursuance of this agreement work began on the Denver end of the line May 18, 1868, when several thousand people assembled to witness this, the most interesting and important event in the history of this fair city up to that period. In February, 1868, Major W. F. Johnson was elected to succeed General Hughes, who had resigned. The entire grading was completed during the fall of the same year, when the ties were ready to be laid. The first annual meeting occurred December 14, 1868, when the following officers were elected: W. F. Johnson, president; Luther Kountze, vice-president; David H. Moffat, jr., treasurer; R. R. McCormick, secretary. Upon the death of Mr. Johnson, March 5, 1869, Governor John Evans was elected to succeed, under whose wise and energetic management, assisted by his able associates, the road was carried to completion. In the spring of 1869 the Union Pacific was called upon to fulfill its contract and iron the road to Denver. The reply was that Denver would have to wait, as the Union Pacific was financially embarrassed. The officers of the Denver Pacific insisted that Denver could not wait, and President Evans proposed that if the Union 'Pacific would cancel the contract and sell the iron to the Denver Pacific, the company would complete the road it self. This proposition was agreed to, and an agreement was at once entered into with the Kansas Pacific, that company agreeing to build their road into Denver, and complete the construction. of the Denver Pacific, taking a certain amount of the stock of the latter road. From this time the difficulties of construction were in the main overcome, and the building of the road progressed rapidly until the twenty-second day of June, 1870, when a silver spike, contributed by the miners of Georgetown, completed the first connecting link between Denver and the outside world." Of the twenty-five hundred miles of railway now traversing the state, the Denver & Rio Grande company have built about eighteen hundred-its president having thus been identified for twenty years with this progressive feature in the development of this growing commonwealth. The last road to enter this great mineral realm was the Rock Island railway, an event which was appropriately celebrated at Colorado Springs about the beginning of this year. Upon that occasion Judge Wilbur F. Stone, a distinguished pioneer and lawyer, made a speech, in reply to a toast, a selection from which is here introduced as a befitting conclusion to this article: "When I left the states for Pike's Peak, nearly twenty-nine years ago, I traveled in a stage-coach from Ottumwa to Omaha, and I remember that from Coon River,' a little west of Des Moines, to Council Bluffs, there was not a house except the stage stations in all that distance of prairies as wild as the plains west of the Missouri. Since then I have passed over that route many times in the luxuriant cars of the Rock Island, and I have seen on either side a continuous corn field five hundred miles after the settlement and business of the country demanded them. Now railroad companies build into the country first and wait for the business. They do not have long to wait. The business comes; the railroads create it. They bring settlements, population, towns, cities, wealth and prosperity in their train. They make states, found commonwealths and spread civilization. And this sug. gests the justice of a welcome public sentiment, friendly encouragement and protection, unhostile legislation and reciprocal favors between the railroads and the people under the common government." HENRY DUDLEY TEETOR. H GENERAL DAVID H. MOFFAT. THE romance of family history has an illustration in the life of General David H. Moffat, president of the Denver & Rio Grande railway. "Moffat of yt Jlk " were among the ancient and unruly clans of Scotland. Nicol de Moffat was Bishop of Glasgow A. D. 1268-70. Robert and Thomas de Moffat, both of the county of Dumfries, did homage to Edward I., A. D. 1296. The lands granted by Robert Bruce to Adam de Moffat were still in that family in the seventeenth century. Three hundred years ago a David H. Moffat was buried at Moffat, Scotland, a village situated at the foot of Moffat hills, which rise nearly three thousand feet high and form the boundary between Dumfries upon the south and Peebles and Lanark shire upon the north. Here we find the origin both of the surname and the family of Moffat. After the lapse of nearly ten generations a descendant of this old and honorable Scottish family, bearing the same ancestral Christian names, is at the head of the railway system of Colorado, the president of the First National Bank of Denver, the promoter of immense mining interests, and one of the most influential and highly esteemed and widely known gentlemen west of the Mississippi river. Thus the Highlands of Scotland and the mountains of Colorado are inevitably associated in the mind whenever the genealogy of the Moffat family may engage attention, for the builder of the great "Scenic Line of the World," which involved such marvels of railway engineering, is one whose hereditary traits were first transmitted from father to son three centuries ago amidst those historical hills which give rise to the Annan, the Tweed and the Clyde rivers, even as the Rocky mountains feed forever the tributaries of the Platte and the Rio Grande flowing into the self-same ocean. Spero meliora "I hope for better things "was the ancient heraldic motto of the family, whose crest was and still is a red cross,originally borne by one of the founders of this family, granted to him because, as a Crusader, he "bore a bloodie cross upon his breast, while on his shield the like was also scored." Along with this "hope for better things," embodied in this family motto, has come the inspiration to do and to achieve what at last brings the high realization of better things, better surroundings and a better life. The busi ness, the social and the personal standing of General Moffat is the noblest commentary upon the results of his labors, thus descended and thus actuated. The land of heroes and martyrs has given many such to America. Their names are found profusely written upon the pages telling of the founding of churches and cities and railways and schools and colleges-every institution in our land having in view the culture of the mind and heart, the good of man and the glory of God. These Scotch emigrants do not come to destroy, but to fulfill the law of civil and religious growth and development under the flag of our country. General Moffat is a banker by virtue of experience which began at nine years of age, when he entered a bank in New York city, serving from 1847 to 1855, thus taking his first and second steps. up the ladder of preferment. He is a native of that state-born in Orange county in 1839. Westward, like many another youth, he took up the line of march, hoping for better things. His next engagement was with the bankinghouse of A. J. Stephens & Co., of Des Moines, Iowa, then one of the largest banks in that state. An acquaintance resulted therefrom with Mr. B. F. Allen. These two new-made friends, in 1856, moved still further west, locating in Omaha, where they organized a bank of which Mr. Moffat took charge as cashier. In 1860 they went out of the banking business, and after paying off its entire indebtedness, Mr. Moffat came still further west, hoping for better things, and located in Denver. The first seven years he was in the book and stationery business, with Mr. C. C. Woolworth as partner. Upon the organization of the First National bank he was elected cashier, thus resuming the business for which experience and natural aptitude qualified him. Thirteen years afterwards880) he was elected its president. The eighteen years of his leadership have demonstrated his eminent fitness for the place won by himself in a successful effort to realize better things; while the long-continued prosperity of the bank is attributable to having been established upon abstract banking principles, and guided in its management by the experience of pro fessional bankers of which General Moffat is now a distinguished instance. But as a railroad man General Moffat has also done the state and the west great service. He began his railroad record as one of the organizers of the first railroad in Colorado, the Denver Pacific, of which he was at first treasurer and afterwards vice-president; is one of the heaviest stockholders of the Denver & South Park; was connected with the management of the Boulder Valley railroad, and himself built the extension from Marshal coal banks in Boulder county. As president of the Denver & Rio Grande, he represents the magnificent corporation that has built eighteen hundred miles of railroad around and over and through the Rocky mountains of Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. The struggle with the Santa Fe road for the Grand Canyon of the Arkansas was before the Rio Grande management demonstrated to the world that capacity for engineering skill in laying their track and running their coaches over the Continental Divide at Marshall Pass, the highest point yet reached by any railway in America, eleven thousand five hundred and forty feet above the level of the sea. "At Tennessee Pass," says a fascinating descriptive writer, "the track reaches the very verge of timber line, surrounded by bare and desolate peaks that hold during the hottest summer the snow and frosts of winter. Amid these awful and lonely surroundings is the wonderfulcurve around the tiny springs which are the headwaters of the Arkansas river. From the storm-swept summit travelers may view the mountain of the Holy Cross, bearing aloft its mystic symbol limned in spotless snow." Thus the 'Crest of the Continent' is a cross argent upon an everlasting rockthe summit of a mountain uplifted twice seven thousand feet from the bosom of the earth; while upon the gold and silver taken from its ore-exuding sides is stamped, when coined, the sacred motto, In God we trust. As adjutant-general of the territory of Colorado, upon the staff of Governor John Evans, his fealty to the Republican party and loyalty to his country in her most perilous hour were demonstrated by exceptional efficiency and marred by nothing whatever of that "insolence of office" which pride of place sometimes begets, both in civil and military positions. General Moffat's well-known mining operations have had the dual result of demonstrating the truth of George Francis Train's declaration : "Colorado is a gold mine;" while his successful ventures have greatly enriched him. His name is historically associated with the origin and development of the Caribou, the Breece, the Henrietta, the Maid of Erin and many other mines throughout the state. These investments grew out of the relations which so long and amicably subsisted between General Moffat and the late Honorable J. B. Chaffee, United States senator from Colorado. Having at last realized the better things for which he hoped and labored from his youth, true to his ancestral trend, in the great success which has attended his career as banker, miner and a railroad man and manager, perhaps the highest and best evidence thereof is the beautiful residence which he has built and now occupies in DenHis ideas of a typical American home are thus materialized, while much ver. travel and observation in other lands have enabled him to embellish it within and without, thus rendering it the abode of culture and the scene of perfect domestic happiness. HENRY DUDLEY TEETOR, CHICAGO: THE METROPOLIS OF THE WEST. ALTHOUGH La Salle had early formed an unfavorable opinion of the Chicago and Desplaines rivers as a route by which to go from Lake Michigan to the Illinois river, he took that way at the beginning of 1682 in again going to the stream last mentioned. In the dead of winter, he and his men "made sledges, placed on them the canoes, the baggage and a disabled Frenchman, crossed from the Chicago to the northern branch of the Illinois, and filed in a long procession down its frozen course."* It is quite unnecessary in this connection to trace the subsequent journey ings of La Salle, only remarking that, in 1683, on the famous "Starved Rock" of the Illinois river, he finished Fort St. Louis, where Tonty was soon after in command. But the latter, fearing an attack from the Iroquois, sent a canoe to Captain Olivier Morel de la Durantaye, at Michilimackinac, for help. With sixty Frenchmen, Durantaye gave succor to Tonty, building, before his return, a fort at Chicago, where, in the latter days of 1685, he was in command. But this II. first civilized establishment at Chicago was soon abandoned. Concerning the post there are no particulars extant. It is well known that La Salle met his death in what is now the state of Texas, on the eighteenth of March, 1687. One of his faithful adherents was M. Joutel. The latter, towards the close of the year just noted, reached the Chicago river, made a cache for his baggage and provisions, and returned to Fort St. Louis on the Illinois, which place he had visited on his way from the scene of La Salle's death. Joutel, in the spring of 1688, again made his way to the Chicago river, leaving that stream on the fifth of April, on his way to Canada. A little over a year after his departure, the river was visited by the Baron La Hontan. His extravagance of description is well known. He assures us that he engaged on the Illinois, four hundred Indians to assist him across the portage from the Desplaines to the Chicago. For the next ten years, published accounts of the Chicago river and portage are wanting, when a traveler-J. F. Buisson St. Cosme-reached the mouth of that |