"Transcontinental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... case to-day! Six transcontinental railroads now deliver their trains in the Puget Sound cities. These are: The Northern Pacific, which was the first trunk line to reach the Sound; the Great Northern; the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; the Chicago, Milwaukee & Puget Sound; the Oregon-Washington ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... tell of what happened when I reached the end of the division. On single-track, transcontinental lines, the freight trains wait at the divisions and follow out after the passenger trains. When the division was reached, I left my train, and looked for the freight that would pull out behind it. I found ...
— The Road • Jack London
... in transporting its provisions and munitions of war, except in the mountains, where the faithful pack-mule was substituted. The American freighters, since the occupation of New Mexico by the United States, until the transcontinental railroad usurped their vocation, used wagons only; the Mexican nomenclature was soon dropped and simple English terms adopted: caravan became train, and majordomo, the person in charge, wagon-master. The latter was supreme. ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... editorial machine broke down. A cog must have slipped or an oil-cup run dry, for the postman brought him one morning a short, thin envelope. Martin glanced at the upper left-hand corner and read the name and address of the Transcontinental Monthly. His heart gave a great leap, and he suddenly felt faint, the sinking feeling accompanied by a strange trembling of the knees. He staggered into his room and sat down on the bed, the envelope still unopened, and in that moment came understanding to him how people ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Holmes's The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), nine years before the admission of Nebraska. In 1861 Mark Twain went to the West in a primitive stagecoach. Bret Harte had finished The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868) before San Francisco was reached by a transcontinental railroad. ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... or the Monongahela, "as commissioners... shall find most convenient and beneficial to the Western settlers." This was the only public aid which the enterprise received; and the stipulated purpose clearly indicates the fact that, in the minds of its promoters, the transcontinental character of the undertaking appeared to be vital. The remainder of the money required for the work was raised by public subscription in the principal cities of the two States. In this way 40,300 pounds was subscribed, Virginia men taking 266 shares ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... granite peaks and domes pushing ever higher above the scattering forests of its middle zones, its eastern ramparts dropping in precipices to the desert, it valiantly guards its sunny state against the passage of eastern highways, and forces hard engineering problems upon the builders of transcontinental railroads. Where it becomes the eastern boundary of the Yosemite National Park it breaks into climaxes ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... greatest saving fund which the American people possess. The total value of school property is greater than the entire fortune of the richest American. Each year the people spend upon their schools a sum sufficient to construct a Panama Canal or a transcontinental railway system. Thus the public school is the greatest public ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... gazed upon the bight, the transcontinental lines had not yet begun to consider the thrusting of their tentacles into southwestern Washington, and, with the exception of those regions where good harbors had partially solved the problem of transportation, timber in Washington ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... they may be, there is something strangely impressive about all-night journeys by rail, and those forming part of an American transcontinental trip are almost weird. From the windows of a night express in Europe or the older portions of the United States, one looks on houses and lights, cultivated fields, fences, and hedges; and, hurled as he may be through the darkness, he has a sense of companionship and semi-security. ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... of May 20, 1862, opened vast areas of public lands to a new immigration. The flow of population was westward, and the West called for communication with the East. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific railways, the pioneer transcontinental lines, fostered on generous grants of land, were the tokens of the new transportation movement. Railroads were pushing forward everywhere with unheard-of rapidity. Short lines were being merged into ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona—through tangled forests, across broad rivers, morasses, and desert stretches beset by wild beasts and men; but ever spurred on by vague reports of a colony of their countrymen to the southwest. At last (May, 1536), the miserable wanderers, first to make the transcontinental trip in northern latitudes, reached the Gulf of California, where they met some of their fellow countrymen, who bore them in triumph to the City of Mexico, as ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... for more than twenty years, and in a hundred ways, by introduction of Germans into the military organization, promotion of German financial enterprise, pushing of German commerce, pressure on behalf of German concessions which would entail provincial influence (for example, the construction of a transcontinental railway in Asia), those powers had been manifesting their interest in Turkey with ever-increasing solicitude. Now they must attach her to themselves with hoops of steel and, with her help, as soon as might be, try to recast the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... to the central ridge beyond old Ellis, you get the last summit between here and Yellowstone waters. The tunnel runs under that now. The railroad books say that is fifty-five hundred and sixty-five feet—the highest of the three northern transcontinental passes. ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... of the English westward through Canada since the war of the Revolution has been in its essential features merely a less important repetition of what has gone on in the northern United States. The gold miner, the transcontinental railway, and the soldier have been the pioneers of civilization. The chief point of difference, which was but small, arose from the fact that the whole of western Canada was for a long time under the control of the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... indicated the bearing of an American army officer. He was of medium height, and his features and eyes implied that the storms and winds of the plains and mountains were familiar friends. This was Park Stanley, charged at that time with the construction of the first transcontinental railroad. ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... appointments, having been built for utility and convenience, and not for comfort. The day will come, I suppose, when modern improvements will be introduced, and the long journeys which are necessary to reach any part of the vast empire will be made as pleasant and luxurious as transcontinental trips in the United States. Just now, however, the equipment is on a military basis of simplicity and severity. Passengers are furnished with what they need, and no more. They are hauled from one place to another at reasonable rates of speed; they are given shelter from the sun and the storms ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... events determine policy, in place of policy controlling events. He could not deny the Grand Trunk's ambitions, but he obliged it to submit to modifications demanded by political pressure which turned its project, perhaps practicable in its original form, into a huge, ill-thought-out transcontinental enterprise. Equally he could not hold the ambitions of Mann and McKenzie in check. The advisability of a merger of these rival railway groups was obvious at the time, but Laurier let them each have their head, dividing ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... meet the obligations of the Government under the contracts may be made promptly, so that the lines that have entered into these engagements may not be embarrassed. We have had, by reason of connections with the transcontinental railway lines constructed through our own territory, some advantages in the ocean trade of the Pacific that we did not possess on the Atlantic. The construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the establishment under large subventions from Canada and England of fast steamship service from ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... was only putting into expression the thought which was indulged in pretty generally by the entire crowd. Those who were making the transcontinental trip for the first time marveled at the expanse of open country, and the exquisite scenery through which they passed; and they were wondering how they ever came to think that the noise of the hammer and the smoke of the factory ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... minimum of luggage filled five wardrobe-trunks. In vain we went over our lists and cast out such bulky things as extra handkerchiefs and silk socks and fancy neckties and toilet-silver. We started with all five. It was boiling hot; the sun beat in at the windows of the transcontinental train and stifled us. Over the prairies, dust blew in great clouds, covering the window-sills with white. The Big Boy and the Middle Boy and the Little Boy referred scornfully to the flannels and sweaters on which I had been so insistent. The Head slept across the continent. ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in another way they have made living cheaper. The half-rail-and-half-water route from the Pacific coast to New York via New Orleans, which the Jetties first made possible, forced the transcontinental railways to cut down their time for shipping freight over one half. The tonnage by this newer route has increased enormously, and its competition has affected commerce by reducing all rates from the ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... and Tisdale squared his shoulders resolutely and swung his chair more towards his own window, which did not afford a view of the lake. He wanted to see this new railroad route through the Cascades. This Pass of Snoqualmie had always been his choice of a transcontinental line. And he was approaching new territory; he never had pushed down the eastern side from the divide. He had chosen this roundabout way purposely, with thirty miles of horseback at the end, when the Great Northern would have put him directly into the Wenatchee Valley and within a ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... hand, your tourist is unfortunate enough to get left at some North Woods railway station where he has descended from the transcontinental to stretch his legs, and suppose him to have happened on a fur-town like Missinaibie at the precise time when the trappers are in from the wilds. Near the borders of the village he will come upon a little encampment ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... A transcontinental highway appeared below. It was plainly marked by the headlights of more than usually heavy traffic on it. He ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... other city west of the Alleghanies, San Francisco has always been a literary center; and certainly that was a remarkable group to be out there under the sunset, dropped down there behind the Sierras, which the transcontinental railway would not climb yet, for several years. They were a happy-hearted, aspiring lot, and they got as much as five dollars sometimes for an Era article, and were as proud of it as if it had been a great deal more. They felt that they were creating ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the frontier, at the edge of the Blue Ridge, we perceive that these names represent the militant expansive movement in American life. They foretell the settlement across the Alleghanies in Kentucky and Tennessee; the Louisiana Purchase, and Lewis and Clark's transcontinental exploration; the conquest of the Gulf Plains in the War of 1812-15; the annexation of Texas; the acquisition of California and the Spanish Southwest. They represent, too, frontier democracy in its two aspects ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... Pacific Railway passes, today, not far from the site of General Trednoke's ranch. But the events now to be narrated occurred some years before the era of transcontinental railroads: they were in the air, but not yet bolted down to the earth. The general, therefore, was a pioneer, and was by no means overrun with friends from the East in search of an agreeable winter climate. The easiest way to reach him—if you were not pressed for time—was round the ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... mountainous character, there being but one—that from Nogales, at the boundary with Arizona, to the port of Guaymas on the Gulf of California, about 255 miles long, connecting to the north of Nogales with the Southern Pacific Transcontinental Railway of the United States. There are several good roads and a telegraph system. Timber and water are plentiful in some parts of the state; in others scarce or absent. The capital of the state is Hermisillo, with a population ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... Breech (Executive Vice President, Ford Motor, Company; member of Board of Directors of Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc., Pan-American Airways; President of ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... from 7 to 3-1/2 in. at Mile 230 (Plate V) is on account of delivering water to the Santa Fe's new transcontinental low-grade line which crosses the El Paso and Southwestern Railway at Vaughn, and has a division point there. On its adjacent divisions, the Santa Fe had the same trouble with local waters which ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell
... the century," he piped, "makes a fellow pause and study. I've seen fifty-three years of the old century—seen the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, the fast printing press, the transcontinental railroad, the steam thresher, the gasoline engine—and all its wonders clear down to Judge Tom's devil wagon. That's a good deal for one short life. I've seen industry revolutionized—leaving the homes of the people, and herding into the great factories. I've seen steam revolutionize the daily ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... live together, they have within themselves the possibilities of heaven or of hell. The balance between the two, however, is very slight. There is only a foot, or less, in difference, between the West and the East on the Transcontinental Divide. I have stood with one foot in a rivulet the waters of which reached the Pacific, and the other in one which reached the Atlantic. The marital divide is even finer than that. It is all in the habit of mind. If one determines ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... the transcontinental trip of voting envoys to the President. Campaigned in Nev. 1914 and 1916. Became national organization chairman N.W.P. Organized the Washington picket line for several months. One of the first six women to serve prison sentence for suffrage in District Jail. ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... have a most important bearing upon the trade between the eastern and far western sections of our country, and will greatly increase the facilities for transportation between the eastern and the western seaboard, and may possibly revolutionize the transcontinental rates with respect to bulky merchandise. It will also have a most beneficial effect to increase the trade between the eastern seaboard of the United States and the western coast of South America, and, indeed, with some of the important ports on the east coast of South America ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... ready to finance the deal. It would have amused you to see the horizontality of the coat-tails of the management of the Lattimore & Great Western, as they flaxed round getting up a directors' meeting, so as to have a real, live directorate of this great transcontinental line for the wolves of Wall Street to do business with! Things like this are what you miss by hibernating there, instead of dropping everything and applying here for your pro rata share of the gayety of nations and ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... took a high moral stand on the treaty it was said among Republican Senators that he was thinking more of the transcontinental railroads which were fighting competition by water than he was of the sanctity of international engagements. The probability is that he was probably thinking more of John Hay and Elihu Root than he was of either. He was in the Cabinet when John Hay ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... that signature and the Wall Street address and Mary Fortune saw with sudden clearness what had been mystery and moonshine for months. W. H. Stoddard was Whitney H. Stoddard, the man who controlled the Transcontinental Railroad. His name alone in connection with the Tecolote would send its stock up a thousand per cent. And what a stroke of business that was—to make a feeder for his railroad while he built up a great property for himself. Now at last she understood the inexplicable reticence ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... "Oh, every transcontinental pilgrim is probably scrutinized closely these days," I remarked carelessly. "Mrs. Bashford has lost a brother in the war, and I haven't heard any one talk more bitterly against Germany. And her companion certainly has no illusions about the Kaiser. ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... kindly toleration whilst I adverted to the excellent work of more recent explorers, whose discoveries had made the Transcontinental telegraph line a feasible undertaking. But his discursive mind ricochetted off to the laying of the Transatlantic cable, in '65; and he dwelt on that epoch-marking work with such minuteness of detail, and such confident mastery of names, dates, and so forth, that ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... heal! There are the long fingers of the cable and telegraph that pry through earth's hidden places, gathering choice bits of international gossip and handing them out to all the breakfast tables of the Great Neighborhood. There are the swift fingers of transcontinental train and ocean liner, pushing the dweller from the West into the Far East, the man from the prairie into the desert. There are the devastating fingers of war that first fashion and then carry infernal machines and spread them broadcast ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... machine. The complex and intricate sewing machine of to-day, with its various attachments to meet the needs of the modern seamstress, is not the crude machine that came from the brain of Elias Howe; the giant locomotives that now speedily cover the transcontinental distance between New York and San Francisco bear but slight resemblance to the engine that Stephenson first gave us. In fact, the first productions of all these pioneers, while they disclosed the principles and laid the foundations upon which to build, resemble the later ...
— The Colored Inventor - A Record of Fifty Years • Henry E. Baker
... claimed the rich and fertile bottom lands, filled the towns which have sprung up there, established the prosperity which has, through them, advanced the state. The mountain men of Tennessee and of Kentucky are almost as primitive, to-day, as were their forefathers, who, early in the great transcontinental migration, dropped from its path and spread among the hills a century ago, rather than continue with the weary march to ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... rivulets come laughing and singing down from their sources in the forest depths. A drop falling from a passing shower into the lake of Delolo may be carried eastward, through the Zambesi, to the Indian Ocean, or westward, along the transcontinental course of the Congo, to the Atlantic. The mists that rise from great streams, separated by vast stretches of territory, commingle in the upper air, and are carried by vagrant winds to the wheat-fields of the far Northwest or the rice-fields of the South. The ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... her elder son, shaking his head soberly. "Our field-superintendent did say that he would give me the first opening in the transcontinental line, since my records lead the bunch, and he even offered to displace one of the boys on that route and put me ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... up early on summer mornings and, with his faithful mongrel Jack, with the ridiculous curly tail, walk and run a mile to the railway-station to see the Transcontinental stop and pass on. How the sun shone down the empty streets before any one was up! Strange how his whole life seemed to be coloured by the newly-risen sun! And the long train with the mysterious, luxurious sleeping-cars, an occasional tousled head at the window; ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... the QUEENSLANDER Transcontinental Expedition, organised to discover the nature and value of the country in the neighbourhood of a then proposed line to Port Darwin, and the geographical features of the unknown portion. Leaving Blackall, the then most western settlement in Queensland, the party made Powell's Creek on ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... of maintaining a national tariff to clothe that skeleton with the flesh and blood of production and exchange, and, as far as possible, to clothe it evenly. Australia, too, is waking, though somewhat hesitatingly, to the need of transcontinental railways, for the protection of new industries and for the even development and filling up of all her territories. In South Africa the economic process preceded the political. It was the dread of the ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... Bearing in mind his instructions to this party, that they should see whether the Oregon furs might not be shipped down the Missouri instead of passing around Cape Horn, and the relation of his early canal schemes to this design, we see that he had conceived the project of a transcontinental fur trade which should center in Virginia. Astor's subsequent attempt to push through a similar plan resulted in the foundation of his short-lived post of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia. This occupation greatly aided our ...
— The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin • Frederick Jackson Turner
... while railway progress has been highly encouraging. The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway was a remarkable enterprise at the time of its construction. Recently Canada is approaching a position of rivalry with the United States in this particular, a new transcontinental line, the Grand Trunk Pacific, having been completed in 1914, while the Canadian Northern is ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... completion of the transcontinental and Utah railways, this magnificent lake in the heart of the continent has become as accessible as any watering-place on either coast; and I am sure that thousands of travelers, sick and well, would ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good time this winter. You're running her as though she were a transcontinental ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... fifty, thatched with a sparse growth of iron-gray hair, he looked several times the age of Dowsett. Yet Nathaniel Letton possessed control—Daylight could see that plainly. He was a thin-faced ascetic, living in a state of high, attenuated calm—a molten planet under a transcontinental ice sheet. And yet, above all most of all, Daylight was impressed by the terrific and almost awful cleanness of the man. There was no dross in him. He had all the seeming of having been purged by fire. Daylight ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... a large number of such repeater stations in the United States along the important telephone routes. In Fig. 136 I am showing you the location of those along the route of the famous "transcontinental telephone-circuit." This shows also a radio-telephone connection between the coast of California and Catalina Island. Conversations have been held between this island and a ship in the Atlantic Ocean, as shown in the sketch. The conversation was made possible by the use of the vacuum ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... and Connaught built up nourishing towns like Geelong and Kilmore. Two Irishmen, Dunne and Connor, were the first discoverers of the Ballarat goldfields. An Irishman, Robert O'Hara Burke, led the first transcontinental expedition, and another Irishman, Ambrose Kyte, financed it; Wentworth was the father of Australian liberties. An Irish Roman Catholic, Sir Redmond Barry, founded the Public Library, Museum, and University of Melbourne. In the political annals of Victoria and New South Wales the names of Irish ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... Mont Cenis Passes are about the only land channels of commerce between Italy and transalpine Europe, and most of the communication between northern Italy and the rest of Europe is carried on by means of these passes. Every transcontinental railway of the American continent crosses the various highlands by means of gaps and passes, and some of them would never have been built were it not for the existence of the passes. Fremont, South, and Marshall Passes have been of ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... The great transcontinental railway had been in running order for years before the managers thereof decided to build a second line across the Rocky Mountains. But "passes" are few and far between in those gigantic fastnesses, and the fearless ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... in urging these claims, and thousands of men planned to try some one or the other of these "side-doors." The movement overland seemed about to surpass the wonderful transcontinental march of miners in '49 and '50, and those who loved the trail for its own sake and were eager to explore an unknown country hesitated only between the two trails which were entirely overland. One of these led from Edmonton ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... Mountains before the great transcontinental line was built was remarkable for concentrating in itself the extremest forms of almost every peril, hardship, and privation which is incident to the frontier. Even at the present day and with the increased facilities for ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... of a most important factor in the situation. The crying need of the country was a feeder to some transcontinental railroad. By reason of natural barriers, Humboldt County was not easily accessible to the outside world except from the sea, and even this avenue of ingress and egress would be closed for days at a stretch when the harbour bar was on a rampage. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... of mine lived at the Transcontinental Hotel. The partition between his room and mine didn't come clear to the ceiling, so when I arrived home late I uset to heave a boot over on top of him and have a chin. He was a nice feller, Hadds. A pale, thin sort of man, very red-headed—that is to say, ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... government to report upon the country west of the Lakes, had declared in 1863, after four years of careful labour in the field, that, thanks to the choice of the 49th parallel as Canada's boundary, there was no possibility of ever building a transcontinental railway exclusively through British territory. The man chosen for the task of achieving this impossibility was Sandford Fleming. Appointed engineer-in-chief in 1871, he was for nine years in charge of the surveys, though for half ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... withdrew from the Nile valley and accepted a boundary line which satisfied her earlier ambition by uniting the whole of her territories in North, West and Central Africa into a homogeneous whole, while effectually preventing the realization of her dream of a transcontinental empire from west to east. By this declaration it was agreed that the dividing line between the British and French spheres, north of the Congo Free State, should follow the Congo-Nile water-parting up to its intersection with the 11th parallel of north latitude, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
