TEXT A Before the mid-1860’s, the
impact of the railroads in the United States was limited, in the sense that the
tracks ended at this Missouri River, approximately the center of the country. At
the point the trains turned their freight, mail, and passengers over to
steamboats, wagons, and stagecoaches. This meant that wagon freighting,
stagecoaching, and steamboating did not come to an end when the first train
appeared; rather they became supplements or feeders. Each new "end-of-track"
became a center for animal-drawn or waterborne transportation. The major effect
of the railroad was }o shorten the distance that had to be covered by the older,
slower, and more costly means. Wagon freighters continued operating throughout
the 1870’s and 1880’s and into the 1890’s. Although over constantly shrinking
routes, and coaches and wagons continued to crisscross the West wherever the
rails had not yet been laid. The beginning of a major change was foreshadowed in
the later 1860’s, when the Union Pacific Railroad at last began to build
westward from the Centre Plains city of Omaha to meet the Central Pacific
Railroad advancing eastward from California through the formidable barrier of
the Sierra Nevada. Although President Abraham Lincoln signed the original
Pacific Railroad bill in 1862 and a revised, financially much more generous
version in 1864, little construction was completed until 1865 on the Central
Pacific and 1866 on the Union Pacific. The primary reason was skepticism that a
Railroad built through so challenging and thinly settled a stretch of desert,
mountain, and semiarid plain could pay a profit. In the words of an economist,
this was a case of "premature enterprise", where not only the cost of
construction but also the very high risk deterred private investment. In
discussing the Pacific Railroad bill, the chair of the congressional committee
bluntly stated that without government subsidy no one would undertake so
unpromising a venture; yet it was a national necessity to link East and West
together. The word "subsidy" in line 16 is closest in moaning to ______.