Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

14 страница из 56

When the founder of the Santa Fé railroad—Halliday—came west and jumped off the back of nowhere, he found a place called Topeka—Indian word for “where potatoes will grow.” Where potatoes will grow, almost any staple farm product will grow; so he planted his meager fortune in the future capital of the State and incidentally, let it be added, quadrupled it and got him busy interesting friends in a rail line to center traffic in Kansas. The Civil War ditched his plans but did not stop them. When the first spadeful of earth was turned for the railroad and a little later a poor lame duck of a train came wabbling over twelve miles of rattling track bed and Halliday spread his arms and predicted his line would yet reach Chicago to the northeast and the Gulf of Mexico to the south and San Francisco to the west, a cowboy who had imbibed too freely of “tangle-foot” threw himself on the ground, kicked up his heels in the air and yelled “the blank old fool.” The old-in-head but young-in-years fool lived to see that cowboy become the mayor of Topeka.