In ’49 the wagons swung round a little to the south through an easier gap. So it went through the fifties, and one might have said that the great days of the Pass were over, that it would lie in the future like a thousand other Sierran gaps—untrodden snow or wind-clean granite. In the sixties the main road followed the double-summited route by Lake Tahoe. There in fiction Hank Monk drove Horace Greeley to Placerville on time, and there in reality passed the stages and the great freighting-wagons to and from the Nevada mines. There galloped the pony-express riders, and there stood the poles of the first transcontinental telegraph.

But railroad-crazy Theodore Judah craftily shunned the double summit, and changed everything. For after Judah’s surveyors came Charlie Crocker and his coolie gangs digging like ants. The railroad reached Auburn and Illinoistown; it rounded “Cape Horn” and came to Dutch Flat. There it paused, but a wagon-road was laid out ahead. Once more Donner Pass woke to life, and echoed back the sound of cracking whips and teamsters’ bawling. But the rails came on again. In ’67 the coolies were camping at the summit where Ide had set up his windlass. (There, even yet, you can dig up fragments of cheap Chinese bowls.) Then in ’69 the Gold Spike was driven, and the trains went through.

With routes as with people, success breeds success. The new wagon-road preceded the railroad; the telegraph came with it. In their due time, each supporting the other, came the transcontinental telephone, the all-year automobile highway, the electric transmission-line, and the air-lane. Because Judah chose that crossing for his railroad, the pass of the ill-omened name is now a main channel of world communication.

So we come, in less than a century, from the death-dogged snow-shoers of the Donner Party to the carefree week-end skiers dotting the mountain-sides with bright costumes. Above the place where little Stanton sat to smoke his last pipe, Cisco beacon flashes out to Donner beacon. Where John Denton, plucky Yorkshireman, waited in the snow for death, the streamlined trains slide by. And over that camp where the poor emigrants ate the forbidden meat, the pilots of the wide-winged planes follow the whining Reno beam to Blue Canyon, where—turning—they set their last course for the airports of the Bay.

6

Like Casey Jones, the Road Superintendent kissed his wife and started out for the day’s work. He was not a railroad man, and the hour was not half-past four. Nevertheless, the comparison is sound; for about the Superintendent and his job gathered something of that matter-of-fact heroism which makes the song of Casey Jones the epic of the American working-man.