In 1859 young engineer Grenville Dodge met Abraham Lincoln by chance in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Dodge assured the future president that the Platte Valley would one day be the route of the Pacific Railroad. Seven years later he would be the chief engineer of that project.
Slow to speak, a deliberate thinker, Stanford was characterized by a plodding nature that repeatedly vexed his railroad partners. However, he relished public life, and it was in this capacity that he best served the Central Pacific.
Earnestness and frugality combined with a slight gray beard to earn Hopkins the nickname "Uncle Mark." But the unthreatening exterior disguised a resolute mind.Â
Theodore Judah and the American railroad matured together. In 1854 Judah found himself invited to a New York meeting. Returning home, he informed his wife, "Anna, I am going to California to be the pioneering railroad engineer of the Pacific coast."
Thomas Durant was a born manipulator. Educated in medicine, Durant kept the honorific "Doctor" in front of his name but abandoned the pursuit for business, the only enterprise that could satiate his rapacious appetite for profit.
 Donald Fixico, Thomas Bowlus Distinguished Professor of American Indian History and Director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas, talks about the West before white settlement.
