Imagine the cattle town of Sioux City, Iowa, in 1912. What wasn’t dusty was surely muddy. What wasn’t hauled by wagons or riverboats was loaded on railcars. Livestock was bought and sold every single day, coal was being unloaded and burned, and buildings and houses of brick and stone were going up. The scent of progress was in the air when Hubert Everist stepped off the train and made his way to his father’s place of business.

His father, L.G. Everist, was a purveyor of retail coal on what was lower 4th Street. Much of his time during the past 15 years had been spent gaining a slim foothold in the very competitive coal business in this hardscrabble boomtown in western Iowa.

We don’t know what the conversation was that day, but by the end of it, Hubert, age 25, was sitting at the president’s desk and his father …show more content…
Hill, President of the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota. This era followed the completion of the first transcontinental railroad via linkage between Council Bluffs, Iowa (Omaha, Nebraska), and San Francisco, California.

The Union Pacific Railroad ran across Nebraska and Wyoming connecting the Southern Pacific Railroad at Ogden, Utah, near Salt Lake City, which continued across Utah and Nevada to Oakland, California; then by Southern Pacific ferryboat to San Francisco. The Southern Pacific had the toughest section to build, as a pile bridge was required for 10-plus miles across the Great Salt Lake. The other engineering hurdle was the locked-in gradient for the 60 miles from Sacramento, California (sea level) to Donner Pass (6,000 ft. elevation) over the Sierra Mountains, which approached the maximum allowable 2% grade for railroads. This final 1,500 miles replaced the Pony Express mail, the wagons (powered by oxen and horses), and the months’ long sea trip around South America through the Magellan Straits (later by land across