For policies during the Civil War, Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 170-72., 175, 178-180.
Dodge to Scott, Jan. 12, 1874, Letterbooks, Texas & Pacific Railroad, Box 160, Dodge Papers.
Thomas Canfield, Northern Pacific Railroad, Partial Report to the Board of Directors,May, 1870, p. 55, Graff 573, Newberry Library, Chicago.
Pierre Berton, The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), 60-65.
There was a charter for a railroad of 165 miles linking the oceans at one of the continent's narrowest points at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. There was a British line from Vera Cruz and a charter for a road from Vera Cruz to an unspecified terminus on the Pacific coast in Oaxaca, Guerrero, or Michoacán, and another linking the Gulf Coast between Tecolutla and Tampico to the Pacific Ocean somewhere between Zacatula and San Blas.
David Pletche, Rails, Mines, and Progress: Seven American Promoters in Mexico, 1867-1911 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1958), 37, 48.
Plumb to George E. Church, Jan. 27, 1872, box 2, f. 20, Plumb Papers.
George Earl Church to Plumb, June 11, 1872, box 2, f. 21, Plumb Papers.