Northern Pacific has completed some two hundred…

Northern Pacific has completed some two hundred and thirty miles (three hundred and seventy kilometers) of railroad on the east end of its system, reaching out to Moorhead, Minnesota, on the North Dakota border in 1871.

In the west, the track extends twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) north from Kalama.

Surveys are carried out in North Dakota protected by six hundred troops under General Winfield Scott Hancock.

Headquarters and shops are established in Brainerd, Minnesota, a town named for the President John Gregory Smith's wife Anna Elizabeth Brainerd.

The backing and promotions of famed Civil War financier Jay Cooke of Philadelphia in the summer of 1870 had bought the first real momentum to the Northern Pacific Railway.

Over the course of 1870, the company pushed had westward from Minnesota into present-day North Dakota.

It also began reaching from Kalama, Washington Territory, on the Columbia River outside of Portland, Oregon, towards Puget Sound.

Four small construction engines have been purchased, the Minnetonka, Itaska, Ottertail and St. Cloud, the first of which had been shipped to Kalama by ship around Cape Horn.

In Minnesota, the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad had completed construction of its one hundred and fifty-five-mile- (two hundred and forty-nine kilometer-) line stretching from Saint Paul to Lake Superior at Duluth in 1870.

Leased to the Northern Pacific the following year, it is eventually absorbed by the Northern Pacific.