USA > California > A history of California: the American period > Part 34
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But the men who had shown sufficient mettle to construct the Central Pacific were not now likely to see it overwhelmed by more recent rivals; and with characteristic energy they set to work to master the situation. The menace of the Oregon Short Line was met by the construction of a road from San Francisco to Portland through the Sacramento Valley. This line, originally called the Oregon-California Railroad, followed the general course of the Williamson- Abbott survey through Northern California and Southern Oregon. Most of the road was built by the Contract and Finance Company of Central Pacific fame; and as in the case of the Central, the line was largely financed by govern- ment subsidies of land and bonds. It was completed to Ashland, Oregon, the terminus of the Portland division, in 1887.
Some years before the Oregon connection was established, moreover, the Central builders had completed a much more comprehensive and daring program in the south. Here their ambition was threefold: to monopolize the transportation business of Central and Southern California, where agricul- tural development foretold enormous freights; to close the eastern border of the state to rival lines; or failing this, to keep them south of the Tehachapi; and to secure for them- selves a through road to the east, independent of the Union Pacific and without the handicap of the Sierras. Inciden-
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tally, too, the prospect of acquiring some tens of thousands of acres of rich agricultural land was not altogether without its weight.
To realize these ambitions required the construction of an entire railroad system. One of the first measures was to make sure of the San Joaquin Valley. This was done by absorbing a number of independent lines and constructing sufficient mileage to give a through track from Lathrop on the Central Pacific to a place known as Goshen in the north- western corner of Tulare County.
By the time this was done, a new road, which had made an insignificant beginning in 1865, began to attract a great deal of public interest throughout the coast counties south of San Francisco. This was the Southern Pacific Railroad Company of California; and like the mustard seed men- tioned in the Scriptures, from being one of the least of California roads, it was soon destined to become the greatest.
The original charter of the Southern Pacific called for a road along the coast, following pretty closely Parke's survey, from San José to San Diego. Thence the line was to run to the Colorado, where a junction was planned with the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad which Congress had author- ized along the line of the thirty-fifth parallel. By the acquisition of the San Francisco-San José Road, which by this time had reached Gilroy in the Salinas Valley, and by showing an apparent intention of continuing down the coast in keeping with the provisions of its charter, the Southern Pacific for a time appeared in the guise of a formidable rival to the Central's monopoly.
This hope was short lived. As early as 1867 the Southern Pacific had announced a change from its proposed route down the coast to a line across the mountains into the San Joaquin, and on to the Colorado by way of the Tehachapi. This radical departure from the original plan, though greeted with strong opposition from many quarters, especially in the coast counties most seriously affected, was approved by Congress. The latter body also granted the Southern Pacific the privilege of building a branch from its proposed
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Tehachapi-Colorado line to Los Angeles, and of continuing this by way of the San Gorgonio Pass to Fort Yuma.
Two short extensions of its line from Gilroy, the one running to Soledad in Monterey County, and the other to Tres Pinos in Benito County, put the Southern Pacific in a position to block the approach of any rival coming up from the south along the coast. As its congressional grant gave it the right of connecting at Needles and Yuma with the two through roads from the east, it was only necessary for the Central and Southern Pacific to unite to complete the railroad monopoly of California.
By 1871, when the Contract and Finance Company undertook the construction of the Southern Pacific line from Gilroy to Fort Mojave, it was clearly understood that this merger had taken place, and that "Stanford and Company," as the Big Four were generally spoken of in California, had effectually killed all hopes of the Southern Pacific standing out as an independent road.
Beginning at Goshen, where the Central Pacific stopped, the Southern Pacific tracks were laid through Williamson's favorite pass, the Tehachapi, and thence extended to the Colorado. Control of one of the southern transcontinental routes was thus assured, so far as an entrance into California was concerned; but the real test was yet to come. A road known as the Texas Pacific was already under construction westward from New Orleans along the thirty-second parallel. To meet this road at Yuma was not sufficient. The South- ern Pacific must be carried on through Arizona and Texas to become a transcontinental road in its own right. The fulfillment of this ambition was largely due to Huntington's determination, for his companions regarded the undertaking with apprehension and gave it something less than whole- hearted support.
Opposed to Huntington was Thomas A. Scott of the Texas Pacific, who was seeking to extend his own road to the California line. To succeed in this he must obtain govern- ment aid in the form of land grants and federal bonds. Huntington used all the skill he could muster to defeat this
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grant, and adroitly showed up Scott's previous record, when the latter sought to win the support of Congress on the ground that he was a public benefactor. To embarrass his rival further, Huntington even offered to build the Southern Pacific without federal subsidy of any kind.6 In these and other ways he successfully defeated Scott's plans for the Texas Pacific and was able to carry out the program for his own line.
While Huntington was thus engaged in checkmating Scott in Washington, the rails of the Southern Pacific, in the face of a government order to the contrary, were hurried through the Yuma Indian reservation and over the Colorado. Work was then rushed across Arizona and New Mexico to El Paso. The line was finally built almost to the Louisiana boundary, where connection was made with a road running into New Orleans which the Southern Pacific directors acquired from the Morgan interests. Thus the California railroad at last reached its long coveted outlet to the Gulf and made direct connection with eastern markets.
From the California boundary to New Orleans, however, the line was still known by various names and operated, nominally, by as many separate corporations. To simplify the management and bring all the roads, both within the state and beyond its boundaries, under one head, Hunting- ton and his associates afterwards formed a corporation known as the Southern Pacific Company. This was char- tered by the state of Kentucky in 1884 and by stock owner- ship and lease has since controlled the combined properties of the Central and Southern Pacific Railroad Companies.
This chapter has shown in sufficient detail how four surprisingly able men-Huntington, Stanford, Crocker and Hopkins-built the first great railroad systems of the state. It is a truism to say that the railroads did more than any other human factor for the economic development of California. Yet for various reasons the generation that witnessed the construction of the Central and Southern
6 Huntington, however, counted
upon substantial subsidies from the
legislatures of the territories through which the road ran.
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Pacific Railroads accorded to the founders of those great enterprises more of censure than of admiration. The reasons for this unfavorable attitude will appear in part in the following chapters.7
7 The history of later railroad building in California makes a chapter in itself, which cannot find space in the present volume. In 1883 the Atlantic and Pacific Rail- road reached the Colorado to find the Southern Pacific already in control of the approach to California. The two roads, however, made an ar- rangement by which the Atlantic and Pacific, or Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé, as it was now called, se- cured from the Southern Pacific much of its trackage in Southern California, which was not essential to its main line east. By additional construc- tion on its own behalf, the Santa Fé was thus able to enter Los Angeles by way of Barstow and the Cajon Pass, and also to extend its opera- tions down the coast to San Diego. Many years later, by purchase of the San Joaquin Valley road, built by disgruntled ranchers as a rival to the Southern Pacific, the Sante Fe secured a share of the San Joaquin Valley trade, and an outlet to the Bay of San Francisco.
Two other through lines have been built since the completion of the Santa Fé. The San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, which makes use of the Santa Fé tracks through the Cajon Pass and follows pretty closely the old Mor- mon immigrant trail to Salt Lake, was completed in 1905. Originally the project of Senator W. A. Clark of Nevada, this line early became a feeder of the Union Pacific and in 1921 passed entirely under that road's control. A few years after the completion of the Salt Lake Railroad, the Western Pacific from Salt Lake to San Francisco, (a different road entirely from the old Western Pa- cific acquired by the Central) was built to give the Gould lines a Pacific outlet. From Sacramento the line followed the North Fork of the Feather River, finding, strangely enough, the easiest grade and the least difficulty with snow of any of the transcontinental roads, though built the last of all.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE DISCONTENTED SEVENTIES
THE building of the Central Pacific Railroad overcame some of the most serious transportation difficulties of California; but it left unsolved, and in certain notable instances greatly increased, many of the vexatious political and social problems of the state. Indeed, for more than a decade after the railroad's completion, a deep current of popular discontent ran beneath the whole course of California history. Conditions in general were favorable to the creation of this spirit of unrest and dissatisfaction. The economic life of the state was still undergoing a process of readjustment incident to the close of the bonanza period of 1849. Industry and agriculture were not yet sufficiently developed to absorb the surplus population. Capital was scarce and interest rates almost prohibitive so far as the small merchant and rancher was concerned. Wages had fallen to a comparatively low level, and a large influx of population to the cities had given rise to grave problems of poverty and unemployment.
The rural communities were as discontented as the cities. Ranching in California was essentially different from farm- ing in the east, and even where inexperience and ignorance did not result in failure and distress, some whim of nature, such as drought or flood, occasionally ruined the crops and brought discouragement and discontent. There was seldom a reserve of capital with which to tide over such disaster to the next harvest; and crop failure consequently often meant the loss of the land as well as of the money and time in- vested. Land titles were uncertain and often the subject of expensive litigation which the ordinary rancher could not afford. Only a few of the agricultural products which now
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rank as the most valuable of the state were then grown on a commercial scale, and the industry as a whole was not yet out of the experimental stage. The knowledge of the best methods of irrigation was still in its infancy; and the ques- tion of water rights had not yet been stripped of confusion by adequate legislation and judicial interpretation. Altogether, therefore, the lot of the small rancher was not such as to make him a satisfied and contented man. He, like his fellow citizen in the towns and cities, was inclined to radicalism.
Yet Edmund Burke in substance once said that no Englishman cared a fig for abstract liberty, but would move heaven and earth for the concrete right of voting his own taxes. So, in California, the political discontent and popular unrest of the seventies did not arise alone from a general sense of grievance, but was also the product of very definite factors, the effect of which men felt in the practical affairs of every day life. When, therefore, late in the decade the citizens demanded a new constitution for the state, they were thinking much less of the rights of man (though out of respect to tradition they had to say something of these, too) than they were of certain very specific and concrete practices to which they traced many of their material ills.
The chief of these grievances had to do with corruption and inefficiency in government; the evils of the railroad situation, and the political activities of the Central Pacific; large land and water monopolies, accompanied by unfair methods of taxation; wages and conditions of labor; and finally, unrestricted immigration of Chinese coolies. The bill of particulars was large. It remained to be seen how far the evils could be eradicated.
One of the most serious of the problems was that of government reform. Never, in the history of the state, had political standards been quite so demoralized and the responsibility of public office so lightly felt. The nation itself, during this decade, was passing through a period of political laxness, of which such scandals as the Credit Mobilier, the Indian Frauds, and the Whiskey Ring were merely symptomatic. New York was giving to the world
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the inspiring example of the Tweed Ring. The Gould- Fisk combination was playing fast and loose with the welfare of great railroad systems, attempting to corner the nation's gold by the control of Cabinet officials, and insolently damning the public in the bargain. In business and politics the whole country was suffering the worst moral collapse it has yet experienced. George F. Hoar's indictment of the period, severe as it was, contained nothing of exaggera- tion. On May 6, 1876, he made this statement in the Senate:
"My own public life has been a very brief and insignificant one, extending little beyond the duration of a single term of senatorial office. But in that brief period I have seen five judges of a high court of the United States driven from office by threats of impeachment for corruption or maladministration. . .. I have seen in the State in the Union foremost in power and wealth four judges of her courts impeached for corruption, and the political administration of her chief city become a disgrace and a by-word throughout the world. I have seen the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs in the House, rise in his place and demand the expulsion of four of his associates for making sale of their official privilege of selecting the youths to be educated at our great military school. When the greatest railroad of the world binding together the continent and uniting the two great seas which wash our shores, was finished, I have seen our national triumph and exaltation turned to bitterness and shame by the unanimous reports of three committees of Congress-two of the House and one here that every step of that mighty enterprise had been taken in fraud. I have heard in highest places the shameless doctrine avowed by men grown old in public office that the true way by which power could be gained in the Republic is to bribe the people with the offices created for their service, and the true end for which it should be used when gained is the pro- motion of selfish ambition and the gratification of personal revenge. I have heard that suspicion haunts the footsteps of the trusted com- panions of the President."
As already intimated, California politics in the period under discussion suffered from the same ills which Hoar found in the national capital and in New York. No branch of the state government was free from this low tone of
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political morality; but it was generally recognized that the Legislature was more completely lost to a sense of political honor than any of the other departments. There were several reasons for this condition, apart from the general factors of corruption and inefficiency inseparably connected with all legislative bodies. The California Legislature, unfortunately, had behind it no tradition of honest govern- ment. On the contrary, almost from the organization of the state, its proceedings had been marked by a moral laxness that frequently assumed the proportions of open scandal. Therefore, whenever the body came together, lobbyist and corrupt agent of every sort flocked to the state capital, where a man with money or favors at his command might do much to influence legislation.
Again, the members of the Legislature too frequently united second rate ability with second rate morals; and as the constitution (naïvely framed on the supposition that public officials could safely be trusted with power), imposed few restraints on the law making power of the body, the combination was exceedingly injurious to the state. Com- plaint was made particularly against the free hand allowed the Legislature in levying taxes, making appropriations, granting away franchises and state lands, and enacting special legislation.
Even where no dishonesty prevailed, the organization of the Legislature and its methods of doing business led to the enactment of hurried and ill-digested laws, most of which were crowded through the last few days of the session, allowing all sorts of private interests to profit at the expense of the public good. William J. Shaw, a member of the California Senate, made the following trenchant criticism of these conditions in 1875:
"It is really difficult to comprehend how a Legislature could be intelligently contrived to render it more certain that proper legislation cannot possibly be performed. ... The last session ended on the 30th of March, 1874. In December our Legislature passed thirteen statutes. In January it passed thirty nine. In February it passed one hundred and nine. In its thirty days in
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March it passed five hundred and eighteen statutes. . . . But we have not yet told all. Of the six hundred and seventy-nine statutes . . . no less than five hundred and eighteen were merely local or personal acts, and of no moment to the State at large. . . . No less than thirty-two were passed to permit county sheriffs or clerks to leave the State or for the private interests of some persons in the way of getting money claims allowed, justly or unjustly. Nine several separate statutes were passed to enable school districts to build school houses, or to do something else of a like local nature. . .. One statute was enacted to change the orthog- raphy of an unknown place, and two or more to change the names of some such places. Three several statutes were passed to pro- hibit hogs from running about in some of the counties, and one to prevent horn cattle. . . . Several separate statutes were passed to make counties pay debts they apparently were not obliged to pay otherwise. One special statute was passed to authorize the County Government of San Francisco to hire a messenger; and, I believe, one other to enable it to better provide for removing dead dogs from its streets. . . . No less than thirteen several statutes were passed at the last session and approved by the Governor, to repeal or amend thirteen other statutes previously passed and approved by the Governor at that very same session. So that even before the one hundred and three working days had passed by, they found it necessary to begin again to repeal or to amend some of the very acts the Houses had just passed, and the Governor had just approved only a few hours, or a few days previously."
Dishonesty, mediocrity, and confusion thus combined to make the California Legislature an easy prey to many species of corrupt politics. Independent newspapers characterized session after session of the body as extravagant, useless, and corrupt. Outright bribery was so common that the San Francisco Bulletin, without any trace of sarcasm, congratulated the people of the state because the members of the Legislature during one session, "even though evincing ignorance and incapacity," seemed to be influenced in their support of objectionable bills more by political prejudice and personal ambition than by mercenary motives.
What was true of conditions at Sacramento was also true of the politics of San Francisco. The salutary lessons taught
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by the Vigilance movement of 1853 had been forgotten; and the city officials, though no longer so openly in league with cutthroats and similar gentry, had formed a highly profitable partnership with certain contractors and public utility corporations of various kinds. The award of municipal contracts, the paving of city streets, the erection of public buildings, and various kindred enterprises offered rare op- portunities for exploitation of the city's funds.
"Our official rascals may be set down as the meanest in Amer- ica," said one San Francisco editor. "There appears to be nothing too small for them to appropriate. . . . They go for everything in sight, from a horse and buggy to the shirt studs of a suicide. Everybody who has any dealings with the city has to grease the wheels. ... The city hall needs reformation almost as badly as the most notorious dive on the Barbary Coast. . . . Faster than we can make note of them or take account of them, rogues are being discovered."
The truth was, the whole political situation of California, as evidenced by the conditions both at Sacramento and in San Francisco, was unfortunately bad. The concrete effects of these evils in government appeared in increased taxes, unjust assessments, poor streets, high railroad rates, water monopolies, and in a score of other abuses which brought home to the average citizen the significance of government. He became interested in reform, not as a political philosopher, but because he wanted to save money.
Inseparably connected with political abuses, were griev- ances of economic origin. Foremost of these were the issues arising out of the transportation monopoly. The Act of 1861, incorporating the Central Pacific, had fixed a maximum passenger fare of ten cents a mile and a maximum freight rate of fifteen cents per ton-mile. Within these limits, however, the sole method of determining rates was to charge as much as the traffic would bear-and perhaps a little more. Time and again the Legislature had been importuned to enact a full schedule of freight and passenger rates to which the railroads would have to conform. But the Central
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Pacific officials denied the power of the state to pass such legislation and effectually killed all bills of the kind.
Whether rates as a whole were extortionate or reasonable is not now a vital question. In spite of repeated denials, accompanied by plausible figures, that the California roads were yielding a profit, or charged proportionately more than eastern lines, public opinion stubbornly took the other view. To the people of that day the "swollen fortunes" of the builders of the Central Pacific was evidence enough of the revenue producing powers of the road. Moreover, the assertion that rates were much lower by rail than in the days of the stage coach, that goods were carried much more quickly, and that land through which the railway ran had greatly enhanced in value, failed to convince the California public that the road was indeed a great public benefactor, entitled to practice any methods it might choose.
There were also many features of a technical nature connected with the fixing of railroad rates, which the public of that day could not fathom, and in which they saw only great injustice. For example, it is doubtful if many of the ranchers of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys could understand why it cost them more to ship barley a hundred miles by rail to tide water than to send it all the way from San Francisco to Liverpool on a British vessel. Similarly, an alfalfa grower of Kern County had difficulty in comprehending the necessity of paying a hundred and eighty dollars for the shipment of a carload of alfalfa seed, when an equal weight of wheat would be carried the same distance for sixty dollars. The city of Winnemuca, Nevada, lies east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and is about 400 miles nearer Chicago than San Francisco. Yet the freight rate from Chicago to Winnemuca was two and one-third times as great as the rate from Chicago to San Francisco, by way of Winnemuca. The reasoning by which the railroad justified this practice was not convincing to inland shippers.
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