USA > California > A history of the new California, its resources and people; Vol I > Part 16
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59
Dr. Samuel Barton was one of these in 1834. and Hartley Carver in 1835, and John Plumbe in 1836, and Asa Whitney in 1845. John C. Fre- mont, building paths in the western wilderness, meditated a road to Califor- nia, a land he loved, and, dying, called his home. Thomas H. Benton, the father of Jessie Benton Fremont, in 1849 became the advocate of Fremont's route. This proviso was in the plan : the road was to be a railway "wherever practicable." Until now the difficulties of the adventure had hardly been dreamed of. Fremont's road was to be driven as far as possible, and horses and carriages were to bridge the gaps-a giant highway one hundred feet
157
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
wide, and free of toll or charge. In one of his speeches on the subject, the great senator said: "There is a class of topographical engineers older and more unerring than mathematics-the wild animals; buffalo, elk, deer and bear. Not the compass, but instinct seeks the correct passes, the shallowest fords, the best practicable routes. There are migrations back and forth. Indians follow, pioneers and lumbermen come, and finally the railroads of civilized man."
What these creatures of the wild were to the actual route, the dreams of Carver, Whitney, Fremont and others were to the realization of the great scheme itself. They started discussions, resolutions, legislation in Congress and elsewhere, and prepared the way for the actual builders.
It is a curious and interesting study now to recall the reasons which ap- pealed to men. The discovery of gold turned all minds toward California, and the need was felt, of course, for providing for the surge of travel and traffic. But Whitney anticipated this emigration. He was in China when he read of the first experiments in railroad building in England, and he began to speculate upon the possibility of a railroad across the American continent. His chief thought seems to have been the trade with China, Japan and India, and he never rested until he had obtained a hearing before Congress, and well nigh secured a land grant for his project. The first appropriation made for surveys, made in 1853, was due almost wholly to Whitney's persistent efforts, and he only retired, baffled and discouraged, when his private fortune was ex- hausted and his hope worn out. But his idea of a vast oriental commerce had fastened itself in the public mind, and this became the real objective point in subsequent discussions. Senator Benton expressed the hope that he might "live to see a train of cars thundering down the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, bearing in transit to Europe the silks and spices of the Orient." When the road was actually completed, at the driving of the last spike, Gen- eral Dodge said in his address: "Accept this as the road to India," and Bret Harte, moved by the picture of the two engines :
"Pilots touching head to head, Facing on the single track, Half a world behind each back,"
makes the Western engine say :
158
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
"I bring the east to you : All the Orient, all Cathay, Find through me the shortest way, And the sun you follow here, Rises in my hemisphere."
The Far East, and not way traffic, the development of the vast territory to be traveled was not in any one's mind, save, perhaps, as a contingency. "The main thing." Sidney Dillon said, "was not to develop the country and make it hospitable, but to get across it as quickly as possible."
Then presently a new factor arose. In those days events moved swiftly, and the east and the south in the shadow of the dark days just at home, lost sight of the question of traffic, and bickered jealously over the route to be chosen. Then another question arose with the breaking out of Civil war. It was no longer the Orient and its trade, but an undefended and imperilled western coast. The south was out of the contest, and a central and direct route was demanded by the political situation. The Pacific coast was im- perilled. The "Trent Affair" had aroused fears of a war with England, whose Asiatic fleet found convenient harbor at Victoria, Vancouver's Island, while in the Pacific itself, the Confederate Admiral Semmes had destroyed nearly a hundred whaling vessels belonging to the north. It was felt to be a critical time, and that the nation might easily lose her Pacific coast states for want of a railroad. The wealth of the nation would not suffice to supply a large army on that coast in the event of a foreign invasion, in the absence of quick over- land transportation facilities.
Meanwhile, California was not idle. Sacramento at this time was but a small inland town of 12,000 people. It had a little river traffic with San Francisco, but its chief dependence was upon its mountain commerce, and great mule teams threaded the defiles of the Sierras, and crossed even to the silver lodes of Nevada. These freighting teams, straining on the dusty roads, were objects of picturesque interest, but slow and poor substitutes for the lo- comotive and the shuttling train behind it. And Sacramento, at least, was ready for the railroad idea.
But the difficulties were immense. It was more than 2,000 miles to the nearest railroad in the middle west. Two great mountain ranges had to be crossed, and intervening deserts. The route would traverse from the west
159
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
but a few acres of arable land. Not a navigable river ran between the Sacra- mento and the Missouri. There was no immediate and but little remote prospect of way business ; the common estimate was that of a rough country to be traversed, and not capable of being developed; the expense of building would be enormous, and the completed line might be "as unproductive as a bridge."
Then there were the hopeless and the unbelieving. They are always in evidence. Human nature has not changed since Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem in the face of the jeers of "Sanballat the Horonite" and his as- sociates. The story of the opposition which the great idea encountered in the country most to be benefited is told in the newspapers of the period. Two musty scrap books in the archives of the Southern Pacific are alternately irri- tating and comforting, humorous and pathetic in the light of to-day, but they tell of a time of storm and stress that rocked the young commonwealth. "The voice of the people is the voice of God!" No, there are times when the convictions of one man must be taken against the hostility of ten thou- sand. A crowd is not wiser than the wisest man in it. The Boston town meeting, Curtis says, was not more sagacious than Sam Adams. Antagonism to the railroad was but part of the history of all progress-the history of the printing press, the cotton-gin, the power loom, of agricultural machinery in England, of the conservative in the face of reform, of the old striving to strangle the new. But here in those days, men might well doubt the wisdom of attempting to scale the Sierras with a locomotive. A railroad had never been built under such conditions, driven to success in the face of such ob- stacles, and by a community so feeble. It was a task without a parallel. Un- usual ability, unusual courage, indomitable will must confront the difficulties and push a way through the uncharted wilderness.
THE MEN FOR THE HOUR.
As early as 1856 a railroad had been projected from Sacramento to Placerville, and a young engineer called from Connecticut. His name was Judah, and he was to build the first railroad in California. That he was fa- miliar with the idea of a trans-continental road is clear, for when called to the west he said at once to his wife, "I am going to California to be the pioneer railroad engineer of the Pacific coast, to know the country and to help build a
.
160
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
great railroad." Even earlier than this he seems to have had some premoni- tion of his future. "The railroad," he said, "will be built, and I shall have something to do with its building." Was he a man of Destiny? He was a man for the hour, and the history of the Central Pacific cannot be written without recognizing the place and the importance of this man in the con- ception and execution of the great work.
Always a great work waits until the man is found to do it. Always the man strikes the hour. From Watts and Stephenson pondering the locomo- tive, to Field laying the Atlantic cable, and Judah surveying the passes of the Sierras for the first overland line; from Washington at the birth of the nation to Lincoln in the crisis of its history, always a man for a definite and neces- sary work is found. God, the poet tells us,
"Could not make Antonio Stradivarius violins Without Antonio."
And the Central Pacific railroad could not get over the Sierra Nevada without Theodore Judah. It waited for the inspired engineer.
No matter where his inspiration came from, or how his convictions grew into power; they did grow until they mastered him; and perhaps the man whom the people called "railroad crazy" was the one man fitted by his en- thusiasm, his poetic spirit, his professional skill and natural ability, to cope with the difficulties of the incipient legislation and the actual construction of a road across the Sierras.
The Sacramento Valley road did not get far. The cost of materials and labor, and the exhaustion of some of the placer fields of the region stopped the work at Folsom; but during its progress Judah pondered the problem of the greater road across the defiant mountains at whose feet he was toiling. He studied the topography of the range, the canyons and water sources and climatic conditions, and he settled, as firmly as the granite bases of the mountains, his convictions that a practicable route could be found over their summits.
There is a curious electrical quality in some men. It communicates itself to other men. Judah had a fine intelligence, nobleness of spirit, the enthusiasm of the poet backed by the solid furnishings of the civil engineer; had an un-
161
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
conquerable will and the qualities of a leader, and it followed as the night the day that other men should be fired by his convictions and drawn into the circles of his sympathies and activities.
The editor of a Sacramento journal became the voice of Judah, uttering his convictions, rehearsing his plans, "putting his whole heart into Judah's enterprise," and presently the Railroad idea had taken possession of certain merchants in Sacramento who caught the engineer's enthusiasm, and saw as he did, "the great thing beckoning to them across the mountains." The names of these men were then almost unknown, and are now forever linked with the history of the enterprise which they carried, through storms in the Sierras, and storms of calumny in the plains, to a triumphal end. Their names are part of the history of the state and the nation. They were Leland Stan- ford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles and E. B. Crocker. They were young men, and untried, "shop-keepers" as England would call them, and without riches. Perhaps the wealth of these men combined did not exceed one hundred thousand dollars, but they had character and so had credit ; they had youth, health, ability,-organizing, executive, financial ability, -unknown to themselves the qualities of leadership. They have been called "foundation men of our coast," and it is impossible to look over the cities and plains of California without recalling the men whose energy and enterprise underlie the fair structure of the commonwealth.
In 1859 a meeting of citizens was called in San Francisco to discuss "the Railroad," its route over the Sierras, and measures for securing congressional action. The route by way of Dutch Flat and Donner Lake was chosen, and, because Judah was an engineer, with personal knowledge of the route,-he was sent to represent the wishes of the convention before Congress and the Cabinet. Armed with plans and with definite and positive information, the engineer went to Washington hoping to secure the passage of a bill that would provide for grants of lands and funds sufficient to insure the building of a transcontinental road. But in spite of heroic labors the bill did not pass. Congress, in 1860, was alive to the importance of a western road, but it was a time of excitement and much sectionai feeling, and the heart of the nation was troubled and afraid.
Mr. Judah accepted the situation without complaint, wrote a report of his fruitless mission, and though his personal expenses, apart from his time,
162
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
were over $2,500 he presented no bill to the convention, and unshaken in pur- pose returned to work. "Facts and figures, backed by my own honest con- victions, will convince them next time," he said, and with a determination to be at the next Congress he took up the difficult work of deciding beyond ques- tion the best route across the Sierras, and was soon surveying among the wild canyons and spurs in the heart of the mountains.
In June, 1861, in advance of any action by Congress, and in the face of the Civil war, Judah called a meeting of the citizens of Sacramento, and the Central Pacific was organized under the laws of California, with a nominal capital of eight million of dollars. Leland Stanford was chosen president, Collis P. Huntington, vice president, Mark Hopkins, treasurer, James Bailey, secretary, and Theo. D. Judah chief engineer. The board of directors included those just named and E. B. Crocker, John F. Moore, D. W. Strong and Charles Marsh. The subscriptions to the capital stock were not large.
Perhaps never in the history of railroading has a gigantic and expensive undertaking been faced with so little capital and so much courage and hope. The physical and financial difficulties were enough to daunt the stoutest heart. When the little group of men whose names now are historic were actually en- gaged in the work of construction, an experienced railroad builder, then freighting across the mountains, said of the men behind the movement, and said it in testifying before the Senate committee: "Well, the men who were constructing the Pacific railroad were a little off-yes, that is what we all thought." It was the general conviction that such fortunes as the projectors had would be sunk in the canyons of the Sierras, and the scheme abandoned as hopeless. Judah said that the route was practicable, but if his associates had been trained railroad men, they would have hesitated, refusing assent to his judgment. They were all young men, the adventurous spirits of a land of adventure, and enthusiasnı may have outrun prudence, but the sequel showed that they were men of good judgment, clear-sighted, far-sighted men, whose intelligence pierced to the heart of difficulties, whose courage was equal to any strain, and they ventured fortune and reputation not as speculators,. but as men of business, on a proposition which their judgment approved. They made five preliminary surveys and knew the difficulties of the situation. They anticipated the aid of the government, but went ahead without it and much work was done while as yet there was no certainty of government action.
163
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
Judah spent August and September in the mountains studying, making pro- files, mapping the surveys, and in October, armed again with specific in- formation, went to Washington. If "the stars in their courses fought against Sisera," they fought for Judah. Sargent was the newly elected repre- sentative from California, and he traveled eastward in company with the ar- dent engineer. The sea voyage of more than three weeks made Sargent fa- miliar with the mountain routes, the engineer's maps being studied by day, and the subject talked over on the deck in the warm still nights, and when the new member at last got the Pacific Railroad bill before the House, he made an impressive presentation. The breaking out of the Civil war had prepared the way, and Congress was ready to act. Three thousand millions more were to be spent before the close of the war, and it seemed an unfavorable time to consider the expenditure of a hundred millions more for a railroad, but it was a time of excited feeling, the building of the road was "a war measure," and it was important to bind the east and the west together. On July 31, 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railroad bill, and the Central Pacific and Union Pacific were authorized to construct the first trans-continental road. Judah returned at once to California, reported to the company, and the gov- ernment was notified immediately of the acceptance of the provisions of the bill.
In the east capital shrank from the undertaking. It was a thousand times more promising than in the west, but most people looked upon the scheme as visionary, and nothing was done beyond effecting an organization until two years after actual work had been begun in California.
In 1864 the charter was amended, the land grant doubled and the bonds of the government made to issue to the company on the completion of twenty miles instead of forty as at first proposed. The Central Pacific was limited to 150 miles east of the California boundary, a curious discrimination being thus made in favor of the eastern company. When Mr. Huntington saw this, he said, "that ought not to have gone into the bill," and he added with · characteristic positiveness, that he "would take that out as soon as he wanted it out" and he did. The roads were to build toward each other, and the length of each line would be determined by the meeting place,-a good ar- rangement to develop rivalry and ill feeling, and a bad one if the equities of
164
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
the case are considered. For the eastern end of the line had much level country and good arable land, and the promise of way traffic, while the west had the giant wall of the Sierras and the deserts of Nevada and Utah.
Meanwhile in October, 1863, Mr. Judah had started to Washington again, but in Panama was stricken down by fever, and seven days after land- ing in New York he dropped forever the great work to which he had given the ardor of his youth and the energies of his whole being. It is idle to say that but for this man the road would not have been built. It might have been delayed a little, but a transcontinental road was inevitable, and some other man would have come to the front. But any other man must have had Judah's convictions, his quenchless enthusiasm, his courage, his persis- tence in the face of discouragement, his indomitable will, and because Judah had these qualities, he saw the great undertaking well begun, and the glory of its final triumph belongs largely to him. One who knew him well, Judge C. C. Goodwin, said of him, "When the names of the strong men and the great men who found California a wilderness and then caused the transfigura- tion which revealed a glorified state, are called over, close to the very head of the strong list should be the name of Theodore Judah."
Mr. Huntington took up Judah's duty before the congressional com- mittees; S. S. Montague was made chief engineer, and the quartet of giants in the west buckled down to their chosen work. "Circumstances make the man," we are told. Yes, true; but it is equally true that the masterful man antedates the circumstances. Difficulties but call out unsuspected forces. It was so with these pioneer railroad builders in California's infancy. Hunt- ington in the east and Stanford in the west looked after finances and legal questions. Crocker proved a great organizer and had the push of one of his mountain locomotives ; Hopkins was a man of judicial mind, forceful but careful, the balance-wheel of the organization. Mr. Huntington said of him, "I always feel sure of a thing when I have Hopkins' judgment in its favor."
These men took their places not by chance, not by caprice, nor by force of circumstances, but by divine right of foresight, by strength of character. by ability to lead, and sagacity to interpret Opportunity when it came.
165
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
THE BATTLE WITH THE MOUNTAINS.
In January, 1863, the first shovelful of earth was thrown, Leland Stan- ford, being the governor of the state.
It was a time of rejoicing, and the people seemed to be of one mind. But they put little money into the great undertaking, and presently were broken up into factions, and railing at the enterprise as "a great swindle." After the ceremony of "breaking ground" came the struggle. Men had to be gathered and organized, money provided, material accumulated, diffi- culties surmounted. Everything save cross ties had to come around the Horn and then be reshipped at San Francisco. No government subsidy bonds were available, but by the sale of stock, by using their own individual funds and their credit, the four determined builders began to climb the foothills of the Sierras. The political situation, the necessities of commerce, the ex- igencies of the company itself, which must build far toward the east or have a profitless road,-all called for rapid work. But from the first hour a thou- sand difficulties sprang into being, and when Newcastle was reached, 31 miles from Sacramento, the company's treasury was depleted, and work had to be suspended. It was not an auspicious beginning, and must have seemed to the men most interested as "the hour and power of darkness." For all the hostility which had been directed toward the undertaking now found voice. "I told you so" was in all the air. It was in the press. The oppo- sition that had been outspoken and half vindictive-that gathered bitterness as the work went on, now rejoiced openly.
There were troublesome complications. Certain cities and counties of California delayed or refused their aid. San Francisco went into the courts on the question. Placer county sent a committee to examine the books of the corporation on the absurd charge that the grants made to the Central Pacific were made to the individuals named in the act as incorporators, who in turn had sold their rights to the corporation for paid capital stock, amount- ing to several million dollars. The committee went back satisfied,-perhaps ashamed, but suspicion had been engendered, and suspicion is often deadly.
About this time another rumor was set afloat. A whisper at first, it soon grew into a roar. Before the incorporation of the Central Pacific, the principal members of the company were promoters of local mail routes, and
166
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
had built a toll-wagon road from Dutch Flat to Reno and Virginia City. There were opposition toll roads, and so it was asserted that the Central Pacific was not headed for the east, that it did not intend and never had in- tended to build an overland road, but merely a local "feeder" to the Dutch Flat Wagon Road. This was the origin of the hostile epithet, "The Dutch Flat Swindle," thrown at men who had always been honorable. It became the cry of the populace, and the head lines of bitter editorials, and under this opprobrium Stanford and his associates rested for many months. But though graders' camps were abandoned, and construction trains stood still, the com- pany was not idle. With iron resolution these men borrowed money on their personal security; they endorsed paper in the east to one party to the ex- tent of $1,250,000, and this enabled them to procure funds for their own enterprise; counties and cities that had subscribed for stock proposed to surrender it and issue bonds for a lesser amount, and as these bonds were negotiable, fresh capital accumulated, and work was resumed. Up to this point California, in spite of opposition, may fairly be said to have been pay- ing for the railroad. Certainly there was no abatement of interest or paraly. sis of purpose on the part of its organizers.
Then came the amended act of 1864 which enlarged the land grant, modified the conditions upon which the government bonds were issued, and virtually made the United States an indorser of the company's bonds, and presently it was impossible to get men enough to drive the road as fast as the condition of the treasury warranted. Then coolies were imported. Miners were drifting about, but they were unreliable. These sons of excite- ment found the routine of railroad work distasteful; stories of great strikes were in the air; on each side of the route lay the great placer fields of Gold Run and Iowa Hill, and before the allurement of the "new diggings" about which rumor was continually rife crowds of men melted away into the hills and were lost to the company. Coolie labor was a necessity. This pres- ently became a new source of hostility to the company, and demagogues sought to make capital out of it. The railroad was not the friend of "honest labor;" it had introduced for its own enrichment "Chinese cheap labor," and long after the completion of the road this flame of anarchy was blown about the sand lots of San Francisco by every windy orator who could gain a hear- ing from the idle or the vicious.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.