USA > California > A history of the new California, its resources and people; Vol I > Part 17
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
167
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
The building of the railroad created a demand for laborers which could not be met. That this demand hastened the coming of the Chinese, no one doubts, but so did the discovery of gold. The opportunity to work aban- doned placer mines brought many a Chinaman to California, and the man who thinks that the problem of Asiatic labor could have been avoided, in the absence of laws expressly framed to exclude them, has not studied the situation very deeply. The Burlingame treaty opened the door wide, and the coming of Chinese to the Pacific coast was among the inevitables. The building of the railroad only offered immediate employment. After the passage of the Amended Act of 1864, Governor Stanford was enabled short- ly to say that "The financial problem has been solved," and with improved finances the company quickly became independent, and gathered in stock in- stead of selling it. They dismissed sub-contractors, organized a construc- tion company under the name of Crocker & Company, and thus saved the profits arising from construction for their own treasury. It was a wise stroke, hut made necessary by the general skepticism as to the outcome. Contract- ors would not take the work. Meantime the victories of endeavor were tell- ing and the public sentiment was turning toward the builders. When the new road had passed beyond Newcastle to where Colfax now stands, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Schuyler Colfax, making the trip across the continent, stopped at Virginia City and made an address. "When men paid by the government talked about the amount of money the road would cost. I said, it is not an iota in the balance in comparison with its national benefits. It will pay back to our national treasury far more than the bonus which may be given for its construction; it will add to the national wealth."
Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican, was here the same year and wrote a stirring appeal back to his paper. "The new road would create a new republic; it would marry to the nation of the Atlantic an equal if not greater nation of the Pacific. Here is payment of your great debt ; here is wealth unbounded, but you must come and take them with the locomotive."
Out of San Francisco came a voice, not quite solitary, but sufficiently strong to be heard at this juncture. Rev. Dr. Horatio Stebbins expressed the best thought of the city, the sanest and noblest life of the young metropolis, when he said to his congregation : "As the condition of a noble social life
168
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
and progress we need an unbroken and swift communication with the places which we still fondly call home. The longing for this comes like the sigh of the night wind over the habitations of men. When the continental rail- way is complete we shall be nourished by the blood of the heart of the world. Intelligence will be increased, society liberalized by intercourse, and extem- porized adventure driven out by better industries. No great impulse of hu- man affairs having breadth, and height, and depth of permanent and en- during progress, can be felt here until the great highways are opened over sea and land, and the world, the many sided world of industries and arts. of commerce and letters are imported to us. And the people of California can make no better investment of their time, their talents, their money and their public spirit, than in turning all the power of the state to overcome the barriers which lie between her and the nation's hearthstone, between her and the heart of the world." These were weighty words, backed by a vigorous and commanding personality, and if heard in the heights of the Sierras would have heartened the engineers and the energetic men behind them. The difficulties of construction were enormous. At Cape Horn, where the present day tourist from a solid road-bed looks down 2,000 feet into the blue canyon of the American river, the engineer found an almost perpendicu- lar mountain, a great circular precipice-face with no foothold even for a survey. Men must be let down by ropes and a place to stand picked out of the rocks while swinging above the depths, and then a pathway slowly and laboriously constructed along the sheer walls of the crags. It was treacherous rock, loose and shaly in places, and the road-bed must be pro- tected from slides from above. At a point beyond a similar formation was found and when the road-bed was constructed the hillside slid in and obliter- ated it. For weeks gangs of men were kept at this point while construction was pushed on ahead.
Many tunnels had to be constructed. and the granite framework of the Sierras was hard. The Burleigh drill and the high explosives of today were unknown, and the work was slow. Nitroglycerine was manufactured by the company at a camp on the summit, but it was too dangerous for general use and reliance was had upon common black powder. The hard rock shot out the blast again and again like a cannon. Winter came to add to the dangers and difficulties of the work. The road must get on-on over the mountain
169
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
barrier, on over the deserts of Nevada, into the Salt Lake Valley, or be handicapped fatally for want of traffic, and this compelled work to go on in stormy mountains in the face of cold and under great depths of snow. Re- taining walls in the canyons were built, roadways constructed, and ties and rails laid in the snow, and sometimes under it. A dome or archway was shoveled out of the white mass, a shaft lifted up through it, and material lowered from above to the buried workmen. Snowslides were frequent, an avalanche on one occasion burying forty-two Chinamen, killing half their number. It was security to be inside the rock and men were set to tunnel- ing, but before this could be done another slide swept over the men and eight or ten white laborers were killed. Combs of frozen snow curved over the precipices in great masses, and when they could be reached were blown up and their menace averted. The faces of rock to be pierced were reached by tunneling through the snow. and then the borings went on. On the heights of the Sierras and its slopes fifteen thousand men were sometimes at work and it was no small task to keep this industrial army officered, organ- ized, efficient, and to keep the commissary at the front as they went on- ward.
The camp and the terminal remained at Cisco for two years.
Water in the desert was hauled over long distances-at one place forty miles. Much money was spent in boring for water, and at one point it was piped eight miles. The maximum haul for ties was six hundred miles, and the longest for rails and materials was 740 miles.
In the inter-mountain region but little wood could be found for fuel, and much had to be carried forward from the Sierras. Not a coal bed on the line was then known.
In the mountains, snow sheds had to be constructed to keep the tracks from being buried under drifts. About forty miles had to be thus protected, 665 million feet, board measure, of lumber being used, and 900 tons of bolts and spikes. All that entered into the construction of the road was expensive. " Five years later," the engineers testified before the commission, " The work could have been done for from 30 to 75 per cent cheaper." The average price of rails in New York was eighty dollars per ton. Freights to San Francisco averaged $17.50. Insurance ranged from 51/2 to 17 per cent. Material came around the Horn, or across the Isthmus, and had then to be
170
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
transported to Sacramento by boat and sent forward on the line. Rails laid down by the graded track cost $125 per ton. One locomotive by way of the Isthinus cost $8,100 freight. The first ten cost over $190,000, the second ten $215.000, an amazing price, compared to today.
Material for a year's construction was constantly in transit, and the company had stock for the road on the ocean most of the time valued at from one to three millions, at interest of from 12 to 15 per cent.
Wages were high, and provisions. Hay cost over the mountain $120 per ton, oats and barley $200 to $500 per ton, and all other supplies in pro- portion.
By 1866 the two companies were approaching each other, the Central Pacific building from the west, the Union Pacific from the east. The fight for a meeting place had begun, and the eyes of the world were being drawn to the mid-continent. The great difficulties of the Central Pacific had been surmounted, and the work was driven ahead with great speed. The value of the road would be enhanced by every mile traveled, and the goal was Og- den. It became certain that the Union Pacific would reach there first. The Central Pacific had been authorized to continue its road eastward in a contin- uous line until it should meet the Union Pacific line. By 1867, it was a race for the trade center of Utah, and for bonds and lands. It was a race of giants. The Central had escaped from the mountains, had ample means and a well organized force of laborers, while the Union Pacific had still some expen- sive work to do east of Ogden. How keen was the rivalry is seen in one circumstance, and the reprisal which followed. The Union Pacific sought to anticipate a meeting point by pushing a force of graders 500 miles west of Ogden, to what is now Humboldt Wells. There 80 miles were graded and laid with track, but it cost the company a million dollars, for the gap between that portion and the continuous track east of it was never filled. The Central played the same game, but more successfully. It sent graders east of Ogden, filed a map of its route to Echo Summit with the Secretary of the Interior, made a demand for the two-thirds of the bonds due on completion, and by sheer force of argument, persuaded the government to issue $2,400,000 in United States bonds for this portion of the road. Some delay ensued in the transfer of the bonds, and but half of them were delivered. There was no over-issue of government bonds ; they had been issued in accordance with
171
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
the law and the facts, and on the opinion of the attorney-general. This was the testimony before the Senate committee, and though the Secretary of the Interior sought to evade the delivery of the bonds, he yielded to the persistence of Mr. Huntington, and turned them over, saying "You seem entitled to them under the law." This success was of vast consequence to the future of the Central Pacific. To be shut back in the midst of a bar- ren country with a short and difficult piece of road to operate, would have placed the Central Pacific at the mercy of the longer line. It would have put the control of the trans-continental traffic in the hands of men whose interests were all east of Salt Lake, and not in harmony with the interests of the Pacific coast.
As it was, the point of junction could not be made at Ogden, as the Union Pacific had already passed that point, and the Central Pacific was still seventy miles west of it. It was sought to secure a legal right to make the junction at Ogden, but Congress would not consent. Strenuous en- deavors had been made to drive the completed line to Ogden, but the diffi- culties were insurmountable. Laborers could not be obtained in the west. Negotiations were opened with a firm of Mormon contractors, who under- took to build two hundred miles in a given time. But Mormon labor had been secured by the rival road, and the Mormon contractors were handi- capped. Wages went up point by point, until shovelers were getting $3 a day and board, and still the supply was short. It was a work of magnitude to keep the camp provisioned in that uncultivated heart of the continent. Shifts were worked day and night and overtime; superintendents and even officials did manual labor at times with the rest of the men.
In the summer of 1868, the two companies were equally distant from the Great Salt Lake. They had between them 25,000 laborers and 6,000 teams-an army of conquest, but in the interests of peace. As the roads drew together, the excitement mounted until it was at white heat. Men vied with each other in feats of strength and in endurance. Six miles of track were laid in one day by the Central Pacific. The Union Pacific accepted it as a challenge, and laid seven miles. But the Central Pacific forces were organ- ized to move with the precision and regularity of a machine, and its officers were born leaders. They had mastered untold difficulties. Their triumph in the heart of the Sierras was the wonder of the nation. They could not
172
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
be defeated now in a mere track-laying contest. A day was set. Officials of the west-bound road were invited to be present. Superintendents, foremen, laborers, faced the east. Eight picked men handled the rails, lifting that day 704 tons of material. Others handled the ties, and others the sledges and shovels, and by night, ten miles of track was laid.
The road had long since passed Humboldt Wells, and had paralleled the abandoned grade of the Union Pacific for miles. The wild momentum of the work could not last, and presently the two lines met at Promontory Point, fifty-three miles from coveted Ogden. The date was April 28, 1869, and the ten miles of road were laid on that last day.
The dauntless leaders of the west were not content. They offered $4 .- 000,000 for the Union Pacific line to Ogden. It was refused. Congress was appealed to. and a joint resolution finally provided that the terminus of the roads should be at Ogden, or near it. The Central Pacific secured at cost price the Union road from Promontory to within five miles of Og- den, and subsequently acquired that link by lease.
On the morning of the 10th of May, 1869, a hundred yards of track remained to be laid. The Wahsatch mountains were greening with the spring; nearly a thousand people had been drawn from the east and west; a fringe of Indians being on the outskirts, dumbly pondering over their destiny in the face of the white man's daring. Over the grassy plain be- tween the green hills came trains from the east and the west with garlanded and bannered engines, and with saluting whistles drew up on opposite sides of the unrivaled space. Contractor Strobridge, who had been in charge of the Central Pacific work since the laying of the first rail at Sacramento, advanced from the west with his drilled corps of placid Chinese laborers, who marched and maneuvered as one man. Eager white laborers, their faces shining, advanced from the east to meet the stolid Mongolians. The space was quickly covered by the two hosts, and that last rail and tie waited to complete the girdle that ran gleaming from east to west. California had furnished a polished laurel tie, having in its center a silver plate, bearing the names of the officers of both companies, and that memorable spike of gold; Nevada was there with a spike of silver, and Utah with a spike of gold, silver, and iron. Then the gleaming laurel tie was laid, the gold spike set in a cavity made to receive it, and President Stanford, with a silver sledge,
173
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
drove it home, each blow being recorded on a hundred instruments all over the land, so that bells rang and whistles blew and cheers swelled out on the Atlantic and Pacific shores, on the consummation of the great and memor- able event. Prayer was offered, addresses made, congratulatory telegrams read. Then the Union Pacific train ran over the connecting rails and re- turned to its own track; the Central Pacific repeated the ceremony and re- turned with its face to the front. Cheers and music and banquetting fol- lowed. Half a dozen passenger coaches for the Central Pacific arrived next morning from New York, and part of these were attached to the president's car and taken to Sacramento, being the first train across the continent, the precursor of the electric lighted Overland Limited of today.
Thus the long dream of years was realized; the slow movement of evo- lutionary forces reached another stage, and Puck's girdle around the world in forty minutes was more nearly an actual fact than ever before. For the telegraph had kept pace with the advance of the track, and the east could now speak to the west without waiting the slow and perilous movements of the Pony Express or the Overland Mail.
THE PERIOD OF CONSOLIDATION.
The rejoicings at Sacramento and San Francisco were hearty and loud. It was sincere. The work was too important to California to be ignored, and skepticism was now dead in the presence of the accomplished fact. The road was finished, but still not complete. The indomitable men who built the Central Pacific saw at once that no trans-continental railway could long stop at Sacramento. The road must reach the Bay of San Francisco and be able to touch directly the commerce of the ocean. When the Western Pacific attempted to build from San José to Sacramento via Stockton, and got into difficulty, the Central Pacific bought and finished the road, and so had a connecting line from San José to Ogden. Then the Central was consolidated with the short line running from the Bay of San Francisco to Niles, where it connected with the Western Pacific, and this brought the great pioneer line into San Francisco. Efforts were made to secure Goat Island for a terminus, but this failing, the road was projected into the shal- low waters of the bay, a depot erected and a line of ferries established. Steam ferry boats of immense capacity carried freight cars directly to the
174
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
yards of the company south of Market street, and the terminal advantages of the company were at once adequate and not likely to be excelled by any other line.
In 1868, the state, out of its tide lands, granted sixty acres to the Cen- tral and Southern Pacific railroads near the south water front of San Fran- cisco, and this now constitutes the great business terminal of the company.
The charter of the Southern Pacific was for a line through the coast counties. It was built but a part of the way and stopped, but the southern end was pushed on from Santa Barbara, and a line extended down the San Joaquin Valley through Los Angeles, Arizona and New Mexico, and finally, by purchase or construction, going into New Orleans, thus making a new trans-continental line. It is necessary to refer to this, because the build- ing of the Southern Pacific has been severely criticised by those who imag- ined it to be a rival to the Central Pacific, and built to wreck the aided line and throw it into the hands of the government. On the contrary, it was built to serve the Central Pacific. Without it, the pioneer road would have been destroyed. How? Why? By the competition of other roads, by the building of other trans-continental lines, by the construction of the Suez Canal. It was not expected that other roads would be aided until at least the obligations of the original road to the government were discharged. There was no promise not to do so, and the Central Pacific has always recog- nized that it was a wise policy so far as the government and the people were concerned, to aid other lines, but the earning capacity of the Central Pacific was "almost totally destroyed." The dreams, as we have shown, were for a large Oriental traffic, but De Lesseps opened the ancient canal, and short- ened by thousands of miles the water line from Asia, and the dreams were nearer realization. Then the company, with a generalship seldom equaled, built up lines in California and elsewhere and saved their credit. They built interior lines to strengthen the trunk line. They built to secure the trade of the south and of southern California, and to protect the main line. It was legitimate, it was honorable, and it was magnificent generalship. But when the attention of the public was called to the advantages of the south- ern route, many thought it a scheme to build up that line at the expense of the Central Pacific. It is safe to say that no man who knew the integrity of the men who built the Central Pacific thought so for a moment. It is safe
175
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
to say that no man who knew the facts thought so. The best part of the long and complex history of this company's railroad management in Cali- fornia is the unchallenged integrity of the men who organized the Central Pacific. What Creed Haymond said before the select committee of the United States Senate in 1888, can be repeated after years have elapsed, and all the actors in the great enterprise have passed away : "This company dur- ing all its existence performed every obligation which it undertook to per- form. Its projectors have been railroad builders and not railroad wreckers. They have given employment to industry, not plundered it by stock jobbing. No road constructed by them has ever defaulted in meeting its obligations. No person has ever lost in any manner a dollar at their hands, nor have they ever had one they did not honestly obtain. They have developed an em- pire, but no broken promises have been left in their path."
The busy citizen of today observes that the Central Pacific is no longer in evidence, and that in place of it the Southern Pacific is everywhere visible and active-the dominating system on the Pacific coast-and he wants to know how the change came about. The Central Pacific controlled many lines that were in separate ownership. They sought leave of Congress to con- solidate in one company. The anti-railroad feeling in California was at its height, and a hostile resolution was passed by the legislature. Congress was asked not to permit consolidation. Then the Southern Pacific Company of Kentucky was chartered under the laws of the United States-not the railroad company-but a separate corporation, with a large capital stock. "The roads took that stock and became in fact that corporation," and the new organization leased all of the roads for ninety-nine years, and became virtually the owners. It owned the stock and held the lease, and for all practical purposes, was the owner. This was in 1885. The Southern Pa- cific took the place of the Central Pacific, agreeing to discharge the annual obligations imposed upon the Central Pacific Company by the acts of Con- gress. The indebtedness of the Central Pacific to the government matured in 1898, principal and interest, amounting to $50,812.715.48. The agreement entered into finally provided for the payment of the whole within ten years, in equal semi-annual installments, with interest at three per cent per an- num. In order to create the necessary refunding mortgage gold bonds, the financial affairs of the company were reorganized, the new plan providing
176
HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.
for the retirement of all outstanding securities of the company, and for the organization of a new company with a sure capital of $20,000,000 4 per cent cumulative stock, and $67,275,500 common stock, with authority to is- sue $100,000,000 first refunding mortgage bonds and $25,000,000 secured mortgage bonds, the first at 4 per cent gold, the other at 31/2 per cent. These bonds bear interest from 1899, free of taxes and run not less than forty- five years. They are secured by mortgage on all the railroads, terminals, and equipments owned by the Central Pacific. The new company was the Southern Pacific, which offered to purchase the entire issue of common stock, and agreed to guarantee unconditionally the payment of principal and interest of the refunding mortgage gold bonds at the stipulated rate of in- terest.
Thus this great feature of the first great experiment of the government in aiding to build a difficult and expensive road was satisfactorily adjusted without loss to the government, and without involving the honor or integ- rity of the men whose money, whose energy, and whose reputations went into the undertaking.
It has been called "unrivalled as a wonder of railway engineering achievement, and the best existing example of daring constructive enterprise and skillful execution." Forty years have seen but few changes in the road, and the general testimony has been that it was well built. They de- termined to build for that day a first-class road. Not a surface road, but a road of the lowest grades and the highest curvature the country would ad- mit, and this not through any excess of virtue, but as a business proposition, such a road offering the greatest commercial value.
It is difficult now to understand the hostility that followed the builders of this pioneer road almost to the last. The antagonism and abuse for years was very bitter. These men, it was said, had become rich at the expense of the government. Suppose it were true. If builders got more profit out of the enterprise than was expected, were the material interests of the government less fully subserved? Every obligation was kept, and the courts have usually decided that the company rightly interpreted the law. But they did not grow rich at the expense of the government. When the road was completed, they had expended all their means, all the aid they could obtain from the sale of lands, and were more than $3,000,000 in debt. And
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.