The Railroad, part 7

All the while that Thomas Durant and his bunch were back east and mid west wheeling and dealing and laying railroad tracks virtually the same thing was going on in another part of the country.

Way out west was a land populated by gold miners, homesteaders, business people, ranchers, and a whole lot of cowboys as well as outlaws. Actually, those last two professions were occasionally interchangeable. As a matter of fact, all of those business endeavors were, at times, interchangeable with the outlaw enterprise. In some opinions that fine line between running businesses and outlawing extended to four shopkeepers out in California, and one of them at this particular time was the Governor of that golden area.

In 1861 these four California shopkeepers came up with a really grand idea. After probably a lot of deep thinking shopkeepers Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, California governor Leland Stanford, and Mark Hopkins dug deep into their pockets and then sank eight and a half million dollars into their pet project, that is the founding of the Central Pacific Railroad. Just to help them out a bit, the following year Congress passed the Railroad Act which granted the four men a western charter—and a whole lot of money. The four were granted federal loans of sixteen thousand dollars a mile for building their railroad over flat land and forty-eight thousand dollars a mile over mountains, namely the Sierras.

By January of 1863 in Sacramento, three of the four got out their shovels and did a little official groundbreaking for their railroad. Stanford, being the governor, made a speech that predicted that in time, because of this railroad to be, the streets of Sacramento would soon “resemble the fabled streets of the Orient, teeming with ‘the busy denizens of two hemispheres’ as they passed through town ‘over the great highway of nations.’ “ That may have been quite a stretch of the imagination considering that at the time good ole Sacramento’s streets were sort of ankle-deep in spring mud.

The Big Four, as Huntington, Crocker, Stanford, and Hopkins came to be known, needed all the money they could lay their enterprising hands on. Stanford convinced the state legislature to give the Central Pacific ten thousand dollars for every mile of track that was laid within the state, and counties all along the route signed up for more than half a million dollars’ worth of CP stock. All that seems not to have been enough because in April they asked San Francisco voters to give the railroad six hundred thousand dollars in cash. The governor’s brother Philip Stanford even pitched in and helped raise funds by visiting polling places and chatting with the voters about approving the plan. According to a sworn statement sometime later, Phil Stanford threw around more than mere words amongst the voters. The statement more than implied that he threw money “by the handful among the voters” and he was “making bargains with gangs of men to vote in a body for the subscription.” Not to surprising, the Central Pacific won.