In charge of the enormous undertaking was a quartet of capitalists who would come to be known as the Big Four. The acknowledged, though not unchallenged, leader was the president of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford of Sacramento. A majestic figure with his burly frame, ramrod posture, and thick beard and hair, he had amassed a small fortune as a Placer County merchant and then served as Unionist governor of California before he reached forty. The CP’s hard-driving construction boss was another big, burly young man with chin whiskers, Charles Crocker; two of its key capital raisers were the hardware merchant Mark Hopkins and a partner of Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington. Missing by now was the man who most of all had dreamed the great dream, Theodore Judah, a brilliant leader in conceiving the transcontinental route, lobbying the railroad bill through Congress, and raising money. He had died of yellow fever after crossing Panama.
As the Chinese threaded the railway through the mountain passes and over trestle bridges, Stanford’s office in Sacramento became a kind of GHQ. The generalissimo recruited thousands of workers and horses and flung them into the battle, brought locomotives and other heavy weapons around the Horn and up the Sacramento River to the railhead, shipped quantities of food and other supplies to the front-line troops (but expected them to live off the land too), communicated with Crocker in code, fought the wretched weather, made visits to what he called “the Front.” He had to deal with local nabobs commanding their territory, most notably with the imperious Mormon leader, Brigham Young. And he had to deal with labor shortages, to the point where the partners considered importing blacks from the East or even Confederate war prisoners.
Crocker was field commander. Spurred by messages from Stanford to “double his energy” or “move forward to north pass,” he shuttled back and forth in his private car, or rode on his sorrel mare. “There was no need for sympathy for those men,” he later told the historian H. H. Bancroft. “Why I used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull, stopping along the way wherever there was anything amiss and raising old Nick.” When the Chinese workers finally lost patience and struck for a pay increase to $40 a month and an eight-hour day in the tunnels—“Eight hours a day good for white men, all the same good for Chinamen,” their circular explained—Crocker put it down in a week, “I stopped the provisions on them,” he said later, “stopped the butchers from butchering, and used such coercive measures.” This was food the Chinese had already bought.
But the dread enemy was not strikers or slackers or Indians—it was the Union Pacific spearing its way west. Stanford and Crocker picked up rumors that the foe was stealing their supplies and even their men. Desperately they threw every reserve into the battle, hauling locomotives on sleighs and even on logs, working shifts of men through long days, goading their men to faster progress along the Nevada flats. When word arrived that the Union Pacific had laid 7.5 miles of track in a long, twenty-hour day, a Central Pacific crew put 10 miles down in thirteen hours. Seeking above all else the huge federal land grants, the two companies fought for exclusive rights-of-way and even graded 100 miles of parallel roadbed.
In the end, though, the two armies met peacefully at Promontory Point near Ogden, Utah. The CP’s “Jupiter,” wood-burning engine No. 6o, proudly stood, cowcatcher to cowcatcher, facing the UP’s coal-burner, No. 119. While the chief engineers of the rival roads shook hands, workers on the cowcatchers held out champagne bottles to each other. Stanford and his UP counterpart, Thomas C. Durant, used silver sledges to drive home the golden spikes. Both men missed the spike a few times, but no matter: America had its first transcontinental railroad.
The poet Bret Harte wondered what the engines said, head to head, each with half the world behind its back:
You brag of your East! You do? Why, 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.…
After the ceremony of the golden spikes, the men who had built the Union Pacific, mostly Irish, could just keep “headed west,” now traveling on the road their Chinese counterparts had built. The CP’s Chinese workers (who are hardly evident in a photograph of the ceremony) drifted off to mining camps or headed back to California, some of them perhaps riding on the rails they had hauled into place. Newcomers and locals alike, they—and later a mellow philosopher from Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson—could share in the glories of the trip: immense numbers of ducks settling in the northern shallows of the Great Salt Lake, purple mountains beyond, and snow-covered ranges in the distance. Emerson was fascinated by the constantly shifting tints and lights of this landscape.
For Easterners, the terrain seemed incredibly varied. At one moment the train would be steaming through irrigated fields where corn, wheat, potatoes, and diverse fruits grew luxuriantly. Then the engine would be chugging through the canyons of the Humboldt River—“torn, jagged, barren rocks and cliffs, that looked as if wasted by a hundred centuries of lightning and storm,” a traveler with Emerson later remembered; “then through an alkaline region, where the surface of the ground was white like a city street that has been watered with salt water; but the alkali was thicker.” All of this reminded Emerson of biblical lands. Then they were pounding through country without trees, nothing but sagebrush and a “prickly shrub, and a sort of Scotch broom,” with small plumes of steam in the distance marking hot springs. Then finally the “grand stormy rush” down the Sierras and onto the Sacramento plain.
One sight above all electrified the passengers, causing some to get off and try their fortune—gold mining. They could see men spraying powerful jets of water against the gravel sides of mountains, washing away the earth so that the yellow ore might be exhumed. Long flumes carried the water, often for miles along the tracks. Almost the whole distance, indeed, mining towns were visible, perched on hills or straggling through canyons, and enveloped by once-barren hillsides covered with miners’ tents and gear. Everything in these towns appeared to revolve around minerals, including quartz; everyone in town seemed to own a gold or quartz claim, almost the way Easterners owned gardens. A visitor in one of these towns, during much excitement about a coming circus, observed “little urchins going out to the fields beyond the town with their mothers’ tin kitchen-pans” to “pan out enough to pay their entrance-fee to the circus.”
Passengers riding the Central Pacific to Sacramento found a bustling little town, proud of its position as the state capital and the hub of Central Valley agriculture, at the head of the tidewater on the Sacramento River. Many passengers left the train here to take the riverboat west to San Francisco; others traveled south on the new Southern Pacific railway. Often these included Chinese and Irish who would find jobs on the railroad itself. Spearing south along the San Joaquin River, through the immense burning prairie between the Sierras and the coast, the Southern Pacific connected with lovely towns like Stockton, which seemed to one traveler aflutter with windmills which irrigated domestic gardens. At Merced, tourists could turn east to view the mountains, gorges, and waterfalls of Yosemite. It was in this spectacular area that Emerson in 1881 encountered a young botanist and sawmill worker who told him excitedly of the local flora and of his long rambles through the mountains he loved. This was the “father of the wilderness,” John Muir.
Renewing their trip through the Central Valley as it widened out, travelers crossed a farmland of almost limitless expanse and diversity. At first, settlers from the east had found it hard to adjust their farming ways to the new seasonal rhythms of California. They had sown when the rains ended in May or June, only to see their crops turn brown in the long dry California summer. As time passed they found the grass on the plains to be abundant and nutritious, curing naturally in the summer sun and providing ample feed for sheep and market cattle. Only workhorses and oxen required grain. Plowing early in December and sowing and planting in March, farmers could grow six and even eight crops of alfalfa.
The rub was always wate
r. Farmers often joined hands to build reservoirs and canals, windmills and artesian wells. Be more careful in buying water than land, old-timers advised.
It was a world of Spaniards and Indians. As travelers moved south, they could tell at a glance who lived in the houses along the way. “If the house is of reeds and straw, the owner is an Indian; if it is of adobe, it is a Spaniard who lives there; if it is of frame, be sure it is an ‘American,’ ” noted a visitor from the East. It was a peaceful land. A traveler through the lonely southern counties reported he had “stopped to cook my dinner in the Indian huts, asked for a night’s lodging at Spanish ranchos, slept sometimes on the green grass, with my horse staked out, my feet near a fire, and wrapped in overcoat and blanket; and journeying thus day after day, I had not even a revolver with me, and no arm larger than a pocket-knife.”
It was also a land of big ranches. A Spanish padrone might own 40,000 acres, 1,500 or so young colts, several thousand sheep, and so many cattle he could not count them until after the annual rodeo. This was the big event of the year. After the stock in a large district had been driven onto one great plain, vacqueros would pick out each owner’s cows, break them up into separate herds, brand the calves that innocently followed their mothers, and either turn the whole mass loose again or drive them home. The señor often lived in a house of adobe, perhaps with a store in front from which he sold dry goods and grape brandy to his Indian hands. Beyond the house might be a clay oven for baking bread, and beyond that the shanties for Indians and their roosting chickens. Many Spanish homes had earthen floors covered with expensive rugs, reflecting the new wealth of these landowners after the Gold Rush demand for beef made cattle owners rich.
The great Spanish landowners owned most of California, a traveler noted; the land, the cattle, the horses, the sheep were theirs. No-fence laws assured ranchers of almost unlimited range for their cattle. They had good relations with their hands, and in return “no vacquero addressed the master without either touching or taking off his hat.” But they “were not business men; they liked to live free of care; and they found it easy to borrow money….They knew nothing of interest” and they often squandered their money. This old, easy, bucolic life could not escape the currents surging through southern California in the 1870s.
In particular, the town of Los Angeles was just about to emerge from its drowsy, indolent past when one might, on driving into El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, encounter market wagons full of “oranges, pumpkins, a lamb, corn, green peas in their pods, sugar-cane, lemons and strawberries” and one-story, dilapidated houses whose inner courtyards were lovely gardens of flowers and fruit. The Southern Pacific came to the town in 1876, however, after the railroad exacted large subsidies from the city fathers. Los Angeles was not ready to be consigned to a backwater of progress, which was the fate of other cities that resisted the Southern Pacific’s strong-arm tactics.
Soon the railroad began shipping to the east wine, paper-wrapped oranges packed in ice, lemons, walnuts, and other products of the area’s new irrigated intensive farming. A growing emphasis on agriculture ended once and for all the cattle ranchers’ rule over the range, for cattle now had to be fenced in to prevent their trampling freshly planted fields or ripening harvests.
Young entrepreneurs were helping transform the city. One of these was Phineas Banning, who had begun to make carriages at the port of Wilmington, south of Los Angeles, built a wharf and warehouses, and developed a stage connection with the city. Banning was said to be the first to use a wireless telegraph in the area, the first to dig an artesian well, and the first to have an oil well. But now a spectacular real estate boom was about to begin, one that would transform the city and its environs. The old Los Angeles of flowers and vineyards would no longer exist. After years of struggles with the Southern Pacific, Banning would sell out to it.
The most direct route from Los Angeles to northern Californian ports in the 1870s was still by steamer or packet. Beating their way north, passengers could watch the great Pacific rollers breaking on the sands, the wooded and craggy coastal ranges, and sometimes the snow-covered Sierra peaks in the distance. It was always a breathtaking moment when the ship entered the Golden Gate and turned starboard to the fabled city on the hills.
San Francisco! With its fog-shrouded mornings, steep dunelike hills, busy, picturesque harbor, and lusty yet cultivated style, the city was still a magnet for the richest rich and the poorest poor, for immigrants from west and east, for Chinese, Irish, Yankees, Italians, and more Spanish from the south. It was now the economic capital of the West, and a cultural and social center as well. The Big Four had not remained long in Sacramento after their Central Pacific was built and making money. In the mid-seventies Stanford, his wife, and his son moved into a $2 million mansion that was greeted in the local press as “Stanford’s Palace, the Finest Private Residence in America.” The place was a great pile with marble steps, bay windows, billiard room, picture gallery, “Pompeian reception room,” ballroom, and forty or so other rooms, decorated in the Italian and other styles, and topped by a glass dome illuminating the entrance hall seventy feet below. Natives and visitors alike gawked at this and other ornate mansions built on Nob Hill.
While the Big Four ran their railroad empire out of their Southern Pacific offices, also long since removed from Sacramento, their wives and daughters dominated the social life of the city. For a wealthy young woman like Lucy S. Jones, niece of a high railroad executive, life in San Francisco in the 1870s was a weekly round of social calls, dress fittings, parties, cultural events, and church. Her brothers took singing lessons while she studied French. Her carefree life was shadowed only by the illnesses that coursed through San Francisco—influenza, consumption, scarlet fever. One young friend died, others were home in bed, the cook and Chinese servant were too ill to come to work, and Lucy and her aunt battled recurrent colds. “So many are going now,” she wrote in her diary after one friend’s death, and then crossed it out, as if it were bad luck.
Down in Chinatown, not many blocks north and east of Nob Hill, lived the people at the bottom of the social pyramid, in “dark and dingy garrets and cellars, steaming with air breathed over and over, and filled with the fumes of opium,” according to a newspaper report. By the mid-eighties the Chinese quarter had become known as an inner city of brothels, opium dens, and gambling halls, described by the historian H. H. Bancroft as “closely packed with some 25,000 souls, nearly all males, with a sprinkling of loose females.” This dense honeycomb was mostly owned by white absentee landlords. The Chinese experienced both discrimination and segregation, both legal and illegal harassment. “Negroes, Mongolians, and Indians” were excluded from the public schools. It was illegal to bring Chinese women into the country unless they were persons of “correct habits” and good character. In fact, estimated Bancroft, of 116,000 Chinese in California in 1876, 6,000—or 5 percent—may have been women, further arresting Chinese assimilation in California.
Feeling against the Chinese had mounted on the return of thousands of railroad workers from the Sierras. Whites reviled them for their willingness to accept low wages and harsh conditions, their alien ways, their pigtails, their Taoist stoicism, their habit of sending to the “old country” both their money and the bones of their dead. Labor leaders held mass meetings, formed “anti-coolie” clubs, organized mobs to climb Nob Hill and shout “the Chinese must go” outside the mansions of the magnates deemed responsible for bringing in Chinese labor. To win the labor vote, Democrats often passed planks against the Chinese.
The opposition of labor was especially telling, for San Francisco was already becoming a “labor town.” Most of the trades had been organized since the fifties. Building trades were especially strong, in line with San Francisco’s construction boom. In 1868 unions won the eight-hour day, but the following year labor faced its biggest challenge, the incoming flood of unorganized workers discharged from the Central Pacific Railroad.
Anti-Chinese sentiment becam
e the binding force in the labor movement. Such organizations as the Knights of St. Crispin, shoemakers directly competing with a major Chinatown industry, and the Plumbers’ and Carpenters’ Eight-Hour League organized spectacular mass meetings throughout the 1870s, demonstrations that often exploded into riots and the burning and looting of Chinatown. Out of these meetings also erupted the meteoric Workingmen’s Party, led by the fiery Denis Kearney and fueled by economic frustration—a drought, a decrease in mining returns, a depression, and railroad strikes in the East. In June 1878, Workingmen won one-third of the seats in the state’s second constitutional convention, even against a coalition of Democrats and Republicans.
Fixed as it was on the issue of ending Chinese immigration, however, the Workingmen’s Party’s participation in the convention proved to be its undoing. Within a year of ratification of an anti-Chinese article of the new constitution, the United States Circuit Court declared that virtually all of its provisions violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
In the 1870s San Francisco was outliving its reputation as a frontier town full of saloons, opium dens, and gold seekers and other philistines. The city was becoming a place for thinkers like Henry George, poets like Bret Harte, historians like Bancroft, musicians, artists. The patronage of the rich was providing symphony orchestras, opera houses, museums, galleries. For years, Tivoli maintained a twelve-month opera season. Newspapers in seven languages offered a peculiarly western brand of humor, developed by Mark Twain and others. Edwin Booth broke all attendance records for American theater when he played for eight weeks in the city. Lillian Russell, appearing in Babes in the Woods wearing purple tights and high-buttoned shoes, delightfully shocked the city. Lucy Jones’s cultural life included Shakespeare and Wagner.
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