 26 The Central Pacific Railroad The Pacific Railroad Bill, which closed the long struggle for a transcontinental railway, provided that the road should start on the one hundredth meridian between the Republican and Platte Rivers and proceed westward along the most direct, central and practical route to the western boundary of Nevada, there to meet and connect with the line of the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California. The bill thus authorized the construction of two distinct roads. The one, designated the Union Pacific, was to reach from Omaha to the California boundary. The other, known as the Central Pacific, was to be built eastward from Sacramento until it crossed the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It is the purpose of this narrative to deal only with the construction of the Central Pacific, except where the history of the two roads becomes inseparable, and to leave the fascinating but somewhat intricate affairs of the Union Pacific and Oake aims as credit-mobile aid to other riders. The Central Pacific found its origin in the enthusiasm of one man and owed its completion to the determination and shrewdness of four. A civil engineer named Theodore D. Judah had come to the coast in 1854 to lay out a pioneer railroad called the Sacramento Valley Line, which ran between the city of Sacramento and Folsom. Before Judah was through with this local road, he had been caught by the challenge of the Sierra and began to plan the conquest of the mountains. Within the next few years, often in the dead of winter when the snow lay fifteen or twenty feet deep on the higher levels, Judah made twenty-two examinations of possible routes across the Sierra, and in the intervals between these trips he tried to organize popular backing for his undertaking. The California public, so far as mere talk was concerned, was full of enthusiasm for the road, but for a long time Judah's efforts did not bring out any financial support. A great railroad convention was held at San Francisco in 1859 at the call of the state legislature to which every county in California, Arizona, Washington, and Oregon was requested to send delegates. Its sessions, presided over by John Bidwell, lasted for several days but accomplished little or nothing of a practical nature. He continued his agitation, however, as vigorously as ever, and at last secured the tangible assistance the enterprise so badly needed. This was the incorporation, June 28, 1861, of the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California with a capital stock of eighty-five thousand shares and a nominal value of a hundred dollars each. The officers of the new company were all engaged in business in Sacramento and from the very beginning the Central Pacific became more of a partnership affair than a corporation. Leland Stanford, nominated but ten days before the organization of the company for the governorship of the state by the Republican Party, and destined to win the election the following September, was chosen president. Collis P. Huntington became vice president. Mark Hopkins, treasurer, and James Bailey, a jeweler through whom Judah had become acquainted with Stanford and Huntington, became secretary. Judah himself was chosen chief engineer. The three men first mentioned, together with Charles Crocker, whose name intentionally did not appear as one of the company's directors, were in reality the Central Pacific Railroad. They afterwards became the most powerful railroad group in the West and for nearly a generation were the controlling factor in the state's economic development. At this time, however, they were neither very rich nor very widely known, and the task to which they had put their hands was overwhelmingly great. Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker were all born in New York, and Huntington, though a native of Connecticut, had lived most of his life in the same state. Stanford and Hopkins, as young men, were educated for the law, but Huntington and Crocker had known little schooling of any kind, except the schooling of poverty and hard work. All four reached California at the time of the Gold Rush, and eventually became the leading merchants of Sacramento. Stanford and Crocker were in the dry goods trade while Huntington and Hopkins, more than a decade before, had formed a mutually satisfactory partnership to deal in hardware and minor supplies. From the time these four men joined forces in the organization of the Central Pacific, until the combination was finally dissolved by death, they worked together as a unit, opposing a solid front to all opposition and never allowing personal disagreements or jealousies to defeat their purpose. This perfect teamwork largely accounted for their phenomenal success. It is remarkable, however, considering the character of the men, that they should have maintained such harmonious relations over so many years, for with a possible exception of Hopkins, all four were men of determined wills and vigorous opinions. FUTNOTE Huntington once said, Crocker attended to the construction of the road and he was a very earnest and good man. We did not agree in all things. He erred in judgment sometimes. IN FUTNOTE One of the reasons for the successful cooperation of the four was the wise division of labor very early made between them. Almost from the outset, Crocker was put in charge of the actual construction of the line. Huntington became the company's eastern representative, attending to the national legislation, purchasing material and securing funds. Stanford handled state politics and managed the financial end in California. And Hopkins, with his keen analytical mind, served as a valuable advisor for the others and particularly aided Stanford in local matters. When Judah presented his plan to these men in 1861 for a railroad across the Sierra, he was able to hold before them two inducements which made the enterprise less foolhardy from the financial standpoint than it seemed on its face. The first of these was a prospect of securing government subsidies of various kinds, and the second, the certainty of monopolizing the California Nevada trade by the proposed road, even though the line should stop far short of its announced goal. This Nevada trade, at the time of the Central Pacific's inception, was a prize worth seeking. Two years before the great Comstock load had been discovered in the Wachow Mountains, and a mining boom of tremendous proportions was already in progress. Nearly all the food and necessaries for the thousands who flocked to Carson City and Virginia City, as well as the tools and heavy machinery which were required for the mining operations, had to be freighted across the mountains. Literally tons of bullion were also being brought back annually to San Francisco for minting or shipment east, and in addition the passenger traffic to and from the mines was a bonanza in itself. Some idea of the value of this Nevada business, which the organizers of the Central Pacific proposed to secure, may be seen from Judah's report in 1862 on the Placerville-Carson Road. This, the most famous stage road of Northern California, ran from Placerville by way of Johnson Pass and Kingsbury Grade to the Wachow Valley. Over it, in the year of Judah's report, a hundred and twenty tons of freight were carried daily at rates varying from six to eight cents a pound, yielding an annual total of five and a quarter millions of dollars. A half million dollars additional were received from passenger fares, and Wells Fargo transported over two hundred thousand pounds of silver bullion not included in the figures for ordinary freight. If the Central Pacific, by building only partway across the mountains, could capture the greater part of that trade, together with that which passed over other stage roads, its directors might well afford to risk even the heavy initial cost of construction. The second inducement held out by Judah, that of federal subsidies, was of more immediate importance than even the Nevada freight, for it was manifestly impossible to provide the necessary finances for the road without some form of government assistance. In securing this federal aid, the backers of the Central Pacific were by no means disappointed, and an essential feature of the Pacific Railroad Bill, which Bailey and Judah helped to pass through Congress, was the grants of land and credits that bestowed upon the railroad companies. These were sufficient in themselves to tempt Huntington and his companions to begin actual operations. But two years later, by the act of 1864, the government proved itself even more generous and materially increased the subsidies carried in the original bill of 1862. As a result of these two bills, the builders of the Central Pacific stood to receive twelve thousand eight hundred acres of government land for each mile of track constructed, and, in addition, were allowed a credit in United States six percent bonds payable at the end of thirty years both as to principal interest of from sixteen thousand to forty eight thousand per mile, depending upon the nature of the ground over which the line ran. Following the example of Congress, the California legislature also passed various measures to aid the Central Pacific, enacting as high as seven bills in a single session on its behalf. The most important grants were made in 1864. Legislation of that year gave the company the right to issue twelve million dollars in first mortgage twenty years, seven percent bonds, and provided that the state should pay the interest for twenty years on the first one million five hundred thousand dollars issued, or a total of two million one hundred thousand dollars. A fund known as the Pacific Railroad Fund was created for this purpose by the levy of a special tax of eight cents on each hundred dollars of taxable property throughout the state. Property subsidies were also granted to supplement those of state and nation. Placer County subscribed for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of Central Pacific stock, issuing bonds and payment, and under a similar arrangement Sacramento County pledged three hundred thousand dollars. The company also obtained a valuable right-of-way, certain portions of the waterfront, and other public lands in the city of Sacramento. San Francisco, after a long struggle fought in the state legislature at the polls and before the courts, donated four hundred thousand dollars outright to the main road, and two hundred thousand dollars to its subsidiary, the Western Pacific. The latter road, connecting the Central Pacific with the San Francisco Bay by way of Stockton, Niles, San Jose and Oakland, also received valuable aid from San Joaquin and Santa Clara counties, and enjoyed besides the federal subsidies provided by the Act of 1864. Even though these various government subsidies were of princely proportions, the fate of the Central Pacific for two years hung in the balance. From the beginning the enterprise was for doomed to failure by the profits, and even its sponsors were not over-hopeful of the outcome. It was this skepticism that led Huntington to object when others planned a celebration at the laying of the first rail. Quote, If you want to jubilate in driving the first spike here, said he, go ahead and do it. I don't. These mountains look too ugly and I see too much work ahead. We may fail and I want to have as few people know it as we can, and if we get up a jubilation a little of anybody can drive the first spike, but there are many months of hard labor and unrest between the first and last spike. These months of hard labor and unrest between the first and last spike, which Huntington foresaw, not caring to boast as he was putting his armor on, were even worse than the builders anticipated. The difficulties of construction, of financing, of securing material, of combating opposition, of securing favorable legislation were tremendous, and would early have staggered less resourceful or less energetic men. The route chosen by Judah and supported by him against all subsequent attack followed in the main the old immigrant road from Sacramento to Donner Pass by way of Auburn, Clipper Cap, and Colfax, or Illinois Town, as it was then called. Footnote, Judah gave at one time thirty reasons for his choice of routes. From the summit of the mountains the line descended along a general course of the Truckee River to the Nevada Plains. A few miles beyond Colfax lay Dutch Flat, from which Judah proposed to build a wagon road to Carson Valley, thus diverting the Nevada traffic to the Central Pacific, until the railroad could be completed to the California Boundary. The selection of this route led to one of the first and most violent attacks on the Central Pacific. Rival lines such as the San Francisco and Washoe and the Sacramento Valley, whose history cannot be traced here, joined with an already outraged San Francisco and Placibil public to denounce the whole project. The road was dubbed the Dutch Flat Fraud and its builders were accused of securing government subsidies for a line with they had no intention of completing across the mountains. Whether or not there was truth in these charges, the fact remains that the Central's wagon road brought to it most of the Nevada trade and enabled it to pay very large returns while still under process of construction. Rival opposition was the least of the Central's difficulties. The Sierra Nevada's opposed a barrier nearly one hundred fifty miles wide, rising at times to an elevation of seven thousand feet. To overcome this, an army of workmen and teams had to be organized, sheltered, fed and paid. An incalculable amount of grading, filling, trestle building, cutting and tunneling, much of the way through solid rock, had to be accomplished. Mile upon mile of snowsheds had also to be built in the higher altitudes to protect the track in the winter so that material could later go forward for use of construction gangs hurrying the work across Nevada. The responsibility for this phase of the work fell upon Charles Crocker, who as head of the Charles Crocker Construction Company, afterwards superseded by the Contract and Finance Company, was in full charge of building operations. In reality the companies just mentioned were only the Big Four and Edwin B. Crocker operating under another name, for Huntington and his associates saw the advisability from many standpoints of keeping the roads construction in their own hands, as well as a financial advantage as to be gained from such an arrangement. But unlike the Credit Mobile A. which served the chief stockholders of the Union Pacific in similar capacity, the construction companies organized by the California builders, whether in connection with the Central Pacific or any of their other roads, never revealed the details of costs and profits to inquisitive congressional committees. Next to Huntington, Charles Crocker had the heaviest responsibility of the Four. Upon his shoulders fell a physical burden of the undertaking. The best testimony to his ability is that, along with the chief engineer, Montague, who succeeded Judah upon the latter's death, and Strobridge, who served as superintendent of construction, he carried the road over every difficulty mountain desert and man could place in its way. When white labor failed or became difficult to handle, he brought in thousands of Chinese Cooleys and used these Crocker's pets, as they were called, without mercy to himself or them. Even the winter snows were not allowed to check his impetuous ambition. While Crocker was carrying forward the construction work, Stanford, aided by Hopkins and an occasional visit from Huntington, was adroitly handling the state and local legislation necessary to secure the subsidies mentioned in the previous paragraph. In the East, meanwhile, Huntington gave himself to three great tasks, any one of which was beyond ordinary capacity. The first was to dispose of enough Central Pacific stock and bonds to finance operations, or, failing that, to borrow sufficient money on the personal security of himself and his associates to keep the road from lagging. His genius along this line was so marked that, even in the stress of the Civil War and its aftermath, he enabled the road to carry a floating debt of seven million dollars, for none of which had paid more than seven percent per annum, though the Union Pacific was charged a much higher premium and the common interest rates in California ranged from two to three percent per month. Footnote. At one time the single house of William E. Dodge & Company held the personal notes of Huntington and his associates for three million, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, so confident were the New York bankers of Huntington's ability to meet the Central's obligations. Infotone. Besides financing the road, Huntington had also to keep it supplied with material. This meant the purchase of every foot of rail used in the track, of locomotives, of passenger coaches, of flat cars, spikes, powder shovels, and all other implements from eastern manufacturers, since California at that time had nothing in the way of steel and iron foundries, and the shipment of this material either around a horn or across Panama. This was an especially difficult task while the war lasted. The government had prior right to most of the supplies required by the railroad, and even when cargoes could be secured, ships were not easily found. During the war freight rates increased from eighteen to forty-five dollars a ton. Marine insurance owing to the menace of southern privateersmen rose from two and one-half to ten percent. Railroad iron trebled in value, locomotives, rolling stock, everything in fact the Central Pacific required, had to be bought at increased prices. Even after the war, the rivalry of the Union Pacific and the market for the same material kept up the cost of rails and locomotives and made it hard to fill orders. Yet Huntington's genius overcame these difficulties and kept a steady stream of supplies flowing from the Atlantic seaboard to the construction camps in the Sierra. The following is a typical example of the methods by which Huntington accomplished his ends. In 1866 he succeeded in stealing a march on the Union Pacific in the purchase of 66,000 tons of rails, which the latter rode badly needed, and at the same time defeated a threatened combine on the part of the steel mills to increase the price. To get these rails to California required a large number of vessels, so Huntington went to a gentleman named E. B. Sutton to charter the necessary bottoms. The details of this interview are best given in Huntington's own words. Quote, I said, well, I want to get a good ship, a good steady ship, safe. I said, you go out and run around and give me a list of what you can find. He came in with three or four. He said, you can have this one for so much and this one for so much. What's your price, said I? It is too high. I can't take one of these ships. I am in no hurry, said I. The ships are coming in all along. Well, he came back. He went out three times, and he came back with twenty-three ships. I got them all down whilst talking. Well, said I, Sutton, I will take them. Take them? said he. Take what? Said I. I will take those ships if they are A-1. Well, he said, I can't let you have them. I thought you wanted only one. He said, I will have to have two or three of them myself. Said I, not of these you won't. Well, those ships took about forty-five thousand tons of rails. Mr. Sutton told me afterward, Huntington, you would have had to pay ten dollars per ton, at least, more if I had known you wanted all those ships. That would have been four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. End quote. Huntington's third task in the East lay in the field of politics. At this time, or a little later, the Central Pacific maintained an agent in Washington to whom they paid a salary of twenty thousand dollars, and allowed an un-audited expense account of twice that amount. But this man was only a subordinate. Huntington himself was the real director of railroad affairs in Washington. What he accomplished in this capacity was more important from the standpoint of the Central Pacific than any of his other work. Aside from the subsidies earlier granted by Congress, one of the measures of most advantage to the California railroad was passed in 1866. By the act of 1864 the eastern limit of the Central Pacific had been fixed one hundred and fifty miles east of the California Nevada boundary. The territory beyond that line belonged exclusively to the Union Pacific. The bill, indeed, went even farther and permitted the Union Pacific to continue its operations westward if it reached the junction point ahead of the Central Pacific. This clause was, of course, obnoxious to the backers of the Central, who were secretly determined to carry their line entirely across Nevada into Utah and enter Salt Lake City ahead of the Union Pacific. To object to this feature of the bill at the time, however, might have defeated the entire measure with its large subsidies from the federal government. Consequently, Huntington accepted the objectionable provision and bided his time until by the enactment of the bill in 1866 he succeeded in releasing the Central from its limitations and in obtaining the desired right to build eastward until a junction should be made with the Union Pacific. The measure was a perfectly legitimate piece of legislation and deserved the large support which it received in Congress, but Huntington had taken no chances of its defeat by rival lobbyists. In later years in his own brusque way he told the following incident relative to the passage of the measure, quote, a congressman by the name of Alley from Massachusetts when the bill passed came over to me. He says, Huntington, he says, there must have been great corruption, great money used, or you could not have passed that bill. Well, I said to him, Mr. Alley, I'm surprised to hear you talking that way of your associates here. I am very much surprised, but I will be frank and tell you that I brought over half a million dollars to use every dollar of it if necessary to pass this bill. I got a large majority of them, I knew that was in favor of it without the use of one dollar. We still had our means and wanted to get every vote, so I went into the gallery for votes, one hand after another. I sat right there, I examined the face of every man, and I'm a good judge of faces. I examined them carefully through my glass. I didn't see but one man I thought would sell his vote, and you know devilish well I didn't try that, so I didn't use one dollar, end quote. Of course, Huntington's ability did not always secure the enactment of favorable measures or prevent the passage of bills opposed to the Central's interest. One act, for example, was carried through Congress fixing the gauge of the road at four feet, eight and one-half inches, after Huntington had convinced Lincoln that five feet was the proper width and had secured the issuance of an executive order to that effect. But even in this case, Huntington turned to feet to his advantage and drove a satisfactory bargain with his opponents on the issue, footnote. By a presidential decree of January 12, 1864, the western base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains was officially fixed where the line of the Central Pacific crosses Arcade Creek in the Sacramento Valley. Opponents of the railroad pointed out that this decree actually moved the mountains twenty miles west of their true location across a comparatively level plain, thus increasing the government's loan to the road from sixteen thousand dollars a mile to forty-eight thousand dollars a mile for the twenty miles involved. In footnote. With the passage of the bill permitting the Central to inter-Union Pacific territory east of California, the two rivals began a headlong race unique in railroad history. In this contest, the Central was contending for a double prize. Every mile attract laid east of the Sierras, brought the government subsidy of twenty sections of land and a credit of thirty-two thousand dollars. Equally important was the revenue to be derived from the Utah traffic, if Salt Lake could be reached before the Union Pacific built so far westward as to shut its rival away from the Mormon settlements. Huntington, indeed, had set a much farther goal for the Central Pacific's eastern terminus and later blamed the apathy and opposition of San Francisco for holding the road back, when with proper support in California it might have reached the Green River and controlled the traffic of all Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. Had this object been realized, one might also add that California Road would have been relieved from that thorn in the flesh the Oregon short line, and the building of the Southern Pacific to New Orleans and of the San Francisco Portland line might have been delayed for many years. The stirring details of the race between the Union and Central Pacific, the one building eastward across the Nevada and Utah deserts, the other progressing westward from the Black Hills, cannot be told here at length. On the one side was a corporation backed by almost limitless resources, well-entrenched in federal politics, transporting its material from a comparatively near base of supplies over its own line, and relying pretty largely upon Irish labor for construction purposes. On the other side were four men, by this time well enough supplied with funds, skillful as their rivals in the use of political machinery, compelled, however, to ship supplies by long sea voyages, using Chinese coulis by the thousand for grading, track laying, and the innumerable tasks of railroad building, maintaining a secret watch over the rival's affairs, hoodwinking the agents he sent out, stripping the markets wherever possible of material to force the Union's construction crews to stand idle, and obtaining government bonds for 60 miles of track to which their opponents laid claim. Around these elements centered the greatest race in the history of railroad construction. The two roads met at Promontory Point in Utah, an insignificant place some 53 miles west of Ogden. Here on the 10th of May 1869, in the presence of a thousand spectators, the two tracks were joined. Silver and gold spikes were driven in a silver-bound tie of California laurel. Speeches were made. A ninja from the east touched front with a ninja from the west, and the old, old dream of linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans became a reality. Quote, Sir, said the telegram sent by the participating officials of the two roads to President Grant, we have the honor to report that the last rail is laid, the last spike is driven. The Pacific Railroad is finished." End quote. Finished, too, for California was much that it made her previous history. Slow going ox wagons no longer crossed the Sierra. The mining counties dwindled in population while the agricultural regions in the cities took on increasing life. Great land grants of early days were gradually broken up to make room for a rapidly enlarged population. The cattle baron retired to the foothills and out-of-the-way valleys to make way for grain fields, orchards, and vineyards. The San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys began to fulfill the old prophecies that one day they would become the granary of the Pacific. California products made their appearance in eastern markets, and eastern tourists daily enriched the California merchants. Travel became a source of unity and culture. Thousands of persons, long stranded on the coast because of the difficult overland journey, rushed eagerly back to their old homes in the States, and after a brief stay rushed even more eagerly back to the West. Tenfold more enthusiastic for California than ever they had been before. Real estate booms grew to be familiar phenomena. Labor problems thrust themselves upon the public notice. The state government failed more and more to meet the demands of its citizens. Society and business became more complex. On every side new forces, social, economic, and political, marked the development of a new day. In this period of transition the builders of the Central Pacific played a foremost part, for their celebration at promontory point was for them the beginning rather than the end of a great task. The line from Sacramento to Ogden was only a single link and a great system yet to be constructed. By means of the Western Pacific a line running from Sacramento to San Jose, with a branch from Niles to San Francisco Bay, known as the San Francisco, Oakland, and Alameda Railroad, the Central had an outlet to Tidewater. Later the road got control of most of the Oakland waterfront and sought to occupy Yerba-Wayne Island, deeming it necessary to control every avenue of approach to the city of San Francisco, the Central next absorbed the California Pacific, which ran from Sacramento to the Ejo and carried it on to Benicia, where ferry connections were established with Port Costa, thus forestalling any competition from that approach to San Francisco. Similarly the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad, which had been built down the peninsula largely through subsidies provided by the two cities whose name at Boer passed under control of the Central directors and completed the desired monopoly of San Francisco trade. The process was aided by a grant from the state legislature of 60 acres of land for terminal facilities on the shore of Mission Bay. While these local developments were in progress the Central Pacific found itself threatened in two dangerous quarters. The Union Pacific, stopped at Ogden by the Central from proceeding to California, sought an outlet to the Pacific by way of Portland. The building of the Oregon short line, thus threatened to divert from the Central most of the Oriental trade. By running a line of steamers from Portland to San Francisco, a still more serious menace, the Union Pacific might even take over a large share of the California traffic to the east unless the Central in some way could protect itself. But this was not the most serious menace the California railroad had to face. Before the Civil War the best judgment of the country as shown in a previous chapter favored the extreme southern route for the Pacific Railroad. The proposed line along the 35th parallel was also highly recommended. The war checked but did not kill the interest in these two routes and before the Central Pacific itself was well established, other companies where it worked to build into California along both of these more southerly routes. Should a road reach the Pacific over either route it meant incalculable loss to the Central because the ladders long haul across the Sierra with the heavy grades and winding track made competition with the Southern Road impossible on anything like equal terms. But the men who had shown sufficient metal 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 government 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 for agricultural development foretold enormous rates, to close the eastern border of the state to rival lines, or, failing this, to keep them south of the Tahachapi and to secure for themselves a three-road to the east, independent of the Union Pacific and without the handicap of the Sierra. Incidentally, too, the prospect of acquiring some tens of thousands of acres of rich agricultural land was not all together 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 northwestern 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 through the Coast County south of San Francisco. This was the Southern Pacific Railroad Company of California, and like the mustard seed mentioned 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 Park Survey from San Jose 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 authorized along the line of the 35th parallel. By the acquisition of the San Francisco San Jose Railroad, which by this time had reached Gilroy in the Salinas Valley, and by showing an apparent intention of continuing down the coast and 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 Tahachopee. 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 Tahachopee Colorado line to Los Angeles, and of continuing this by way of the San Gorgonial Pass to Fort Yuma. Two short extensions of its line from Gilroy, the one running to Soledad in Monterey County, and the other to Tre Espinos 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 its 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 effectively killed all hopes of the Southern Pacific standing out as an independent road. Beginning at Goshen, where the Central Pacific stopped, the Southern Pacific's tracks were laid through Williamson's favorite pass, the Tahachapi, and then 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 32nd parallel. To meet this road at Yuma was not sufficient. The Southern 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 wholehearted support. Opposed to Huntington was Thomas A. Scott to the Texas Pacific, who was seeking to extend his own road to the California line. To succeed in this he must obtain government aid in the form of land grants and federal bonds. Huntington used all the skill he could muster to defeat this 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. Footnote. Huntington, however, counted upon substantial subsidies from the legislatures of the territories through which the road ran. In footnote. In these and in other ways he successfully defeated Scott's plans for the Texas Pacific, and was able to carry out the program for his own line. Well, Huntington was thus engaged in check-making Scott in Washington. The rails of the Southern Pacific, in the face of a government order to the contrary, were hurried through to 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 the road running in the 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 the 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, Huntington and his associates afterwards formed a corporation known as the Southern Pacific Company. This was chartered by the state of Kentucky in 1884 and by stock ownership and lease has since controlled the combined properties of the Central and Southern Pacific Railroad companies. This chapter is 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 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. Chapter 27 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 farming 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 invested. 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 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 question of water rights had not yet been stripped of confusion by adequate legislation and judicial interpretation. All together, therefore, the lot of the small rancher was not such as to make him a satisfied and contented man. He, like his fellow citizens in the towns and cities, was inclined to radicalism. Yet Edmund Burke and 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 everyday 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 men, though out of respect or dedication they had to say something of those 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 these 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 Mobile, the Indian Frauds and the Whiskey Ring were merely symptomatic. New York was given to the world 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 goal by control of cabinet officials and insolently damning the public in the bargain. In business and in politics the whole country was suffering the worst moral collapse it has yet experienced. George F. Horr's indictment of the period, severe as it was, contained nothing of exaggeration. On May 6th, 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 byword 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 turn 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 in for which it should be used when gained is a promotion of selfish ambition and the gratification of personal revenge. I have heard that suspicion haunts the footsteps of the trusted companions of the President. As already intimated, California politics in the period under discussion suffered from the same ills which horror found in the national capital and in New York. No branch of the state government was free from this low tone of 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 and separately connected with all legislative bodies. The California legislature, unfortunately, had behind it no tradition of honest government. 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, naively framed on the supposition that public officials could safely be trusted with power, imposed few restraints on the law making power of the body, and the combination was exceedingly injurious to the state. Complaint 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 in the last few days of this 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. Quote, 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 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 have 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 separate statutes were passed to enable school districts to build schoolhouses, or to do something else of a like local nature. One statute was enacted to change the orthography of an unknown place, and two or more to change the names of some such places. Three several statutes were passed to prohibit 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 obligated 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 in 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 103 working days had passed by, they found it necessary to begin again to repeal or 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 to 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 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 the various kindred enterprises offered rare opportunities for exploitation of the city's funds. Our official rascals may be set down as the meanest in America, 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 a 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 could 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 grievances of economic origin. For most 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 10 cents a mile and a maximum freight rate of 15 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 Pacific officials denied the power of the state to pass such legislation and effectively killed all bills of the kind. Whether rates as a whole were extortionate or reasonable as 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 opinions 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 stagecoach, 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 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 Tidewater 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 Winamuck in Nevada lies east of the Sierra Nevada mountains and is about four hundred miles near Chicago than San Francisco. Yet the freight rate from Chicago to Winamuck was two and one-third times as great as a rate from Chicago to San Francisco by way of Winamuck. The reasoning by which the railroad justified this practice was not convincing to inland shippers. The principles upon which most of these discriminations were based, for example that of the long and short haul and the lower rates for Tidewater points, have since been settled in favor of the railroads, but at that time they were an effective source of aggravation to thousands of shippers and cost the railroads heavily in public favor. Other practices, legitimate neither then or now, were just as freely, if not quite so openly indulged in, to the further unpopularity of the railroad and the real harm of the public. Uniform freight rates and service prevailed only in theory and were determined largely by the relation of the individual shipper to the road. The Central Pacific was charged with granting rebates, discriminating between shippers and the allotment of cars, manipulating service to injure or favor some particular patron or community, and otherwise abusing the tremendous power which its monopoly of the state's transportation facilities conferred upon it. Suits brought against the railroad for real or fancied injuries seldom netted the plaintiff anything but loss. The most capable lawyers of the state were in the employee of the Central Pacific, and it was natural that the road should have a tremendous advantage in dealing with an individual opponent. Unless the latter were gifted with unusual resources he could scarcely survive the delays, appeals, and endless technical obstacles which the company could obstruct as suit, even though the legal advantages were on his side. The success of the railroad in obtaining favorable decisions was not credited by the common opinion, however, entirely to the ability of its legal staff, for there was a feeling abroad in the seventies that judges as well as legislatures could be bent to do the Central Pacific's will. In the matter of taxes the railroad also gave offense, owing to the limitations of space this subject, like many others in the chapter, can only be touched upon. Public opinion on it was pretty well summed up, however, by Volney E. Howard before the State Constitutional Convention of 1878. Quote, it is said by Mr. Stanford, Howard remarked, that their railroads pay five hundred thousand dollars in taxes and it is shown by their official documents and reports that if they were taxed as other people are taxed on the value of the property that they would pay annually over three million dollars. But they are not taxed as other people are taxed. In my county and in others they elect the assessor and in my county the road that cost on an average of twenty five thousand per mile to build was assessed at six thousand dollars a mile and land which they are selling sometimes for ten dollars per acre which they received in subsidy from the government they have taxed at a dollar per acre. In quote, for these and other reasons the Central Pacific became the object of bitter and deep-rooted hostility in California and men came to ascribe to it the responsibility for most of the hurtful economic and political conditions from which they suffered. Another source of popular discontent in the 70s was the large land holdings which in some sections of the state reached the proportions of actual monopolies. Aside from the railroad grants to be spoken of later this land problem was largely a heritage from the old Spanish-Mexican period. The sparse population and limitless extent of unoccupied territory together with the peculiar demands of a cattle-raising people encouraged a system of princely holdings in the California of early days. The Mexican government was most liberal in its grants to individuals and the secularization of the missions also through enormous areas into private hands. Thus by 1846 it was estimated that eight million acres were held by eight hundred grantees. When the first rush to the Goldfields started the newcomers paid a little attention to these large holdings of agricultural and grazing lands, but before long squatters and rival claimants began to throw the old system into utmost confusion. Title to many of the grants had not been perfected. Others were fraudulently held and in the case of nearly all indefinite or carelessly drawn boundaries caused serious overlapping and left large areas in dispute. As population increased and mining ceased to absorb general attention the settlement of these perplexing agrarian questions became vital to public interest. In 1849 and again in 1850 following investigations ordered by the government reports were sent to Washington on the subject of California titles. Congress however could not agree on any settled policy with regard to the California lands until 1851. In that year after a deal of wrangling the famous Land Act of March 3 was enacted. The bill created a board of land commissioners before whom the grantees under the old Spanish-Mexican regime were required to appear with witnesses and documents to establish ownership. Failure to meet this requirement within a specified time caused forfeiture of title. As this act worked out it was in reality a violation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, one provision of which guaranteed that property held in the seated Mexican territory would be inviolably respected by the United States. Under the bill however these titles were thrown into the utmost uncertainty. An endless litigation followed the attempts of the commission to adjudicate the cases brought before it. Its decisions affected nearly 13 million acres and as appeals could be carried from the commission to the United States courts more than 30 years went by before many of the claims were settled. In the meanwhile two classes of persons suffered. The native Californians, original holders of the grants, were robbed by squatters squeezed by shrewd businessmen who lent them money at two or three percent a month with which to meet the costs of litigation and other demands for ready cash, and defrauded right and left by designing lawyers. But the native Californians were not the only sufferers, small settlers, men who had but little capital found land investments dangerous because titles were so insecure. Frequently those who bought small tracts in good faith were driven off by some more powerful claimant or compelled to exhaust their last resources in the courts to retain possession only in the end to see house, ranch, and improvements pass into other hands. Under these conditions agricultural advancement was slow. Needed improvements such as irrigation works could not be undertaken on a large scale and worst of all the land passed into the hand of speculators whose wealth enabled them to defend their holdings before the law and to keep them intact until increasing population brought enhanced values. Large holdings were also made possible by the methods employed by the federal government in disposing of its public lands. While sound enough in theory these lent themselves to various kinds of fraud and evasion by which the speculator profited at the expense of the actual settler. The state also aided the monopolist both to its own serious loss and the hurt of the small rancher. California like many other western states had received princely gifts of land at various times from the federal government. These included swamp and overflowed lands within the state boundary so-called school lands consisting of every 16th and 35th section of the federal domain in California and various minor grants for a state university, an agricultural college, and other public purposes. All told the state thus received from the federal government nearly nine million acres of public land. It was intended that this land should be sold to actual settlers for a fixed price of a dollar twenty-five an acre, and while a good share of it was thus actually disposed of, far too much passed into hands of large owners, commonly dubbed land hogs. First and last the government also granted to the pioneer railroads of the state some 15 million acres of California land. Much of this was of little value but other portions lay in the richest sections of the state. The prices on this land nomally ranged from two fifty to ten dollars an acre but the railroad builders were accused of keeping the most valuable land off the market entirely, selling it to speculators, and buying it in themselves to hold for future profit. On top of this were innumerable disputes between the railroads and those settlers who had preempted government land along the company's right-away. The culmination of these controversies was a pitched battle between the regular officers of the law, representing the Southern Pacific, and a group of desperate ranchers at a place called Mussel Slew in Tulare County. The engagement resulted in the death of several persons and created an animosity against the railroad which a generation has scarcely effaced. The land monopoly resulting from the various factors just enumerated weighed heavily upon the people of California. Holdings covering half a million acres were not unknown and many counties were almost swallowed up by the possessions of a single company. A careful rider, A. N. Young, has estimated that half the available agricultural land in the state was thus held by only one five hundredth of the population. The popular dissatisfaction which arose from this condition was aggravated by methods of tax assessment which placed a much lower valuation per acre upon land owned in large tracts than upon that belonging to small owners, or allowed the large holdings to escape assessment altogether. In most sections the irrigation problem was also an acute grievance of the small rancher. Without water, his land was worthless. To build canals and other necessary irrigation works demanded large capital. This the settler could not command by himself and as the formation of mutual companies was slow the large landholders generally got control of the available water supplies and extracted high rates from the small users or forced them to relinquish outright whatever land they had acquired. The evils resulting from this agrarian situation were undoubtedly magnified by those who suffered from it. Not every large landowner had come by his property dishonestly or enriched himself at the expense of society. Much of the land held in large tracts, particularly a goodly share of the railroad grants as already stated, was of so little value that no one would purchase it at any price. Yet unquestionably the system was bad in itself and worked a great injustice to individuals and to the state. Not the least significant of its effects was the aggravation of the public mind and the stimulation of popular discontent. Quote, It is the land monopolist, said J. M. Days in the state legislature in 1875 speaking for most of his fellows, who gathers toll everywhere and puts a blight on everything. He holds millions of acres of uncultivated land, refusing to sell except at an enormous price. He pays comparatively no tax as shifting the burden on industry. He drives the poor into cities to compete with one another for bread. As though abuses in government, the railroad monopoly and the land situation were not sufficient to unsettle California politics and render public opinion impatient, a business depression set in about 1875, caused chiefly by the great panic in the East two years before, and aggravated by a wild period of local speculation in mining stocks, which centered in the Nevada Silver Companies. The collapse of this excitement was sudden and complete, and for a long time the air was filled with the debris of broken fortunes. Drought added to the general gloom, entailing a loss of twenty million dollars to farmers and cattlemen in a single season. The distress of these years in the rural communities was greatly accentuated by unemployment and poverty in the cities. This was particularly true of conditions in San Francisco, where the industrial depression was most keenly felt. By this time the city had a population of some two hundred thousand persons. Among these were miners who had drifted in from mountains with a closing down of the mines and all sorts of industrial laborers thrown out of employment by the hard times. The Irish element was large, and labor unions had already begun to teach the working men the advantages of solidarity and the power of political action. To the other grievances of the laboring population, which embraced the sins of capitalism in general, was added the more tangible evil of Chinese immigration. To go into a detailed discussion of the Chinese invasion of California is impossible at this time. The Celestial Cooley has enjoyed more publicity than almost any other subject of California history, and if one should start to narrate his career on the Pacific Coast in anything like a comprehensive fashion, there would be no end. The salient facts of the subject, however, may be briefly given. Up to 1850 a mere handful of China men had come to California. By 1876 the handful had increased to one hundred and sixteen thousand, of whom perhaps five thousand were women. There was some merchants in this number, but the overwhelming majority were common laborers or Cooleys, mostly from Hong Kong or other seaport cities. These Cooleys were brought into California chiefly by Chinese organizations known as the Six Companies, very wealthy concerns which had their headquarters in San Francisco, and combined many other activities of a mercantile nature with the business of importing Cooleys. The China men came into California under contract to pay back to the companies the price of their passage and a certain percent of their earnings. The companies in turn guaranteed to find them employment in California and to send them back living or dead to China. From the Cooley standpoint it is safe to say there was nothing obnoxious in any phase of the bargain. Once in California the Chinese kept almost entirely to themselves, did not understand the white man, had no desire to associate with him and refused to adopt his customs or manner of life. The Californian, on the other hand, saw in the China men only an inferior being, simple in some ways, but cannier than a scot and others who lived in squalor and stench, spoken out landish jargon, worked with a patience and industry beyond comprehension, worshiped strange gods, suffered from strange diseases, practiced strange vices, ate strange food, regarded China as the land of the blessed, thrived under standards of living no white man could endure, administered his own law in his own way through his own agents, without much regard for the officials and statutes of the sovereign state of California, suffered with helpless stoicism, whatever indignities were thrust upon him, partly because he had no vote, and represented but the far-flung skirmish line of an army of four hundred million beings like unto himself. No wonder California became alarmed. The state faced irreparable injury if something were not done to keep the stream of immigration under control. The fault lay not in dealing with the problem, but in seeking to meet it with agitation and passion instead of sound statesmanship and common sense. Much legislation had already been passed before the discontented 70s to protect the whites against the Chinese. The foreign miners' tax made life a little more uncomfortable for the celestials, but knit-dont drive any large number back to China. Exclusion bills of various sorts and under various guises either failed to meet the situation or drastic enough to afford some actual restraint were declared unconstitutional by the courts. The attempts to check the importation of Chinese by various forms of taxes was also tried without much avail. And municipal ordinances, many of the mere petty persecutions, similarly had little effect dealing with even the local aspects of the question. Meanwhile, the China men kept coming in ever larger numbers to fill a real economic need in the state. He monopolized the laundry business, and without him most families in California would have worn dirty clothes from one week's in to another, or wash their own garments. He became the universal household servant, both in fashionable homes around the bay and in lone ranch houses where harvest crews had to be cooked for in the heat of summer over old-fashioned wood ranges. He opened cheap restaurants in every city, giving his patrons more and better prepared food than his white competitors ever dreamed of furnishing. He began to raise and peddle vegetables, to work in vineyards and orchards, to show his age-old training in building irrigation systems and reclamation canals. Finally, he was called upon by Crocker to lay the Central Pacific tracks, and from that time on did much of the unskilled construction and maintenance work for the rest and railways. In the eyes of labor, however, this last arrangement increased the unpopularity of both railroads and Chinaman. It became one of the chief grounds for their denunciation of the Central-Southern Pacific Monopoly, and was a principal cause of much of the anti-Chinese agitation in the 70s. Another very definite ground of complaint during this period was the Berlin Game Treaty of 1868. Under the terms of this agreement, whose interesting history cannot be told here, Chinaman were placed upon an equal footing in the United States with citizens of other nations. They were promised protection, offered the privilege of attending American schools, allowed freedom in their religious beliefs, and given the right to reside in the country at will. The railroad use of the Cooley Labor and this American negotiated treaty prepared the way for some of the most shameful incidents in California history. Anti-Chinese agitation soon took the form of violence. In Chico, San Diego, and a number of other towns, mobs from time to time destroyed Chinese laundries and restaurants. But it was chiefly in San Francisco and Los Angeles that brutality reached its climax in open murder. The worst incident of the kind was the Los Angeles Massacre of 1871. The trouble originated when two police officers, seeking to break up a Tong War in the Chinese Quarter, were seriously wounded, and a third member of the squad killed outright by frenzied Chinaman. A mob of a thousand persons, armed with pistols, guns, knives, and ropes, immediately marched into the Chinese section, seized victims without any attempt to discriminate between the innocent and the guilty, overpowered the officers of the law who were seeking to disperse the crowd, and hanged at least 22 Chinaman before the evil business came to an end. Most of the lynchings took place on commercial and new high streets in what was then the very heart to the business district, and though the mob was composed of the scum and dregs of the city, no serious attempt was ever made to bring the reading leaders to justice. Though the anti-Chinese agitation never again expressed itself in quite so bloody a fashion as in the Los Angeles Massacre, yet the popular outcry increased year by year. By 1875 a sort of hysteria began to sweep over the state, and the phrase, the Chinese must go, became the battle cry of a frenzied crusade. Merchants headed their advertisements. Our motto, the Chinese must go. A saloon keeper, speaking in the third person, exhorted his customers in the following poetic vein. Quote, his drinks are a one, and his prices are low, his motto was always the Chinese must go. So call on your friends, working men, if you please, take a good solid drink and drive out the Chinese, end quote. A member of the state constitutional convention who did not believe in any ways to words introduced a bill with a single clause, resolved that Chinese must go. The expression became the chivaleth of every second rate office seeker in the state and was effectively used to appeal to prejudice and the mob spirit. This of course does not mean that all anti-Chinese feeling was founded on ignorance or class hate. Intelligent, sober-minded men, both among working men and employers, realized the seriousness of the problem and sought to deal with it on a rational basis. A congressional commission, state legislative committees, all sorts of organizations and scores of individuals set to work to collect statistics and information regarding the Chinese at home and in the United States. And though much of the data thus obtained was prejudiced and unreliable, it served the purpose at least of thoroughly erring every side of the question. With a railroad monopoly, the land monopoly, hard times, unequal taxes, a government in which the people had little faith, lack of employment in the Chinese question, disaffecting the masses of labor throughout the state, a capable man might go far in organizing the radical element for dangerous action. By 1877 the situation in San Francisco had become serious, and the labor unrest found expression in such dangerous demonstrations against the Chinese residents and the property of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, as well as in such outspoken threats against the monied classes, that the aid of a committee of safety, headed by W. T. Coleman of Vigilotti fame, and the presence of three United States naval vessels in the harbor, were required to maintain order. These outbreaks in San Francisco occurred during July. The next month a self-elected leader appeared to take command of the hitherto poorly organized labor movement. This man was Dennis Kearney, an Irishman 30 years of age who had been both seaman and teamster before aspiring to political leadership. At this time huge labor meetings were held every Sunday afternoon on a vacant sandlot on Market Street, just across from the city hall. Here Kearney showed a remarkable genius for mass leadership. As a public speaker he sensed the taste of his audience perfectly, and his harangues combined enough course humor with vigorous denunciations of capitalism in general, and violent abuse of prominent business leaders in particular to make him at once a recognized favorite. Judged by his language alone Kearney was a strong and advocate of direct action as the most rabid of modern syndicalists, but his radicalism ended there, though he urged a little judicious hanging of capitalists and stock sharps, and called upon every workman to provide himself with a musket. There was no actual destruction of property or loss of life during his regime. Kearney, however, was not a mere spellbinder. Under his leadership a party known as the Working Men's Party displaced a much less effective organization called the Working Men's Trade and Labor Union, which had been formed some time before and became a very powerful factor in California politics. While naturally strongest in the cities the new party also drew from the ranks of discontented agricultural labor and even formed an effective alliance with a recently organized Grainger movement among the small landholders. Its platform was remarkably free from the communistic doctrines then in vogue among the radicals, for as so frequently happens, fortunately for society, the conservative element in the party far outnumbered the extremists and consequently gave a more moderate direction to the movement. Kearney maintained his leadership from the summer of 1877 until the following spring, but in May 1878 a hostile faction in San Francisco, headed by the party's county-central committee, tried to read him out of control. He was formally charged with trying to establish a dictatorship, with party disloyalty and personal dishonesty, with being more than suspected of selling out to the enemy, with using indecent language and showing no respect for the rights of others, with irresponsibility and even insanity. If his opponents failed to make the bill complete, it was only through oversight. The night of May 7th, 1878, the Kearney and anti-Kearney factions met at a mass meeting which proved anything but a love-fest. Quote, Frank Rooney, one of the oppositions, set an account in the next morning's bulletin, attempted to speak, but was throttled and born to the floor. His friends sprang to the rescue in a scene followed. The surging crowd clutched at each other's throats, gesticulating and vociferating like madmen. The sergeant at arms sprang into the melee, striking right and left with his commendable impartiality. The president pounded away on his desk with a police club, but no heed was given to his calls for order. Finally he called out, Hold your ground, Rooney. Don't you go out, Rooney? At that, the treasurer, O'Neill, went for the president. But the sergeant at arms properly separated them. Kearney, who was not present when the melee took place, arrived shortly after his supporters had gained control and order had been restored. Called upon for a speech, he predicted a bloody revolution and denounced the county commission. The breach in the workingmen's party, coupled perhaps with money received from certain interests he had most vigorously attacked, brought about Kearney's retirement from public notice. He had enjoyed a skyrocket sort of notoriety and made his name a source of considerable alarm to the conservative elements of society. With more education and less class prejudice, his control might have been constructive, beneficial, and long continued. As it was, though his party played a prominent part in the constitutional convention, and filled some local offices for a number of years, its lack of effective leadership soon led to disintegration. Largely through its influence, however, the Chinese agitation was brought to a climax. Certain measures of a social and economic nature were embodied in the state constitution, and labor came to play a more important part in California politics. Incidentally, the expressions Sandlot politics and Kearneyism were added to the state's political vocabulary. Enough has been said thus far to show how strong the current of discontent ran through California in the 70s. The people everywhere were seeking relief, and as the best means of getting this demanded a new constitution. The convention to frame this document met September 28, 1878. The political makeup of the gathering was as varied as the colors of Joseph's coat. Out of the 152 members, there were 10 Democrats, 11 Republicans, two independents, 78 nonpartisans, and 51 working men. The nonpartisan delegation represented a fusion of those who were willing to break away from party lines to get the best men possible. They realized that reform in the state government was necessary, but wished to keep it within bounds and give it the advantage of intelligent direction. The convention elected Joseph P. Hogue, a San Francisco lawyer, president, and Joseph A. Johnson, secretary. Its sessions lasted until March 3, 1879, when the new constitution was adopted by a vote of 120 to 15. On May 17, the document was submitted to the people of the state and received a majority of 10,280 votes out of a total of 145,000 cast. One section of the press, under railroad and corporation influence, has bitterly denounced the convention and all its works as Kearney had denounced the San Francisco capitalists, and indeed many of the resolutions introduced in the convention were either impractical, confiscatory, or plainly a violation of the federal constitution. Most of these extreme measures, however, were voted down in the convention, and though many of the provisions that remained seemed reactionary to the conservatives of that day, to the present generation, they appear extremely moderate. A large number of the articles failed to accomplish the good they were intended to bring about, and the intent of others was nullified by the courts, or so twisted by legislation as to serve the very evils they were designed to abolish. As a whole, however, the constitution of 1879 was much more adapted to the needs of the state than the old constitution of 30 years before. It is true that abuses flourished under it, with all the vigor of a green bay tree, but the delegates to the convention had at least made an honest attempt to meet the needs of the time and to relieve the people of deep-seated grievances. They failed in many particulars, but in passing judgment upon them one should remember that they were seeking to solve a perplexing variety of economic, social, and political problems with which the people of the state themselves were not qualified to deal. Even a perfect constitution would not have brought the changes men desired. These waited upon a more enlightened public opinion and on a higher order of business and political morality rather than on due organic law.