by Edward Ball
At some point during these months Helios took another revealing picture of himself, or rather he told an assistant to take it. He sat on a precipice, dangling his legs over a thousand-foot drop in a death-mocking stunt, and signaled to a helper to get the shot. The picture possesses a mania, an unmistakable ecstasy. He had no reason to risk his life for a photograph, and yet he did. Everyone who saw the picture had a similar reaction and took note of the artist’s curious death drive. The photograph would come up again, after the murder.
Helios lowered himself into the wilderness—other than a mule driver he might not see another face for two days. He was alone, which he preferred, but he had his cameras and chemicals.
During these same months, in the state capital at Sacramento, 150 miles away, Leland Stanford was never alone. Much the opposite. Stanford was beset, which he preferred—he was the person that everyone swarmed around. The former governor of California, age forty-four, Stanford sat on top of and gave the convincing impression that he ran the Central Pacific Railroad, an enterprise that involved some fifteen thousand workers, the largest workforce in America. Stanford’s apparatus, if you like, was somewhat larger than Helios’s. Stanford’s apparatus was a grinding, exploding machine for the conquest of nature that was at this particular moment trying to chip and bomb a 1,700-foot-long hole through granite at the summit of the Sierra Nevada, a place called Donner Pass.
Muybridge and Stanford had never met. The photographer knew about Stanford, as did everyone in California, but the railroad president probably did not know about Muybridge as yet.
Thick, slow-moving Leland Stanford spent most of his days in a second-floor office on K Street in the Sacramento headquarters of the Central Pacific. His six-year-old company had on its balance sheet one hundred miles of track, six locomotives, six passenger cars, two baggage cars, twenty-five flat freight cars, and fifteen boxcars.8 Stanford knew his train speculation would make an immeasurable fortune if he (helped by thousands of Chinese men) could find a way to drag his machines over the Sierras. “We are crawling up the mountains,” he called the track laying. It was a Sisyphus-like scheme that nobody thought would work, not even Stanford and his partners, at least on some days. Except that this year they had a new piece of equipment to add to his kit and speed things up—nitroglycerine.
Stanford might have found it hard to remember he was once only a grocer.
Muybridge, self-portrait, 1872. Muybridge asked an assistant to photograph him tempting death, dangling on a precipice above a thousand-foot drop, a picture that would be introduced as evidence of his insanity at the murder trial. (Illustration Credit 3.12)
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a In her book about Eadweard Muybridge, River of Shadows, Rebecca Solnit describes the national curiosity about Yosemite this way: “The United States rooted its identity in its landscapes, as though to suggest that its identity was itself natural, in contrast to the much denounced artificiality of European culture.”
HARNESSING THE ELEPHANT
Interstate 80 was routed during the 1960s, following the path of the old Central Pacific Railroad through Nevada and California. If you drive west on I-80 from Utah, the road takes you over the Sierras along the same route the train once did and deposits you in the same place, Sacramento, in central California. Sacramento erupted during the Gold Rush as a frontier post, then as a settlement on the banks of the Sacramento River, which flows north to south, at the confluence with the American River, which runs east to west. In 2010, the city counted 460,000 people. Downtown, several blocks of nineteenth-century buildings survive, squeezed against the river levee by another 1960s highway, Interstate 5. Within this thin strip of the past an idea of the Old West, although it is not entirely clear whose idea, has been quarantined in order to make a tourist district.
I paid a visit, in the make-believe settler strip, to the California State Railroad Museum on I Street. The museum has a library that houses some of the paper records of the Central Pacific, its reading room all paneled walls and dark shelving, like an apothecary. Here the patrons are men older than sixty with a liking for flannel. It is the only library I have ever been in where men can be found who possess a gentle kind of fetish, the one for old trains.
With its wooden sidewalks and shed porches, the California capital of Sacramento was much the frontier town. Leland Stanford’s grocery occupied one of the brick buildings on these blocks of K Street, the main commercial strip, photographed in 1865. (Illustration Credit 4.1)
In the fall of 1860 Theodore Judah, a railroad engineer living in California, placed a notice in the Sacramento Union newspaper calling an open meeting of whoever might be interested in a new railroad scheme. It was a sales pitch; he wanted investors. Judah appears in one photograph, dressed in checked vest and slanted hat, like a supreme dude, his body language more than a little vain. Leland Stanford, a Sacramento grocer with a store on K Street, had probably already heard about Judah. The garrulous, somewhat manic engineer from upstate New York had helped to design the only rail line that then existed in California, the twenty-four-mile-long Sacramento Valley line. Judah had lately been ricocheting around with a new and preposterous scheme, a plan for a “Pacific railroad” that would cross the United States. Railroads had already spidered inland from the Eastern Seaboard as far as the Missouri River, a third of the way across the continent. The idea of continuing the link all the way west to California had floated around Washington, D.C., for fifteen years. But in part because of regional divisions—where to put the route—in part because the scheme was too vast, it died frequent deaths in Congress. Judah had tried to sell his version of the Pacific railroad to rich men in San Francisco but had found no one to put down money (maybe his frenzied personal manner scared them), so he had come to California’s second city, Sacramento, population twelve thousand. Some say twelve people came to his sales pitch, some say thirty, but the most likely story is that Collis Huntington, a hardware dealer on K Street, came, and more shopkeepers fell into place. A lanky, ostrichlike man with a squeaky voice, Huntington persuaded other small businessmen to listen. To hear more from Judah, Huntington recruited his partner, the meticulous and brittle Mark Hopkins, plus the grocer a couple of doors down K Street, Leland Stanford, and finally the dry goods dealer Charles Crocker, bibulous and barrel-shaped at 250 pounds. This group and two or three others gave Judah a second and third meeting, after which they presented him with enough money to survey a route for his train over the Sierra range to Nevada, a task of several months on horseback.1
In 1860 Theodore Judah, railroad engineer and obsessive personality, recruited store owner Leland Stanford and other shopkeepers for his scheme to build a railroad to the Pacific. (He is shown here in 1848.) (Illustration Credit 4.2)
Judah came down from the rocks and peaks and made a huge map, sixty feet long, that showed a hypothetical train route of many switchbacks up the western hills, cutaways that wrapped the road around each mountain, four tunnels through granite, ravines to be leveled with infill, a route over the crest of Donner Pass (elevation seven thousand feet), the placement of creaky wooden trestles, and a wheeling descent to the east. He called the 115-mile track “my little road.”
Leland Stanford, in his mid-thirties, owned a busy and profitable store on K Street in Sacramento, and, unusual for his time and place, he was active in the Republican Party. Stanford’s politics were probusiness and antislavery, which made him a rarity in California, a state run by Democrats, some of them proslavery, the rest indifferent to it. He had tried for several offices, including that of governor (which one could do as a grocer in a full-length apron if your state had only 120,000 voters), losing in the last election by a margin of ten votes to one but always going back to party meetings. In March 1861, Stanford went to Washington to attend the inaugural of the new president, Abraham Lincoln. Republicans had national power for the first time, and although the party had not carried California, Stanford had reason to lobby Lincoln about the West and ask for party spoils, perha
ps a few appointments he could manage. He also had reason to talk about the railroad.
The timing of Theodore Judah’s scheme was good, perversely, thanks to the disaster of the Civil War; the Southern states had just seceded, and the War of Rebellion was about to begin. Despite earlier promoters with train plans before Judah and two federal surveys for a coast-to-coast train, the idea of funding a railroad with tax money had gone nowhere in Washington, due to the sectional split that divided North and South. Southern lawmakers wanted a southern route through Louisiana and Texas, and northern politicians wanted a track that ran anywhere but through the South. Suddenly, with the South in revolt in 1861, half the senators and congressmen had disappeared from Capitol Hill and gone home to work for the new Confederate States of America. By the rule of crisis politics—do not let a calamity pass without exploiting it—this meant an opportunity. There is no direct evidence that Stanford talked to Lincoln about Theodore Judah’s train, but the circumstances point to it.
In mid-June of 1861, California’s Republican Party, for the second time, named Stanford its candidate for governor. Nine days later, on June 28, Theodore Judah, the four shopkeepers—Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker—and four others incorporated the Central Pacific Railroad of California. The nine speculators named Stanford president of the company; he had met Lincoln, and if he became governor he could push the train. The would-be train executives were small-town rich, with combined personal assets of $118,000, whereas Judah’s estimate put the cost of a track over the mountains at $12 million. Stock went on sale at $100 a share, and the first tally of returns came to an unpromising 1,580 shares, which, at 10 percent down, resulted in $15,000 cash in hand.
Aside from Judah, the train investors looked at the railroad as a gamble. They could conceivably trim back plans, perhaps building a short line that took advantage of the silver rush up to the Comstock Lode in Nevada and get Congress to pay for it, and that by itself would be a boondoggle.
Stanford seems to have been confident things would happen, at least for him. In July he and his wife bought a big brick house on Eighth Street in Sacramento, and he announced to her that this would be their governor’s mansion. He was right: Stanford won the election in September, thanks to the crisis back east. In California Republicans usually lost, but when the South seceded, the Democrats split the poll, running two candidates for governor, one pro-South, the other pro-Union, and the divided ticket gave the victory to Stanford.
A month later, Theodore Judah packed his map and sailed from San Francisco on the steamship St. Louis for Washington, D.C., to sell the train to Congress. On Capitol Hill, Judah restarted his sales machinery—a pitch to anyone who would listen, handshakes in the corridors, the map brandished in committee. If Congress funded it, a train across the West would defeat the Indians, he said. If Congress funded it, a train would send Easterners into the empty western half of the country and ignite the economy, he said. Building the Central Pacific would keep California in the Union during the fight between North and South, he said, if Congress funded it.
The Pacific Railroad Act was written in the spring, passed in June, and signed by President Lincoln on July 1, 1862. It chartered two companies—the Union Pacific Railroad, to build west from the Missouri River, and the Central Pacific, to build east from California. The act told the builders to string telegraph lines alongside the track, extending those already in place, in effect spreading physical and virtual networks at the same time. The law—“an act to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean”—provided for two links between New York and San Francisco, one physical, one mental, the telegraph being the line for the mind.
When the Railroad Act went through, Theodore Judah sent a fifteen-word dispatch that zigzagged from Washington along still-patchy lines to California.
“We have drawn the elephant,” he wrote Governor Stanford. “Now let us see if we can harness him up.”
Rain threatened to wash the crowd gathered at First and K Streets in Sacramento on January 8, 1863, but clouds drifted off in time for the ceremony at noon. It was a Thursday. A thousand people shuffled in the dirt street beside the Sacramento River levee, and more clustered on the wood plank sidewalks. All eyes went to the man in formal clothes standing behind bunting on a makeshift wooden stage, Governor Leland Stanford. A band played patriotic songs and ministers stood around, awaiting permission to pray.2
Stanford had always been uneasy in speechmaking, and his remarks began with a bromide.
“Fellow citizens, I congratulate you upon the commencement of the great work which we this day inaugurate—the Pacific Railroad.” His hands felt for the shovel as his eyes went down the speech. The railroad “will form an iron bond that shall strengthen the ties of nationality,” he said. Stanford was referring to the Civil War that had pulled America apart for two years. It was an unlikely time for declarations of national unity. One week earlier, President Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a 250-word executive order that freed, on paper though not in fact, four million people enslaved in the South. And three weeks before this date, at Fredericksburg, Virginia, 114,000 Union troops had turned out against 72,000 Confederates and lost, with 12,000 killed or wounded.
The railroad, Stanford went on, would “vanquish the untutored native.” In other words, the train would defeat the Indian nations, perhaps a million people between California and Missouri who did not want the coasts to be united by an “iron bond” and who suspected the rail line would bring a fresh round of wars, treaties, and deportations. The previous month, in Minnesota, the United States Army had put down some of the “untutored natives,” crushing an uprising of the Sioux and staging a mass execution of thirty-six Dakota Indians. Stanford acknowledged these things in a few words that conveyed much.
The choice of Sacramento as the terminus of the national rail line made another odd feature of this groundbreaking ceremony. The capital of California was barely two miles square, with a population that had risen to just fifteen thousand, not quite a counterbalance to the million-plus of New York City at the other end.
For all the national conflict and other drawbacks, “the wealth and the commerce of the East and the West is to float upon this rail line,” said Stanford from the platform. He might have been referring to the payout from the Railroad Act. If he and his partners could actually build the train, they would receive government bonds at the rate of $16,000 per mile of track over flat country, $32,000 per mile in the foothills, and $48,000 per mile through the Sierra peaks. They would also acquire vast stretches of land, five tracts per mile on alternating sides, amounting to 6,400 acres for every mile of railroad. If they could build, the rail operators would immediately become, after the federal government, the biggest landlords in the country.
Stanford would have thought that all this was much to be thankful for, so he wound up his speech and turned things over to a minister. “It is meet and proper that we should invoke God’s blessing upon the undertaking,” he said, as he stepped back and one Reverend J. Benton stepped forward. The clergyman requested bowed heads, offered a prayer, and retreated.
Two wagons full of dirt pulled up to the platform—the first mounds of earth for the railroad bed. Governor Stanford shoveled “with a zeal,” according to the newspaper, and the dirt hit the road to applause and huzzahs.
The Central Pacific investors divided up their work. The public face of the company would be Stanford, polished, unsmiling, and not incidentally the governor of the state. Stanford had the second-floor warehouse of his brick, two-story grocery on K Street renovated to create offices for the train company. His governor’s desk stayed in the capitol, the train desk above the grocery, but the new president of a railroad with no track walked the five blocks between them once or twice a day, blending the government’s and the company’s fortunes.
At the train company’s loftlike headquarters, Stanford shared space with the careful and withdrawn Mark H
opkins, the designated accountant. Meanwhile, Charles Crocker, the dry goods dealer, by several accounts a loud and crude man, became the contractor. Occasionally Crocker appeared in Sacramento, but for months at a time he played the barnstorming crew captain, riding out on horseback to drop in along the building line, distributing bags of gold coin to pay the men, yelling orders and riding on.
The fourth speculator, Collis Huntington, possessed a will to power as strong as that of the other three combined. It would be an understatement to describe Huntington, a cranelike man whose voice creaked, as severe. Huntington was the cashier who ended the day with more money than sales would strictly account for, the tally man with his thumb always on the scale. He moved to New York in 1863 to raise construction funds for the train—selling bonds, bonds, bonds, and more bonds for the company—while also arranging the shipment of the hardware that would make the track happen.
The Sacramento shopkeepers edged out the rest of the company’s investors during construction, until only Stanford, Crocker, Hopkins, and Huntington remained. (No one yet called them “the Big Four”—that label would wait until a 1935 book of that title about them and their train.) They referred to themselves as “the associates.” There was a fifth associate, Charles Crocker’s brother, Edwin Crocker, a lawyer who was cut in with stock and given a job as the train company’s attorney, but the balance of power stayed with the quartet.
When Stanford was California governor, his term of office extended for only two years. During his first twelve months, in 1862–63, Stanford signed seven bills to subsidize the Central Pacific and persuaded two county governments to buy stock outright. No one doubted his self-dealing, no one complained about conflict of interest, although in a few years many would. Californians wanted the train and did not yet object to one man running both the state and the company that would cash in. When Governor Stanford had to fill an open seat on the California Supreme Court, he appointed one of the associates, Edwin Crocker, knowing Crocker would rule for the railroad in every case. Crocker served out the two-year justiceship and then returned to the train company, picking up the honorific “Judge Crocker,” which he wore for the rest of his life. (Judge Crocker had another distinction: several years later he would be the instrument for the introduction of Leland Stanford to Helios, the landscape photographer.)