Men Against Mountains

CHAPTERS 12—21

BY OSCAR LEWIS

How Men against Mountains’ began . . .

A VISIONARY began it, as is so often the case. His name was Theodore D. Judah. He came from Bridgeport, Connecticut, had an engineering turn of mind, and got his first job on the railroad which was being built from Troy to Schenectady. Thereafter he built bridges at Niagara and in Vermont, and worked on the Erie Canal, but railroads were his ambition and his dream. In his twenty-eighth year, Judah was engaged as the chief engineer of a railroad to be built at Sacramento. Judah and his patient wife went West, and within a year and a half his twenty-one-mile road had been surveyed and built and its first locomotive had come by clipper ship round the Horn. But Judah’s mind visualized a larger picture: this twenty-one-mile spur was simply the first unit in the road that was to link the oceans. He wrote reports, he talked to every Californian who would listen, and despite his nickname — ‘Crazy Judah’ — he was a tireless delegate in the Pacific Railroad Convention which met in San Francisco in 1859. They picked a representative to carry their recommendations to Congress, and Judah was the man.

So the voluble engineer became a familiar figure on Washington streets and in committee rooms. He repeated his story to members of the House and Senate, even to James Buchanan in the White House. He set up a Pacific Railway Museum, but his bill was blocked by the larger issue then in men’s minds — Slavery.

Back in California and undaunted, Judah began raising money for the Central Pacific Railway of California. In three days, Dutch Flat and the few neighboring villages had pledged $46,500. At the St. Charles Hotel, in Sacramento, he expanded his plans before a druggist, a jeweler, a lawyer, the owner of a dry-goods store, and two hardware merchants. Among those present were four names destined to go down in California history — Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington.

The Big Four, as they came to be known in later years, were big men physically. Biggest of them all was Charlie Crocker, who tipped the scales at 245 pounds, a driving force in any combination. Huntington and Stanford were both above 220, but Uncle Mark Hopkins was tall and bent and ‘ thin as a fence rail.’ He was a vegetarian and a teetotaler. On the wet afternoon in 1862 when ground was broken for the new road, the Big Four were comparatively young men. Stanford, Governor of the state,

was 38, Crocker 40, Huntington a year older, and Uncle Mark a graybeard of 49.

During the preliminary stages, Judah and Crocker were the men who did the taxing physical work. Judah surveyed the line from Sacramento across the foothills to the base of the Sierras, and then — with the optimism of a genius — over and around the towering heights. It was also Judah who, on a second trip to Washington, persuaded Congress to grant the Federal aid. Loans ranged from $16,000 to $48,000 a mile, depending upon the slope. The Civil War was a reality, and Washington was in need of California gold and Nevada silver.

But early in the construction the engineer was forced out of the partnership. Judah would not sanction certain financial dealings. He sailed to New York in the hope of raising new capital, and died of yellow fever at Panama four months before his thirty-eighth birthday.

Storming and bellowing up and down the line, it was Charlie Crocker who carried the work forward, directing the largest force of workmen the country had ever known. It was Crocker who conceived the idea of importing Chinese workmen from Canton, and shiploads were sent until he had nearly six thousand. The terminus shifted to Cisco, ninety-four miles from Sacramento and nearly six thousand feet high. By use of a temperamental new substance called nitroglycerine, and with the Chinese crowded shoulder to shoulder chipping and hacking at the rock faces, the road advanced — eight inches a day. For seven years the work went, as Crocker said, ‘bravely forward’ — in winter working against thirty-five-foot snowdrifts and in summer during the sizzling heat and alkali dust. In the early sixties, everything needed in this railroad building except lumber and masonry had to be purchased in Eastern markets and transported West by ship. Thus, against tremendous odds, men fought their engineering war against the mountains until in May 1869 the Irish gangs of the Union Pacific and the Chinese gangs of the Central Pacific fitted rails together, driving home the golden spike which spanned the continent with its first railroad. On the day of national celebration, Mrs. Judah sat alone in her brother’s house in the East, refusing to see friends.

It was Charlie Crocker who bossed the job those seven arduous years. But it was up to Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Huntington to see that the railroad kept running. . . .

Now with each twelve months of the Atlantic

THREE GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR

MEN AGAINST MOUNTAINS

BY OSCAR LEWIS

II. CROCKER, HOPKINS, AND STANFORD

THE country-wide enthusiasm aroused by the completion of the transcontinental railroad first informed many in California that Sacramento’s former shopkeepers had become men of consequence. As a belated gesture of recognition, Sacramento citizens prepared to entertain the empire builders at a testimonial banquet. Invitations were issued and accepted in elegantly phrased letters reproduced in Coast newspapers. In late September the partners faced half a hundred prosperous fellow townsmen, and learned that their courage, industry, and vision had won the admiration of their home town. Stanford responded with an address. Crocker and Hopkins talked briefly, Huntington not at all. But his new role of public benefactor proved not distasteful; he announced that he would do anything for his good friends except make a speech.

So gradual had been the change that they themselves were hardly aware of it; Huntington once told that they sometimes paused to wonder at their power and responsibility. Crocker, who had begun construction with two hundred men, later announced that he was directing the largest force of workmen ever assembled in the country’s history. To Huntington the contrast must have been even more amazing. Before the road was well started the hardware merchant was monthly awarding contracts that ran into the millions and chartering so many ships that he became the largest individual shipper in the world. Even

placid Mark Hopkins, fresh from hardware accounts, must have had periods of astonishment as he contemplated the size of the figures beneath his pen.

At the beginning their moderate personal fortunes were in the balance; soon it grew clear that success would bring fortunes beyond any ever before created on the Coast. The necessity for building up and protecting their property had kept them too busy to give much thought to what they would do with it after it was won.

Stanford’s driving of the last spike ended one stressful period and began another. The early weeks after the celebration brought little change in the familiar routine. Construction crews were still active all along the line, repairing makeshifts adopted when haste had been the main consideration, fitting the roadbed to meet federal inspection, assembling equipment, and perfecting schedules for anticipated heavy traffic.

By 1870 the partners faced an entirely different task. Building the road had proved fabulously profitable; now it was uncertain whether operation would realize any profit at all. A few weeks after their line was completed, the Suez Canal was opened. Possibility that traffic between Asia and Europe would flow over the new railroad vanished. Volume freight between the coasts continued to be shipped by water. Once the initial rush was over, the one through train a day sometimes carried no passengers at all.

For seven years the four had been looking ahead to the time when they could enjoy their new wealth. Instead of the anticipated ease, a variety of new problems appeared. Tension did not relax, and the partners realized that the struggle to gain fortunes was to be followed by a struggle to keep them. Their letters reveal a time of indecision. Should they embark on what Hopkins called ‘the certainty of continued years of anxious toil, and the uncertainty of how well and with what results we may work out the problem of final success,’ or should they sell out, pocket a handsome profit, and let others wrestle with problems of operation?

Crocker first reached a decision. That he chose to sell caused no surprise, for he was definitely a man of action. Stress of construction had been exactly to his liking. To one who throve on physical activity, routine administration had no appeal. He had developed strong opinions on the injurious effects of mental work. There was the example of his elder brother, E. B. Crocker, the only one of the four brothers who had received a formal education. As attorney for the Central Pacific, he had wrestled for six years with its complicated legal problems, and with what result? In 1868 he had fallen at Stanford’s feet, victim of a paralytic stroke. Invalid ever since, he was to die, still a young man, a few years later. Charles weighed this catastrophe. He announced that he would have no administrative job and invited his partners to buy him out.

Crocker’s decision brought Huntington hurrying on from New York. The deal was too important to be negotiated by others. Hopkins lacked force in argument, and Huntington had more than once written that ‘trading is not one of Stanford’s strong points.’ Negotiations continued through the fall of 1870. The three remaining partners agreed to pay the two Crockers $1,800,000, in three yearly installments of $600,000. Huntington left for the East, thinking the matter settled. Charles Crocker, however, delayed signing from week to week. When he asked certain modifications in the terms of the agreement, Huntington lost patience. ‘We bought Mr. Crocker out fairly and without an if, and I propose to do just what I agreed with him and nothing more.’

Late in 1871, Crocker signed the agreement and received the initial payment. He departed with his family for a tour of Europe. Although no longer a partner, Crocker retained large holdings of Central Pacific stock, received as dividends from the construction companies that had built the road. The remaining partners thought of his carefree existence and concluded that he had not made a bad bargain. In one of his lucid letters to Huntington, Mark Hopkins wrote: ‘This gives them [Charles and E. B.] a productive fortune of a vast sum, and a reasonable expectation from C. P. stock of many millions more, so yoked with our interest in like property that we must realize to them their expectations, or do worse for ourselves.'

Huntington’s dark mood continued. Through the fall of 1871 he made persistent, secret attempts to follow Crocker into retirement. Negotiations were conducted by a brilliant Jewish attorney, Alfred Cohen, of the company’s legal staff. The plan was to form a syndicate of San Francisco bankers to raise the purchase price, approximately $20,000,000. Cohen talked with D. O. Mills, president of the Bank of California, and sent encouraging letters to Huntington in the East. Stanford and Hopkins joined in the negotiations, although Stanford had no real wish to sell. Stanford wrote Huntington that the banker had not seemed ‘ much interested.’ Huntington was not misled; his next letter to Hopkins contained this passage: ‘I do not suppose Stanford wanted to have us sell, and therefore I would not suppose that he would talk to Mills in a way that would induce him to buy, and then as he did not make his best effort he very likely would not make the trade.’

Uncertainty added to Huntington’s restlessness. He concluded that the reason Stanford wanted to remain was that he had a son (Leland Jr., born in 1868) who would eventually carry on in his place. Huntington sent another pessimistic note: ‘The more I think of it the more valuable my interest on the Pacific Coast looks to me, and if I had some boys growing up to attend to this interest

I hardly think I would sell . . . but as it is I know no reason why I should wear myself out for the sake of getting more money.’ Later, in the same vein: ‘If I had someone growing up to take my place, I would hardly name a price that I would take, but as I have not, what the devil is the use of my wearing myself out?’ When Cohen telegraphed that Mills had turned the sale down, Huntington’s gloom deepened. ‘I think we must make some change,’he wrote Hopkins, ‘for I am losing my grip.’

The panic of 1873 wiped out all possibility of finding a purchaser. In face of this threat, Huntington forgot fatigue and self-pity. In the midst of bedlam, he watched the nation’s financial structure disintegrate. On September 18 he dashed off a brief note to Hopkins: ‘This has been the wildest day on the ‘change that I ever saw. The house of Jay Cooke & Co. gave notice to the stock board at

II A.M. to-day that they had suspended & since then the newsboys in the streets have been crying their extras of this failure and that. God only knows where we will land. Help me all you can.’

Fisk & Hatch, the brokerage firm handling the railroad’s securities, was in danger. The Central Pacific owed this house more than $1,500,000. If it failed the extent of the railroad’s indebtedness would be made public, with disastrous results on its credit. The brokers called on Huntington for $500,000, which they hoped would see them through. Huntington sent urgent wires to Hopkins and Stanford, but the time proved too short. Before noon of the nineteenth, Fisk & Hatch closed their doors.

Huntington waited idly in the centre of the tumult, recognizing that nothing could be done. On the nineteenth he warned his partners in San Francisco to prepare for the worst. They must sustain the Central Pacific — ‘everything depends on that.’ He added: ‘There is a terrible excitement on the street to-day, but, like everything else, it will pass away.’ The first fury of disaster was followed by a helpless calm in which no one knew what to do next. For once Huntington’s reports were vague. ‘Everything is at a standstill. I stay in my office, not knowing just what to do. There is no use in going out to borrow any money, for, however small the sum, I should not be able to get it. Everyone is getting in all the money they can’and locking it up. In fact, there never was such a time and I do believe and I hope to God there never will be again.’

At that inauspicious moment Crocker arrived in New York. Since his return from Europe he had been presenting his second note for $600,000 daily to Stanford and Hopkins in San Francisco. Not a dollar had he been able to collect. As always, the decision was left to Huntington. Crocker accordingly headed for New York. He walked into Huntington’s office a week after the failure of Fisk & Hatch. That afternoon Huntington reported to Hopkins: ‘Mr. Crocker has just left the office. We had a long talk. He said he wanted his money. I told him we were to have a fearful fight with the government and that we could not pay him until the fight was over. He said it was our fight and not his, &c. I said he must help make the fight. He said if he helped make the fight he wanted his part of the profits, &c. He then said that he would come back now and take his position just as though he had not been out and give S. and H. & H. $100,000 each. ... I well know that this is not what we want, but is it not best as matters are?'

The partners agreed. Within a month California newspapers announced that Charles Crocker was again a director of the Central Pacific, and its second vice president. The Coast editors were pleased: it was again possible to give the group its familiar name, the Big Four. Somehow the Big Three had never had the right sound.

XIII

By gaining control, in 1871, of the California Pacific, operating between Sacramento and the Bay, the partners extended the transcontinental line to its logical terminus, San Francisco. Preparations were made to move the main offices, and Stanford and Hopkins began building their impressive houses on Nob Hill. Not to be outdone, Crocker, newly returned to the fold, also acquired a site on the hill, a block west of his partners and on more elevated ground. His property was extended until he possessed, except for one small lot, the entire block. The exception noted was owned by one Yung, a local undertaker, who refused to sell. Crocker’s efforts to oust the stubborn householder became a public issue.

Meantime Crocker started his mansion, a complicated wooden structure in a style his architect, Arthur Brown, called ‘early Renaissance.’ Twenty years later Willis Polk, fresh from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and beginning his career as local eesthete, pronounced it ‘a delirium of the wood carver.’ The chief feature, aside from its cost, — said to have been $1,250,000, — was a 76-foot tower, up which Crocker piloted his guests to admire the panoramic view.

As the house neared completion its owner made another trip to Europe to purchase furniture. Soon after his return, Crocker became active in prosecuting Alfred Cohen, the former railroad attorney, charged with misappropriating $50,000 of Central Pacific funds. Cohen looked on Crocker as instigator of the case, and in his defense plea the attorney brought his powers of satirical invective to bear on that unhappy individual. Cohen likened the trial to a comedy and the opposing witnesses to its actors. Crocker, he stated, aspired to be the hero ‘ who longed to languish in the scene as leading lover, but, being too fat of diaphragm for genteel comedy, and too fat of wit for low comedy, was compelled to be content with the place of general utility man, whom the counsel would only trust to carry off the dead, light the lamps, and sweep the stage.’ He continued: —

Mr. Crocker showed a great deal of feeling in this case, and wishes to have credit for inaugurating it, but then Mr. Crocker is a great man; I do not think the most carping critic will deny that. He is a great man from any point from which you look at him. If you survey him from his broad pedal extremities to the narrow apex of his cranium, or whether you look at him longitudinally, you see that he is great; and if you walk around him, by the time you return to the starting point you are assured of his greatness.

He has given us the benefit of his presence most of the time that this case has been progressing, and being desirous of making the best possible impression on the court and bar, he has reclined back in one of these chairs and, with his feet elevated to the rail surrounding the jury-box, has presented to our gaze that portion of his person for which he has the most admiration.

The defendant reminded the court and the tittering spectators that he was not accusing the railroad official of ‘conduct contrary to the most orthodox rules of refinement ‘: —

For Mr. Crocker is a ‘traveled gentleman’; he told you that he had been to Europe, and he has been, he says, ‘around the world.’ He did not tell us whether he is the person commemorated by Mr. Jules Verne, who made the trip in eighty days, but I incline to the belief, from a knowledge of Mr. Crocker’s attributes and from his appearance, that it was done hurriedly.

There was much more in this vein of not too gentle irony. Cohen ended by imagining the former dry-goods merchant’s soliloquy before he set out on his furniture-buying trip to Europe: —

I will drop the obsequious smile with which I used to roll up calico and tape for my customers, and in its place there shall come the arrogant, supercilious grin of oleaginous self-satisfaction. I will build myself a mansion, which I will set upon a hill. I will upholster and furnish it so that visitors shall be filled with doubt whether it is designed for a haberdasher’s shop or a stage scene for a modern furniture drama. I will purchase Gobelin tapestries, and employ someone to tell me whether they should be hung upon the walls as paintings or spread upon the floor as mats. I will buy pictures from the galleries of the Medicis and employ Mr. Medici himself to make the selections.

I will show the world how an intelligent patron of the arts and literature can be manufactured by the process of wealth out of a peddler of needles and pins. I will visit Europe until I can ornament my ungrammatical English with a fringe of mispronounced French. I will wear a diamond as big as the headlight of one of my locomotives; and my adipose tissue shall increase with my pecuniary gains until my stomach is as large as my arrogance, and I shall strut along the corridors of the Palace Hotel a living, breathing, waddling monument of the triumph of vulgarity, viciousness, and dishonesty.

The charge against Cohen was dismissed and regrettable personalities were in time forgotten. The partners recognized that a man so gifted in abuse should devote his talents to the company’s interests rather than to those of its enemies. Cohen quickly re-allied himself with his ex-enemies to devote the next twenty years to championship of their interests.

Crocker occupied his new house late in 1876. The silver anniversary of his wedding was celebrated with a reception of such magnificence that local society editors remained lyrical for weeks. Descriptions of the mansion appeared in the local Sunday supplements. Details of its 172-foot façade, its 12,500 square feet of floor space, its fully equipped little theatre, in which amateur theatricals were regularly given, its library and billiard room, became staple reading to thousands of wondering Californians. Crocker’s paintings were particularly admired by the art-conscious community. On an easel in the drawing-room stood the prize of the collection: ‘The only Meissonier on the Pacific Coast, if we except his portrait of Governor Stanford. Mr. Crocker’s Meissonier is called “ The Smoker.”’ Its owner had paid $12,000 for it.

The next dozen years passed pleasantly for Charles Crocker. His eldest son, Charles Frederick, entered the company. The aging Charles gave his son some sound advice: ‘ If it becomes necessary to jump off the dock in the service of the company, instead of saying “Go, boys,” you must pull off your coat and say “Come, boys.” ‘ The young man proved both shrewd and energetic; he made himself more influential in the company’s affairs than his father had been for years. Charles Frederick’s rise was sufficiently rapid to engage Huntington’s attention and to persuade him to send his own nephew, Henry E., out to the Coast to represent his interests. The two young men were presently at odds, and a battle for supremacy between the factions they represented seemed inevitable. Young Crocker’s early death removed a serious obstacle to Huntington’s plan of assuming complete control.

The elder Crocker continued to buy San Francisco real estate, visited the construction camps of new Southern Pacific lines, and with Dave Colton toured the West looking for ‘investments.’ Following Stanford’s example, he took over great blocks of railroad subsidy lands in the San Joaquin Valley. The Crocker & Huffman Land Company of Modesto built there an extensive irrigation system. Discovery of low-grade coal at lone, in the Sierra foothills, attracted his attention, and he tried to supply the state with that mineral product. On another large area in Nevada he set up one of his sons in the cattle business; for another, who wished to go into finance, he acquired a controlling interest in the Woolworth Bank.

Crocker did not participate in the great diamond discovery of the ‘70s, although Dave Colton was a leading figure in it. The fact that Crocker missed being taken in by that notable fraud — which fooled the shrewdest financiers of the city — confirmed his faith in the infallibility of his judgment. He remarked later, ‘In no enterprise that I have taken up, where I superintended it myself, was I ever unsuccessful.’

Crocker’s egotism grew with his years and weight. Business associates found him increasingly gruff in manner, dogmatic, and intolerant of opposition. In the early ‘80s, having to appear before the Los Angeles city council, he was kept waiting. Enraged, he stalked from the building, announcing that he ‘would make grass grow in the Los Angeles streets.’ Citizens of that arid town stated that they would welcome the miracle; after years of effort they had been unable to make grass grow even in their lawns.

In San Francisco, Crocker’s feud with Yung waxed warmer, for the undertaker continued to refuse successively higher offers for his lot. Carpenters set to work surrounding the Yung dwelling with a wall forty feet high. Throngs daily climbed Nob Hill to stare at the ‘spite fence.’

The matter took a serious turn. Dennis Kearney, the picturesque ex-teamster, had gained control of the powerful Workingmen’s Party. The tone of his speeches in the sand lots near the city hall aroused concern. To Kearney and his disciples, Crocker’s quarrel with the undertaker was clearly a contest between capital and labor. The spite fence became a symbol of the arrogance of wealth. In his speeches Kearney promised his followers that he would tear it down and chastise its builder with the boards. Disapproval spread from Crocker to the other Nob Hill nabobs, all employers of‘cheap Chinese labor.’ Kearney shouted: ‘The monopolists who make money by employing cheap labor had better watch out. They have built themselves fine residences on Nob Hill and erected flagstaffs upon their roofs. Let them take care that they have not erected their own gallows.’

One summer evening in 1877 three hundred held a ‘political meeting’ in the midst of the mansions of the capitalists. Kearney demanded that the Stanford and Hopkins houses be taken over by ‘the people’ and converted into asylums. Addressing Stanford’s darkened house, he promised that if Stanford would acknowledge that he was a thief he would forthwith be elected president of the Fourth Ward Workingmen’s Club.

The crowd disbanded without violence, but a few weeks later mobs roved the city wrecking Chinese laundries, applying torches to the wreckage. The exploit nearly brought on a wholesale conflagration in this city of wooden structures. Citizens awoke to their danger, revived the vigilance committees of the ‘50s, and intimidated the sandlotters. Kearney was thrown into jail, charged with inciting riot. During his long imprisonment and trial his following dropped away.

Crocker’s spite fence ceased to be a political issue. Later the undertaker agreed to sell; both fence and cottage were pulled down, and Crocker realized his ambition to own the entire block.

His sixty-fifth birthday came, and doctors began to advise him to go easy. He was too active and too heavy for his years. He should shun excitement. His real estate and coal mines, his irrigation development in the San Joaquin, the Southern Pacific expansion — all these were jobs for a younger man; his days of ‘storming up and down the line’ were past. Crocker listened carefully to this sound advice and obeyed — for a few days.

But he was too energetic to accept the role of invalid. The scrollwork mansion on the hill became a prison. A man used to doing things could not forever talk to cronies in the Palace bar. In a day or two he was off again; perhaps to the Merced development, where he drove a four-horse team through the tunnel of the world’s largest irrigation canal. To newspaper men he prophesied that this project would eventually be recognized as a more important achievement than the railroad.

Southern Pacific capital produced a sprawling resort hotel among the oaks beside Monterey Bay. Word passed that a week-end — or a summer — at Del Monte would be useful to those seeking favors from the company. Railroad officials made frequent visits; society editors of friendly newspapers printed daily columns on the activities of guests. To be a visitor to Del Monte became an easy but expensive way of attaining social importance. Well-filled Pullmans were soon rolling in over the Monterey branch.

Del Monte became Crocker’s pet; there he remained while the big wooden structure was rushed to completion. He is remembered wandering through the unfinished public rooms, sitting for hours in his carriage beneath a neighboring oak, looking on while ‘the largest resort hotel in the world’ took shape. The place became his favorite residence, because he had watched the driving of ‘every nail.’ He liked the structure, too, because it was intended to pay for itself and did, handsomely. No equal interest attached to his houses in San Francisco and Sacramento, which were the opposite of profitable investments. In his New York house on West 58th Street, bought and furnished in 1886 at a cost of $250,000, he spent only a few restless months before presenting it to his daughter Hattie.

The old man’s distaste for New York was not lessened by his being thrown from his carriage there and so badly shaken that he was in bed for weeks. Dispatches to San Francisco exaggerated his injuries; local editors recalled his age and weight — still above 225 pounds — and prepared his obituary. But Crocker was presently back on the Coast again. When fire destroyed one of his business houses, he had the satisfaction of seeing a pet theory vindicated. For years he had ‘carried his own insurance,’ putting a percentage of the yearly real-estate income into a special fund. Luckily this serious fire did not occur until the ‘fire fund’ was large enough to rebuild the structure. His foresight was widely commented on in California and elsewhere; the old man’s last months were brightened by public applause of his shrewdness. Meantime his interest centred on the Merced project. This development was less successful than the insurance fund, but he remained confident that it would double his fortune.

Naturally the captain of so many large enterprises refused to look on himself as an invalid. The diet prescribed by physicians was often disregarded, and 1888 found him again incapacitated. He paid another visit to Del Monte, confident that a few weeks at the new hotel would restore him to health. He grew worse instead of better. On August 14 word that he was in a diabetic coma reached San Francisco. A special train hurried his eldest son and a group of doctors to the hotel. It arrived too late by minutes.

He was one of the first guests to die at Del Monte. That night the special train carried the body back to San Francisco. A bow of crape appeared on the door of the house on California Street; within, mirrors were covered and pictures turned to the wall. Two days later, accounts of his burial at Laurel Hill recorded that the Crocker casket was a replica of one in which General John A. Logan had been buried. The public reflected that a fellow citizen who sixty years earlier sold newspapers on the streets of Troy had achieved a burial not less elaborate than that, of a Civil War general.

XIV

Uncle Mark Hopkins hunched his thin shoulders forward when he walked, and he had an odd, unhurried stride which carried him over the ground with deceptive speed. When he spoke he stroked his beard hesitantly with a long, skinny hand, a characteristic that made him seem older than he was.

On the wet afternoon in 1862 when ground was broken for the new railroad, the future Big Four were all comparatively young men. Stanford, already Governor, was thirty-eight, Crocker forty, Huntington a year older. Hopkins, always the gray beard of the group, was born at Henderson, New York, on September 1, 1813, and so was a few months short of his forty-ninth birthday. In the early ‘60s in California, anyone past his mid-forties was considered senile. The gold rush had been a movement of youth; Argonauts thirty-five and over were unusual enough to draw attention, and many thousands were still in their teens. Hopkins, past thirty-five when he left the East, seemed old from the moment he put foot ashore. Easily he accepted the title of ‘Uncle Mark.’ His partners looked on him as a kindly but slightly decrepit ancient, full of wisdom, but hedged in by conservatism.

He differed from his partners in other ways. They were large men physically; Crocker normally weighed more than 240 pounds, Huntington and Stanford about 220. Uncle Mark was tall and bent and ‘thin as a fence post.’ His skinny knees and elbows were awkward and loosely hinged. He had small gray eyes, a long thin nose set in a long thin face and surmounting a long thin beard, and he lisped softly. He neither smoked nor drank, and he was sparing enough in the use of profanity to impress that eccentricity on the minds of acquaintances. He had a sparrow-like appetite. At table with his partners, Uncle Mark would musingly consume half a cup of tea while the others applied themselves to a succession of steaming dishes. He ate almost no meat; even in a previtamin age green vegetables were his staple, and the cost of procuring a regular supply darkened his early years in California.

Perhaps because of the meatless diet, he disliked hard physical work and managed to avoid it all his life. His partners had done the back-breaking labor then required of farm boys, but Hopkins was always an ‘inside man.’ At fifteen he was a clerk in a New York village store, and he remained a storekeeper, in New York and California, until he died. The firm of Huntington & Hopkins, founded in 1856, survived him more than twenty years.

Throughout his career he had the good fortune, or good judgment, to ally himself with men of initiative. An accurate judge of his own strength and limitations, he early recognized that, while he could not create a business, he could make one go. His business life was a long series of partnerships; beginning when he was twenty with Hopkins & Hughes, at Lockport, New York, and progressing through Williams & Hopkins, dealers in farm implements, and James Rowland & Co., commission merchants of New York City, to his association with Huntington at Sacramento and the final quadrangular partnership in the railroad venture.

‘Hopkins’s defect as a business man,’ wrote one critic, ‘was that he was too cautious, but he was wise enough to overcome that weakness by allying himself with speculators.’ Alone, he would have gained a comfortable livelihood, for he was shrewd, industrious, and thrifty. But he was too prudent to gamble for large stakes, one of those cautious men who are never penniless and seldom wealthy.

‘Against his better judgment’ he became possessed of more than twenty millions. The role of capitalist made him faintly uncomfortable, and he sometimes acted ‘as if he wanted to apologize for his millions.’ This attitude set him apart from other rich men.

Reporters rightly described him as a man of simple tastes. He disliked involvements, in a business letter, a meal, a system of bookkeeping, or a manner of life. He was good-natured in his dealings, but when he took a stand he could be ‘hell on wheels.’ The phrase is Charles Crocker’s, who recalled plaintively: ‘When Hopkins wanted to be, he was the stubbornest man alive.’ As affairs expanded, Uncle Mark’s programme of ordered simplicity was harder to maintain, and his minor revolts grew more frequent. Stanford and Crocker usually opposed him, Huntington less often. Huntington knew the futility of trying to argue him out of an opinion. When Uncle Mark took issue with others, investigation usually disclosed that the better arguments were on his side.

This passion for simplicity regulated his private life. Mounting wealth brought no quick change in his habits or surroundings. Because he failed to toss his abundant dollars about, he was accused of penny-squeezing. The charge was not just; Hopkins had no particular love of money. Traits put down as miserly were merely symptoms of inbred thrift. Clerks smiled when Uncle Mark paused to rescue bits of still-serviceable blotting paper from the wastebaskets. On the line (he made such visits not oftener than once a year), onlookers saw his lean figure bending to pick up rusty bolts and stray bits of iron.

When the general offices of the Central Pacific were moved from Sacramento to San Francisco in 1873, Hopkins, Stanford, and Crocker duly followed. The latter two made plans for new residences in keeping with their increased wealth; while these were building, they leased the most pretentious houses available.

Hopkins’s change of residence was more casually accomplished. He finished work one evening, took a night boat down the river, went direct from the wharf to his new office, and there spent a busy day. After a canary-like meal in a restaurant, he strolled out Sutter Street, regarding the to-let signs. Near Leavenworth Street a small cottage took his eye. Assuring himself that the roof shed water, he paid a month’s rent —thirtyfive dollars — and returned to the office for another hour or two of work.

He remained in that cottage more than five years. In fine weather he walked to and from the railroad offices at 4th and Townsend streets; when it rained he rode the horsecars. The arrangement suited him perfectly. His work was exacting, for he controlled the financial details of an expanding corporation; frequently he carried papers home and the coal-oil lamp in his window burned until past midnight. He kept no carriage, entertained few guests, took no vacations. For recreation he tried stubbornly to raise vegetables.

He would hardly have departed from this routine but for the insistence of his wife. Twenty years had passed since Mary Frances Sherwood, a lively, romantic girl, had married her quiet Cousin Mark, home for a visit after five moderately prosperous years in the gold fields. Hardly a romantic figure, he was then forty-one, almost twice the age of his pretty bride; but he was from California. In 1854, to live in that still glamorous land was romance enough for any adventurous girl east of the Alleghenies. Mary Hopkins seemingly found the early days of her married life full of variety and interest. But novelty wore off and life fell into commonplace patterns. The cousins remained childless. As the years passed, Hopkins devoted longer hours to work. When they settled in San Francisco, the vivacious girl Uncle Mark had married nineteen years before was a retiring, rather subdued matron, rarely seen in public.

When the wealth and growing power of the partners made them conspicuous figures on the Coast, society editors seldom found much to say of Mary Hopkins. She preferred domesticity to society. She was cultured, handsome, and gracious, and reading was her favorite recreation. Friends ‘whispered’ that she was a close student of the classics (an addiction to literature was then frequently mentioned in whispers), and she had a wide acquaintance with English novels.

That Mary Hopkins was not reconciled to the genteel boredom of her existence was long unknown. Uncle Mark, however, knew it. For she made it clear that living in a rented cottage and growing vegetables were not the ideal existence for a multimillionaire. Why should they not maintain an establishment comparable to those of the Stanfords and Crockers? Of the three local partners, why was her husband alone required to be at the office every day of the year?

Uncle Mark had no convincing answers to these questions. If his wife felt they should branch out a bit, he would be good-humored about it. So, after twenty years of eclipse, the active, funloving girl of the ‘50s began to reassert herself. Her emergence began the day Uncle Mark agreed to give up the Sutter Street cottage.

As always, Hopkins proceeded cautiously. He discovered that Stanford, who had escaped the vice of frugality, had just paid $60,000 for a block of land on the steep upper ridge of Nob Hill. From habit, Uncle Mark listened while Stanford described the attractions of his purchase. Hopkins stroked his beard and weighed the possibilities. He decided to look at Nob Hill. The hill was then a treeless waste, but its high eastern shoulder dominated the growing town, whose business section was already encroaching on its lower slopes, and Hopkins grew convinced that it would become the most valuable residential district of the city. He foresaw that a Nob Hill lot might eventually return a profit. When Stanford offered to share his purchase with him, Uncle Mark unhesitatingly paid him $30,000 for the western half of the block.

In the early ‘70s, it required vision to foresee the future of the hill. Only a few small houses had yet been built on its crest, because San Francisco’s streets veered up its steepest sides at grades so abrupt that two horses had difficulty pulling up a carriage. That streetcars would ever scale the height had until very recently been regarded as fantastic. But a local manufacturer of wire rope named Hallidie had been tinkering with a device intended to grip and release a moving cable buried in a trench beneath the street. By 1874 the invention had been proved practical, and the partners’ $60,000 ‘vertical real estate’ promptly became a conservative investment.

Stanford, always fascinated by mechanical gadgets, was soon financing the California Street Cable Railway. By 1876, tourists witnessed with amazement toylike cars, with no horses attached, gliding up the three steepest blocks from Kearny to Powell Street. Cable lines presently crossed Nob Hill north, south, east, and west. Comstock millionaires joined those of the railroad, and the late ‘70s saw a dozen mansions taking shape on the hill.

But all this was still in the future when Hopkins and Stanford undertook to anchor their houses to the hilltop. The partners turned over the task to the Central Pacific’s engineering staff. Citizens looked on while the organization that had conquered the Sierra demonstrated its skill anew. When the show was over, the block bounded by California, Pine, Powell, and Mason streets was girded by a slate-colored wall of masonry that on one side reached the height of a three-story building. The rock was granite from the railroad’s quarries at Rocklin, hewn and laid by the railroad’s stonemasons. Finished walls were identical with those of bridge approaches and cut facings. This great wall still stands. Passing citizens regard it speculatively, puzzled to account for its familiar texture and pattern; few recognize it as twin brother to the characteristic Southern Pacific rockwork.

For most of its length the wall is devoid of ornament. At the southwest corner, however, it becomes the wall of a mediœval castle, complete with battlements and towers, narrow windows and thick arched doorways. ‘The effect,’ wrote a local authority in the '80s, ’is as unexpected as it is charming. ... It rivals the best efforts of Viollet-le-Duc and . . . brings a bit of ancient Carcassonne to the shores of the Pacific.’

XV

Responsibility for this mediteval touch lay with Mary Hopkins. Bulwer-Lytton, Ouida, Mrs. Southworth, and others of the romantic school of the period were purveying the literature of escape long before the phrase came into use. Mary Hopkins, thumbing their pages during her barren years, shared the trials and st resses of countless chaste, triumphant courtships, eagerly absorbing the background against which England’s idealized virgins skirted the whirlpool to gain the safety of the altar. When she closed her novels and returned to reality, the transition must have been painful to her. By a turn of fortune’s wheel as surprising as any she had encountered in fiction, her elderly, bearded husband had the means of providing her with a setting not less Spacious than that of her favorite heroine.

Under her instructions the plans were gradually changed by the architects, Wright and Saunders, until what Uncle Mark hoped would be a modest dwelling became a singular mass of towers and gables and steeples. When the wooden framework at length began to rise, the city was astonished to discover that quiet Uncle Mark was building a castle beside which Stanford’s by no means tiny mansion shrank into insignificance. During construction, descriptions of the future wonders of the place filled the Sunday papers. Long before it was ready for occupancy, citizens were familiar with its drawing-room modeled on one of the chambers in the Palace of the Doges; dining room large enough to seat sixty, paneled to the ceiling in carved English oak; master bedroom finished in ebony and inlaid with ivory and ‘semi-precious stones’; library ‘so beautiful that only poetry should be read there.’

The house was a long time building. Meanwhile reporters who went to his cottage found Uncle Mark in shirt sleeves, nursing his vegetable beds. The old man leaned on his hoe, gazed up at the unfinished towers and turrets, and inquired if his visitors thought ’Hotel de Hopkins’ would ever pay dividends. He looked forward with less than complete pleasure to the day when he would have to live up to such magnificence, but’his concern for its mounting cost was uncomplicated by a suspicion that his thousands were being squandered to create an eyesore. He need not have worried about accustoming himself to the régime on the hill, for he died before the castle was finished.

Characteristically, he managed to achieve an uncomplicated exit. His health had always been a detail which gave him no concern. He had remained close to his desk, leaving vacations and European water cures to his younger partners. During the wet winter of 1877-1878 his gangling legs and arms tied themselves into rheumatic knots. For weeks he shuffled about with a cane in each hand before he went to Sacramento for a rest. He returned sooner than anyone expected, and Colton reported: ‘Mr. Hopkins has just come into the office, and I am happy to say is very much better.'

Early in March 1878, Hopkins hobbled aboard a company train for an inspection of the new Sunset Route. He thought the Arizona sun would bake the stiffness out of his joints. One evening he stretched himself on a couch in the car on a Yuma siding. Presently one of the construction engineers heard the old man sigh in his sleep, recalled that it was past his punctual bedtime, and tried to arouse him. For once Uncle Mark was not concerned with being punctual.

He was a few months short of sixtyfive. His body was taken to San Francisco, and the pastor of his old Sacramento church hurried down to conduct a funeral far more elaborate than Uncle Mark would have desired. Accounts of his death in California newspapers retain to this day the ring of sincerity. Hopkins was unquestionably the bestliked of the Big Four. By 1878 the railroad was unpopular with nine out of every ten citizens, but even those most resentful of its tactics did not blame the senior partner. He had defects and eccentricities; he was an unextravagant rich man, and therefore a miser. But he was modest, kindly, and quietly humorous, with none of the vanity and little of the ruthlessness of his partners. Men found him friendly and approachable. ‘I’ve often crossed the street to shake hands with Mark Hopkins, and I’ve done the same to avoid meeting the others,’ said one.

His body was later moved to Sacramento and installed in a mausoleum his widow had built for him at a cost, it was said, of $150,000. Its walls were of rosecolored marble, so highly polished that they flashed like mirrors in the hot valley sun. There were massive bronze doors flanked by urns, and within was a frieze of acanthus leaves. Alary Hopkins returned to her unfinished mansion on Nob Hill. She had installed her husband at last, in a setting proper to his station.

The telegram from Yuma announcing Hopkins’s death had the indirect result of projecting the public spotlight upon his widow. Millions suddenly wanted to learn all about her. Pictures of the plump, square-faced, rather stern woman (caption: ‘America’s Richest Widow’) appeared in newspapers all over the land. Readers of Sunday supplements were enthralled by drawings of the lonely widow, ‘mistress of fifty millions,’ gazing from the windows of her castle, while bordering text speculated on what Prince Charming would come riding to her rescue.

By such journalistic alchemy, Mary Hopkins was transformed into a celebrity. She was t hen close to fifty, reserved by nature, and this invasion of her privacy appalled and frightened her. While local papers discussed when she would remarry, she acquired a growing dislike for the town. Announcement of her engagement to a retired naval officer, one of many eager to relieve her of the tedium of widowhood, proved the final straw. The heiress made angry denial and left for the Atlantic seaboard. She settled at Great Barrington, Massachusetts— where her and Uncle Mark’s common forbears had lived — and embarked on a building spree. McKim, Alead & White designed a château, modeled on Chambord, which eventually cost above two millions. Headstrong tendencies were already in evidence. The widow dismissed the original architects; a Boston designer followed, and lasted a month; the work was completed under a young protégé, Edward T. Searles.

The San Francisco castle stood unfinished, but before long Airs. Hopkins returned and saw it to completion. She also acquired in rapid succession a New York house, at 60 Fifth Avenue, a summer cottage at Block Island, and yet another at Metuchen, New Jersey. During the first half-dozen years of her widowhood she was constantly building or furnishing one or another of these; often several at a time.

Other unsuspected qualities became evident. With no preparation, the power of virtually unlimited wealth had been put into her hands. Flattery speedily transformed the once subdued matron. She developed an imperious manner; employees learned that to question orders meant instant dismissal; business and social relations were often explosively terminated. Because she refused to grant interviews, the newspapers exaggerated her eccentricities, and recorded her activities and extravagances in terms of mild burlesque.

By degrees she became known as a frivolous woman, egotistical and selfwilled. Her often-expressed dislike for California was cordially reciprocated, and her occasional visits to Nob Hill aroused no local enthusiasm. At first lonely and confused, she presently grew bitter, convinced that she was being persecuted. She suspected and quarreled with old friends, developed a contempt for the opinions of others, and eventually contracted an extraordinary marriage.

During the years intervening between Mark Hopkins’s death in 1878 and that of his widow in 1891, the latter’s business affairs on the Coast, were in the capable hands of her adopted son, Tim. Of business she knew rather less than the average wife of the period, but, her quarter interest in the railroad being important to the surviving partners, she had no lack of advisers. Her income proved equal to her heavy expenditures, and Hopkins’s death necessitated only minor changes in the financial structure of the partnership.

Timothy Hopkins was under thirty when Uncle Mark died. He was a son of Patrick Nolan, a New Englander who had arrived in San Francisco in 1862 and worked there as a dock hand while he accumulated funds to send for his wife and three children. On the day his family sailed for the West, Nolan fell into the bay and was drowned. One of Ids children died on the voyage; his widow arrived destitute, and found work in the Hopkins household. Uncle Mark and his wife, childless, were attracted by the boy and he came to live with them.

The boy grew up in Hopkins’s Spartan household, attended Sacramento and San Francisco schools, then went to work in the railroad’s general offices. When Hopkins died, Timothy was assistant treasurer, one of the bright young men of the executive staff. He was competent to step into the dead man’s shoes, and did. He became the widow’s main reliance. So close were their relations that the widow took a step which had been contemplated while Uncle Mark was alive: Timothy was legally adopted. Later the bond was strengthened by the marriage of the widow’s newly adopted son and her niece.

XVI

Mrs. Hopkins returned to the Coast only for occasional brief stays. On one such visit, a young man from New York, employee of a firm of decorators, called at the Nob Hill house. Furniture was his major enthusiasm; having heard of the wonders of the new house, he was politely eager to inspect it. Their common enthusiasm for houses and furnishings was the basis of a friendship that sprang up between the widow and twenty-eightyear-old Edward T. Searles.

Tim Hopkins failed to share his foster mother’s admiration for the decorator. As the widow’s infatuation grew more evident, so did Timothy’s alarm. When Searles left again for the East, Mrs. Hopkins accompanied him to the Oakland Pier; the enamored widow threw her arms about him, gave him a good-bye kiss, and informed friends that they were to marry. She soon followed Searles east, where their engagement was announced. Timothy bombarded her with arguments against the match — with the usual effect. These aroused her resentment at what she considered meddling. At length she wrote a curt note forbidding mention of the subject again; Timothy replied with still more arguments and the widow broke off communication entirely. There was a partial reconciliation on her last visit to the Coast before her marriage, but thereafter communications between her and Timothy were confined to matters of business.

When, on July 26, 1891, Mrs. Searles died, it was expected that Timothy would inherit only a minor share of the estate. But neither the public nor her adopted son was prepared for what her will disclosed. The indomitable lady enlivened her exit with a final thumb-tonose salute to her critics. To her husband she left her entire estate. There were no bequests to relatives or to charity. Friends and family servants were unmentioned, and Timothy was specifically disinherited.

This unorthodox will became big news. Reporters gathered at the town house on lower Fifth Avenue to learn from disgruntled servants interesting details of the bereft husband. While Searles may not have been a hero to his valet, he was at least a mystery. He is revealed as a man of intense but restricted enthusiasms. Unlike his spouse, he was no lover of literature; none could recall ever having seen him read a book or a newspaper. He had, however, two passions: a dislike of his wife’s adopted son, and a love for furniture.

His chief pleasure was to wander from room to room in his various residences, standing absorbed before a blank wall, contemplating the draperies of a window, examining the cabinets and chairs. Servants reported that he would often spend an entire day — sometimes until late at night — in a room moving furniture about, hanging and rehanging pictures, rearranging bric-a-brac.

Would Timothy Hopkins contest the will? Within a week after his ret urn from Japan, suit was filed. Hopkins asked for a share of his foster mother’s estate, alleging that the will had been secured by undue influence and fraud, and that Mrs. Searles had been of unsound mind when it was executed.

Trial opened at Salem, Massachusetts, in September 1891. On the stand, Searles faced a tittering courtroom to reveal details of an extraordinary courtship. He testified that the widow had proposed marriage to him in 1883. At first he had refused to ‘entertain the proposition.’ His hesitation, he added, had lasted three years. Meantime he had accompanied her and a party of friends to Florida in 1886, and from 1885 to 1887 had superintended the completion and furnishing of the Great Barrington château.

Prodded by Hopkins’s attorneys, the witness stated that he had known his bride was twenty-two years his senior and that she was a woman of large means. He denied that he had married her for her money; denied also that it had been a ‘love match,’finally admitting unhappily that he had been moved by ‘ both love and money.’ As his wife’s sole heir, he had received the Hopkins share of the railroad properties, the San Francisco mansion, property at Sacramento and elsewhere in California, the Great. Barrington and New York houses, an undetermined amount of cash and miscellaneous property. He fixed his current annual income at between $500,000 and $600,000. On advice of counsel, he refused to state what his income had been before his marriage.

The following morning spectators were disappointed to learn that an out-ofcourt settlement had been reached. Timothy Hopkins received a sum which the Boston Globe stated was ‘between eight and ten millions.’ In San Francisco the Call commented: ‘Evidently Mr. Searles did n’t want another day on the witness stand.’

The settlement left Searles in control of much the greater part of the Hopkins railroad securities. His agents held the balance of power between the Stanford and Huntington factions. Had Timothy come into possession of the majority of the Hopkins stock, Huntington might have been forced from the Southern Pacific presidency. Huntington had realized the danger and, because of it, had treated Searles with a benevolent friendliness. He had even commented approvingly on the way Searles had conducted himself on the stand. The bulk of the Hopkins stock continued to be voted solidly as Huntington directed, despite increasing objections from the Stanford and Crocker factions on the Coast.

Rivalry between Huntington and the heirs of his partners persisted through the ‘90s. With them Huntington was frequently at odds, mainly because his autocratic tendencies grew with his years. ‘When I was younger I sometimes had to tolerate fools,’ he snapped in one of his later interviews. ‘That’s one place where I draw the line now.’ A writer in the Examiner explained that there was nothing complicated about Huntington’s definition of a fool: it was anyone who disagreed with or opposed him. ‘If he had had his way, Ins partners’ millions would have reverted to the Southern Pacific’s treasury.’

Not being able to accomplish that, Huntington ill concealed his low opinion of the ability of the second generation, He began harping again on the failure of others to work as hard as he did. His suspicion of the descendants of his partners included Timothy Hopkins, but it is doubtful if the latter gave offense by failing to attend to business. The railroad securities forced from Searles assured Timothy’s continuance as a railroad official; he remained an active and useful citizen of California until his death in 1936.

Searles retired gratefully from the public spotlight. He traveled, indulged his taste for furniture and its arrangement, and passed out of the picture — one of the most curious figures in the gallery of those thrown into prominence by Central Pacific profits.

While Uncle Mark was the first of the partners to die, his millions continued to occupy public attention long after interest in the estates of the other three had waned. Although the probate court ordered the distribution of his property in 1883, word got abroad that much of the estate was still intact. There were but two important heirs: the widow — who received by far the greater part — and Uncle Mark’s picturesque brother, Moses, who had served as administrator. In the early 1900’s, petitions began to be filed in California courts stating that assets of the estate had been fraudulently concealed and asking the distribution of $40,000,000 stated to be lying in the vaults of San Francisco and Sacramento banks. Petitions of nearly a thousand lost heirs were filed in the federal courts. The lower courts in 1927 dismissed the pleas, and two years later the Supreme Court ended the hopes of the expectanl thousand by denying an appeal. New crops of heirs with new petitions continued to turn up in such number that in 1931 a San Francisco judge denounced the scheme as a country-wide swindle by which a group of attorneys were ‘beating innocent and usually ignorant people out of their savings by making them think they are heirs to Alark Hopkins.’

What prudent, practical Uncle Mark would have thought of this horde of real or imagined descendants and their hope of sharing the mythical fortune must be left to conjecture. His meagre dust had lain beneath the acanthus frieze at Sacramento for half a century. The Nob Hill house had become the first home of the San Francisco Art School. Later still the post-war building boom produced a twenty-story hotel on the site, where Hollywood notables came ‘to get away from it all.’ It is the Mark Hopkins, most frivolous of the local hotels; ‘the Mark’ to the younger crowd. Perhaps it is well that Uncle Mark is safe in the little marble house his wife built for him at Sacramento. One cannot be sure that he had a sense of irony.

XVII

For thirty years Leland Stanford had more than his share of praise and abuse. ‘Had he come at an earlier era,’wrote one admirer, ‘he would have been a Christ or a Confucius.’ Others compared him, without irony, to Cæsar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and John Stuart Mill, to the disadvantage of all four. A California editor stated that more properly than Lorenzo he might be called ‘the Magnificent.’ One of Hubert H. Bancroft’s anonymous scribes thus began a biographical sketch: ‘If he [the biographer] starts with the simple assertion that he [Stanford] is the greatest man in the world to-day, it may sound like senseless adulation, yet it is no more than the truth.’

On the other hand, his partner Huntington once described him as ‘a damned old fool.’ Alfred Cohen, on a brief vacation from the Central Pacific’s legal staff, credited him with ‘the ambition of an emperor and the spite of a peanut vender.’ Ambrose Bierce delighted to print his name £eland $tanford, and Arthur McEwen suggested in 1804 that the arch above the entrance to his new university should bear the legend: ‘With Apologies to God.’ At Stanford University’s dedication eight, thousand citizens stood respectfully in the hoi sun while praises were sung of‘the noblest gift in the history of mankind.’ But many suppressed grins when asked to join in the closing hymn: ‘We Give Thee But Thine Own.’

He was a large, heavy man, deliberate in thought and motion. All his life he was a notably slow talker. Hesitant speech grew more pronounced with his years. Later interviews refer to his meditative silences between the putting of a question and its answer. This extreme deliberation of thought was regarded by many as evidence of sincerity, of a desire to weigh the merits of a question and frame his answer only after the matter had received sagacious analysis. These grave pauses impressed strangers more profoundly than those who knew him well. The latter recognized that length of pause bore no relation to the complexity of the question. ‘How do you feel this morning, Governor?' required as long concentration as a query involving the safety of the Republic.

Stanford’s slowness proved no handicap. It made him a success in politics. Extemporaneous speaking was beyond him; public addresses had to be written in advance. Brief remarks were memorized; those of any length were read from complete manuscripts. This gave him a twofold advantage. During his entire political life he never made a statement that had not been considered in advance. This big, earnest man on the platform, stolidly reading his speech line for line, page by page, won the votes of his listeners. Here was no orator intent on swaying electors by sinister eloquence. The speaker was uninspired, therefore he must be sincere; he was dull, and hence probably profound; of course, only thoroughly honest politicians make thoroughly bad speeches.

Not long after the completion of his redwood mansion, an official of a British company called on Stanford and was invited to dinner. He wrote in his diary: ‘The house I later heard spoken of as the finest in the western part of America, and in San Francisco I saw no others that rivaled it in size.’ Silently and grimly, Stanford led him on a tour of the structure, a circuit of t he steep grounds, and a visit to the stables. Mrs. Stanford being indisposed, the two dined alone. After a long and, except for the guest’s remarks, an almost completely silent meal, Stanford led the way to the library.

‘For the next half hour,’ the visitor wrote, ‘we talked. That is, I talked and Mr. Stanford sat silent. I do not say that he listened, for that I had no means of knowing. He merely sat, regarding me not impolitely but with a face from which all expression had been erased. He may have beard every word I uttered or he may have heard nothing. I began by feeling that I must be boring him, then by wondering if I had perhaps given him cause for grave offense. Next, it occurred to me that he might be sleepy; finally I became certain that he was ill.’ When the visitor at length fled, Stanford remarked how much he had enjoyed their ‘chat,’ with such sincerity that the caller believed him. The Englishman lay long abed reflecting on the eccentricities of American millionaires.

Stanford was not always loat h to talk. He granted interviews more willingly than most prominent men, and actively enjoyed the hubbub of political campaigns. Before he had been in California two years he was serving as justice of the peace at Michigan Bluff, a cluster of canvas shacks in the Sierra foothills. He had hardly settled in Sacramento before he was a candidate for alderman, receiving 87 of 991 votes. Undeterred, he ran for state treasurer the same year and was again badly defeated. A little later he helped organize the new Republican Party in California, and was elected Governor in 1861. He served a two-year term, retired from politics for twenty years, then decided to go to the Senate.

A week after the California legislature of 1885 had elected him, a reporter for the Examiner asked James G. Fair, Senator from Nevada: ‘Senator, how much do you suppose Stanford’s seat cost him?’

The mining man shifted his toothpick: ‘ Well, judging from what I had to pay up at Carson, my guess is not a cent less than a hundred thousand.'

Other guesses were higher. This election was the cause of his final break with Huntington, a piece of bad luck that cost him many times a hundred thousand. But five years later he could still remark: ‘I learn every year more and more to love the landscape, and this the poorest man in California can enjoy as well as the richest.'

His religion has been described as Unitarian Methodism. David Starr Jordan mentioned ‘a rarely beautiful smile which illumined his otherwise impassive face.’ He was currently believed to have paid the editor of a San Francisco weekly $10,000 a year to write admiringly of his activities. In his old age he coined maxims: ‘If il rained twenty-dollar gold pieces until noon every day, at night there would be some men begging for their suppers.’

One of eight children, Stanford was born on March 9, 1824 at Watervliet, New York. Josiah Stanford, a farmerinnkeeper, moved several times during the boy’s childhood. One of his locations was the Elm Grove Hotel, between Albany and Schenectady, where he owned 300 acres of wooded land. As his sons grew old enough to swing an axe, they were set. to chopping firewood for the Albany market. Leland kept busy throughout his sixteenth and seventeenth years on a railroad contract for 2600 cords. During that time he met the daughter of Dyer Lathrop, an Albany storekeeper. At once he formed the habit of making elaborate detours about the Lathrop house on Washington Avenue so that the girl might not encounter him in his rustic clothes, perched on top of a load of firewood.

The elder Stanford decided to give one of his sons professional training. Leland was chosen. He set off in 1841 for a school near Utica. Later he transferred to Cazenovia Seminary. There he was in intermittent attendance until 1845. Although never graduated, and apparently undistinguished in the classroom, he came to be regarded as one of the Seminary’s distinguished sons. Stanford in after years made substantial gifts to the school.

Next came three years with an Albany law firm. Now he was at less pains to avoid the storekeeper’s daughter. By the time he was admitted to the bar in 1848 he and Jane Lathrop were engaged. Desiring to settle in one of the new towns on the Western frontier, he married and took his bride to Port Washington, Wisconsin, a village on the lake front some miles north of Milwaukee. There he prepared to grow up with the country. Three years later it was obvious that Port Washington was not to be another Chicago. When a fire destroyed Stanford’s office, his library, and the businesses of most of his debtors, he left the declining town without regret and returned to Albany.

The year was 1852. While he had been trying to begin a professional career on the shore of Lake Michigan, five of his brothers had been drawn west by the rush to California. Their reports to the family at Elm Grove told of moderate success and brighter prospects. Within a few weeks Leland was headed west by steamer to California. His wife remained behind.

Stanford was twenty-eight when he arrived in San Francisco. The crest of the gold rush was of course well past, and with it went the myth that nuggets were to be picked up like pebbles in the streams. This Argonaut of’52 had no intention of mining; he had come to join his brothers in the grocery business. The elder Stanford, Josiah, opened a store at Mormon Island in 1850; later he established a central store at Sacramento, and as his brothers arrived he put them in charge of branches set up in various foothill camps.

Leland took his place in this primitive chain-store system. He acquired an interest in a one-room store at Cold Springs, then mostly inhabited by Chinese. But business was poor, and Stanford moved to another mushroom camp: Michigan Bluff. This settlement was still on the upgrade. For three years the store grew and its owners prospered.

The Sacramento store, managed by Josiah and another brother, Philip, also flourished. By the middle ‘50s, Stanford Brothers was a wholesale grocery house of standing. When Josiah and Philip moved ‘down to the bay, Leland took over sole management of the Sacramento store.

Through the store Stanford was introduced to gold mining. A chance shot proved remunerative. Among the customers of Stanford Brot hers were a pair of storekeepers, Hanford and Downs, in Volcano, fifty-five miles southeast, of Sacramento. They owned an interest in a quartz mine at Sutter’s Creek and, like thousands of others, bankrupted themselves trying to develop it. Stanford was among their creditors; they settled their bill by turning over to him 76 of their 93 shares in the Lincoln mine. Soon the mine began to produce. In 1872 Stanford and the other owners sold out for $400,000. With dividends he realized over half a million by the transaction.

During this early period Stanford had no intention of living permanently on the Coast. He wanted to accumulate a fortune as quickly as possible, go back East, and settle down. This he was able to do in 1855. He returned to Albany with three major objectives: to go into the wholesale grocery business there; to rejoin his wife; and to buy a certain imposing Albany residence he had admired in his youth.

His disillusionment paralleled that of other returned Californians. After the Coast, life in older communities seemed humdrum. His desire to return to California was seconded by his wife. During his absence she had lived at. her father’s house, where friends and neighbors regarded her with glances of sympathy. Convinced that she was looked on as a deserted wife, Jane Stanford developed a lifelong dislike for her native town. California, to her mind, was none too remote from Albany. Stanford once remarked that Albany’s gossips were indirectly responsible for making him Governor of California.

XVIII

Then and later Stanford possessed a ponderous geniality, considerable personal vanity, and a naïve love of display. Of the Big Four, Huntington was the dominating figure, but until late in life he chose to sit in the wings while others carried out his wishes on the stage. Crocker, although physically domineering, was essentially a subordinate, while Hopkins never rose, or desired to rise, above keeper of the accounts.

There remained Stanford, who craved leadership but lacked Huntington’s talent for moving straight to a desired end. Denied true leadership, he seized nominal leadership as a substitute. His failure to dominate the affairs of the Central Pacific profoundly influenced his career, and his last thirty years became a struggle for self-justification. He succeeded better than most men so situated. Although he was defeated in the end and died knowing it, there were long periods when seeming success was indistinguishable from reality.

As profits from the railroad enterprises accumulated, the greater part of his share went to create a background against which he played his late-Victorian version of political sage and financial king. It was a magnificent production, put on with utter disregard for expense. The Stanfords moved from Sacramento to San Francisco in 1874, and the following year occupied the most desirable suite in the newly finished Palace Hotel. Then they rented a house on Pine Street, from the windows of which they could overlook erection of the latest of their elaborate houses.

Stanford startled San Franciscans by encircling two acres of sand on Nob Hill with a thirty-foot wall and constructing a mansion that dominated the city. From its marble steps visitors walked into a circular entrance hall, the stone floor of which was inlaid with the signs of the zodiac in black marble. Amber light filtered from a glass dome seventy feet above. A wide hall terminated in a conservatory. Sliding doors opened into high-ceiled chambers: a reception room finished in the style of the East Indies, a library which the Governor—this was his favorite title, retained long after he left office — used as his home office and in which he received callers; a communicating door led to a billiard room. On the sunny Powell-Pine corner was the downstairs sitting room, the windows of which, hung with purple and gold velvet, overlooked the entire business section of the city. There the family and guests listened to hymns and waltzes, admired birds brought in from the aviary, and radiated the elegance of Victorian domesticity.

To this prim chamber came Miss Mary Frayne, a journalist preparing articles on ‘Our Millionaires at Home.’ She found the Stanfords leading a life not greatly different from that of humbler families. Neither Stanford nor his wife cared for the frivolous life. The Governor liked quiet evenings at home. His chief hobby was business; next, the breeding and training of horses.

Miss Frayne noted that Stanford had never bet a dollar on a horse. He no longer cared for travel, but considered it an elevating experience. It was the duty of rich men to have good copies made of famous paintings, so that humbler citizens might study them and develop a taste for art. Mrs. Stanford let her husband speak for both.

Soon after the completion of the railroad, his wife presented its president with a private car, the ‘ Stanford.’ When the Governor traveled he liked to receive the attentions due him as president of the company. News of his approach was telegraphed ahead. At division points officials filed past to pay respects and inquire after the president’s welfare. Section crews stood at attention while the special roared past, engines of freight trains waiting on sidings sounded long salutes, and repair crews were marshaled at points visible from Stanford’s window.

When his car passed to the tracks of rival railroads, Central Pacific’s president was received as an honored guest. Even in England, Stanford’s pomp on arrival convinced other passengers that here was no ordinary traveler. The steamer was met in the Mersey by a tug; Stanford and his party were hurried ashore, ushered into a private car, and dispatched to London in advance of regular boat trains. There a favorite suite at the Hotel Bristol was ready, with the same servants who had attended his wants on earlier visits.

Stanford’s magnificent establishments aroused interest that persisted from year to year. Texture of Stanford carpets, quality of Stanford lace curtains, the intricacy of Stanford gas-lit chandeliers, cornices, and iron fences, were discussed in the remotest corners of the state. During his last twenty years he moved restlessly from extravagance to extravagance. Because the ascent to Nob Hill was too abrupt for convenient scaling by horse and carriage, he built the California Street Railroad. Thereafter, to the measured click of the underground cable, carloads of natives and tourists passed in day-long procession before the stone gateposts and marble steps.

Its noble isolation gone, Stanford lost interest in the Nob Hill house, to focus on a larger enterprise. The Palo Alto farm, a nine-thousand-acre block of foothills and oak-studded meadow, provided a suitable background for horse breeding. Descriptions of the wonders of Palo Alto began to appear regularly in the press. The residence — Stanford’s fourth in a decade—had ‘all the luxuries of a beautiful manor’; the two race tracks and the sixty-acre trotting park were ‘rolled and sprinkled daily’; long lines of stables were attended by the farm’s hundred and fifty employees.

Stanford’s horses added new lustre to his name: ‘Ten full-aged stallions, 50 young stallions, 250 brood mares, 250 colts and fillies less than three years old.’ Supremacy on the track became his goal. Hour after hour, six days a week, Stanford’s horses circled the flawless track; ninety colts were kept in training and each was exercised for twenty minutes daily. Near-by stables housed ‘twenty selected colts in careful training for the Eastern race courses two seasons in the future.’ Beyond were quarters for the stallions Shannon and Flood, and thirty brood mares sired by celebrated studs of England and America.

One of Stanford’s horses was named in the news sixty years later. This was Gloster, first trotter to cover a mile in under 2:20. Gloster was trained on the Palo Alto tracks. Before the eastward journey was well begun, the horse was killed in a train wreck. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President-elect, retold the story of Gloster’s achievements; his father had sold the horse to Stanford.

The names and reputations of other Palo Alto horses revive memories of reverence: Piedmont, imported at a cost of $30,000, Clay, Frolic, Electioneer, Fiddler, fastest stallion ever bred in England, Musk, Fetterlock, Ison, Macgregor, Hermit, Lowlander, Salvador, Peregrine. . . . The stocky, aging Governor, in his shining sulky, made the rounds over dustless roads, inspecting recent purchases, hastening the completion of still more stables, sitting for hours beside the track while his trainers put likely prospects through their paces.

His interest next turned to farming. For a million dollars he acquired 55,000 acres in the northern end of the Sacramento Valley. There another baronial estate was presently in the making. Grapevines to the number of 2,800,000 were planted in a single 3500-acre block, ‘incomparably the largest vineyard in the world.’ Wineries were built, irrigation systems installed; the town of Vina came into being. Descendants of imported French vintners to-day lend an unexpected Gallic, touch to several valley communities. These, the ruined wineries, and the stumps of dead grapevines, are the only present remainders of the grandiose scheme. Soil and climate refused to coöperate.

Stanford thought less of marketing his products than of convincing the public that the enterprise had a high purpose. His intention was to make Vina brandy exclusively for medicinal purposes. Oak casks were shipped to San Francisco and stowed as ballast in the holds of the grain-carrying clipper whips, the brandy aging five years in the gentle agitation provided by the seven seas.

XIX

The Vina farm had hardly passed its experimental stages when Stanford’s main interest again shifted, this time to the most spectacular enterprise of all. For nearly twenty years after their marriage, the Stanfords remained childless. Leland Jr. was born at Sacramento in May 1868, and for the next fifteen years the child’s welfare was a determining factor in every decision his parents made. The family moved to San Francisco in 1874 partly to avoid his growing up in the provincial atmosphere of a valley town; the Nob Hill house was planned on an elaborate scale because his father and mother expected that some day he would dispense hospitality there. Even the purchase of the Vina ranch was influenced by consideration for his health. He grew to be a normal youth, studious and quiet. He was expected to succeed his father in the management of the Stanford properties, and his training was planned with that in mind.

That his responsibilities would be heavy the father knew, for he had not found his millions an unmixed blessing. ‘It is pleasant to be rich,’ he told a Washington reporter. ‘But the advantages of wealth are greatly exaggerated. . . . I do not clearly see that a man who can buy anything that he fancies is any better off than the man who can buy what he actually wants. He can easily gratify his whimsies, to be sure; but there are some positive disadvantages. . . . My wife and I are worried almost to death by beggars, between whom it is very difficult to discriminate. Most of them are regular “rounders,” who solicit, implore, entreat, and command that there shall be given them at once certain stipulated sums of money. Of course there is no pleasure in being thus tormented. ... A man’s annoyances increase with his wealth.’

Of the elder Stanford the interviewer said: ‘The life he was compelled to lead in order to accumulate wealth probably prevented that cultivation of taste for art, music, and letters which is essential to the highest enjoyment.’ There had been deficiencies in Stanford’s education. Despite the presence of his portrait in the chapel at Cazenovia Seminary his grammar was never faultless, lie knew no foreign languages, and discovered belatedly that his taste in art was not reliable.

Young Leland was to be spared all this; he was to be trained from childhood to be more than a ‘mere business man.’ Accordingly, when he was hardly out of the nursery, he was studying music, taking dancing lessons, and conjugating French verbs. When he was eight, his parents took him to Philadelphia to broaden his mind by a study of the arts and crafts at the Centennial Exposition. He carried a set of wood-carving tools back to San Francisco. Some months later his parents, delighted at this evidence of talent, exhibited his carvings at the annual Mechanics’ Fair.

At eleven, Leland was deemed ready for foreign travel. From 1879 to 1881 the boy and his parents moved over England and the Continent. Stanford and his wife visited spas, gratified their whims for jewels and paintings, had their portraits done by currently fashionable artists, and followed the pattern expected of rich Americans. Leland continued his studies, visited galleries, improved his accent under ‘the best teachers money could hire,’ and began his celebrated ‘museum.’

The boy collected antique coins, medals, and fragments of pottery and sculpture, and eagerly studied the periods that had produced them. Had he lived, it is not unlikely that the bulk of the Stanford fortune might eventually have been invested in antique art. Before Leland was fifteen, his collection filled three rooms on the top floor of the house; this, with additions made during his last trip to Europe and the Near East, eventually found its way into the Stanford University museum, where it may be seen to-day—the naïve and promising beginnings of what might have been a life enthusiasm.

Leland was being prepared for college when he returned to San Francisco in 1882. That, fall he presided for the first time as host, entertaining groups of boys and girls from San Francisco’s eligible families. The parties were in the nature of a farewell, the family soon returning to New York, where Leland studied for the entrance examinations to Harvard. His parents, meantime, unwilling to be separated from him by the width of the continent during the coming four years, leased a house on Fifth Avenue, which they never occupied. Stanford’s health gave concern and doctors advised a water cure in Bavaria, so early in 1883 the three crossed the Atlantic again, spent the summer in Germany and France, and in November started for Athens. There, during December and January, Leland made notable additions to his collection.

But the weather continued bad, and the boy became ill. The three sailed for Naples in February, then on to Rome. As Leland grew worse they hurried to Florence. There his persistent fever was diagnosed as typhoid. Physicians from Paris and Rome were summoned to his room in the Hotel Bristol. Blinds were drawn over the windows facing the Arno, and the street outside was covered with straw to deaden sounds of trallic. But the methods of treatment — including a periodical wrapping of the patient in sheets dipped in ice water—proved ineffectual, and on .March 13, 1884 the youth died. He was not yet sixteen.

In later years Mrs. Stanford several times revisited Florence. Not until nearly two decades later did she bring herself to glance briefly at the windows behind which the losing battle had been fought. In 1907 a group of Stanford students caused a memorial plaque to be set into the wall of the hotel.

In Paris, five weeks after Poland’s death, his father and mother rewrote their wills to endow a memorial to their son. For a time the Stanfords considered founding a ‘museum of artistic and natural curiosities,’thereby completing what the boy had tentatively begun. How the decision to found a university was reached is not definitely known. Mrs. Stanford in 1892 publicly repudiated the theory of supernatural guidance via spiritualism — a statement thankfully received by members of the Stanford faculty, already lecturing in the new halls.

The Stanfords then intended establishing a technical school — a decision influenced by the Governor’s admiration for ingenious mechanisms. Once he spent half a day contemplating a mediawal catapult in Paris. Visits to historic castles were prolonged while he inspected the mechanism of drawbridges and studied the methods by which moats were filled and drained. When a San Francisco photographer named Muybridge proposed photographing one of Stanford’s race horses with a battery of cameras Stanford financed the experiment. By financing publication of Muybridge’s book, The Horse in Motion, his name became permanently linked with the beginnings of motion pictures. Stanford’s favorite exhibit was his orchestrion, a complete orchestra mechanically operated. Mechanical birds perched on potted trees sang by compressed air.

Stanford considered making his technical school part of the new state university at Berkeley. Accordingly, he had the Governor appoint him to the university’s board of regents, but the state legislature unexpectedly refused to confirm the appointment. The rebuff ended all possibility of his joining forces with the Berkeley institution.

Leland Stanford Junior University, announced in the summer of 1880, was regarded as monumental folly outside of California. To take a tract of farmland in a sparsely settled state and with five million dollars convert it into a centre of learning aroused little enthusiasm in the East. The University of California had an enrollment of less than 300, evidence that there was no need for another college less than forty miles distant. One Easterner wrote: ‘There is about as much need for a new university in California as for an asylum of decayed sea captains in Switzerland.’ Less than a generation later, Stanford authorities were struggling to keep the enrollment down to manageable size, and the Berkeley institution, swollen from 300 to 18,000, was straining to absorb the increasing crowds entering its gates.

Newspaper gibes about building marble palaces on his wheatfields and buying live million dollars’ worth of intellectual centre had no effect on Stanford. During the fall of 1880 his car shuttled over Eastern railroads, and in its rosewood drawing-room the founders interviewed Eastern talent. At Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University initiated them into research. Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell impressed Stanford anew with the value of the applied sciences. Andrew D. White of Cornell was urged to come west as president. At Cambridge, Charles Eliot Norton bluntly informed them that a university was an expensive hobby; they must be prepared to spend every penny of the advertised five millions. ‘Mrs. Stanford looked grave,’ wrote Norton later.

One Saturday afternoon, the Stanford car being shunted to a sidetrack, half the population of Bloomington, Indiana, hurried to the depot to stare at its curtained windows. At five the next morning the thirty-nine-year-old president of the University of Indiana returned to Bloomington from a speechmaking trip. A breathless friend appeared to announce that the ‘ Governor of California ‘ was at the village hotel and wished to see him. Stanford and his wife described the stone quadrangle taking shape on the Palo Alto meadow and announced that their joint estate, the bulk of which would go toward the university’s endowment, was valued at thirty million dollars. Hesitantly the founder stated that it was to be a university of the highest order, a centre of invention and research, coeducational and interdenominational, with no tuition and free from political control. Its president would be paid ten thousand a year. Stanford had often paid far more for a likely race horse, but the sum staggered the young educator.

David Starr Jordan hurried home for Consultation with his wife, while Mrs. Stanford and her secretary set off to attend service at a local church. The chronicles of Bloomington record that she dropped five dollars in gold on the collection plate and took occasion, when the student preacher hurried up to inquire if a mistake had been made, to tell him that his vengeful Old Testament God was unlike the gentle deity of her acquaintance.

Meantime Dr. Jordan had decided ‘with some enthusiasm’ that he would become the first president of the new university. A year later, with an infant son and three pieces of baggage, he stepped from the train at Menlo Park. An acquaintance, waiting with Stanford in the latter’s carriage, remarked that he guessed one so laden would ‘stay hitched.’ Jordan stayed hitched for nearly four decades.

In October 1891 the university formally opened its doors. Stanford, with Jordan holding an umbrella over his head, slowly read an address to 415 prospective students (one Herbert Hoover among them) and to a dense crowd of visitors.

The Coast’s newest educational plant functioned smoothly for twenty months. Then, on June 20, 1893, Stanford died unexpectedly, and hidden weaknesses threatened to bring its brief history to a close.

XX

Stanford’s troubles extended far back to the early days of the Central Pacific. Behind the university and the race horses, vineyards, and mansions of the spacious Stanford setting was the railroad, source of dollars that made the rest, possible. And behind the railroad stood the cynical Collis Huntington. Ironically, Stanford’s gilded career had been shaped by the hand of his enemy; the cold New Englander was ever the ghost at the Governor’s banquet.

Stanford’s difficulties, however, were largely of his own making. His grandiose activities led him into extravagances that even his quarter share of huge railroad profits could not bear. Intervention of his partners had several times extricated him from financial tangles. A letter to Huntington from tho company’s financial manager, David Colton, on January 4, 1878, listed the amounts the four partners had drawn from the treasury for their personal use since August 1 of the preceding year: Huntington, $57,000; Crocker, $31,000; Mark Hopkins, $800; Stanford, $270,000.

Stanford became unnecessary in Huntington’s scheme of things, and the latter proceeded to lighten ship by dropping him over the side. Reserved and unsocial, he was aroused to contempt by his partner’s liking for display and applause. In the early days he had been willing to let his partner shine in public as the company’s representative before the people. Stanford became president when the project was still dubious, and he held office, as a figurehead, for twenty-eight years. It was a part of company policy to keep his essential weakness from the public. As candidate for Governor in 1861, Stanford received full support from his partners. His election was an asset: to the new corporation; to have its president in the Governor’s chair gave the project a semi-official air.

Stanford’s term covered the years from 1862 to 1864, when war fever intensified loyalties and stilled opposition. This prestige carried over until the Civil War tradition was moulded into a political weapon. Later, when the country lost faith in Civil War reputations, Stanford’s political appeal faded rapidly. He hoped to regain lost prestige when he reentered politics in 1885 and the railroad-controlled legislature sent him to the Senate. Huntington had expected his friend Aaron Sargent to be made Senator and had obtained Stanford’s promise to support Sargent’s candidacy. Then he learned that Stanford was himself seeking the office. This aroused Huntington’s active enmity.

The time was drawing near when the government’s thirty-year bonds, lent the company to help build the road, would mature. Huntington for years had been planning to force cancellation or a drastic scaling down of t ho huge debt, on grounds of Central Pacific poverty. Stanford’s extravagances embarrassed the ‘poverty lobby’ at Washington. While debt cancellation was being argued before Congress, Stanford inexpediently bought his wife a $100,000 diamond necklace. The university — ‘Stanford’s circus’ — seemed to Huntington another ill-timed folly, and Stanford’s announcement that ‘the children of California will be my children’ left his partner cold.

To build his university, Stanford borrowed on short-term notes, which he expected to meet with an anticipated division of railroad profits. Shortly before the payment was due, Huntington informed his partner that no profits would be distributed; the money had been ‘loaned out.’ The only explanation Stanford ever received was that ‘it helped the standing of the railroad to have the money out at interest.’ The ‘hard times’ of the early ‘90s decreased the value and negotiability of Stanford’s securities; the world’s greatest vineyard, costing $500 a day, proved a failure. Stock farm, mansions, and, above all, the university, made increasing demands on his shrunken fortune.

Stanford’s last months were devoted to finding a way out of his difficulties. During that period Timothy Hopkins called at Palo Alto. Stanford announced that he wished Hopkins to witness a revised will. With Hopkins and Mrs. Stanford as audience, he read the document. After a long list of cash bequests to relatives and friends, Mrs. Stanford ventured a mild protest: —

‘But, Leland, you know times have been bad. Don’t you think you are being too liberal to some of these people?’

Her husband smiled grimly. ‘They won’t think I’m so liberal,’ he announced, ‘when they come to collect.’

He staved off the crash, but the debacle came soon alter his death.

Out of confusion emerged the strongwilled widow, .Jane bathrop Stanford. While her husband lived, Mrs. Stanford remained discreetly in the background, contenting herself with domestic, charitable, and religious dut ies. Herhusband’s death projected her into a trying situation. The estate was tied up by lawsuits; one filed by the government attached the assets until question of the railroad’s .$57,000,000 debt was settled. Meantime, expenses went on. The university required an unexpectedly large sum. Upkeep of various other Stanford properties raised monthly expenses to impressive heights. The Palo Alto farm alone had 150 employees, and cost annually close to $250,000.

In probate proceedings, the outstanding debts and gifts provided in the will reached a total of $18,000,000, to be satisfied before the remainder could be distributed. The university entered upon short rations. Expenses were slashed and tuition charged. Hundreds of race horses were sold. Vina ranch was shut down, and its young vines were left to parch. In professorial contracts the stipulation as to salary was given a qualifying clause: ’or as much of this sum as may be available.’

A sympathetic probate judge provided relief by ruling that faculty members might be classified as Mrs. Stanford’s personal servants, their salaries included in her household allowance. In a starvation period, President Jordan received a dole of $1200 from the court. He carried the twcnty-dollar gold pieces in a canvas sack to Palo Alto, and set out to pay fifty dollars to each of twenty-four professors. Not one had change for twenty dollars.

Creditors demanded that the college shut down. Huntington said: ‘Close the circus.’ Disregarded, he played another card. The question of the Big Four’s liability to the government must soon be decided. The Hopkins and Crocker estates had already been distributed; Stanford’s remained. If litigation could bo pushed at once, the Stanford estateand not Huntington — would bear the expense of contesting. The government enjoined distribution until Stanford’s share of the debt — in excess of $14,000,000 — became due and was paid. Huntington watched the legal battle proceed through the District Court, the Circuit Court of Appeals, and finally the Supreme Court. The decision was favorable to the Stanford estate. It was both favorable and inexpensive to Huntington.

During these months of litigation the Stanford interests tightened belts. Economy became a game into which the widow entered with enthusiasm. All but two or three servants were dismissed. Work was stopped on the Palo Alto grounds, where dozens of gardeners had been engaged for years. All but absolutely essential items were lopped off from household accounts. ‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Stanford, to a friend, ‘you know I can’t afford a carriage.’

Soon after Stanford’s death the widow closed their Washington residence, the Brady house at 17th and I streets. Early in 1891 she set off for the capital to oversee the furniture removal. She left with $500, in her private car, paying nothing for transportation, since every railroad in the country granted her passes as long as she lived. During her stay in Washington she lived in the car, saving hotel bills, and returned triumphantly to Palo Alto with $340. Despite such feats of personal economy it was a question whether the university could be kept open. On week-end visits to Palo Alto Mrs. Stanford gazed anxiously from the car window for a glimpse of the tall smokestack of the university’s heating plant. Smoke meant that coal was holding out, classes were in session, the university functioning.

Mrs. Stanford’s champions compared her to Queen Victoria. The indomitable young Widow of Windsor, in her rustling black silk, forcing to completion every one of Albert’s projects, had her counterpart almost half a century later in this invincible daughter of an Albany merchant. Jane Stanford herself saw a similarity between her plight and that of the bereaved Queen; her letters followed Victoria’s epistolary style. Your poor Queen’s mind is constantly overtaxed’ is paralleled in scores of messages from Mrs. Stanford to her personal Lord M., Dr. Jordan: ‘It exhausts my ingenuity and resources to such an extent that had I not the University so close to my heart I would relieve myself from the enormous burden and take rest, and recreation for the next year.’ ‘Gladly would I live on bread and water to do this, my part. ‘Every dollar I can rightly call mine is sacredly laid on the altar of my love (or the University, and this it shall ever be. ‘I could lay down my life for the University. Not for any pride in its perpetuating the name of our dear son and ourselves, its founders, but for the sincere hope I cherish in its sending forth to ihe world grand men and women who will aid in developing the best there is to be found in human nature.’

Her resemblance to Victoria amply compensated for lack of beauty. A short, erect figure inclined to stoutness, a florid complexion, and large, slightly protruding eyes, like Victoria’s — these are remembered characteristics. She made the old lady of Buckingham Palace her model in statesmanship and deportment, following her lead even in clothing. She had caught glimpses of the Queen on earlier visits to England, but when Victoria’s Jubilee approached she determined to attend. She went not merely as a sightseer, however; she wanted to sell her jewelry in order to buy books for the university library.

So, early in 1897, the determined old lady carried her treasures in her hand to London. Not once did she let them out of her sight. The sentimental followed the little drama with damp enthusiasm. California’s brave widow descending on London in her suppliant’s rôle, proffering her bag of gems to the guests at Victoria’s glittering celebration, became a symbol of Western womanhood. That the assembled notables would not pay the prices she demanded did not spoil the picture.

On June 22, the sixtieth anniversary of Victoria’s ascent to the throne, Mrs. Stanford was up before daylight, and by seven was driving along the route the Queen herself would presently take. On Fleet Street, a second-floor room had been leased for the day. A long wait ensued, but for once the California widow was not impatient. This was Jane Stanford’s opportunity to view her admired model at close range. Nor were her expectations disappointed. Congestion ahead caused those farther back to slow down, and the royal carriage halted directly opposite the Fleet Street window. Victoria lowered her parasol, looked about. Her eyes reached Mrs. Stanford; for an electric moment they rested on the eager face of the California widow. Her Majesty bowed perceptibly. Mrs. Stanford returned the salutation and in addition blew a kiss in the direction of the royal carriage.

During a visit two years later Mrs. Stanford received an invitation to one of the royal garden parties at Windsor, where she was presented to Victoria’s daughter-in-law. But the aged Queen was visible only at an upper window.

XXI

Jane Stanford enjoyed the rôle of Lady Bountiful and continued to play it as long as she lived. She would descend on relatives, many of whom she had not seen or apparently thought of for years, and rearrange their affairs after her own ideas, with utmost kindliness and vigor. One of these pilgrimages took her to an upstate New York town to visit an aunt of whom she had not heard in years. The ancient lady was found to be living on a farm. Mrs. Stanford hurried back to the town, engaged a suite for her Aunt Marinda at the hotel, and arranged to have her meals served in her rooms and her monthly bills paid through the local bank. The rest of the afternoon was spent buying furniture and clothing for the pensioner. The next day the latter was informed of her good luck — and flatly refused to move to town. The philanthropist sent her gifts out to the farmhouse and settled a monthly pension on the rebel.

Clergymen shared her bounty. Always deeply religious, Mrs. Stanford nonetheless regarded the clergy with a sometimes critical eye. At no time did her faith include a belief in the infallibility of its interpreters, But she was an ardent churchgoer, who could be depended on to contribute liberally. She found Menlo Park’s one tiny church badly equipped and in miserable disrepair, communicants few, and the pastor and his family living in cramped quarters. Immediately she undertook a cure. Paint, carpet, and a new organ lent the structure attractions that brought wandering members back. A comfortable cottage was built and furnished as a parsonage. But the pastor committed the faux pas of insisting on changes before he would move in. Presently it was disclosed that he went to San Francisco two days a week to advocate redistribution of the national wealth. The new parsonage soon had another tenant.

Another major disappointment occurred many years later in connection with the Memorial Chapel at the University. The building and decoration of that structure, a memorial both to her husband and to her son, had been one of the widow’s chief concerns. During her travels she kept an eye on ecclesiastical architecture and decoration. In intricacy of design the structure far outshone anything else in all California. A contemporary account said truly: ‘No artifice known to the stonecutter, no secret of the artist who shapes hits of colored stone into rich patterns, no device of the ecclesiastical painter, but has contributed its part to this grand building, the spiritual temple of the students and their mentors.'

Mrs. Stanford undertook seriously the choosing of a shepherd for this handsomely housed flock. After examining many prospects, she gave tentative approval to Dr. Heber Newton, of advanced years and uncertain health. A variety of things caused him distress. A trunkful of favorite sermons had been lost en route. In his New England church he had been allowed the luxury of a well-trained — and well-paid — choir. The singing in the Memorial Chapel, while spirited and enthusiastic, was by students, and strictly amateur.

Never noted for her patience with complaining clergymen, the widow one afternoon stopped her carriage before the Newton cottage, listened to the Doctor’s plea that he be allowed to bring out at least the soprano from his Eastern choir, then lost her temper and informed him that his services were no longer wanted. Dr. Newton’s dismissal caused a stir on the campus. Faculty members signed petitions requesting that he be reinstated, asking each other meantime if their jobs too might not depend upon the whims of this strong-minded old lady. But she remained unshaken.

The University’s period of short rations finally ended. As the century closed, the widow began to relax her close supervision over its affairs. In 1897 she deeded the San Francisco house to the university’s board of trustees in return for the right to occupy it for life. Six years later she transferred executive control to the trustees. She was by then well known wherever she went, and much of her time was spent happily in travel. From 1894 the University had been sending graduates out into the world. Often alumni would appear at her hotel to pay their respects, much to the old lady’s delight. Reunions with ‘her boys’ grew frequent. The University became internationally known; in foreign lands she was irequently received with honors as its founder. She carried a supply of books of photographs of the buildings, These she autographed and presented to those from whom she received official favors.

Her private car was then nearly thirty years old, and its rosewood and plush sitting room impressed visitors as curiously like a museum. Hut Mrs. Stanford found it comfortable. In it she shuttled between the two oceans or up and down the Pacific Coast. On the Southern Pacific she continued to receive the courtesies accorded her husband during his lifetime. Such attentions were known to Huntington and approved by him. That may have puzzled Mrs. Stanford, for she had long looked on Huntington not only as her husband s chief enemy but as a leader of the group that had tried to destroy the University — Satan in a black skullcap.

This view persisted until the turn of the century. Then, on one of her last visits to New York, the old lady’s secretary brought Huntington news that Mrs. Stanford washed an appointment. Huntington, obviously astonished, suggested that he stop off at Mrs. Stanford s hotel on his way home that evening. Informed that Mrs. Stanford wished to call on him, he fixed an hour. The secretary, present at the meeting, saw that Huntington had had an armchair moved into his barren office for the visitor, watched the two shake hands, and observed that the old lady’s face was colorless as she said: ‘Mr. Huntington, I have come to make my peace with you.’ The latter took both her hands, had her sit down, mopped his brow, and ejaculated: ‘Well, I declare!’ His visitor went on firmly. They were both old. They were the only survivors. The time had passed when they should bear grievances or hold unkind thoughts. Huntington said, ‘Of course! Of course!’ and the onlooker thought she saw tears come into the eyes of these old people (both long past seventy) as they shook hands again.

In her Nob Hill house one January evening in 1905, Mrs. Stanford poured a glass of mineral water from a jar that stood on a table beside her bed. After consuming about half the liquid she thought that it had an unfamiliar taste. The next morning the residue in the jar was sent to a chemist for analysis. His report was sensational: the water contained strychnine. Soon the ent ire Coast was reading of the sensational ‘Stanford poison plot. Police and reporters thronged the house, while servants were questioned and the big building searched from cellar to roof for ‘clues.’

Meantime Mrs. Stanford was really ill, either from fright or from the effects of the poison. In active fear for her life, the old lady fled by the next boat to Honolulu.

Police finally found a prosaic explanation: that the jar had formerly contained cleaning fluid and had not been properly rinsed out. Newspapers turned their attention to other sensations, and the public had nearly forgotten the episode when a cablegram from Honolulu announced Mrs. Stanford’s death.

The murder theory revived. A statement by physicians that death had been due to natural causes was received in San Francisco with open skepticism. Stanford University authorities appointed a group of specialists to reexamine the evidence; they reported unanimously that she had died of old age.

Mrs. Stanford had survived Queen Victoria by less than four years, her husband by thirteen, her son by twenty-one. Her body was buried in the mausoleum on the Stanford campus. To-day students glance with unconcern at its high bronze doors. They speak of t he sleeping three within as the Holy Family; this is tradition, however, not irreverence.

(To be continued)