Men Against Mountains

CHAPTERS 22-31

BY OSCAR LEWIS.

The Early Chapters of ’Men against Mountains...

A VISIONARY began it, as is so often the case. His name was Theodore D. Judah. He came from Bridgeport, Connecticut, and had an engineering turn of mind. Railroads were his ambition and his dream. In his twenty-eighth year he went west to Sacramento to build a twenty-one-mile spur. Then his vision possessed him, and this spur became for him the first unit in a railroad that was to link the oceans. He drew up plans, lobbied at Washington, talked to anyone who would listen. His nickname was ‘Crazy Judah.’

Not until 1862 did Judah succeed in raising the money for his project. 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.

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. But early in the construction the engineer was forced out of the partnership.

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. By use of a temperamental new substance called nitroglycerine, and with the Chinese crowded shoulder to shoulder chipping and hacking at rock faces, the road advanced — in winter working against thirty-five-foot snowdrifts and in summer during the sizzling heat and alkali dust. 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.

Building the road had proved fabulously profitable. But by 1870 the partners faced an entirely different task. For the road had to be

maintained, it traffic secured, and its credit upheld through years of financial panic and against bitter odds.

But prosperity followed panic, and as dividends piled up in the late ’70s the Big Four began building their impressive mansions on Nob Hill. Such houses they were! Stanford and Hopkins were the first to anchor their houses to the hilltop. Then Crocker commissioned his early Renaissance dwelling, which a local critic pronounced a ‘delirium of the woodcarver.’ Its chief feature was a seventy-sixfoot tower; its cost was said to have been $1,275,000.

Mounting wealth brought no quick change in the habits of Mark Hopkins. He would willingly have continued living in the same cottage, occupying the same ramshackle office of the early days. But after his death, in March 1878, his wife (America’s richest widow) found herself transformed into a celebrity. She turned her energies to castle building on a large scale, and acquired in rapid succession a New York house, a summer residence at Block Island, another at Metuchen, finally a French chateau at Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

The deaths of Crocker and Hopkins led to an inevitable conflict between Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington. For years Stanford had been the president of the road and its spokesman to the public. The Governor, as he liked to be called, lived spaciously during his last twenty years. Because the ascent of Nob Hill was difficult for a horse and carriage, he built the California Street Railroad. At Palo Alto he laid out a 9000-acre farm suitable for horse breeding. For a million dollars he acquired 55,000 acres in the northern end of the Sacramento Valley.

All of this vast empire was to have been inherited by the Stanfords’ only son, young Leland, who was educated with fastidious care but died of typhoid in Florence in his sixteenth year. Heartbroken, the parents returned to California, and in less than two years were building that enduring memorial to their son, Leland Stanford Junior University. The hard times of the early ’90s found Stanford’s resources very much overdrawn, and his last months were devoted to retrieving his shrinking fortune. The resolution and resourcefulness with which Mrs. Stanford kept the University alive during the lean years make a story of which every Californian should be proud. . .

Now with each twelve months of the Atlantic

THREE GREAT ROOKS OF THE YEAR

MEN AGAINST MOUNTAINS.

BY OSCAR LEWIS

III. STANFORD AND HUNTINGTON

A HARD and cheery old man, with no more soul than a shark.’ Thus, at the end of the century, Arthur McEwen greeted Collis P. Huntington’s last visit to San Francisco. Huntington often had the grudging respect of his enemies. An unknown epigrammatist called him ‘scrupulously dishonest’ and added that his distaste for claiming virtues he neither had nor respected made him the Coast’s least convincing hypocrite. In its obituary the San Francisco Examiner remarked that he had always been ‘ ruthless as a crocodile’ and went on to state that he met death as he had met other and earlier reverses — head on. ‘ Had he been a soldier,’ wrote C. C. Goodwin, once editor of the Virginia City Enterprise, ‘he would not have depended upon tactics . . . he . . . would have struck directly at the enemy’s centre.’ Goodwin likened his methods to those of Mark Hanna.

The public recognized a heroic quality in the old man’s ruthlessness, and journalists who set out to revile him lost heart after the first few paragraphs. There was an abundance of ammunition, but few vulnerable spots at which to aim. Ridicule and abuse slid off his broad, bent back as lightly as chaff. Hostile journalists went through the motions, but their hearts were not in the task.

Methods of attack that had proved effective against other millionaires were useless against the grim New Englander. Ridicule of his social ambitions invariably angered naive, good-natured John W. Mackay. Huntington had no social ambitions. Attack Stanford’s personal popularity from any angle; at once the papers under his control furiously counterattacked. Not only was Huntington indifferent to popularity; it was actually distasteful to him. Dandified William Sharon, in most ways as frigid as Huntington himself, could be reached by well-aimed thrusts at his political aspirations. Huntington’s letters to his redhaired confidant, Dave Colton, advertised his unyielding contempt for public offices and for those who held them. Accused of hoarding dollars while men of less wealth were winning renown as philanthropists, he cheerfully admitted the charge. Philanthropy was no more attractive to his eyes than such imbecilities as social climbing and a desire to sit in the Senate. When he astonished the West by contributing $25,000 to help beautify the bleak sandhills of San Francisco’s new city park, he specified that the money be spent for an artificial waterfall. If one paid out cash and got nothing in return, logic demanded that it be spent for a useless purpose.

‘I’ll never be remembered for the money I’ve given away,’ he once told a visitor to his New York office, almost certainly with the knowledge that he was understating the case. Years later a young civil engineer in the employ of the Central Pacific wrote, ‘He liked to have us think he was close in money matters,’ then went on to record his astonishment when, after a noontime meeting in a restaurant, the miser casually paid for luncheons for five. Huntington’s remark to a clerk at the Palace Hotel after he had found and corrected a twenty-five-cent overcharge in his bill was repeated for decades, frequently by Huntington himself: ‘Young man, you can’t follow me through life by the quarters I have dropped.’

He once went so far as to admit: ‘While money-making is a good indication in a man and is evidence that he is a good man, it is not the highest quality in the world.’ This place was reserved for a related activity — that of saving it. Advice to the young in the ’80s and ’90s was a necessary part of an interview with any rich man. Huntington’s prescription was a fixed formula: work hard and save money. He reduced success to ultimate simplicity: put money in the bank. One of his few public speeches was addressed, in 1891, to the youth of the village of Westchester, New York, and his two minutes of advice ended with this climax: ‘Learn to live on a little less than you earn and thus always have a balance in the bank.’

In business he was cold, crafty, hard, and not always honest. But there were rumors that he had a softer side. Some professed to see a trace of sentiment in the fact that he named his private cars ’Oneonta I’ and ‘ Oneonta II ’ after the New York town where he had spent his young-manhood. In his last years he sometimes grew almost poetic when he recalled his early exploits in wresting dollars from the reluctant palms of his elders, and he once reproved his two-hundred-pound stepson for shooting a bird.

There is no record that he ever wanted to reform anything or, except when personal interest was involved, to change anything. He never sought to be a militantly good citizen. Social or civic consciousness was a meaningless phrase; a man’s responsibility was to himself. He was neither democrat nor snob. The man who worked hard and saved his money had his respect, whatever his station. When a Negro porter in his Broad Street office paid for a house out of his microscopic wages, Huntington’s pleasure in the feat was spontaneous and real. In the middle ’70s the ex-policeman and small-town politician Dave Colton embroidered letters to his chief with occasional references to ‘our class’ and ‘us moneyed men.’ Huntington’s replies contained no such nonsense.

Whatever stood in his way he fought stubbornly and with every evidence of pleasure; everything else was a waste of time. This attitude, often mistaken for tolerance, was merely indifference. A plan to build a local railroad north of San Francisco was brought to his attention. ‘Let them do what they damn please,’ he wrote. ‘ But see that they keep out of our way.’ This attitude he maintained consistently. Persons who kept out of his way might do what they damn pleased — with one exception. The absurdities of other rich men brought forth capable bursts of profanity. Officeholders, newspaper editors and publishers, men who wanted to reform something, these were expected to be mountebanks; one could tolerate that. But a man who had made — and kept — twenty million dollars should avoid behaving like a circus clown. He should n’t ‘paint himself red and climb a pole.’

To the end, Huntington refrained from pole climbing, but as he advanced into the seventies he allowed himself certain frivolities. In 1899 when he arrived for his last visit to the Coast, reporters met his private car at Oakland Mole and accompanied the old man across the bay. Back at their offices, one reported him ‘as bald as the American Eagle on our dollar, and as white as one just minted’ — but still as keen as a man of fifty. He was likened to Atlas, ‘holding up, controlling and guarding the mighty enterprise that he and his partners had created, after all his first associates had died, and he himself was an old man.’ There was no lack of metaphors. He was a lordly oak, towering above the forest of ordinary men. ‘As the first forest melted away and a new one of different species succeeded, this oak still stood; warded off all storms that were hurled against it ; turned aside the damp and the frost; waved its arms in the face of the hurricane; beat back decay; healed its own wounds, sheltered its own eagles.'

Old age and the loss of his hair caused him annoyance. Sensitiveness over the glistening expanse of his great domed scalp was responsible for his familiar black skullcap and for the fact, often mistaken for arrogance, that his hat usually remained on his head when good manners dictated that it should be removed. On the last visit to San Francisco he was persuaded to pose for a photograph by William Keith and again the hat was not removed.

That portrait deserves a passing word. Keith’s fame as the ‘California Turner’ was then at its height; to have one of his dim meadows in the parlor was as much a badge of social consequence as a summer at Del Monte. Purchasing a Keith landscape was no sordid business transaction; those who had experienced it recalled unsmilingly a young woman writer’s remark that ‘to visit the Master’s studio is to step into the anteroom of God.’ God’s anteroom had black velvet curtains across one end, before which patrons sat while on the other side the Master superintended the placing and lighting of his painting. He then appeared, issued a quite unnecessary command for silence, and the curtains parted in the middle and moved slowly back. After this prologue, to refuse to buy, or to haggle over the stiff prices, required more courage than most of his visitors could summon.

Keith’s photograph of Huntington — perhaps it was preliminary to a portrait that was never painted — was several times published after its subject’s death a few months later. It is that of a tired old man, stubbornly wearing his broadbrimmed hat, his trimmed mustache and short, snow-white beard. The pose of his head and the expression of his eyes are characteristic; he is looking, attentive and watchful, straight ahead, his heavy shoulders bent. Perhaps it was cold in the velvet-hung studio, for the old man had kept on not only his hat but his black overcoat, a panel of satin in its lapel catching a high light. A worn, austere figure, all black and white, against a sombre background, with but one touch of frivolity: the wrinkled hand on the chair arm has a narrow gold ring on its smallest finger.

This photograph belonged definitely to Huntington’s later period. As one looks at it, much of the nonsense of his last years becomes credible: his garrulous interviews to the press, his collections of books and paintings and French furniture, his box at the Metropolitan. This tidy, benign old gentleman might have been a United States Senator, or a retired grocer or clergyman living on a pension. The journalist who invented the ‘man of oak’ simile had certainly never seen this portrait.

Another photograph is more typical. Taken some years earlier, it has no suggestion of a bulldog with its teeth drawn. Huntington is hunched over the littered desk of his New York office, a broad, heavy figure, skullcap close down to his ears. This was his normal environment: plain oak table, walls bare except for a framed photograph of his Newport News shipyards. The room was perhaps twelve feet square. It might have been the stationmaster’s office in any village along the 11,000 miles of railroad under his control.

The simplicity of his seventh-floor office in the Mills Building in New York reflected a lifelong dislike for elaborate settings in business — for all that a later age terms ’front’. As far back as 1862, he rejected a plan for a railroad office building. He glanced once at the drawing, turned the sheet over, sketched a building that was described as ‘ a slightly oversized tool house,’ and stubbornly refused to approve any other. A dozen years later, when work began on the San Francisco headquarters, appointments of the private dining room and of the executives’ offices were described as ‘worthy of an exclusive club.’ But Huntington reached the Coast in time to prevent such folly. On completion the structure resembled a warehouse.

While he lived, the railroads under his control never pampered the traveling public. Rolling stock and roadbed were kept in operating condition and leaks in the roofs of freight sheds repaired. But railroad stations were utilitarian structures; he saw no point in making them look like Gothic cathedrals or Roman baths. While he lived no Central or Southern Pacific station bore any such resemblance. In hundreds of towns and cities of the West the original barren sheds persisted from decade to decade, their rotting boards re-covered at intervals with mustard-yellow paint. ’Mr. Huntington’s views on architecture,’ wrote Willis Polk in the middle '90s, ‘would shame a Digger Indian.’

Curiously, when in later years he came to select the settings for his leisure hours, his taste ran to extreme overelaboration. His New York and San Francisco houses were both crowded with French furniture of ornate and fragile design. A generation after his death a roomful of carved desks, marquetry cabinets and sideboards, satin-covered chairs, sofas, and love seats, was exhibited in a San Francisco museum. Visitors regarded the one-time owner’s statue on an adjacent pedestal and wondered that these fragile sticks had withstood his massive weight.

XXIII

The railroad partnership had not been in force three months before Huntington was referred to as the brains of the group. With this opinion he was not inclined to quarrel, but what he most admired in himself was his ability to make an investment earn a profit. Money so earned was money created; the man who built up a paying business enriched not only himself but the world. In his old age he compared his methods with those of Jay Gould, picturing himself as the practical railroad man and Gould as the speculator. He once told his secretary, George Miles: ‘I would n’t go into the stock market against Gould, for he would whip me at that game. That is his business. When it comes to building and operating railroads in the most efficient and economical way, I can beat him, for that is my business.’

Yet, beginning with Theodore Judah, his critics have stated that he was not a railroad man, notwithstanding that he died controlling more miles of railroad than any man before him. What they meant was that, while railroads were good for Huntington, Huntington was not good for railroads. He entered the transportation business direct from a Sacramento hardware store; the shopkeeper’s point of view shaped all his subsequent actions. To him a railroad was merchandise in exactly the same sense as were shovels or nails. In Sacramento he and Mark Hopkins once cornered the supply of blasting powder. Easy money! Huntington had not been in the railroad business a week before he was planning a similar exploit: a corner on the freight, and passenger business between Sacramento and Nevada. Later the plan was broadened: it became a scheme to control the traffic of the entire Pacific Coast.

In Huntington’s store he had been in the habit of charging as much as he could get. His prices were determined not by cost but by how badly the customer wanted the article. That was the way prices were fixed in California through the ’50s; it was the way Huntington operated his railroad system as late as 1900. He was not disturbed when shouts of indignation greeted the Big Four’s admission that they fixed tariffs on the basis of all the public could pay; his climb to business success had been accompanied by similar shouts. He regarded them as the normal customer reaction; they were a bad sign only if followed by a dropping off in the volume of trade. If the buyer protested at the top of his lungs but still bought, then the merchant knew that he was making a reasonable — that is, the maximum — profit.

Born at Harwinton, Connecticut, on October 22, 1821, son of a miserly tinker who died leaving $3000 in cash, Huntington needed few lessons in the arts of accumulation. In his father’s household, thrift was a cardinal law of existence. In rural Connecticut a century ago, cash was extraordinarily esteemed, to be gathered and held at virtually any cost. During Huntington’s boyhood the appearance of a spendthrift in his Litchfield County countryside would have been a hardly less astonishing apparition than a live dinosaur.

In the ’90s, when it had become the obligation of rich men to boast of a youth spent in poverty, this one never had to draw on his imagination for harrowing details. Poverty, plus industry, plus thrift — this was his formula for success. ‘From the time I was a child until the present I can hardly remember a time when I was not doing something.’ With this sentence Huntington began one of several biographical interviews, and he commonly returned to the subject every paragraph or two. What productive enterprises occupied his time until he was fourteen are not now known, but it is known that by then he had earned — and saved — more than a hundred dollars. His fourteenth year (1835) was spent as ‘hired man’ on a neighbor’s farm; he received $7.00 a month and his clothes, and of course every penny was saved. With the $84, plus his earlier accumulations, the young Crœsus — still a month short of fifteen — left New England for wider opportunities in rural New York. ‘From that time on,’ he wrote, ‘I have been very busy.’

At Oneonta he invested his capital in a country store, in partnership with an elder brother, Solon. But he spent little time behind the counter; he had already discovered that the world is full of men eager to do routine work for low wages. During the next dozen years one catches glimpses of the brawny, square-jawed young man pursuing excess profits down a variety of byways: peddling jewelry to farmers’ wives in Ohio and Indiana; tramping through the pre-war South on the lucrative business of collecting unpaid balances of notes bought for a few cents on the dollar; selling butter in New York City, and turning his hand to whatever else promised a quick return.

The significance of events in California following January 24, 1848 was not overlooked by the young trader. There is no evidence that Huntington ever intended to become a miner. He later recalled the half day he had once spent shoveling gravel from a creek bed as a mistake in judgment. When he sailed from New York in March ’49 (aged twenty-seven), he saw the gold rush merely as a more than usually promising business opportunity for a trader. With him on the Crescent City went a stock of merchandise, including a number of casks of whiskey, which he planned to sell — at maximum profit, of course — to the bona fide Argonauts.

Few adventurers who set out for the gold fields were less affected than he by the prevailing improvidence and optimism. Huntington foresaw the impracticability of the ‘ mining and trading companies’ then being formed everywhere in the East, After he reached Panama, he was able to put some of these disintegrating organizations to his own use. ‘They quarreled,’ he later remarked, ‘and came to me. They all seemed to come to me.’ The quarrels meant a distribution of assets — and, as the latter were usually in the form of merchandise, Huntington was able to buy stocks of desirable goods at bargain prices. Before he was on the Isthmus a week he was carrying on the most active trading of his career. He bought whatever promised to meet two simple requirements: quick turnover and large profit.

During his three months’ enforced stay on the Isthmus — a period less industrious Argonauts spent bemoaning the lack of boats to carry them north — Huntington took a flyer in the importing business. ‘While I was down there, I went down to Estebula and bought a little schooner called the Emma and filled her up with jerked beef, potatoes, rice, sugar and syrup in great bags and brought them up to Panama and sold them.’ Profits averaged well above a thousand dollars a month. His ventures required frequent trips through the fever-laden jungle between the two coasts. He estimated that he made the crossing at least twenty times. ‘It was only twentyfour miles,’ he recalled. ‘I walked it.’

He was, then and later, strong as an ox, and healthy to the point of absurdity. When he was nearly seventy he remembered only one serious illness. In Sacramento, in the early ’50s, he once fell victim to the current scourge, dysentery; before the summer ended, his weight had fallen from over 200 to 125 pounds. Not until old age was upon him did he confess that he could no longer ‘eat everything.’ At seventy-five he publicly deplored an inclination to lie abed mornings. Hard physical exercise was his key to health. At Oneonta he scorned to buy his winter fuel already chopped; sawing and splitting logs was the best form of calisthenics— ‘it exercises you all over.’ But there were no chopping blocks at his house at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, or on his private cars. His muscles grew soft and his weight increased to above 250 pounds. The Oneonta woodcutting was habitually done before breakfast, and the sound of his axe ushering in the sunrise may have inspired the legend — kept alive by Huntington himself— that in his eight years there he had never been seen wasting his time in a saloon or hotel lobby, the town’s only social centres.

Huntington’s apprenticeship was completed long before he reached California; an experienced trader landed in San Francisco in the spring of 1850. On the trip he had increased his capital from $1200 to $5000. In later life he liked to recall that on the day the ship docked he lent some fellow passengers enough to buy a hearty meal in celebration of their arrival; Hungtington himself dined on crackers and cheese.

To follow his activities during his first five years in the West is to witness an expert demonstration of the art of accumulation under fluid conditions. His formula was simple: ‘I kept my warehouse full when prices were low, and when they went up I sold out.’ Supply and demand reached an equilibrium only rarely and by accident; stable prices could be expected for no more than a week at a time. Huntington shuttled between Sacramento and the Bay (by boat, the distance here being too far to walk), keeping one eye on the supply of merchandise at both places and the rate at which it was being consumed. The other eye was cocked at the Golden Gate, the only source of new shipments.

To pick up incoming ships, he bought the most powerful field glasses he could find, and a dory which he kept moored to the wharf at Clark’s Point. Masters of scores of sailing ships were first hailed in the harbor by this one-man reception committee. Huntington’s frail craft would come alongside while its occupant shouted an inquiry about the cargo. If it was salable merchandise, Huntington scrambled aboard and concluded a deal on the spot, paying a deposit from the pouch of gold dust he always carried, strapped about his waist. Once he said that had his little craft overturned he would have sunk like a rock. Until 1862 he dealt in everything not perishable. Huntington liked to hold merchandise until he got his price.

To control supply was the common aim of San Francisco’s scores of speculators — though realized less frequently than biographies of the pioneers imply. Huntington did it once, by cornering the shovel market — his first real killing. At Sacramento he and Hopkins had another partial success, with blasting powder, and later he sold for a dollar a pound a consignment of iron bars picked up at twenty dollars a ton. When, as was constantly happening, too much of a product was dumped on San Francisco’s waterfront, he was always willing to buy heavily, provided prices were low enough. Unlike the shoestring speculators, he had both capital and facilities to hold merchandise for an advance. In Sacramento before long it required six large tents to hold his stock.

Huntington valued his reputation as a speculator who would buy whatever was offered. ‘Everybody used to come to “Old Huntington,"' he recalled. (He was then in his early thirties.) ‘I had a Panama hat that was very broadbrimmed, and used to come down to my shoulders . . . so I was well known.’

Even as early as that he had original ideas, and his partnership with Hopkins, effected in 1853, allowed him to put some of them into effect. Hopkins occupied the same relative position as had Solon Huntington in the earlier Oneonta venture: he saw that things ran smoothly at headquarters, leaving Collis free to rove on bargain-hunting expeditions. Goods shrewdly bought on a depressed market jammed the big brick store that succeeded the tents, and the firm was soon among the largest in the state.

Huntington took a close, paternal interest in the welfare of their score or more of clerks, who lived in a combined dormitory and recreation room in the rear of the store. This was furnished, not with the packing boxes and empty kegs usual in early California interiors, but with tables, chairs, and bunks luxurious with straw-stuffed mattresses. He bought at auction, for $29, a box of books that unexpectedly showed up at a local sale, and established one of the first free circulating libraries in California.

To this room employees were required to return immediately after supper; at nine o’clock they were safely in bed with the candles extinguished. Thus their morals were protected; gamblers and prostitutes received not one penny of their wages, and to a man all reported for work with clear heads, steady hands, and non-alcoholic breaths. His young men were expected to save their wages, remain sober and chaste, and get eight hours’ sleep a night. This was good for them; unquestionably it was good for their employers.

Huntington’s righteousness was not, of course, carried to unprofitable extremes. Neither he nor Hopkins nor their young men drank intoxicants — but the trade in whiskey was large and profitable. No employee was permitted, under pain of dismissal, to enter gambling dens or brothels; but as customers the owners of both had their good points. They bought liberally of the best, paid promptly, and seldom quibbled about prices.

There were, however, a few triumphs of conscience over profit. One day the keeper of a bawdyhouse sent her colored porter to ask the cost of preserved peaches. Huntington chanced to have the only supply in town and he named a high price. The porter returned and stated that the madam was agreeable and wished them sent over. ‘You tell her,’ returned the merchant loftily, ‘that if she pays $96 and takes the peaches along I have no objection, but my boys cannot go into her house.'

A similar episode remained so clear in memory that half a century later he was able to repeat his exact words. One of his cut-rate purchases had been a thousand-barrel lot of corn meal. This had proved so bulky that storage facilities were taxed and the overflow had to be piled on the sidewalk before the store. The price was $10 a barrel. When he saw another of the town’s madams approaching, he could not refrain from hoisting the figure sharply.

‘She came along with a silk dress trailing halfway across the street and asked for corn meal. She said: “ What do you ask for a barrel?”

‘Said I: “Two ounces [thirty-two dollars] a barrel.”

‘Said she: “Do you think I am a damn fool?”

‘“No,” said I. “I will be frank with you. I have not thought anything about you one way or the other.”

‘She gathered her skirts up and went across the street.’

XXIV

In the late ’80s Hubert H. Bancroft, California’s businessman-historian, called on Huntington at the Palace Hotel. Bancroft outlined a plan for compiling a history of the building of the Central and Southern Pacific in greater detail than had been possible in his seven-volume History of California.

Huntington listened without comment while the plan was outlined. He refused, however, to commit himself even when Bancroft made his usually effective vanity appeal: that Huntington himself would have the deciding voice in the creation of this portrait by which he would be known to posterity. But the interview was not a complete failure. Huntington had agreed to allow one of Bancroft’s writers to accompany him back east.

At intervals during a four-day run from Oakland to New Orleans the old man submitted to questions by D. R. Sessions, Bancroft’s scribe. He recalled incidents of his youth and of the early years at Sacramento, and delivered short, confused pronouncements on such questions as railroad subsidies, the future of the Negro, and his personal tastes in art and literature.

The result, 128 foolscap pages literally transcribed, is an uncommonly interesting document. In it one sees Huntington as he chose to be seen. The self-posed portrait is that of a man by no means disappointed in himself. Looking back, — he was then in his late sixties, — he saw nothing in an active lifetime that he would have changed in the least degree. Born of poor parents, he had learned the virtue of frugality. His schooling, limited to four months a year, had ended when he was thirteen; formal education was a waste of time. His temperament was not of a sort that inspired close friendships; this, too, had a virtue. ‘I never had any chums ... I ran in a crowd by myself.’ ‘I am not a sociable man . . . but I get as much out of life as any man in America.’

Hunched forward in his chair, he accommodatingly searched for revealing anecdotes of his past. The incidents he recalled were commonly those in which he got the better of an opponent in a business deal or conquered adverse circumstances by shrewdness and hard work. Industry, frugality, ability to drive a bargain — these were qualities to be admired wherever found, and Huntington most frequently found them in himself. Tenacity stood high in his list of the virtues; a man must stick to a thing and see it through. For those who divided their interests and dissipated their energies he saw no hope. His favorite derogatory adjective was ‘restless’; to call a man that was to catalogue him as past redemption.

Although he continued to preach the Spartan axioms that had guided his youth, he had by then adopted most of the conventional follies of rich men of his time: houses, travel, objets d’art — even, in a guarded and tentative way, philanthropy. From the early ’80s onward, reports of his new enthusiasms drifted west, causing old-time acquaintances to shake their heads. During his life on the Coast he had been heard to boast on two subjects only: his personal strength and endurance, and his ability to protect himself in a business deal. Huntington in some of his new rôles — as a connoisseur of paintings, for instance — made no sense. Self-hypnotism of that sort might be expected of other rich men, but people looked to Huntington to remain rational despite his millions.

There were definite Huntington characteristics, however, even in this hobby. In 1888 he paid $25,000 for a painting of ‘a religious scene.’ This any ol a hundred rich men might have done — but the reasons why he had purchased it were Huntington’s own: —

There are seven figures in it — three cardinals of the different orders of their religion. There is an old missionary that has just returned; he is showing his scars, where his hands are cut all over; he is telling a story to these cardinals; they are dressed in luxury. One of them is playing with a dog; one is asleep; there is only one looking at him — looking at him with that kind of an expression saying what a fool you are that you should go out and suffer for the human race when we have such a good time at home. I lose the picture in the story when I look at it. I sometimes sit half an hour looking at that picture.

One imagines the old man, seated gingerly in one of his Louis XV chairs, fixing the canvas with a searching stare. Long before the half hour is up, the scene comes to life, peopled by figures no longer unfamiliar. Do not these luxuryloving cardinals resemble Huntington’s own associates? There is that one in particular, the idle fellow who plays with the dog — or is it perhaps not a dog, but a race horse? ‘Stanford has his horses and his ranches, and Crocker likes to run off to Europe,’ he had once informed Hopkins in a letter complaining that his strength was not equal to the work piled on him. One begins to see why Huntington ‘loses the picture in the story’ — for the story is his own. Who is the weary wretch in the centre who has spent himself doing what needed to be done while the idle cardinals gave themselves over to worldly pleasures— who but Huntington himself?

It was another manifestation of his habit of thinking of himself as a martyr to his duties. Unquestionably there were times when he drew too heavily on his strength, and in the depressed periods that followed wondered if the game was worth the effort. ‘What the devil is the use of my wearing myself out?’ he demanded of Hopkins. Sure that his health would break under the strain, in almost daily letters he emphasized his desire to sell out. but he was only partly serious. In the midst of his dissatisfaction the panic of 1872 seriously jeopardized his fortune and multiplied his problems. He promptly forgot himself in the struggle, and his letters thereafter had no room for self-pity.

Crisis effected a permanent cure. Huntington not only outworked his partners; he also outlived them. During his last ten years he liked to boast that he could do more than men half his age. An English journalist who interviewed him in 1899 found him planning enterprises that would take him twenty years to complete. On one of his half-yearly visits to California a friend remarked that he was looking well; Huntington replied: ‘Five years ago I thought I might live until I was a hundred. I know now I’ll reach a hundred and ten.’ The Huntingtons, he declared, were longlived; his father remained hale and hearty until long past ninety. In New York a notable banquet was given to Sir William Van Horne, with a score of leading financiers present. Levi P. Morion, who had been Vice President under Harrison, remarked to C. P. Stubbs, general passenger agent of the Southern Pacific: ‘This gathering comprises some of the most wonderful men in the United States, and that old man is the most wonderful man of the lot.’ The next day Stubbs repeated the compliment. Huntington’s face showed no pleasure as he demanded: ‘Did he say old man? Did he say old man? Why did n’t you kick him ? ’

xxv

Huntington married in September 1844, when he was in his twenty-third year. His bride, the former Elizabeth Stoddard, conformed to Victorian standardsof how a dutiful wife should conduct herself. For the nearly forty years of her married life she accomplished a perfect feat of self-effacement. While Huntington shouldered his way up the financial scale from country storekeeper to leading figure in American transportation, her existence was recalled only because newspaper accounts of his movements sometimes ended with such sentences as this: ‘He is accompanied by his secretary, G. E. Miles, and his wife.’ In the smalltown neighborliness of early Sacramento she was well liked by the wives of her husband’s partners. The couple remained childless, and she and her husband undertook to bring up Clara Prentice, daughter of her deceased sister.

The child was then but ten months old; she grew up in the household, and in later years Huntington often remarked that he treated her exactly as though she were his own daughter. Her presence compensated in purl for Huntington’s lack of children of his own, particularly of sons — a lack that was frequently on his mind. ‘I don’t blame Stanford for not wanting to sell,’ he remarked in the early '70s, when the question of selling their railroad property was under constant discussion among the partners. ’If I had a son growing up nothing could persuade me to get out.’ There were other references to the fact that he alone of the four partners had no male heir. Crocker had several sons and Stanford one; even Mark Hopkins, without children of his own, had taken young Timothy Nolan into his house and was bringing him up as his son. But Clara Prentice presently became known as Clara Huntington, and letters between the partners began to refer to Huntington as a man of family. ‘I am sorry to learn of Clara’s illness,’ wrote Colton on May 2, 1878.

' I hope she is quite well.’

The girl adapted herself to the ornate life Huntington’s millions made inevitable. The old man indulged her extravagances, even to expending, in the late ’80s, $2,500,000 to accomplish her wellpublicized marriage to Prince Ilatzfehlt, of one of the minor German noble houses. This came to be recognized as the worst investment Huntington ever made, for the Prince’s exploits remained staples of American scandal sheets for a generation.

Long before Clara’s marriage, however, Huntington’s almost mythical first wife died. Not many months later, in New York, on July 12, 1884, the widower, then almost sixty-three, took a second bride. This was Mrs. A. D. Worsham, born Arabella Duval Yarrington, a native of Alabama and, by current newspaper account, ‘quite a prominent woman in New York and the subject of considerable comment as being very ambitious.’ She had one child by her former marriage, Archie Worsham, who adopted his stepfather’s name. As Archer Huntington, he became well known for his philanthropies and as a Hispano-American scholar. Hunt ington, himself a large man, admired size in others; he once boasted that young Archie, at sixteen, weighed 220 pounds.

The new Mrs. Huntington did not share her predecessor’s liking for personal obscurity. Under her influence Huntington dropped one by one his austere habits and stepped into a setting proper to his position as one of the dozen wealthiest men in America. The plunge into luxury proved not so bad as he had feared. With no signs of revolt, he began making a succession of profitless investments: houses in New York and San Francisco, a summer camp in the Adirondacks, a box at the Metropolitan, hundreds of square yards of innocuous paintings by currently fashionable European artists. ’I suppose I have half a million dollars’ worth of pictures,’ he told an interviewer in 1889, and added with pride that Henry Ward Beecher had once asked to see a newly hung canvas.

Beecher had performed his second marriage. Off on a lecture tour with his manager, J. B. Pond, the preacher amused himself weeks later by cleaning out the accumulated litter in his pockets. Pond looked on while Beecher brought forth a mass of papers and glanced through them, tearing up such as he did not want and tossing them out the car window. From the watch pocket of his trousers he pulled out a tightly folded envelope, stared at it blankly, then recalled that Huntington had passed it to him after the ceremony. It contained four $1000 bills. Huntington was proud of Beecher’s friendship and remained loyal through the Tilton scandal in which the latter became involved. After Beecher’s death Huntington befriended his widow, providing her with railroad passes that she might visit her son, who lived on Puget Sound.

Although Huntington brought himself to spend prodigally, personal extravagance remained beyond his powers. To the end, he boasted that he had never spent above $200 a year on personal adornment. Even after he had acquired the baroque setting of his later days, he continued not only to preach but to practise frugality. With amusement he confessed that his wife and daughter had to remind him to ring for servants instead of performing household duties for himself. In a day when a French chef was a necessity in every rich man’s kitchen, he liked to tell dinner guests about his Chinese cook, who worked for small wages and wasted nothing.

He understood the problems of those in lowly stations and, if they met his rigid requirements, was quite willing to help them. Lacking even the beginnings of diplomacy, he publicly referred to laboring men as ‘inferiors’; but more clearly than most large employers of his time he recognized their rights, and there were few strikes on enterprises under his control. He had t he respect of all his servants, and the affection of some. When news of his death reached San Francisco, perhaps the only locally-shed tears were those of the Irish caretaker in his house on Nob Hill. Early one summer morning in the year 1900, Mary Foley dabbed her eyes with her apron and assured reporters that Mr. Huntington had been a fine and unassuming gentleman; he had never put on airs, although she was prepared to state without reservation that he knew everything.

The personal affairs of a Negro porter in his Mills Building office engaged his interest. Huntington encouraged him to buy a house, then withheld $40 of his $75 monthly salary to make sure that the monthly payments were met. This device he used with other employees who lacked the fortitude to save voluntarily. Slightly different was his treatment of ’Uncle George’ Bromley, a California ancient whom he had known since early Sacramento days. Word reached him that Bromley, long celebrated on the Coast for his humorous after-dinner speeches, was hard up. One day Bromley was informed that, on Huntington’s instructions, he was being put on the payroll. He was not told what duties were expected of him, nor did he ever learn. The salary was paid with regularity until Huntington’s death, five years later, when it stopped. Thereupon the pensioner, quite understandably, felt himself abused at being tossed into the world again.

Toward the end of 1898, Bailey Millard, Sunday editor of young W. R. Hearst’s Examiner, heard an Oakland schoolteacher read a poem at a literary gathering. Millard, impressed, saw an opportunity to enlist the Examiner’s methods in the novel cause of literature. No work of an unknown poet was ever launched with a greater splash. After days of preliminary advertising it was given to the public, accompanied by a column of editorial praise. Rival papers jeered, but ‘The Man with the Hoe’ made the hoped-for sensation and Edwin Markham leaped into prominence as ‘The Poet of the People.’

The poem, effective propaganda in the hands of the Socialists, came to Huntington’s attention. Millet’s painting, the poem’s inspiration, was owned by the Crocker family. Indirectly, Central Pacific profits had supplied ammunition to the enemy, and this may have had something to do with Huntington’s decision to wage counter-warfare. Another possible reason was the fact that the Examiner was then Huntington’s most ruthless enemy on the Coast. Like many rich men, Huntington had taken serious alarm at the rising tide of Socialism. He considered the situation important enough to grant one of his infrequent interviews. ‘Is America going to turn to Socialism over one poem?’ he asked a reporter for the Sun. ‘Markham’s Hoe Man has a hoe. Let him rejoice. The only man to commiserate is the man who has no hoe, the man who cannot help to enrich the world.’

Through the Sun an anonymous donor put up a prize of $750 for the best poem ‘answering’ Markham’s possibly dangerous work, and personally outlined the rules of the contest. Needy poets rallied to the defense of the existing order with five thousand ’answers.’ The prize went to John Vance Cheney for his poem ‘Responsibility.’ Huntington died before he learned to what extent his $750 had confounded the Socialists.

XXVI

Far overshadowing Huntington’s fear of Socialists, however, was his dislike of his slow-thinking partner. That Huntington and Stanford were mut ually antagonistic had been known to a few from the beginning. As early as 1863, references were made to their lack of harmony on questions of policy. A San Francisco paper later pointed out that ‘a moneymaker and a money-spender cannot pull together as a business team, however well that combination might work in the matrimonial harness.’

Temperamentally the two were poles apart; an open break was merely a matter of time and expediency. Huntington would have welcomed it years before it came. He had little talent for concealing his dislikes, and Stanford’s conspicuous qualities were precisely those he found hardest to endure. But Huntington also realized that a public quarrel would be bad business; internal conflict would inevitably hurt the prestige of the company. Through the '70s and '80s he convinced himself that the Big Four must present a united front to a world growing increasingly antagonistic. So, for the sake of policy, Huntington stifled his dislike for his vainglorious associate, He could settle the score later. He waited, as a matter of fact, nearly a quarter of a century before he considered it expedient to bring the quarrel into the open.

Stanford’s election to the Senate in 1885 set off the explosion. The term of one of California’s Senators was about to expire. Casting about for a man who would be useful in Washington and who deserved reward, the railroad group decided on Aaron A. Sargent. Sargent had been a staunch Central Pacific man. During his first term as Congressman in the early '60s, he helped Judah get the original Pacific Railroad bill through the House, and by subsequent acts in both House and Senate he proved himself a statesman after Huntington’s heart. In 1874 he retired to private life. Friendly with both Huntington and Stanford, he was one of the few men for whom the former had a genuine liking. Hi’s ambition to return to the Senate after ten years of retirement met with the approval and encouragement of both men.

Railroad support was promised Sargent at a meeting in Huntington’s New York office in the spring of 1884. Formalities leading to his election proceeded with their customary smoothness and order. In November, local elections in California gave the Republicans a large majority in the state senate. There remained only the routine business of uniting on Sargent as the party’s candidate and casting a few courtesy ballots to rival candidates before voting Sargent into office. Sargent himself shared the opinion of political observers that he was as good as elected. The final step was for Stanford, as the Southern Pacific’s president, to declare that Sargent was the railroad’s choice. Stanford unaccountably failed to act. Sargent, still confident but a little nervous, pondered this continued silence. After a time he dropped his friend Stanford a note: —

Dear Governor: It is very necessary that you come out soon.... I have a good majority of those elected and can see success ahead. But your presence here and your strong influential words will make assurance doubly sure. I know your personal friendship for me will induce you to comply with my request. . . .

To this Stanford made no reply. By the time the new legislature gathered at Sacramento, rumor said that Sargent had lost the all-powerful railroad support. Even the politicians were mystified. That Stanford wanted the office for himself occurred to no one. His friendship for Sargent, the latter’s lifelong support of the railroad’s interests, and the road’s habit of rewarding the faithful with political office were all against the possibility. Stanford, however, had convinced himself that a term in the Senate would be a fitting climax to his public career.

The Governor had edged himself into a difficult position. Besides his widely known friendship for Sargent, there was the fact that the latter was generally known to be the railroad’s candidate. There was, too, his definite, though secret, promise to support Sargent — and there was Huntington, who had been present when his word had been given. But now Stanford was determined to take the office himself. He allied himself with Sargent’s political enemies, who pressed him to announce his candidacy. While he hesitated, the legislature convened. Sargent—now thoroughly alarmed and suspicious — grew more insistent. To his letters and telegrams Stanford at length made a feeble reply. While he personally continued to support Sargent, he stated, the situation had grown complicated. There were many factors that must be considered very carefully. . . .

Sargent was too old a hand not to realize what was taking place. On January 13, 1885, a week before the scheduled election, he wrote to Stanford pointing out that two of the latter’s friends were in Sacramento ‘trying to pull away my votes.’ He continued: ‘As this is so inconsistent with your letter of yesterday, I call your attention to it directly that you may stop it. ... I appreciate the friendship these men have for you and that their zeal for you is the cause of their acts. But they should not trifle with your honor.’ Sargent added that he had the election by a majority of twenty ‘if these gentlemen would speak a word of encouragement for me, instead of opposing me; and I would have a fair majority if they would be neutral.’ His earlier letters had begun: ‘My dear Governor’; in this the salutation was more formal, perhaps a trifle ironical: ‘Hon. Leland Stanford.’

Sargent did not fail to inform Huntington of how events were shaping themselves at Sacramento. An ominous wire presently reached Palo Alto: ‘It is reported that you are in the field against Sargent. I cannot believe it. Please telegraph me at once.’

Stanford could no longer evade. He issued a statement confirming what California’s political writers had been prophesying for days. On the insistence of his friends, and for the sake of concord within the party, he had decided with much reluctance to enter the race. . . . The Republicans met in caucus on January 20. Stanford received the nomination on the second ballot, with 47 votes. Sargent was able to hold but 16 of the ‘fair majority’ he had expected a week earlier. On January 28 the senate voted Stanford into the office.

His motives were variously explained. To mitigate the charge of betrayal, one California politician, Henry Vrooman, announced that Stanford had allowed his name to be presented ‘only when I told him plainly that I and his friends were bound to make him Senator in spite of everything he could do for Sargent.’ After thirty years in California politics Sargent had his enemies, and these were unwilling to let credit for his defeat go to others. Frank Pixley, whose weekly Argonaut had been singing Stanford’s praises for years, laid claim to the glory of instigating the coup. Stephen T. Gage put forth the most original claim. It was his argument, he stated, that had finally won over his chief, then vacillating between personal vanity and loyalty to a friend. A period of residence at Washington, Gage had informed Stanford, might prove beneficial to Mrs. Stanford, whose health had not been robust.

California papers commented in ironic vein on Washington’s rise to prominence as a health centre. Others pointed out that if a man wished to live in Washington for his wife’s health he might go as a private citizen and avoid the necessity of breaking his word to an old friend. The railroad papers, of course, approved wholeheartedly, while others straddled the issue. The Los Angeles Times commented: ‘The result is now known. We accept it, without displeasure, as the best choice, all things considered, that could have been made.’ With unconscious cynicism the paper went on to develop the theory that, since the state was fated to be represented in the Senate by a man pledged to serve the railroad, the road’s president was better than a subordinate. Stanford was a man of wealth and therefore presumably able to resist the temptation to sell his vote.

No statement was forthcoming from Huntington. Stanford took his seat on March 4, 1885, the day of Cleveland’s inauguration, and Huntington was not in the gallery to witness this new Stanford triumph. Nor was he ever a guest at the new Senator’s apartment in the Arlington Hotel or in the pretentious house he later leased on Farragut Square.

Huntington maintained in public a discreet silence, but those who knew him well — including Stanford himself — were not convinced that he had forgotten the episode. Privately Huntington decided that Stanford’s vanity had passed the limit of tolerance. Concern for public policy was no longer a restraining influence. Huntington determined to give himself the pleasure of deflating the Stanford balloon. It was only a matter of choosing the right time.

XXVII

Characteristically, Huntington was in no hurry to take his revenge. He laid his plans with patience, and five years passed before he was ready to act. The annual meeting of Southern Pacific Stockholders was held at San Francisco on April 9, 1890. So far as advance information went, it was to be a regularmeeting given over to routine business. A few, however, knew that questions of more importance were to be decided, for Huntington had partially shown his hand at a preliminary meeting at New York. Present were Huntington and Stanford, the two survivors of the original four, Charles F. Crocker, and two attorneys representing the interests of Mrs. Edward T. Searles, Mark Hopkins’s widow.

Into the midst of this group Huntington casually dropped his bombshell. At the forthcoming annual meeting, he announced, Stanford was to be dropped and Huntington himself would succeed him as president. An agreement embodying this and other matters was presented, and all parties — Stanford included — signed it. The reason the latter agreed without a struggle to give up an office he had held for nearly thirty years is partly explained by these excerpts from the document: —

Fourth: That the papers in possession of C. P. Huntington in reference to the Sargeut matters be either destroyed or delivered sealed to the undersigned for disposal as they shall see fit.

Fifth: That all parties owning or representing interests in the property of the Pacific Improvement Company shall in good faith refrain from hostile or injurious expressions concerning each other, and shall in good faith coöperate for the election of Leland Stanford to the next term of the United States Senate.

Stanford would be allowed to return to the Senate, but this time he was to pay for the privilege. The price would have been high even had Huntington carried out his part of the agreement— which, as events proved, he had no intention of doing.

The Southern Pacific’s annual meeting was held at San Francisco the following April, and the ready-made programme was duly put through. Stanford rose from his accustomed place and Huntington took it. The latter had prepared a statement; his first act as president was to rise and read it. After the expected conventional remarks came this bombshell:—

I can promise you nothing more, for at all times my personal interest has been second to that of the company. It shall he so in the future, and in no case will I use this great corporation to advance my personal ambition at the expense of its owners, or put my hands in the treasury to defeat the people’s choice and thereby put myself in positions that should be filled by others, but to the best of my ability I will work for the interests of the shareholders of the company and the people whom it should serve.

This was a typical example of Huntington strategy. He had waited more than five years, manœuvring his less skillful opponent into a position from which there was no possibility of escape. It was also one of the few occasions when Huntington exhibited the slightest talent for showmanship or allowed himself the luxury of satisfying a personal grudge at the expense of business expediency; but, having decided to settle an old score, he was not content until he had made a thorough job of it. The blow fell when Stanford’s prestige was at its height. The doors of his new university had been thrown open only a few months earlier, and the magnificence of the gift had for three years been a favorite topic throughout the West. For a generation he had been the nominal head of the Republican Party in California; he was then Senator and had been Governor. Since its organization he had been president of incomparably the largest corporation in the West. This was Stanford’s darkest day. A member of the Stanford household recalled that when the Governor returned to Palo Alto that evening he appeared to have grown years older since the morning.

Huntington’s revival of the Sargent incident and his public admission that Stanford’s elect ion had been bought with railroad money received attention beyond the walls of the directors’ room. For years, opposition papers in California had been stating that railroad money had been spent at Sacramento in the campaign of 1885. To have the charge confirmed by Huntington himself was unlooked-for good fortune of which editors made the most.

Newspaper readers w ere soon enjoying a public airing of mutual dislike by the two surviving members of the Big Four. Stanford, always hospitable to the press and now concerned for his reputation, turned to the newspapers in an effort to counteract Huntington’s deplorable frankness. This was to be expected. Huntington overcame his aversion for publicity and fought vigorously. The successive interviews grew in frankness as the angry partners reached the stage of personal abuse. The West learned that Stanford had so little regard for the honesty of his associate that he would trust him only so far as he could ‘throw Trinity Church up the side of Mt. Shasta,’ and Huntington was goaded to the length of calling the estimable founder of the new university ‘a damned old fool.’

The battle was uneven. Stanford was normally able to hold his own in an exchange of invective, but this time it was his bad luck to be on the defensive. Hostile newspapers were asking not merely for abuse of Huntington, but for proof that the latter’s charges were untrue. Railroad-controlled editors, in doubt as to which side of the controversy they were expected to take, played safe. Creed Hammond, the current chief of the railroad’s legal staff, spoke soothingly to reporters: ‘The facts of the election are not known to Mr. Huntington in their true light.’ Others followed his lead. Frank Pixley’s Argonaut, usually shrill in its support of Stanford’s interests, was singularly temperate. The reason was known to many: Pixley believed himself responsible for persuading Stanford to run against Sargent, whom he heartily disliked. The editor was sulking because he could not claim credit for a personal victory over Sargent, but must help maintain the fiction that the latter had been reluctantly sacrificed because Stanford alone could have won for the Republicans.

After the controversy had begun to die down, Stanford accommodatingly added more fuel by a demand that the new board of the Southern Pacific investigate Huntington’s charge that railroad money had been used to buy his election. Opposition journals pointed out that the investigation might better be conducted by a less biased body. In Washington the appointment of a Senate committee to look into Stanford’s fitness to remain a member was seriously discussed.

Neither investigation materialized. The Senate took no notice of Huntington’s charges, and the railroad’s directors refused to render a decision that must win them the enmity of either Stanford or Huntington. Meantime, on advice of conciliators, Stanford was prevailed on to temper his demands for an immediate investigation, and Huntington agreed to write a letter of apology. The latter proved to be a curious document. The degree of sincerity with which it was written may be judged from the following excerpts: —

DEAR GOVERNOR: So many items mentioning your name and mine have lately appeared in the daily papers that some of our friends think it would be well for me to write you a letter. Hence this communication; although I do not apprehend any danger that you and I will be put in a hostile attitude in our business — or for that matter, in our personal relations; but the intervention of others who do not altogether understand our difference may tend to separate our friends. Our views when at variance have been freely expressed and it is needless to allude to them further than that we have each of us agreed to disagree. . . .
The remarks that I recently made at the Southern Pacific board meeting were intended only as a seasonable expression of my views on these subjects. . . . My words, and especially the phrase which relates to campaign uses of the Company’s funds, or, as it expressed it, ‘putting hands into the treasury of the Company to defeat the people’s choice,’have been construed in some quarters as a personal attack on you. Allow me to say that I greatly regret this impression since I did not intend to make such an attack or to charge that you had used the Company’s money to advance your personal interests or in any improper manner, and I am satisfied that you have not done so. Allow me also to express the wish that our relations may continue as friendly hereafter as they have been heretofore.
C. P. HUNTINGTON

This was not the complete vindication Stanford had been demanding daily; but he must have realized that it was the best he could get, for he prudently let the matter drop. Huntington was agreeable: he was already tired of his unaccustomed place in the limelight. Moreover, he had accomplished xvhat he had set out to do. Why ask more? To carry the quarrel further might hurt business. The principals granted no further interviews; the feud had burned itself out. Both principals xvere heartily glad that it had settled one point; it was no longer necessary for either to maintain pretense of friendship. Thereafter they met only on business; their conversation was monosyllabic and their infrequent letters severely formal. Once Huntington interjected a personal note, perhaps unconsciously ironic: ’I certainly have no reason to complain of you, or of any of my co-directors in the past, for I have usually had my own way.’

XXVIII

One of the minor results of this public airing of the feud was that certain Coast journalists propounded this question: which of the two men had played the more important part in the creation of the road? One weekly, reviewing the years when the Central Pacific was being built, pictured the Governor carrying the main burden of the early enterprise, meeting and overcoming a succession of crises, financial, legislative, administrative. While Stanford was in the midst of the tumult, fighting, conciliating, driving the great inert machine toward success, where was Huntington? Huntington, remarked the editor, was in the East buying supplies, spending money raised by Stanford, and writing petulant letters demanding more rapid construction. This critic claimed that Huntington lacked the qualities necessary in a successful promoter. Unlike the affable Stanford, he was formal and direct in business; he had neither the ability nor the desire to place himself on a friendly footing with those with whom he dealt. He lacked, too, eloquence in argument, the gift of winning support by firing others with enthusiasm.

That there was truth in this estimate of Huntington cannot be denied. Unquestionably there were phases of the enterprise in which he was a liability. Until late in life he uniformly refused to make speeches, whatever the occasion. His manner toward interviewers, when he could be persuaded to grant them an audience, showed clearly his hope of getting the nonsense over as quickly as possible.

His failure as a herald of goodwill for railroad ambitions arose from a constit utional dislike of asking a favor of any man. He was proud to announce, in season and out, his ability to pay for what he wanted. Consequently, when it was a question of pleasing rather than buying, he was ill at ease, Ids attitude a combination of defiance and arrogance. He was hardly more helpful in construc1 ion and operation. There is no evidence that, he had a grasp of engineering problems, except in their relation to costs. During the entire construction period he contributed but one suggestion. When the problem of scaling the final steep rise to the Sierra summit was furrowing the brows of company engineers, he proposed a huge elevator in which whole trains could be lifted up and down the thousand-foot cliff.

Huntington had obvious limitations, but he was of course far more than a mere purchasing agent. It was years before the full extent of his other activities became generally known. Much of this information reached the public against Huntington’s wishes and over the objections of railroad attorneys. Some he gave voluntarily when, in later years, lie showed one of the weaknesses of old age by boasting of past triumphs. A favorite narrative concerned his clash with Secretary of the Treasury McCulloch over the delivery of $2,400,000 in subsidy bonds.

This was when the rival roads were reaching ahead to grasp as large a share as possible of the construction subsidy. After a slow start, the Union Pacific by 1867 began to hit full stride, and its owners wished to build as far west as the California border. This would have given their Western rival only the costly section over t he Sierra, leaving the Union Pacific in control of the traffic to the Nevada silver mines.

Alarmed letters to Huntington reported Union Pacific advance-construction crews in central Nevada, five hundred miles west of Salt Lake and less than half that distance from the California line. Every mile of desert construction taken over by the rival company meant $20,000 less profit to Central Pacific, and the loss of a mile of completed road. Could n’t something be done to make the Union Pacific stay on their own side of the Rockies?

Huntington read these appeals with unconcern and scrawled one of his awkward letters. Let the partners stop worrying about the Union Pacific. Let them attend to their own sufficient job, which was to construct their railroad— as much of it as they could and as fast as they could. The cars of Tom Scott’s Pennsylvania Railroad saw much of Huntington during the ensuing weeks as he shuttled between New York and Washington. At the capital he visited department heads and talked with important figures on the Congressional railroad committees. Word was sent west outlining a plan of counter-warfare. Soon Central Pacific crews were playing the same game as their Eastern rivals. If the Union Pacific sent advance parties five hundred miles ahead of their tracks, the Central Pacific could, and would, send theirs a thousand. Before their line was complete even to the California border, company engineers were in Salt Lake City, letting contracts to Brigham Young to grade Central Pacific roadbed east of Ogden.

Huntington’s strategy soon became obvious. Had both companies built as far as their lines were surveyed, the rails would have paralleled each other for more than fifteen hundred miles — and the government was granting only one subsidy. Both sides were frankly bluffing; both were playing for trading advantage in the inevitable compromise.

The question, as Huntington foresaw, would be settled, not by surveying crews in Utah and Nevada, but by Congress. And there the Central Pacific had a decided advantage. Huntington, then as always, knew clearly what he wanted for the company, and he had been long enough in Washington to know how to go about getting it. In this instance he desired to manœuvre the government into paying over to the; Central Pacific the subsidy bonds for part of this debated section of the line. With an innocent air of attending to a routine detail, he filed with the Secretary of the Interior a map of a projected new section of the line — one extending as far east as Echo, well up toward the summit of the Rockies. The map was accepted by the department. Next Huntington applied for bonds covering two thirds of the subsidy on this section, in accordance with the Pacific Railroad Act, as amended, which specified that in certain emergencies bonds could be paid in advance of actual construction. The sum involved was $2,400,000.

With what one writer called his ‘remarkable persistence in presenting an argument,’ Huntington succeeded in convincing the Secretary of the Interior, the Attorney General, the federal railroad commissioners,and finally President Johnson that an emergency existed. Accordingly, the bonds were ordered paid. Huntington was on the point of receiving them when astonished officials of the Union Pacific learned what was happening. Oakes Ames reached Washington in time to arouse official doubts as to the justice of the transaction. Secretary of the Treasury McCulloch was prevailed upon to delay turning over the bonds while Congress investigated.

To withhold a sum of that size from Huntington, once it had been promised, proved a greater task than McCulloch imagined. In his anecdotal style Huntington later gave his version of what happened next; —

I went to McCulloch and said I: ‘Here’s a report I want you to have.’ He had heard we were working there — meaning among the departments — and he had a talk with Ames. I knew he had agreed not to show me the bonds; but I was determined to have them if I could.

I got a report from the Attorney General that I was entitled under the law to those bonds. I got one from the Solicitor of the Treasury; lie asked for that, I was legally entitled to them. 1 got two cabinet meetings in one week outside of the regular day. The majority of them voted that I should have the bonds. Then he would not let me have them. I went there nearly a week. I wanted to get them the day the administration closed. ... I called at McCulloch’s office; I sent in my card. McCulloch would let me know the next morning. ... I said, never mind, I will go and see him. I did not know McCulloch. I wanted those $2,400,000 bonds. ’Well’, said he, ‘you seem entitled to them.’ I answered: ’That is right; give me the reasons, Mr. Secretary, why yon won’t let me have them?' ’Well,’he said: ’You seem entitled to them under the law.’ I said: ‘That is all right: give me the bonds.’ ’Well,’he replied, ‘no, I can’t do it.’ ’Well,’I said, ’I want your reasons. I have men in New York who are interested with me; when I go back, if I don’t have the bonds I want the reason why. You can see for yourself.’ Finally he remarked, ‘You do seem entitled to them.’

Well, I was nearly a week. I went in there every day and asked him to give me the bonds and asked for the reasons. One day there was a score of men right behind me. ’Now,’said he, ‘ if you do not let these gentlemen see me, I will decide this thing against you.’ ‘Now,’I replied, ‘Mr. Secretary, rather than have the Secretary of the United States do so foolish a thing as that, I will sit here for a fortnight..’ For half an hour or so I sat down. ’Now,’said he, ’Mr. Jordan [he came up just then], Mr. Huntington is worrying me to death. He says he wants those bonds; what do you think of it ?' Jordan said: ‘I have given you a written opinion, Mr. Secretary, that he is entitled to the bonds under the law.’ ’Well,’said he. ’he shall have the bonds. . . . A little after eight, o’clock I went out, and found the bonds in my room.

The full amount was not delivered. Huntington’s persistence had succeeded, however, in adding more than $1,300,000 to the Central Pacific’s treasury.

XXIX

Considering the size of his fortune and the number of years he remained in possession of it, Huntington’s benefactions were few. What he gave was seldom given carelessly. He was not the type of rich man who, recalling from time to time that a certain degree of philanthropy is expected of him, arrogantly tosses a few dollars into whatever palms happen to be extended. On occasion he passed out trifling sums for dubious purposes, as when he gave $100 to a solicitor for a home for disabled miners and when he endowed the famous waterfall in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. But usually when he parted from his dollars he wanted to know in detail how they were to be spent and by whom.

Several years of Huntington’s moneygrubbing youth had been spent in the South, where the condition and prospects of the Negro had engaged his interest. More than fifty years later, among the few mourners at his funeral were J. R. Frizzel of the Hampton Industrial School and Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee, evidence of the dead man’s long but never extravagant support of the theory that young Negroes might sensibly be taught blacksmithing and simple arithmetic. In 1896 his secretary, George E. Miles, recalled a visit to Huntington’s office by the Negro principal of the Salisbury School, in North Carolina. Huntington that morning had denied himself to all callers, but when he heard the Negro’s voice in the outer room, his door flew open. ‘Come in, Price,’ he called. ’I have given orders to keep out everybody this morning, but you can walk in at any time.'

The philanthropist took the trouble to point out that his sympathy for the black men did not spring from the fact that they were required to work hard; Huntington had never been of the opinion that hard work was anything but a privilege. But, by his code, honest effort should be coupled with a hope of advancement, and it was the lack of such hope that made the Negro’s plight deplorable.

By the middle ’70s, efforts to train young Negroes in manual trades, advocated since the close of the Civil War, had gained headway. Huntington grew interested in General S. C. Armstrong’s Hampton Institute. He investigated the work and ended by giving moderate financial support. His first contribution was $50. Later he established a trust fund of $1000, the income from which would pay tuition for one student. Other minor benefactions followed, always after careful consideration and explicit instructions as to how the money was to be spent. Blacksmithing, carpentry, and other forms of woodand metalworking seemed to him proper fields for instruction. The building and equipping of the institute’s shops became his particular interest.

Unlike most amateurs in philanthropy, Huntington never allowed enthusiasm to get out of hand. Training for the Negro could be a benefit only if it were kept within narrow limits. The brightest of them, he felt, could safely learn trades and thereby lift themselves out of the ranks of unskilled labor. To go further, to give them even the beginnings of a formal education, was pernicious folly. Would someone please tell him what in hell the Negro was expected to do with his ‘education’ after he had it? Let him learn how to do useful work with his hands. If he wanted more, teach him to read and write, to add and subtract. Huntington let it be known that if General Armstrong yielded to the pleas of certain Northern backers of the school (who saw the institute turning out droves of black Ph. D.s) his support would be withdrawn immediately.

This was not spectacular philanthropy, and other benefactions were of the same order. In the middle ’80s he presented a chapel, in memory of his mother, to the villageof Harwinton, Connecticut. At about the same time he bought a house at Throgs Neck, at the edge of Long Island Sound, stocked the grounds with horses, cows, and dogs, and lived there summers, playing the country gentleman without extravagance.

In the near-by village of Westchester, now part of the Bronx, a group gathered one summer evening in 1891 to celebrate another Huntington gift :a small, churchlike brick structure enclosed by a prim iron fence. The meeting came to order, and the eyes of the villagers focused on the donor of Westchester’s Library and Reading Room. Huntington talked with commendable brevity and listened to the speeches of five consecutive clergymen. His own remarks were packed with wholesome adv ice to the young. ‘ Let me urge upon you the importance of choosing the right path early in life.....A wrong beginning is almost certain to result in a wrong ending. . . . Let me urge the careful use of your time.’

Other speakers stressed the same virtues, at more length. One clergyman invited his listeners to consider what might happen to the renowned Huntington judgment should its owner take to frequenting barrooms. Lest the audience draw wrong inferences, the chairman interrupted to assure listeners that the philanthropist was a teetotaler. A local account of the rites was headed: ‘Church and State Unite in Glowing Tribute to Young Men’s Benefactor — Collis P. Huntington.’

Those who expected little philanthropies to grow into big ones were disappointed; the trickle never came to resemble a flood. In the same issues that carried his obituary, editors speculated on the possibility that death might have relaxed the famous tight fists. His will, however, revealed no posthumous generosity. Instead, the document provided for his assets to go into the hands of other Huntingtons, chiefly his wife and his favorite nephew, Ed. There for nearly a quarter of a century longer his fortune remained intact. Not until the l920s was any considerable part of it diverted into philanthropic channels.

The medium was this same nephew, Henry Edwards, son of Collis’s elder brother Solon, co-owner of the Oneonta store in the '40s. When Collis left for California in 1849, Solon bore part of the cost of the shipment of whiskey that went on ahead. Henry was born the year Collis arrived in California. Twenty years later he called on his uncle in New York, and the latter had him made manager of a West Virginia sawmill. By a familiar Huntington transition, the young man presently owned the mill. Collis’s interest, sharpened by this feat, caused him to take the voung man into his organization. Except for a brief period when he returned to the family store at Oneonta, H. E. remained his uncle’s aide, holding progressively more important railroad offices.

Childless himself, the elder Huntington developed a strong liking for his keen and acquisitive nephew. ‘No better boy than Ed ever lived,’ he once pronounced. In 1873 the young man married Mary Alice Prentice, niece of the first Mrs. Huntington and elder sister of Clara, whom Collis had adopted. Thus entrenched, H. E.’s advance was rapid. By 1881 he was superintendent of construction for one of the Eastern lines his uncle was developing; five years later he was managing the Kentucky Central. By 1892 he had become the Huntington representative at San Francisco, with an office at Post and Montgomery streets and a moderately elegant residence on a Jackson Street, hillside. The newcomer had neither the support nor the admiration of the sons of his uncle’s partners. Echoes of clashes with Charles F. Crocker and Timothy Hopkins found their way into the local press. But the elder Huntington was then solidly in the saddle, and young H. E. uniformly had his way.

When Collis died, Henry was managing the railroad-owned streetcar system in San Francisco. Later he was to demonstrate that local car lint’s could do in a limited area what his uncle’s steam lines had done in whole states; that is, they could be made to shape the region’s future by controlling both the rate and the direction of its growth. Soon after the century opened, H. E. moved to Los Angeles, when that backward village was just beginning its startling rise. From his uncle he inherited much real estate, and to this he added largely, buying numerous outlying parcels of valley and foothill lands.

Purchases were not made at random, though what plan he was following was not evident at the time. He began a network of fast interurban car lines, and when their routes were laid out it was found that they passed through miles of Huntington-owned land. Of course he profiled enormously by the subsequent boom, some of the profits of which were put back into a variety of other local investments. His finger was presently in so many pies that the child in the classic Los Angeles dialogue, who had left the Huntington Hotel, traveled down Huntington Boulevard in a Huntington streetcar, and arrived at Huntington Beach, quite logically inquired if this ocean might also be Mr. Huntington’s. The answer may have been that Mr. Huntington’s uncle had once had control of the traffic on the ocean, but his option had been allowed to lapse.

Thus far H. E. conformed to the Huntington tradition: he continued to make money and to hold on to it. He even surpassed his uncle in discovering a new method of accumulating capital: that of marrying it. Divorced by his first wife in 1906, he seven years later, in Paris, married Collis’s widow, thereby reuniting the bulk of his uncle’s fortune. He was sixty-three, his bride a year or two younger.

Then at last the tide of interest began to turn. The business of adding superfluous millions to an already unwieldy total lost its fascination. After sixty years of persistent accumulation the stream of Huntington dollars began to how outward. In their progress they cut an entirely unexpected channel.

About 1902, H. E. purchased the San Marino ranch, an area of foothill land covered with brush and stunted oak trees just beyond the Pasadena city limits. Eight years later he retired and went to live there. But ihe acquisitive instinct well developed in all the clan made a life of idleness out of the question. Like his uncle, he had earlier acquired a dilatory habit of buying pictures and books and had assembled a considerable though undistinguished collection of both. After withdrawing to his San Marino hilltop, the collecting fever set in in earnest. He continued, then and later, to purchase paintings, specializing in the eighteenth-century English school, but his main interest swung to books.

There followed a spending spree unique in book-collecting history. From 1910 until his death in 1927, the force and weight of his dollars dominated world markets. When H. E. set out to buy a library he followed exactly the procedure his uncle had found effective; he captured it by a direct assault, brushing aside obstacles and demolishing opposition. For fifteen years he bought en bloc every important library that came on the market. Dealers gave him first choice of all worth-while books that came into their hands. His agents made clean sweeps of the auction houses here and abroad. They approached the owners of noted private libraries — in America, on the Continent, mostly in England — and made offers of such size that few dared to refuse. As a result, war-swollen taxes were paid on numerous English country seats, while their library shelves were swept clean of hereditary collections, to fill shelves in Huntington’s new marble library.

While this fantastic buyer was in the market, rival collectors and the great public and state libraries had to be satisfied with what Huntington did not want. When disappointed ones complained of ‘the brute force of money,’H. E. smiled and continued to take what he wished, and to pay for it liberally. He had a stock answer: ’I am an old man. I haven’t much time.’ I Unlike his uncle, he was unable to convince himself t hat he would live forever. How many dollars were poured into the collection was never made public. One estimate places the total at $30,000,000. His method was admittedly ruthless, built on a bottomless purse. But the library and art gallery he assembled and in 1919 placed in trust for public use (with an endowment of $8,000,000) were one of the most princely gifts in history. In fifteen years he had made his San Marino ranch one of the world’s important storehouses of the literature and history of the Englishspeaking people, a magnet that draws scholars and research workers from every civilized country.

Westerners reflected not without irony that the dollars wrested from them by a monopolistic railroad system had returned in the form of canvases by Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, of incunabula, Elizabethan first editions, and literary and historical works of a bulk and value beyond estimating.

XXX

‘A tall, well-built man, with a full beard tinged with gray, a square, resolute jaw and keen, bluish-gray eyes . . . sitting in his office chair, with a black skullcap which he usually wears in business hours pushed back on his head, he has an open, jolly, unassuming look.’

This was Collis Huntington in lighter mood, as seen in 1887 by Henry Clews, banker and co-tenant of the handsome Mills Building on Broad Street, Clews, who saw him frequently, admired his active movements and healthy appearance, qualities which he attributed to good habits of his youth and good care in later years. At that period Huntington had begun to observe that he tired easily. ‘I would feel better if I did n’t have to spend most of my life on trains,’ he once complained, and went on to outline his weekly schedule: two days in New York, one in Boston, four in Washington. That called for four nights of travel out of every seven. The situation was not improved by the fact that he had to commute between New York and Washington on Tom Scott’s Pennsylvania, for he and Scott were fighting to control a second transcontinental line, then building across Texas and Arizona Territory. In the circumstances, Huntington considered it unsound policy to accept passes on the Pennsylvania; twice a week the old man reluctantly bought and paid for his ticket.

But he could not avoid travel. He made trips to Europe, to quell incipient revolts of British holders of Central Pacific stock, who periodically needed to have explained to them why dividends had stopped the moment they made their investments.

On one such visit to London he crossed the Channel on a mere pleasure jaunt and took in the Paris Exposition of 1889. Paris journalists did not fail to interview the quaint American railroad baron. At home Huntington never hesitated to denounce American institutions, but abroad he proved as patriotic as a Rotarian. No, he was not much impressed by the exposition. Except for the paintings, he had seen nothing that could not be better made in America, and at less cost. He belittled the Eiffel Tower, at which the rest of the world was gaping in awe. It was 985 feet tall? Well, American engineers could build one ‘a mile high’ if they wanted to. Besides, what was the use of the thing? The reporters withdrew in strained silence. Huntington and his wife remained a week longer, buying furniture by the drayload for their Fifth Avenue house. No one pointed out that perhaps the latter too might have been better and less expensively made in America.

Travel for pleasure was an excellent thing if a man had leisure, but Hunt ington chanced to be busy. An interviewer asked if he intended to go abroad one summer in the ’90s. ’I have practically promised my wife to go,’he replied, ‘but I have a bridge to build over the Ohio River at Cincinnati.’ Here was no senseless Eiffel Tower, but something practical, something to shorten the haul of his trains and increase dividends. Europe would have to wait.

His twice-yearly trips to the Pacific Coast had the same practical excuse. While his interests in the East were enlarging, his major properties still centred in California. These needed periodical inspections. Had this not been so, it is doubtful if the old man would ever have returned to the Coast. His dislike for California, and in particular for San Francisco, increased with age. He had a theory that mild climate bred weaklings; a man who did not. have to fight the weather was unlikely to fight anything else. There were other reasons, less theoretical. Stanford’s continued prestige on the Coast was persistently irritating, and the expense of preventing the passage or enforcement of anti-railroad legislation at Sacramento seemed to him far too high. There were also the sustained and bitter attacks on him by San Francisco newspapers, led by the Examiner, whose cartoonist, Homer Davenport, daily pictured Huntington with his hands in the pockets of the common people, a design of dollar signs ornamenting his enormous paunch.

Huntington never agreed that the Coast treated him and his partners with liberality and had been robbed for its pains. ‘We have served California,’he announced, ’better than any other set of men have ever served any other stale in the Union.’ Again, of the metropolis: ‘We never had a dollar’s worth from San Francisco, either in money or moral support.’ Of the state’s lawmakers: ‘California has never had anybody in Washington that has done much of anything good.’

On his San Francisco visits he had made his headquarters at the Palace Hotel, and it was there he took his second wife in the winter of 1884. The hotel was huge, ornately luxurious, and for thirty years it maintained its prestige without a sign of diminution. To live there was a badge of unquestioned eminence, for its two-acre roof sheltered positively everyone of consequence who reached the West Coast. But, for all its prestige, the Palace was too big for its time and place. Whole floors of walnut and plush bedrooms remained untenanted. Moreover, the place was noisy from the passing cable cars, the clatter of drays over the Market Street cobbles, and the procession of carriages around its central court. In the early ’90s an ever-interested city learned that Huntington would stop there no longer. He had purchased the austere Colton house on Nob Hill. It was directly across Taylor Street from the fantastic redwood mansion of the Crockers, and local critics regarded the circumstance as unfortunate, for that baroque structure, it was said, tended to ‘kill’ its modest neighbor.

There is no doubt that the complexity of the Crocker towers and gables and art glass, the incrustations of millwork and iron, caught and held the eye, and hat by contrast Hunt ington’s new property looked as unornamental as a Central Pacific way station. The general opinion was that Huntington must have bought the place because he had got a tremendous bargain.

The house could hardly have held pleasant memories for him. It had been David Colton’s residence — and Huntington’s association with that gentleman had, a few years earlier, been the means of exposing his business methods and ethics to an astonished and resentful public. The matter, however, disturbed him not at all. He had recent ly assumed the presidency of the Southern Pacific, the Palace Hotel was noisy, a residence on the Coast seemed desirable, and among the available houses this was the one he chanced to like best.

Colton’s widow moved out, and for months the place stood vacant, for Huntington had meantime returned east. In the fall of 1892, however, society columns broke out in excited paragraphs:

‘It is a satisfactory certainty that Mrs. C. P. Huntington will return here in early spring. She is having her residence on California Street redecorated and the reception rooms refurnished.’ Readers learned that while the furniture of the former occupant was ‘very rich and gorgeous’ it was ‘rather old style’ and that Mrs. Huntington was planning many changes. Cornices and curtains were to be removed, walls and ceilings refinished in lighter shades, and windows hung with something very new and smart: ‘orange-tinted brocade with a stripe in it.’ ‘The mansion,’ stated the society editor of the wave, ’will be very swell indeed.'

XXXI

During the next eight years Huntington spent perhaps six months in the San Francisco house, for at seventy and beyond he continued to extend his activities. By the middle ’90s he was a national figure, linked in the public mind with the Goulds, Vanderbilts, Hills, and other titans of transportation, to share with them the deference and abuse of a money-conscious nation. How many dollars he had accumulated became a sort of national guessing game. When, toward the end of the century, one financial writer estimated his fortune at $70,000,000, Huntington said this might be as good a guess as any. Asked to make an estimate of his own, he refused on the ground that guessing was a waste of time. But he then controlled enough miles of railroad to connect the North and South Poles, and he had recently traveled from Newport News to San Francisco over his own rails. He had, besides, the deciding voice in a score of other enterprises: steamship lines, coal mines, timber holdings in the Northwest, huge blocks of land in Southern California, great shipyards at New port News.

All these were directed from a cramped office, the glass door of which bore only his name. He worked at a long tabledesk, perpetually piled with a mass of papers, one corner clear for current business. Across that desk corner, business deals involving more than a billion dollars were worked out. ‘ Over it have been drawn and studied carefully, inch by inch, profiles of thousands of miles of railroad. Plans and policies and combinations have been whispered around it.’ The desk with its faded red felt cover was once pronounced ‘comparatively new’ by Huntington himself, who went on to say that it was less than twenty years old. The office floor was uncarpeted, the windows uncurtained, the few chairs so bat tered and angular that when Leland Stanford’s widow ended the historic feud by calling on him, in the late ’90s, Huntington had to send out for a leather armchair in which the old lady might sit at ease.

He was less concerned for the comfort of other visitors, who came and went so steadily that in 1896 his secretary wondered how a man past seventy-five could continue to carry the load. ‘He is the object of continual solicitation on the part of promoters who are eager to secure the influence of his name in floating new enterprises. His anteroom is the rendezvous of a multitude of people who want something. He is almost momentarily the recipient of visitors’ cards. His door is continually opening to let out one caller and admit another. His morning mail is supplemented hourly, and he is bound to finish it before he goes home.'

This, in 1896, was the man who twenty-five years earlier convinced himself that overwork was ruining his health and made persistent attempts to retire. In 1899, when preparations for New York’s first subway were begun, he recalled that he had planned just such a project thirty years before and had abandoned it for the opportunity to pick up, at a bargain, an uncompleted railroad in Virginia: the Chesapeake & Ohio.

‘I don’t work hard,’ he told one solicitous caller; ‘I work easy.’ He had learned, he said, to keep troublesome business problems locked up in his office, and to carry home only those that required no concentration. Sometimes he spent a pleasant hour or two of an evening scratching his signature on checks or scribbling a score or so of confidential letters. One of the last men to whom he granted an interview came away impressed by the old man’s firm belief that there was virtue in work for work’s sake. Sixty years had failed to shake a conviction formed in boyhood that there was something reprehensible in the enjoyment of leisure.

Yet there were moments when he confessed that a life less weighted by responsibilities might have been pleasant. He found time to recall his youthful tramps through the South when all he owned was carried on his back. Power and possessions were pleasant, but he thought it possible that one might pay too much for them. He liked to reflect, too, on his infrequent trips out on the line when the Central Pacific was building. Once he had set off alone on horseback and spent several nights under the stars. Memory of that brief touch of Arcadia remained with him to the end: a horse and a blanket and no other possessions; freedom to roam and loaf and be brazenly idle. ‘I could, see how the Indians liked that kind of a life.’ But Huntington was no Indian. On that same trip he came, one evening, on a group of teamsters hired by the railroad to haul ties from the Sierra foothills. They were reclining in the warmth of a huge bonfire. He drew no pleasure from that happy scene, for the crackling ties cost him and his partners eight dollars each.

As he approached eighty, he remained as vain as ever of his physical strength. When newspapers repeated some Connecticut ancient’s boast that he had vanquished Huntington in a schoolyard fight, the latter made prompt and heated denial: ‘No boy in school ever licked me, or ever could! I could wipe up the floor with half the boys in school all together!'

In San Francisco the Examiner suggested that the two fight over again, pointing out that the public would pay well for the privilege of looking on, and that Huntington’s share of the profits might be used to maintain his lobby against the Nicaragua Canal.

Observers who saw him often detected signs that the old man was slowing up. For the first time in memory he began to arrive late at his desk and to allow employees to lock up at night. He gave over more time to such frivolities as billiards and whist, though refusing to play for stakes. Until past middle life he had never smoked or used alcohol; in his seventies he became a proficient cigar smoker and admitted that he usually swallowed a slug of brandy before going to his early bed. But one drink a day was his limit; when he reached a hundred, he once said, he hoped to find time for serious drinking.

Other austerities of his youth were shunted off. No longer insistent on doing as he pleased, he ended by doing whatever was conventionally expected of a multimillionaire. Thus his adopted daughter contracted an international marriage; he dozed through interminable evenings in his Metropolitan box; he wore a Prince Albert coat during business hours. His belated taste for display found expression in a succession of ‘mansions,’ reaching its climax in the investment of two millions in a square, grim town house, suggestive of a country courthouse, at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. But he disliked the place and rarely occupied it. He spent another quarter of a million for a marble mausoleum at Woodlawn, refusing even to look at it after it was built.

By then most of his time was spent at Throgs Neck or in travel; the motion and noise of trains helped him to sleep. Among his last purchases was a summer camp in the Adirondacks, a log palace on Paquette Lake called Pine Knot Camp, bought from W. West Durant, former president of the Union Pacific.

To reach it conveniently, he had a twenty-six-mile railroad built. This passed through a strip of state-owned land, and newspapers had another opportunity to belabor him for disregarding public rights. The World inquired if this was not government for and by, not the people* but Huntington.

He was long past worrying over such pinpricks. Toward the beginning of August 1900, he left the Fifth Avenue house (where he was afraid he might die) for a month at Paquette Lake. There, early in the morning of the fourteenth, he awoke, announced, ‘I am very, very ill,’ and died at once. The next morning his old enemy, the Examiner, could not forbear brightening a conventional obituary with its famous remark that in fife he had been ‘ruthless as a crocodile.’ Another San Francisco paper, the Bulletin, ran a frontpage editorial sympathizing, not with Huntington’s family, but with the Examiner, which had lost its dearest enemy. ‘Othello’s occupation is gone.’

Executives on the Coast sent on a $500 bouquet of roses and lilies of the valley, and the San Francisco offices were ordered closed all the day of the funeral, while the favorite nephew, Henry E., hastened by special train from Texas. After a day of hesitation, Princess Hatzfeldt cabled from London that it would be impossible to cross the Atlantic in time for the funeral. For three days the nation’s newspapers printed estimates of the dead man’s wealth and conjectures as to who would succeed him, and collected a disappointingly slender sheaf of stories about his life and habits.

Six policemen were assigned to control the crowds before the Fifth Avenue mansion as the hour of the funeral approached. But summer showers kept the curious away, and the policemen, with nothing else to do, stood in the downpour, idly watching less than a score of invited guests hurry through the stone columns of the gate.

(To be concluded)