COLLIS P. HUNTINGTON.

 

            MASSIVE and strong, compelling in all his ways, C. P. Huntington filled exactly the world's idea of a masterful man of affairs. Had he been trained a soldier and been given a command, he would not have depended upon tactics or grand strategy, but upon force. He would never have fought until he believed he had the heaviest battalions, and then would have struck directly at the enemy's center, and his order would have been to "slay and slay and slay" until all opposition was crushed. From such points in his history, as they appeared from time to time, the late Mark Hanna was nearer his type of man than any public man that I can recall.

            Still he was a most courteous and companionable man to those whom he held as friends, and, deep down, he was a generous man and most appreciative of those who had favored him.

            After a close friendship of nearly forty years he broke with Lelancl Stanford because he persisted in permitting the sycophants around him to elect him United States Senator, when A. A. Sargent wanted the place. He did so because as a just man he felt that it was his duty and Stanford's duty to serve Sargent in every honorable way, in gratitude for the inestimable services performed without reward in getting the charter for their railroad, the old Central Pacific, through Congress, loaded as it was with subsidies.

            That he was a captain among great financiers, he abundantly established in his more than thirty years' wrestle with the strongest of them. His one weakness in that regard was the strength of the late E. H. Harriman. If he once made up his mind, he would not change it. If he once fixed his eyes upon a golden cloud, he noted nothing at his feet, though what he stumbled over might be real gold, while the cloud was but an illusion made by passing sunbeams. His heart was fixed on California ; he held it as holding more treasures, treas-

66 AS I REMEMBER THEM.

ures in soil, in mines, in scenery, in climate, than any other state, but when he came to the dividing line where the glorified, wooded Sierra, having exhausted all the moisture that came in from the sea, broke down into the desert to the east ; he said to himself : "All this is but as the barren ocean at best ; if we build a railroad across it, the road will be but as a bridge, our profits must come from California and from where beyond the mountains the green fields are once more found.'' And notwithstanding the expansion that he saw in, and the profits he realized from, that desert, he never changed his stubborn mind. Thus with the completion of the road to Promontory, his idea was to commercially fortify San Francisco, and later Los Angeles and San Diego, to keep all opposition roads from coming in from any direction ; his thought being to build up San Francisco and so far as possible, California, and to milk the desert for "all that the traffic would bear."

            So soon as possible for him he went east and inaugurated the building of the Chesapeake and Ohio road, his dream evidently being to complete, link by link, his roads, to build a great new capital for commerce at Newport News and depend upon the through traffic for his ultimate great fortune. He fought it out on that line as long as he lived. And he dominated the other three chief associates with him, and that policy ruled to the last.

            We cannot help but think that had Mr. Harriman been in his place, when the results from the Comstock, the other great mines of the desert, and the possibilities of the soil when touched by water, been shown him ; with a quick intuition he would have said to himself: "Why, of course, vast treasures are at my feet, else nature would not have so carefully guarded them through the centuries, by this forbidding desolation. It is for me to make them available through a transportation system that will give the men who toil with brawn and brain a chance." And he would have fixed his capitals at San Francisco, at Los Angeles, at Portland and Seattle, not to keep others out- -for he would have known that would be impossible, but to have covered the country that he wanted and from

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which he would have been sure of drawing sufficient rewards.

            And when the mortgages on the old through road fell due, instead of its being but a rusty line of steel and a right-of-way, it would have been double-tracked from Omaha and Kansas City to San Francisco and Portland, so perfect in condition and equipment that passengers going east or west would have no thought of taking any other line, and he would have settled the mortgages with his individual check.

            Mr. Hunting-ton was a merchant in Sacramento when the Comstock was discovered. He, with his business partner, Mark Hopkins, in consultation -with Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and his brother, Judge Crocker, after much consideration, determined to build a toll road from Dutch Flat over the Sierra to a terminal on Truckee river, got their charter and began work. This was in 1859. I have explained how from that the old Central Pacific Railroad was projected and carried to completion.

            But let no one conclude that the building of that road was not a great achievement. Mountains were not torn down then as they now are. Dynamite was not discovered then and nitroglycerine was awfully dangerous. It was far from the base of railroad supplies, the second-class labor of California was scarce and practically worthless, the first-class laborers could not be obtained; before the work was hardly begun, a great war was threatening the very life of the nation and fast destroying its credit, and behind all there was no faith in the success of the undertaking in any financial center of the world. Then there was a mile and a quarter in altitude to be made in ninety miles and the jealous Sierra piled up its obstacles in the way of the audacious few who were essaying to lead the assault up its rugged side.

            Anyone who remembered how long a time was consumed in boring the Hoosac tunnel will catch a glimpse of the work before these men. Charlie Crocker was the executive man in the field. Mark Hopkins saw to the accounts ; Governor Stanford wrote an optimistic letter now and then, while upon Mr. Huntington was the work of keeping the finances always in

68 AS I REMEMBER THEM.

solid form, and in purchasing rails, rolling stock, etc. Judge Crocker was too ill to be of much use, and died before the work was completed.

            Before the work started, elaborate plans for a railroad office were prepared. They were shown to Mr. Huntington ; with a pencil he sketched a cheap building, one story, with five or six rooms, in form and appearance much like a dilapidated barn, and said : "Build it that way. That will do for us until we get out of the woods." And it did.

            He went east and advertised for bids for a huge contract for rails and rolling stock. One bid, the lowest, had enclosed with the bid a separate note explaining that a large percentage would, should the bid be accepted, be returned to him personally as his commission. He accepted the bid, but returned it with a request that it be made over less the commission, that it might be filed, as there were to be no individual commissions in the building of the road.

            Mr. Crocker contracted for ten thousand Chinese for graders, tried them a month, then informed the companies to which they belonged that there must be a change; that no men could work on the food they were restricted to, that wheaten flour, beef, pork, mutton and vegetables must be substituted in great part in lieu of the everlasting rice. This was done, and in another month they became an effective working force.

            So the road pushed its way slowly to the crest of the mountains ; the grade down the eastern slope was much easier, and when the desert was reached, it was rushed with all speed until the locomotives touched noses at Promontory.

            The minds of the chief actors had grown immensely in performing their great work. They had, too, apparently grown in their acquisitiveness. They never for a day used the road as a common carrier, but as private property. They did nothing to develop the country through which the road passed, but rather to exact the utmost revenue possible.

            When a carload ten tons of ordinary merchandise cost $340 from Chicago to Sacramento; if the car was stopped at Reno, one hundred and fifty miles east of Sacramento and run up the little fifty-mile road from Reno to the Comstock,

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the charge there was $760. The through freight to Sacramento and the local freight back to Reno was exacted. When people complained, they were treated as enemies, and as nearly as possible the company owned the legislature, congressmen and judges of California.

            The same company pushed the road from Sacramento to Oregon, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, for the subsidies given for building them, and finally out across Arizona and New Mexico to eastern connections. It nursed all its ventures but the old Central Pacific : that it simply milked until when the payments came due upon it, it was half a wreck.

            Meanwhile, Mr. Huntington had grown to be acknowledged as one of the foremost financiers in the nation, and the spectacle he presented holding up, controlling and guarding the mighty enterprise that he and his partners had established, after all his first associates had died and he himself was an old man, was grand. His brain never faltered, his energy never lost its spring.

            His iron will fought all obstacles he worked in royal harness to the last, in truth a financial and industrial king. In the forest of men in California in the Argonaut days there was one lordly oak. As that first forest melted away and a new one of different species succeeded, this oak still stood ; warded off all storms that were hurtled 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, and stood erect until struck and shattered in a moment by the thunderbolt.

            That oak was C. P. Huntington ; one of the highest types of the men who fought back the savageries of the west coast ; blazed the trails over which progress could advance, smoothed the paths and erected signal stations to point the way for civilization to come and build its temples, that at last full enlightenment might find prepared for it a home.