have organized to secure local transportation, but would hardly have undertaken a railroad across the continent. But it was inevitable that the very dawn of the abiding and permanent life of California should be signalized by the demand for just such a line, providing at once for rapid communication with the homes left behind, and with the industries in the east, which for a time must supply the necessities of the west. Men were now here to stay; business must expand; the resources of a region rich in everything that tends to make a prosperous and independent community must be developed, and rapid and adequate transportation was a matter of necessity. This was the foundation.

THE GROWTH OF THE IDEA.

The evolution of a great enterprise is slow. It may start into being suddenly; but back of it are long years of preparation. There are dreams. All the temples and the statues in them; all the galleries of art and the paintings hanging there, all the dramas and lyric poems, all the great reforms and material triumphs of the blossoming ages were first dreams.

"We figure to ourselves

The thing we like, and then we build it up

As chance may have it, on the rock or sand."

There is a wide interval often between the dream and the task. Many never get beyond the conception. Over and over again visionaries planned the great road in airy projection. There are always pioneers, forerunners, voices in the wilderness, the crying of men who want to be heard; who are full of ideas, convictions-men in advance of their times, the prophets of a new day, eager spirits who outrun Progress itself.

Dr. Samuel Barton was one of these in 1834, and Hartley Carver in 1835, and John Plumbe in 1836, and Asa Whitney in 1845. John C. Fremont, building paths in the western wilderness, meditated a road to California, a land he loved, and, dying, called his home. Thomas H. Benton, the father of Jessie Benton Fremont, in 1849 became the advocate of Fremont's route. This proviso was in the plan: the road was to be a railway "wherever practicable." Until now the difficulties of the adventure had hardly been dreamed of. Fremont's road was to be driven as far as possible, and horses and carriages were to bridge the gaps-a giant highway one hundred feet

wide, and free of toll or charge. In one of his speeches on the subject, the great senator said: "There is a class of topographical engineers older and more unerring than mathematics-the wild animals; buffalo, elk, deer and bear. Not the compass, but instinct seeks the correct passes, the shallowest fords, the best practicable routes. There are migrations back and forth. Indians follow, pioneers and lumbermen come, and finally the railroads of civilized man."

What these creatures of the wild were to the actual route, the dreams of Carver, Whitney, Fremont and others were to the realization of the great scheme itself. They started discussions, resolutions, legislation in Congress and elsewhere, and prepared the way for the actual builders.

It is a curious and interesting study now to recall the reasons which appealed to men. The discovery of gold turned all minds toward California, and the need was felt, of course, for providing for the surge of travel and traffic. But Whitney anticipated this emigration. He was in China when he read of the first experiments in railroad building in England, and he began to speculate upon the possibility of a railroad across the American continent. His chief thought seems to have been the trade with China, Japan and India, and he never rested until he had obtained a hearing before Congress, and well nigh secured a land grant for his project. The first appropriation made for surveys, made in 1853, was due almost wholly to Whitney's persistent efforts, and he only retired, baffled and discouraged, when his private fortune was exhausted and his hope worn out. But his idea of a vast oriental commerce had fastened itself in the public mind, and this became the real objective point in subsequent discussions. Senator Benton expressed the hope that he might "live to see a train of cars thundering down the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, bearing in transit to Europe the silks and spices of the Orient." When the road was actually completed, at the driving of the last spike, General Dodge said in his address: "Accept this as the road to India," and Bret Harte, moved by the picture of the two engines:

"Pilots touching head to head,

Facing on the single track,

Half a world behind each back,"

makes the Western engine say:

"I bring the east to you:

All the Orient, all Cathay,

Find through me the shortest way,

And the sun you follow here,

Rises in my hemisphere."

The Far East, and not way traffic, the development of the vast territory to be traveled was not in any one's mind, save, perhaps, as a contingency. "The main thing," Sidney Dillon said, "was not to develop the country and make it hospitable, but to get across it as quickly as possible."

Then presently a new factor arose. In those days events moved swiftly, and the east and the south in the shadow of the dark days just at home, lost sight of the question of traffic, and bickered jealously over the route to be chosen. Then another question arose with the breaking out of Civil war. It was no longer the Orient and its trade, but an undefended and imperilled western coast. The south was out of the contest, and a central and direct route was demanded by the political situation. The Pacific coast was imperilled. The "Trent Affair" had aroused fears of a war with England, whose Asiatic fleet found convenient harbor at Victoria, Vancouver's Island, while in the Pacific itself, the Confederate Admiral Semmes had destroyed nearly a hundred whaling vessels belonging to the north. It was felt to be a critical time, and that the nation might easily lose her Pacific coast states for want of railroad. The wealth of the nation would not suffice to supply a large army on that coast in the event of a foreign invasion, in the absence of quick overland transportation facilities.

Meanwhile, California was not idle. Sacramento at this time was but a small inland town of 12,000 people. It had a little river traffic with San Francisco, but its chief dependence was upon its mountain commerce, and great mule teams threaded the defiles of the Sierras, and crossed even to the silver lodes of Nevada. These freighting teams, straining on the dusty roads, were objects of picturesque interest, but slow and poor substitutes for the locomotive and the shuttling train behind it. And Sacramento, at least, was ready for the railroad idea.

But the difficulties were immense. It was more than 2,000 miles to the nearest railroad in the middle west. Two great mountain ranges had to be crossed, and intervening deserts. The route would traverse from the west

but a few acres of arable land. Not a navigable river ran between the Sacramento and the Missouri. There was no immediate and but little remote prospect of way business; the common estimate was that of a rough country to be traversed, and not capable of being developed; the expense of building would be enormous, and the completed line might be "as unproductive as a bridge."

Then there were the hopeless and the unbelieving. They are always in evidence. Human nature has not changed since Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem in the face of the jeers of "Sanballat the Horonite" and his associates. The story of the opposition which the great idea encountered in the country most to be benefited is told in the newspapers of the period. Two musty scrap books in the archives of the Southern Pacific are alternately irritating and comforting, humorous and pathetic in the light of to-day, but they tell of a time of storm and stress that rocked the young commonwealth. "The voice of the people is the voice of God!" No, there are times when the convictions of one man must be taken against the hostility of ten thousand. A crowd is not wiser than the wisest man in it. The Boston town meeting, Curtis says, was not more sagacious than Sam Adams. Antagonism to the railroad was but part of the history of all progress-the history of the printing press, the cotton-gin, the power loom, of agricultural machinery in England, of the conservative in the face of reform, of the old striving to strangle the new. But here in those days, men might well doubt the wisdom of attempting to scale the Sierras with a locomotive. A railroad had never been built under such conditions, driven to success in the face of such obstacles, and by a community so feeble. It was a task without a parallel. Unusual ability, unusual courage, indomitable will must confront the difficulties and push a way through the uncharted wilderness.

THE MEN FOR THE HOUR.

As early as 1856 a railroad had been projected from Sacramento to Placerville, and a young engineer called from Connecticut. His name was Judah, and he was to build the first railroad in California. That he was familiar with the idea of a trans-continental road is clear, for when called to the west he said at once to his wife, “I am going to California to be the pioneer railroad engineer of the Pacific coast, to know the country and to help build a

great railroad." Even earlier than this he seems to have had some premonition of his future. "The railroad," he said, "will be built, and I shall have something to do with its building." Was he a man of Destiny? He was a man for the hour, and the history of the Central Pacific cannot be written. without recognizing the place and the importance of this man in the conception and execution of the great work.

Always a great work waits until the man is found to do it. Always the man strikes the hour. From Watts and Stephenson pondering the locomotive, to Field laying the Atlantic cable, and Judah surveying the passes of the Sierras for the first overland line; from Washington at the birth of the nation to Lincoln in the crisis of its history, always a man for a definite and necessary work is found. God, the poet tells us,

"Could not make

Antonio Stradivarius violins
Without Antonio."

And the Central Pacific railroad could not get over the Sierra Nevada without Theodore Judah. It waited for the inspired engineer.

No matter where his inspiration came from, or how his convictions grew into power; they did grow until they mastered him; and perhaps the man whom the people called "railroad crazy" was the one man fitted by his enthusiasm, his poetic spirit, his professional skill and natural ability, to cope with the difficulties of the incipient legislation and the actual construction of a road across the Sierras.

The Sacramento Valley road did not get far. The cost of materials and labor, and the exhaustion of some of the placer fields of the region stopped the work at Folsom; but during its progress Judah pondered the problem of the greater road across the defiant mountains at whose feet he was toiling. He studied the topography of the range, the canyons and water sources and climatic conditions, and he settled, as firmly as the granite bases of the mountains, his convictions that a practicable route could be found over their summits.

There is a curious electrical quality in some men. It communicates itself to other men. Judah had a fine intelligence, nobleness of spirit, the enthusiasm of the poet backed by the solid furnishings of the civil engineer; had an un