had built a toll-wagon road from Dutch Flat to Reno and Virginia City. There were opposition toll roads, and so it was asserted that the Central Pacific was not headed for the east, that it did not intend and never had intended to build an overland road, but merely a local "feeder" to the Dutch Flat Wagon Road. This was the origin of the hostile epithet, "The Dutch Flat Swindle," thrown at men who had always been honorable. It became the cry of the populace, and the head lines of bitter editorials, and under this opprobrium Stanford and his associates rested for many months. But though graders' camps were abandoned, and construction trains stood still, the company was not idle. With iron resolution these men borrowed money on their personal security; they endorsed paper in the east to one party to the extent of $1,250,000, and this enabled them to procure funds for their own enterprise; counties and cities that had subscribed for stock proposed to surrender it and issue bonds for a lesser amount, and as these bonds were negotiable, fresh capital accumulated, and work was resumed. Up to this point California, in spite of opposition, may fairly be said to have been paying for the railroad. Certainly there was no abatement of interest or paraly sis of purpose on the part of its organizers.

Then came the amended act of 1864 which enlarged the land grant, modified the conditions upon which the government bonds were issued, and virtually made the United States an indorser of the company's bonds, and presently it was impossible to get men enough to drive the road as fast as the condition of the treasury warranted. Then coolies were imported. Miners were drifting about, but they were unreliable. These sons of excitement found the routine of railroad work distasteful; stories of great strikes were in the air; on each side of the route lay the great placer fields of Gold Run and Iowa Hill, and before the allurement of the "new diggings" about which rumor was continually rife crowds of men melted away into the hills and were lost to the company. Coolie labor was a necessity. This presently became a new source of hostility to the company, and demagogues sought to make capital out of it. The railroad was not the friend of "honest labor;" it had introduced for its own enrichment "Chinese cheap labor," and long after the completion of the road this flame of anarchy was blown about the sand lots of San Francisco by every windy orator who could gain a hearing from the idle or the vicious.

The building of the railroad created a demand for laborers which could not be met. That this demand hastened the coming of the Chinese, no one doubts, but so did the discovery of gold. The opportunity to work abandoned placer mines brought many a Chinaman to California, and the man who thinks that the problem of Asiatic labor could have been avoided, in the absence of laws expressly framed to exclude them, has not studied the situation very deeply. The Burlingame treaty opened the door wide, and the coming of Chinese to the Pacific coast was among the inevitables. The building of the railroad only offered immediate employment. After the passage of the Amended Act of 1864, Governor Stanford was enabled shortly to say that "The financial problem has been solved," and with improved finances the company quickly became independent, and gathered in stock instead of selling it. They dismissed sub-contractors, organized a construction company under the name of Crocker & Company, and thus saved the profits arising from construction for their own treasury. It was a wise stroke, but made necessary by the general skepticism as to the outcome. Contractors would not take the work. Meantime the victories of endeavor were telling and the public sentiment was turning toward the builders. When the new road had passed beyond Newcastle to where Colfax now stands, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Schuyler Colfax, making the trip across the continent, stopped at Virginia City and made an address. "When men paid by the government talked about the amount of money the road would cost, I said, it is not an iota in the balance in comparison with its national benefits. It will pay back to our national treasury far more than the bonus which may be given for its construction; it will add to the national wealth."

Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican, was here the same year and wrote a stirring appeal back to his paper. "The new road would create a new republic; it would marry to the nation of the Atlantic an equal if not greater nation of the Pacific. Here is payment of your great debt; here is wealth unbounded, but you must come and take them with the locomotive."

Out of San Francisco came a voice, not quite solitary, but sufficiently strong to be heard at this juncture. Rev. Dr. Horatio Stebbins expressed the best thought of the city, the sanest and noblest life of the young metropolis, when he said to his congregation: "As the condition of a noble social life.

and progress we need an unbroken and swift communication with the places which we still fondly call home. The longing for this comes like the sigh of the night wind over the habitations of men. When the continental railway is complete we shall be nourished by the blood of the heart of the world. Intelligence will be increased, society liberalized by intercourse, and extemporized adventure driven out by better industries. No great impulse of human affairs having breadth, and height, and depth of permanent and enduring progress, can be felt here until the great highways are opened over sea and land, and the world, the many sided world of industries and arts, of commerce and letters are imported to us. And the people of California can make no better investment of their time, their talents, their money and their public spirit, than in turning all the power of the state to overcome the barriers which lie between her and the nation's hearthstone, between her and the heart of the world." These were weighty words, backed by a vigorous and commanding personality, and if heard in the heights of the Sierras would have heartened the engineers and the energetic men behind them. The difficulties of construction were enormous. At Cape Horn, where the present day tourist from a solid road-bed looks down 2,000 feet into the blue canyon of the American river, the engineer found an almost perpendicular mountain, a great circular precipice-face with no foothold even for a survey. Men must be let down by ropes and a place to stand picked out of the rocks while swinging above the depths, and then a pathway slowly and laboriously constructed along the sheer walls of the crags. It was treacherous rock, loose and shaly in places, and the road-bed must be protected from slides from above. At a point beyond a similar formation was found and when the road-bed was constructed the hillside slid in and obliterated it. For weeks gangs of men were kept at this point while construction was pushed on ahead.

Many tunnels had to be constructed, and the granite framework of the Sierras was hard. The Burleigh drill and the high explosives of today were unknown, and the work was slow. Nitroglycerine was manufactured by the company at a camp on the summit, but it was too dangerous for general use and reliance was had upon common black powder. The hard rock shot out the blast again and again like a cannon. Winter came to add to the dangers and difficulties of the work. The road must get on-on over the mountain

barrier, on over the deserts of Nevada, into the Salt Lake Valley, or be handicapped fatally for want of traffic, and this compelled work to go on in stormy mountains in the face of cold and under great depths of snow. Retaining walls in the canyons were built, roadways constructed, and ties and rails laid in the snow, and sometimes under it. A dome or archway was shoveled out of the white mass, a shaft lifted up through it, and material lowered from above to the buried workmen. Snowslides were frequent, an avalanche on one occasion burying forty-two Chinamen, killing half their number. It was security to be inside the rock and men were set to tunneling, but before this could be done another slide swept over the men and eight or ten white laborers were killed. Combs of frozen snow curved over the precipices in great masses, and when they could be reached were blown up and their menace averted. The faces of rock to be pierced were reached by tunneling through the snow, and then the borings went on. On the heights of the Sierras and its slopes fifteen thousand men were sometimes at work and it was no small task to keep this industrial army officered, organized, efficient, and to keep the commissary at the front as they went onward.

The camp and the terminal remained at Cisco for two years.

Water in the desert was hauled over long distances at one place forty miles. Much money was spent in boring for water, and at one point it was piped eight miles. The maximum haul for ties was six hundred miles, and the longest for rails and materials was 740 miles.

In the inter-mountain region but little wood could be found for fuel, and much had to be carried forward from the Sierras. Not a coal bed on the line was then known.

In the mountains, snow sheds had to be constructed to keep the tracks from being buried under drifts. About forty miles had to be thus protected, 665 million feet, board measure, of lumber being used, and 900 tons of bolts and spikes. All that entered into the construction of the road was expensive. "Five years later," the engineers testified before the commission, "The work could have been done for from 30 to 75 per cent cheaper." The average price of rails in New York was eighty dollars per ton. Francisco averaged $17.50. Insurance ranged from 5

Freights to San

to 17 per cent.

Material came around the Horn, or across the Isthmus, and had then to be

transported to Sacramento by boat and sent forward on the line. Rails laid down by the graded track cost $125 per ton. One locomotive by way of the Isthmus cost $8,100 freight. The first ten cost over $190,000, the second ten $215,000, an amazing price, compared to today.

Material for a year's construction was constantly in transit, and the company had stock for the road on the ocean most of the time valued at from one to three millions, at interest of from 12 to 15 per cent.

Wages were high, and provisions. Hay cost over the mountain $120 per ton, oats and barley $200 to $500 per ton, and all other supplies in proportion.

By 1866 the two companies were approaching each other, the Central Pacific building from the west, the Union Pacific from the east. The fight for a meeting place had begun, and the eyes of the world were being drawn to the mid-continent. The great difficulties of the Central Pacific had been surmounted, and the work was driven ahead with great speed. The value of the road would be enhanced by every mile traveled, and the goal was Ogden. It became certain that the Union Pacific would reach there first. The Central Pacific had been authorized to continue its road eastward in a continuous line until it should meet the Union Pacific line. By 1867, it was a race for the trade center of Utah, and for bonds and lands. It was a race of giants. The Central had escaped from the mountains, had ample means and a well organized force of laborers, while the Union Pacific had still some expensive work to do east of Ogden. How keen was the rivalry is seen in one circumstance, and the reprisal which followed. The Union Pacific sought to anticipate a meeting point by pushing a force of graders 500 miles west of Ogden, to what is now Humboldt Wells. There 80 miles were graded and laid with track, but it cost the company a million dollars, for the gap between that portion and the continuous track east of it was never filled. The Central played the same game, but more successfully. It sent graders east of Ogden, filed a map of its route to Echo Summit with the Secretary of the Interior, made a demand for the two-thirds of the bonds due on completion, and by sheer force of argument, persuaded the government to issue $2,400,000 in United States bonds for this portion of the road. Some delay ensued in the transfer of the bonds, and but half of them were delivered. There was no over-issue of government bonds; they had been issued in accordance with