LELAND STANFORD.

BY W. E. BROWN

L

ELAND STANFORD, eighth Governor of California, and President of the Central Pacific Railroad Company, was born in the County of Albany, State of New York, March 9th, 1824. His ancestors were English. They settled in the valley of the Mohawk about the beginning of the last century, and for several generations were classed among the substantial and thrifty farmers of that region. His father, Josiah Stanford, was a prominent citizen of Albany County, where he lived for many years, cultivating and improving the old, homestead farm, called Elm Grove, on the stage road between Albany and Schenectady. His family consisted of seven sons, of whom Leland, the subject of this sketch, was the fourth-and one daughter who died in her infancy. Being in the prime of his life at the time that De Witt Clinton had successfully urged upon the people of New York his great project of canal navigation between the Hudson river and the lakes, the mind of Mr. Stanford was keenly alive to the importance of the enterprise, and he watched with absorbing interest the completion, in 1825, of the extensive work. This was the beginning of that great system of internal improvements which has made the State of New York an empire within itself.

A little later the practicability of railroads as a means of expeditious transit was freely discussed, but not until 1829, when the success of steam locomotives upon the Liverpool and Manchester road was established, did any

project of the kind find much favor among business men in the United States. About this period a scheme was set on foot, and a charter obtained from the Legislature of New York, to build a railroad from Albany, to the old Dutch town of Schenectady. The project, at the outset, had but few friends among the farmers; but Mr. Stanford. satisfied in his own mind that the lands of Elm Grove and of all the valley would be doubled in value by the advent of the road, became one of its warmest advocates. and argued its advantages with all the vigor of which he was capable. The work was finally commenced, and Mr. Stanford, leaving the duties of the farm to be attended to by his elder sons, took large contracts for grading the line. and pushed them forward with characteristic rapidity and success.

During this time Leland was attending school near his father's farm, and doubtless watched, in the intervals of his lessons, the progress of the, to him, novel work which was being prosecuted in the neighborhood. He little dreamed in those youthful days, that his manhood would be devoted to a kindred enterprise, the magnitude of which would attract the attention of the civilized world. Confined in his boyhood's experience to the limits of his own county, the shores of the great lakes, but a few hundred miles away, were to him the distant West. The country between the Mississippi and the Rocky mountains, was looked upon as a vast unknown region, inhabited only by Indians, while the unexplored ranges and plains beyond seemed as inaccessible and as inhospitable as the frozen solitudes of Siberia. The Erie canal, which was then floating the products of the lake shore to the waters of the Hudson, had, in its infancy, been looked upon with distrust by some of the most sagacious business men of that period; and yet, ere the boys of that day had matured into manhood, those distant and solitary plains had been explored, the ranges of mountains had been pierced and made to yield hundreds of millions of precious metals, and a new empire had been battled for, occupied and peopled, on the Pacific coast; while the wants of commerce had demanded and secured railroad communication be

tween the two oceans that make the Eastern and Western boundaries of the United States.

Until the age of twenty, Leland's time was divided between his studies and the occupations incident to a farm life. He then commenced the study of law, and in 1845, removed to the city of Albany, and entered the office of Wheaton, Doolittle & Hadley, prominent members of the legal profession in that city. Early in 1848, he determined to seek in the Western country a desirable location for the practice of law. He visited various localities in the vicinity of the lakes, and finally settled at Port Washington, in the State of Wisconsin. Here he remained for the period of four years, and while here, in 1850, was married to Miss Jane Lathrop, daughter of Dyer Lathrop, a merchant of Albany, whose family had been among the early settlers of that town. Soon after Leland's arrival at Port Washington the reported discoveries of fabulous mineral wealth in California were a constant theme of the newspapers in the West, and the eyes of half the young men in the land, of all trades and professions, were eagerly turned towards the alluring deposits of the Pacific slope. Five of his brothers had arrived upon the banks of the Sacramento, and were successfully engaged in mining and in trade. They, and hundreds of others of his friends, were anxious that Leland should join them; but he had selected a residence in the growing State of Wisconsin, and his temperament was not so sanguine as to cause him so soon to give up the comforts of a permanent home, which he was just beginning to enjoy.

It was not therefore until the Spring of 1852, that he came to the determination to push his fortunes in the new field to which so many of his friends had been attracted, and where so many of them had met with success. He arrived in California, July 12th, 1852, and at once proceeded to the interior, being determined to examine into, and to engage by himself in, practical mining. He tried a number of locations in various parts of the State, and at length settled at Michigan Bluff, on the American river in Placer County. With his mining interests at this point, and the mercantile house with which he was connected in