Big Four

by Oscar Lewis

The latter were natural pioneers, men of backwoods training and preferences, independent, resourceful, born wanderers. They were free agents, unfettered by sentimental attachments that caused others to call certain localities home. To them home was where they chanced to be, and homesickness was a word without meaning.

For on the journey he first realized that if one boldly assumed leadership others were willing to accept the role of subordinates.

When news of the ruling reached California a roar of amazement shook the state. Sacramento’s four shopkeepers began to command closer attention, a grudging respect. Any group who could move the base of the Sierra Nevadas twenty-five miles westward into the center of the valley and could net a half-million dollars by the exploit would bear watching.

“No system similar to slavery … prevails.… Their wages … paid in coin at the end of each month, are divided among them by their agents … in proportion to the labor done by each.… These agents are generally American or Chinese merchants, who furnish them with supplies of food, the value of which they deduct monthly.…”

The big boss—“Cholly Clocker” to the Orientals—rode into the midst of a group, produced a paper, and called off the names of the men. As each stepped forward he dipped into the saddle-bags—gold on one side, silver on the other—and dropped the coins into the lifted palm. It was a chore he insisted on doing himself. Riding up the noisy canyon with a hundred and fifty pounds of gold and silver in his saddle-bags appealed to his sense of the dramatic, and its distribution periodically confirmed a pleasant sense of power. Later he was to remark in sincere admiration: “My faculty of leadership developed more and more as I grew older.”

Track-layers followed close behind the graders, and locomotives pushed strings of flatcars loaded with construction iron, lumber, explosives, food, drink, and more men to the railhead. Cape Horn, a sheer granite buttress, proved the most formidable obstacle of the year; its lower sides dropped away in a thousand-foot vertical cliff that offered no vestige of a foothold. The indomitable Chinese were lowered from above on ropes, and there, suspended between sky and earth, chipped away with hammer and chisel to form the first precarious ledge, which was then laboriously deepened to a shelf wide enough to permit the passage of the cars. Three years later when overland trains crept cautiously along this ledge, passengers gazed straight down from their windows into thin air.

Stanford, always fascinated by machinery, was particularly impressed. No possible flaws in a mechanized civilization were ever visible to his eyes, and this gadget instantly charmed him. Inventor and invention were dispatched to the summit with instructions to set to work at once, and the San Francisco group confidently awaited the result.

It went on, even though nearly half his force of nine thousand were needed to keep the line clear of snow, and his reports showed so little progress that the partners in California were newly alarmed. In December, Stanford and Hopkins, up from balmy Sacramento to view the battle for themselves, stood shivering on a snowbank above Cisco while five locomotives strained futilely to drive a snowplow through thirty-foot drifts. They returned to the lowlands convinced that Crocker’s reports of his troubles were not all imagined.

But he was too prudent ever to gamble for large stakes. He was one of that cautious type of men who are never penniless and almost never wealthy.

Preventing waste, reaping an unexpected profit, driving a good bargain, all regardless of the amounts involved—these were his favorite recreations, the only sport he enjoyed. But the public failed to see why a man reputed to be worth twenty million dollars should get his pleasure in this way. Such virtues were tolerable only in the poor.

“When I was younger I sometimes had to tolerate fools,” he snapped in one of his later interviews. “… That’s one place where I draw the line now.”

nights and the saxophone-player of the reigning orchestra intermittently croons into a microphone, beginning at nine. It is the Mark Hopkins, most frivolous of the local hotels; “the Mark” to the younger crowd. At dinnerdances lights are dimmed in the main dining-room and through its arched windows the ghostly roofs of the city grow visible. The dancers move in viscous rhythm, the music blares and throbs, youths in pairs slither in from the bar, merge in the gloom, and the mass of undulating bodies swallows them up. “The Mark.” Perhaps it is well that Uncle Mark is safe in the little marble house his wife built for him at Sacramento. One cannot be sure that he had a sense of irony.

“lecture to empty benches in marble halls.” One Eastern editorial writer stated that “there is about as much need for a new university in California as for an asylum of decayed sea captains in Switzerland.”

“YOUNG MAN, YOU CAN’T FOLLOW ME THROUGH LIFE BY THE QUARTERS I HAVE DROPPED.”

He had learned, he said, to keep troublesome business problems locked up in his office, and he carried 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 at 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.

When, as frequently happened, no other space was available, the Rosalie’s captain entered the railroad’s slip and there discharged and received passengers. The company discouraged the practice by releasing half a ton of coal dust from a near-by bunker just as the Rosalie’s patrons were crowding the ferry apron, enveloping them in a dust-cloud from which they emerged stifled and unrecognizable.

The story of the organization and building of the Valley Road is a striking illustration of how widespread was the resentment in California against the monopoly. From its inception, anti-railroad newspapers pictured the project as a means by which California was to free itself from the extortions of the Big Four, and it is evident that the public shared the belief. To subscribe for stock in the enterprise became a patriotic obligation of every citizen.