Yuma, at the extreme southeastern corner of California in the Mojave desert, is still remote. Back then, it was a desolate and almost deserted fort, and the hottest military post on the continent. Southern Pacific track reached this bleak, empty place by mid-1877. It was from here that Huntington wished to bridge the Colorado River and push into Arizona, a move that entailed crossing land that belonged to the Army. Huntington applied to the Secretary of War for permission, which was first granted, then denied. The Southern Pacific went ahead and started building the bridge anyway.
“At this point the Army stationed at Fort Yuma was ordered to prevent any more labor being done,” the New York Times reported. The army in Yuma at that point consisted of one major, one sergeant, and one enlisted man, and the enlisted man was in the guardhouse, noted the Times, “for conduct unbecoming a gentleman and a soldier.” So it was left to the sergeant to confront the railroad’s workforce, which he did, with bayonet fixed, sweating in the late summer heat. But the sergeant couldn’t stand there twenty-four hours a day, and while he slept the construction gangs simply went back to work, hurrying to finish the bridge at night. Hearing the clang of rails, the major himself, T. S. Dunn, came out of the fort and told the man in charge to consider himself under arrest. The Southern Pacific superintendent cheerfully agreed, but, as the Times said, “went on with his tracklaying just as though he had not just won a victory over the entire garrison at Fort Yuma.” Next morning the bridge was done, and along came a locomotive that Charlie Crocker had prepared, bedecked with American flags.
Newspapers across the country seized on the symbolic importance of this comedy. “The Iron Horse has snorted in the ear of national authority,” said the Alta California. “Now what are you going to do about it, Uncle Samuel?”
As far as Huntington was concerned, he’d been going about his usual policy of seize and protect. In Washington he met with the secretary of war, other members of the cabinet, and then Rutherford B. Hayes himself. The president wanted an explanation.
“He was a little cross at first, said we had defied the government, etc.,” Huntington wrote to Colton. The “etc.” here is masterful. In general, Huntington’s letters show an easy, vivid command. He wrote as he spoke. “I soon got him out of that belief.”
How did he do this? By reenacting the incident for Hayes, playing the roles of railroad superintendent and Major Dunn, cajoling the president into seeing the funny side.
“The President laughed heartily and said he guessed we meant business. He then said: ‘What do you propose to do if we let you run over the bridge?’ I said: ‘Push the road right on through Arizona.’ He said: ‘Will you do that? If you will, that will suit me first rate.’”
In face-to-face dialogue, Huntington always seemed to emerge with what he wanted. He was both subtly perceptive and boldly persuasive, a great listener too, not just to words themselv es but the currents running beneath. He’d guessed that the reform-minded Hayes didn’t really want to embark on another program of railroad subsidy and needed only a little encouragement to renege on the deal he’d made with Scott. Thus, with Hayes, Huntington was open yet unapologetic, humorous, engaging. He walked in there seemingly on the defensive, yet came out with the president of the United States having tacitly agreed to stab in the back the man who’d helped put him in office. In these fields of power and betrayal Huntington was a master.
Even by Huntington’s standards this had been a staggering performance, and for once he allowed himself to feel pleased. Now it was up to his partners. He told them it was essential they spent “a little money building east of Yuma, quickly.” But the bedridden Mark Hopkins shook his stubborn head: no. Depression gripped California and money was tight. Railroad receipts were down, jobs scarce. William Ralston’s Bank of California had failed. Others had followed. On July 23, 1877, eight thousand of the unemployed attended a torchlit rally organized by the Workingmen’s Party. There was violent anti-Chinese agitation. A crowd turned up outside Charlie Crocker’s mansion on Nob Hill, seeking to hang the man who had imported the city’s enormous Chinese workforce. Crocker and others organized opposing vigilante groups, who roamed the streets with pickax handles hanging from their wrists. “In the days that followed, San Francisco seemed a city under military occupation,” writes California historian Kevin Starr. The violence threatened to turn into open revolt against the control of the railroad. This wasn’t the time to be thinking about yet further expansion.
Huntington, thousands of miles away, was unimpressed. He’d told the president he would lay track into Arizona, so why were his partners balking? He was adamant, not least because Jay Gould was sniffing around the Texas & Pacific, thinking of buying it, and, if that happened, Huntington knew, the stakes of this particular game would grow yet higher. Hopkins still didn’t like the idea. Why this obsession with laying yet more track that wouldn’t turn a profit for years? But he and Collis had worked together for a long time. Often before he’d acted as a check on his friend’s always bolder ambition. But he knew, too, that Huntington’s schemes usually had something behind them.
Hopkins forced himself off his sickbed. In a private railroad car, he ventured to the California/Arizona border to see the land for himself, and, on the night of March 28, 1878, while the car stood in a siding at Yuma, he went to sleep and didn’t wake up.
“My old friend Mr. Hopkins has gone over the river. His death has made me very sad. I was very fond of Mr. Hopkins. We had been friends from the day of our first meeting, and partners in business, as you know, for many years,” wrote Huntington. He didn’t come west for the funeral, being, of course, too busy. “There may be other men as good as Mr. Hopkins, but I shall not see years enough hereafter to allow me to ever again form such a friendship as I had with him.”
Crocker, too, was unwell. As his role in the running of the railroads was marginalized, he looked for other outlets for his energies, buying real estate, mines, and expensive art that, with an agreeable and unStanford-like lack of pretension, he happily confessed to knowing nothing about. He set up his sons in business. For one he bought a ranch in Nevada. For another he acquired the Woolworth Bank, first renamed the Crocker Woolworth National Bank, then the Crocker National Bank. Now, suffering from his weight and the diets that doctors inflicted upon him, he decided to built a resort hotel for himself, in Monterey Bay, so he would have somewhere to rest in peace, and Southern Pacific trains would have another place to stop. It couldn’t just be any hotel, of course; in true Associates style Crocker determined to build the “world’s biggest.”
Huntington caught the mood, saying: “I am tired and want to quit.” He was in his late fifties, already an oldish man by the standards of the time, and no doubt the death of Hopkins hit him hard. Huntington had never been happier than while cornering the California market in shovels. That was his age of innocence, insofar as this vigorously cunning and venal animal might be said to have had one. The following years were toil and a scramble that never ended. But he was a survivor, and he grasped that success in business meant going through the cycle of challenge as though it were new each time. History kept repeating itself, successive railroad rivals kept leaping up like characters in a Punch & Judy. Yet every time he won another of these big battles, fighting some fresh enemy to a standstill, or into his grave, the snowball of the monopoly rolled forward, enlarging and enriching itself. Tom Scott wasn’t giving up, and neither would he.
“They offered one member one thousand dollars cash down, five thousand when the bill passed, and ten thousand of the bonds when they got them,” Huntington wrote, sounding unsurprised, knowing better than anybody how Washington worked.
The New York Times saw villainy on either side. “ROGUES FALLING OUT,” ran one headline. “Scott and Huntington are fighting about the building of a Southern transcontinental road, and the impression they make upon the mind of an impartial observer is equally damaging to both.”
Testifying before a Congressional Railroad Committee, Huntington accused Scott of “bad management and bad faith.” Scott coolly noted that Huntington spoke from “a conspicuous glass house.” The Central Pacific, he said, was a fraud. “It fosters the delusion that it is enormously wealthy, when, in truth, its floating debt is heavy enough to break it down. It robs the Government and violates the law. It aspires to be the railroad monopoly of the Pacific Coast and with this view has acquired the Southern Pacific, has obtained legislation to suit itself from the territory of Arizona, and would fain hoodwink Congress in order that it may kill the only rival it dreads and control completely transcontinental traffic.”
Nicely put, and a fair enough analysis of the situation in some ways, even if Scott’s own motives undercut the merit of his accusations. When Huntington came west for the annual board meetings in San Francisco, staying until early in the fall of 1878, he had a single goal above all others: to urge Stanford and Crocker at last to abandon their caution and lay track from Yuma. Luck played into his hands, or maybe the timing was right.
In 1878, Arizona wasn’t a state, merely a vast territory with a population of less than 10,000. Its high desert and spectacular mesa were roamed by Apaches, Geronimo and his warriors. But recently, outside Tombstone, then a town of forty cabins and merely 100 people, a prospector named Ed Schieffelin had found a rich vein of silver. The shifting checkerboard of national railroad politics and subsidies was one thing, but here was an economic force Stanford and Crocker knew in their bones”: a silver rush, a boom of the kind that had helped create the Central Pacific in the first place. The Associates now agreed they would build east, across Arizona, and try to reach as far as the Gulf of Mexico. Huntington went back to New York to raise money, and, a strategy having been settled on, Leland Stanford and Charlie Crocker heaved great sighs of relief and took themselves and their families on holiday. Crocker was in London when the next crisis came.
It was Colton. Down the years he’d caused problems, daring to stretch his wings, presuming to sell stocks without permission or pay to the others, and himself, dividends that hadn’t been agreed. In 1876, Huntington had lost patience and fired him. Colton, in a display of distinctly ungeneral-like weakness, flopped to his knees in front of Charlie Crocker and wept. Crocker pleaded mercy for his friend, and Huntington gave in. He saw the value of Colton and realized he still needed the man to maintain the flow of information from West to East, and to keep business ticking and tidy in San Francisco. Colton, in turn, learned his lesson, and reined in his temptation to use the Associates’ power and connections to get rich quick. Instead he took matters at Huntington’s pace and became Huntington’s principal correspondent. Colton began to flourish. His San Francisco real estate brought in $3,000 a month. He had his salary of $10,000 a year and drew money, as did the others, from the Western Development Company. By the beginning of 1878, he had $500,000 in the bank and every expectation that he’d be able to meet the terms of the promissory note and give the others their $1 million on time. The San Francisco papers reported his comings and goings. His daughters were local belles, sought after at balls and for marriage. “Me and my partners,” he became fond of saying. He was at last assuming the substance for which he’d longed. But he retained the knack for making enemies faster than money. He was vain and strutted through the railroad offices. “He had a way of stroking the cat’s fur the wrong way,” a Central Pacific employee said. One morning posters were found stuck to walls and nailed to telegraph poles. “There is a Colt-on Montgomery Street, to be seen every day, who needs a wholesome piece of advice, Look out, old SORRAL TOP! Neither your PAID HOUNDS nor yourself will obtain the prey you seek for. There is a BLOOD HOUND on your track you little dream so near, who will have justice, slow but sure. . . . Were you in any city but San Francisco, your DAMNABLE LOOKS would hang you. Meddle no more with business not your own, or you will reap a bitter but well-merited punishment, for such scoundrels as yourself, for you are known.”
A signature at the bottom of the poster stated, ominously: “Justice.” It sounded like nonsense, but on October 8, 1878, at 10:30 in the evening, a carriage pulled up outside Colton’s mansion on Nob Hill. Inside the cab was Dave Colton, unconscious, and a rumor flashed around town. He’d been stabbed. Reporters from the San Francisco papers rushed to the scene, waiting in the dark, eager for news. The Central Pacific issued a statement, claiming that a horse had thrown Colton, hurting him badly. This was the official line, stuck to when Colton died two days later, leaving the truth of his death a mystery, and throwing the day-to-day affairs of the Central/Southern Pacifics into confusion yet again, although the true and massive significance of Colton’s colorful cameo appearance in the history of the companies was yet to be revealed.
“I loved Dave Colton, and when I heard of his death I sat down and wept,” wrote Charlie Crocker, still in London. He came back to San Francisco, arriving at night, and the next morning visited with Colton’s widow, Ellen Colton. Together the two shed tears, remembering the dead man. But of course business, too, was on the agenda. Colton had made a will the night before he died, making his wife the sole heir. His assets had become hers, his obligations too. She now owned a large portion of the Central and Southern Pacifics; and would soon be liable to pay the surviving Associates $1 million under the terms of the promissory note.
Ellen White was the daughter of a Chicago doctor. She had no experience of business but was described as “a woman of unusual ability”: energetic, clearheaded, and articulate. She told Crocker she wanted to understand as much as possible of her husband’s financial affairs, so Crocker became a frequent visitor to her house. The news he brought, however, became less and less encouraging. His good friend Dave Colton, it pained him to report, had been a very naughty fellow. One of the Associates’ smaller satellite companies was called the Rocky Mountain Coal and Iron Company. It provided coal to the railroads, and Dave Colton had been its president. He’d been drawing quadruple his agreed salary, using company funds to generate interest in his own accounts, and had been charging the CP more for coal than the Rocky Mountain Coal and Iron Company actually received while pocketing the difference. Sums approaching $190,000 were involved. Dave Colton was an embezzler, Ellen Colton was told.
“I would have given $20,000 as quick as a penny to prove Dave Colton innocent,” Charlie Crocker said.
“He’s guilty. He’s a robber,” Huntington wrote.
These were deep waters. The Associates didn’t want Ellen Colton holding shares in their companies, though they protested that they were prepared to carry her along. They knew she couldn’t yet pay the $1 million on the promissory note; nor did they want to give her full value for the shares she held. So they proposed this: The promissory note would be torn up, her husband’s malfeasance would be forgotten, and the slate would be wiped clean, so long as she returned the 20,000 shares, and, by the way, the 50 Southern Pacific shares that Colton had given to one of his daughters as a wedding present. It was a tough deal, but there would be no scandal. And Ellen Colton wished above all to protect her dead husband’s reputation. Still, she hesitated. Huntington arrived in San Francisco to see that matters were settled quickly. Charlie Crocker no longer came to the Colton residence; the Central Pacific lawyers did, putting papers on the desk in front of Ellen Colton, and at last she signed, not quite able to shake the feeling that she was being treated with less than kindness, with, indeed, dishonesty.
There matters stood, until one day she picked up the San Francisco Chronicle and read about the settling of the Mark Hopkins estate. Impartial financial observers, she was perhaps unsurprised to learn, gave those shares in the railroad a far higher value than the Associates or their attorneys had been prepared to assign during their conversations with her. Knowing for sure now that she’d been bilked, she set out to find and retain a lawyer the railroad didn’t own.