ABSTRACT
You take the cars of the Central Pacific Railroad at Ogden, at a level of 4200 feet above the sea, and the locomotive dl'awS your train over many miles of an alkali desert, in parts of which water had to be drawn forty miles for the men who built the road; up the Sierra to a height of 7017 feet, where the snow lay sixty feet deep one winter while the roaa. was building, and where they actually dug tunnels through the snow and ice to work Oil the road-bed; down from the summit around cliffs, along the edge of precipices, throngh miles of snow-sheds, through tunnels and deep rock-cllts, across chasms where yon shudder as you look down into the I'Ushing ton'ent far below; and all this, until you reach the plain of-the Sacramento, through a country even yet almost uninhabited, believed ten years ago to be uninhabitable, present.ing at every step the most tremendous difficulties to the engineer as well as to the capitalist,
The story of the building of the Central Pacific Hailroad is one of the most remarkable examples of the danntless spirit of American enterprise. 'rhe men who built it were merchants, who probably knew no more about buildillg railroads when they had passed middle age and attained a respectable competence by trade, than a Colusa Pike knows about Greek. Hnntington and Hopkins were, and are, hardware merchants, Stanford was at one time a wholesale deal·· er in groceries, though later Governor of the State; the two CI'ockers were dry-goods men, These five, all at 01' past middle age, all living in Sacramento, then an insignificant interiOl' town of Califo1'l1ia, believing in each other, believing that the railroad must be built, and finding no one else ready to undertake it, put their hands and heads and their means to the great work, and cal'- ried it through.
