Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Read Online Free PDF

went to work for his older brother Solon, who had built a store. He did so well that when he was twenty-three years old he went into a partnership with Solon, contributing in cash the considerable sum of $1,318. That was on September 4, 1844; two weeks later, Collis went to Cornwall, Connecticut, to marry Elizabeth Stoddard, whom he had been courting. 13
    For the next four years, he went to New York City to make purchases for the Oneonta store. As in the past, he did well. In the 1890s, Huntington told an interviewer, “From the time I was a child until the present I can hardly remember a time when I was not doing something.” 14 There were other young men, in New York State and elsewhere in America, getting ahead in the 1840s, a great age for just-beginning businessmen. But few did as well or moved as fast as Huntington, who seized the main chance before others even knew it was there. His looks, his self-assurance, and his bulk all helped; he weighed two hundred pounds and had a great round head and penetrating eyes. Strong as an ox, he claimed he never got sick. * He made it a habit to take charge of any enterprise in which he was involved.
    Doing well in Oneonta with his brother, however, was not enough. Late in 1848, Huntington embraced the rumors of gold for the taking in California. He persuaded five other young men in town to come with him on a trip by sea to California. They joined many others. In the month of January 1849, eight thousand gold seekers sailed for California in ninety ships, to go around South America’s Cape Horn and then north along the coast.
    Huntington, however, decided to take his chances on the shortcutacross Panama. This was a bold, risky decision. After his steamer made its way from New York City to the Colombia shore, his plan was that he and his party would hire natives with canoes to take them up the Chagres River to its headwaters, then travel by mule down to Panama City to await a boat going to San Francisco. The drawbacks were the expense, the possibility of missing boats going north, and, more serious, the danger of contracting tropical fever.
    Huntington was twenty-seven (a little older than Crocker), and he was leaving with no illusions about striking it rich on a gold-bearing stream. His companions and thousands of others headed toward California were looking for an easy fortune, but Huntington headed west in his already developed capacity as a trader. He brought with him to New York and had loaded on his steamer a stock of merchandise, including a number of casks of whiskey, which he intended to sell to the argonauts. He had no interest in the “mining and trading companies” forming at the New York docks. His interest was in starting a store, with his brother Solon sending on the goods from New York. 15
    On March 14, 1849, Huntington and his mates bought steerage tickets for $80 each on the
Crescent City.
It left the next day—about the same time that Crocker started west—with around 350 argonauts on board. Twenty-four-year-old Jessie Benton Frémont—daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who was a leading advocate of the Pacific railroad—was on the ship, on her way to California to meet her explorer husband, John Charles Frémont. He had just completed his fourth expedition through the Western reaches of the continent, this one in search of a usable railroad route to the Pacific.
    Huntington was a long way from California and from building a railroad. On the first days out of New York, his concern was with the health of his mates and fellow passengers. Except for him, they were all seasick, vomiting nearly every morning and night and always full of queasiness. They had gone around the tip of Florida and past Cuba before the sea settled down. On March 23, after eight days at sea, the
Crescent City
hove to a mile or so off the mouth of the Chagres River. Huntington went ashore in a native canoe, along with some others, to