The city of San Francisco is built along the eastern base and up the
side of a row of high sand-hills, which stretch southwardly from the
Golden Gate, between the Pacific ocean on the west and the bay of San
Francisco on the east. The city has been built out into the bay some
fifty to a hundred rods by carting in sand from the eastern slope of the
hills, which are thus left more abrupt than they originally were. The
compactly built district seems rather more than two miles north and
south, by somewhat less east and west. I judge that the city is destined
to expand in the main southwardly, or along the bay, avoiding the steep
ascent toward the west. The county covers 26,000 acres, of which
one-half will probably be covered in time by buildings or country-seats.
I estimate the present population at about 80,000.[14] It seems not to
have increased very rapidly for some years past; and this is as it
should be. San Francisco has the largest trade of any city on the
Pacific; but as yet she is the emporium of California and Oregon only. A
railroad communication with the Atlantic states would make her the New
York of this mighty ocean—the focus of the trade of all America west of
the Andes and Rocky Mountains, and of Polynesia as well, with an active
and increasing Australian commerce. Without an inter-oceanic railroad,
she must grow slowly, because the elements of her trade have been
measured and their limits nearly reached. The gold product of this
region has for years averaged about fifty millions per annum, and is not
likely soon to rise much above that amount. That sum does not require,
and will not create, a larger mart than San Francisco now is. The
horrible anarchy of land-titles forbids any rapid expansion of
agricultural industry hereabouts; but if it were to expand, where is its
market? Wheat is cheaper here to-day than in New York or Liverpool; yet
whither can any considerable amount of it be exported at a profit? I do
not know.
Footnote 14:
The S. F. Directory for 1859 makes it 78,083, including 3,150 Chinese
and 1,605 Africans.
With an efficient protective tariff, San Francisco would become, what
she ought now to be, a great manufacturing center—the united Manchester
and Birmingham of the South Seas. She ought to make half the wares she
now merely buys and sells. Under our present tariff, with the high rates
of labor prevailing in this state, this cannot be. She is evidently
destined to become a great city, but not yet.
Some of the elements of greatness she certainly has—a spacious, secure,
magnificent harbor, with easy access to the ocean, and a noble river
communication inland; a temperate and equable climate—one very favorable
to the highest efficiency in industry, though I do not deem it a
pleasant one; an inexhaustible supply of the finest timber close at
hand; the richest mines of the precious metals; and a fertile,
beautiful, but not unlimited agricultural region filling up the interval
between her and those mines, and stretching hundreds of miles north and
south. She has a population rarely surpassed in intelligence,
enterprise, and energy. Add to these a railroad and telegraph to the
Atlantic, and she could hardly fail to grow in population, trade,
industry, and wealth, with a rapidity for which there have been few
precedents.
San Francisco has some fine buildings, but is not a well-built city—as,
indeed, how could she be? She is hardly yet ten years old, has been
three or four times in good part laid in ashes, and is the work mainly
of men of moderate means, who have paid higher for the labor they
required than was ever paid elsewhere for putting so much wood, stone,
brick and mortar into habitations or stores. Her growth for the first
five years of her existence was very rapid; but Pottsville, Chicago,
Liverpool, have also had rapid growths, and St. Louis is now expanding
faster than this city has done since 1852. Cities are created and
enlarged by the wants of populations outside of their own limits; San
Francisco will take another start when she shall have become beneficent
if not indispensable to a much larger radius than that now buying and
selling mainly through her. In the hope that the time for this is not
far distant, I bid her God speed.
XXXIV.
A RAILROAD TO THE PACIFIC.
NEW YORK, _Oct. 20, 1859_.
I propose in this letter to present such considerations as seem to me
pertinent and feasible, in favor of the speedy construction of a
railroad, connecting at some point our eastern network of railways with
the waters of the Pacific ocean.
Let facts be submitted to, and pondered by considerate, reflecting men.
There are thousands of usually intelligent citizens, who have decided
that a Pacific railroad is a humbug—the fantasy of demagogues and
visionaries—without having ever given an hour’s earnest consideration to
the facts in the case. Let me have a patient hearing while I set forth
some of the more material of those facts: and first, in answer to the
question, _Is there a national need of a railroad from the Missouri to
the Pacific?_ Let us study the records:
The number of passengers arriving at, and departing from San Francisco
by water, so far as we have official returns of them, is as follows:
Years. Arrivals. Departures.
1849 91,415 No returns.
1850 36,462 No returns.
1851 27,182 No returns.
1852 66,988 22,946
1853 33,232 30,001
1854 47,531 23,508
1855 29,198 22,898
1856 28,119 22,747
1857 22,990 16,902
——————— ———————
Total 381,107 139,002
Of course, these were not all from the Atlantic slope, via the Isthmus,
or Nicaragua; but the great mass of them were. Probably most of those
brought by small vessels from the Pacific ports were not reported to, or
recorded at the custom-house at all. There were some immigrants to
California, who did not land at San Francisco; though the great mass
undoubtedly did. Then there was a heavy, though capricious overland
emigration. Governor Bigler stated the number in 1854 alone at sixty-one
thousand four hundred and sixty-two; and there was a very large
migration across the Plains in 1852. In 1857, the number was estimated
at twelve thousand five hundred. This year, my estimate of the number,
founded on personal observation, is thirty thousand; but others make it
forty thousand to sixty thousand. There was, also, a very considerable
emigrant movement across the Plains in an easterly direction. So far, I
have taken no account of the emigration to, and travel from Oregon and
Washington. I know I am within bounds in estimating the number who have
passed from the Atlantic slope to California and Oregon or Washington at
an average of fifty thousand, while the average number who have annually
returned thence cannot have fallen below thirty thousand.
Can there be any doubt that nine-tenths of these would have traveled by
railroad, had such a road stretched from the Missouri or Mississippi to
the Pacific, the fare being moderate, and the passage made within ten
days? I estimate that twice to thrice the number who actually did go to
California would have gone, had there been such a means of conveyance,
and that the present Anglo-American population of the Pacific slope
would have been little less than two millions—say California, one
million five hundred thousand; Oregon, three hundred thousand;
Washington, one hundred thousand; Sonora and Mexican California, one
hundred thousand.
Now as to the gold crop of California:
The custom-house returns of San Francisco show the following shipments
of gold from that city.
Year. Amount.
1849 $4,921,250
1850 27,676,346
1851 42,582,695
1852 46,586,134
1853 57,331,024
1854 51,328,653
1855 43,080,211
1856 48,887,543
1857 $48,592,743
The returns for the last two years, and the first three quarters of the
present are not before me; but they are known to have varied little from
the rate of fifty millions of dollars per annum, making the total amount
entered at the custom-house of San Francisco, as shipped at that port up
to this date, rather over five hundred millions of dollars. How many
more millions have been brought away in the trunks or belts of returning
emigrants, or mercantile passengers, I will not attempt to guess; but
the amount is certainly large. On my recent trip homeward, one of the
steerage passengers was currently reported as having thirty thousand
dollars in gold in his carpet-bag, which he kept in his hands or under
his head; others were said to have their thousands each, to a very large
aggregate amount. Manifestly, the export of gold from California, the
current produce of her mines, has exceeded fifty millions of dollars per
annum, while a considerable amount is retained in the country.
Now all this gold is sent away to pay for goods—many of them very costly
in proportion to their bulk and weight—silks and other dear textile
fabrics; jewelry; rare wines; expensive wares; drugs, spices, etc.
Experience has amply proved that all such products take the quickest
rather than the cheapest route. I believe that twenty million dollars of
costly or perishable merchandise would annually seek California overland
if there were a continuous line of railway from the Atlantic to the
Pacific seaboard; and that this amount would steadily and rapidly
increase. When the Erie Railroad earns over three million dollars per
annum by freight, it certainly must be moderate to hope that ten million
dollars would be paid as freight on all the merchandise sent from this
side to the Pacific by railroad, and that the larger share of this
freight must be earned by and paid to the Pacific road.
Now let us see how far the government would necessarily patronize such a
road:
The Post-Office Department is now paying at least one million and a
quarter for the conveyance of mails between the Atlantic and Gulf states
and California, and was recently paying one million and a half. For
this, it gets a semi-monthly mail by way of the Isthmus (six thousand
miles, or more than double the distance direct), and a semi-weekly mail
by the Butterfield route (also very circuitous), which carries letters
only. There are two or three slow mails on other routes, but they cannot
be said to add anything of moment to the facilities enjoyed by
California and the older states for the interchange of messages or
ideas.
As to military transportation, I cannot say what is its amount, nor how
far a single line of railway could reduce its proper cost. I believe,
however, that the government is now paying at least six millions of
dollars for the transportation of men, munitions and provisions to our
various military posts between Kansas proper and California, and that
fully half of this would necessarily be saved and earned by a railroad
to the Pacific.
Utah is now receiving accessions of population (mainly from Europe) over
the Plains, though very much of their household stuff has to be
sacrificed to the exigencies of the long, hard, tedious journey in
wagons drawn by weary, thirsty, famishing cattle. Her people generally
live poorly, yet they have to eat and drink, while most of them like to
smoke or chew also. At present, most of them abstain from the use of
tea, coffee, etc., because these are very dear while the Saints are
mostly poor. If there were a good railroad through Utah from Missouri to
California, I believe the Saints would patronize it to the amount of at
least half a million per annum, and that this amount would rapidly grow
to one million. It would of course not stop there. The Rocky Mountain
gold mines are no longer a matter of speculation. They just as surely
exist as we live; and I believe they are destined to increase in
importance and productiveness. I advise no man to dig gold or start for
“Pike’s Peak.” I presume ten of those who go thither will come back
ragged and penniless, for every one that they make rich. I expect to
hear many times yet that the Kansas gold mines are a humbug—that they
have exploded—that every one has left or is leaving them, etc., etc.—and
I expect further to hear of new discoveries in this direction or in
that, and to record the receipts of millions thence in each of the years
from 1861 to 1871 inclusive. Meantime, those who prospect or mine there
must live—a point to which eating is rather essential in that keen
mountain air. Everything that can be eaten or drank is selling in the
Kansas mines at far more than California prices. A railroad from the
Missouri to the heads of the Platte or Arkansas would reduce, in those
mines, the average cost of food at least half, and would thereby
diminish sensibly the cost, and increase the profit of digging gold. If
one hundred thousand persons can manage to live in the Rocky Mountain
gold region as it stands, three hundred thousand could do better there
with a railroad up from the Missouri. And that number, if located there,
could not supply less than three million dollars per annum of travel and
transportation to a Pacific railroad.
Let us sum up, now, and see what elements of support for such a railroad
may be presumed to already exist:
I. Fifty thousand passengers from the Missouri to
California and thirty thousand the other way, half
first-class at $100, and the residue, second-class
at $50 each: Total passage-money $6,000,000
II. Fifty millions of gold brought from California, now
paying 1¼ per cent. freight and insurance, if
charged 1 per cent. for conveyance over the railroad
would pay 500,000
III. Freight on merchandise sent overland to California,
say $20,000,000 worth, paying at least $5,000,000
freight, of which the Pacific Road could not receive
less than 3,000,000
IV. Conveyance of troops, with freight on arms, munitions,
and provisions forwarded to the various military
posts between the Missouri and California 3,000,000
V. Conveyance of a daily mail each way in ten days
between the Missouri and California, at least 1,000,000
VI. Freight and passage for the Mormons 500,000
VII. Ditto for the Kansas and Rocky Mountain gold region 3,000,000
———————————
Total yearly earnings of the Road $17,000,000
In this statement, I have made no account whatever of India, China,
Australia, Polynesia, etc., as taking this road in their way to and from
either shore of the Atlantic. I do not doubt that they would make some
use of it at first, and more and more annually thereafter; but this is
not a resource to be relied on. I count on no transportation of aught
but passengers and gold from California eastward; though I am sure that
much grain would flow thence into the _placers_ and settlements of the
Great Basin, especially the rich mines newly discovered in Carson
Valley. I know that California would soon begin to send wines, fruits,
etc., eastward, and that her wool, hides, etc., would soon follow in
their path. I can have no doubt that a railroad from the Missouri to the
Pacific would earn seventeen millions of dollars the year after its
completion, and that its income would increase thenceforth at the rate
of at least one million per annum for ten or fifteen years.
Let us now consider the political or national necessity and use for a
railroad from the Missouri to the Pacific:
1. The Federal government is now paying some twenty-five millions per
annum for military service, mainly west of the Mississippi. Nearly half
of this heavy sum is paid for transportation in its various shapes—for
the conveyance of provisions, munitions, etc., to the army in Utah, and
to the various posts scattered through the Indian country; for horses,
mules, and wagons, required to facilitate the conveyance of soldiers,
arms, munitions, and baggage from post to post, etc., etc. Every
regiment employed in the Indian country, or on the Pacific, costs the
treasury at least one thousand dollars per man per annum, of which I
estimate that nearly half would be saved by a Pacific railroad.
Certainly, the saving from this source could not fall short of five
millions per annum.
2. But the efficacy, the power of an armed force, in the defense and
protection of a vast empire, depend less on its numbers than on its
mobility—on the facility with which it can be conveyed to the point at
which it may at any time be wanted. For instance, our government has now
some six to eight thousand regulars scattered over Nebraska, Kansas, New
Mexico, Northern Texas, Utah, California, Oregon, and Washington. These
six or eight thousand are not as efficient as two thousand would be, if
it were in the power of the government instantly to transfer those two
thousand, by a mere order, to the point at which they might at any time
be wanted. A Pacific railroad would not, indeed, fully effect this; but
it would go far toward it.
3. Suppose our little army, now largely concentrated in Utah, were
urgently needed to repel some sudden danger, whether on the Pacific or
the Atlantic coast: It would be a good three month’s work to provide the
needful animals, and remove that force to either seaboard. But with a
Pacific railroad, the whole might be in New York, Charleston, New
Orleans, or San Francisco, within a fortnight after the order was
dispatched by telegraph from the War department, at Washington. The
value of this facility of movement can hardly be over-estimated.
4. At present, the regiments employed on the Pacific are almost or quite
wholly raised and recruited in the Atlantic States. Their removal thence
to their destination costs largely, heavily, in direct expense, and in
that time which is money. Suppose a regiment to cost half a million per
annum, and that six months are now consumed in sending it from Baltimore
to Puget’s Sound, while one month would suffice with a Pacific railroad.
In addition to the saving on the present cost of its transportation, the
saving in the time of that regiment would be two hundred thousand
dollars directly, and practically much more; as a part of the cost of
recruiting, drilling, etc., now lost in the tedious transportation,
would be saved by the accelerated movement.
5. In case of war with any great maritime power, in the absence of a
Pacific railroad, we should be compelled either to surrender the Pacific
states to subjugation and spoliation, or maintain a double armament at
enormous cost. Our army on this side of the Rocky Mountains would be
utterly ineffective as against an expedition launched against the
Pacific coast, and _vice versa_. But, with a Pacific railroad, and the
telegraph which would, inevitably accompany it, it would be morally
impossible that an expedition directed against either seaboard, should
not be anticipated in its arrival by the concentration, to oppose its
landing, of our soldiers, drawn from every part of the country. Our
government, in aiding the construction of such road, would inevitably
stipulate for its use—exclusive, if required—in times of public peril;
and would thus be enabled to transfer fifty thousand men from either
coast to the other in the course of twenty or thirty days.
6. We have already expended some scores of millions of dollars on
fortifications, and are urgently required to expend as many more.
Especially on the Pacific is their construction pressingly demanded. I
do not decide how fast nor how far this demand may or should be
responded to; but I do say that a Pacific railroad, whereby the riflemen
of the mountains could be brought to the Pacific within three days, and
those of the Missouri within ten, would afford more security to San
Francisco than ever so many gigantic and costly fortifications.
But enough on this head.
The social, moral, and intellectual blessings of a Pacific railroad can
hardly be glanced at within the limits of an article. Suffice it for the
present that I merely suggest them.
1. Our mails are now carried to and from California by steamships, via
Panama, in twenty to thirty days, starting once a fortnight. The average
time of transit from writers throughout the Atlantic states to their
correspondents on the Pacific exceeds thirty days. With a Pacific
railroad, this would be reduced to ten; for the letters written in
Illinois or Michigan would reach their destinations in the mining
counties of California quicker than letters sent from New York or
Philadelphia would reach San Francisco. With a daily mail by railroad
from each of our Atlantic cities to and from California, it is hardly
possible that the amount of both letters and printed matter transmitted,
and consequently of postage, should not be speedily quadrupled.
2. The first need of California to-day is a large influx of intelligent,
capable, virtuous women. With a railroad to the Pacific, avoiding the
miseries and perils of six thousand miles of ocean transportation, and
making the transit a pleasant and interesting overland journey of ten
days, at a reduced cost, the migration of this class would be immensely
accelerated and increased. With wages for all kinds of women’s work at
least thrice as high on the Pacific as in this quarter, and with larger
opportunities for honorable and fit settlement in life, I cannot doubt
that tens of thousands would annually cross the Plains, to the signal
benefit of California and of the whole country, as well as the
improvement of their own fortunes and the profit of the railroad.
3. Thousands now staying in California, expecting to “go home” so soon
as they shall have somewhat improved their circumstances, would send or
come for their families and settle on the Pacific for life, if a
railroad were opened. Tens of thousands who have been to California and
come back, unwilling either to live away from their families or to
expose them to the present hardships of migration thither, would return
with all they have, prepared to spend their remaining days in the land
of gold, if there were a Pacific railroad.
4. Education is the vital want of California, second to its need of true
women. School-books, and all the material of education, are now scarce
and dear there. Almost all books sell there twice as high as here, and
many of the best are scarcely attainable at any rate. With the Pacific
railroad, all this would be changed for the better. The proportion of
school-houses to grogshops would rapidly increase. All the elements of
moral and religious melioration would be multiplied. Tens of thousands
of our best citizens would visit the Pacific coast, receiving novel
ideas and impressions, to their own profit and that of the people thus
visited. Civilization, intelligence, refinement, on both sides of the
mountain—still more, in the Great Basin inclosed by them—would receive a
new and immense impulse, and the Union would acquire a greater accession
of strength, power, endurance, and true glory, than it would from the
acquisition of the whole continent down to Cape Horn.
The only points of view in which a railroad from the Missouri to the
Pacific remains to be considered are those of its practicability, cost,
location, and the ways and means. Let us look at them:
I. As to practicability, there is no room for hesitation or doubt. The
Massachusetts Western, the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore and
Ohio, have each encountered difficulties as formidable as any to be
overcome by a Pacific railroad this side of the Sierra Nevada. Were the
railroad simply to follow the principal emigrant trail up the Platte and
down the Snake and Columbia to Oregon, or south-westwardly from the
South Pass to the foot of the Sierra, it would encounter no serious
obstacle.
II. The dearth of timber on the plains is the chief difficulty to be
overcome; and this, with the prevalence of deep snows in and about the
South Pass, will probably send the road considerably north or south of
that famous and facile pass. I presume the shortest, most feasible, and
best wooded route for a railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific is
one from Minnesota to Puget’s Sound, leaving the Rocky Mountains, save
some low spurs, on the south, and encountering less formidable snows
than those of the North Platte, South Pass, and Green River. Another
pretty well timbered and direct route, with but a moderate elevation at
the pass of the Rocky Mountains, strikes westward from Dubuque to the
Yellow Stone, follows one of the sources of that stream into and through
the Rocky Mountains, and thence down a similar stream to the Columbia,
and so through Oregon to Astoria. By taking this route, the timber of
the Rocky Mountains could be cheaply rafted or floated to every part of
the track on either side at which timber is naturally deficient. The
routes which turn the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada by the south
are necessarily longer than those above indicated (the earth’s
circumference being greater toward the equator than near the pole),
traverse in good part a parched and sterile desert, and must encounter
serious obstacles in the dearth of water and in crossing the Rio Del
Norte and Colorado. They would, however, rarely or never be formidably
obstructed by snow.
In my judgment, however, the preferable, though not the easiest route
for a Pacific road traverses the valleys of the Kansas and its Smoky
Hill fork, crossing thence to the more northerly sources of the
Arkansas, and passing with one of them through the Rocky Mountains, not
far from the South Park, thence winding down some tributary to the
Colorado, thence up a western fork or valley and down the Timpanagos or
some such stream into Utah, and through that territory on or near Capt.
Simpson’s new road to the valley of the Carson, Truckee, or whatever
stream should be found to proffer the least difficult way across the
Sierra Nevada, to San Francisco. A railroad on this route would at once
command a large and lucrative traffic from the Kansas gold region, from
Utah, and from the newly discovered but rich and growing gold region of
Carson Valley or western Utah—soon, I trust, to be the territory of
Nevada. Thousands have recently been drawn to Carson Valley by the fame
of these mines; and the fact being established that gold, silver, and
other valuable metals are found in Carson Valley, it is at least
strongly probable that they will be found elsewhere along the eastern
base of the Sierra Nevada. A railroad on this route would have an
immediate and large local traffic, both in passengers and goods, from
California to Carson Valley, from Missouri and Kansas to the Rocky
Mountain gold region, and from each to Utah. Its mails, too, would be
heavier and far, far more beneficent, than if conveyed by any other
route. I judge, therefore, that on this route the railroad is most
likely to be built, unless future developments of mineral wealth north
or south of it should change the whole aspect of affairs.