Central Pacific Railroad
Years: 1862 - 1959
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The other three associates are Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington.
Leland Stanford succeeds John Gately Downey as Governor of California, on January 10, 1862.
After being admitted to the bar in 1848, Stanford had moved with many other settlers to Port Washington, Wisconsin, where he began law practice with Wesley Pierce.
His father presented him with a law library said to be the finest north of Milwaukee.
In 1850, Stanford was nominated by the Whig Party as Washington County, Wisconsin district attorney.
On September 30, 1850, Stanford married Jane Elizabeth Lathrop in Albany, New York. She was the daughter of Dyer Lathrop, a merchant of that city, and Jane Anne (Shields) Lathrop.
The couple will not have any children for years, until their only child, a son, Leland DeWitt Stanford, is born in 1868 when his father is forty-four.
In 1852, having lost his law library and other property to a fire, Stanford followed his five brothers to California during the California Gold Rush.
His wife, Jane, returned temporarily to Albany and her family.
He went into business with his brothers and became the keeper of a general store for miners at Michigan City, California, later the name changed to Michigan Bluff in Placer County; later he had a wholesale house.
He served as a justice of the peace and helped organize the Sacramento Library Association, which later became the Sacramento Public Library
In 1855, he returned to Albany to join his wife but found the pace of Eastern life too slow after the excitement of developing California.
In 1856, he and Jane moved to Sacramento, where he engaged in mercantile pursuits on a large scale.
The Central Pacific Railroad hires agents to recruit thousands of Chinese workers from Guangdong Province in March 1865.
In the United States, the western labor teams will be primarily made up of Chinese emigrant workers with up to twelve thousand such laborers employed by the Central Pacific Railroad, representing ninety percent of the entire work force.
The tracks of the Union pacific join those of the Central Pacific at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869, which event, through the symbolic driving of the ‘Golden Spike’, links the United States from sea to sea.
Many Chinese men who had been employed by the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) relocate to the town of Tusacaror, Nevada, and begin placer mining.
Tuscarora had been founded in Elko County after an expedition by trader William Heath discovered gold.
As miners flocked to the town in 1867-70, a fort had been built to offer protection from native raids and a water ditch had been created to supply the town with water.
The 1867 expansion of Nevada’s southern boundary had been prompted by the discovery of gold in the area, since officials thought Nevada would be better able to oversee the expected gold rush.B
After 1870, however, the mining industry had begun to go into eclipse, as the state's Silverite politicians work to secure laws to require the federal government to purchase silver.
Silverites, who belong to a number of political parties, including the Silver Party, Populist Party, Democratic Party, and the Silver Republican Party, want to lower the gold standard of the United States to silver (which would simultaneously allow more money to be printed and made available to the public and cause inflation).
Many Silverites are in the West, where silver is mined.
Advocates predict that if silver were used as the standard of money, they would be able to pay off all of their debt.
The debt amount would stay the same but they would have more silver money with which to pay it.
The Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco, California via the First Transcontinental Railroad on June 4, 1876, 83 hours and 39 minutes after having left New York City.
The feat, essentially a publicity stunt, is reported widely in US newspapers.
Edward H. Harriman has gained control of about sixty thousand (ninety-six thousand) miles of track by 1899.
His operations over the past two decades have involved the Illinois Central, the Union Pacific, the Central and Southern Pacific, and the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company.