Western Railroad Monopoly

The route through the Sierra Nevada was built by Charles Crocker's "coolies and whites", but even by then the partners had bigger plans.  By 1868 they had acquired the Southern Pacific Railroad Company for a rail and shipping monopoly on the West Coast.  The two railroads met in Promontory, Utah in 1869.  The tracks extended around the San Francisco Bay area, through the San Joaquin Valley with the "Big Four" building their own lines and buying up smaller railroads until all rail traffic in California belonged to them.

The Southern Pacific reached eastward, building and buying lines in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana, reaching New Orleans in 1883.  By 1885 they had became the "Big Three" when Hopkins died in 1878, and they merged the Southern and Central Pacific Railroads.  Another railroad, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, reached the Pacific Ocean as well, but had to pay to run its trains on the tracks of the Southern Pacific.

The Southern Pacific opened southern California to settlers, provided services to lumbermen, wheat farmers, ranchers and farmers.  A rancher in the San Joaquin Valley said of the railroad when asked how he improved his cattle, "I crossed them on a Southern Pacific locomotive." 

Many did not think the intentions of the Southern Pacific all that good...they complained loudly of ruthless business practices and monopoly freight rates charged by Huntington and his associates. 
San Francisco newspapers constantly criticized the "Big Three" for their iron rule over business and politics in California.

Huntington died in 1900, the last of the "Big Four" to do so.  He remained defiant to the last that what he and his partners did was good for the people.

Next time...The Union Pacific
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On April 26, 1798, James Beckwourth, one of only a handful of early mountain men to emerge from the system of slavery, is born in Fredericksburg, Va. In 1824, he joined William Ashley’s third and most arduous fur-trapping expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Beckwourth received a crash course in the dangers of mountain life, just barely managing to avoid death by freezing, starvation, and Indian attacks. Despite the risks, Beckwourth enjoyed being a mountain man, and he spent the next several years as a free trapper.