I will never forget the horrors of that five days passage, and to add to our trouble, we experienced one of those terrible storms they called “northers” in that latitude, during which we very nearly foundered. You can imagine a small paddle-wheel river-steamboat of 600 tons loaded down with nearly 2,000 men, 16 pieces of brass cannon, and thousands of Mexican lances, besides the rotten pork, Rio coffee, and the hardest kind of tack. The cannon and lances were captured by Colonel Donophan’s regiment at the Battles of Sacramento and San Jacinto, and comprised all the artillery the Mexicans had at these two fights.
I am confident if this war occurred at the present day, we would have had a harder task to perform, as Mexico is possessed now of a well-disciplined army, splendidly officered and of very different materials, and trust we will always live in peace and friendly intercourse with our Mexican brothers, as should become all near-by neighbours and friends.
Sherman and others, returning from the shores of our Western sea, joined in another march, from Atlanta, to our Eastern sea, and but for these, who can tell what would have been the result of our experiment of self-government, or where the boundary lines of the States of freedom would be drawn to-day. Milton says:
“Peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war,”
and the men of peace who remained fought battles in the material world, with equal dangers requiring equal courage, and with results as supremely grand. The difficulties, dangers, and cost incident to the construction of the Central Pacific Railway were such as scarcely to be comprehended by men of to-day; its obstacles were simply appalling. The art of railway construction at that time was so far removed from its present advanced state that engineers looked upon the project with amazement, and capitalists with derision, its conception was so bold, so grand, so stupendous, so startling, as to fill the incredulous even with admiration. Bonaparte’s crossing of the Alps with his army and artillery is dwarfed into tameness when compared with the achievement which made this the highway of nations and the “rapid transit” of the world’s commerce. In the autumn of 1849, the very month that California was organised as a territory, a Pacific Railroad Convention was held. On May 1, 1852, the Legislature of California passed “an Act granting the right of way to the United States for a railroad to connect the navigable waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for the purposes of national safety in the event of war, and to promote the highest interests of the Republic, pronounced one of the greatest necessities of the age.” A Senator, upon the floor of Congress, said: “I look upon the building of the railroad from the waters of the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean, at the time particularly in which it was built during the war, as perhaps the greatest achievement of the human race on earth.” Let us honour the builders with a simple moment’s consideration. Engineer Colonel O. M. Poe, in his report to General Sherman, said: “An army of workmen were employed, 25,000 men and 6,000 teams, and the route presented a busy scene. The woods rang with the strokes of the axe, and the quarries with the click of steel; the streams were bordered with lumbermen’s camps and choked with floating logs, and materials, supplies, and equipment for the Central Pacific were scattered from New York via Cape Horn and San Francisco to the end of the track advancing eastward.” The base of supplies of the Central Pacific from the Eastern Rolling Mills, by the way of Cape Horn to the track layers, was equal to the circuit of the globe on the parallel of the road. This distance was so great as to keep materials to the value of millions of dollars, and sufficient for nearly a year’s construction, constantly in transit. In cutting the Sierras, miles of snow and rock were tunneled; snow slides and avalanches destroyed many lives and large amounts of property. To hasten the work of piercing the Sierras, three locomotives, forty cars, rails, and track material for forty miles of railroad were hauled on sleds by oxen and horses over the summits of that Alpine range and down into the cañon of the Truckee River. This over a pass in which the annual average snowfall was forty feet and the depth of hard settled snow in midwinter was eighteen feet on the level. Who at this distance appreciates the stupendous work of these Titans? From the Truckee to the Bear River in Utah, the inhabitants did not average one to each ten miles. With the exception of a few cords of stunted pine and juniper, all the fuel had to be hauled from the Sierras. For over five hundred miles there was not a tree that would make a board or tie. Fortunes were expended in boring for water and in laying pipes, in some instances over eight miles in length, to convey water to the line of the road.
Upon this desert stretch, as far as from Boston to Buffalo, there was nothing that entered into the superstructure of a railroad, not even good stone, and water for men and animals was hauled at times for forty miles. The cost of supplies was fabulous; oats and barley for the animals cost from $200 to $280 per ton, and hay $120. But, as with Grant at Vicksburg and at the Wilderness, the work went on, the road was completed, and it was California Pioneers who did it, and who made the road they built their monument, and “success” their epitaph. Senator Benton said his dream was “to see a train of cars thundering down the Eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, bearing in transit to Europe the teas, silks, and spices of the Orient.” His dream is practically realised, as there are seven trans-continental lines bearing this commerce to the Atlantic.
The Pioneer has left other material legacies to the nation. The great American Deserts you knew will soon be blotted from our maps. By the science of civilization large tracts of these have been made to “blossom like the rose,” rivers that ran to waste now work the mine, turn the wheel, and then with the artesian flow irrigate the desert wastes, until fruitful gardens have grown like sweet dreams along the trail where comrades of ours died of damning thirst.
We all love the sweet flowery land we knew as territory, then as the new, and now the dear old State. We remember with becoming pride our first votes. California came into the Union a Free State. How controlling this action was none knew, nor when viewed in the light of the history of the Rebellion can it be measured. California became a gem in the Federal coronet. The pen of Bishop Berkley must have pointed toward it when he wrote his epigrammatic expression, “Ho! westward Empire takes its way.” It is a sunny land, and merits the sobriquet, “Italy of America,” with its clear skies, charms of climate, wonderful soils, wealth of mines, fabulous products and enchantments of scenery, crowned with the Yosemite Falls, the highest in the world, descending in three leaps 2,500 feet, or one-half a mile, from the glaciers and eternal snows of the Sierras to the valley below, a very Eden of sublimity and loveliness, perhaps the most wondrously grand and beautiful spot on the earth. To stand for an hour upon a summit crest of the Sierras, the grandest of America’s Alpine ranges; to live a day amid their icy homes; to descend their western slopes; to trace their long summit lines of snow-clad peaks that link Oregon to Aztec Mexico; to walk where a single step takes you from the glacier ice to Spring’s resurrection, where the violets greet you with sweetest smiles through dewy tears of joy, born on the spot where the snows of yesterday were melted by the morning’s sun; the great pines and sequoia gigantea, those wonders of the world’s forests, in whose branches the birds chorused their matin songs centuries before the Christian era, towering below you; the silvery lines of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers mirroring hundreds of miles of the great central valley, reaching far North and South from the Bay of San Francisco; the Coast Range alone curtaining the Pacific Sea, with stern old Mount Diablo standing as the sole sentinel guarding the Golden gate—these are alone worth crossing a continent to see—and recall the words of Tom Moore, who, after visiting the mountains of New England, the rivers and lakes of New York, the St. Lawrence and grand old Niagara, wrote to Lady Charlotte Rowdon, saying:
“Oh, Lady, these are miracles which man,
Caged in the bonds of Europe’s pigmy plan,
Can scarce dream of, and which the eye must see
To know how beautiful this world can be.”
Pity he could not have seen and sung of our lands of the Yellowstone, the Columbia, and the Yosemite,—what words would these have inspired his poet pen to write.