Cartoons and Archetypes: Charles Crocker, Ambrose Bierce and the Aftermath of a Dynasty

Walt Whitman’s masterpiece Passage to India (1871) seized upon the era’s most audacious feats of engineering: the laying of the Atlantic cable, the cleaving of continents by the Suez Canal, and the iron wedding of the Union and Central Pacific railroads—works he boldly proclaimed to have “outvied” the Seven Wonders of the ancient world—and transmuted them into something far grander than a mere celebration of steel and steam.

When the world’s first transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, UT, on May 10, 1869, the country knew it had gone through something epochal. News traveled instantly by telegraph to every city in the nation, and the celebrations that erupted—bells, cannon fire, and torchlit parades from Sacramento to New York—had the quality of a people recognizing their own transformation. The builders of the western portion of the railroad—the “Big Five” aka “The Associates”: Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and the Crocker brothers, Edwin aka “The Judge” for his short stint as a California Supreme Court Judge, and Charles—were feted as heroes of a new order, men who had accomplished what administrations had debated and visionaries had dreamed of for two decades, and had done it in six brutal years.

In Sacramento, after a day of dignitaries parading the streets, enumerable prayers and benedictions, champagne toasts, and a lengthy address by Governor H.H. Haight, the Brothers Crocker were called to speak to the energized crowd. The Judge, who headed the railroad’s legal branch, spoke of the monuments of antiquity—the walls of Babylon, the pyramids of Egypt, the great wall of China “built largely from pride, ambition, and immense human toil,” and how they compared with the Pacific Railroad, which he proclaimed to be the greatest monument of human labor put to practical human use. “For ages to come, the locomotive will travel from the tide-waters of the Atlantic to the tide-waters of the Pacific,” Edwin declared. In his vision, the transcontinental railroad represented nothing less than “a new age in which human ingenuity was directed not toward monuments to power, but toward works that would improve, ameliorate and benefit mankind.”

Brother Charles thanked the citizens of Sacramento who stood by the partners, loaning them their money and their confidence. When others said that all the Associates intended to build up was a poor, little, miserable wagon road, “the people of Sacramento would not believe them, but believed we were in earnest—that the railroad would be built, and went heart and hand with us in assisting in the prosecution of this great work.” Charles proclaimed, “It is built honestly; it is an honest road; honest men built it. This generation and future generations will render their verdict on that work, and by that verdict I am willing to stand or fall.”

The rails bound a fractured country in iron, forged a wealth-pumping artery, and shrank a six-month odyssey into a six-day stride—Manifest Destiny realized at last.

Charles Crocker was the Central Pacific’s construction superintendent who drove his workforce of nearly 10,000 mostly Chinese recruits from California and from China’s Guangdong Province. Their task was to build the Western portion of the road, to drill and blast through the granite cliffs of the Sierra Nevada, among the most forbidding terrains on the continent. Going in the other direction, the Union Pacific’s crews enjoyed the relative mercy of the Nebraska plains. In a final flourish of competitive bravado, Crocker waited until the two railroads were nearly joined, then laid ten miles and fifty-six feet of track in a single day—still a world’s record—an orchestration of humanity, as one correspondent wrote, as magnificent as the Pacific Railroad effort itself.

Charles, who was compared in print to Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, suffered the loss of over 1,200 laborers during construction: to explosions, illness, avalanches and rockslides. His troops were never safe from attack.

Months after the golden spike ceremony the fearless field marshal would begin construction on a route that would link to the second transcontinental railroad.

Like Sherman, Charles Crocker was celebrated with full fanfare as a figure of almost mythic American energy—an empire builder, the self-made man writ continental. He became a real life superhero, not unlike Neil Armstrong, who skyrocketed to the Moon almost exactly one hundred years later. Both men were the operational executors of massive, government-backed national projects—not the visionaries or politicians who conceived them. Both were chosen because they were supremely competent under pressure, physically brave, and capable of commanding the confidence of the people working under them.

Both achievements were moments when the nation paused, collectively held its breath, and understood that the boundary of the possible had just been permanently redrawn. Both required years of grinding preparation, the coordination of thousands, and the conquest of environments indifferent to human survival. And both entered the national consciousness less as news than as myth: instant and overwhelming.

It was this Crockerian human feat—iron meeting iron at Promontory—that Whitman received as almost a sacred event, a fulfillment of what Columbus had only dreamed. In the poem, he traced the railroad’s route with the ecstatic precision of a man riding the cars himself: “I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier, I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying freight and passengers, I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle, I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world”—and on he went, threading the Laramie plains, the Humboldt ranges, the Nevada passes, and Lake Tahoe’s clear waters until the whole spine of the continent had been sung into verse.

Yet even as he blessed the builders, Whitman was careful to insist that their work was not “for trade or transportation only.”  The iron arteries crossing the Sierra Nevada were carrying peoples, ideas, and cultures—the very possibility of civilization itself. In his imagination, a deeper rondure was taking place, a mystic circling toward a truly global civilization and universal brotherhood. The task of unifying East and West was handed over to the poets to complete in the realm of the spirit “in God’s name, and also for thy sake, O soul.”

Among the prizes awarded the newly minted San Francisco heroes, gifted by President Lincoln himself, were government subsidies and land grants. The Central Pacific and their subsequent Southern Pacific railroads (along with associated lines) were eventually granted approximately 27.6 million acres of land by the federal government—equal to 43,125 sq miles or about the size of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Connecticut combined.

After the CPRR associates, who built the most consequential rail line in history, became the executives in charge of running it, the mood in America would change. A succession of severe blows to the corporation would do some damage to their heroic image. Into a complicated mix of critics, reformers, and labor agitators entered a particularly aggressive and spicy journalist.

Brutal Bierce

Born into a devoutly abolitionist family, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce enlisted as a private at the very start of the Civil War. He would rise to the rank of sergeant and then brevet major and topographical officer under the command of General William Babcock Hazen. Bierce received an astonishing 15 commendations for bravery under fire and saw ferocious combat through nearly the entire length of the war, including at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Kennesaw Mountain—where he was nearly killed when his skull was “broken like a walnut” by a musket ball. In October of 1864, Bierce was captured by Confederate guerrillas along the Coosa River in Alabama, but escaped and returned to his regiment.

Bierce concluded that the war was nothing more than a meaningless and murderous slaughter, devoid of virtue or valor or purpose. His battle scars gave birth to a lonely, stoic, and bitter constitution, a sensibility that was the core of his calling as a journalist, critic, short story writer and poet. Bierce resolved early in his career that he would “wage war upon every man with a mission.”

Bierce gleefully attacked anyone and everyone—Democrats, Republicans, organized religion, corrupt politicians and tycoons, Freemasons, unions, socialists, anarchists and suffragettes. He would sometimes rise to the defense of oppressed minorities including Blacks, Jews, the Irish, the Mormons and the Chinese. Yet, according to Bierce biographer Richard Saunders, the unapologetic blasphemer’s lukewarm affinity for minorities was the result of a preference “to attack majority in order to insult as wide a range of individuals as possible.” His core working philosophy was that “the stupidity of every soul on earth has nothing whatsoever to do with ancestry.”

Before becoming the most acerbic, pernicious, disturbing and gloriously hateful son-of-a-bitch in Gilded Aged America, Bierce was on the best of terms with the burgeoning artist crowd that made San Francisco a sort of American Bagdad. He was a founding member of the Bohemian Club and in 1876 club secretary.

Bierce, true to form, later characterized the San Francisco Bohemian as “a lazy, loaferish, gluttonous, crapulent, dishonest duffer, who, according to the bent of his incapacity—the nature of the talents that heaven has liberally denied—scandalized society, disgraces literature, debauches art, and is an irreclaimable, inexpressible and incalculable nuisance.”

As a journalist, he claimed a sterling, unbiased reputation. He wrote, “I keep a conscience uncorrupted by religion, a judgment undimmed by politics and patriotism, a heart untainted by friendships, and sentiments unsoured by animosities.” Bierce habitually dressed in black, carried a loaded revolver under his coat, and displayed a human skull and a box of ashes on his desk—the remains, he said, of former friends.

After Oscar Wilde’s San Francisco appearances during his 1882 American lecture tour, a teenage Aimée Crocker claimed to have met the great playwright several times socially. They became fast friends and she sang his praises for decades. Bierce was not impressed:

That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde, has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it—says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft…

The blistering denunciation continues for another 300 words. Bierce later skewered other fellow wordslingers and literary geniuses, Walt Whitman and James Whitcomb Riley. He referred to Whitman fans as “Whitmaniacs,” and frequently mocked the great bard’s lack of traditional meter and rhyme, referring to his work as “doggerel” or “unmetrical stuff.” Rambling and unrefined.

When Riley claimed to do his writing on an empty stomach, Bierce claimed that reading his poetry “empties ours!”

Bierce habitually filleted writers of both fiction and non-fiction. His shortest, most dismissive book review simply claimed that “the covers are too far apart.”

Ambrose Bierce had come to San Francisco in 1866 and shortly thereafter became a member of the staff of The San Francisco News Letter. In his weekly column, “The Town Crier” he developed his dark, sarcastic style in satirical exposés and attacks on what seemed to him the foibles and pretenses of the time. In December of 1871, Bierce married a wealthy woman then scampered off to London to write satirical articles and columns for Tom Hood’s humor magazine Fun under the pseudonym “Dod Grile.”

As a member of the Argonaut’s editorial staff in the late 70s, “Brutal Bierce” contributed a series of columns patterned after The Town Crier but called “The Prattler” later shortened to “Prattle.” It was at The Wasp, as chief editor, that he would sharpen his fangs and claws on his favorite enemy—Charles Crocker.

Before his arrival at the editor’s desk in 1881, Bierce was handed a boatload of ammunition to wage war with the larger than life mogul.

The year 1876 opened amid national celebration. Americans marked the centennial of the Republic with parades, speeches, exhibitions, and renewed confidence in the nation’s destiny. America’s first World’s Fair, held in Philadelphia, was a whirlwind of sensory overload and historic milestones. Beneath the shadow of the monumental Main Exhibition Building—a 35-acre architectural giant that reigned as the largest structure on Earth—millions of wide-eyed Americans treated their tastebuds to exotic, brand-new flavors by sampling bananas, Hires Root Beer, popcorn, and Heinz Ketchup for the first time. Above the crowds, the colossal, disembodied right arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty stretched toward the Philadelphia sky, shipped directly from France to ignite a massive fundraising campaign for her eventual pedestal.

Overhead, a futuristic steam-driven monorail zipped past structures humming with revolutionary technology like the Remington Sholes Typewriter and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. The exhibition committee snubbed nearby resident Walt Whitman to name the traditionalist Bayard Taylor (Aimée Crocker’s future uncle-in-law) as official poet laureate, forcing a sidelined Whitman to pay the 50-cent admission fee to experience the industrial marvels.

On the West Coast that summer, Charles Crocker, extending his empire that had begun in the Sierra Nevada, drove another golden spike for his company, this one linking San Francisco and Los Angeles by rail. The last 1,000 feet of track were laid by workers under Crocker’s supervision before a captivated and excited crowd of more than a thousand people. The Chronicle reported that no man living or dead, had superintended the original construction of as many miles of railroad on the face of the globe as Charles Crocker.

Yet beneath the festivities, a different story was gathering force.

Newspapers began to attack the management of the firm, claiming that the CPRR directors, no longer civic minded shop keepers and respected community leaders, were shifting their focus from transporting civilization to self-gratification and conspicuous consumption.

In the fall of 1875, majestic mansions began to appear at the crest of the city’s highest hill, monuments to the private virtues of public money. Leland Stanford led the procession with a fifty-room palace of 41,000 square feet—larger, by square footage than the Taj Mahal. He sold half of his lot to partner Mark Hopkins, who built an English Gothic castle of his own beside it, thirty-four rooms strong.

Charles and Mary Crocker had begun assembling their own kingdom two years earlier, buying lots at California and Taylor Streets for a French Renaissance dream mansion. A tower in the middle of the residence rose 76-feet which commanded panoramic views of Mount Talmpais, the hills of Saucelito, Angel and Goat Island, Mount Diablo and the Alameda shores, the Mission Dolores and Lone Mountain.

Across the street, General David Colton, a second tier associate, put up a wood-framed Palladian palazzo, which Collis Huntington later acquired—thus completing the transition from respectable neighborhood to railroad encampment on high.

The Tycoon vs. The Undertaker

When Charles Crocker’s Nob Hill mansion was being built, in the summer of ’76, the celebrated national hero and archetypal builder became embroiled in a much-publicized imbroglio with Nicholas Yung, a German undertaker who lived on the only piece of the block bounded by California, Sacramento, Taylor and Jones streets that Crocker did not own. To assemble his estate, the millionaire had bought out twelve property owners. Yung, the last holdout, proved to be a formidable negotiator. He enjoyed the panoramic views from his residence and had no desire to surrender them. Crocker offered $3,000. Yung refused. As his mansion neared completion, Crocker doubled the offer to $6,000. He refused again.

The railroad tycoon then made his intentions unmistakable. He told the price-gouging undertaker that he was contemplating building a thirty-foot wall on three sides of the Yung property—a structure that would choke off much of the family’s light, air and magnificent views.

Yung raised his price to $12,000.

Crocker gave a final offer of 9K, which the contumacious, immovable Yung turned down. A peace treaty would never be signed. True to his word, Crocker spent $3,000 to build the wall that would permanently divide the neighbors. Yung challenged its legality in court and lost. In retaliation the undertaker threatened to rent his house to “the most pestilential Chinamen that can be found,” or perhaps to, “establish a Chinese wash-house on the premises, affording unlimited facilities of cleaning the dirty linen of the Railroad Company.”

These threats would fall flat to Charles, possibly the most pro-Chinese capitalist on the planet.

Yung told the Chronicle that he also intended to erect a gigantic coffin on his roof, emblazoned with a skull and crossbones—a macabre rebuke, and perhaps a veiled threat, directed at the great and powerful Chas Crocker. Eventually, the immovable Yung and his family were forced to move.

What might have remained a local feud quickly became a supercharged lightning rod. Denis Kearney and his politically potent Workingmen’s Party seized upon the wall as a monument to autocratic bullying and ostentatious arrogance. Rallies were organized right on California Street, just down the road from the Crocker compound. Angry crowds set bonfires and shouted down the Nob Hill capitalists and the Chinese laborers they hired. In 1877, Kearney gave a fiery speech to 2,000 people and declared that if the wall was not removed, he would tear it down himself and beat Crocker with the broken boards.

Inside his gilded fortress Charles grabbed a shotgun to protect his family and his property.

Though Kearney was arrested and briefly imprisoned, the public’s sympathy was not with the terrorized young Crocker children inside the mega-mansion, but with the stubborn undertaker. Crocker, apparently tone-deaf to the politics of his own city, had turned a property dispute into a public-relations nightmare, bringing ridicule and contempt for all of the Associates of the Central Pacific on California Street.

Ambrose Bierce wrote about Crocker’s famous fence in 1882:

The ugly fence is become to him a monument of his folly, “to keep his anger still in motion.” Three thousand dollars invested in that “reverend pile,” upon which the very ivy refuses to grow—expended in an infamous scheme to drive from their home a family whose offense was that the husband and father would not part with his property for less than its just value—wasted in provoking an unholy laugh, the echoes of which have already died away! When Mr. Crocker considers these things he is not amiable. The whole unpleasant business gets into his egg and taints his coffee. It breaks him all up. May the devil fly away with the fragments and some other wronged undertaker “provide whatever is necessary” for the burial of his unholy soul.

Courthouse Drama

That centennial summer brought Crocker additional vexation in the person of the disgruntled Alfred A. Cohen—once the railroad’s confidential attorney. The angry Central Pacific sued him for civil fraud/financial misconduct on a land deal and a coal shipment. The CPRR sought to recoup $106,376. Cohen argued his own case before Judge W. P. Daingerfield in San Francisco’s Twelfth District Court.

This wasn’t his first quarrel with the Associates. Eight years earlier, Stanford and Judge Crocker had wanted his San Francisco and Oakland Railroad. When Cohen balked, they threatened to build a rival line and bury him. He sold—and they paid him in promissory notes, extended again and again. The 1876 lawsuit wasn’t his first quarrel with the law. In 1856, Cohen was jailed for nearly six months and tried for embezzling the assets of the failed Adams & Co. Bank, a charge that ultimately collapsed on appeal.

Cohen called the CPRR suit retaliation. He had supported the Archer bill to regulate railroad freight fares; the Central Pacific, he charged, responded by attempting to destroy his reputation before the Legislature could act. The complaint, he said, was rushed into the newspapers before it reached the court: less a lawsuit than a public execution.

The disputed “Block 9” land deal ran through the Contract and Finance Company, a corporation legally separate from the railroad but controlled by the same men. Charles Crocker was the president. Cohen argued that this was no innocent corporate convenience. He told Judge Daingerfield:

The Contract and Finance Company…that pulseless, viewless, conscienceless, impalpable but affluent incorporal monster… composed of Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins and the Crockers; was in partnership with the Central and Western Pacific Railroad Company, composed of the Crockers, Huntington, Hopkins and Stanford. It was a partnership which resulted in the first corporation owning all the property, and the second corporation owing all the debts. The railroad corporation proper, the debt-saddled and curse-encumbered corporation still lives; It lives to elude assessors; to debauch legislatures, and to cower at the doors of Congress, seeking only immunity and oblivion.

In 1872 a similar scheme blew up in Washington—Crédit Mobilier, the Union Pacific’s own self-dealing racket, dragging down congressmen and a vice president. Company records for both the Contract and Finance Company, and its predecessor Crocker & Co. were claimed by the directors to be lost in a company move. Cohen referred to the shell company as “a twin sister, in incestuous shame, of the Credit Mobilier.” No indictments were issued in the CPRR case. Judge Crocker adeptly designed the finance company’s architecture just inside the confines of the law.

Alfred Cohen delivered a legendary, scathing closing argument that leveled legal broadsides against his former employers, exposing their financial greed and calling them out as a syndicate of corporate thieves. His speech included deeply searing personal insults and ridicule aimed at his former employers. Cohen portrayed the whole trial as a play badly cast—his enemies as actors in roles too small for their vanity.

Leland Stanford was the heavy in the plot “sullen, saturnine, remorseless, grand, gloomy and peculiar; with the ambition of an Emperor and the spite of a peanut vendor,” who spoke his part “in a basso-profundo growl.”

The counselor of ill-repute mocked Crocker’s character as “too fat of diaphragm for genteel comedy, and too fat of wit for low comedy…compelled to be content with the place of general utility man, whom the counsel would only trust to carry off the dead, light the lamps and sweep the stage.” Cohen claimed that as Crocker’s wealth grows, so too will his body fat, until his belly finally matches the size of his arrogance.

For Huntington, the satire became something more monstrous. Cohen called him “Ephraim Smooth,” mocked his conveniently movable memory, and finally transformed him into a sea monster and “devil-fish,” with gilded tentacles reaching into legislatures and assessors’ offices. Huntington, Cohen said, left the witness stand with “the brand of perjury indelibly impressed upon his forehead.”

It was a remarkable performance: a legal defense that became, by turns, indictment, caricature and character assassination.

Judge Daingerfield ruled for the defendant.

The conquerors of the Sierra spent 1876 refashioned as ego-maniacal swindlers. They were tried and found guilty in the one court that mattered—public opinion. And having discovered, too late, that Cohen’s tongue was a weapon better wielded for them than against them, the Big Four (Edwin Crocker had died a year earlier) did what men of their sort always do with a dangerous enemy: they swallowed their pride and put him back on the payroll.

But the confrontations of ’76 didn’t end there.

Joint Committee

The Central Pacific stood accused of monopolistic power, corporate greed, political corruption, and also importing a labor force many Californians blamed for falling wages and unemployment. By 1876, anti-Chinese sentiment was reaching a boiling point in California. In response, Congress formed a Joint Special Committee to investigate the economic and social impacts of Chinese immigration. That fall Crocker was called to testified primarily to defend his use of Chinese labor. Instead of the nation’s capital, they met at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Manpower was a constant issue to the Central Pacific. The population of the West Coast was paltry compared to the East. Judge Crocker had petitioned the War Department to send out five thousand Confederate prisoners to work on the railroad. The end of the war would put an end to that hope. Demobilized able-bodied soldiers mustered out a living primarily on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and those that made the long journey out West, were drawn to high-paying gold and silver mining aspirations rather than steady railroad wages.

San Francisco’s Black newspaper, The Elevator, offered up another solution urging railroad executives to hire the newly emancipated freedmen instead. “We hope contractors and managers of that work will see the importance of employing the freedmen on the railroad,” the paper wrote, “The American people owe the negro labor. They have given them freedom; he now requires labor and protection.”

Crocker instead began hiring Chinese men, initially a trial crew of a few dozen from local California mining communities. They proved to be highly efficient, meticulous, and reliable workers.

Crocker turned to dry goods merchants Robert S. Egbert and William H. Wallace, who were operating a store that sold provisions and mining tools in Illinoistown, now Colfax, then a mostly Chinese village in Placer County.

The Chinese made the same wages as their white counterparts, $30 a month, but the Irish did not have food, tools, or lodging costs deducted from their paychecks. The Central Pacific recruiting agents argued that back in China the cost of living was such that a man who saved up a few hundred dollars could come home and retire on it.

Nearly half of the laborers were “sojourners,” guest workers looking to amass a fortune quickly and return home to their families in Guangdong. 

Journalist Samuel Bowles visited the camps and met with Chinese dignitaries while traveling with Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax. He wrote about the workers, “None come really to stay; They do not identify themselves with the country; But to get work, to make money, and go back. They never, or very rarely, bring their wives. The Chinese women here are prostitutes, imported as such by those who make a business of satisfying the lust of men.” He also observed that the Chinese “do not ask or wish for citizenship; they have no ambition to become voters; and, in case of death, they have their bodies sent home.”

Bowles wrote about the grotesque anti-Chinese sentiments that he was exposed to:

Thus ostracized and burdened by the State, they [the Chinese] of course have been the victims of much meanness and cruelty from individuals. To abuse and cheat a Chinaman; to rob him; to kick and cuff him; even to kill him, have been things not only done with impunity by mean and wicked men, but even with vain glory. Terrible are some of the cases of robbery and wanton maiming and murder reported from the mining districts.

The most widely circulated daily paper of this city, pronounce against the Chinese, and would drive them home. Their opposition is based upon the prejudices and jealousy of ignorant white laborers, the Irish particularly, who regard the Chinese as rivals in their field, and clothes itself in that cheap talk, so common among the bogus democracy of the East, about this being a “white man’s country,” and no place for Africans or Asiatics.

The Paragrapher and his Cartoonists

In January of 1881, The Wasp, under the new ownership of businessman Edward MacFarlane and Henry J.W. Dam, a journalist and Lothario who later had love affairs with both Governor Stoneman’s wife and our own Aimée Crocker, hired the seasoned “paragrapher” Ambrose Bierce. The weekly humor magazine specialized in social and political satire, sharp commentary, and striking, large-scale color lithography cartoons. Bierce gave The Wasp a new jolt of vitality and electricity.

Dam originally took the reigns as editor and during those critical transition months, Harry and Ambrose Bierce were the ghostwriters of virtually the entire magazine by themselves. They invented fake letters to the editor, fake regional correspondents, and unsigned humor pieces. By July Bierce was chief editor edging out Dam who would become a private secretary to Governor Stoneman the following year. Bierce immediately revived his column, “Prattle,” and then revamped Harry Ellington Brook’s satirical column “Wasp’s Improved Webster in Ten-Cent Doses.” Bierce took over the page to publish his own serialized list of cynical definitions, which ultimately became his masterpiece, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Under the previous owners, The Wasp had been at best a desultory critic of the railroad. It was not until the Bierce years that the biting humor magazine became known for its opposition to the CPRR. The team of MacFarlane, Dam and Bierce and their brilliant illustrators, among the most diabolically creative in the country, wasted little time in issuing a serious graphic assault on the Railroad Associates. Chief among this talented band of merry hooligans were artists George Frederic Keller, Solly Walter and 19-year-old phenom Henry Barkhaus.

Systematically, the heroic railroad builders were transformed by Bierce and Co. into something darker: monopolists, plutocrats, political puppeteers and “railrogues.” Bierce supplied the language—venomous, theatrical, relentlessly sarcastic. His artists supplied the faces, bodies, grotesque proportions, and unforgettable symbols.

The hefty Charles Crocker, President of the Southern Pacific, with his signature long goatee, was debased and humiliated weekly by Bierce and his dream team. Under his reign, Crocker was depicted as a clown, a cherub, a baby, a kindergarten teacher, Moses, a housewife, a milkmaid, the Governor’s mistress, and one of Macbeth’s, Three Witches. The illustrators loved putting him in drag.

Charles was pilloried as a puppet master, a circus acrobat, a pig, a calf, a merman, a pirate, Brutus, the Knight’s Templar Furor, a greedy money lender and Satan.

He is seen cheating at poker, robbing a stagecoach, and plowing through town as a giant on train car roller skates.

Charles Crocker was most famously placed in the eye of an octopus, but he was also an eye of a dragon and the nose of Goliath.

Vanderbilt and Gould

Of the three vampires which have sucked the lifeblood of this state—stock gambling, Chinese labor and railroad extortion—the latter is certainly the chief. The miner digs, the farmer plows, the shepherd shears—and Stanford and Crocker take the proceeds.– –The Wasp, Jan 29, 1881

Battle bugles were blown a few months before ownership of the Wasp was transferred. The railroad barons, both on the East coast and the West, were declared “one of the greatest dangers which threaten this country.”

The Big Three (Hopkins died in 1878), plus their fellow East coast magnates William Henry Vanderbilt and Jay Gould possessed enough wealth and power to dictate freight rates, sway legislators, and bend government to their will, especially if they combined their colossal forces. Unless the public awakened, the waspy magazine concluded, these railroad kings could become the nation’s “future autocrats.” The remedy was regulation—or national ownership of the railroads, so the country’s “iron highways” would serve the people rather than enrich a handful of millionaires.

Bierce wrote: “Stanford, Crocker and Huntington, who, without a cent of their own money, built a railroad as a war measure after the war was over, by mortgaging their land grant; their other subsidies being shoved down into their pockets as dividends. High old patriots; these!—just the sort of chaps to save us from the Eastern monopolist—by taking a hack at our pockets themselves…”

Vanderbilt and Gould were already household names for their absolute corporate villainy, universally loathed across America. They had spent the previous fifteen years perpetrating some of the most destructive, high-profile financial crimes in American history. While Gould and Vanderbilt primarily used private capital and predatory stock-watering to build fortunes, the Big Three built their empire almost entirely on taxpayer money, massive federal subsidies, and free public land grants. By the time Bierce led The Wasp team, The Southern Pacific Railroad, with Crocker at the helm, according to detractors, completely controlled California’s governorship, its legislature, its courts, and its newspapers. To Bierce, this wasn’t just corporate greed; it was a treasonous overthrow of democracy.

Ambrose Bierce would make it his moral duty to break the spell of California citizens who still harbored a lingering sense of gratitude toward Stanford, Huntington and Crocker for physically connecting the West Coast to the rest of the nation. They were constantly placed together with the East coast plutocrats in “guilt by association” editorials and cartoons to convey an immediate, unspoken message: “These local heroes you praise are exactly like the ruthless monsters plaguing the East.”

Mussel Slough 

In addition to the spite fence backlash and the Cohen revelations, Bierce and his fierce battalion of illustrators lambasted the railroad barons for the tragedy at Mussel Slough.

The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, signed, sealed and delivered by Abraham Lincoln himself, was one of history’s more ingenious exchanges. Unable to finance a transcontinental railroad with cash, Lincoln’s administration financed it with public land.

The scheme was irresistible. Along the railroad, alternating sections passed to the companies, the balance remaining with the government. The wilderness would become valuable only after the railroad arrived, allowing both parties to profit from civilization itself. The railroad would finance construction by selling land. Lincoln’s vision was that the public land would be used to build infrastructure that would strengthen the Union, encourage settlement, and promote economic growth.

The CPRR’s real operational profits came from the Central Pacific’s absolute monopoly over freight moving out of California’s agricultural and mining hubs. Because there were no competing lines for over a decade, they could charge exorbitant rates to local shippers. Lincoln didn’t foresee that with the Central Pacific deal he would be forming a natural monopoly.

The president also didn’t envision the massive disputes that his overly generous land grants would cause. As the new landowners, the Associates had a dual mandate: that of a transportation company and a real estate developer. The railroads however didn’t acquired “empty” land. Much of it was already occupied, settled, used, claimed, or contested, before surveys, before patents, before anyone knew exactly which sections would belong to the railroad.

The Homestead Act was signed into law the same year as the Railroad Act. It granted 160 acres of land to adult citizens or those intending to become citizens, requiring only a small filing fee and five years of continuous residence and cultivation. Native communities—including the Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone—lived on much of these designated territories for generations before either the federal government or the railroads asserted ownership. There were also thousands of squatters. These were people who simply occupied land without legal title, expecting eventually to purchase it, which had been common practice in California since 1849.

The land grants therefore created overlapping claims—legal, customary, and ancestral—and the Central Pacific found itself at the center of conflicts that reflected the larger tensions of westward expansion, property law, and federal policy in the nineteenth century.

Mussel Slough was a farming region and waterway in Tulare County, California. Southern Pacific brochures advertised the land at “$2.50 per acre and upwards” stating that to all who would go upon the lands, before the Company obtained a patent, they would be sold at their actual value, without regard to any improvements which might be made. The squatters and settlers had found an arid wasteland and, with little more than shovels and hunger, made it bloom. Before any land could be cultivated, they needed water. The settlers reported that five hundred miles of canals were dug by the settlers, toiling in the burning heat. Fields were fenced, orchards were planted, schools and churches were built. “What God made a desert,” The Wasp reported, “these people made a land of peace and plenty.”

Back in 1863 Charles Crocker’s younger brother Clark, then a farmer, purchased a ranch in Tulare County, in the “hog-wallow” hills—9,000 acres on the banks of the Kaweah river. It was a joint venture with Sisson’s partner Wallace, who built a general store and a warehouse in town in the mid-70s after a railway station was built and the town of Tulare City was established. Wallace and Clark purchased also the water rights, plus a ditch that they widened in 1875. The Sisson-Wallace store, much more than a commercial outpost, provided valuable local intel. The partners were quiet vanguards with agricultural backgrounds who offered SPRR their understanding of the water-diversion systems in Mussel Slough twenty miles away.

In ’76, after receiving intelligence from his brother and Mr. Wallace, Charles hired land agent B.R. Redding to give a full report on the number of settlers in the Mussel Slough country and the value of their improvements which specifically included irrigation ditches. In 1877, the railroad company, awaking to the value of this land, a value given it by the indefatigable efforts of the settlers, commenced the construction of a branch road through it, and obtained a patent for about a quarter of a million acres.

Stanford met with the settlers in March of 1880 and insured them that the railroad would lower its land prices, discounting any increase in value that might be thought attributable to the settlers irrigation system, and the settlers took this to mean prices in the neighborhood of $5 per acre.

When the time came to sell, the arithmetic had changed. Southern Pacific’s land agent William H. Clark notified settlers of the prices. Instead of $2.50, most parcels were priced between $8 and $20 per acre, with some of the most desirable parcels being offered for as much as $35 per acre. The railroad claimed the increase in value belonged to the railroad because they made the land accessible. The settlers claimed it belonged to them because they had made the land worth reaching. Both could marshal facts. Neither could surrender the principle.

The Wasp called it simply constructive eviction masquerading as justice.

The company preferred selling land because land sales generated revenue. Litigation was expensive and unpopular. The company changed their tune when six hundred residents banded together at Mussel Slough as the “Settlers’ League” to resist the SPRR’s attempt to sell them their own improved land at inflated prices. They began considering pursuing court orders and evictions to enforce their titles.

“The soul-calloused and conscience-seared robbers would listen to nothing,” wrote the anti-railroad magazine.

Crocker, tired of the endless back and forth, leaned in on upholding the railroad’s rights. He couldn’t stomach what he considered a willful misreading of the brochures. To him this was property dispute where a fair price would never be agreed upon, reminiscent of the Nicholas Yung debacle. Crocker and his cohorts employed a full team of land commissioners, attorneys, surveyors, local agents, sheriffs, and federal marshals to handle the impending dirty work.

On May 11, 1880, the settlers gathered for a picnic to hear counsel on their legal defense. Key land claims awaited review before the United States Supreme Court, but the Southern Pacific didn’t wait for the cases already on appeal. The Associates had obtained other judgments in the lower courts. The Southern Pacific chose picnic day to begin the evictions.

U.S. Marshal Alonzo W. Poole and William H. Clark, aka the “wanton agents and bloodthirsty hirelings of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company,” arrived with land purchasers Mills Hartt and Walter J. Crow and four writs of eviction. Under one of these writs Crowe was to be put in possession of land held by a Mr. Henry Brewer. According to the settlers, they arrived not with deeds but with patents of uncertain parentage, a wagonload of Winchester rifles, breech-loading shotguns, and bulldog revolvers, plus cases upon cases of ammunition.

Hartt had written to Charles Crocker that when the time came, he would “make the number of settlers largely less.”

The hired hands and land grabbers were confronted by a group of around fifty armed and mounted men in the settlers’ party, according to the marshall who attempted to disarm and arrest some of the most unruly. The settlers claimed there were no more than a dozen men, only four or five of whom were armed. Most eyewitnesses agree that the first to fire was Mills Hartt, who was then shot immediately by one of the settlers. Walter Crow, renowned as a crack shot, then mortally wounded five settlers before fleeing the scene. Later that day he was tracked down and killed.

The railroad called the gunfight a regrettable encounter between law and lawlessness. They mourned the loss of the fallen land grabbers who supported the SPRR’s hired officers performing their duties.

Bierce sat in to hear the testimony in the various trials after the disaster. In one case a jury decided that the settlers were “resisting an officer in the discharge of his duty” at the time of their bloody battle with Walter Crow; in another a United States Judge decided that they had no legal title to the lands.

The moral right to the lands was another question.

In the weeks after Mussel Slough, Bierce turned his Wasp column into a pulpit and a funeral parlor at once. He damned the railroad as a “heartless, shameless and monstrous tyranny” and, when the courts ruled against the settlers, simply appealed over their heads. He was not “infidel enough,” he wrote, “to believe law stronger than right, nor Leland Stanford greater than God,” and he doubted that Charles Crocker’s patent to a single inch of the earth was divinely confirmed. Even if the Supreme Court blessed the railroad’s title, it would prove defective, for the company had made no satisfaction to the Original Owner, from whom the settlers held. “I think He will kick.”

Yet the same pen made a martyr of Walter Crow, the railroad’s accomplice land grabber. Bierce called him “the bravest spirit that ever passed from earth to heaven,” for delivering battle against such fearful odds to defend what was legally his home. Bierce called the wails of the six widows and their fatherless broods a “noble testimony” to his power, then prayed that his own deathbed be lulled by “the melody of sobs from the widows of all my enemies.” The traumatized settlers spoke out in opposition. They said that they courted no trouble and anticipated none. They were not in readiness to “resist” the Marshal, though they outnumber his gang. For them Crow was the corporation’s armed instrument, one of the robbers sent with writs, rifles and revolvers. The farmers walked unbeknownst from a picnic of peace “to the railroad’s charnel house of death.”

The Railroad effectively won the dispute, securing legal ownership of the land and forcing most remaining farmers to buy it at prices ranging from $11 to $35 per acre. No one was convicted of murder. Even though railroad-aligned gunmen killed five settlers during the shootout, the federal government focused its prosecution entirely on the homesteaders. The public, many informed by Bierce and his team, viewed the deceased settlers as martyrs.

More than 40,000 Californians signed a petition in support of the “Mussel Slough Five,” who, in the aftermath of the shootings, were convicted of obstructing a United States marshal in the execution of his duties. The five soon became folk heroes throughout California. When, after several months in the San Jose jailhouse, they returned to the fertile grounds of Mussel Slough, some 3,000 people lined the streets to greet them, cheering their arrival in a remarkable display of popular sympathy.

Anti-railroad sentiment intensified across California.

Decades later the tragedy would become the plot of Frank Norris’s muckraking 1901 novel, The Octopus, a near masterpiece of American naturalism. Norris’s electric storytelling brought the company’s callous behavior vividly to life.

Henry George—the Bohemian Club alumnus who would become an economist to the world—had seen mayhem coming twelve years before guns were drawn at Mussel Slough. In 1868, still an obscure California editor, he warned in his essay “What the Railroad Will Bring Us” that the coming riches would belong less to the men who broke the soils and made the land productive than to those who held its title before the breaking began.

Mussel Slough was that prophecy made flesh. Yet even George could scarcely have been prepared for the spectacle of America’s arithmetic of opportunity being rewritten so plainly before his eyes. The railroad had done more than cross a continent. It had moved the wellspring of fortune—from the making of value to owning the ground where value would someday gather.

The Pacific Railroad Act supplied the Gilded Age with a founding formula: privatize the land, socialize the risk, and call the fortune that followed individual genius. In Charles Crocker, the doctrine found its perfect exhibit—not merely the archetypal self-made man of legend, but the government-made capitalist who, once made, professed to owe his maker nothing.

Lincoln broke one system of bondage while helping to construct another. The first held men as property. The second made property sovereign. In financing the railroad with a kingdom of public land, he elevated corporations from useful servants of the Republic into something that could sit across the table from the government and bargain with it as an equal.

The policy collided with the older promise of preemption and homestead, leaving ordinary settlers caught between two federal promises Washington had never reconciled: One hand had promised them the land. The other had already given it away.

That collision was Mussel Slough. Karl Marx, reading about the killings from London, saw California in this period as the world’s fastest clock, built to show how quickly capitalism could make a fortune, break a promise, and turn on itself. California was to him a sort of accelerated laboratory for capitalist upheaval.

The Strike

It was during Charles Crocker’s testimony to Congress in the summer of ’76 that the public learned of yet another serious transgression during the building of the railroad.

In the summer of ’67, when the Central Pacific reached Sierra summit, the highest point an iron horse had reached on a railroad anywhere in the world, nearly ten thousand Chinese laborers—almost a quarter of the Chinese population in the United States—were working for the Central Pacific. They had heroically blasted tunnels through granite, hung from ropes over sheer cliffs, and pushed the railroad across the Sierra Nevada. Competing mining concerns began poaching the workers. They were finding work in quartz mills, building roads and canals, and many were going to Idaho and Montana. “We have proved their value as laborers, and everybody is trying them, and now we can’t get them,” wrote Judge Crocker in a letter to Collis Huntington. The Associates raised pay to $35 a month to attract more labor to the summit.

On June 19th, 1867, a horrific tunnel explosion near Cisco killed an Irish foreman, who was blown five hundred feet into the air along with five Chinese men, and a horse and cart. Several others were badly injured. Days later, a placard printed in Mandarin was distributed along the line of the road. In it were strong protests about the disparity between their employment package and their Irish counterparts. They thought their grueling work should command $40 a month. They wanted to cut their dawn-to-dusk hours to a ten-hour rule on open ground, and eight hours in the powder-filled tunnels. They also wanted safer conditions while handling unstable nitroglycerin explosives.

The Daily Union reported an especially serious allegation among their list of demands. They wanted “to deny the right of the overseers of the company to either whip them or to restrain them from leaving the road when they desire to seek other employment.”

On June 25th, over 3,000 Chinese workers spanning a 30-mile stretch of the Sierra Nevada mountains laid down their tools and went on strike. They raised their initial demand to $45 a month. It was the largest organized labor action in American history up to that time. The Chinese Six and the Central Pacific executive board scrambled to respond. Charles thought that emissaries from the Union Pacific were inciting his laborers. The government gave land grants to both railroad companies based on mileage. The Easterners wanted to keep the Central Pacific in the mountains while they were speedily building the road over the plains. The Judge wrote Huntington, “Who has stirred up the strike we don’t know, but it was evidently planned and concerted.”

Mark Hopkins speculated that “the strike appears to have been instigated by Chinese gamblers and opium traders, who are prohibited from plying their vocation on the line of the work.”

Hopkins expressed hope in a Central Pacific application for 5000 freedmen from the Freedmen’s Bureau to recruit and transport thousands of recently emancipated African American laborers from the Reconstruction-era American South to the Sierra Nevada mountains. He coolly observed, “a Negro labor force would tend to keep the Chinese steady, as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet.”

The Sacramento Daily Union printed that a plan was in place to get a large number of freedmen to cross the plains to come to California under the Freedmen’s Bureau with the aid of the government in a sort of organized military action. A telegram attributed to Huntington stated, “There will be no trouble in getting all the laborers you want. How many thousand shall I send? You can contract for passage at low rates.”

He was bluffing. The story was planted.

The Judge rifled off the message to his partner Huntington: “The only safe way for us is to inundate this state and Nevada with laborers. Freedmen, Chinese, Japanese, all kinds of labor, so that men come to us for work instead of our hunting them up. They will all find something to do, and a surplus will keep wages low. It is our only security for strikes.” He called for a deliberately diversified labor market.

Hopkins’ message was clear, “if they are successful in this demand, then they control, and their demands will be increased.”

Charles Crocker later echoed Hopkins’ take when he testified to Congress that a railroad built entirely with white labor would face constant strikes and escalating wage demands. Chinese labor stripped white workers of their bargaining monopoly.

The strike revealed the complexity of the Associates’ labor strategy. When white Irish masons walked off the job, Crocker turned to Chinese workers—not simply to pit one racial group against another, but to keep the railroad moving when one labor force refused to work. The contradiction was unmistakable. The Crocker brothers had been abolitionists since boyhood—Judge Crocker defended fugitive slaves in courthouses in both Indiana and California—yet they were now presiding over a labor system sharply divided by race.

To the Associates, the railroad was not merely a construction project but an enormously consequential transcontinental operation. They all knew the Pacific railroad was a historic undertaking that would transform and help unify the deeply war-torn nation. While active military battles had ceased by 1869, the physical, political, and social fabric of the nation remained heavily fractured. Fashioning themselves as empire builders, the Big Five increasingly treated the extraordinary demands of completing the railroad as justification for their extraordinary methods.

The Chinese camps were isolated deep in the Sierra Nevada and depended entirely on the Central Pacific’s single-track line for supplies, including the specialized Chinese dried foods they relied on—a dependency both Crocker and his field boss James Strobridge, a notoriously hot-tempered taskmaster, recognized as their greatest point of leverage. To break the strike, Crocker ordered a total embargo. He choked off all supply trains and forbade Sisson-Wallace, who held an exclusive monopoly on all incoming shipments to the remote mountain camps, from selling a single ounce of rice, tea, or dried goods to the striking camps. The workers had no independent source of food or fresh water.

The Judge wrote, “None of us went near them for a week. We did not want to exhibit anxiety. Then Charles went up, and they gathered around him, and he told them that he would not be dictated to, that he made the rules for them and not they for him.”

Charles Crocker later told Congress:

I stopped the provisions on them, stopped the butchers from butchering, and used such coercive measures. I then went up there and made them a little war speech and told them they could not control the works, that no one made laws there but me. I talked to them so that they could comprehend what the rules and regulations were, and that if they did not choose to obey they could go away from the work, but under no circumstances would I give way to them. I gave them until the next Monday morning at six o’clock to come back, and told them that every man who went to work then should be forgiven for the week’s strike, but that all others should be fined.

Crocker’s union busting strategy wasn’t to be a lengthy process of wearing down worker solidarity through intimidation or false promises. He would literally starve the laborers into submission. Facing hunger and lost wages, the workers returned to work on the old terms. As sojourners, the Chinese tolerated appalling living conditions, hazardous work, and a complete lack of civil rights as a trade-off for short-term financial gain. Crocker believed in the principle of free labor while exercising enormous power over it in practice.

The Daily Alta California reported on July 3rd that Crocker had returned from the mountains and that “all the Chinamen have resumed work” with “no increase of pay” allowed. The article focused entirely on the immediate resumption of progress and heavy mountain travel, completely omitting how the workers were forced back to work. After the short strike, Crocker praised the “celestials” peacefulness, noting that thousands of striking white workers would have resulted in “murder and drunkenness,” while the Chinese strike was “just like Sunday all along the work.”

On July 6, Judge Crocker surmised in a letter to Huntington of the Chinese workers’ shame, predicting, “I don’t think we will ever have any more difficulties with them.”

Under oath, at the 1876 Joint Session to Congress, he insisted the transcontinental line could never have crossed the Sierra without the Chinese. He asserted that a Chinese man was more than ordinarily intelligent, entirely peaceful and temperate, and were more reliable and steady than their Celtic counterparts. When asked about their powers of endurance he testified:

They are equal to the best white men… We measured the work every Sunday morning; and the Chinamen without fail always outmeasured the Cornish miners; that is to say, they would cut more rock in a week than the Cornish miners did, and there it was hard work, steady pounding on the rock, bone-labor. The Chinese were skilled in using the hammer and the drill; and they proved themselves equal to the very best Cornish miners in that work. They are very trusty, they are very intelligent, and they live up to their contracts.

When pressed on whether Chinese immigration degraded free white labor and drive down white wages the way slavery did, Charles declared emphatically that the Chinese were free agents, entitled to the same standing as any other workingman—not a servile caste to be exploited and then expelled.

A Man is a Man for A’ That

When Charles Crocker walked into the Chinese immigration debate, he found himself at its absolute center. He was a railroad king, and one of the men most responsible for bringing thousands of Chinese laborers into California. Now a congressional committee wanted him to explain what, exactly, those men were worth.

Crocker framed his sympathies through his own biography: a self-made laborer who left school at nine and left home when he was 16 1/2 years old, “owing 62 1/2 cents, without a copper in my pocket and not a change of clothes.” He declared that he always was a committed abolitionist who said he’d have given “my last dollar” for Black freedom. Charles recollected that he’d watched an anti-Irish St. Patrick’s Day riot as a boy in Troy, NY, that left two men dead and a dozen seriously injured. Crocker recognized the old American appetite for a scapegoat when it came roaring back against the Chinese.

That history—poverty, hard labor, abolitionism—appeared to be the root of his defense of the Chinese, not a cover story for exploitation.

Pressed repeatedly by hostile committee members, Crocker refused several traps laid for him. Asked whether homogeneous populations are preferable, he first punctures the premise (are a Dutchman, an Irishman, and an American even “homogeneous”?), then carefully separated his personal preference for residing among people like himself from his economic conviction that Chinese labor benefited California materially—declining to let the two collapse into an argument for exclusion. Crocker was worn down enough to say at the end of his testimony, “Rest assured that any white man, unless he is demented, or has debased his mind by vicious habits, such as love of liquor, can rise above the Chinese class.”

Asked whether Christian conversion would improve Chinese morals, he demurred from Christianity altogether and reached instead for poet Robert Burns: “I am not much of a believer in Christianity, I am sorry to say. I believe ‘a man is a man for a’ that.'” It’s a striking substitution—swapping a religious yardstick of worth for a secular, labor-and-character-based one, drawn from Burns’s own anti-aristocratic, anti-clerical egalitarianism.

Charles Crocker testified that he thought that Chinese civilization was possibly superior to American civilization, said an American in China would get a fairer trial than a Chinaman in America, and stated that an educated, assimilated Chinese immigrant “would make just as good a voter as I will”

This was a remarkable thing to say. Crocker was not merely defending Chinese labor. He was defending the possibility that the Chinese laborer might become an American in the fullest sense—that education, character, and conduct could matter more than the accident of birth.

Crocker concluded that, given a “good square vote,” eight-tenths of California property owners would vote for the Chinese. The anti-Chinese movement, he said, was a manufactured “hue and cry”—the sort of agitation by which newspapers and politicians could persuade a people to “hang a good citizen.” He testified, “I believe that if to-day the question could be presented to the people of California, free from partisan politics—free from that agitating tirade against a race, particularly on account of their color, their manners and customs, and all that—the people to-day would vote against this anti-Chinese sentiment.”

The New York Tribune printed an editorial castigating Crocker, claiming that in his testimony, “evidence is given as strongly as possible in favor of the superiority of the Chinese to whites as laborers, and of their unrestricted emigration to this State.” While Crocker reassured the public that the Chinese were only taking the commonest positions, “white men could not afford to work for $32 a month, when their subsistence and clothes would cost them, at the very lowest $20 a month,” according to the editorial. It continued:

The logical result is that the whites must come down to the wretched standard of coolie wages and coolie subsistence, or starve or steal or engage in vicious and forbidden conduct—as to both males and females—conduct too shocking for patient contemplation…The truth is they will either remain in enforced idleness or have to submit to coolie wages and the vile and bestializing style of coolie life. That is the long and the short of it….the whole system of this emigration is a coolie slave system.

The transcontinental “Manifest Destiny” railroad project was completed seven years ahead of schedule thanks largely to the manpower and stability provided by Chinese workers. At the joyous celebration in Sacramento to mark the completion of the railroad, E.B. Crocker extended a public thank you to the Chinese, “In the midst of our rejoicing at this event I wish to call to your minds that the early completion of this railroad we have built has been in a great measure due to that poor, despised class of laborers called the Chinese—to the fidelity and industry they have shown…” But their visibility—thousands of Chinese laborers building one of the nation’s greatest infrastructure projects—galvanized anti-Chinese political platforms. Labor leaders in California channeled this anti-railroad and anti-Chinese sentiment into a powerful political force, lobbying for discriminatory laws, the formation of the combative Workingmen’s Party, and ultimately the federal Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Charles Crocker’s optimistic belief that the vast majority of Americans didn’t possess anti-Chinese sentiment proved untrue.

Brother Clark

In the early 1880s—precisely when the Exclusion Act was being debated and passed—The Wasp was actually an active participant in anti-Chinese sentiment. G. Frederick Keller, chief illustrator of the satirical magazine from its inception in 1876, painting with the broadest of brushes, was vehemently anti-Chinese in his cartoons. Bierce kept his distance somewhat from the popular and talented Keller because he was such a draw for magazine customers. By contrast, Bierce approached the “Chinese question” through satire and fiction, using it to expose the hypocrisy, cowardice, and self-deception of white workers and a clear lack of foresight in the politicians who scapegoated Chinese immigrants to quell their own anxieties.

Ambrose Bierce predicted that the Chinese Exclusion Act would fail, and, after observing its outcome, sarcastically declared vindication in a piece that he wrote for The Wasp on October 20, 1883: “Chinese immigrants, he claimed, keep entering through the porous Mexican and Canadian borders, and even those arriving directly through San Francisco did so legally by obtaining treaty-sanctioned exemption certificates as ‘merchants,’ ‘students,’ or ‘persons of curiosity’ rather than laborers.” He continued: “The whole Chinese nation appears to have incurred a violent distaste for honorable toil; there is not a laborer to be found anywhere in all that country. All the hard work, at a cent a week and a rat pie at the full of the moon, is now performed by men of elegant leisure about to sail for San Francisco, where they will kindly undertake to construct our railroads and cigars, promote the domestic duck and reform our linen.” Bierce closed his piece by proposing the law be renamed from an “Act to Execute Certain Treaty Stipulations with China” to an “Act to Improve the Social Standing and Elevate the Intellectual Character of the Chinese Immigrant”—since in practice it screened for respectability rather than excluding anyone.

Bierce did not predict the powers of mob-rule when it came to the Chinese question, and he didn’t recognize how deep-seated Chinese hatred was in certain sectors of the country.

In 1882, the year the act was passed, younger brother Clark Crocker became a partner with the Sisson group after William Wallace died and swiftly became enemy number one to a region of California that vociferously wanted to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act.

A campaign began in late fall of 1885 that vowed to find a respectable way to rid the “Chinese-cursed community” of Truckee of its “Yellow Peril.” It was abundantly clear that the day was not far distant when Chinese would monopolize every avocation and industry, according to the citizenry, and white labor would be entirely driven from the Truckee basin. The sentiment of the violent element of the community was tersely expressed at one of the meetings by a speaker who stated, “One hour of revolution is worth a century of talk.”

Instead of driving out the Chinese themselves, it was decided that they would drive out their employers. For nine weeks the committee worked its way through the town one business establishment after another, using persuasion, intimidation, boycotts and, when necessary, open defiance. By January, the Chinese had nearly disappeared from the basin. Sisson, Crocker & Co. and one other proprietor were holdouts.

His central argument was one of hypocrisy. When Huntington, Stanford and Crocker claimed to have the right to charge all that the market could bear, Bierce retaliated. “If they had really set up the railroad on their own and operated in a truly free market, perhaps. But Congress had enriched the railroad men with public subsidies, public loans, and public land. The federal government had exercised the right of eminent domain on their behalf and had provided U.S. Army troops to protect their holdings.”

Bierce referred to the barons as “public enemies and indictable criminals.” He campaigned indefatigably for public ownership of the railroads.

For years Bierce denounced the crimes of the railroad trident and demanded public judgment. Nobody seemed to hear his cries—“they least of all.” Then, he wrote, came the day when the barons discovered that the reckoning had begun. “Suddenly, one morning they awoke to find themselves outlaws. They looked about and saw all fingers pointed at them; saw the scowl of hatred on every brow; heard on every side the curses of their fellow citizens.” The railroad royals, Bierce said, had fallen from social favor. Their wives and daughters were no longer welcome in drawing-rooms they had once entered as conquerors.

The men who had commanded legislatures, courts, newspapers, and railroads had discovered that wealth could not purchase immunity from contempt.

Crocker’s storyline, the archetypal “self-made man,” uneducated and unrefined, who hurtled from manual labor and frontier commerce into immense wealth, was one that Bierce despised. He questioned the greed that often fuels such transformations: “What drives men who are millionaires many times over,” Bierce questioned, “to continue to pursue wealth with lies, bribes and theft.” Charles Crocker became one of the most convenient embodiments of the disease of plutocracy that Bierce saw in Gilded Age America. When word came that Crocker was considering abandoning California for New York, Bierce offered him a farewell that was less benediction than indictment:

Godspeed from a people whose generous encouragement he had punished by plunder—from a state whose industries he has impoverished, whose legislation he has sophisticated and perverted, whose courts of justice he has corrupted, of whose servants he has made thieves, and in the debauchery of whose politics he has experienced a coarse delight irrelative to the selfish advantage that was its purpose—from a city whose social tone he has done his best to lower to the level of his own brutal graces, and for whose moral standards he has tried to substitute the fatty degeneration of his own heart.

This was Bierce at his most merciless: not simply accusing the railroad men of greed, but charging them with having corrupted nearly every institution through which a society governed itself. In June 1883 The Wasp declared that Stanford, Crocker, and Huntington were “rogues while they sleep and scoundrels when they wake,” and proceeded to enumerate the indictment: defrauding the nation of lands and bonds, evading state taxes, wresting homesteads from settlers, crippling the prosperity of the San Joaquin Valley, oppressing and terrorizing the merchants of San Francisco, the farmers of the Interior, the miners of Arizona, and the stockmen of New Mexico. Their corruption, Bierce charged, had reached so deeply into “law, justice and intelligence” that “there is safety for neither property, life nor character.”

By July, Bierce had gone from indictment to something approaching a bill of particulars. The Wasp laid down its terms: relinquish some fifteen million acres of public land in Texas; cease dishonest dealings in public lands and credits; pay to the Government its just dues “to the last penny” and to the state and counties their taxes without litigation; abolish the “piratical” special-contract system and rebates to favored firms; abandon subsidies to newspapers and bribes to public officials; and, most important, accept a freight and passenger-rate schedule approved by the state. It was an extraordinary demand because Bierce was no longer merely mocking the railroad kings. He was telling them what surrender would look like. The cartoonists had put the plutocrats in the dock; now the prosecutor was reading the sentence.

Fred

During the running feud with the Associates Charles Crocker’s son Fred, as Third Vice President of the SPRR, was also constantly made to look the fool by the relentless illustrators of The Wasp, usually as a child or sidekick but also in drag, as a circus performer and as a freakish two-headed calf.

On August 14, 1888, a year after his testimony to a contentious Congressional Committee fell flat, the unindicted Charles Crocker, president of the Crocker & Co., the Contract and Finance Company and the Southern Pacific Railroad, fell into a diabetic coma and died at his resort, the Hotel Del Monte, aged 65.

California put aside all transgressions and again ceremoniously lifted Charles up as a man of honor.

His funeral at the First Congregational Church drew a massive crowd of people “from every condition of life, from the toiler on the streets to the millionaire.” The pews and the aisles were filled with as heavyweight a cross-section of California’s business and political establishment as could be assembled. Partners Huntington and Stanford were far afield and couldn’t attend. Mourners gathered in grief all around the vicinity of the church. Those who appeared to grieve most, according to The Sacramento Daily Union, were the employees of the Southern Pacific Company, “and among these the colored servitors were loudest in their expressions of sorrow.” The named pallbearers included the sitting Governor of California and his predecessor. The men who actually carried the casket were the eight Black employees who had served the Southern Pacific longest.

There was nothing but accolades from the local press often noting his larger than life personality.

The San Francisco Call wrote, “By the bier of Charles Crocker the voice of detraction is hushed, and there is no place for him who speaks ill of the rich chiefly because they are rich…”

The San Francisco Daily Alta: “He was in the truest sense of the words a self-made man. What he accomplished was due to his own efforts. He had no advantages save those that nature gave him. His early life is a record of struggles with adversity, of misfortunes bravely met and of obstacles gallantly overcome. This success was not due to chance, but to work, hard work, assisted by patient self-reliance and an inward consciousness of the great things of which he felt himself capable.”

The San Francisco Bulletin: “Few men have secured so great a fortune and made so few personal enemies. He had a great fund of animal spirits. He was fond of a joke and a good story, and aside from business, he was the most companionable of men. It was said of him, because of the freshness and overflow of his spirits, that he was always a boy. But his buoyancy gave him great power. He carried heavy loads. But he never let the load crush him.”

The Sacramento Daily Union told tales of his benevolence, imparting that his nature was kindly: “when resenting a wrong his impulses were formidable but not revengeful.” Local minister and longtime friend Rev. J. A. Benton told Sacramento, “He was jolly, easy, mirthful, social, full of bonhomie,” then pondered, “How could he be so cheery, affable, genial, and turn to one so abruptly the face of decision, negation, firmness and reproof.”

For a paper that specialized in blood sport, The San Francisco Examiner, chose an almost tender headline: “His Work Is Done”:

Charles Crocker proved himself to be a practical man. He was a builder, and in that sense takes rank above any of his associates. He could command a large force of men better than either Stanford or Huntington, and the men were not so diffident in approaching him… He always backed his opinions with an array of facts and figures as proof. Consequently he was very dogmatic in upholding his views, and when an official would question his position he would sharply ask for a reason. Should the reason prove insufficient he would drive his own views home with more force. If convinced that he was wrong he is said to have always yielded with the best of grace.

“Mr. Crocker was a man of commanding figure, being very tall, with a broad chest and shoulders. In manner and speech he was gruff and abrupt, but withal kindly,” continued The Examiner, “His face was seriously cast, but it had a pleasant expression and frequently a jovial smile. His temperament was genial, and in private life he was full of mirth and given to humor. His character was strong, and he was positive in his convictions.”

The Examiner

The Showdown

“Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down.”
                                                                                                                    — attributed to Collis Potter Huntington

Amasa Leland Stanford died on June 21, 1893 at his Palo Alto Stock Farm (later the campus of Stanford University). The Examiner showered him with praise and called his university, not the transcontinental railroad, the great work of his life. The active pallbearers for the casket were long-serving locomotive engineers employed by the Southern Pacific railroad. The local press tributes were a far cry from Bierce’s Wasp summary of King Stanford a few years earlier:

Governor Stanford of the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads is a pirate and a pig, but Governor Stanford of California street is a gentleman and a philanthropist. In his dual character of malefactor and benefactor he somewhat resembles the ideal highwayman dear to the heart of the novel writers, who sometimes bestows in charity as much as one half of one per cent of his plunder.

And then there was one.

The last man standing, Collis Huntington, sent his condolences from afar. He had deeply resented that Stanford received the lion’s share of public adoration and prestige, while doing the least amount of actual work, his chief contribution, according to Collis, was as West Coast figurehead and spokeshole. A breaking point occurred in 1885 when Stanford ran for the U.S. Senate. He actively campaigned against and defeated the incumbent, Aaron A. Sargent, who was one of Huntington’s closest personal friends and a vital political ally for the railroad in Washington. Huntington viewed Stanford’s actions as an unforgivable personal and professional betrayal. He maneuvered to oust Stanford as the Southern Pacific president in 1890.

Weeks before the Governor’s death, Hearst’s Examiner published a 22-page article with dozens of illustrations of attractions along the Southern Pacific Line plus flattering biographies of all the Associates. Col. Fred Crocker was several times a guest contributor to Hearst’s decidedly pro-railroad newspaper.

Things changed radically on January 20, 1896, when the House Committee on Pacific Railroads, chaired by H. Henry Powers, began hearings on a plan to adjust the Central Pacific’s debt to the government. Powers’s bill, H.R. No. 8189, formally reported in April, proposed to refinance the maturing government debt rather than force a foreclosure. It would give the Central Pacific an additional seventy-five years to repay the government, at the remarkably low rate of 2 percent interest—an extraordinary concession to the railroad/Huntington.

Hearst saw the Funding Bill as an existential battle for California and a prime opportunity for his brand of “stunt” and investigative journalism. He adroitly transformed The San Francisco Examiner into a populist anti-railroad newspaper. Recognizing the political dynamite in the issue, Hearst launched an all-out blitz to destroy the bill and Huntington’s reputation.

For nearly a decade, Ambrose Bierce had backed off of the railroad giants. His old animosities were, however, easily rehashed. His long held grudges were called back into service when Hearst sent him to Washington to attack Huntington’s effort to refinance the Central Pacific’s federal debt in January of 1896. Artists Homer Davenport and James Swinnerton tagged along to turn his invective into unforgettable cartoon masterpieces. Bierce supplied the words; Davenport and Swinnerton supplied the distorted faces.

On February 18th, Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama spent an afternoon walking Huntington back to the Contract and Finance Company until the old man admitted under oath: that the company and the Central Pacific’s own directors were the same men, that it had swallowed $116,000,000 in Central Pacific assets for a road he now claimed had cost seven or eight million to build, and that its books had been destroyed. After much evasion, Mr. Huntington further admitted that the Kentucky based Southern Pacific Company was the actual owner of all the so-called “leased” lines from Portland to New Orleans except the Central Pacific. With the profits the operating company built twenty ocean steamers that ran between New Orleans and New York.

Huntington confessed that the Southern Pacific also had a revenue-sharing and rate-control “arrangement” with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company dating back to 1872 given it virtually a Trans-Atlantic line. The Associates had their own Trans-Pacific route with their Occident and Orient Steamship Company, which was also under the umbrella of the Southern Pacific. Progressive Democrat and banker James D. Phelan, who would become mayor of San Francisco in 1897, commented on the Southern Pacific monopoly, “They hem us in on the north, they hem us in on the South, they hem us in on the East, and, remarkable to state, they hem us in on the West. They pay a monthly subsidy to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to keep a prohibitive tariff on freights. They monopolize—what seems remarkable—the ocean itself…”

In person Huntington wasn’t the intimidating character, the “moral pachyderm,” that Bierce always believed him to be. He saw him as a man who “feels disgrace and discredit as keenly as anybody.” In a February 18th dispatch Bierce wrote:

The situation was dramatic, the bad old man pathetically defending his claim to the right of adding to his useless millions, shuffling, falsifying, cowering under the pitiless gaze of his persecutor, mortified by admissions already made and trembling under apprehension of the ones to come…The tradition of his invincible callousness is henceforth (to me at least) faded fiction. I wish every boy in the land could have been in that committee room today and seeing what it may cost to be dishonestly rich. As an awful example to American youth Mr. Huntington, sweating beads of blood in the heat of exposure.

By the end of the day Huntington, supremely distressed, looked as though another question would finish him, according to Bierce. “He had hardly enough effrontery left to throw coherent blame on his dead partners and exonerate himself.”

Three days later Huntington presented a counteroffer to the committee that bore an unmistakable resemblance to Crocker’s testimony nine years earlier. Both men had come up from nothing. Huntington’s biography starts as a struggling farmboy in “Poverty Hollow” Connecticut, then graduates to an itinerant Yankee peddler working the roads with a suitcase of watches. Both Crocker and Huntington became humble Sacramento merchants. Both Crocker and Huntington arrived at the same conviction: that a road finished seven years early had made the country their debtor, not the other way around.

A statement from C.P. Huntington was given to the committeemen that detailed the great services that he had rendered to the United States government, the great work that he had done in building up this grand empire of the Pacific, in peopling it and making it possible to establish industries and to communicate with its brethren of the Eastern states. He proudly tallied the sums he had saved the government by carrying its troops, mail, supplies, and munitions by rail instead of mule.

Crocker had asked for a hundred and fifty years, or forgiveness outright. Huntington’s version was more modest—only seventy-five years of graduated payments—half of Crocker’s proposal. General T.H. Hubbard, an attorney employed by the Central Pacific, testified that no railroad ever extinguishes its debt; They pay one creditor by making another, or, as he preferred to put it, issue new bonds to take the place of those retired. If railroads were compelled to pay their debts, he explained, they would all be bankrupt. General Hubbard’s notion was that honesty, as understood in railway circles, consisted in the payment of interest.

Bierce became an inexhaustible, copy producing dynamo, turning out some sixty articles, most of them on the front page, in which he depicted the railroad as a predatory power—buying legislators, bending newspapers to its will, corrupting the courts, and converting the public authority into private wealth.

Bierce met Huntington face-to-face twice that winter. Twice Bierce refused to shake his hand. The first time was in a Capitol corridor before three reporters. The second in a Senate Committee room. Huntington, exasperated by the relentless Bierce, told The Washington Star that The Examiner was once on the payroll of the Southern Pacific at twelve thousand dollars a year. After becoming president in 1890, Huntington claimed that he cut them off. The irascible Bierce and haughty Hearst were bought men settling a canceled retainer.

Bierce wrote his response to the pro-railroad paper that if Huntington could prove that he once paid The Examiner 12K a year to the satisfaction of three mutually agreed upon gentlemen, he declared that he would retire permanently and shake his hand. One condition. Huntington was not to object to his glove.

Ambrose Bierce claimed victory on May 27, 1896, announcing the funding bill dead. At least until Congress’s second session in December. He wrote:

Huntington will be unable to get his funding bill up in either house, even if he had the hardihood to attempt it. His hundreds of thousands of dollars to a half a hundred high-priced lobbyists has been absolutely wasted… if he renews the struggle next winter, he must do so with broken prestige, his pretensions discredited, himself despised by those who once sought his alliance, entreated his favor and ran with glad feet in the pathway of his will. He could not now secure consideration for his villain bill if he dared…this indefatigable seeker for unfair advantages this promoted peasant with a low love of Labor and an unslackable thirst for gain, being already so rich that he stinks—this Huntington person is dead until December. My work here is at an end.

The voice of the people filled Metropolitan Hall in San Francisco in June in praise of the senators and congressmen from California and their colleagues from the East and South, who blocked the passage of Huntington’s infamous funding bill at the first session of the 54th Congress. The hall was crowded with thousands of enthusiastic citizens, who cheered and then cheered again with jubilation.

The keynote of the many speeches was given by Democratic Congressman James G. Maguire of San Francisco, a fierce anti-monopolist, who led the congressional charge against the bill, an uphill battle as the committee on Pacific Railroads in the Senate was packed against him and in favor of refunding. Maguire had provided a powerful legislative voice that complemented Bierce’s public pressure campaign.

The congressman cast the funding fight as something larger than a dispute over railroad bonds. To him, it was another engagement in the perpetual struggle of “manhood” against the dominion and tyranny of concentrated wealth—a fight against a monopoly that had acquired the power to tax the many for the enrichment of the few.

Maguire recounted the evidence he had assembled against the Central Pacific and C. P. Huntington, including Alfred Cohen’s celebrated speech and the damning Huntington-Colton correspondence which contained the railroad baron’s own written admission that in earlier Congresses he had resorted to bribery, deception, and fraud to advance the railroad’s interests.

Maguire ended his speech by asking the audience to recognize The Examiner and Bierce for their faithful publication of the facts and their invaluable services in fighting what he called the “funding infamy.” The Examiner had gathered more than 200,000 signed protests in remarkably short order and sent the monster petition to Washington, helping awaken Eastern opposition. At Maguire’s direction, a thousand copies of The Examiner were distributed daily in Washington, even placed in the mailboxes of members of Congress. He praised Bierce as “one of the most wonderful handlers of the English language within the borders of the union” and acknowledged the role of the illustrators as nearly as impactful as the talented Mr. Bierce. Some pro-funding members of congress found that Davenport and Swinnerton’s scathing caricatures more objectionable than Bierce’s scathing articles.

Huntington again tried to get his funding bill, H.R. No. 8189, passed in the second session of the 54th Congress. The revived bill was defeated in the House on Monday, January 11, 1897, by a vote of 168 to 102. A settlement was signed early in 1899, with the final terms requiring the railroad to pay its total debt—calculated at $58,812,715.48 (combining principal and interest)—via a series of 20 promissory notes spanning 10 years at a 3% interest rate. The debt was paid off in full by 1909.

Later in 1897 a bill was introduced by Republican State Senator of New York, Timothy E. Ellsworth, acting on behalf of political boss Thomas Platt to ban political cartoons completely. It was quickly and unceremoniously killed. Davenport wasted no time in demolishing and ridiculing the effort and Platt with a particularly debilitating cartoon.

Bierce had accused the railroad of buying legislators, controlling newspapers, extorting shippers and farmers, corrupting courts, looting taxpayers and converting public power into private wealth. Huntington was no longer the lionized empire builder who had helped bind the continent. In Bierce and the illustrators’ hands, he became a spider, reptile, money king, and finally an octopus, its tentacles clutching Congress, the courts, the press, farmers, merchants, and California politics.

This was proto-muckraking journalism before the Progressive Era had given the style its name. Bierce did not merely report on corruption; he prosecuted it in public, making the railroad fight personal, theatrical, and unforgettable. Huntington had the money, the lawyers, the politicians, the newspapers, and nearly everything else a nineteenth-century plutocrat could reasonably want. Bierce had a mighty pen. Yet the campaign helped kill Huntington’s refinancing effort and transformed Bierce from a feared San Francisco satirist into a national political journalist—the Woodward and Bernstein of his day. More enduringly, it helped replace the image of the railroad titan as nation-builder with that of the political predator Bierce had spent years warning about. Huntington had become, in latter day terms, the “Robber Baron.”

Huntington’s death received pages of coverage in August of 1900 in The Examiner, including a less-than-flattering caricature by cartoonist Robert Edgren and an article by reporter Edward F. Cahill, “Facts as to Huntington: Plain Narrative of His Marvelous Career, Showing the Good and the Evil He Wrought.” There was less mourning and fewer tributes to the great man than to his partners, and more speculation about who would succeed him.

What made the assault against Crocker, Stanford and Huntington so powerful was its repetition across two publications and through several artists working from the same satirical vocabulary. Bierce wrote the indictment; Keller, Walter, Barkhaus, Davenport, Swinnerton and others illustrated the crime. Month after month, issue after issue, they transformed the visionary empire builders into monstrous robber barons—men who were not simply greedy, but morally diseased, symbols of what happens when private wealth acquires public power. That kind of sustained portrait is harder to produce today. Attention is scattered across a thousand channels instead of concentrated in a few widely read pages, and no single satirical vocabulary has time to take hold before the news cycle replaces it.

The fusion of private fortune and public power did not creep into American life through a side door. It arrived triumphantly, in full force, by transcontinental rail in 1869. The Crockers, Huntington, Stanford, and Hopkins had to be businessmen and political actors at once, negotiating land grants, subsidies, and rights-of-way with a government that had no machinery to police deals of that size. The fusion was not a corruption of the system—it was part of the bargain that built it, engineered deliberately by ambitious men who called the arrangement progress and persuaded the nation to call it destiny.

Then came the cover story: the great scheme to persuade a democratic people that concentrated wealth was evidence not merely of success, but of moral superiority. The self-serving barons became self-made men, poor boys turned princes, forces of nature. The subsidies vanished from the sermon. So did the political favors, the exploited labor, and the machinery that had made their fortunes possible. As Richard White, Stanford historian of the American West and author of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America has observed, the Gilded Age was never the market paradise of libertarian dreams—it can just as easily be described as a golden age of government subsidies, tariffs, and judicial interventions favoring the rich and powerful.

The myth outlived the reckoning. Many of the defining structural characteristics of the original Gilded Age have reappeared, recast and restaged. The railroad has been replaced by the platform, the land grant by the algorithm, the baron by the founder—but the cover story plays to the same audience, with the same appetite for flattery. The billionaire is the genius force of nature, never a beneficiary of the tax code, a government contract, or a labor market arranged in his favor. His fortune is not called a fortune; it is called an ecosystem, as though it occurred in nature rather than in Congress. His corporation is not called a monopoly; it is called a network, as though it connects the public rather than meters it.

For three generations, the story changed. The Progressive Era and the New Deal built a regulatory order that constrained concentrated economic power. Antitrust suits, progressive taxation, and strong unions helped make the politically dominant monopolist seem like a relic of another age. The Gilded Age, Professor White writes, “seemed unique, traumatic and regrettable”; the plutocrats “had gone the way of the dinosaurs.” Then, one court case and one act of deregulation at a time, the climate warmed to them again.

“Now here we are,” White writes, “in Jurassic Park.”

The Aftermath of a Dynasty

 

Selective Sources

“A Yankee Tourist,” The Saturday Review, Oct 6, 1867, pp 427-428.

Adam Smith, “The bloodiest Western gunfight you’ve never heard of,” March 17, 2015.

Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. (Berkeley, Ca., University of California Press, 1971), 401 pages.

Alexandra Sokoloff, “Chinese workers build the Transcontinental Railroad,” After the Gold Rush | Substack, Sep 01, 2025.

Ambrose Bierce, “Bierce to Huntington,” San Francisco Examiner, Mar 21, 1896, p10.

Ambrose Bierce, Black Beetles in Amber, (Western Authors Publishing Co., San Francisco), Nov 1892.

Ambrose Bierce, “Crocker’s Nightmare,” The Wasp, Aug 19, 1882.

Ambrose Bierce, “Funding is Dead Until December,” San Francisco Examiner, May 27, 1896, p1.

Ambrose Bierce, “Hubbard’s Plan Never to Pay,” San Francisco Examiner, Feb 27, 1896, p1.

Ambrose Bierce, “Huntington Under Morgan’s Lash,” San Francisco Examiner, Feb 2, 1896, p2.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” [Lezinsky], San Francisco Examiner, Apr 7, 1895, p6.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” [Lezinsky], San Francisco Examiner, Jan 6, 1895, p6.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” [Lezinsky], San Francisco Examiner, Jun 2, 1895, p6.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” [Lezinsky], San Francisco Examiner, Jun 4, 1893, p6.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” [Lezinsky], San Francisco Examiner, Jun 16, 1895, p6.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” [Lezinsky], San Francisco Examiner, Mar 24, 1895, p6.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” [Lezinsky], San Francisco Examiner, May 19, 1895, p6.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” [Lezinsky defense], San Francisco Examiner, Nov 3, 1895.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle” [Mussel Slough] The Wasp, Dec 2, 1881, p261.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” [Mussel Slough] The Wasp, Dec 9, 1881,  p. 390.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle” [Mussel Slough] The Wasp, Nov 4, 1881, p293.

Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle” [Mussel Slough] The Wasp, Nov 11, 1881, p307.

Ambrose Bierce, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, (San Francisco: E.L.G. Steele, 1891).

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1909).

Ambrose Bierce, “Those Were Bully Letters,” The Wasp, Dec. 29, 1883.

“An Important Change,” Truckee Republican, May 8, 1886.

Anthony Madrid, The Seventy-Four Best Entries in The Devil’s Dictionary, theparisreview.org, Oct 25, 2017.

“Armed Chinese: Boycotting a Business in Truckee,” San Francisco Examiner, Jan 19, 1886, p3.

Carey Mcwilliams. Ambrose Bierce: A Biography, (UK: Delphi Classics, Jul 17, 2017).

“Central Pacific Company vs. Alfred A. Cohen, Argument of Mr. Cohen, Twelfth District Court, City and County of San Francisco,” 1876.

“Charles Crocker’s Evidence,” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov 25, 1876, p2.

“Clark Crocker’s Visit,” Truckee Republican, Feb 3, 1886, p3.

“Colored Laborers for the Pacific Coast,” The Elevator, Sep 22, 1865, p2.

“C.W. Crocker’s Estate,” Sacramento Record Union, Dec 20, 1893, p1.

David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, (Penguin Group, 1999).

David J. Weber, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, (University of California Press, 1975).

Daniel Lindley, Ambrose Bierce Takes on the Railroad: The Journalist as Muckraker and Cynic, (Praeger, 1999).

Dennis Drabelle, The Corrections – Pacific Standard,  August 28, 2012.

Dennis Drabelle, The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took On the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad. (Macmillan, 2012).

Doug OLaughlin, “Lessons from History: The Great Railroad Buildout: History doesn’t rhyme, it just repeats itself with increasingly strained analogies,” Fabricated Knowledge, Dec 17, 2025.

Edward F. Cahill, “Facts as to Huntington: Plain Narrative of His Marvelous Career, Showing the Good and the Evil He Wrought,” San Francisco Examiner, Aug 15, 1900, p2.

“End of Chinese Laborers Strike,” Daily Alta CA, Jul 3, 1867, p1.

[Fred Crocker’s bribery attempt], The Wasp, Oct 7, 1882, p612.

Fresno Weekly Expositor, Sep 27, 1882.

Gaye LeBaron, “Widow’s SR Trial Revealed Much About Money, Politics, thepressdemocrat.com, August 12, 2012.

Greg Rosalsky, “The price America paid for its first big immigration crackdown,” www.npr.org, November 26, 2024

Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850-1870, Harvard University Press, January 1, 1964, 316 pages.

“His Work is Done,” The San Francisco Examiner, Aug 15, 1888, p2.

“Honoring Visitors,” San Francisco Examiner, Nov 7, 1887, p4.

“How It Was Done,” Truckee Republican, Jan 30, 1886.

“Importation of Coolies,” Auburn Morning News, Mar 11, 1875, p1.

“In Memoriam, Obsequies of the Late Charles Crocker,” Sacramento Daily Union, Aug 21, 1888, pp1-3.

Jack Epstein, “The Real Old Gringo,” San Francisco Examiner, Sep 17, 1989, 209.

Kenneth M. Johnson, The Sting of the Wasp, (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1967).

Letters exchanged between E. B. Cocker to Collis Huntington, Jan-Jul, 1867, “Collis Potter Huntington Papers,” Syracuse University Libraries.

Letters exchanged between Mark Hopkins to Collis Huntington, Feb-Jul, 1867, “Collis Potter Huntington Papers,” Syracuse University Libraries.

“Magnificence,” The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Aug 25,  1876, p3.

Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).

Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

“Mr. Crocker as a Witness,” New York Tribune, Sep 21, 1887, p7.

“Mussel Slough,” The Wasp, Dec 9, 1881, p375.

“Mussel Slough,” The Wasp, Dec 9, 1881,  p391.

Nick Paumgarten, “Launching Mr. Whitehouse,” The New Yorker, Mar 20, 2006.

“Pacific Railway Affairs,” Democrat and Chronicle, Sep 21, 1887, p1.

[Railroad Barons East and West Threaten This Country], The Wasp, Nov 27, 1880, p261.

“Railway Matters,” The Pittsburgh Commercial, Sep 6, 1876, p1.

“Report of the Committee on Public Lands in relation to bill S. 445,” Senate Report No. 190, 44th Congress, 1st Session, (Washington: Government Printing Office), March 28, 1876.

“Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration,” Senate Report No. 689. 44th Congress, 2nd Session, (Washington: Government Printing Office), February 27, 1877, pp 666-688.

Richard Samuel West, The San Francisco Wasp An Illustrated History, (Easthampton, MA: Periodyssey Press, 2004).

Richard Saunders, Ambrose Bierce: The Making of a Misanthrope, Chronicle Books,‎ Jan 1, 1985.

Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011)

Robert Buckman, “The Life, Death and Legend of Ambrose Bierce,” Quill: A Magazine by the Society of Professional Journalists, December 20, 2013.

Roland De Wolk, American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford, (University of California Press, 2019).

“Royalty proverbially has its disquietudes…,” Feather River Bulletin, Sep 9, 1876, p2.

Salvador A. Ramirez, A Clash of Titans, (San Luis Rey, CA: The Tentacled Press, 2010).

Samuel Bowles, Across the continent a summer’s journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons and the Pacific states, with Speaker Colfax, (Springfield, Mass.: Samuel Bowles & Company, 1865).

Sheldon Whitehouse, Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy, (The New Press, 2017).

“Sisson, Crocker and Co.,” San Francisco Examiner, Jan 20, 1886, p3.

“Sisson, Crocker & Co.,” Truckee Republican, Feb 22, 1882, p3.

[Stanford, Crocker and Huntington are outlaws], The Wasp, Sept 30, 1882, p612.

“Stanford Dead,” The San Francisco Examiner, Jun 21, 1893, p1-2.

“Testimony Taken by the United States Pacific Railway Commission,” Senate Report, Vol. 7, No. 51, Part 8. 50th Congress, 1st Session, (Washington Government Printing Office), 1887, pp 3639-3695.

“Thanks to Congressman, Hisses for Huntington,” San Francisco Examiner, Jun 30, 1896, pp1-3.

“The Chinese Strike,” Sacramento Daily Union, Jul 3, 1867, p2.

“The Colton Case,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb 15, 1884, p2.

“The Fourth in Sacramento,” Sacramento Daily Union, Jul 6, 1867, p5.

“The Last Spike,” San Francisco Chronicle, Sep 6, 1876, p3.

“The Late Accident on the Railroad,” Appeal Democrat, Jun 27, 1867, p2.

“The Mountains Overcome,” Sacramento Daily Union, December 2, 1867, p2

“The Mongolian Question,” San Francisco Examiner, Nov 15, 1876, p3.

“The Railroad Celebration,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 10, 1869, p1,8.

Twelfth District Court, City and County of San Francisco: Central Pacific vs. Alfred A. Cohen, Statement of the Case, Copy in Huntington Library.

“Wallace et al. v Sisson et al.” California Unreported Cases Being Those Decisions Determined In The Supreme Court and the District Courts of Appeal of the State of California but not Officially Reported with Annotations Showing Their Present Value as Authority Reported and Edited by Peter V. Ross of the San Francisco Bar Author of “Inheritance Taxation,” “Probate Law and Practice ” etc. VOLUME 4 : (San Francisco Bender-Moss Company 1913 pp34-37.

[When the ” Chinese exclusion act ” was passed], The Wasp, Oct 20, 1883, p4.

“Which Will Yield?” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug 22, 1876, p3.

William Greer Harrison, “The Degeneracy of Ambrose Bierce,” San Francisco Call, Oct 20, 1895.