El Buscaderos-Cowboy Action Shooting-Feature

On June 28, 1861 three California merchants founded the Central Pacific Railroad Company at Sacramento: Leland Stanford acted as president of the company, Collis P. Huntington as vice-president and Mark Hopkins as treasurer. In a few tears these three and Charles Crocker, who had joined them in the venture, came to be called the "Big Four". Originally, their enterprise relied less on their efforts than on the single-handed determination of a young engineer from Connecticut, Theodore D. Judah. At the age of twenty-eight in 1855, Judah had laid out the rails of the Sacramento Valley Railroad to serve the mining regions along the Sierra Nevada. This had stirred Judah’s ambition to promote a transcontinental system. By the late fifties Judah had advanced engineering concepts that he felt would make possible the construction of railroad over the Sierra. For this he was ridiculed in both Washington and California and was referred to as "crazy Judah". Some thought he was simply operating a scam. Judah, however, had considerable construction knowledge gained in the East and California and his experience gave his ideas certain credibility. By personally lobbying individual congressmen, he was able to get a railroad bill passed. It was also Judah who had interested Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker. His line, which only ran from Sacramento to Folsom, became the basis of the Central Pacific and Judah was the chief engineer.

On July 1, 1862 congress passed the Pacific Railroad Bill. I addition to a four hundred foot right-of-way, a generous land government land subsidy was given the builders. In all, the railroad builders were entitled to 1,280,000 acres of public land for every hundred miles of track they laid plus some three million dollars in credit for each of the two companies. Both companies were obligated to build twenty-five miles of track each year and the thirty-year bonds (at six percent interest) could not be redeemed in cash until the last forty miles of track had been laid.

Judah and his company had also induced Congress to grant them a federal loan subsidy of $16,000 per mile for track laid across level land, $32,000 a mile in foothills and $48,000 per mile across mountain area. Judah’s company was able to convince Congress that the foothills of the Sierra Nevada were only ten miles from Sacramento. In a few years all except Judah were multimillionaires. Judah, the originator of the idea, died prematurely in 1863. He was en route to seek Eastern capital to buy out his partners when he was stricken with Yellow fever, which he had contracted on a previous trip to the East via the Isthmus of Panama.

It seems likely the original intent of Judah’s partners was to amass the lucrative federal subsidies by laying down the roadbed as quickly as possible. Crocker admitted in 1883: "We built that road for the profits we could make building it and when we got it done we didn’t know what the devil to do with it." Stanford too stated years later that he and his colleagues would gladly have sold their railroad in 1869 for ten cents on the dollar. Judah had apparently fought some bitter battles against his partners’ desire to substitute rapid construction for sound engineering. Perhaps due to "Crazy Judah" the construction actually proved to be quite enduring.