Journalist and historian Carey McWilliams, long-time editor of The Nation, published the exceptional California history book California: The Great Exception in 1949, to commemorate the state’s first centennial. His core idea was that the California Gold Rush of 1849 essentially created the innovative, open, free-wheeling place we know today—a state of the United States, yes, but one more equal than all the others in part because of the great wealth it wielded.
Once the gold rush was on, the need to connect extremely isolated California to the rest of the U.S. become urgent. The problem was very real. When President William Henry Harrison died in 1841, for example, it took 110 days for that news to reach Los Angeles. In 1848, when gold was discovered, by land California was still 2,000 miles away from the existing western frontier. Other than traveling overland by horseback or wagon train, the only other way to go from the East coast to the West was by ship, which meant sailing all the way around the South American continent then north along the coast of two continents.
A visit to Old Sacramento offers an excellent introduction to gold rush-induced communications and transportation innovations. First came the stage coach—Wells Fargo the largest among various competing companies, becoming the Overland Mail Company by 1858. Then came the Pony Express, in 1860, which shortened the trip between East and West for communications—newspapers, mail, and messages—from about 25 days to just 10 days. Sacramento was its western terminus. But those ponies and their relentless relay lasted only about 18 months, suddenly made obsolete by the transcontinental telegraph in 1861.
The biggest breakthrough came in the 1860s, a story told in full by the wonderful California Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento. Here’s a little-known fact: The valley's first railroad, completed in 1856, ran the 22 miles between Folsom and Sacramento. But the railroad's engineer, Theodore Judah, dreamed of a transcontinental railroad connecting California growers and merchants to the rest of the nation. Judah convinced four Sacramento business leaders that this east-west link over the treacherous Sierra Nevada could be built. With the help of California's "Big Four"—Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford—he founded the Central Pacific Railroad Company, which soon began lobbying the U.S. Congress for federal construction loans. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation that finally authorized loans to construct a railroad route over Donner Pass—with the proviso that no money would be lent until 40 miles of track were laid.
For almost seven years, thousands of Chinese workers, seasoned in the California goldfields, picked tunnels through mountains of solid rock and hand-graded the railroad beds. In the spring of 1869, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads were ceremoniously joined at Promontory Point, Utah. As Oscar Lewis noted in his book The Big Four, the slogan of the day was: "California Annexes the United States." Half in arrogance and half in the spirit of play, the wildest of the western colonies, he noted, "prepared to take its place (near the head of the table) with the family of states."
