HOW TO GET STRONG
for goods, which sold at a large profit; the next known of him he was travelling in the South on his own hook; at twenty-two, with his brother Solon, opened a country store at Oneonta, New York; March 15, 1849, sailed for California; detained three months at the Isthmus, he made some money there, so that the twelve hundred dollars he had started with became five thousand dollars when he reached Sacramento; there he established the hardware-house of Huntington & Hopkins, which is there yet; bought supplies low, sold high; would give something for anything not perishable, till it was said: "If you cannot sell elsewhere, go to Huntington; he'll buy and pay you cash"; in 1856 he had a fortune; one of the first to see the need of a railroad east; he got seven others to join him in the first survey across the mountains; in 1861 the Central Pacific Railroad Company was organized with a capital of eight million five hundred thousand dollars, and he went to Washington with maps and charts to urge its construction and get government aid; and in 1864 Congress agreed to give lands and bonds to aid in the construction, upon which Mr. Huntington said: "We have drawn the elephant; now let us see if we can harness him up." He then came east to enlist the aid of capital; and "the story of his experience in the negotiation of bonds offers an example of financial achievement, in the face of disbelief in the practicability of the great work and doubt of the value of the security proposed, which stamps the daring leader in the enterprise as one of the greatest financiers of the century.
"The faith of the four men, Huntington, Hopkins, Stamford, and Crocker, is illustrated by the characteristic way in which they solved the first problem of construction, when they agreed to pay personally for the labor of eight hundred men on the road for one year, and pledged their private fortunes to meet the obligations they assumed. The construction-race with the Union Pacific, which was rushed westward, while the Central Pacific was pushed eastward, created unbounded excitement and enthusiasm as the wires flashed across the continent daily the progress made. The tremendous strain, the anxieties and difficulties of this construction, can never be adequately told. Freights, prices of material, and wages rose enormously, and the necessity of paying in gold coin in California at a time when gold was at a high premium was an aggravating feature of these difficulties. A hundred discouraging problems arose, under the burdens of which the build-
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