Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1888-08-21
EXPRESSIONS OF THE PRESS.
Lebors Closed. but Monument Left
Which VIII Endure Forever.

By the death of Charles Crocker Cali
fornia has lost one of her foremost citizens.
For over twenty-five years he has
been closely identified with the pro-
gress of the State whose development
is so largely due to the great enterprise of
which he was one of the originators. He
has been taken from the scene of his
labors, but he has left behind MIN monu-
ment which will endure forever. So long
as the United States shall stand, his name
will be remembered as one of the four
earnest men whose far-seeing minds con-
oeived the gigantic project of spanning the
continent with bands of iron, and who by
their perseverance and indomitable energy
carried their plans to successful COM
pletion in the face of difficulties that at
first seemed insurmountable. The lives Of
men like Charles Croker afford useful
lessons. They serve to show what brains
and industry can accomplish under free
institutions. From peddling newspapers
in the streets of an interior New York
town to constructing and owning a vast
railroad system seems almost to great a
stride to be taken in one lifetime, yet that
is the history in brief of the man whose
earthly remains now lie cold in death. He
was in the truest sense of the
words 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 record of struggles with ad-
versity, of misfortunes bravely met and of
obstacles calamity overcome. His 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. Per-
haps his most manifest characteristic was
his strong and determined will. With
him, to conceive purpose was to execute
it; fortuitous circumstances might inter-
pose delays, but the plan once formed was
to be carried out if well-directed human
effort could accomplish that end. In 1849,
fred with the stories of golden discoveries
by the waters of the Pacific, he was about
to undertake the trip across the continent
when he saw all his little accumulations OF
eight or ten years swept away by fire. But
he went to work again, and one year later
found him, at the age of twenty-eight, on
the arduous march across the plains with
an emigrant train. After a comparatively
brief experience of the uncertainties of a
miners existence, he devoted himself to
mercantile pursuits, and was fairly on the
road to fortune, when the fire again left
him penniless. He was then absent in
his former home in Indiana, whittier he
had gone to take for his wife the girl
whose love he had won while work
ing in her fathers lumber mill
But this second misfortune could not
81 IL 81 Is GoI.fo-
MIA, and resumed business with no capital
but the reputation that he had made for
industry and honesty in all his dealings.
Success rewarded his efforts, and in 1852
he found himself in position to cooperate
with Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and
Coils p. Huntington in what then seemed
to so many the visionary scheme of build
ing a railroad that should unite the COM
merce of the Atlantic and Pacific shores.
People in the East and many in the West,
pointing at the engineering difficulties to
be encountered, ridiculed the idea that a
work of such magnitude could be accom-
plished by men whom they were pleased to
call country store-keepers;" but the men
with when Charles Croker was associated
were of the same stamp and nodded in
the same mold with himself. In the face
of ridicule, in the face of disasters that
sometimes seemed almost like defeat, these
brave men persevered and finally accom-
plished the task they had set before them.
They found California State in name, but
in effect an outlying province cut off from
the rest of the world by trackless desert
on the one hand and an ocean on the
other; they made her an integral
portion of the United States. But their
work did not end here. From the main
line which they thus constructed other
lines have branched out, new enterprises
have been undertaken, remote points that
were otherwise inaccessible have been
tapped, millions of acres Of rich soil have
been opened to settlement and cultivation,
the OK team and the mule train have given
way before the rush of the iron horse, the
commerce and the markets Of the world
have been brought to our doors, and all
this in one generation by the well-directed
efforts of the man from whom the breath
of life has Just passed and his associates in
business. Wealth came to him as the re-
ward of his life's work, and he had earned
it; but his fortune princely as it was, is
but as drop in the ocean, compared with
the added wealth which the successful COM
pletion of the magnificent enterprise with
which he had so much to do, gave to Cali