Coloma

The trip every (at least Northern) California school kid has to – or had to in the day – take. And well worth it: The spot where gold was discovered in 1848, setting off the California Gold Rush and the 49ers (not the football team), said to be the largest migration in American history.

There is nothing like actually being at the location where something significant that shaped our world took place. The reproduction of the mill is excellent, the location is attractive and the visitor center just big enough to tell the story but not so big as to bore a child.

Two qualifications anyone would like to see the state parks people fix: First, the signage coming in that tell you where to park, where the mill is, where the visitor center sits is, at best, inadequate. First time visitors will often drive back and forth trying to figure it out. Second, the placards saying diaries of the workers from “the morning” of Marshall’s discovery are just plain incorrect. The diaries they refer to come from Christmastime the month before.

Sutter’s Fort

This handsome, sprawling California monument doesn’t get the respect it deserves. It is a pleasure to walk around and poke into the many excellent exhibits. People from overseas seem to be more interested in this important and attractive monument than Californians, who may not know their lives were shaped here to some not insignificant extent. One big problem, which the state parks is not so great at acknowledging much less fixing, is navigation: The handout map for visitors bears little relevance to the way the simple place is laid out. The staff’s indifference to this easily resolvable problem was rather more disturbing.

Stanford Mansion

Many 19th century mansions are surprisingly small and plain compared to the ostentatious extremes of even upper middle-class Americans today, much less those with great wealth – or great bank credit.  This Sacramento building is a little different, in that even a jaded visitor will see how profligate Stanford was even when he was just beginning to amass the wealth of taxpayer subsidies for the railroad. We can’t see Stanford’s enormously more grandiose mansions in Palo Alto or San Francisco anymore as they are gone, but the Sacramento home is a good indicator. It would be wonderful if the people who run the place could present some graphic context of how other, working people, lived in Sacramento at the time. Especially the Chinese immigrants who actually built the Central and then Southern Pacific.

Stanford University

People come from around the world to wander around the huge grounds of this one-of-a-kind university that is the true core of Silicon Valley. Its great, if somewhat muted, wealth is everywhere, so much so, one wonders if an errant leaf were to fall on one of the manicured grounds, would a team of horticulturalists in biohazard suits not swiftly arrive in Apache Warship helicopters and promptly tend to the insult. One may find a light dust in some of the gleaming hallways, but probably only if gold.

Despite the many jokes it must endure, and serious questions it should answer, Stanford University is a great institution. Its contributions to California, the United States and the world are immense.

Del Monte Hotel

Charles Crocker built the Del Monte just south of the town of Monterey, which was then a sleepy fishing village not tourist destination.  Fire destroyed the first building and a subsequent inferno did the same. Crocker died there in 1888. Today, the building has one of the grandest interiors of any public building in California. And it’s owned by the American people – although most will never have an opportunity to see their property.

It’s on military land, specifically the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

If you are an active member of the military or a veteran – or accompanied by one –  you can get in if you follow the process outlined on its website: https://my.nps.edu/lodging.

Dealing with the military can be a massive headshaking headache, but if you appreciate great California architecture and history, it will be worth it.

Vina

California’s legendary Central Valley is, among the cognoscenti, known as the Big Valley but psychologically is divided into two: From about Stockton on down it’s the San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton north, the Sacramento Valley. I noticed a relatively recent L.A. magazine put the kibosh on saying, writing, or referring to “Cali,” instead noting it as the mark of an Auslander (foreigner/outsider). Real Californians never use the word. (Or ‘Frisco’ for San Francisco, btw.) Being a real Californian, I so get it. But it’s not nearly as bad as some of the more obnoxious types from a particular part of the country we Californians are too polite to name who just moved to San Francisco and refer to people who live elsewhere in the Bay Area as “tunnel & bridge” folk. Here’s a one–way Greyhound ticket outta here for anyone who even thinks that. Stop me, I could go on all day about people who say “sneakers” instead of tennis shoes and… OK, OK, I’m stopping. I’m writing about our visit to Vina.

It’s a great drive up or down the Sacramento Valley, especially if you can stay off Interstate 5. It’s bakin’ hot in the summer and can get pretty darn cold wintertime, not to mention the tule fog. The vast groves of orchards bearing fruits and nuts are easy on the eye, especially the mature trees that may not produce as much as the younger ones but are spectacularly more attractive. Rice is also grown in the flooded fields thanks to the crazy and just plain wrong federal and state water policies, but that’s another story. About three hours north of the Bay Area you will get to Vina, still just a village, with a tumbly down old tractor barn, a great place to camp – Woodson Bridge State Recreation Area along the mighty Sacramento River – and, of course, straight-as-a-ruler railroad tracks running right through town.

But wait. There’s more: The Roman Catholic Trappist Abbey of New Clairvaux, which makes excellent wines and serves as a retreat. (It is also the place where former Gov. Jerry Brown regularly finds solace & sanctuary.) Ask them about the cloisters from the Hearst fortune. The monks have renovated part of one of Stanford’s brick barns and use it for the tasting room. The vineyards, the adjacent walnut orchards, the funky little town all suffused with history are all just plain wonderful.

Btw, do not call it Vinn–yah. It’s pronounced Vye–Nah. In Ta–Hame–ah County. Don’t be an Auslander.

We flew to Chicago, and that evening drove up to Port Washington. It was a fast, pleasant drive in the middle of June 2016. We stayed at the Holiday Inn by the water, which was probably a mistake since I discovered only the next day a grand old hotel in town that is much more my style.

I had expected a seedy dockside burg but was pleasantly surprised to find Port Washington is a tidy, prosperous town of about 11k. The waterside facilities are first rate and probably paid for by the gi-normous power plant just on the south side of town. The main street – Franklin – is a little Carmel-like although I was relieved not to smell candles or soap. And no guys were wearing sweaters over their shoulders (arms not in sleeves) strolling past immaculately detailed black BMWs.

The local historical society is prosperous. The ladies at the Ozaukee Historical Society in nearby Cedarburg said they had heard the Port Washington people got a super generous donation, which is how they bought their building and filled it with cool stuff. Everyone at both places were very helpful. Midwesterners’ famous good manners go a long way with me.

At Port Washington, they had two manila folders with some old Leland Stanford material and a very cool map of their town circa 1850. I spent the afternoon there and was grateful for it. They showed me their basement, musty and filled with more cool old stuff. On the top floor, a desk that reputadly belonged to Stanford waited for me. After I left, I came across a bench and plague commemorating the site of what they call the Stanford Building. It’s now a bowling alley. Some of the original bricks were sent to the university, at the request of the then archivist. (When I asked the prickly Stanford University Archivist about them, he said he had no clue.)

Next day we went to Cedarburg, maybe the prettiest town we saw in Wisconsin. The people at the Ozaukee County Historical Society also had some Leland Stanford holdings and they were generous with their time and help.

A big Thank You to all of them.

Golden Spike National Historic Site is a wonderfully quiet, windswept, desert bookmark of Americana. The drive through the desert from Salt Lake City – as a good a place to begin as any – is about two hours. After getting off Interstate 15, heading north, making the left turn west on Utah State Route 83, a certain peace that descends on a traveler on a lone desert highway settles all freeway nerves. Pass the Walmart distribution center (that takes a while, even at 70 mph) out in the middle of the scrub, a honkytonk called Mims and then the sci–fi mysterious Orbital ATK Test and Research Operations complex before you turn off the road for the last jaunt to the historic site.

It is simple, down–to–earth, and staffed by friendlier–than–some National Park Service folk. The arch–typical railroad buff is well represented here, but you don’t have to know, or even care, about rail gauge widths, locomotive torque ratios, or X–trims.

It’s a good trip and great American place.

My first trip on the New York Thruway was when I was 16, hitchhiking that summer from Stamford, Connecticut where I met a pen pal, to Niagara Falls to see a band that another friend of mine’s brother was playing in. Why not? I was 16.

Naturally, I had trouble at the Canadian border with the authorities when I crossed it just for fun one afternoon. And there is the tale of the mosquitoes. And my hitchhiking sign. Other stories for other times.

More than 40 years later, I landed at the Albany Airport, rented a red Nissan Stanza from Hertz and pointed the grill towards Cazenovia College.

But first, I stopped at the site of the Bull’s Head tavern, which now is the New York State Worker’s Compensation Board and a massive parking lot at 100 Broadway. Next door is Ideal Food Basket (for “underserved neighborhoods”) and a Family Dollar Store. Oh, also a KFC. Down the street a few hundred yards towards the river and vestiges of the original Erie Canal is the Albany County Sewer District. A nice guy in a septic tank tanker truck helped me with directions. You get the idea. It ain’t Palo Alto.

Then up the Thruway to the handsome country village of Cazenovia (pop. 2,600) and the pleasantly tiny and tidy campus of Cazenovia College where I stared at the ostentatiously ornate frame around the implacable portrait of Amasa Leland Stanford hanging the lobby of the president’s office.

There is one original exterior building left on the campus itself and the old church across the street – all that’s left of what he might have recognized there.

A nervous college publicist introduced me to the school’s grouchy history teacher, who was also the recognized authority on the school’s past. I bought his book and thanked them for the tour.

The Oneida Institute of Science and Industry and Clinton Liberal Institute are no longer extant, though close by. I had to wonder how young Stanford got to the region from his Albany home 130 miles downstream. Did he take a riverboat up the Hudson and then the Mohawk or a barge up the Erie Canal? Or did he ride horseback or take a wagon?

For that matter, did he make his way to Wisconsin by way of the Canal and then cross the Great Lakes? One way or the other, it would have been a great voyage and an adventure for that simple farm boy born in a bar. Wish I coulda taken it with him.

The train today from the Bay Area up to the summit and then down to the Nevada desert and across the plains and Rockies to Chicago is called the California Zephyr. A pretty name, an evocative one, but likening a train to a wind somehow seems odd. It may be the least of one’s trivial concerns when chugging up from the Central Valley floor, gently ascending the foothills and then suddenly into the mountains. The trip, which can be made in very comfortable if not very swift or often on–time Amtrak trains today qualifies as spectacular. As is so often the case, there are many foreign visitors on the Zephyr and not always so many Americans. It’s great our guests are interested in us, but what’s up with the lack of American interest in our land and story?

We stopped in Salt Lake City, saw the sights, had dinner with a great old friend, and returned the Bay Area the next day, sleeping overnight in today’s poor version of a Pullman. The porter, however, was truly cool.

Just beyond Sacramento to the East 10 miles there is a sense of amusement to actually see how Stanford and Crocker hoodwinked the taxpayers in having Honest Abe declare the Sierras start at Arcade Creek. Using a simple online tool such as Google maps, you can watch your progress and see the first elevation bumps are after Dry Creek just before Roseville and then the geography truly changes at Antelope Creek in Rocklin.

If you sit on the right side of the train going up and east, you will have to pay attention after Colfax if you want to get the full measure of going around what railroad buffs call Cape Horn. And even if you are in the train’s observation car, it will be difficult to truly appreciate the civil engineering of the dozens of tunnels the workers bored through the granite mountains they could not circumvent.

If you are an American (especially Californian!) of Chinese ancestry, this is a trip in particular you will want to travel to begin to appreciate the enormous achievement completed by the immigrants who took nothing for granted and were instrumental in the nation-building that is the United States of America. Regardless of what country or continent you or your ancestors came from in this land of immigrants, this ride is one where all of us can and should pay homage and tribute.

There is no explicit intent in American Disruptor to compare Leland Stanford or his cohorts to any politician of our time, though even the most casual reader may certainly see unsettling similarities to at least one outsized politician today. It is simply that history does, indeed and often tragically, repeat itself. This seems to be especially true for we Americans, who have successfully sold almost everything using the word “New!” for decades, and endlessly repeat clichés such as “don’t look back.” One might suggest “once burned, twice shy,” has far more value for us.

Blowing the stereotype, the profiling if you will, that these are the concerns of old folks, are young history majors at American colleges and universities who soon grow accustomed to someone asking them what they intend to do after they graduate. They know the code & real question – Americans are generally too polite to ask it outright: Why would you major in something that doesn’t get you a job that makes a lot of money and could make you famous? Many history teachers, unfortunately, are a loss to get in front of this remedial line of inquiry.

My remedial answer is the simplest and repeats perhaps the most famous, if famously unheeded, remark by George Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” To that, I might offer one of my personal favorites by Henri Bergson: “The present contains nothing more than the past, and what was found in the effect was already in the cause.” And there’s always Churchill: “How strange it is that the past is so little understood and so quickly forgotten.”

For me, ‘the solace of history’ is my go-to thought when it looks as if the sky is falling above our crazy, everyday world. We’ve been through far worse before. And we came out not just upright and respirating, but stronger.

History is, in essence, completely about today and the future. Plotting the curve from the past and perhaps – just perhaps – getting in front of disasters ahead. Everyone loves a good story and your story – our story – is called history.

Tell it.

American Disruptor is not a book about Stanford University or the transcontinental railroad, although both are significant aspects of the saga. It’s actually not even a book about Leland Stanford. It’s really a story about how the nation – and the world – changed from an ancient, simple, stable, agrarian culture to the very modern, highly complex, insanely turbulent one we live in today.

Leland Stanford is arguably the most appropriate avatar of that historically revolutionary change.

American Disruptor is not meant to be a slow slog through the dead past. It aims to be a brisk ride showing the raucous, if deeply sourced, story of how we got where we are now and perhaps where we appear to be heading.

American Disruptor will annoy some people. There are, on occasion, honest disputes about events that have taken place more than a century past, many of which are among notable scholars who have come to conclusions about situations with differing accounts. This is a sign of health. Beware of occupations where everyone celebrates each other and never openly questions each other’s work.
As reporter Seymour Hersch once noted about journalism, “the news is true. It’s not the truth.” The same can very much be said for the discipline of history.

American Disruptor, although deals somewhat extensively with the story of building the western end of the transcontinental railroad, it will be obvious, is not a railroad book.

The romance of the rails is a familiar trope to American audiences, and one I have certainly appreciated since I was 5–years–old and rode the Southern Pacific from Oakland to Sacramento and back for my then best friend’s birthday party. Regardless, it is very much my impression that the world doesn’t need another old railroad book, gee whiz, scalding, or otherwise.

It’s not that railroads are a 19th century anachronism. In fact, I have taken those same rails from the Bay Area to the state capital and beyond many times in researching American Disruptor, as well as many other occasions for investigations into modern projects such as a state Senate probe into the disgraceful history of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge construction. One of the main reasons I take the train – now leased by the state on Union Pacific tracks – is to have the ability to get online with my laptop and cell phone. Thank you, Silicon Valley and Leland Stanford.

Because the transcontinental railroad is how Stanford accumulated his immense fortune, and because toward the end his life he, and his widow Jennie, used much of what was left of those riches, ill-gained as they were, to start the university bearing his name, the story of the railroad is, again, obviously, important. My object is to tell that part of the tale accurately but succinctly.

The noted scholar Robert W. Fogel, who undertook a scientific dissection of the Union Pacific almost half a century ago, knew what he was up against: the doxology of the cross–continental railroad epic story. Fogel, aside from being a world class scholar who won the Nobel prize 33 years later for economic science, was nobody’s fool. He wisely pointed out towards the end of his slim, but crucial work, that even the crimes coloring the building of the road have enhanced its appeal. “Once formed, myths are sturdy things;” Fogel wrote – and one can almost hear him sighing. “They can withstand the findings of a dozen documented studies.”

The wonderfully complex, significant, and still controversial story of the transcontinental railroad is told in intricate detail in many books. Some of the best along with Fogel’s The Union Pacific Railroad: A Case of Premature Enterprise are David Haward Bain’s Empire Express, Richard White’s Railroaded, and Stuart Daggett’s Chapters on the History of the Southern Pacific.

As a student of history trained at what is often called the most rigorous university history department in the nation, UC Berkeley, I know full well the true utility of the discipline is to help prevent us from making the same mistakes as the past – a seemingly futile but worthy goal.

Consequently, American Disruptor is not a book simply about events that took place a long time ago. Rather it is also about our future – a future in which we look to technology to salve our wounds, create our possibilities, and enable us to live better lives. Which, of course, is how many 19th century Americans regarded the railroad. The attendant victories and disasters parallel to the high tech of Leland Stanford’s enterprises during his life and that of the one born and incubated at his university prove the point.

Unlike authors of some well-known railroad books, I have neither sought nor accepted any subvention from the railroad companies, or other interests, examined. This is not to say there has been some collusion or glad–handing of the subjects in some of those volumes, but as any good reporter knows, the appearance of a conflict of interest inevitably, if not purposely, tarnishes the work.

Unlike the very few earlier biographies of Leland Stanford, which are antiquated, seriously incomplete, and carry the hagiographical weight of their time, I have not found reason to simply eulogize him in death nor vilify him as he was in life. Leland Stanford’s story, as with all of ours, is clearly a far more complicated, complex one in which he played hero and goat and much between.

American Disruptor is, instead, what the wild, flamboyant, rowdy life of Leland Stanford was like and has wrought. I hope that will be obvious to all who ride this train.