Leland Stanford: Big Four Railroad Baron, Governor and University Founder

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Leland Stanford was born in New York in 1824 and practiced law in Port Washington, Wisconsin until an 1852 fire destroyed his property, including a prized law library. He followed five brothers to California, opened a store for miners in Placer County and then a wholesale business in Sacramento. In 1861 he joined Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington, the Big Four, and engineer Theodore Judah to form the Central Pacific Railroad, with Stanford as president. Backed by Pacific Railway Act land grants and bonds, and contracting with a construction company the partners secretly owned, they met the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah in May 1869. Stanford later took control of the Southern Pacific as well.

As California's first Republican governor he cut the state debt in half, pushed forest conservation and founded the normal school that became San Jose State, yet also denounced Chinese immigrants while his railroad depended on Chinese workers, and funded the Bald Hills War against Native tribes. As a U.S. senator from 1885 to 1893 he proposed worker cooperatives and land backed currency. After his only son, Leland Jr., died of typhoid in Florence in 1884 at age 15, Stanford and his wife Jane gave about $40 million to found Leland Stanford Junior University on their Palo Alto stock farm. Collis Huntington ousted him from the Southern Pacific presidency in 1890, and he died in 1893. Jane Stanford died of strychnine poisoning in Hawaii in 1905, and the killer was never identified.

• During California's Great Flood of 1862 he rowed a boat through Sacramento's streets to his inauguration.
• Chinese laborers were lowered in baskets down Sierra Nevada cliffs to drill and pack explosives.
• To settle whether a galloping horse ever has all four hooves off the ground, he hired Eadweard Muybridge, whose tripwire rigged cameras produced the Sallie Gardner at a Gallop sequence.
• His 55,000 acre ranch in Tehama County held what was then the largest vineyard in the world.
• Future president Herbert Hoover was the university's first student in 1891.