Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/194

 160 THE TOURIST'S CALIFORNIA men casting their lines for salmon and bass and catching them. The Crocker Art Gallery, a noteworthy collec- tion of paintings, reminds us that Sacramento was in 1861 the scene of a momentous conference between four of its active business men, one of whom was a grocer, two of whom were hardware merchants and the fourth a dealer in dry-goods. Stanford the grocer, Hopkins and Huntington the vendors of tools and gold-washers, and Crocker the draper, met to discuss with Judah, the en- gineer, the need for a continental railroad and the means for its construction. A railway, the first in California, had been laid between Sacramento and Folsom in 1856. In 1864 a line was extended from the capital to Newcastle in the direction of the Central Pacific's surveys for the overland route which was completed five years later in con- junction with the Union Pacific. The first time- card, issued June 6? 1864, was signed by Leland Stanford, President. Citizens were frank in their denunciation of the enterprise, which was com- monly known as " the Dutch Flat Swindle." One of the city's proudest possessions is the os- trich farm at 10th and W Streets. The pompous bi-peds prosper here, as does the orange, fully as well as in the South, owing to the sheltered warmth of this great trough of the Sacramento Valley, walled by two mountain ranges. The farm is one