Book Alert / The Associates

The Associates -- Four Capitalists Who Created California by Richard Rayner, Norton '08, $23.95, 223 pages, ISBN #0393059138. Index, bibliographical note, source notes, unillustrated.

Author Richard Rayner sums up his new book better than a reviewer could:

"It's a legendary story, a central part of the American West's creation myth, and it's been told many different ways: as a kind of triumph of will, guts, and the American can-do spirit  over unimaginable difficulty and danger; as a tragedy, involving the virtual extermination of Native American cultures and the vast herds of buffalo that sustained them; as a race, between the Irish navies of the Union Pacific, laying track from the east, and the Chinese coolies of the Central Pacific, advancing from the west. All these versions have some validity. But really it's a story about cash, about rapacity. The railroad was built -- built, as opposed to dreamed of and talked about -- by men who cared only about money and were absolutely ruthless about money."

The story of the golden spike driven into the ground at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, completing construction of America's first transcontinental railroad, is better known than that of how it came to be. Rayner describes how four Sacramento, CA shopkeepers -- Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Collis Huntington -- joined forces to build the railroad but whose animating force wasn't social or economic progress but the search for money, money and more money.

It is curious that, in subtitling his book Four Capitalists Who Created California, Rayner gives such short shrift to Huntington's nephew Henry, characterizing him briefly as having used his inherited wealth to collect books and art. The real story is far more interesting and significant for California. Collis left his fortune to his young widow, Arabella, and his nephew (he had no children), who soon married and pooled their $100 million fortune (multiple billions today) into land development in Southern California, increasing land values by building interurban lines out to it, and then selling the enhanced land at huge profits.

Because of the huge footprint the Huntingtons were able to impress on greater Los Angeles, they created the urban sprawl for which Southern California is best known.  And with their other hand, they built the massive collection contained in the Huntington Library today. In short, no history of the structural creation of California is complete without major attention being given to Henry Huntington. Rayner is the author of two books of nonfiction and five novels.