In 1861, four Sacramento shopkeepers invested $24,000 and built the most powerful corporation in the American West. The Southern Pacific Railroad would control 85% of California's railroad mileage, own millions of acres of land, bribe the state legislature for decades, and run San Francisco from its headquarters on Market Street. They called it the Octopus. This is the story of the Big Four — Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker — and the railroad empire they built from the Gold Rush through the Gilded Age. From the brutal construction of the transcontinental railroad through the Sierra Nevada, to the grand mansions on Nob Hill, to the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880, to the Supreme Court case that made corporations "people," to the rise of Governor Hiram Johnson and the Progressive movement that finally broke the machine.
