With all of the stark contradictions in his character, Leland Stanford—a man best known as a railroad magnate, California governor, and putative philanthropist—embodies American typecasts that have bedeviled us for centuries. Today’s infamously disruptive, get-rich-quick, world-altering, ill-mannered, entrepreneurial culture traces directly back to this enigmatic, mythical man.
He had a quintessential American provenance. His earliest American ancestor arrived in New England a few years after the Mayflower moored at Plymouth Rock. A later Stanford fought in the Revolutionary War. (That ancestor’s widow had to fight the government to get his pension. How American is that?) Stanford’s people moved west to what is now Albany, New York and ran a bar called the Bull’s Head tavern, where he was born in 1824.
Leland’s real first name was Amasa, after a troublesome Old Testament figure who joined a failed rebellion against his own uncle, the duplicitous warrior king, David. Leland dropped Amasa in favor of his benign middle name—which means meadow, although Stanford was hardly so open and agreeable.
He spent most of his life altering himself, moving about, shifting. And he failed at just about everything. As a student, he was a repeated dropout who never graduated from what today would be high school. He claimed to have passed the New York State bar, but the record indicates he did not. He was, not surprisingly, a classic American anti-intellectual, who disparaged people with better educations. Later in life he liked to boast that he hired Harvard and Yale graduates to run his San Francisco street cars, his point being they had wasted their time at university.
By the time he was 28, Stanford was dead broke. Letters, manuscripts, and other documents reveal he fled in 1852 to California, where his brothers had already established a successful retail business. With understandable skepticism, the brothers sent Stanford up to the mountainous Gold Country to open a branch store, to see how he would do—and for the first time ever, he did fine. He got himself appointed local justice of the peace, opened a bar he called the Empire Saloon to honor his New York tavern past, and used the joint to dispense justice and liquor.
When the brothers moved out of their Sacramento headquarters and on to other enterprises, Stanford came back down the hill to take over—and met the partners who would help him accrue his vast wealth. A hardware store next door was run by two successful entrepreneurs named Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins. Another prosperous merchant of carpets and shoes by the name of Charles Crocker worked just around the corner. These men recruited young Stanford into one of the biggest, most audacious gambits in American history: financing and building the transcontinental railroad.