On December 2, 1865, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company of California was incorporated in San Francisco. The company’s first formal project was the construction of a rail line from San Francisco to San Diego. Timothy Phelps served as the first president of the Southern Pacific until 1868 when the company was purchased by a group of businessmen known as “The Associates,” better known in history as the Big Four: Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, and Mark Hopkins. The Associates founded the Central Pacific Railroad in 1861 and the company merged with Southern Pacific in the early 1870s. The Central Pacific-Southern Pacific Railroad played a key role in not only the development of railroad lines in California, but also across the United States, the obvious being the first Transcontinental Railroad completed on May 10, 1869. By 1877, the Southern Pacific controlled 85 percent of railroad traffic in California and it had grown over the years as one of the major freigh...