need some facts?

Question

i've searched many books, internet articles, wikipedia etc... but i can't find what i'm looking for!
i'm writing a report on the central pacific railroad, and i need some specific facts about the unfair practices and scandal involving the big four (not including labor exploitation i have that down)
any help would be great!

Answer 1

been searching for you for awhile now, and i can't find alot of scandal for the central pacific...quite a bit for the union pacific tho.

here is the little bit of scandal i was able to dig up.
By early summer 1863 things were not going well. The railroad was running out of cash, and a widening rift had developed between Judah and Stanford, Huntington, Crocker and Hopkins—who were now becoming known as the "Big Four." Judah disliked the fact that Charles Crocker was given the contract to build a section of line, and wanted to use the completed part of the railroad as collateral for loans to stay afloat until the government bonds became available. The Big Four favored going deeper into personal debt to support the railroad rather than lower the line's credit rating by borrowing against it. There were other disagreements: soon Judah and his supporters on the board were excluded from important decisions. Matters came to a head at the end of September when both camps adopted a put-up-or-shut-up compromise. The Big Four agreed to buy out Judah's interest in the railroad for $100,000, and in turn offered to let him buy them out on the same terms if he could raise the funds. If Judah wanted to run the railroad here was his opportunity, otherwise he could take the money and leave. He boarded ship for New York giving the impression that he was about to secure financial backing sufficient to buy out his partners and take over the enterprise. Whatever his plan, Theodore Judah did not live to carry it out. While crossing the Isthmus of Panama he contracted yellow fever, and died in New York.

Answer 2

It was planned by Theodore Judah, authorized by Congress in 1862 and financed and built through "The Big Four" (who also called themselves "The Associates"), who were Sacramento, California businessmen Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. Crocker was in charge of construction; much of the labor were Chinese workers. The first rails were laid in 1863 and the golden spike, connecting it to the Union Pacific railroad to Omaha, was hammered on May 10, 1869. Coast-to-coast travel in 8 days now replaced wagon trains or months-long sea voyages.
By setting different wages for whites and Chinese - each having different elasticities of supply - and using Chinese in the menial and dangerous jobs, with whites in the better positions, the two groups were complementary rather than interchangeable. Calculations thus prove higher levels of exploitation of the Chinese than in previous studies.
2. The dubious financial practices of the men who ran the railroads--they controlled every aspect of the rail system from real estate to construction and thus found it easy to engage in profiteering--earned them the pejorative title "robber barons." Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton offers a searing critique of the robber barons' monopolistic business practices in her novel The Squatter and the Don. Featuring the four men who headed the California railroad monopoly (known as the "Big Four") as characters in her book, she indicts their immoral business manipulations and unfair control over the economic resources of the state. In the novel, the Big Four, in collusion with Congress, ensure the failure of a proposed rail line, interfere with the prosperity of San Diego, and create financial hardships for honest working people. As Ruiz de Burton so vividly demonstrates in her portrait of the fate of San Diego, exclusion from the rail line could spell doom for a town.
See source.

Answer 3

google central pacific railroad. I just did and found several sites with detail information.

Answer 4

If your school has databases, then look through those. Your librarian can help you with that. There might be some old newspaper articles that you can read or some papers. It's amazing what you can find in your library!