Mansions on Nob Hill
Nob Hill in San Francisco has long been a symbol of the city's elegance and grace. Known originally as the California Street Hill, it became the home of San Francisco's wealthiest families in the 1870s. The city's elite were the "nabobs," (referring to the title of prominent governors of the Mogul empire in India) which was later shortened simply to "nobs."
On the crest of the hill sprawled the homes of the Big Four, the wealthiest and most powerful Californians of their generation. The home of Leland Stanford was on California Street where the Stanford Court Hotel stands today. Visitors to the magnificent Stanford home entered through a circular entrance hall, bathed in amber light from a glass dome in the ceiling seventy feet above. The family of Mark Hopkins lived just up the street, where the Mark Hopkins Hotel now stands. Topped by a crown of towers, gables and steeples, it looked like a fanciful medieval castle.
Charles Crocker's home was the grandest of them all, occupying an entire square block where Grace Cathedral stands today. It contained a fully equipped theater, library, and billiard room. An imposing seventy-six-foot tower offered Crocker an uninterrupted view of the entire Bay Area.
But the view was not so grand for Crocker's neighbor, a lowly San Francisco undertaker who refused to sell out when Crocker was buying up the block for his new residence. To spite the uncooperative undertaker, Crocker constructed a fence forty-feet high on three sides of his neighbor's property! The Crocker "spite fence" was denounced by the railroad's opponents as a galling symbol of the unrestrained wealth and power of the Big Four.
Following the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the Big Four established a virtual transportation monopoly in California and exercised great political power. Many of their fellow Californians came to believe that these four railroad tycoons had amassed too much wealth and power. They complained that the Big Four's transportation monopoly was draining the profit from other business enterprises in the state and that their political machine was corrupting California government.
Anger against the Big Four was frequently expressed in contemporary editorials and political cartoons. One of the most devastating cartoons appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1898. "Highwayman Huntington to the Voters of California" pictured the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad as a vicious gunman, complete with skull cufflinks and a garish diamond stickpin. Collis P. Huntington was not amused.
The following year, several bills aimed at silencing offending journalists were introduced in the railroad-dominated state legislature. One bill effectively banned the future publication of political cartoons. It prohibited the publishing of any drawing which reflected adversely upon the "honor, integrity, manhood, virtue, or reputation" of any individual. This anti-cartoon bill became law in 1899 and remained on the books for fifteen years, a chilling legacy from the era of the Big Four.
Born in Chicago in 1870, Frank Norris moved with his family to San Francisco when he was fourteen. Three years later, he was sent to Paris to study art, but was soon summoned home by his father who suspected that young Frank was wasting both his time and his money. Norris then enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied for four years but failed to graduate. After leaving college, Norris became a professional writer in San Francisco and later in New York. He was much influenced by the works of Émile Zola, and Norris's fiction is an important contribution to American naturalism.
In 1901 Norris published The Octopus, a gripping story of the struggle between California wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad. The farmers in the novel believe that they have been cheated by the railroad's deceptive land practices. The farmers also complain that the railroad charges extortionate freight rates to ship their products to market.
In one memorable scene, an angry farmer denounces the local railroad agent with these words: "What next? My God, why don't you break into our houses at night? Why don't you steal the watch out of my pocket, steal the horses out of the harness, hold us up with a shotgun; yes, 'stand and deliver; your money or your life.'"