Then four men, Huntington, Crocker, Stanford, and Hopkins, determined to build the road that he had surveyed. Again the pessimists said: "It is impossible; you will never raise the money to build a railroad over the Sierra Nevadas." But the four men worked away, and little by little got the money. As they built they were harassed on every hand. Labor troubles in those days were terrible. The President of the company said, "I don't know what we are going to do." Crocker, the man who had undertaken to see after the actual building of the road, said: "I know what I am going to do; I am going to get help to build that railroad somewhere." And so he sent a man to China to secure a lot of Chinese laborers. These were brought to this country, and the result was that with those Chinamen, in defiance of the President of his company, who had said that Chinamen should not be employed, Crocker built the railroad. And now you can cross the Sierra Nevada range without a thought of care because of the dominant, insistent will of that man and his associates.
The fact of the matter is, if you are going to achieve anything in life you will have to be "drivers"--you will have to keep at it until you succeed. You will have to be a slave driver, and you yourself will be the slave, willingly, gladly, joyously, of your own purpose. Do you want to be a slave to your own purpose? Do you want to _do_ the things that you have willed to do? Some of us get the idea that bondage--to be bound to anything--is always an unpleasant thing. Not at all! Bind yourself to a high and noble purpose. Make yourself a slave to it in the sense of conscientiously sticking to it. Now drive yourself, and compel yourself to go ahead and do that which you have determined to do.
When I think of the old pioneers who walked and rode across this country to reach California; when I think of the many dangers, difficulties, and hardships that faced those men; when I see that they were living illustrations of this thought I am trying to bring out--I wish I had only time and space to give a definite account, instead of a mere synopsis of the kind of things they had to endure. They were surrounded by hostile Indians; again and again their lives were in jeopardy. Now and then they came to great sloughs and marshes, and their wagons and animals were bogged. They had to find their way across the dangerous quicksands; hard storms came and they had whirlwinds and floods to contend with. Now and again they found themselves in the heart of canyons, where there was no apparent way out; yet they went on, and on, until they either died or reached the land for which they had started!