There is no doubt that a good deal of dissatisfaction with the transcontinental system was felt first and last by shippers to and from the terminal cities. Yet, after all, the situation of these cities as a group was excellent. The communities which were really handicapped were the towns intermediate between the Pacific terminals and the East, towns which paid higher rates for less service than did the terminal cities, and which found that this condition not only increased the cost of living to their consumers, but prevented their merchants from enjoying a profitable distributing trade. It seems probable that the associates intended from the beginning to charge the mountain towns more on through hauls than was exacted from towns on the coast. Huntington relates a conversation which took place at Carson, Nevada, in 1861, between Stanford, Dr. Strong, Mr. Crocker, and himself, representing the railroad, and some twenty representative men of Nevada. The Nevada people observed that Huntington kept a pretty good hardware store, but that he was likely to leave it in the mountains if he started to build a railroad in Nevada. Huntington replied that he would look out for that, but, he continued, when the road was built he proposed to charge through rates which, while less than the Nevada people were paying for goods which then came to San Francisco by boat and were subsequently teamed across the mountains, would be materially greater than the rates to San Francisco. “We shall charge you for bringing back,” said he, “almost as much as we shall charge from New York.” After the road was built Huntington says he met one of these same men with whom he had talked in 1861. “Said I, ‘You recollect that talk we had in the Curry House in 1861?’ ‘Yes, oh yes.’ Well, we talked about that. He said, ‘You’ve got me there, Huntington.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘I said you would grumble. Now,’ said I, ‘you shut up.’”[405] Objections It is to be presumed that Mr. Huntington’s rejoinder was effective in the particular discussion which he relates. Yet the grievances of the interior towns found full and repeated expression after 1869, and indeed are still emphatically presented at the present day. The more fundamental criticisms of the transcontinental rate system are the following: The principal objection directed against the whole adjustment is that it leads to charges to intermediate points which are prima facie unreasonable. Speaking of the rates on iron and steel, a representative of the Traffic Bureau of Utah called the attention of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce in 1918 to the fact that the rate on iron and steel articles for export from Chicago territory to Pacific Coast terminals was 40 cents per hundred weight or 3.54 mills per ton per mile. He continued: