It was in order to increase their popular support, and not alone for the sake of the money involved, that the promoters of the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway early began a campaign for small subscriptions. Claus Spreckels took pains to say that while large subscriptions were all right and desirable, it would be the $20,000, $10,000, and $5,000 stockholders who would control the property and its policy.[467] In February, after the first arrangements had been made for reaching the larger business interests of the city, attention was paid to the offering of facilities for subscription to all classes of investors in San Francisco. Districts were mapped out and assigned to canvassers.[468] The following month the _San Francisco Examiner_, which had taken a prominent part in the fight from the first, began to print subscription blanks in its daily issues. Arrangements were made by which persons might subscribe for fractions of shares by joining with their neighbors in share clubs. The _Examiner_ offered a gold watch to the first person forming such a club, and when there was doubt as to priority, compromised by giving two watches. The formation of the first colored club was given special mention, as was the decision of a colored club in San Francisco to make one paid-up share in the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway a tug-of-war prize to be competed for at its annual games. The winning team was to constitute a share club, and was to choose a trustee from among its members.[469] Appeal to Local Patriotism While devices such as these were perfectly ineffective as a means for raising large sums of money, they did give the new road valuable advertising, and helped to predispose the whole community in its favor. For the same reasons that actuated the promoters in their attempt to gain the support of investors of small means, the San Francisco committee also made appeals to the public which rested upon moral and patriotic as well as upon financial grounds. Without going into this aspect of the matter at length, it may be said that there has probably never been a commercial enterprise launched on the Pacific Coast so advertised, and praised, and predicted about as was the project of the San Joaquin Valley Railway. Participation in the movement became a test of local patriotism. The railroad took the aspect not merely of a business expedient, to be considered solely from the point of view of monetary gain, but it also became an expression of the hopes of expansion entertained by a generation of business men, strengthened by the accumulated antagonism of years between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the shipping public.