The Southern Pacific system today embraces lines from Ogden and New Orleans on the east, to Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles on the west. The part of the system first built, however, and at all times the most important part of it, is that section reaching from a few miles west of Ogden, Utah, to the cities of Sacramento and San Francisco. This portion of the larger system was built and is owned by the Central Pacific Railroad Company.[1] It is therefore to the circumstances attending the construction of this portion of the line that attention will first be directed. Early Activities of Theodore Dehone Judah The promoter of the Central Pacific Railroad was a young engineer named Theodore Dehone Judah. Judah was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He obtained his first experience in railroad building on the Troy and Schenectady Railroad in New York. Later he built a railroad down the gorge of the Niagara River to Lewiston, served as resident engineer on the Erie Canal, and in 1854 had charge of the Buffalo and New York Railroad then building to connect with the Erie. This was a responsible position for a man with so brief a period of training. When Judah came to California in 1854 he was only twenty-eight years of age. He was soon to make it evident, however, that he possessed more than respectable engineering ability, while he also displayed a capacity for sustained enthusiasm in connection with the project for a transcontinental railroad which eventually overcame all obstacles and resulted in the formulation of definite and successful plans for a transcontinental line.[2] Judah began work in California as engineer of the Sacramento Valley Railroad. He left the service of the company, however, before the road was finished to Folsom. Subsequently he made a survey for a railroad from Sacramento to Benicia, and also one for a short branch on the California Central Railroad. Still later he was employed by the trustee of the Sacramento Valley Railroad, J. Mora Moss, and the superintendent, J. P. Robinson, to explore the Sierra Nevada Mountains for wagon road routes north of the south fork of the American River, and at the same time to act as agent for the Sacramento Valley Railroad in soliciting freight.