In later years there was discussion concerning the right of the Southern Pacific to refuse to build the stretch of road lying between Tres Pinos and Alcalde, connecting the San Benito and the San Joaquin valleys. It was insisted that the contract implied in the Congressional land grant of 1866 was an entire one, and that the amount of land given had been fixed in consideration of the difficulties of mountain construction between the valleys named. This contention is not, however, borne out by the terms of the Act of 1866, and there seems to be no good reason why Congress should have stipulated for the building of this particular bit of road, when satisfactory connection between the San Joaquin Valley and San Francisco could be secured in another way. On their part, the associates never intended to build across the Coast Range, at least not out of the San Benito Valley. In 1872 the articles of association of the Southern Pacific Branch Railroad Company contained provision for a line from a point at or near Salinas City in the county of Monterey southeasterly to a point in Kern County south of Tulare Lake, intersecting the San Joaquin Division of the Southern Pacific. Even this road never was built.[173] At the time when the Southern Pacific Railroad entered upon its ambitious project for southern construction, the territory south and east of Goshen was very slightly developed. Los Angeles was a city of 5,728 persons in 1870, with an assessed valuation of $2,108,061, and an average of one saloon to every fifty-five inhabitants.[174] San Diego had a population of 2,300, and Santa Ana 1,445. These were the largest concentrations of people to be found, and they amounted to nothing more than little country towns.[175] Nor were the statistics of industry much more striking. Los Angeles and Kern counties produced respectable amounts of wool, and in the matter of wine the output from the former amounted to nearly one-third of that for the entire state and one-sixth of that reported for the United States as a whole. The number of cattle was also considerable. But in grain only a beginning had been made, the yield of the orchards was still small, and the volume of general agriculture, to say nothing of manufactures, was insignificant.