They stationed relays along their own line to compete, and Nature and Fate seemed to come to their aid.

A fierce storm arose the day before the start was to be made, and it fell heavier on the Placerville than on the other route.

Though the drivers of each line did their utmost, feeling their own personal honor, as well as that of their company at stake, the heavy rains at Strawberry arrested the Placerville stage and made further progress impossible, while the other route was enabled to complete its trip on record time.

Mr.L.L.Robinson, the Superintendent of the Sacramento Valley Railroad, who himself accompanied the stage, wired from Strawberry, "Heavy rains, heavy roads, slow time"-- reluctant to own a possible defeat.

But the Sacramento _Union_, the organ of the Central Pacific, came out the next morning with glowing accounts of the successful run of the stages over the Emigrant Gap route and ridiculed Mr.Robinson's telegram, ironically comparing it with Caesar's classic message to the Roman Senate: "Veni, Vidi, Vici." It was such struggles for local business as this that led the San Francisco _Alta California_, a paper bitterly opposed to the Central Pacific, to denounce the railway, in 1866, as the "Dutch Flat Swindle." It claimed that the railway would never be built further than Alta and that it was built so far only for the purpose of controlling passenger and freight traffic over their wagon road to Virginia City and other Nevada points.