Theodore, freshly excited by Lincoln’s success, had travelled to Washington yet again, and two days after the inauguration, on 4 March 1861, Lincoln had told him at a private meeting that ‘there must be war, no matter how conciliatory I am; the South has the need of it’. Lincoln had repeated to Theodore his support for a transcontinental railroad, and had given him a tortoiseshell pen as a souvenir.

The very next day, as Theodore packed his steamer trunk to return to California, the news came from Richmond that Jefferson Davis, who had reluctantly agreed to accept the Presidency of the Confederated States the previous month, had already called for 100,000 military volunteers.

Theodore wrote to Collis:

I do not doubt for a moment that we have now arrived at that great crossroads in history for which we have been waiting for so long. It is a tragedy, and there is considerable sorrow and bewilderment here in Washington, both personal and national. But now (at last!) they may ‘Clear the Way’ for the railroad.

He enclosed a cutting from the Petersburg Express, which read; ‘The election of Lincoln is truly a national calamity. May God avert the storm which is now impending.’

Collis showed the letter to Leland and Charles. Leland was not so sure about the prospect of civil war; and in any case he was too preoccupied these days with his Republican candidacy for the governorship of California to worry about very much else except his long-winded political speeches, which he practised nightly in front of his cheval-glass, his hand thrust into his coat in unconscious imitation of Daniel Webster. Charles, on the other hand, firmly believed that there would be war, that there must be war, since he saw no other way of getting a few months’ respite from Mary. Whatever any of them felt about it, however, there was little doubt in their minds that the events of the winter had given the Sierra Pacific the best chance it had ever had of going ahead. Jefferson Davis and most of the fiercest supporters of a southern railroad route had now abandoned Washington for Richmond, and that left the Sierra Pacific and the Union Pacific with what Collis believed to be the only feasible route for the federal government to adopt. Theodore’s surveys of the Dutch Flat-Donner Pass-Truckee River trace were at last on the verge of acceptance. They had been so generously financed by Senator Stride’s ‘conscience money’ that Theodore had even been able to take Annie along with him on several of his expeditions, and she had illustrated his statistics with pages of alluring watercolours of California flowers.