People laughed at him when he announced that he was going to extend his line to the Pacific. No line had ever been built across the continent without a great subsidy from the government—to secure a subsidy was always the first step; besides, it was believed that the country through which the Great Northern was to extend would not even grow wheat, and the new road was promptly dubbed "Hill's Folly." But in 1893, his line reached the Pacific. A few years later, the owners of the great Northern Pacific were begging him to manage that road, too. For he had created business for his road—a great market in the Orient to fill his west-bound freight cars, and a great market in the eastern United States for Puget Sound lumber to fill his east-bound cars. For remember no railroad can make money unless, after it has hauled a loaded car from one end of the line to the other, it can find another load to put in that same car to haul back again. Hill supplied the business and his story is the wonderful story of the development of the Great Northwest.
Which brings us to the Napoleon of the railroad world, E. H. Harriman. America has never seen another quite like him. When the panic of 1901 was at its height and the financial world seemed trembling in ruins about his head, he refused to break the corner, as he might have done, but sat watching the tape, cool, quiet and calculating, while men failed, banks tottered, and his own associates begged him to yield. For the ambition of this man knew no limitation. His kingdom must stretch from sea to sea and from the lakes to the gulf.
His kingdom lay to the south of Hill's, for he ruled the Union Pacific, and between the two men there was ceaseless war. Physically and mentally they were as far apart as two men could be. Hill is a large man, with massive head and brow, and his eyes are steady and cool and brown, his lips full and sensitive, his whole personality bespeaking force and decision. Quite different was Harriman; a small, ordinary looking man, with glasses and a scraggy mustache, giving the impression of nervous force rather than of power; an irritable man, easily angered; a fighter clear through, but fighting sometimes when peace were wiser—that was Harriman.
Harriman was born at Hempstead, Long Island, the son of a clergyman with a large family and a small income. The boy was renowned chiefly for his daily fights and for his aversion to study. At the age of fourteen, he was put to work in a broker's office in Wall street, at eighteen he had a partnership, at twenty-two he bought a seat on the stock exchange, and pretty soon entered the railroad field by getting control of the Illinois Central. He at once inaugurated a new policy. Before that time, the prevailing idea of railroad management was to run a road as cheaply as possible and pay big dividends. Harriman's idea was that the biggest dividends would be secured in the end by making a good road, and he proceeded to carry the idea out by putting his road in the very pink of condition. And it paid.
That was the beginning. His great coup was the rebuilding of the Union Pacific. A railroad with 7,500 miles of track, a giant crushed by its own weight, it had gone into a receivership in the panic of 1893. For five years it stayed there, despite the utmost efforts of the giants of finance to lift it out. Then Harriman got possession of it, and taking an engine and a car, turned the train backward and, running in the day time only, went over the road mile by mile. He decided that the road must be made a good road, and he told his executive committee that he needed for his immediate necessities one hundred millions of dollars!
Well, he got the money and he got good men and went to work. The result was soon apparent. Earnings grew, business increased, and the company's credit improved. Never before in the history of railroading had there been such daring rebuilding. The line was levelled down to a maximum grade of forty-one feet to a mile; two hundred and forty-seven feet were scaled off the top of the Great Divide; millions of cubic yards of dirt and stone were blasted out and moved; tunnels were drilled; and, finally, when the Southern Pacific, too, was acquired, a trestle twenty-three miles long was built across Great Salt Lake, through water thirty feet deep, taking railroad trains farther from land than they had ever yet been run, and shortening the road forty-four miles. And the result? The gross earnings have risen to over $170,000,000 a year, and $28,000,000 a year are distributed in dividends. Truly a transformation from the old water-logged road which Harriman took over.
He had his reverses—he attempted to get hold of the Northern Pacific, but it slipped through his fingers; the Burlington was cut out from under his guns, and so was the Rock Island. James J. Hill outgeneraled him more than once, and he was never able to "get back" at Hill effectively.
With Harriman we shall close this chapter on men of affairs. Many others might have been noted. In fact, none of the great industries of the country has been built up except by inspired work. Armour and Cudahy and Swift made the packing business; Marshall Field built up a business in Chicago rivalling Wanamaker's; August Belmont, William C. Whitney, Levi Leiter, Robert Goelet, Pierre Lorillard, and a hundred others, amassed great fortunes. Yet there was nothing in their career different to those of the men already considered in this chapter. They had a genius for money-making. Each in some special field; but, beyond that, they did few memorable things. And so we need not pause longer over them here, except to remark, that it is, in the main, to such men as these, that America owes her great material prosperity.