Last Train to Paradise by Les Standiford Read Free Book Online

in 1862, and a king’s ransom in the tiny town of Bellevue, Ohio.
    Casting about for something more interesting to do, Flagler hit upon the idea of . . . salt. Intrigued by the discovery of vast deposits of the mineral in nearby Michigan and an act of that state’s legislature that made the business tax-exempt, Flagler sank every penny he had into the venture, along with an equal amount that he borrowed. But the great salt rush had drawn a horde of competitors, some of who actually knew a few things about the business.
    When the end of the Civil War brought a collapse in prices, Flagler’s operation fell apart. He found himself not only penniless, but fifty thousand dollars in debt. It was a lesson the ambitious young man would never forget: failure was simply not acceptable.
    He returned to Bellevue from the offices he’d been keeping in Saginaw, Michigan, and borrowed enough money from his relatives to satisfy his creditors. Though he could have opted for safe haven there, Flagler was resolute. He might have been beaten, but he would not move backward.
    Instead, with a few hundred dollars in his pocket advanced him by his father-in-law, he moved with Mary, his wife of eleven years, to Cleveland and renewed his old acquaintances in the grain-dealing world, taking a post in a firm that had been vacated by his old friend Rockefeller, who had left grain for an intriguing new substance called oil.
    Because of its position on Lake Erie and its proximity to the newly discovered oil fields of western Pennsylvania, Cleveland had developed over the past dozen or so years into a shipping and refining center for the new elixir, which, at the time, was still competing with whale oil and lard for supremacy as a fuel and lubricant.
    Rockefeller had invested in a refining business during the Civil War, and by the time of Flagler’s arrival in Cleveland, he had decided to devote all his energies to the business of making and shipping oil. Because Flagler had rented a house on the same street as Rockefeller and kept his offices in the same building, the two often walked to and from work together, comparing notes and sharing their chief, binding passion: the desire to make large sums of money.
    Rockefeller was convinced that oil was the conduit to success, and he had joined forces with a chemist by the name of Andrews, who possessed the technical expertise upon which the refining process was founded. Rockefeller himself was the consummate manager. But he was well aware of his own shortcomings as a marketer, and that was where Flagler came in.
    Flagler was one of the most successful grain brokers Rockefeller had known in the halcyon days before the war. At thirty-six, Flagler was nine years older than Rockefeller, and, if not handsome, was at the very least striking, with a vigorous head of hair and a full mustache, and a personality that radiated confidence and drew others to trust him.
    Rockefeller valued Flagler’s undying optimism and drive as well as his relative maturity, which would come in handy for a fledgling business founded upon a new technology and seeking to attract investment from others. When one of Flagler’s wife’s cousins offered to invest $100,000 in Rockefeller’s new venture, the deal was made. It was an agreement that would alter the course of American history.
    For the next fifteen years, Flagler and Rockefeller worked side by side, walking to their offices together in the mornings, passing drafts of letters and detailed business documents between their desks during the day, walking home together at night, always planning and calculating. The result of their efforts was Standard Oil, the largest, most powerful, most profitable, and perhaps most notorious corporation ever formed.
    Rockefeller would come to freely attribute the secret of the firm’s success to his partner, for they were not long in the business, said Rockefeller, before Flagler realized that the negotiation of a lower freight rate was the key to