The Richest Woman in America by Janet Wallach Read Free Book Online

dancing, and she may have indulged in gossip, but she had no taste for frothy teas, no craving for fussy clothes, no liking for luxuries that money could buy. Hetty hungered for money itself.
    Money served as a substitute for her family’s love, a sweetener that satisfied her gnawing need for affection. She knew that money pleased her father; what she yearned for more than anything else was that herfather be pleased with her. An astuteness for money might win his respect. Writing to him from her cousins’ house, she told him she had had a gay time in New York, but she was tired of the round of parties and balls. Could she have his permission to return to New Bedford? She was soon on the steamer headed for Massachusetts.
    “My father was as pleased to see me as I was to be back,” she said later, though she admitted he was surprised that she cut her trip short. When he asked her why she still had money in her New York bank account, she told him that with the $1,200 he had given her, she had bought $200 worth of clothes. The rest, she proudly announced, she had invested in bonds that had already grown in value. “That investment turned out so well that I soon made others,” she told an acquaintance. Her lack of interest in clothes may have dismayed her aunt, who enjoyed dressing up even with nowhere to go; she accused her niece of looking “like one of the orphans of some sailor lost at sea.” Hetty may not have won her aunt’s admiration, but by pursuing her father’s interests she not only won his praise, she shared his pleasure in making money. She was not alone.

Chapter 4

America Booming

    M oney was on everyone’s mind. Ever since President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country in 1803, Easterners lusted after wealth in the remote new areas in the West. After the Mexican-American War in 1848, when the United States won control over Texas and the area that would comprise Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming, the desire for land increased.
    After the first successful gold strikes in the Sierra foothills that year, tens of thousands more hankered to go out west. Factory men in New England, immigrants in New York, farmers in the South left their homes and families to seek their fortunes with picks and shovels. They may have left for paradise, but they went through hell to get there.
    If the deepest reaches of the earth coursed with golden veins, the surface of the country was clotted with rugged routes. Many crammed into ships, determined to make their way west on the two-ocean, months-long journey that brought illness and queasy stomachs for long stretches on rough seas. Some went overland from the Midwest along the Oregon Trail in stagecoaches or covered wagons, bouncing along through parching droughts, drenching rain, blistering heat, and freezing snow.
    A fortunate few took trains, the most efficient form of travel. With heated cars, upholstered seats with spring cushions, oil lamps for light, and even toilet rooms, trains made travel easier and lowered the costand time of transporting goods and people. At the start of the gold rush, however, most rail lines ran only in the Northeast, and few lines existed west of Chicago; no tracks ran for longer than 250 miles; and no railroad crossed the continent.
    From the 1840s, small rail lines reached north from New York to Maine and south from New York to Atlanta. Trains carried cotton grown in Georgia all the way to New Bedford, where the Wamsutta Mills turned out finished textiles that were transported back to New York. After its opening in 1851, the Erie Canal connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie and short rail lines linked New York with the Midwest; other lines joined Pennsylvania with Ohio, and Chicago with the Mississippi River. But no lines ran to the Pacific Ocean.
    The only long-haul carriers that reached the Far West were sailing packets and steamer ships conveying goods, passengers, and