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

the mail down one coast, across the Isthmus of Panama, and up the other side. But the ships that plied these seas took several months at best; at worst they were waylaid by weather and sank in storms. In the rush to open up the West, better transport was needed, and better transport required men to make it.
    Thousands of workers were hired to mine the iron ore used to build new railroad tracks, and tens of thousands of workers were employed to construct them. New tracks required new towns where the lines met and workers and travelers could stay; new towns, such as Dallas, Denver, and Oklahoma City, needed people to settle them and goods and services to provide for the settlers.
    Entrepreneurs willing to build the rail lines prodded the federal government to grant them land along which they could lay the tracks. But even though the land was free, they needed money for payrolls and equipment. Smart investors and shrewd speculators could see the future whizzing before them. Tempted by the possibility of huge returns from railroads and from the development of the land surrounding them into towns, mining centers, and manufacturing hubs, they poured money into New York banks. A flood of new funds arrived from Boston and New Bedford, from Chicago and St. Louis, and from London, Paris, and Frankfurt. Awash in capital, the banks loaned money at easy interest rates to railroad promoters, mining prospectors, land speculators, merchants, and farmers.
    The nation was bursting with new inventions and new markets and hungry for better transportation. Technology such as the steam engine quickened the pace of manufacturing and railroads. Samuel Morse’s new telegraph put cities in touch with one another and spurred a surge in communications. The discovery of metal ore in the West led to the invention of new tools and instruments like sewing machines and steam irons that were produced in the East. The newly improved cotton gin in the South meant more cotton for more goods that could be made better and faster in the North or exported overseas to England.
    Factories sprouted everywhere: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, manufactured iron, glass, and textiles; Lowell, Massachusetts, made textiles and leather goods; New Haven, Connecticut, produced hardware, guns, and clocks; New York produced books, newspapers and magazines, chemicals, and clothing of all kinds. As a meeting point in the Midwest, Chicago grew at a furious rate, its rail lines stretching west and its population tripling, while New York became the country’s manufacturing center, its financial core, and its transportation hub.
    Even a war in Europe benefited the nation. Grain from the Midwest, already in demand in the East, found new markets across the ocean when the Crimean War broke out at the end of 1853. The conflict, which pitted Russia against the Ottomans, the British, and the French, caused the czar to cut off wheat exports and forced Europeans to turn to America for their grain. Trains carried wheat and corn from Chicago to New York, where dockworkers on the Hudson River piers hurled the foodstuffs onto steamer ships bound for Europe.
    Packet ships continued to carry goods and people and mail to California, and when the ships returned from the West, they brought back stacks of gold bars. But new trains sped hundreds of thousands of travelers westward faster and cheaper, and hauled more manufactured goods out from the East and more grain and food supplies back from the Midwest. The country was growing by the hour, proving almost daily its divinely ordained Manifest Destiny.
    Everyone wanted a piece of the prosperity pie. Eager clients could almost taste their earnings as they bought shares of everything from the Crystal Palace, even as its stock was plummeting from 175 to 53, to the Reading Railroad to Pacific mining ventures. “You can’t lose,” stock salesmen promised naive clients. Trading in railroad stockszoomed. Canny manipulators devised new instruments that enabled