The development of railroad properties under the Vanderbilt influence was not confined to the territory east of Chicago and the Mississippi Valley. |
The early seventies were not a time of great prosperity in the newly opened West, and the farmers, looking about for the source of their discomforts, not unnaturally fixed upon the railroads. |
The entire period in the affairs of the Erie system from the ascendancy of Daniel Drew in 1851 to the end of the Civil War witnessed an endless succession of stock-market exploits both large and small. |
The Erie Railroad control was always nominally for sale, and, as the annual election approached, a majority of stockholders stood ready to sell their votes to the highest bidder. |
The Erie Railroad system was foreshadowed in the time of Queen Anne, when the Colony of New York appropriated the sum of five hundred dollars to John Smith and other persons for the purpose of constructing a public road connecting the port of New York with the West in the vicinity of the Great Lakes. |
The financial condition of the Erie at this time manifested the beginning of that general policy of improvidence and recklessness which afterward, for nearly a generation and a half, made the company a speculative football in some of the most disreputable games of Wall Street stock-jobbers. |
The financial history of the Baltimore and Ohio since the close of the nineteenth century is interesting chiefly in connection with changes in the control of the property. |
The Flying Dutchman, one of the cars devised to furnish motive power, provided for the horse or mule a treadmill which would revolve the wheels and make the distance of twelve miles in about an hour and a quarter. |
The history of the Erie Railroad ever since 1901 has been a record of progress. |
The idea of connecting the waters of the Chesapeake with those of the Ohio had been broached by George Washington before the Revolution, and he had also prophesied the union of the Hudson and Lake Erie by canal. |
The market was buoyant; speculation was rampant; and the outside public, the delight and prey of Wall Street gamblers, were as usual drawn in by the fascination of acquiring wealth without labor. |
The name of Alexander J. Cassatt will always be linked with the comprehensive terminal developments in the region of New York City which were begun almost immediately on his accession to the presidency and which were carried forward on bold and far-reaching lines. |
The nation did not begin to realize the extraordinary possibilities of the vast Western territory until its attention was thus suddenly and definitely concentrated on the Pacific by the annual addition of over fifty million dollars to the circulating medium. |
The old saying that capital is the most timid thing in the world and does not like pioneering is strongly emphasized by such instances as this, and no doubt in 1864 the enormous grants of free land made by Congress did not appear especially attractive to the man who had money to invest. |
The opening of the Erie Canal to New York in 1825 stimulated other cities on the Atlantic seaboard to put themselves into closer commercial touch with the West. |