"King of Spades" Oakes Ames, a Massachusetts businessman and politician, made his money as part of of Ames & Sons, a shovelworks founded by his father and administered by brother Oliver. The transcontinental railroad would bring him even more wealth -- until 1873, when the Crédit Mobilier scandal destroyed his career.
Theodore Judah and the American railroad matured together. In 1854 Judah found himself invited to a New York meeting. Returning home, he informed his wife, "Anna, I am going to California to be the pioneering railroad engineer of the Pacific coast."
Thomas Durant was a born manipulator. Educated in medicine, Durant kept the honorific "Doctor" in front of his name but abandoned the pursuit for business, the only enterprise that could satiate his rapacious appetite for profit.
Donald Fixico, Thomas Bowlus Distinguished Professor of American Indian History and Director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas, talks about the West before white settlement.
The Park Avenue tunnel, built to remove trains from Manhattan's surface and boost public safety, was itself dangerous: dark, smoky, with poor visibility.
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