Sublime

Harrison, though, knew human nature and was toughest to work for when the railroad ran well. The boss worried that his people would get complacent. “When things were bad, it’s when he was most supportive,” Creel said.

Stephens was the president of the railroad, which was a wholly American-owned stock company with its main office in the old Tontine Building on Wall Street. The capitalization was a million dollars.

The flip side of the railroad genius was dismissiveness and distaste for corporate protocol. Harrison had little patience for boards. Put simply, they were a pain, a waste of time and money. They didn’t increase shareholder value or improve the operating ratio (OR), the key metric for a railroad that’s constantly scrutinized by investors.

The idea for a railroad to supplant all of that originated in New York in the late 1840s, shortly before the news of California gold reached the East. The founders were three unlikely, dissimilar individuals, none of whom knew anything about building a railroad, even under favorable conditions. Henry Chauncey was a Wall Street financier. William He

Morgan made his specialty the refinancing, reorganization, and rationalization of America’s badly overextended and overcapitalized railroads; his “clients” included some of the largest, such as the Erie, the New York Central, and the Pennsylvania.

Then, in 1906, Hunt’s enterprise came to an end when he was arrested after rumors broke out how he held the Igorots’ wages he had earlier promised them and that two of the tribesmen in his group who had died were left unburied.

In this case, for Flagler, there was something of a carryover from his former life. All that experience in railroading was about to be put to use in an entirely different context, as he tried to make sense of one of the most chaotic rail systems in the United States.