Sublime

J. S. Morgan’s core business was short-term trade finance, “discounting bills,” as it was called. Its primary customers were American cotton or iron merchants. They typically sold their goods on credit, taking back a piece of paper, or “bill of exchange,” which could be cashed at a specific bank such as Barings at some set future date. If a merchan

The “Q” was truly one of America’s best and most-profitable roads. Well capitalized, well constructed, and well managed by two of the giant figures of American railroading, John Murray Forbes and Charles Perkins, along with their New England associates, it served a densely populated and fertile agrarian hinterland stretching across Illinois and Iow

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.

John Muir is remembered primarily as a no-nonsense conservationist and the founding president of the Sierra Club, but he was also a bold adventurer, a fearless scrambler of peaks, glaciers, and waterfalls whose best-known essay includes a riveting account of nearly falling to his death, in 1872, while ascending California’s Mt. Ritter.

Kittson became his close friend, mentor, and longtime business associate. Jim would name his firstborn son James Norman in the older man’s honor.

On another night of searching, a centuries-old academic journal yielded a reference to a Gaspery J. Roberts. The journal had been devoted to prison reform. The hit sent Olive down a rabbit hole, at the end of which she found prison records from Earth: Gaspery J. Roberts had been sentenced to fifty years for a double homicide in Ohio in the late twe