One of nineteenth-century America's less familiar success stories -
the rise of Collis P. Huntington from untutored village storekeeper
to California railway magnate - now receives fine handling by an
experienced chronicler of the Great West (Climax at Buena Vista;
Land of Giants). Beginning with Huntington's arrival in gold-mad
Sacramento, the narrative moves through the founding of the Central
Pacific toward the dramatic achievement of the first
transcontinental rail link, when Huntington's engineers, directed
to "seize and defend" roadbed turf far in advance of their work
crews, raced east to head off further westward progress by the
rival Union Pacific. Drawing primarily on Huntington's
correspondence, Lavender describes this and subsequent triumphs in
lavish and fascinating detail, emphasizing in particular the
complex, often illegal, financial and political wirepulling that
generally won the day for Huntington. Like the tycoon himself, the
author downplays the contributions of his business associates (the
better known Leland Stanford, co-founder of the Central Pacific, is
treated here as lazy, vain, and stupid). There is also a lack of
historical background against which the reader could understand the
significance of Huntington's railway empire. Nonetheless, this book
is exciting as a portrait of a roughhewn, grasping visonary whose
career demonstrates that blend of entrepreneurial genius and frank
chicanery that really won the West. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Great Persuader is the biography of a robber baron, the
greatest railroad mogul of them all -- Collis P. Huntington, the
Sacramento, California, storekeeper who, along with Leland Stanford
and Mark Hopkins, parlayed $1,500 into America's first continental
railroad. It is an almost unbelievable story of a high dream of
fortune realized through highhanded practices -- an adventure which
left the national treasury poorer by millions of swindled dollars,
and America itself richer by a national railroad system which
contributed greatly to the country's westward expansion.
How did Huntington operate? What were his methods? Was he
corrupt? These are questions that were previously unanswered but
thanks to the cooperation of the Huntington family who supplied Mr.
Lavender with material that had never before been made public,
Lavender shows just how Collis P. Huntington operated -- and it was
defintely outside the law, although well inside the prevailing
morality of his time. It shows his complicated dealings with
Sanford Hopkins, how he bested such tycoons as Thomas A. Scott,
John C. Durrant, Oliver Ames and Jay Gould, how Huntington
accumulated the great fortune which was the legacy to his family,
and how his great railroad network was to prove an unparalleled
legacy to all Americans. The Great Persuader is a powerful story of
a remarkable man whose singleness of purpose and ruthless
manipulation of men and money propelled the great enterprise
forward against all odds.
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