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This particular panic, which was destined to mark a notable change in Cowperwood's career,
was one of those peculiar things which spring naturally out of the optimism of the American
people and the irrepressible progress of the country. It was the result, to be accurate, of the
prestige and ambition of Jay Cooke, whose early training and subsequent success had all been
acquired in Philadelphia, and who had since become the foremost financial figure of his day. It
would be useless to attempt to trace here the rise of this man to distinction; it need only be said
that by suggestions which he made and methods which he devised the Union government, in its
darkest hours, was able to raise the money wherewith to continue the struggle against the
South. After the Civil War this man, who had built up a tremendous banking business in
Philadelphia, with great branches in New York and Washington, was at a loss for some time for
some significant thing to do, some constructive work which would be worthy of his genius. The
war was over; the only thing which remained was the finances of peace, and the greatest things
in American financial enterprise were those related to the construction of transcontinental
railway lines. The Union Pacific, authorized in 1860, was already building; the Northern Pacific
and the Southern Pacific were already dreams in various pioneer minds. The great thing was to
connect the Atlantic and the Pacific by steel, to bind up the territorially perfected and newly
solidified Union, or to enter upon some vast project of mining, of which gold and silver were the
most important. Actually railway-building was the most significant of all, and railroad stocks were
far and away the most valuable and important on every exchange in America. Here in
Philadelphia, New York Central, Rock Island, Wabash, Central Pacific, St. Paul, Hannibal & St.
Joseph, Union Pacific, and Ohio & Mississippi were freely traded in. There were men who were
getting rich and famous out of handling these things; and such towering figures as Cornelius
Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, James Fish, and others in the East, and Fair, Crocker, W.
R. Hearst, and Collis P. Huntington, in the West, were already raising their heads like vast
mountains in connection with these enterprises. Among those who dreamed most ardently on
this score was Jay Cooke, who without the wolfish cunning of a Gould or the practical
knowledge of a Vanderbilt, was ambitious to thread the northern reaches of America with a
band of steel which should be a permanent memorial to his name.
The project which fascinated him most was one that related to the development of the territory
then lying almost unexplored between the extreme western shore of Lake Superior, where
Duluth now stands, and that portion of the Pacific Ocean into which the Columbia River
empties--the extreme northern one-third of the United States. Here, if a railroad were built,
would spring up great cities and prosperous towns. There were, it was suspected, mines of
various metals in the region of the Rockies which this railroad would traverse, and untold wealth
to be reaped from the fertile corn and wheat lands. Products brought only so far east as Duluth
could then be shipped to the Atlantic, via the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal, at a greatly
reduced cost. It was a vision of empire, not unlike the Panama Canal project of the same
period, and one that bade fair apparently to be as useful to humanity. It had aroused the interest
and enthusiasm of Cooke. Because of the fact that the government had made a grant of vast
areas of land on either side of the proposed track to the corporation that should seriously
undertake it and complete it within a reasonable number of years, and because of the
opportunity it gave him of remaining a distinguished public figure, he had eventually shouldered
the project. It was open to many objections and criticisms; but the genius which had been
sufficient to finance the Civil War was considered sufficient to finance the Northern Pacific
Railroad. Cooke undertook it with the idea of being able to put the merits of the proposition
before the people direct--not through the agency of any great financial corporation--and of
selling to the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker the stock or shares that he wished
to dispose of.
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