15

Gould Again

Throughout his business career, Jay Gould was simultaneously engaged on multiple fronts. To the casual observer, his actions all over the chessboard seemed erratic. To disgruntled opponents, Gould’s propensity to anticipate, execute, and usually profit from seemingly unrelated moves was proof that he was an unscrupulous corporate raider in the worst sense of the term. Indeed, generations of business and railroad historians never mentioned Gould’s name without the requisite adjective preceding it: infamous, nefarious, manipulative, and ruthless, to name a few of the kinder ones.

Thanks in large measure to the insightful investigative work of historian Maury Klein, Gould’s reputation has undergone a reappraisal in recent years. Gould and his so-called “robber baron” contemporaries were no more one-dimensional than similar tycoons today. Certainly, in a choir that included Collis P. Huntington, William Jackson Palmer, and Thomas A. Scott, Gould hardly deserved to be singled out as “the supreme villain of his era.”¹

One might question Gould’s movements, one might be envious of his successes, but on a one-to-one basis, even his adversaries admired his forthrightness. “I know there are many people who do not like him,” his rival and occasional partner Collis P. Huntington remarked, but “I will say that I always found that he would do just as he agreed to do.”

Similarly, the head of a commission investigating the affairs of the Union Pacific Railroad was obliged to admit, “I have always found, even to the most trivial detail, that Mr. Gould lived up to the whole nature of his obligations. Of course, he was always reticent and careful about what he promised, but that promise was invariably fulfilled.”²

And General Grenville Dodge, who built the Union Pacific and whose reputation remained largely above cutthroat railroad shenanigans, worked with Gould for two decades without complaint. Dodge, who perhaps had his hand in more railroad construction in the West than anyone, said of Gould, for whom he built the Texas and Pacific and other legs of the Missouri Pacific system, “When we discussed any question and came to a conclusion and Mr. Gould said, ‘General, we will go ahead,’ or do this or that, no matter what it meant or into what difficulties we got, I never had doubts as to where Jay Gould would stand.”³

Gould’s reputation as somewhat of a loner may have come from the fact that he was leery of people wanting something from him. But that appears to have made him value his closest friends and family all the more. “I appreciate your friendship very highly,” Gould confided to Silas Clark, his longtime business associate, “because I know it is the real stuff.” As for his family, Gould was devoted to his quiet and shy wife, Helen, and their six children, particularly eldest son George and darling daughter Helen. Wall Street may have shuddered at Gould’s approach, but underneath his receding hairline and jet-black beard, Gould’s family knew him as a doting teddy bear.⁴

All this is not to say that Jay Gould was not a stickler for detail. Indeed, as will be seen some pages hence, Gould frequently held his opponents to the most minute points of a particular contract while using his multiple holdings to overlook its broader spirit. As the 1880s progressed, Gould’s overriding goal became the consolidation of a major east-west transcontinental system under his independent control. He went about it with much the same imperial, entrepreneurial spirit as Collis P. Huntington.

This meant that the other railroads of the Southwest, chief among them the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, were never quite sure where Gould would strike next. Just as the Santa Fe’s entry into California did not mean that its battles against Huntington and the Southern Pacific were over on the western end of its line, there would never be any rest from the continuing machinations of Jay Gould in the East. Gould’s assault on the Santa Fe was complicated and multifaceted, but it generally occurred in three stages.