The idea of becoming a candidate for President of the United States first came to him in a Dublin jail. (“A jail,” he observed philosophically, “is a good place to meditate and to plan in.’ And he should have known: he was incarcerated fifteen times during his life—always in behalf of some cause, for, in his own words, he“never commited a crime, cheated a human being, or told a lie.”) As the election of 1872 approached, the man’s confidence in himself was subline; the record he offered American voters, unique. Describing his qualifications, he said, “I am that wonderful, eccentric, independent, extraordinary genius and political reformer of America, who is sweeping off all the politicians before him like a hurricane, your modest, diffident, unassuming friend, the future President of America—George Francis Train!”

Ophaned at the age of four, he had become a shipping, magnate in Boston while still in his teens, and when he was twenty-four sailed for Australia, where gold had been discovered To that raw, backward land he brought feverish energy and ideas by the score, introducing prefabricated buildings, Concord coaches, canned goods, bowling, Fourth of July celebrations, and free champagne lunches. When his wife became pregnant, he sent her home to give birth in the States; if the child was a boy, he explained, he wanted no technicality to stand in the way of his becoming President of his country. Soon afterward, miners in the gold fields revolt against the Austrian government, tried to set up a republic, and offered Train the presidency. But he had decided to move on.

In America he promoted a railroad on behalf of María Christina, Queen of Spain. In England he introduced cheap public transfortation in the form of horse-drawn streetcars; while laboring to sell street railway systems, Train also served his country as an unofficial ambassador. He made speeches, he wrote pamphlets, he published a newspaper—all to keep Great Britain from entering the Civil War on the side of the South. And while not otherwise engaged, this human dynamo found time to make a few practical suggestions to the backward British: unloading coal wagons by means of a chute; putting rubber erasers on the ends of pensils; perforating sheets of postage stamps to make tearing easy; and adding pouring spouts to the mouths of ink bottles. Back in America, he secured a charter from the U.S. Congress to build what became the Union Pacific Railroad, and organized its financing by means of an ingenious scheme he had heard about in France—the Crédit Mobilier. Fortunately, Train was out of Crédit Mobilier before its collapsed—he had gone on to bigger and better things.

His campaign for the Presidency began in earnest in 1869, when he had just turned forty. He planned to make 1,000 speeches, and he not only made them but successfully charged admission—collecting a total of $90,000 during three years of barnstorming. By the end of 1871 Train calculated that