The time was right. The bloody bludgeoning of civil war was past, and the American people of the sixties and seventies went, headlong, about the manifestly destined business of making a continent into a nation. These Americans, their energies and enthusiasms so long sidetracked, were ready to support practically any patriotic-seeming venture put forward by men with brass and brains, with muscle and money. And government support was there too, and there aplenty. The reigning Republican party’s primary concern was for the interests of its “chief stockholders,” as Secretary of State William Seward called the northern industrialists. In July of 1866 Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, noted in his diary: “Congress accomplishes little that is good.… The granting of acts of incorporation, bounties, special privileges, favors, and profligate legislation … is shocking.”

Indeed, in the matter of sponsoring a transcontinental railroad such acts, bounties, and privileges were freely granted by a complaisant Congress—and cheered by a populace that regarded a continent-spanning railroad as a suturing, a binding-up of a wounded nation.

That is not the way Thomas Durant, prime mover of the Union Pacific, saw things. Durant placed profit well ahead of patriotism, and he had no intention of waiting twenty or thirty years for freight and passenger traffic to put the line in the black. He wanted his loot now. The idea, as he so lucidly put it, was to “grab a wad from the construction fees—and get out.”

Tom Durant and his fellow boodlers in the U.P. directorate had just the device they needed to make their score. In 1864 they formed the Crédit Mobilier of America. (The original Crédit Mobilier was a French joint-stock company; during the 1850’s it had fleeced a number of its investors. It took a bizarre sort of bravado to borrow the name.) C.M. was the construction company by which these men would route to themselves the vast profits to be had in building a government-backed railroad at exorbitant rates. Land grants and money poured out of Washington, and many applauded Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts when, in an ecstasy of nationalism, he cried: “I give no grudging vote in giving away either money or land. I would sink $100,000,000 to build the road and do it most cheerfully, and think I had done a great thing for my country. What are $75,000,000 or $100,000,000 in opening a railroad … that shall connect the people of the Atlantic and the Pacific.… Nothing!” It just so happened that Senator Wilson, along with a goodly number of other “Railway congressmen,” owned stock in the Crédit Mobilier.

Their shares came from a colleague, Representative Oakes Ames of Massachusetts, who had invested heavily in C.M. and was the titular contractor (frontman) for over six hundred miles of U.P. trackage. In the latter part of 1867 he wrote to a crony, “We want more friends in this Congress”; in November he offered some of his peers C.M. stock for