Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/174

 were taken from the lines of the Union Pacific and other great railroad systems controlled by Mr. Gould and those of the American Union were substituted. The stock of the older corporation fell to 88. It was said at the time that Mr. Gould was short 30,000 shares of Western Union, and if that was so he made $840,000.

But in 1881 Mr. Gould and his associates had practically secured control of the Western Union. It was proposed to sell and transfer the entire assets and property of the American Union and the American and Pacific to the Western Union directors. Rufus Hatch, as a stockholder of the American Union, obtained an injunction restraining the consolidation, but on February 4, 1881, Judge Barrett refused to continue the injunction, and by the time he had concluded his opinion the papers were drawn up, the consolidation was ratified by the directors of the three companies, and almost before the country knew it there was one telegraph company where there had been three before.

The stock of the Western Union Telegraph Company was at once "watered" $40,000,000, or thirty-seven per cent. and Mr. Gould became the leading spirit in that company, directing its affairs from his offices, which were in that building.

Nothing Mr. Gould ever did in his life so arrayed public sentiment against him as this creation of the telegraphic monopoly. Eventually the Western Union acquired the Baltimore and Ohio telegraph, which Robert Garrett was glad to sell in order to get