Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/75

 grave, charity and forgetfulness stand guard on either side. But the lesson of Gould's career would be lost, if even at this time the facts were not plainly and openly told. To say that Gould ruthlessly plundered the Erie railway is to speak the plain truth.

Fortunately the record of Erie, notwithstanding Mr. Gould's silence, can be told from authoritative testimony. In his famous "Chapter of Erie," published in the North American Review, in 1869, Charles Francis Adams gives a thrilling account of Erie from the time Daniel Drew engaged in his famous war with Commodore Vanderbilt, to the time when that unfortunate road was in complete control of Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr. Mr. Adams' history stopped short in the middle of the story, but the record of Erie, from 1869 till Mr. Gould was driven from power in 1872, is given in the report of the legislative inquiry in 1873, and of the Hepburn investigation of 1879.

It is a curious fact that years after writing this "chapter" Mr. Adams, having become president of the Union Pacific, sat in the same Board of Directors with Gould, but only for a comparatively brief period, and Mr. Adams never repudiated or recalled his early history of Gould in Erie. It is a striking illustration, however, of the power of millions that Gould should live to sit in the same board with the representative of the aristocratic Adams family, which furnished two Presidents to the United States; that after an effort to involve the administration of