When I introduced Collis P. Huntington in my second book in the Durant family saga: Castles in the Air, my biggest dilemma was how to portray this magnate of the Central Pacific Railroad and nemesis of Dr. Thomas C. Durant, who was in charge of the Union Pacific. These men competed against each other to be build the transcontinental railroad across the western frontier and gain financially from the transaction. 

When Dr. Durant died in 1885, Dr. Durant’s son William was on his own to navigate the nefarious jungle of business and politics in New York City at the height of the gilded age. At some point after his death, Huntington struck up a relationship with Durant’s son William. My guess is it was soon afterward, when Huntington became a board member of the Adirondack Railroad Company, a venture started by Dr. Durant to bring people into the wilderness.

While going through William West Durant’s papers at the Library of Congress, I only found a few letters written from Huntington to William. In one letter Huntington writes William that he and his wife will be visiting William’s great camp Pine Knot in the Adirondacks, traveling from their home in Throggs Neck, NY. William also hosted a dinner in New York City in the early 1890s with Huntington as a guest. Huntington appears on the guest registry of William’s yacht, the Utowana.


My research into the catalog of Huntington's papers housed at Syracuse University reveal nothing in the way of actual correspondence between the two men, but the deeds and transfers of Durant property in the Adirondacks were all there. 

What I do know about Huntington from reading his biographies is that he was not a generous man, although he did befriend Booker T. Washington and donated money toward the Tuskegee Institute. Other than that, well let's just say he was not, like  Andrew Carnegie, well-known for his philanthropy.

So why then, would he befriend William, support some of his business ventures, and, lend him money to do so? One biography of William suggests that Huntington, who had only an adopted son, took William under his wing as a fatherly gesture. I don't believe that was the motivation.

When William and Huntington first met, things were not going all that swimmingly for the robber baron. Huntington and his business dealings with the Central Pacific, were under investigation in 1887 by a special commission appointed by President Cleveland. The government wanted its money back, plus interest from the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads. The Central Pacific had also some questionable book keeping, and the government suspected that like the Union Pacific Railroad, the company had inflated construction costs for the founders' monetary gain. If Dr. Durant had been alive, he would have been called to the witness stand as well.

But Huntington, I've come to learn was wily. One source I read states that Huntington had nothing to worry about, he had burned any incriminating evidence. He even had the audacity to continue to bribe and cajole congressmen to delay the payments, at the same time he was defending his actions as head of the Central Pacific!

Newspapers that covered the special hearings stated that Huntington was clearly avoiding the truth, using obfuscation, and what one deemed 'almost denial'.  I had to wonder, did Huntington befriend William believing that he might be in possession of documents once owned by Dr. Durant that he could use in his defense? Or did he covet the land that Dr. Durant had accumulated in the Adirondacks while both men were building their railroad empires?

Ultimately Huntington's generosity toward William ended with his death in 1900. This after he had purchased William's first great camp, Pine Knot at a greatly reduced price and had most of the rest of the Durant land holdings held as collateral for the loans he gave to William; loans which William could not pay back. One wonders if Huntington knew this would be the case and had planned the eventual takeover of the Durant lands all along.

The term the 'Gilded Age' actually comes from a novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873. I never knew that until recently. I started to read the book online and found it, like a lot of stories written back then, verbose. The storyline however is very interesting. A family seeks their fortune from 75,000 acres of land they own in Tennessee, believing it will bring them great wealth one day as mining, railroads, and people flock to the area. The story also satirizes political corruption at the time: one of the family members tries to lobby the U.S. Congress to buy the land. It all sounds so familiar!!!

This book was written at the beginning of what is historically called the Gilded Age in America. A time when political corruption was rampant, and a period of conspicuous  consumption. That term, was coined in 1899 by economist Thorstein Veblen, in a book titled The Theory of the Leisure Class. The theory, in a nutshell, is that people of the time were consuming goods not for want or need but purely to show off to their friends that they could afford such things as yachts, jewels, and lavish homes. 

My research helped me understand the motivations of the characters in my Durant family saga. Along the way I picked up a book at a library book sale titled: Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: the Story of a Daughter and Mother in the Gilded Age, and I am shocked at the excess. One passage in particular caught my attention: after her divorce Alva Vanderbilt stays in Newport where the Vanderbilt mansion, the Marble House, was located. There, she "withdrew to a life of extravagant vacuity", inviting guests to dig for party favors of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds with silver spoons in a stream that ran through the center of the dining table.

Jeesh, my dinner parties would never pass the muster in this time period. Our idea of entertainment is letting go of sky lanterns on a quiet summer night.