railroad success in the twentieth century: long hauls of high volume at low rates.
Harriman did not invent the formula, but he applied it more rigorously and
with greater speed and efficiency than anyone else.

Harriman's vision did not stop at the water's edge or the national boundary.
He built lines into Mexico and looked to extend them deep into Central Amer-
ica. Late in life he envisioned a combined rail-water transportation system that
would circle the globe. To that end he visited Japan and negotiated for rights to
construct lines in China, Manchuria, and elsewhere that would complete such a
system. Nothing stirred him more than a challenge. In 1899 he transformed a
vacation cruise to Alaska into a major scientific expedition that left a lasting
legacy of knowledge about the region. When the earthquake of 1906 devastated
San Francisco, Harriman rushed to the scene to direct Southern Pacific opera-
tions personally. When the Colorado River overflowed its banks and threatened
to immerse the entire Imperial Valley of California, he ordered the Southern
Pacific's long and expensive campaign to force the river back into its bed.

In everything he took up, Harriman tended to be ruthless and single-minded.
His abrasive style and personality made enemies almost as rapidly as did the
novelty of his approaches. Impatient of those slower and duller than himself, he
charged ahead to his goals without bothering to explain or mollify. Having
thrust himself into the public arena, he found himself engulfed in one contro-
versy after another. A well-publicized split with his onetime friend Theodore
Roosevelt blackened his reputation for a time and generated some of the myths
about Harriman that endured for many years. Before his death in 1909 he had
reclaimed public recognition for his many accomplishments, but he remained a
controversial and misunderstood figure.

It seems odd that no full biography of so seminal a figure in American
business history has appeared since George Kennan produced his two-volume
work in 1922. The story of that work is found in the prologue and is a natural
place to begin the quest for the real E. H. Harriman. Kennan had access to most
of the men who were closest to Harriman, but his work was both sponsored and
supervised by the Harriman family and advisers. Moreover, Kennan had a dis-
taste for the intimate and the familiar and was careful to avoid dealing with any
aspect of Harriman's personal life beneath the surface. The result was a work
that perpetuated as many myths about Harriman as it tried earnestly to correct.
But Kennan did have access to materials that no one has seen before or since,
and which most people believed had been destroyed in a 1912 fire. The lack of
good primary source material has long been a deterrent to any study of Harri-
man, as it was with Jay Gould.

Those readers familiar with my biography of Gould will notice that I have re-
cycled the title for use here. As this device suggests, the lives of both men have be-
come so intertwined with myth as to require major reclamation, and there are a

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