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as his mother’s apprentice, and the plan quickly died. Hetty was determined that he would learn to economize. She kept him on a strict allowance—enough to live on but hardly more. She had suggested that Ned stay at the Auditorium Annex, where rooms cost six dollars per night. According to James Morrow, Ned’s plan to put a little spending money in his pockets by moving to less expensive rooms at the Clifton House backfired when his mother learned of the move. She wrote to him: “I notice that you are not staying at the hotel I suggested. It is all right, but I have reduced your daily allowance $3. You are not to have any more spending money than the amount decided on originally.”

Though Ned liked Chicago, liked the reception he received and the feeling of being an important man of affairs, Hetty had other plans for him. In 1893, she sent Ned, now twenty-five, down to Texas to see about some railroad matters. Specifically, it was time for her to exact some long-awaited revenge on Collis P. Huntington.

By the time Hetty and Collis Huntington had crossed paths during the Cisco crisis in 1885, Huntington was sixty-four years old and one of the most successful and feared businessmen in the United States. The sixth of nine children from a small town in Connecticut, Huntington set out for California in 1849 along with hordes of other gold seekers. But it didn’t take him long to recognize that for every man who struck gold, thousands more came away with their dreams as empty as their pockets. Most came from the East without experience or equipment, and Huntington realized that, whether they were destined to strike it rich or, more likely, to fail, just about all of them needed picks, shovels, boots, pots and pans, and tents. In the boom-town of Sacramento, staging area for mining expeditions, Huntington took on a partner, Mark Hopkins, and opened a hardware store that thrived from the start.

Surveyor Theodore Judah approached Huntington, Hopkins, and California merchants Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker in 1860 with a plan for a rail route pushing east from Sacramento across the mountains. The four became financial backers of the new project. Eventually, they shunted Judah aside and became known as the Big Four (a term used with equal parts derision and respect) as they pushed the formation of the Central Pacific, the western portion of the transcontinental railroad. Huntington, forceful, fearless, and ruthless, emerged as the Big Four’s leader. The transcontinental hookup was just the start. A new railroad, the Southern Pacific, would, under Huntington’s leadership, spread across California and the southwestern states. Huntington spent much of his time in Washington, D.C., alternately bullying and currying favor with congressmen to earn extraordinarily favorable land rights that essentially turned thousands of California farmers into vassal servants of the railroads—farming land deeded to the railroads, and paying usurious rates to ship their produce.

Novelist Frank Norris had Huntington in mind when he wrote The Octopus, his classic novel about an all-powerful California railroad and its domination and abuse of the local population. For his climactic scene, Norris drew upon a real incident known as the Mussel Slough Tragedy, in which a group of farmers clashed with a coterie of railroad and government men who had come to evict a wheat farmer from his land. When the shooting stopped, seven men from both sides lay dead. Although Huntington was nowhere near the scene, enraged farmers and their sympathizers had no trouble in establishing the true villains behind the violence—the Southern Pacific and its ruthless leader.

A man who, tellingly, would identify himself only as “a citizen of California,” submitted an open letter to Congress during the 1890s, calling Huntington “a persistent intermeddler without proper warrant in Government affairs, an unscrupulous dealer in threats and promises amongst public men, a constant menance to sworn servants of the people in their offices of trust, a tempter of the corrupt and a terror to