History Of The Union Pacific Railway

The Central Pacific would build from the West Coast eastward, and the Union Pacific would build westward from Omaha, Nebraska. With the North and South torn apart by war, President Lincoln and Congress were anxious to bind the nation together East and West. The Railway Act granted huge tracts of land to the railroad, along with massive construction loans, and, at the behest of Abraham Lincoln, multimillionaire congressman Oakes Ames and his brother Oliver created a corporation to build the railroad and another corporation to finance construction. The latter was named Credit Mobilier, after the company that had successfully financed the French railway system 10 years earlier. The Ames brothers made investors an offer they couldn’t refuse: Credit Mobilier, run by the directors (principal investors) of the Union Pacific, was paid by the Union Pacific to build the Union Pacific. The directors made a profit on the railroad as well as on the cost of building it. The scheme was an open door to fraud, and construction bills were routinely padded ...»