Glad I could keep you amused for a bit, Scott. You can tell Weeze she's welcome.
To me, for reasons to be revealed, the most interesting of these "robber barons" was Daniel Drew. You may not know him by name, but he was one of the crookedest of all those crooks. He got his start as a cattle drover, moving cattle across New Jersey to the Hudson for processing at Manhattan slaughterhouses. It was his practice to feed them salt in the holding pens, making them so thirsty they would drink gallons and gallons of water trying to sate this. He would then have them weighted for market, gaining an additional profit off this bogus weight. Thus the term "watering stock" came to be. Drew then devoted these profits to the growing railroad industry by helping to establish the Erie Railroad, where he continued his nefarious practices. He would artificially pump up the value of the stock in the company to lure new investors. Once he received this additional capital, he would then jerk the rug out from under the stock, allowing it to drop to pennies on the dollar. At that point he would buy back the stock he had sold, which he'd then pump up again, only to repeat this over and over, and thus to add an entirely different meaning to "watering stock".
Drew was a good friend to the mammoth of that era, Commodore Vanderbilt. They often played poker together, enjoyed each other's company, and considered themselves friends. They were such good friends that, one night, Daniel Drew stole 6 million dollars from the Commodore (a truly massive sum at that time), stuffed the cash into a carpetbag, and fled with it across the Hudson in a rowboat, holding up in a Jersey City hotel surrounded by his hired goons to protect his stolen booty from his buddy.
In later years Drew began to despair about his odds of avoiding Hell in the afterlife, so in an attempt to purchase his way into Heaven (NB, this was not only long after the Pope sold indulgences, it would also have been no option for a "good" Methodist like Drew anyway), he purchased an estate in Madison NJ in 1867 and established there Drew Theological Seminary, now called Drew University. His tradition continues there, as this small liberal art college a few blocks from me has the highest tuition costs on any institute of higher learning in a state not known for bargains anyway . . . and yes, that includes Princeton.
