Part I
Chapter 1
A Criminal Enterprise
On September 8, 1883, a private four-coach train chugged into Gold
Creek, Montana. It was packed with hundreds of American and European
dignitaries—members of Congress, diplomats, high-ranking judges, Ulysses
S. Grant. On its way from Chicago, the Northern Pacific Special had made
a number of stops so that its passengers could admire waterfalls, scenic
vistas, and President Chester A. Arthur, who had greeted the travelers in
Minneapolis. In dusty Gold Creek—an old mining outpost on its way to
becoming a ghost town—a contingent of Crow Indians performed war
dances for men in bowler hats and women in ruffled dresses. A newly
constructed pavilion, bedecked with gold-mining pickaxes and sprigs of
greenery, afforded seating for a thousand spectators.
Henry Villard—slim, balding, and sporting a well-manicured brown
mustache—stood before the crowd in a black coat, hat, and necktie, ready
for his moment in the limelight. Thirty years earlier, Villard—then going by
his given name, Heinrich Hilgard—had emigrated to America, a penniless,
sickly German eighteen-year-old who spoke zero English. He had worked
in wheat fields and at a lumber yard and on a wood-burning train and as a
bartender before eventually landing a job for a German-language
newspaper. That was the springboard for a reporting career in which he
would cover Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War and, in the process,
become a respected syndicated journalist. After the war, his pedigree
established, Villard married the daughter of the great abolitionist and
progressive William Lloyd Garrison. But all of that was not enough for
Villard: He wanted fame and fortune. And the greatest fame and fortune to
be had at the end of the nineteenth century were in the railroads.
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