84 HISTORY OF THE GRANGE MOVEMENT; OR, 



cutive approval, with a speed unprecedented ; con- 

 tracts, arranged with the Erie managers by boards of 

 directors, were unexpectedly rejected in meetings of 

 stockholders; and for a time this irresistible power 

 even threatened to wrest from the Erie road its own 

 Deculiar and long-established connections. The result 

 of these operations was that the Pennsylvania Central 

 soon controlled by perpetual lease a whole system of 

 roads radiating to all points in the West and South- 

 west. By one it reached Chicago, by another St. 

 Louis, and by a third Cincinnati. At Indianapolis 

 it had absorbed a network of routes ; at Chicago and 

 St. Louis it had formed close connections looking 

 directly towards the Pacific. Here for a time it 

 rested, declaring that its policy did not look to any 

 expansion beyond the Mississippi. The corporation 

 rested, perhaps, but not .the ambitious men who con- 

 trolled it; their individual operations now commenced. 

 They obtained the control of roads endowed with vast 

 land grants in Michigan and in Minnesota ; they were 

 the directors of the Northern Pacific ; and when the 

 men who had constructed the Union Pacific broke 

 down under the multiplicity of their engagements, 

 the first vice-president of the Pennsylvania road ap- 

 peared as the new president of that road also. The 

 very land grants belonging to the companies these 

 men now controlled amounted to 80,000 square miles, 

 or an area equivalent to the aggregate possessions of 

 four of the existing kingdoms of Europe. 



"Meanwhile the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 

 distinct from its individual directors, now owned or 

 held by lease 400 miles of road in Pennsylvania, and 

 directly controlled 450 miles more, almost entirely 



