2
2 The Little Railroad That Could E arlier in 1833, just a few weeks before his twenty-eighth birthday, William Ogden had been ruminating about the nagging torpor that had cloaked him like a shroud since Sarah North’s death. He knew he was far too young to be feeling so enervated; or was he? Maybe the fact that he had been forced to become an adult at sixteen had somehow accelerated his life’s clock. What Ogden did know for sure was that he had to shake himself loose from whatever malady had hold of him. As a boy, Ogden had always imagined his life would be an unending series of adventures. He had always been a voracious reader; and the adventures of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Lesage’s Gil Blas or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe had filled his mind with ideas of how adventuresome life could be. One of his fondest memories was of his father telling him stories. Abraham Ogden had a special knack for making the most mundane experience sound like a grand adventure in his retelling. Among all of Abraham’s stories, none likely had a greater impact on the boy than the story of the Clermont. The year was 1807, when William was only two years old. His Uncle Daniel had heard rumors that a new kind of boat, one with a paddlewheel driven by steam, would be making a trial run up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. The invention of a Pennsylvania man named Robert Fulton, the boat drew all sorts of derisive comments from the citizens of Walton who had heard about her. Daniel and Abraham decided to see it for themselves and set out on their horses for the sixty-mile trip to the Hudson. What they saw that August 11 afternoon was enough to convince both men that a new age was dawning. A young boy named Henry Freeland was fortunate enough to be standing on the riverbank that day and also witnessed the event: “Some imagined it to be a sea monster while others didn’t hesitate to express their belief that it might be the sign of the approaching [last] judgment. What seemed strange in the vessel was the substitution of lofty and straight smoke-stacks rising from the deck 6 instead of gracefully topped masts. . . . the whole country talked of nothing but a sea monster belching forth fire and smoke.”1 The older and wiser men who watched the strange contraption huff and puff its way past them saw the future: Not just the future of ships that could move upriver by steam, but of wagons that could be propelled in the same way. Abraham shared these stories of a changing world with his young son in the years that followed, and William Ogden never forgot them. But Abraham Ogden suffered a stroke when William was only sixteen, and that ended the boy’s fantasies, along with his dream of becoming a lawyer. Still, he adjusted and did his duty. As the oldest son, he took over the family ’s lumber and woolen mills, and he ran them well and profitably. Now, about to turn twenty-eight, WilliamOgden’sphysicalappearance reflected the character and maturity he had gained. His good friend Isaac Arnold, who would come to know him better than anyone else during his Chicago years, described him at about this age: You might look the country through and not find a man of more manly and imposing presence, or a finer looking gentleman. His forehead was broad and square; his mouth firm and determined; his eyes large dark gray; his nose large; hair brown; his complexion ruddy; his voice clear, musical, and sympathetic; his figure a little above the medium height, and he united great muscular power with almost perfect symmetry of form. He was a natural leader, and if he had been one of a thousand picked men cast upon a desolate island, he would, by common, universal, and instinctive selection, have been made their leader.2 A friend-turned-adversary from his later Chicago days, early pioneer Gurdon Hubbard, described Ogden as “a man liberally educated, elegant and softspoken .”3 Ogden had also developed a reputation in the Upper Delaware, indeed throughout the entire northern part of New York, as the kind of man other men looked up to. He had built a reputation as an outstanding business executive, Portrait of William B. Ogden as a young man, circa 1835...
OR
Buy This Book in Print