Harriman was born at Hempstead, Long Island, the son of a clergyman with a large family and a small income. The boy was renowned chiefly for his daily fights and for his aversion to study. At the age of fourteen, he was put to work in a broker's office in Wall street, at eighteen he had a partnership, at twenty-two he bought a seat on the stock exchange, and pretty soon entered the railroad field by getting control of the Illinois Central. He at once inaugurated a new policy. Before that time, the prevailing idea of railroad management was to run a road as cheaply as possible and pay big dividends. Harriman's idea was that the biggest dividends would be secured in the end by making a good road, and he proceeded to carry the idea out by putting his road in the very pink of condition. And it paid. That was the beginning. His great coup was the rebuilding of the Union Pacific. A railroad with 7,500 miles of track, a giant crushed by its own weight, it had gone into a receivership in the panic of 1893. For five years it stayed there, despite the utmost efforts of the giants of finance to lift it out. Then Harriman got possession of it, and taking an engine and a car, turned the train backward and, running in the day time only, went over the road mile by mile. He decided that the road must be made a good road, and he told his executive committee that he needed for his immediate necessities one hundred millions of dollars! Well, he got the money and he got good men and went to work. The result was soon apparent. Earnings grew, business increased, and the company's credit improved. Never before in the history of railroading had there been such daring rebuilding. The line was levelled down to a maximum grade of forty-one feet to a mile; two hundred and forty-seven feet were scaled off the top of the Great Divide; millions of cubic yards of dirt and stone were blasted out and moved; tunnels were drilled; and, finally, when the Southern Pacific, too, was acquired, a trestle twenty-three miles long was built across Great Salt Lake, through water thirty feet deep, taking railroad trains farther from land than they had ever yet been run, and shortening the road forty-four miles. And the result? The gross earnings have risen to over $170,000,000 a year, and $28,000,000 a year are distributed in dividends. Truly a transformation from the old water-logged road which Harriman took over. He had his reverses--he attempted to get hold of the Northern Pacific, but it slipped through his fingers; the Burlington was cut out from under his guns, and so was the Rock Island. James J. Hill outgeneraled him more than once, and he was never able to "get back" at Hill effectively.