Tag: Wall Street

On a Train Ride West

Charlie was a historian of sorts a hundred and fifty years ago. More often, Charlie wrote for newspapers along the upper Eastern Seaboard of the United States. As a young reporter, Charlie covered local stories that pleased the readership of the papers he wrote for. His tales garnered so much attention in the towns and villages in the upper east that the young man decided to compile some of his favorite local stories into book form. The book proved so popular that a big city paper hired the young man in 1877 to write for it because his prose made the local places and events come alive for readers. That’s how Charlie made the transition from reporter to some sort of local historian.

Charlie combined thorough research and good interviews to weave his tales. For example, on a story about some local cloth mills, Charlie gave an overview of the history of not only mills in New England but also of the use of cloth over the past several centuries. Such depth of coverage made him respected and made his writing popular. So, when a group of businessmen wanted someone to provide publicity for an investment they were making in some silver mines out west, they hired Charlie to take a train trip with them to document what was happening both on the trip and in the process of the mining of the silver. It was the investors’ idea that Charlie’s stories would bring in more investment money to their mining venture.

It took the group over four days by rail to reach Colorado, the place where the silver mine was located. Along with the investors, there were some geologists, lawmakers, and some other business types who made the journey as well. And Charlie milled among them all on the train, spending time with them in the dining car, interviewing them in the bar and smoker car, playing cards with them in the poker room, and so forth. And what Charlie learned as he rode the rails with some of the richest men in the nation, well, it was as if the young reporter had been to the best business school in the country. The way Charlie told the story to the papers, and the way the investors used what Charlie wrote, was that the young man wrote a series of “letters back home” as it were, letters that were really news stories that told of what he had learned and saw.

In these letters, later collected into a pamphlet called The Leadville Letters (after the famous silver mine the trip was traveling to), Charlie told of how capitalism had developed, how these men were doing things with their money, things that were changing the face of the nation. Sure, in one way, what Charlie wrote was propaganda, but what he wrote was also true. These men were changing the economy of America, using their investment money to get even more riches that they then turned into things like oil, steel, railroads, and other modern technology that was indeed changing the world itself.

And the trip also changed Charlie. He decided to report on business from that point on. Joining forces with a young college dropout named Ed, the pair opened their own reporting agency that focused on New York’s financial markets. Their reporting was accurate, well-researched, and well-written. And they could neither be bribed nor bought, nor would they allow their reporting to be swayed by market forces. Their daily reporting on the financial markets included a look at several key companies, mostly railroads, some banks, and the Western Union Telegraph Company. Charlie and Ed felt that these businesses were good indicators of how those financial markets were doing. That daily report on those businesses as an economic indicator is well known today. And their success was due in large part to that train trip Charlie took out west a few years earlier.

You see, it was Charlie Dow and Edward Jones who created the Dow-Jones Industrial Average.

On A Wall

The Dutch really wanted to protect their town, so they built a wall. Now, settlements throughout history have built walls of protection. That’s nothing new. Walls seem to have three general purposes: One is to keep people out of a place. Two is to keep people in a place–like the kind you’ll find in a prison or, for animals, in pens or fences. And three is to act as support for some other structure. The wall the Dutch built was the first kind. Well, to be fair, the citizens of the town allowed their animals to graze on the other side of the wall because it kept the animals from coming into the town itself and bringing waste to the streets and alleyways, which means maybe the wall was 90% defensive and 10% keeping animals out.

You see, the Dutch were worried about other people–particularly the English–encroaching on their town, but only from one side. They didn’t worry so much about the other three sides of the town because, like many Dutch towns, it was built on the water front. The only place they felt the town was vulnerable was from the land and that was only on one side. So that’s why they built their defensive and protective wall there. The structure started out as a simple wooden demarcation line, but it soon grew to become a true defensive wall over 12 feet (3.7 meters) high. The Dutch called this defensive line Het Cingel–The Belt or The Ring–even though it wasn’t a true “ring” and only stretched across one side of the town. And, as the town guards walked along Het Cingel, the path they trod in the grass became a walkaway for townsfolks and, eventually, a street on its own. But the purpose was purely defensive.

Well, you can imagine what happened. When the Dutch were attacked, they were attacked from the sea. And the English who did the attacking with their superior navy took the town fairly easily. So the wall proved to be largely ineffective, despite the Dutch attempts at keeping people out by building it, and the English managed to secure the town for themselves.

Now, today, if you go to that particular town built by the Dutch today, you can still see the remnants of the wall or at least the places where the support posts were in the ground where the wall used to be. That line where the wall used to be is actually more famous today, even though there is no wall there.

Today, it’s in the part of the old Dutch town that has a lot of financial businesses affiliated with it over the years. When it was built, it was still legal in many parts of the Europe and the Americas for the buying and selling of people. One of the markets that facilitated this practice was located along this wall. So when you go to New York City, a place that used to be known as New Amsterdam when the Dutch owned it, you can see remnants of the Het Cingel built there, almost three hundred fifty years ago.

You know it as Wall Street.