The history of America's first transcontinental railroad is usually remembered in romantic sepia tones. We picture Chinese workers clawing tunnels through the Sierra Nevada, heading east. Or Irishmen battling Cheyenne and Sioux as they drive track westward across the Great Plains.
Then, at last, two steam locomotives meet, cowcatcher to cowcatcher, on May 10 1869. Click goes the camera in Utah, freezing the moment.
Like most photo ops, this image clouds the truth. For what really laid the rails was greed, as Richard Rayner demonstrates in his admirably terse primer, The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California.
"The railroad was built - built, as opposed to dreamt of and talked about - by men who cared only about money and were absolutely ruthless about money,'' he writes.
The Associates, as they styled themselves, were Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. They sated their hunger for wealth through fraud, congressional manipulation and strike breaking, Rayner shows.
The story opens in 1848, when nuggets found in the Sacramento Valley sparked the Gold Rush.
As 49ers flocked west, so did traders and shopkeepers like Huntington and Hopkins. Their store in Sacramento thrived on their complementary if dubious gifts.
Huntington specialised in "tracking goods, driving the hard bargains, cornering the market in shovels or lamps, while Hopkins ran the store and kept the books; later Hopkins would show he knew how to cook them too'', Rayner writes.
The Gold Rush also drew visionaries like railroad engineer Theodore Judah, who dreamt of binding the Atlantic and Pacific together with rails.
He hauled his maps and charts to Washington, where he lobbied members of congress including one Abraham Lincoln, a railroad proponent who believed in "manifest destiny'' - defined by Wikipedia as "the belief that the US was destined to expand from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean".
Judah also tramped into the mountains, "searching for a route few thought would or could be found - through the towering heights of the Sierras''. He settled on Donner Pass. All he needed was financial backing.
Enter Huntington, Hopkins and two other big fish in the Sacramento pond, Stanford and Crocker. The Central Pacific Railroad was incorporated, and Judah drafted much of the Pacific Railroad Bill of 1862, which Lincoln, now president, signed into law. The Associates thanked Judah by gathering "at night and in secret, making decisions behind his back''.
Back east, the Civil War raged. The drama was just starting.
"By 1862, the economic blueprint for building an American railroad was well established,'' Rayner writes.
You formed a corporation and obtained a charter to build. The charter provided free land grants. Funding came from selling some of the land and getting state-subsidised mortgage bonds. It was "a great national giveaway'', Rayner says.
The author writes in rough-and-ready declarative sentences that evoke the times, spinning a yarn filled with damning details. When congress investigated whether the railroad had defrauded the government, Huntington drew up new figures while Hopkins burned the real books in a furnace.
Crocker paid Chinese workers $35 a month and cut their food supply when they went on strike for $40. Stanford, who later founded a university, split legal hairs to move the "base'' of the Sierras 32km to the west, doubling the government money to be paid for track built on flat terrain.
This railroad story has often been told. Yet Rayner writes with brevity and colour, capturing the harsh winters in the Sierras, where the granite "bent steel drills like liquorice'' and "Chinese workers slept in tiny cots crammed into shacks that were buried in the snow''.
Best of all is Rayner's clear-eyed realism about how great wealth is often amassed.
"Fortunes are hard to get, harder for future generations to hold onto, and this is good, the acquisition and dissipation of huge wealth being the brute motor of America's aspirational wheel,'' concludes the author.
In other words, greed, if not good, often gets the job done.
- James Pressley writes for Bloomberg