joanna grogan -- a lot of stuff is written -- it turns out joanna grogan made $1 investment. she worked in a major hotel. by the time they were done she died -- very incompetent doctors. her hospital bill amounted to two years and she would have to work two years to pay the bill for the hospital. huntington doesn't want to pay the bill but realized more than she did. bile of the local people, the undertaker and all the doctors. stacey this as a chance to make some money off of that. what they have done is taken on somebody on such a colossal scale they have no idea what they have gone into. they won't cheat policyhunting. what it does do is break the law down so they settle for much less or get nothing at all. this is joanna grogan axe -- farm with five children. none of them had shoes. final details come in. this was a typical -- where you came from was county clerk embattled school funds and low about local farmers so at this point from bottom to top no wonder mark twain called it the gilded age. everywhere you see these stories. i later found there are plenty of honest peo

he buys out joanna grogan's fathers farms mortgage.joanna grogan had five children, none of them who had shoes. there's this final detail that comes in there too. where did the mortgage come from? the mortgage came from the county clerk who had embezzled the school fund and then flooded out to local farmers for mortgages. so at this point i thought you know, from bottom to top, no wonder mark twain called at the gilded age. i mean every place you scratch you find these kinds of stories. i later found there are plenty of honest people that i -- in the 19th century. not many in the railroad archives but plenty in the 19th century. >> well we have come to the point in our program where there is time for only one last question. i'm afraid it is kind of a big question i'm going to paraphrase several versions of it that have come up from members of a audience. one standard narrative of the transcontinental railroad is that it is the first installment in a series of federal investments in the development of the american west, nation-building,