BEN HOLLADAY GETS HIS DUE

     Among the antique Concord stagecoaches owned by Wells Fargo is one known as the "Ben Holladay."  Ben Holladay was the sole proprietor of the Holladay Overland Mail & Express Company, an empire of stagecoach lines which extended for 3,145 miles through Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. A flamboyant but unethical one-man conglomerate, Holladay also owned slaughter houses, steamships, whiskey distilleries, grain mills and gold mines.

     No business practice was too cutthroat for Holladay.  He routinely dropped prices to force an adversary into bankruptcy.  Then having succeeded, he would nearly double what they had been originally.

     His partners were no safer.  After collaborating with William Russell, of Russell, Majors & Waddell, on a number of fraudulent but highly profitable transactions, Holladay loaned Russell's firm money only to later foreclose on one of its largest ventures, the Central Overland Mail.

     So why would Wells Fargo name a coach after such an obvious scoundrel?  Because in 1866, with his stagecoach holdings at their peak, but foreseeing the decline of stagecoaching in the face of the growing railroad, Holladay sold out to Wells Fargo for $1.5 million in cash, $300,000 in Wells Fargo stock and... an honorary seat on the board of directors.

     Holladay's rough rider business tactics allowed him a luxurious personal life.  He maintained three residences: one in Washington, D.C., full of crystal chandeliers and leather bound (and rarely read) books; a brownstone on Fifth Avenue in New York City, within easy distance of his Wall Street office and a 200 room palace knows as Ophir Farm located outside New York near White Plains.

     Eventually, however, the speculative financing of Holladay's far-flung empire came tumbling down. With the New York stock market crash of 1873, he was forced into default.  His creditors raided his assets and all but picked him clean.  He died in 1887, trying to make a comeback with what little remained.

(Story is used courtesy of Wells Fargo.com)