He tamed the market's bulls and bears. "He was the best friend I have ever had in every way."—J. P. Morgan

It was the height of the Gilded Age and J. Pierpont Morgan controlled the fate of railroads, corporations, and governments. The wealthy and influential were said to tremble before his blinding intellect and intimidating gaze, yet he deferred to one man: Anthony J. Drexel. Drexel—whose name is familiar today only through the university he founded and his recently canonized niece and protegee, Katharine—was the most influential financier of the nineteenth century.

The second son of an Austrian emigre, Anthony Drexel (1826-1893) soon established himself as the preeminent financial mind in the Philadelphia currency brokerage his father began in 1838. Shunning publicity, self-promotion, and high-profile public accolades (he declined President Ulysses S. Grant's invitation to become Secretary of the Treasury), Drexel initiated a partnership with J. P. Morgan and his father, Junius, that became the most powerful financial combination of its age.

At a time when the United States did not have a central bank, the government as well as large-scale commercial ventures relied on financiers to raise the enormous sums of money necessary to build railroads, construct factories, and fight major wars. With branches and partnerships in London, Paris, Chicago, and New York, all benefiting from their leader's reputation for impeccable integrity, Drexel's firms were able to steer American business through the most extraordinary long-term economic growth of any nation in world history, as well as through four devastating depressions, an enlightening lesson in the cyclical nature of the U.S. economy.

Drexel and his firm quietly pioneered many of the financial and business strategies that we now take for granted, such as trading national currencies, guaranteeing credit for travelers abroad, rewarding workers based on individual initiative, and offering "sweat equity" to deserving employees who could not afford to buy stock. By cultivating Morgan's self-confidence and allowing his younger business partner to become the public face for the firm, Drexel was able to avoid attention and, instead, nurture his extended family.

Today, Anthony J. Drexel's influence and accomplishments are mostly forgotten or credited to others, but after decades of detective work and careful research, Dan Rottenberg has succeeded in writing the first biography of this exceptionally influential and elusive man. Since Drexel gave no interviews, kept no diaries, held no public offices, and destroyed most of his personal papers, Rottenberg had painstakingly to track down every reference and anecdote he could find and, in the process, discovered 150 previously unknown letters and cables in Drexel's hand. Drexel believed that there is no limit to what one can accomplish if one doesn't mind who gets the credit, but as The Man Who Made Wall Street shows, the balance has finally been paid in full.

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The Truth Behind the Tragic Hero Who Helped Save the Union and Created the Myth of the American Gunslinger

"There was such magic in that name, SLADE! I stood always ready to drop any subject in hand, to listen to something new about Slade. . . . Slade was at once the most bloody, the most dangerous and the most valuable citizen that inhabited the savage fastnesses of the mountains."--Mark Twain, Roughing It

In 1859, as the United States careened toward civil war, Washington's only northern link with America's richest state, California, was a stagecoach line operating between Missouri and the Pacific. Yet the stage line was plagued by outlaws and hostile Indians. At this critical moment, the company enlisted a former wagon train captain to clean up its most dangerous division. Over the next three years, Jack Slade exceeded his employers' wildest dreams, capturing bandits and horse thieves and driving away gangs. He kept the stagecoaches and the U.S. Mail running, and helped launch the Pony Express, securing California and its gold for the Union. Across the Great Plains he became known as "The Law West of Kearny."

Slade's legend grew when he was shot and left for dead, only to survive and exact revenge on his would-be killer. But once Slade had restored the peace, his life descended into an alcoholic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nightmare, transforming him from a courageous leader, charming gentleman, and devoted husband into a vicious, quicktriggered ruffian, who finally lost his life at the hands of vigilantes.

Since Slade's death in 1864, persistent myths and stories have defied the efforts of writers and historians to capture the real Jack Slade. Despite his notoriety and place in history as the first celebrity gunfighter, the pieces of Slade's fascinating life--including his marriage to the beautiful Maria Virginia--have remained scattered and hidden. In Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, the West's Most Elusive Legend, journalist Dan Rottenberg assembles more than fifty years of research to reveal the true story of Jack Slade, one of America's greatest tragic heroes....