Edward Charles Creighton was an American telegraph builder, banker, and philanthropist. He was involved in several business ventures in Omaha, including wagon freighting, merchandising, real estate, banking, railroading and ranching.
Background
Edward Charles Creighton was born on August 31, 1820 in Belmont County, Ohio, United States. He was the fifth of nine children of James and Bridget (Hughes) Creighton, both natives of Ireland, who came to the United States in 1805 and 1808 respectively and were married in 1811. They settled in Belmont County, Ohio, in 1813, removing subsequently to Licking County.
Education
Edward received limited schooling.
Career
At fourteen Creighton was put to work as a wagon-driver. When the poles bearing the iron wire began advancing over the Ohio hills, the newly invented magnetic telegraph excited the imagination of the young man. With little capital but his brawn, energy, and vision, he took on contracts to build lines in the Middle West and the Southwest, coming into close touch with the telegraph magnates of that day, especially with Jephtha H. Wade and Hiram Sibley whose complete confidence he won. To Creighton, Sibley entrusted the delicate task of making a pseudo survey of the South to suggest impending construction of a competing telegraph, a performance constituting “the lemon-squeezer” that frightened the company there entrenched into yielding a coveted lease necessary to the success of the budding Western Union.
Sibley originated the first practical plan for a transcontinental telegraph to the Pacific and in this, too, assigned Creighton an essential role. In 1854, Edward Creighton had associated with him in his work his younger brother, John Andrew, and the two made their advent two years later in Omaha City, the prairie-outfitting base on the edge of Nebraska Territory, to which they brought the wires from St. Joseph, bridging distance previously traversed only by steed, stage, and steamboat.
About this time, Edward Creighton was deputed by Sibley to examine a cross-country telegraph route by way of Fort Smith, and another by way of Memphis. Both proving unsuitable, he turned to the trail from Omaha to Salt Lake via Fort Kearny, Laramie, and South Pass and over the Sierra Nevadas to Sacramento and San Francisco. He covered the entire stretch personally on muleback, in the winter of 1860, made his report April 12, 1861, and asserted his readiness to undertake construction to Salt Lake. Having procured congressional legislation for a subsidy, Sibley chartered the Pacific Telegraph Company and engaged with the government for completion within ten years. Actual work at both ends began July 4, 1861, the section from Julesburg, Colorado, to Salt Lake City falling to Creighton.
Connection with Salt Lake City was established October 24, and the section from Salt Lake west was completed two days later. November 15 saw the line in operation from ocean to ocean, only four months and eleven days after its commencement. One of the largest subscribers to the stock, Creighton emerged in possession of a great fortune, further increased by successful ventures in gold and silver mines and large-scale cattle-raising.
For a number of years he served as general manager of the telegraph company, then joined in organizing the first national bank in Nebraska Territory and became its president. A devout Roman Catholic, his public spirit paralleled his prosperity and he frequently proclaimed his purpose to provide a free Catholic school for higher education, a project still of the future when he was stricken with paralysis in his fifty-fifth year. His widow, Mary Lucretia Wareham, whose sister had married John Andrew Creighton, determined to carry out the unfulfilled intention of her husband but she died within two years and it remained for John Andrew Creighton as executor of the bequest in her will ($100, 000), supplementing it from his own ample resources from time to time, to usher Creighton University into existence. It was incorporated August 14, 1879, and entrusted to the Jesuit order.
Achievements
Connections
Creighton married Mary Lucretia Creighton in Dayton, Ohio.