Education
He was educated privately and at Columbia University.
He was educated privately and at Columbia University.
After an apprenticeship as a clerk in the Western Union Telegraph Company, he was groomed to succeed his father in managing the Gould properties, which included four great railroads: the Missouri Pacific, the Texas and Pacific, the International and Great Northern, and the Wabash.
After his father's death in 1892 Gould consolidated the four roads and initiated a program of expansion in the East, in competition with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in the West to San Francisco, finally achieving his plan of a transcontinental system.
But the struggle for expansion and the opposition of Edward H. Harriman and Kuhn, Loeb and Company had weakened him, and he gradually lost control of all his railroad interests; by 1918 his railroad empire had vanished.