Dodge is better than Ford

Daniel Drew was born in 1797 in a place called Carmel located in New York. He grew up on a farm and didn"t have a lot of money or education. Despite that however, he eventually grew up to be a successful person. He was about six feet tall, a little on the big and husky side, and his expressions were to kill for. He was interested in money, not in the way you and I are, but as in he liked to find clever ways to make it and loved to make more of it. Money was his passion, unlike how with most of us, it"s not really a passion, we just want a lot of it. When the war of 1812 came rolling in, Drew enlisted in it for someone else. The "someone else" doesn"t have a name, but we do that they paid Daniel a cool $100 for it. After the war, Drew found clever ways to make money, most of them being illegal at the time. Not getting caught, he wanted to make more money, maybe this time a little more legally. Drew started working with cows, not working with them in the office, but selling, buying, and doing what he can to them to sell more. He bought cows from the countryside of New York City, then started working his way towards selling them in Ohio and Illinois. This business was very well to Drew and a step up from his previous money making acts. Besides being legal, Drew made more profit and met new people, along with traveling to places he"s never been. Drew would try his best at making the cows irresistible to buy. He would feed the cows, water them, and just plain pamper them right before he would sell them, to make the cows seem bigger and better than they really were. Those cows being filled with water to make them weigh more, is where the term stock-watering came from. Look at that, you already learned something. In fact, that term is still used today, and it is one of the many things Daniel is known for. People would buy the cows, paying more than what they usually would, and the only ones who came out on top were Daniel, and the cows. Drew would then use that money to buy more cows, but because people paid so much for them, he would always have money left over. That"s called profit. Once Drew was discovered by a wealthy businessman, his little cattle club he had going turned into a cattle headquarters. So this whole thing was now official and worldwide. This wealthy businessman was named Henry Astor, and he gave Daniel a bit of money to help get him started. Once he proved himself, that is when his cattle business was born. He married Roxanne Read in 1820, and moved to Manhattan in 1829, probably because this is where the headquarters was located. Drew and his wife had one son, who wasn"t as interested in finance as Drew was, so there was one more disappointed father out there. In 1830, Daniel Drew became interested in the steamboat industry. This was better than cattle. More money would have been made, and you didn"t smell cows in the air, just sweet summer lilies. He used the leftover money he had from the cattle to invest in the industry that ran along the Hudson River. This business is what introduced Daniel to Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt was a businessman whose opinions differed from Drew"s. Drew has done some dishonest things in his life but for the most part he likes to be honest in his business. Vanderbilt on the other hand, liked to trick people, and create a monopoly of the industries in which he invested. Drew didn"t like Vanderbilt, and Vanderbilt didn"t like Drew. These two became lifelong rivals who were always competing to be better than the other. Drew always did his best to outplay Vanderbilt, but sometimes that doesn't always work. Daniel had to think of something that would be better than Vanderbilt could ever be, even though Vanderbilt was a very smart man who was very intelligent in would he did. What he did, was exactly what Drew did, but better, and Drew couldn"t stand that. That"s why he decided to sit down and brainstorm. There was no way Drew was going to let Vanderbilt get the best of him. What did he have that Drew didn"t? Other than more skill and motives, they were practically the same. What they should have done was team up and form the ultimate robber baron team, as Vanderbilt himself was also a robber baron. Daniel Drew was a robber baron. A robber baron was someone who was referred to as a "financial lord," or someone who uses illegal or immoral ways of obtaining money or wealth. Another definition is someone who uses impractical ways of gaining wealth. Pretty much the same things but I thought I"d throw it in. Daniel Drew did these things, he found ways to make his cows look more plump and marvelous, he did some illegal things back in his day, and he also sabotaged some of closests people and enemies, just to get ahead, money wise anyway. He wasn"t ahead as in winning, because there wasn"t anything to win, until the Erie War came along and change everything. There were many other robber barons, but I believe Daniel Drew to be the one of the best. He really sets the definition of a robber baron, someone who does anything for money. While Vanderbilt might be a little better at it then he, I still think Drew did a wonderful job at living up to be a robber baron, whether that"s a good thing or not. He really was a great person. He goes from little to no education, he knows just how to get things done his way, he is good at what he does, and he made some friends along the way. Enemies too, but when you do things like Drew did them, you're bound to make enemies. In the 1970"s, Stanford University was going to make their mascot after the robber barons, but it was rejected due to being disrespectful to their founder. In the late 1860"s, there is what was called the "Erie War." The name sounds a lot scarier than it was. The Erie War was a war over control over a railroad. This railroad stretched from Buffalo all the way to New York City. This war was massive and involved some people not even in it and got the newspapers all stirred up. Drew was a part of this war. He invested $2 million into this railroad in an attempt to secure it. He did, but his accomplices didn"t like him and so they sabotaged him, causing him to lose his lead. Drew was known to be a very shady person who shouldn"t be trusted to well, and everybody knew this. This gave Vanderbilt an advantage, because he already had the people"s opinion, which sometimes is all you need. Vanderbilt, at the time was the richest person in America, so that also helped him, with money, comes power and more money. He and his rival Vanderbilt were competing over each other for a slice of the action they called owning the railroad, or at least some of it. This Vanderbilt, we talked about him before, and as I said, he was a very smart person who was really intelligent at what he did. He and Drew competed, Drew came out on top but in the end lost $1.5 million. So really Drew didn"t win, but at the same time he did. Anyway Drew ended up stopping Vanderbilt from getting his part in the railroad, and that didn"t make Vanderbilt happy. So then he goes and tampers with Drew"s stocks he had. There were a lot of stocks owned by Drew, mostly in the steamboat industry because he liked that sort of thing, and anything of the sort, so this act of not nice-ness ended up costing Drew 500,000 big ones. James Fisk and Gould were also not fond of Daniel, and they also decided to cost him some money. Drew decided to take some of Vanderbilt"s stocks so he would be sitting" in the ditches. Once he did that, Vanderbilt wasn"t too happy with learning that Drew had done this. Vanderbilt had convinced some officers that he had been bribing over the years, to get an arrest warrant for on Drew"s head. Drew and his accomplices rowed themselves across the Hudson river for some temporary safety. Once they thought it was safe to return, they came back to buy some votes of the legislatures. This created new laws that prevented such corruption and secured Drew some new land. So yeah Drew didn"t hav