" The railroad they built yonder wasn’t even a decent road, but they’d been granted all that land by a rotten Congress that they’d bought up—land on both sides of the tracks for miles and miles, east and west. That’s what they were after, you see. They got all that land along the right of way—hundreds of thousands of acres—and it never cost them a cent of their own money. "

― Edna Ferber , Saratoga Trunk