COLUMBUS, January 31, 1870.
DEAR UNCLE: — I have been in correspondence with Jay Cooke about his new town of Duluth at the head of Lake Superior. It will be the great town of that region. The Northern Pacific Railroad will begin work there next spring, and finish about three hundred miles as fast as work can do it. A railroad to St. Paul will be completed by the Fourth of July. It will then be the lake port of two-thirds of Minnesota. I want to put in five or six thousand dollars if I can raise it in the next sixty or ninety days. It will double by next fall, and may do a great deal better than that. I can buy on the most favorable terms allowed to anybody, and have my own separate property without mixing up with the company. I don't want you to bother about it at all, but if you see where notes secured by mortgage can raise the money, let me know.
SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 3, pp. 84-5
