Meiggs, Henry (1821–1877)

Henry Meiggs (b. 7 July 1821; d. 29 September 1877), American entrepreneur who oversaw the construction of railroads in Chile and Peru. Business reverses led the New York-born Meiggs to move to California, where he initially enjoyed great commercial success during the gold rush. Then bad economic times and a willingness to forge documents forced Meiggs, almost a million dollars in debt, to flee his creditors in the United States. In 1854 he arrived in Chile, where he breathed new life into a faltering railroad industry. Beginning in 1861, the informally trained engineer supervised the building of a railroad linking the capital to the south. As promised, he completed the Santiago-Quillota spur in 1863. He later helped construct a rail line between the capital and Chile's principal port, Valparaíso, in less than four years. Meiggs enjoyed enormous success because he paid his workers well and did not maltreat his employees. Apparently well liked, the high-living Meiggs, who built himself a palatial mansion, expanded his activities by trading in guano and opening a bank in La Paz, Bolivia.

Meiggs left Chile in the late 1860s for Peru, where he constructed a railroad between Lima and La Oroya, high in the Andes. This task proved to be particularly difficult to complete, since the rail line ran from the coast to the Altiplano, over 14,000 feet above sea level. Although the railroad clearly benefited the Peruvian economy, it hurt Chile's; some twenty-five thousand Chileans in search of work migrated north, never to return to their homeland. Their departure damaged Chilean hacendados (landowners) by depriving them of needed agricultural labor. Meiggs's overall contribution proved substantial, however, helping both the Chileans and the Peruvians develop economically by facilitating the export of their raw materials to the United States and Europe.

See alsoRailroads .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Watt Stewart, Henry Meiggs: Yankee Pizarro (1946).

Thomas C. Wright, Landowners and Reform in Chile (1981), p. 145.

Additional Bibliography

Kemp Heiland, Klaus. El desarrollo de los ferrocarriles en el Perú. Lima, Peru: Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería, Proyecto Historia, 2002.

Thomson, Ian, and Dietrich Angerstein. Historia del ferrocarril en Chile. Santiago, Chile: Dirección Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, 2000.

                                        William F. Sater