The difference between the Central Pacific cabal and all the other fly-by-night railroad concerns that collapsed in the panic was not that the Sacramento shopkeepers were financially scrupulous. They were at least as overleveraged as their peers; their books were obvious bullshit; and they had taken advantage of the exact same scams that felled the Union Pacific’s directors the year before, in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Rather, the difference was that they persuaded their bankers to persuade their bankers to play it cool. With the interested parties denying anything was amiss, the Associates were in place to snatch up failed lines at a discount. For capitalists at the end of the nineteenth century, it paid—as it has ever since—to have several corporate shells to switch between, just in case. They funneled money into the construction of their Southern Pacific line, another Associates-controlled railroad that subsumed the Central, earning the budding monopoly the nickname the Combine.