CHAPTER 9
LAKIN, KANSAS, WAS ONE OF MANY DUSTY WESTERN TOWNS willed into being by the arrival of the railroad. In fact, it was one of the first in which the Santa Fe acknowledged its creationist powers, naming the hamlet after one of its employees, D. L. Lakin, who ran the department that sold the land on either side of the Santa Fe’s tracks.
While The Clifton Hotel in Florence got most of the attention, Fred was also transforming another Santa Fe depot hotel way out west in Lakin, the last stop beyond Dodge City before reaching the Colorado border. The Lakin hotel didn’t have the same epicurean ambitions as Florence, but it still featured excellent service, imported table settings, and consistently good, fresh food, making it the best place to eat and sleep in the Wild West.
The Lakin depot hotel quickly became Fred’s western home away from home. He even had family working there, his niece and nephew from England. His sister Annie had visited America with her children after her marriage to Charles Baumann, a Swiss count, went sour. When twenty-one-year-old Charles and his seventeen-year-old sister, Florence, decided they wanted to stay in the United States, Uncle Fred gave them both jobs.
In Lakin, Fred also got involved with ranching, a business that had intrigued him since he first started working with cattlemen as a freight agent. He found a herd for sale called the XY: ten thousand head of cattle with an “XY” brand on the left side and a signature cropping of the left ear. He spent $4,000 ($89,000) for a one-quarter interest in the herd, and an option to purchase the rest. But he decided to use that option for a more inventive investment in his own future. He reached out to William Strong at the Santa Fe and offered his boss the chance to be his partner in the deal.
Fred had become wiser in the ways of the train industry. He understood that if he wanted to play the game at a higher level, it couldn’t hurt to be in business with his bosses. While the Santa Fe was considered one of the more scrupulous of the railroads, its executives were not above getting a taste of a side venture.
Soon Harvey and Strong were partners in the XY herd, along with another well-placed Santa Fe executive who was invited to buy in. They were looking forward to being ranch owners—as close as three guys who wore waistcoats and watch fobs would come to being cowboys. Strong even wrote excitedly to Fred about the prospect of coming west so he could watch “the round-up” of his own cattle.
FRED ENJOYED LAKIN so much that in the summer of 1879, he brought his family there and invited the entire town out for a Fourth of July picnic.
Fred and Sally’s family had grown. They now had five children: Ford, Minnie, May, Byron, and a brand-new baby daughter, Sybil. Besides the kids, three servants, and a rotating cast of dogs in the house and horses in their small stable, they had Sally’s mother, Mary Mattas, living with them now. The tiny Czech woman still spoke little English, but she communicated her love for her grandkids in other ways, such as praying for each of them in front of their bedroom doors each night.
The whole family came along on the trip to Lakin, as well as Sally’s younger sister Maggie from St. Louis, who, at twenty-three, was more than ready to find a husband.
Fred chose Chouteau’s Island for the Fourth of July picnic, which was hosted by him and Sally and catered by his hotel. Prominent politicians, businessmen, and ranchers from all over southwestern Kansas flocked to the lovely spot in the Arkansas River, a Santa Fe Trail landmark since the early nineteenth century, when a small band of trappers were said to have held off an attack by several hundred Pawnees.
The very young town of Lakin did not yet have an American flag for the celebration, so a group of local ladies volunteered to make one. Led by Mrs. Carrie Davies—a housekeeper at Fred’s hotel and the wife of rancher “Wild Horse” Davies—they hand stitched the stripes and all thirty-eight stars. On the day of the event, the entire Davies clan proudly rode together, on horseback and in coaches, behind their flag bearer, C. O. Chapman. His mettle was tested, however, when the section of the Arkansas River they needed to ford to reach Chouteau’s Island turned out to be deeper in the middle than expected. Suddenly Chapman and his horse were completely submerged. He was barely able to hold the flagpole above his head until someone could rescue it—and then him.
Among the guests at the picnic was Colonel R. J. “Jack” Hardesty, one of the richest ranchers in the West. Hardesty lived in nearby Sargent, but his cattle, branded with a half circle over a lazy S, grazed farther south in “No Man’s Land,” the thirty-four-mile stretch that had remained unclaimed when Texas declared statehood in the 1840s and later became the odd little panhandle of Oklahoma. (The town of Hardesty, Oklahoma, was named for him.)
The Kentucky-born Hardesty had made his first fortune going west to mine in the 1860s, and he invested that money, including $10,000 ($252,000) worth of gold he claimed to have carried in his belt, in Texas cattle. He had a reputation for being a gentleman rancher—his cowboys knew better than to swear in front of him—and a generous host. Hardesty often sponsored grand parties: His Christmas ball in Dodge City was considered the social event of the year. But except for his golden retriever, Tick, he was alone at age forty-six, one of the most eligible bachelors west of the Mississippi.
Until he met Fred Harvey’s sister-in-law Maggie Mattas.
After the picnic, everyone went home to change for the July 4th gala at the Lakin depot hotel, for which a band was imported from Pueblo. As the ball began, Fred and Sally Harvey were asked to lead the Grand March. At one point in the evening, Sally saw her petite sister dancing with muscular Jack Hardesty—who looked every bit the western gentleman in his full beard, Stetson hat, and highly buffed cowboy boots—and knew that Maggie had finally met a man who would change her life the way Fred Harvey had changed hers.
Only months later, the couple was married at the Harveys’ home in Leavenworth. They moved into a fine new house in Dodge City, just a block away from the town’s most infamous tourist attraction—the Boot Hill Cemetery, where all the desperadoes from the early days were allegedly buried with their boots on.
WHEN THE SANTA FE asked Fred to expand into a fourth eating house, in La Junta, Colorado, he decided it was time to end his involvement with the competing Kansas Pacific. This meant finally admitting that he and his old friend Jepp Rice should formally dissolve the languishing partnership that had so strained their relationship over the past few years. It also meant that Fred was walking away from a steady source of income, but he had many others: He was still General Western Freight Agent for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and he had money coming in from the Santa Fe eating houses, the XY ranch, his investments in real estate and private mortgages, and other deals he was juggling.
So, on a Thursday in early October 1879, Fred strode around the corner from his Leavenworth office to the redbrick building of the First National Bank, where he waited in line to see his regular teller. Fred handed the young man one last deposit of $1,398.91 ($31,100) for Harvey & Rice and then told him to close out the account.
“Give me half,” he told the teller, “and place the other half to the personal credit of Rice. Here and now, the firm of Harvey & Rice ceases to exist.”
Fred also moved his growing XY herd closer to the Santa Fe tracks. He and his partners bought huge tracts of land, consolidating two of the biggest ranches in southwestern Kansas and adding a horse farm. Their XY range now spread over four thousand square miles, bounded in the north by the Arkansas River and the Santa Fe railroad near Lakin and Garden City, extending down through the Oklahoma Panhandle and into Texas, where it was bounded in the south by the Canadian River, not far from Amarillo. This made the XY ranch almost as big as the state of Connecticut. (It also meant that Fred Harvey owned what later became the town of Holcomb, the site of the infamous Clutter murders that inspired Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.)
During roundup time, there were often more than two hundred cowboys roaming Fred’s land, looking for XY cattle or others that had strayed from nearby herds. At night there would be huge campouts where cowboys would drink and share stories, some of which may have even been true. They howled over the yarn about young Eli “Romeo” Hall, who turned in two rustlers, “Longtoed Pete” and “Cross-Eyed Swiggett,” for stealing Fred Harvey’s cattle, and then turned down the $1,000 ($22,265) reward because Hall said he would rather just have a job on the Harvey ranch.
Ironically, even though Fred now owned several thousand head of cattle, they did not provide him easier access to meat for his restaurants. Since the West had few slaughterhouses and scant refrigeration, cattle were still being shipped live on railroad cars back to Chicago or Kansas City to be butchered. So, the farther out his eating house chain extended, the harder it was to find dependable local sources for the amount of beef he needed. This was a considerable problem, since most of his patrons had become accustomed to eating steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One of the dramatic touches Bill Phillips had initiated in his dining rooms was to have the headwaiter emerge from the kitchen holding a large silver platter of sizzling steaks high in the air, which he served to each customer himself.
Fred made a deal to buy beef for all his locations—and, in so doing, may have invented the practice of large-scale centralized purchasing for national restaurant chains. He chose Slavens & Oburn, the oldest and most successful meatpacking firm in Kansas City, and ordered an entire year’s worth of tenderloin steaks at twelve and a half cents ($2.78) per pound. For the first ninety days, he committed to buying at least 15,600 pounds of steaks—a minimum of 1,200 pounds of steaks per week. He would then see if he needed more than that.
With this single steak order, Fred dramatically improved dining west of the Mississippi. Before his arrival, few Westerners had ever been served pink meat. They didn’t know quite how to react. One story circulated about a cowboy who was served his first Fred Harvey tenderloin—rare—and didn’t know whether to eat it or to brand it.
“I’ve seen many a critter be hurt worse than that and get well,” he quipped.