CHAPTER 10
LAS VEGAS, NEW MEXICO—THE ONLY LAS VEGAS THAT AMERICANS knew at the time, since the one in Nevada didn’t exist until 1905—had already been transformed once by cutting-edge transportation. It had been an important stagecoach stop on the Santa Fe Trail since the 1830s, and grew even larger when it was annexed by the United States after the Mexican-American War, its population an unusual mix of immigrants from Mexico and, later, from Germany and China.
But nobody in Las Vegas was prepared for the impact made by the first Santa Fe railroad trains coming over the Raton Pass in the summer of 1879. Within weeks, the best and worst of the Wild West began migrating there from Dodge City. “Doc” Holliday, the infamous desperado dentist, even moved there from Dodge to set up a practice.
Dr. John Henry Holliday had trained in Philadelphia at one of the nation’s first dental schools (now part of the University of Pennsylvania) and was practicing in Atlanta in the early 1870s when he contracted tuberculosis. He came west hoping the climate would be curative, and when his hacking cough did not endear him to patients, he found he could make a much better living using his other natural talent—gambling. To defend himself, he learned how to shoot a six-gun, and found his medical training came in handy when deciding where to plunge a knife.
While he had done much more gambling and fighting than dentistry in Dodge City—knocking out more teeth than he ever fixed—Doc Holliday saw the new train to Las Vegas as a chance to give his dental practice one last try. As a backup, he also opened a saloon. And it wasn’t long before Holliday killed his first Las Vegan. He got into a fight with a local gunslinger named Mike Gordon, who didn’t know any better when Doc Holliday asked if he wanted to step outside and settle their differences. Holliday told him to start shooting whenever he was ready. Within seconds Gordon lay dead on the street with three bullets in his belly.
When the lynch mob came for the trigger-happy dentist, he decided that maybe Las Vegas wasn’t the best place for him after all and hightailed it back to Dodge. But other shady characters like Holliday kept pouring into Las Vegas. The crime rate grew so alarming that a group of men, calling themselves “Vigilantes,” took out an ad in the local paper, addressed to “Murderers, Confidence Men, Thieves”:
The citizens of Las Vegas have tired of robbery, murder, and other crimes that have made this town a byword in every civilized community. They have resolved to put a stop to crime, [even] if in attaining that end they have to forget the law and resort to a speedier justice than it will afford … The flow of blood must and shall be stopped in this community, and the good citizens … have determined to stop it, if they have to HANG by the strong arm of FORCE every violator of the law in this country.
Fortunately, none of this deterred many law-abiding citizens from pouring into Las Vegas as well. They found a town with a growing merchant community and a vigorous sense of itself and its place in the West, which was reflected in its lively newspapers. The Las Vegas Optic was especially opinionated and often spit-take funny, romanticizing even the creepiest aspects of western life. Its stories were sometimes picked up by national newspapers and clearly inspired the writing style of the dime novels that later popularized legendary gunfights. It was the Las Vegas papers that renamed William Bonney—a local boy gone bad, who had grown up outside of nearby Roswell—Billy the Kid and turned him into the first rock-star bandit. (“We are informed that a purse of three thousand dollars has been raised to effect the recapture of The Kid,” the Opticreported one Tuesday. “Here is an opportunity for some daring man to engrave his name upon the roll of dead heroes.”)
Fred was asked to establish a temporary restaurant in Las Vegas before the Santa Fe had even built a proper depot, so he had his staff work out of three old Santa Fe cars parked on a rarely used side track. One veteran railroader remembered them as “the worst-looking boxcars … the company and Harvey could scare up … [but] when travelers entered the big side door … they gasped with wonderment at what met their gaze. The walls were shiny with fresh paint in the gaudy Indian colors, the tables were spread with heavy milk-white Irish linen and napkins the size of pillow slips, the silverware shone like a French plate mirror, the clean clear glass goblets were filled with ice and nice clear water, and on the tables were large vases filled with wonderful fresh flowers.”
But Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe had bigger plans for Las Vegas than retrofitted boxcars, or even another conventional depot eating house. They wanted to cash in on a growing trend in the hotel business: health tourism.
For years, eastern doctors had been sending patients west in the hope that tuberculosis and other illnesses could be cured merely by being in the sunshine and fresh air. (The Stetson cowboy hat, that mainstay of western apparel, had been invented by one such health tourist: John B. Stetson, who came up with the idea while recuperating out west, and revolutionized his family’s Philadelphia hat business.) In addition to the therapeutic climate, doctors had a lot of faith in the healing waters of mineral springs.
Six miles north of Las Vegas, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, there were naturally occurring hot springs that had long been believed to have curative powers. In the 1840s, the U.S. Army had even treated soldiers from the Mexican-American War at the Las Vegas Hot Springs, building an adobe hospital and bathhouse that remained in use until the Civil War. It was reopened in the late 1870s, with a new Hot Springs Hotel and a bathhouse in which the hot mineral water was piped into long, coffin-like metal tubs. Among the guests at the Hot Springs Hotel was Jesse James, who spent a relaxing week there in the summer of 1879 and was reportedly joined for dinner on the evening of July 27 by Billy the Kid.
Within weeks after the first Santa Fe train pulled in to Las Vegas station, the AT&SF bought the Hot Springs and all the land and buildings around them for $102,000 ($2.3 million). The railroad took over the small Hot Springs Hotel, but also set to work planning a massive new facility: one of the nation’s first grand health resorts—part spa, part sanitarium. The project was soon wildly off schedule and over budget. Since the AT&SF was having so much success with Fred Harvey’s management of its depot properties, Strong asked him to step in and manage the existing hotel while helping oversee the construction of the new resort, which was to be called the Montezuma. When it was completed, Fred’s company could run that, too.
The Montezuma project was a huge commitment. It would be bigger and more ambitious than all the properties Fred was managing combined. There was also irony and risk in the idea of a health resort being run by a man struggling with his own chronic illness, a man who could put on a brave face in business situations but was privately still keeping tally in his datebooks of how many days he lost to headaches or neuralgia, and compulsively scribbling down new treatments he wanted to try and medical books he wanted to read.
But the Montezuma was an opportunity Fred could not pass up. The Santa Fe was rapidly building farther west into New Mexico and would want more depot eating houses as the tracks were completed. Besides, Strong had done so well as general manager of the railroad that the board of directors in Boston had decided to elevate him to president of the Santa Fe. If Fred did not commit fully to the fast-growing railroad, he knew Strong could find someone else who would.
Fred, now in his mid-forties, decided to take the big gamble. He gave up his lucrative day job with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy and devoted himself to turning his four eating houses into a hospitality empire along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe.
DURING THE NEXT YEAR and a half, Fred basically commuted between Leavenworth, Kansas, and Las Vegas, New Mexico. The trip was more than eight hundred miles and took at least three days each way. It was a stunning ride across America’s better half, but like any commute, it was exhausting, life-sucking. Fred would ride through the gloriously flat state of Kansas, stopping only to scrutinize his eating houses. He liked to hop off the train while it was still rolling into the station, so he could dash ahead and do a quick inspection before the passengers got off.
When he strode into one of his eating houses, the waitstaff was already standing at attention behind fastidiously set tables in the main dining room or curved wooden counters with spinning stools in the lunchroom. They were poised awaiting the ceremonial gong, which the headwaiter would take out onto the train platform and strike to let passengers know the dining areas were open. It was a dramatic flourish Fred had borrowed from the Logan House in Altoona, the trackside eating house he had so admired as a young railroad warrior.
At the sounding of the gong, the staff was to begin serving dozens of full-course dining room meals—with all the trimmings and table-side preparations, including handmade salad dressings—and just as many hundred flawless lunchroom meals, all within thirty minutes exactly. It was an Olympian culinary feat that had to be repeated, as if effortlessly, every time the train rolled into each of his locations.
During his inspections, Fred stalked through the rooms of his eating houses, peering everywhere and running his hand across random surfaces. If he found anything out of place—a crack, a crease, or the mere smudge of a partial fingerprint—he grabbed one of those costly linen tablecloths and yanked it as hard as he could, sending eight complete place settings flying and shattering on the spotless floor.
“You know better than this,” he would say in his clipped British accent, and then withdraw to the manager’s office, while the staff scrambled to clean up the mess and reset the table, the headwaiter still poised on the train platform with his mallet in the air, awaiting word that it was safe to bang the gong.
After the long, level ride across Kansas, the train began the climb into Colorado—where Fred stopped to inspect his house at La Junta—and then continued west to Pueblo before heading due south, with the Rocky Mountains visible out the window to his right. At Trinidad, the engine was changed because the ride up into the mountains to the Raton Pass was the steepest and toughest in all of American railroading and required maximum steam. The Santa Fe had commissioned the most powerful engine ever built from the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia to make the roller-coaster climb; it was engine #2403, nicknamed the Uncle Dick. As the engine chugged high into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Fred could see sections of the old Santa Fe Trail alongside the tracks. At the very top of the Raton Pass, an elevation of almost eight thousand feet, the train slipped into a pitch-black tunnel, almost half a mile long through solid rock and only slightly wider than the cars themselves. He could actually stick his hand out the window and touch the rough-hewn wall.
Just as his eyes adjusted to the dark, the railroad car emerged from the tunnel, and he was confronted with a view of the biggest sky imaginable. From the peak of the Raton Pass, he could see mountains and valleys, forests and deserts, and even several different weather systems hovering over the astounding landscape.
The first stop on the other side of the pass was Raton itself, a small mining and ranching town, and from there it was literally all downhill to Las Vegas. By the time he arrived, he was often so depleted that he spent the next day in a hotel bed—where the ever-nosy Optic invariably would report he was holed up sick. And then he would get back to work.
There was so much to do in New Mexico. Besides the Montezuma health resort up in the mountains outside of Las Vegas, the Santa Fe was building a new trackside hotel and eating house right in town while rapidly grading land and laying tracks westward to Albuquerque and south to Mexico. In 1881, with construction still lagging at the Montezuma, the railroad wanted Fred to open three more eating houses in New Mexico.
Ironically, there was not going to be a Santa Fe eating house in the railroad’s namesake city, Santa Fe. For reasons that were never entirely clear—some combination of the terrain and the local politics being too challenging—the AT&SF bypassed the capital of New Mexico. Instead, its tracks ran some twenty miles south of Santa Fe, stopping at the hamlet of Lamy on their way to Albuquerque.
The railroad did build a small branch line that connected Santa Fe to the High Iron at Lamy—and with that, its twenty-year mission to replace the old Santa Fe Trail with train tracks was completed. But Santa Fe, suddenly no longer a major transportation hub, was left to rethink and reinvent itself.
Fred opened a small eating house in the new Lamy depot in 1881 and took over the trackside restaurant and hotel in Raton, the Mountain House. He also set up operations in the dusty new depot in Deming, a tiny town just thirty miles from the Mexican border.
The Deming house was particularly difficult to manage. The location was incredibly isolated, and the few people there were either railroad workers, miners, or criminals on the lam. Almost from opening day, the Deming eating house was repeatedly robbed at gunpoint.
Actually, Fred was trying to establish order and civilization in New Mexico during a time that would later be looked upon as a watershed moment for guns and gunslinging in America. In the course of just a few months, two of the most legendary dramas in cowboy history unfolded in or near the cities where he was working. Billy the Kid, already sentenced to hang for murder, killed two prison guards and escaped, heading first to Las Vegas, where the newspapers carried so many stories of sightings that it seemed as if the sheriff was the only one who hadn’t seen him. Finally, after two months, he was tracked down to a house in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, by the hard-bitten sheriff of Roswell, Pat Garrett. The twenty-one-year-old outlaw was killed by a single shot that pierced his heart, and in death he became as famous worldwide as he had been in Las Vegas. The shooting was covered in newspapers all over the United States and Europe, and several books were immediately published about the life of “the Kid,” including one by Sheriff Pat Garrett himself: The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, the Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona, and Northern Mexico.
Only months after Billy’s death came the “Gunfight at the OK Corral” in Tombstone, a small mining town just across the Arizona border from the Deming eating house. Sheriff Wyatt Earp, his deputized brothers Morgan and Virgil, and Doc Holliday had a showdown with five unruly cowboys who reportedly were “parading the town for several days, drinking heavily and making themselves obnoxious”—and then refused to surrender their weapons to the lawmen. Thirty seconds and thirty bullets later, three of the cowboys lay dead, a fourth was wounded, and the other had run away. Within days the gunfight was front-page news across the country. “Daring Desperados,” the Leavenworth Times headline blared, “Three Cow Boys Bite the Dust.”
In the middle of all this romanticized Western gun drama, the president of the United States was shot in Washington in early July. James Garfield survived, but one of the bullets was lodged so deeply that it could not be found—even by Alexander Graham Bell, who was enlisted by the White House to invent some sort of magnetic metal-detecting device. The president seemed to be recovering over the next few weeks, but then succumbed in mid-September at the age of forty-nine. While his wife claimed he died peacefully, it was later revealed that he had suffered horribly, his medical care from the nation’s best doctors nearly as hazardous as the shooting itself. Along with high doses of quinine and morphine, and frequent sips of brandy, he was treated with calomel, a diuretic later banned as toxic because its active ingredient was mercury. But the most likely cause of the president’s torturous demise was the doctors’ inability to remove the bullet and close his wound. Originally three and a half inches, the wound was probed so many times by the germy fingers of so many physicians that by the time Garfield died, it was almost twenty inches long, deeply infected, and festering.
FRED CONTINUED TO HAVE troubles in Las Vegas. The doctors at the Hot Springs Hotel—increasingly anxious for the big new Montezuma to be done so they would have more paying patients—were at each other’s throats. The Santa Fe had hired a shiny new Harvard-trained physician, William Page, but he clashed with local favorite Dr. N. J. Pettijohn, who had roots in the Las Vegas community. According to accounts in Page’s diaries, the two constantly quarreled over patients. One day they got into a screaming match over which one of them was treating Mrs. Charles Bush, a New Orleans socialite.
“If you do not stop talking to her, I will fix you!” Pettijohn yelled. “I believe you to be a god-damn old fraud!”
“I know you to be such!” Page shot back to the “scoundrel.”
Actually, employee unrest was a problem for Fred all over New Mexico. He had Bill Phillips come down from Florence to help—still running the hotel there, the jolly British chef had now become Fred’s culinary adviser for the entire chain—but nothing seemed to work. New Mexico was a much wilder West than he and the railroad had ever experienced, and the old Santa Fe Trail towns resisted the changes brought by the railroads. In Kansas and Colorado the railroads created many of the communities, but in New Mexico the AT&SF was going into old cities and literally replacing the centers of town. In fact, the area around the Santa Fe depot in Las Vegas was called New Town. Local residents had a love/hate relationship with the railroads, and Fred’s restaurants, so visible a symbol of what the trains brought to town, were often the targets of local frustrations. Competing restaurant owners resented Fred because they knew he got better, fresher ingredients than they did—and paid less for them, because the railroad waived his freight charges. There were often break-ins at the eating houses or the parked refrigerator cars: not for cash, but to steal those gorgeous aged steaks.
Some customers also resented the dress code Fred was instituting in his eating houses: While almost any outfit was allowed in the lunchrooms, men had to wear jackets (which were provided if they didn’t have one) in order to eat in the main dining rooms. In dress-casual New Mexico, this rule was particularly rankling.
More than ever before, Fred was finding out he had his share of enemies—who were all too happy to run to their friends at the local newspapers whenever they heard about difficulties at his restaurants. One day the Las Vegas Optic reported histrionically that Fred was losing control of his entire operation:
“Eating Establishment Excitements: Whooping It Up in Sad Shape for a Well-Known Hotel Proprietor,” the headline blared on September 12, 1881.
“Fred Harvey … is having a terrible time of it and seems to be gaining an unsavory reputation,” the Optic went on to explain, noting that the manager and night clerk at the Las Vegas depot hotel had quit, and at the Hot Springs Hotel, Fred had “acted so outlandishly ‘off” that his manager there was also leaving.
In Deming, not only had Fred fired the manager; he reportedly heaved him out the front door and onto the train platform, “and the dining room equipment followed after him in quick order.” The mercurial Englishman was also blamed for the “grub” in Deming being so poor that “the beef stake was fairly alive with little crawling things commonly called maggots.” He was accused of “a lack of proper decorum,” and the Optic hoped “for the sake of his reputation, that things will run smoother in the future and that his name will not be contaminated by town talk, as it has been.”
Fred immediately contacted the paper to tell his side of the story, and the next day, under the headline “Harvey Heard,” he explained that the trouble was “incited by chronic howlers,” and it was only a question of whether he or his employees would “dictate management of the houses.” He made it clear that the employees were fired because they were incompetent and had disobeyed orders. “It’s no easy task to operate hotels in New Mexico, so far distant from each other,” he said. “But I believe I have the ability to get along with detrimental circumstances about as well as the next fellow. And that’s all.”
Still, keeping his staff in line remained difficult. Several days after the news stories, he visited the new hotel doctor seeking treatment for “a blow on the right temple.” The injury was caused by a servant opening a door into Fred’s head. It was charitably described in the physician’s log as “accidental.”