CHAPTER 25
IT WAS THE FASTEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE TRAIN RIDE IN HISTORY: Walter Scott, former Buffalo Bill sideman turned boastful gold prospector, offered the Santa Fe $5,500 ($139,000) in cash for a private train and a chance to break the speed record from Los Angeles to Chicago. But if he was going to do it, he wanted to make the wild ride in style: His “Coyote Special” included not only a Pullman sleeping car but a fully stocked Fred Harvey dining car.
Chef Geyer, a Harvey veteran from Germany, was picked for the assignment, and his wife was frantically trying to talk him out of it. She reminded the chef he had four children at home and begged him “to let some other man break his neck” on the swiftest train ride ever.
“Und I say to her,” the chef reportedly explained, “if dot man in der enchine [engine] can stand it to pull der train, I can stand it to ride behind him, yet.”
As the Coyote Special pulled out of Los Angeles, the saltshakers danced across the tables and cookware rattled on the steel kitchen counters as Chef Geyer started preparing the first meal. Cost was no concern, since Scott—known as “Death Valley Scotty” because of the location of his gold mine—had agreed to pay an extra $1,000 ($25,240) for the Pullman dining service. They started with caviar sandwiches—because Scott regarded simpler canapés as “dude food”—and an iced consommé. The diners were Scotty, his wife, and Los Angeles sports-writer Charles E. Van Loan, who had been chosen to write onboard dispatches for the Associated Press.
The first courses were going well until just before Needles, California, when the train hit a curve at sixty miles an hour. Everything on the table went flying, leaving the diners grateful for the prescient wisdom of Chef Geyer for choosing a clear chilled soup.
After the dishes were removed from the table and the soup from the wall, the entrées were served as the train flew at speeds of seventy, even eighty miles an hour. Geyer called his special dishes “Porterhouse Steak a la Coyote, two inches thick and a Marvel of Tenderness,” and “Broiled Squab on Toast, with Strips of Bacon au Scotty,” and he served them with succulent stuffed tomatoes. For dessert, there was freshly made Fred Harvey ice cream with “colored trimmings,” followed by a cheese plate, coffee, and, naturally, cigars.
Although no more food flew, there was one airborne Harvey waiter: During the delicate run through the curvy Glorieta Pass, near Pecos, New Mexico, he was hurled into a dining car window, smashing it with his shoulder.
After getting past the mountainous areas and into Kansas, the train barreled ahead at unheard-of speeds, peaking at 106 miles an hour. From the Dodge City Harvey House—while stopped briefly for fuel—Scotty wired President Roosevelt: “An American cowboy is coming east on a special train faster than any cowpuncher ever rode before; how much shall I break the transcontinental record?” The president didn’t respond, but the press did, filing dispatches from each Santa Fe depot about whether Scott’s train was running ahead of the record or behind. On July 11, 1905, at 11:54 a.m., Death Valley Scotty’s Coyote Special pulled in to Dearborn Station in Chicago, after traveling 2,265 miles in just under forty-five hours—more than seven hours faster than the previous record.
The ride received enormous media coverage, as did Chef Geyer’s gutsy performance. “Any man who can cook like that at sixty miles an hour,” wrote one Kansas City reporter covering the trip, “is worthy of a place in the culinary hall of fame!”
Death Valley Scotty ended up becoming more famous for the record than for the gold mine he used to pay for it—which turned out to be a fraud, and the train ride an attempt to distract his investors. But the trip would forever be a highlight of the last golden age of the railroads, before government regulation altered their world forever.
Trains had been changing life in America for nearly fifty years, but it was just after the turn of the century that the railroad business reached its peak of economic and cultural influence, independence, and power. There were already several thousand gas-powered automobiles puttering around the country, and the Wright Brothers had already made their first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk. But in 1905, the nation’s railroads dominated every aspect of national life as no industry ever had—and, in the estimation of some, no industry has since.
And each time the trains became faster, America seemed a little more intimate, more manageable, a nation paradoxically getting bigger and smaller at the same time.
In the first six years of the twentieth century, the Pullman company filled more orders for “private varnish”—each car costing at least $50,000 ($1.3 million)—than it had in the previous twenty years. There was great competition over the opulence of the decor and the technological perks: Some cars had working fireplaces, and a few even had pipe organs driven by steam from the engine. And those who didn’t want the hassles of ownership could rent from the growing Pullman fleet.
For those who couldn’t afford such luxuries, the train stations also provided a popular form of entertainment—as compelling and regularly scheduled as radio, movies, and television would come to be.
“It was a great deal to us kids, watching the trains come in,” recalled one Midwestern woman who grew up to be a Harvey Girl. “Everybody in town did it, every single day. Mama showed us where to stand, and we’d go down there every afternoon after school and watch all the people and activities around the depot. There was one railroadman who knew us, and he’d take us into the Harvey House for some of their homemade ice cream. We were just little girls. There was nothing like it in the world, nothing!”
FORD’S BUSINESS WAS certainly surging with the railroads, and was only expected to get better as the Santa Fe built him more large hotels along the High Iron. But he had some major life decisions to make. The ten-year contract between the railroad and Fred Harvey—the last deal made while his father was still alive, and the one that Fred’s will was written to protect—had less than a year to run, expiring in September 1906. At the same time, Ford and Ripley were both approaching milestone birthdays. Ripley, his walrussy mustache graying, was turning sixty, an age when most railroad executives considered retiring. Ford was about to turn forty, the same age at which his father had rethought his life’s goals and started the eating house business. And he was faced with a similar window of opportunity. When the contract ended, the promises he made to his father and the company—to honor the obligations made during Fred’s lifetime—would all be fulfilled.
Ford and Ripley had been discussing the gravity of this moment. Ripley was extremely proud of what the railroad and Fred Harvey had been able to accomplish in the past ten years. But he also truly cared for Ford, almost as if he were another son: He had two of his own, but they were more interested in oil and steel than railroading. Ripley’s relationship with Ford was special. He once wrote to him: “To be ‘nice’ to one’s friends is comparatively easy—to be equally ‘nice’ to one’s father’s friends is a much rarer quality and one (among others) that has made you conspicuous … You cannot know the satisfaction a man of my age has in the friendship of one twenty years or more his junior.”
Ford knew that if he chose to, he could parlay his success into a high-profile position in business or politics. He had watched his longtime colleague Paul Morton, Ripley’s first vice president, leave the Santa Fe to join Roosevelt’s cabinet as secretary of the navy and then take one of the top financial jobs in the world: president and chairman of the board of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, in New York. Ford had offers every day for Fred Harvey to take over management of top hotels and restaurants across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which would dramatically broaden the scope of his empire—and perhaps lessen his reliance on the Santa Fe. Or he could simply take all the money he had made, sell the company, and start over.
It was a tough decision because there were signs that the golden age of railroading could soon be coming to an end. Teddy Roosevelt was becoming increasingly aggressive about regulating the railroads—and all aspects of “big business.” This included trying to “bust” the powerful New York–based financial trusts whose leaders—especially New York financier J. P. Morgan, along with heirs to the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt fortunes and railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, the so-called captains of industry—sat on the boards of most major railroads as well as the largest companies that shipped by rail. In 1903, Roosevelt signed the Elkins Act, which beefed up the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission and made it illegal for railroads to offer discounts on published rates. His attorney general also successfully prosecuted and broke up the Northern Securities Company, run by Morgan, Harriman, and John D. Rockefeller, which controlled a number of competing railroads in the Midwest and the West.
Now the Roosevelt administration was pushing through two more pieces of groundbreaking legislation to reinvent the power of the federal government to regulate business. One was a bill Ford Harvey very much supported: the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which created the first national standards for the safety of food and the safety and efficacy of medicines. But the second act, passed the same week, made everyone in the railroad business crazy: The Hepburn Act gave the Interstate Commerce Commission unprecedented power to regulate and infiltrate almost every aspect of the industry. The bill allowed the ICC to actually change any shipping rates deemed not “just and reasonable.” It forced the railroads to adopt standardized accounting procedures so their books could be easily examined by government inspectors. And it completely disallowed discounts or any other preferential treatment for better shipping customers. Under the new rules, the government could also regulate train terminals, express companies, and sleeping cars, which brought it uncomfortably close to being able to directly regulate Fred Harvey.
Ripley and his fellow railroad executives considered the Hepburn Act a disaster, an artificial and unhealthy drag on the industry through which America’s economic lifeblood coursed. As the elder statesman of the American railroad business, he was outspoken about his belief that by keeping passenger and freight rates unnaturally low, the ICC would prevent the railroads from making enough money to maintain and improve train service.
The railroads “are being gradually strangled,” Ripley wrote to the editor of the Kansas City Star, “and before long the people will realize that [they are] practically extinct—then they will be sorry, too late—and there will be nothing left but to take the roads over and run them under a Government Bureau, with what results can easily be guessed when we observe how Government transacts business.”
As the deadline approached for Ford and Ripley to decide whether to make a new deal, they got yet another sign that business as they had known it might be over. One of the most important cities for the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey, and for the American economy, was nearly destroyed. On April 18, 1906, San Francisco—then the nation’s ninth-largest city behind New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Buffalo—was hit by an earthquake registering 7.9 on the Richter scale.
Dave Benjamin was in San Francisco at the time, inspecting the Fred Harvey operation at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, so he was able to help direct the company’s response to the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history. He was awakened in his hotel room before daylight when the first tremor hit, and he was over at the Ferry Building—where the observation tower was left lurching to one side, its clock frozen at 5:15—assessing the damage by the time the aftershock occurred at 8:14 a.m., demolishing many of the structures already compromised.
Hundreds died instantly and thousands more over the next few days as fires raged and troops tried in vain to keep order. Droves of people huddled at the Ferry Building begging for food and shelter. The Harvey employees there did what they could to feed them with whatever was on hand, and the Santa Fe ran barge after barge of disaster victims across the bay to safety in Oakland. The U.S.S. Chicago was summoned via wireless telegraph—the first time the new technology was used in a major emergency—and helped to evacuate over twenty thousand people. The Ferry Building remained untouched by flames until the third day, when the winds picked up and the fire approached. The city’s entire firefighting force was rushed there: It was arguably the most important structure still standing in San Francisco. After hours spent battling back the flames, officials finally declared the building safe.
“This is about the only time in this fire when the puny forces of man have been able to save anything,” one Washington Post correspondent commented. “We have been the sport of the gods.”
ONLY WEEKS AFTER the earthquake, in the summer of 1906, Ford finally decided that he would go ahead and renew his relationship with the railroad—tying his fortunes to Ripley’s, and the Santa Fe’s, for another ten years. He wanted to see just how far this quirky empire that he and Dave had built on the foundation of his father’s standards could go.
Ford negotiated and signed a new ten-year contract for the eating houses, the hotels, the dining cars, and the retail business at newsstands and curio shops. And he made a separate ten-year deal for the Grand Canyon operation—which looked as though it might be a success after all.
Before the new Santa Fe contracts were executed, Ford and Dave put the finishing touches on the process of restructuring the company, incorporating it in the state of New Jersey under the name Fred Harvey. They also created another, smaller corporation, “Harvey Hotel & Restaurant Company” in Kansas City to handle extracurricular businesses like the restaurants in St. Louis Union Station and Chicago’s Dearborn Station.
Ford made himself president of both corporations. And he stopped asking himself if he should do something else professionally for the rest of his life.
This did not prevent him, however, from having a little personal midlife crisis. Several family members would later recall they heard he had a girlfriend. “He was a handsome devil,” his grandnephew recalls, “and Minnie told me many women were crazy about him. I suspect that he could have had liaisons with high society friends and maybe even a love of long standing who was married.”
Ford’s marriage had turned out to be completely the opposite of his father’s. He left town only for business while Judy traveled extensively, usually with the children: She took them all over Europe, often for long stretches. During one of their extended trips—when Ford was a “bachelor” for several months—handwritten notes marked “Personal” began arriving at his office, some by mail, others dropped off.
Ford had always received a lot of personal mail, because in his job he had to keep a lot of secrets. He was privy to a great deal of confidential business information about the railroads, the hospitality industry, and the civic affairs of Kansas City. It was impossible to run hotels catering to an affluent and celebrated clientele if you weren’t able to keep their private needs private.
Still, starting in 1907, he received an awful lot of “personal” notes from a Mrs. John G. Camp of 17 Phelps Street in Kansas City, thanking him for all kinds of extravagant gifts—flowers, wines, gourmet foodstuffs, and other kindnesses. And when these personal notes were discovered, only very recently, by family members, they were found in an old black metal strongbox of Ford’s—along with letters from his wife during the same time period.
It is unlikely Ford was having an affair with Mrs. Camp, a widow who was old enough to be his mother (and, in fact, signed her notes “Mother”). But he did seem to have an unusually close attachment to her, and sent her an awful lot of gifts—which were also enjoyed by her daughter, Rebecca, who was his contemporary. Rebecca Camp was the second wife of meatpacking heir Charles Armour, Ford’s longtime social colleague in Kansas City; the couple had no children, and Rebecca’s mother lived with them. It is curious that all these letters, written by Mrs. Camp on Rebecca Armour’s stationery, were sent to Ford personally at the office and not to him and his wife at home—especially since the Armours knew the Harveys well.
The letters from Mrs. Camp began arriving not long before Judy Harvey took an extended trip to Europe, meeting up with Kitty, who spent much of 1907 studying in Italy. Over the next few years, the Camp letters would provide an interesting counterpoint to the ones Judy sent: the long, detailed missives that always began “My Darling” and were signed “Goodnight my precious love, your Jude” or “I want you so—your own devoted, Jude.”
Judy wrote to Ford from the Waldorf-Astoria on the morning of their anniversary as she was about to leave the country: “I will be thinking of you darling as you read this and longing oh so ardently to be back in your dear arms again. God keep you safe.” Several days later another note arrived—this one from Mrs. Camp.
THE FIRST YEAR of Ford’s new contract turned out to be hugely challenging financially for the country. The stock market crashed twice in 1907, first in March and again in October. The second, more severe crash was triggered by a failed attempt by the founder of the United Copper Company to manipulate the market on his own stock, which took down with it the massive Knickerbocker Trust in New York. This instigated a run on the nation’s banks—which at that time relied only on their own reserves. Many of them simply ran out of money.
To save the U.S. economy, Roosevelt was forced, ironically, to seek help from J. P. Morgan and the very captains of industry whose trusts he had been busting for the past few years. There was money in the federal treasury to rescue the failing banks, but no easy way to get the currency to them. Morgan, who was about to leave town on vacation, set up a command post in the library of his home and, along with other top financiers, basically invented a way to help banks cooperate so those with too much cash could help those with too little (laying the groundwork for what would later become the Federal Reserve system). Within three weeks, the crisis had been averted, Morgan left on his vacation, and the government went back to trust-busting.
Although the Panic of 1907 hurt the financial institutions of the East, Fred Harvey actually had its best year ever, with profits of over $243,000 ($5.7 million). But just after the banner year ended, Ford was faced with disaster. Early in the morning on Monday, January 13, 1908, an electrical fire started in the Kansas City Union Depot annex building, where the Fred Harvey offices had been located for over twenty years, growing from one tiny room with a desk for Dave to a large suite. The annex also housed the post office, all the major express-package companies, the Pullman company, and the Railway Association YMCA. That morning, they all went up in flames. By the time Ford and Dave got there, firemen had already given up on trying to save their annex building, and were instead trying to keep the fire from consuming the entire Union Depot complex.
The depot annex was a total loss. Thirty-five sacks of registered mail and thousands of packages were incinerated, and there was nothing left of the Fred Harvey corporate offices. Ford estimated the company’s loss at more than $50,000 ($1.2 million), although much of what burned was irreplaceable.
Although the fire was devastating, it was the kind of event for which anyone associated with the railroad business—especially in the West—always had to be prepared. In the world of the Santa Fe, flames were an all too frequent occurrence. The railroad’s insurance files were overflowing with fire claims: for bridges, depots, laundry facilities, sheds, Harvey Houses, hotels, anything made of wood. The Fred Harvey files, like all other business paperwork associated with the trains, were maintained in multiple copies for this reason and stored at the major Santa Fe railroad division points. This allowed easy remote access to files in the pre-fax world and also created a backup system.
Because Dave always maintained disaster contingency plans, the company was able to respond quickly after the fire and set up another office across town at the American Bank Building at 8th and Delaware, an eight-story structure with a handsome cut-stone arched entrance and a row of bowed-out windows above it. It would be Fred Harvey’s “temporary” quarters—until Kansas City built the new Union Station complex that had been promised for several years.
All across the country, cities were looking to replace the disjointed stations from the first generation of railroading with grand union stations like St. Louis Union Depot and South Station in Boston. Many of the newer union stations were being designed in the European Beaux Arts style because of a social movement called City Beautiful, which claimed that urban blight could be combated architecturally if major public buildings were all big, white, and of classical design (like those in Chicago’s White City). Washington, D.C.’s Union Station had recently opened, and New York was in the midst of building its new Pennsylvania Station. (This would be torn down in the 1960s, its facilities driven underground in order to create the new Madison Square Garden.) Every other major American city hoped to follow suit, erecting a fabulous classical station not only for the railroads but to anchor an entire new local transport system of trolley cars or even subways.
On September 27, 1908, Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off the production line in Detroit. But it was, at the time, just one more automobile—a machine that was, for most, as unfathomable an expense as buying your own Pullman car. The United States was still a country connected by tracks, not highways. Americans rode together, in trains.