CHAPTER 31
IF FREDDY WAS EVER GOING TO SUCCEED IN THE FAMILY BUSINESS, he needed his own Grand Canyon. It had to be a venture that meant as much to him as flying, with as much potential for the future of the company as El Tovar. And there was really only one place in the Southwest so magnetic and full of possibilities, yet largely unexplored and unexploited by Fred Harvey and the AT&SF. That was Santa Fe itself, which the railroad had left for dead in the 1880s when it replaced the old Santa Fe Trail but was still, to many, the most vibrant and inspiring town in the West.
Santa Fe had been the Harvey family’s favorite place in the Southwest for decades, ever since Sally first took Ford and Minnie there as children. While the Grand Canyon was a glorious place to visit and gape, Santa Fe was a heavenly municipality where people lived and worked amid the grandeur of the big sky and the endless desert, the Indian and Mexican cultures and commerce infusing everyday existence. The oldest colonized city in North America, settled several years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, Santa Fe had been a major commercial center for centuries, the hub for trade between Mexico and America. When the railroad bypassed it in 1880, Santa Fe was forced to do what so many American cities would attempt a century later after losing their manufacturing base—it reinvented itself as a place to visit, a getaway, an escape. It was becoming a haven for health seekers, artists, writers, archaeology buffs, nonpracticing cowboys and cowgirls, and, of course, tourists. Some saw it as a little Paris, a place where the light was also “just different”—but in a distinctly American way. In fact, as a response to the City Beautiful movement that was sweeping America’s urban areas, Santa Fe created its own nickname: “The City Different.”
Santa Fe, more than any other place in the Southwest, already offered what the Grand Canyon had lacked: “something conventional,” in Ford’s words, for tourists to do. It had wonderful shopping, restaurants, and galleries in its small, soulful adobe downtown—which was kept soulful and adobe by a 1912 city plan urging architects to employ the Pueblo Revival and Territorial styles exclusively, so the city would always appear unified and in-scale. And every September the city celebrated Santa Fe Fiesta, which dated back to the 1700s and almost petered out in the late 1800s, but was reinvigorated after the world war—largely at the instigation of archaeologist Edgar Hewett, who had learned a few things about ethnological showmanship while working with Herman Schweizer, Mary Colter, and John Huckel at the San Diego world’s fair in 1915. Hewett helped reinvent the Fiesta as a three-day celebration, centered around each of the major ethnic groups in New Mexico, with parades, street fairs, concerts, and art shows.
Fred Harvey had been booking side trips to Santa Fe for railroad passengers for over forty years, through all these changes. But while Ford and Minnie and their families visited often and had friends there, Santa Fe was, in many ways, the only place in the Southwest where they were still guests. All that was now about to change.
Ford had decided it was high time to open a hotel in Santa Fe. While it was a great opportunity for his son to have a pet project that didn’t require being airborne, he had been persuaded to expand into Santa Fe by someone else: a rising star in the company, Major R. Hunter Clarkson. One of Ford’s most flamboyant and opinionated managers in the Southwest, Hunter Clarkson was a decorated British officer—equally at home in a uniform or a kilt—who had turned his job as transportation manager at the Grand Canyon into a little empire. He was shuttling more than fifty thousand visitors a year around the canyon with military precision, but he had a dream. In his dream, there were fleets of automobiles and buses—“Harveycars” and “Harveycoaches”—taking tourists on adventures all across the Southwest. Not for a few hours like at the canyon, but for days, even weeks. They would go to the pueblos, they would watch the snake dances, they would see real Indians, not just Harvey House Indians. They would have unique American travel experiences, not unlike the one that had galvanized Ford in 1901.
In the West, tourists were commonly referred to by locals as “dudes.” Hunter Clarkson believed that Fred Harvey could corner the entire dude market.
He came up with a catchy name for his scheme, the “Indian Detours,” and even sought backing outside of Fred Harvey. He was married to the daughter of a Santa Fe vice president, and his plan also had the support of Santa Fe railroad advertising director Roger Birdseye, who at the time was the best-known member of the Birdseye family. (His brother Clarence had recently developed the first practical process for freezing food.) His plan was to start the auto tours in New Mexico with the hope of eventually extending them all the way across Arizona to the Grand Canyon. Santa Fe, and its scenic sister city to the north, Taos, were situated right in between the two largest Fred Harvey hotels in New Mexico—the Castañeda in Las Vegas and the Alvarado in Albuquerque—which made the “City Different” a perfect center point and staging area.
Just as Ford had once sent Minnie and John Huckel to Gallup to brainstorm the Indian curio business, he dispatched his son to Santa Fe, where he was to shop for a suitable hotel. Freddy found a property just off the city’s main plaza, on the historic site of the old Exchange Hotel—the actual end of the old Santa Fe Trail. A relatively new hotel had been built on the site, but its investors had already run out of money.
Ford arranged for the railroad to buy the hotel, and it was quickly overhauled to make it sufficiently Harvey-worthy for the 1926 tourist season: New staff was brought in from other Harvey locations, the dining rooms got new linens, silver, and stemware, every surface was repainted. The only thing they kept was the name: La Fonda.
In addition to taking over the hotel, Fred Harvey ordered a large fleet of cars and buses that were so lavishly appointed they were referred to as “Pullmans on wheels.” Freddy and Hunter Clarkson also arranged to buy out one of Santa Fe’s leading tour operators, Erna Fergusson, the energetic docent of Indian country.
Besides her passion and knowledge, Fergusson had the only all-female tour guide staff in town. They became the prototypes of a new kind of Harvey Girl: the “Indian Detours Courier.” The Couriers were expected to be much better educated and more “refined” than Harvey Girls—bright, attractive college students, preferably bilingual in Spanish and at least one other idiom. They were given an enormous amount of historical material to memorize, from scripts and manuals created by the company. Erna Fergusson did much of the writing (and later became a well-known author of lively travel books for Knopf), but the company brought in other writers. The aging Southwest advocate Charles Lummis wrote some of the Courier materials, repurposing old stories from his magazines. Mary Colter and Herman Schweizer also created some of the manuals, bringing the amassed knowledge of over twenty years in the Fred Harvey Indian Department.
While the inaugural team of twenty Couriers faithfully memorized all the material in the manuals during their monthlong training, they did stage a revolt against the outfits chosen for them: men’s shirts, riding breeches, high-laced boots, and straight-brimmed hats. The college girls urged the company to costume them in more stylishly feminine attire, and new uniforms were quickly tailored in Albuquerque. They featured velveteen blouses in jewel colors and elaborate squash-blossom necklaces; the skirts were dark with a walking pleat, accented with a silver concha belt, and they could wear either walking shoes or boots. There was also a soft-brimmed cloche hat with a silver thunderbird symbol—a copy of an image Herman Schweizer had once sketched at an Indian ruin. Except for the hat, the Courier uniform quickly became a look that tourists wanted to emulate, and to this day many female visitors to Santa Fe are delighted to return home with their own updated version of this outfit.
The first group of detourists arrived on May 15, 1926. An editorial in the Albuquerque paper optimistically predicted that the Indian Detours would bring fifty thousand visitors a year to the state’s three major cities—which was almost as many people as lived in those cities combined.
FORD’S WIFE, JUDY, was preparing for her annual midsummer trip to the West, accompanied, as usual, by Kitty and Mary Perkins. While their excursions always ended at the family home in California, on the way they liked to find new places to explore and shop. Since the debut season of the Indian Detours was already in full swing, they decided to visit Santa Fe and do some private detouring of their own.
Before departing on July 14, Judy Harvey did what she had always done before leaving town—she went to Mass and received Communion. Afterward, she visited the bishop of Kansas City, Thomas Lillis, in his residence to say goodbye for the summer. Bishop Lillis was pleased that she was so excited about her trip, but as always he looked forward to her return. With her generous donations of time, money, social networking, and energy, she made his life, and the life of Kansas City, much easier.
The three women left Kansas City in a private Santa Fe railcar, which they rode to Trinidad, Colorado, where they were met at the Fred Harvey hotel, the Cardenas, by one of the plush new Harveycars and a private driver. They drove over the Raton Pass and then enjoyed a scenic route through northern New Mexico that train travelers never saw, hugging the base of the majestic Sangre de Cristo Mountains until reaching Taos Pueblo. From there, they drove down a breathtaking mountain pass—now called the Taos High Road, but back then the only road. When they reached downtown Santa Fe, an entire team of La Fonda bellmen were bucking for the privilege of carrying the bags of the boss’s family.
The next morning, the Judy Harvey party was properly fussed over during breakfast at La Fonda before riding, with their own private driver and Detours Courier, about forty miles to the Santa Clara Pueblo to visit the Puye Cliff Dwellings. As a younger woman, Judy had taken vigorous trips with her children, including a camping trip into the Grand Canyon with Kitty and a group of her friends not long before the war. At fifty-nine, however, she was no longer in good enough shape to keep up with her athletic daughter. To reach the Puye Cliff Dwellings—seven hundred roomy niches carved into a two-hundred-foot-high volcanic ridge—visitors had to walk up a steep, rough trail. Judy gamely tried to keep pace with Kitty and Mary. But then she started to feel faint.
The next thing Kitty knew, her mother was having a massive stroke. They were hours away from medical care.
As soon as Ford heard the news, he summoned the family physician, and they boarded a private car on the next Santa Fe train. By the time they reached La Fonda on Tuesday morning, Freddy had already arrived and was with Kitty at their mother’s bedside. Judy was being treated with stimulants in a desperate attempt to bring her back to consciousness, but nothing helped. By Wednesday evening, her kidneys were failing. After staying up with her all through the night, Ford emerged from the hotel suite bleary-eyed at 5:30 a.m. with the painful news that his wife of thirty-eight years had died.
Word spread rapidly through La Fonda as well as in the town, where the Harvey family had many friends. Everywhere they went, in the hotel or on the street, someone approached to express sympathy. The railroad arranged for two special cars to carry the body and the mourning family back to Kansas City as quickly as possible. Bishop Lillis issued a heartfelt statement about his friend, whose faith “was as simple as that of a child.” He could not believe that after seeing her just a week before, when she appeared to be in the best of health, he was now writing her eulogy.
Three days later, Judy’s casket was carried into St. James Roman Catholic Church, escorted by a Girl Scout “guard of honor” made up of representatives from all the various troops across the city that she had supported. Bishop Lillis gave a moving eulogy, mirroring the editorial about her that appeared in the Kansas City Star.
“Seldom has a woman not in public life had so wide an acquaintance and so broad an influence,” the paper wrote, and then quoted Robert Louis Stevenson: “So long as we love, we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say we are indispensable.”
Ford was beside himself with grief. His friends knew that while he was stoic and patient in business matters, he didn’t believe in hiding his emotions concerning death. They remembered how long and intensely he had grieved for his father, and later his mother. Given how close he was to Judy, and how unexpectedly she had been taken, there was no telling how long he would mourn.
THE INDIAN DETOURS became so popular so quickly that La Fonda’s fifty-five rooms were not sufficient. The overflow of guests were booked into other downtown hotels, although some spent the night in nearby Lamy, where Fred Harvey had a small depot hotel, El Ortiz. When that filled up, the railroad would arrange for multiple Pullman cars to be parked at Lamy, as an expandable trackside hotel with all the amenities.
Mary Colter was told to start planning for a dramatic expansion of La Fonda. Besides the Indian Detourists arriving by train, Ford believed the hotel would soon need to accommodate a new and growing breed of motoring tourists.
They would arrive on U.S. Route 66, the government’s first transcontinental “highway,” which became the most popular and romanticized route from Chicago to Los Angeles, the “Mother Road” for exploring and traversing the American West. Route 66 officially opened only six months after the Indian Detours, on November 11, 1926 (along with the rest of the fledgling federal highway system). The largely unpaved road went from Chicago to St. Louis, then southwest into Oklahoma and northern Texas, crossing into New Mexico near Tucumcari. From there, it pretty much followed alongside the Santa Fe tracks all the way to California, with one major deviation. Unlike the railroad, Route 66 came directly into downtown Santa Fe, just as the original Santa Fe Trail had. Motorists pulling off Route 66 found themselves less than a block from the entrance to La Fonda.