CHAPTER 3
EVEN THOUGH LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS, SITS AT WHAT IS ALMOST the exact center of the United States, in 1865 it was still considered the last major outpost of civilization. Although Texas, Nevada, California, and Oregon had already achieved statehood, since the 1830s the contiguous United States had pretty much ended at Fort Leavenworth and the western bank of the Missouri River. The fort served as the quartermaster station for all American military posts in the West. And while the fort was a city unto itself, a separate civilian city with a population of twenty thousand had grown up just south of its main gates. A company town for the businesses of defending, exploring, and exploiting the West, it was essentially the capital of the American frontier.
Leavenworth was rough, bustling, and bristling. One of Fred’s best friends described moving there from an eastern city as the greatest feeling of freedom he had ever known. “Herds of buffalo still roamed the plains,” he recalled. “Indians huddled on the street corners. Army officers rode back and forth to the jangling of swords and buckles.”
In its utter diversity—ethnic, economic, sociological—Leavenworth was a frontier metropolis that saw itself becoming, if not a New York City for the Wild West, then at least the next St. Louis. It had a large black population, which had already established three churches; in fact, Fort Leavenworth would be home to one of the nation’s first two black cavalry units, the “Buffalo Soldiers.” There was a growing Jewish community that founded the first synagogue in Kansas, and a large German population, many of whom worked in local breweries. And the Indian tribes living nearby, most notably the Pottawatomie, were in town regularly. With thousands of troops moving in and out of the fort, Leavenworth was constantly playing host to high-spending soldiers. It boasted some two hundred saloons and brothels, and attracted its share of criminals and ne’er-do-wells, tossed out by the army or tossed off boats where the pier met downtown.
Leavenworth’s wide dirt streets had gas-lit, wood-planked sidewalks teeming with new businesses, two-and three-story brick buildings with long awnings and large block-letter signs. Looming over Delaware Street was a massive cast-iron eagle, perched on the roof of the Hershfield & Mitchell watch and jewelry shop. From the eagle’s beak dangled a huge clock in the shape of a pocket watch.
The historic center of town was the Planters’ House, a four-story redbrick building that served as the city’s finest hotel and restaurant. Planters’ was originally envisioned as a riverside luxury spot for the city’s pro-slavery politicians and businessmen. But when Kansas declared itself a free state before the Civil War, the hotel’s owners realized it would be bad for business to remain so partisan.
Many new cities in the West were settled almost entirely by politically or religiously like-minded people. Leavenworth was different—its only common bond was frontier business, a shared desire to make money from a fort that took orders from whoever ran the government in Washington. So the hotel maintained separate bars and bartenders in the basement for those on either side of the slavery debate, just far enough apart that patrons couldn’t spit on one another.
The Planters’ House became an epicenter of the political divisiveness and border-war violence that earned the state its nickname: “Bleeding Kansas.” And its signature customer was Leavenworth’s over-the-top mayor, Daniel Read Anthony, who was willing to go to any length to win an argument, especially about slavery. Several years back, when he owned one of the local newspapers, Anthony had shot and killed a rival editor who criticized his antislavery politics and derided his honor. He successfully pleaded self-defense, earning a reputation as a “pistol-packin’ pencil pusher” and ushering in a new era of extreme journalism in American frontier newspapers.
While Dan Anthony would later become better known as the brother of his suffragette sibling Susan B. Anthony, he was, in 1865, arguably the most powerful man in Leavenworth. When he took his regular table at the Planters’ House, he always had twin six-shooters in his holster—in case anyone wanted to talk politics.
Like many city hotels, Planters’ also served as a place of business for traveling salesmen. It was even commonplace for physicians to take out advertisements in the local papers announcing they were temporarily setting up shop there: “Dr. J. J. McBride, the great King of Pain, is in the city at the Planters’ House, room No. 11. Can tell any person their disease without asking questions.” These out-of-towners competed with local healers like Drs. Birge & Morey, whose ads promised cures “in all chronic diseases, such as Sore Eyes, Deafness, Cancers, Dyspepsia, Lungs, Female Complaints, etc., etc.”
Fred decided his ticket counter should be in the Planters’ House—the previous agent had sold train tickets from a bookshop—so he rented office No. 3 on its well-trafficked lower level. And in early February 1865, he loaded his family onto a packet boat to Leavenworth, where he moved them into a modest rented house on Pottawatomie Street, just a block from the river and down the street from his new office.
Sally spent her days at home caring for their two small boys, four-year-old Eddie and two-year-old Charley, both of whom had wavy blond hair, deep blue eyes, and wary grins. If anyone noticed the obvious differences in coloring and facial features between a dark-haired eastern European mother still learning English and her Nordic-looking children, they had the good manners not to say anything.
Fred set out to make an immediate impression in the business community, as the Leavenworth Conservative hailed his arrival: “The men of Leavenworth will be glad to hear of this most excellent appointment. Mr. H is a man of extensive railroad and steamboat experience … He is well and widely known as a thorough, competent and efficient business man, and a most agreeable gentleman. All who entrust business to his hands will receive perfect satisfaction.”
The Harveys arrived in town just as the Civil War appeared to be finally wearing down. The slaves had been freed, Lincoln had been reelected, tentative peace talks had begun. And Fred and Sally, like America itself, felt a sense of renewal and hope.
Unfortunately, that feeling lasted only a few weeks. A scarlet fever epidemic swept the nation at the end of February, and Eddie and Charley both fell ill, their tongues turning the white strawberry color that every parent feared. Soon their tongues went red, their skin became rashy and changed texture—first sandpapery, then so flaky that Sally could peel off layers of their palms. Today, the boys would be cured with a dose of antibiotics, but in 1865 they didn’t stand a chance.
Charley died at 2:00 a.m. on Thursday, March 2. Although he was quickly buried at Greenwood Cemetery, Fred and Sally waited before scheduling a public funeral service; they were too busy trying to keep Eddie alive. At the end of March, they finally put a death notice in the Leavenworth Times inviting their new “friends and acquaintances” to the house for a service for Charley—which was conducted while Eddie lay in his room, barely clinging to life. He died nine days later, at 9:00 on a Sunday morning.
As the Harveys struggled with the emotions of burying their second child in two weeks, the nation’s psyche was being whiplashed from hope to despair. On the day Eddie died, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union commander Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox—the official beginning of the end of the Civil War. But then, five days later, on Good Friday, Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head during the final act of a farcical British play about boorish Americans. He died the next morning, becoming one of the last and most resonant casualties among the 620,000 killed in America’s war against itself.
SEVEN MONTHS AFTER Fred and Sally buried their boys, a peculiar item appeared in the city news section of the Leavenworth Daily Times. It could easily have been missed, surrounded by larger stories about a government sale of nine thousand horses at Fort Leavenworth, a local production of the popular abolitionist drama The Octoroon, several crimes involving stolen coats, and the 1865 equivalent of a weather and traffic report for an unpaved world: “The mud on the streets yesterday was horrible. It is seldom worse.”
The item said that Fred Harvey had returned to town from St. Louis, and noted offhandedly, “He looks happy.” It didn’t say why.
While it may have seemed odd for the newspaper to comment on his mood, it wasn’t surprising. There was something about Leavenworth’s new railroad agent that lured people into his drama. With a brow that looked furrowed even when he smiled, and a certain earned intensity in his deep-set blue eyes, he appeared to have already survived a lifetime of heartache. And he was only thirty.
Local newspapermen had gotten to know Fred because they relied on him: As agent for the major railroad in Missouri, he was the first to get the incoming papers from the East, which he hand delivered to editors each morning as a courtesy. They had noticed his change of disposition and assumed he was just feeling refreshed after an extended vacation—“three weeks rustication” in St. Louis. But it turned out he was elated for a different reason.
Sally had just entered her second trimester of pregnancy. She was beginning to show.
With a baby coming, Fred sought a second job. He had become especially chummy with the staff at the Leavenworth Conservative, who saw that he was not only a smart businessman but an avid newspaper reader. He was offered a position selling ads and subscriptions as the paper’s General Business Agent. He started just before Christmas 1865.
And three months later, Sally had a son. They named him Ford Ferguson Harvey, to honor Fred’s enduring friendship with Captain Rufus Ford. Around the house, they called him “Fordie.”
Fordie made his debut later that year at the Leavenworth County Fair—at the baby show, or what the newspaper referred to as a “large display of matrimonial fruits.” He was one of “twelve specimens of incipient man and womanhood” chosen to be displayed among the prize livestock and vegetables. According to reports, the babies attracted “an immense crowd and elicited numerous remarks, complimentary and otherwise.”
The baby show was just one of many ways Fred and Sally were becoming more active in the life of Leavenworth. Fred joined a Masonic lodge, and the couple started to be seen more and more often at the city’s cultural events. They became regulars at Chaplin’s Opera House, where melodramas like Camille alternated with Saturday matinees of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The Harveys climbed quickly in Leavenworth’s twin social scenes. The town itself had a whirlwind of civilian entertainments, parties, and celebratory dinners, at which they became friendly with Dan Anthony—whose sister Susan B. was often in town visiting—and Colonel James Abernathy, who owned a large furniture factory. There was also a large and well-developed military society within the walls of the fort, with an active calendar of events for officers and their families. The Harveys were popular in that crowd as well.
In fact, Fred Harvey enjoyed inhabiting two worlds. In a town where the mayor carried six-guns, Fred appeared to be quite the English gentleman. He dined like a Londoner: a light breakfast of toast and tea, his main meal at lunch, a low tea with lemon at 4:00 p.m., followed by high tea with meat at 7:00. Many of his friends were British. Leavenworth itself had quite a few expatriate civilians and visiting military men, and there were large enclaves of Brits in St. Louis and other cities he was starting to frequent for business. Yet while he identified with certain British ideals of honor and decorum, Fred was becoming the very model of a modern American striver, known for his ambition and determination.
The Harveys enjoyed having people over to their home in the evenings to play cards, listen to music, or read aloud—Shakespeare was a favorite—into the wee hours. But everyone knew that at precisely eleven o’clock, Fred would stand up, snap his waistcoat taut, and announce he was going to bed. His guests were encouraged to stay and play as long as they liked—and often did. Sally was happy to keep the party going; after growing up in relative poverty, she couldn’t get enough of being a lady who entertained.
BECAUSE THEY HAD grown so fond of Leavenworth, Fred was particularly sad to realize that they might have to move, because the city was probably doomed. Civic leaders were claiming it wasn’t true, that there was still hope. But even though he was just a ticket seller, Fred had absorbed enough about the higher echelons of the railroad business to know that the cause had already been lost. The city wouldn’t die—it would always be a fine place to live. But its grand scheme to become the next great transportation hub, the next St. Louis, was going to fail.
The railroads had, literally, decided to go another way.
As the first city established in Kansas, and the home of the most important military base in the West, Leavenworth had naturally expected to be the first city with train service. That was part of the reason Fred moved there. But there were a lot of factors involved in when and how a city got connected to the railroad.
It was especially important to be on the “High Iron,” industry slang for a railroad’s main trunk line. A city’s future depended on whether it was on the High Iron or merely served by a smaller branch line.
Fred understood how cities got trains. Adventure capitalists created companies that asked the government for long, skinny stretches of land so they could lay tracks along them. At the same time they went to the cities or counties along the route to persuade them to float bonds to pay for the construction—and for engines, cars, and stations. Since railroads never shared tracks or depots, cities were involved with multiple deals at the same time, each one a complex negotiation and a race against time and money. A lot of the deals fell apart.
In Leavenworth’s case, they had all fallen apart, and the town’s leaders—many of whom were now Fred’s friends—watched in dismay as much smaller Kansas towns, like Lawrence and Topeka, got train service first.
Leavenworth had once come close to snagging the biggest railroad deal in the country, spending over $4 million ($88 million) lobbying in Washington to ensure the High Iron of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad came right through the city and the fort. It was during the nationwide competition for the right to build a railroad from the Missouri River all the way to the Pacific, which pitted three different companies, and three different routes, against one another. But in 1862 the Lincoln administration chose the route championed by the Union Pacific—which ran two hundred miles to the north of Leavenworth, through Omaha. The route was a straighter shot from Chicago and more likely to remain sheltered from Civil War battles.
The city’s next best hope was that the first railroad bridge over the Missouri River, connecting Kansas to the eastern train system, would be built there, making Leavenworth the major regional hub. In fact, the decision about that bridge was actually being made by Fred’s boss.
The railroad he worked for, the Northern Missouri, was part of “the Joy System”—a loose conglomeration of regional railroads controlled by Detroit lawyer James F. Joy. While less well-known than the tycoons who were buying up railroads and railroad stock in the East—Jay Cooke, Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan—Joy was the most powerful railroad magnate on the western frontier, starting out with the Michigan Central and eventually controlling major lines in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri.
Unfortunately, Joy wanted to build his bridge and his hub thirty miles downriver from Leavenworth, in a sparsely populated area called “City of Kansas” on the Missouri side and Wyandotte on the Kansas side. Joy wanted this not because it made more sense but because it made more sense for him. He owned land in Kansas that would benefit if the bridge was built in this largely undeveloped area—which would come to be known as Kansas City.
Leavenworth had a strong advocate in Kansas’s powerful U.S. senator James H. Lane. Indeed, Lane had a vested interest in seeing the railroad bridge built there because he was also president of the proposed Leavenworth, Lawrence & Fort Gibson Railroad. But just before the bridge bill was to be debated in Washington, Lane took a controversial stand during the argument over “reconstruction” of the South; he crossed party lines and became the only Republican to support the plan of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, a plan that was considered too conciliatory to the South and weak on civil rights. Lane’s Senate colleagues, the so-called Radical Republicans, turned on Johnson (and later impeached him). They also turned on Lane, who had a history of mental illness. He suffered a complete breakdown in the summer of 1866 and shot himself.
He died ten days later, but before his successor was named—in fact, before he was even buried—the funding bill for James Joy’s bridge at Kansas City was hurriedly proposed on the Senate floor and passed. It would be years before his “Hannibal Bridge” was built—everything in railroad construction took an enormously long time—but the map of Kansas, and of the American Midwest, had now been redrawn. All the young railroads being built in Kansas would use Kansas City as their main eastern hub instead of Leavenworth.
Still, in November 1866, the city did get some train service at last—but just a minor branch line. The Kansas Pacific—the local division of the company chosen to build the transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific—laid tracks between Leavenworth and Lawrence, where passengers could change trains onto the High Iron to go east to Kansas City, or west through Topeka all the way to Fort Riley and Junction City.
Leavenworth had finally joined the modern world. And Fred Harvey was no longer a railroad ticket seller in a city without trains.