David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  Ruff’s idea of what to do about the dam was relatively simple and seemed realistic enough at first. He would rebuild it to a height of only forty feet or so and cut the spillway down some twenty feet deeper to handle the overflow. But when he found that this would cost considerably more than repairing the old break and restoring the dam to somewhere near its original height, he chose the latter course.

  The first indication in Johnstown and thereabouts that a change was in the offing above South Fork was an item in the Tribune on October 14, 1879. “Rumors” were reported that a summer resort was to be built by a Western Game and Fish Association. The next day there was a notice calling for fifty men to work, but no name of the organization was given.

  For some reason or other, intentionally or otherwise, the Pittsburgh men kept the correct name of their organization from receiving any kind of public notice. It was a course of action which would later be interpreted as evidence that they had had no desire for anyone to come looking into their business in general, or their charter in particular.

  Ruff set about repairing the dam by boarding up the stone culvert and dumping in every manner of local rock, mud, brush, hemlock boughs, hay, just about everything at hand. Even horse manure was used in some quantity. The discharge pipes were not replaced, and the “engineering” techniques employed made a profound impression on the local bystanders.

  The man immediately in charge of this mammoth face-lifting was one Edward Pearson, about whom little is known except that he seems to have been an employee of a Pittsburgh freight-hauling company that did business with the railroad and that he had no engineering credentials at all.

  The entire rebuilding of the dam ended up costing the club about $17,000, and there was trouble from the start. On Christmas Day, 1879, only a month or so after work had begun, a downpour carried away most of the repairs. Work was discontinued until the following summer. Then, less than a year later, in February of 1881, once again heavy rains caused serious damages.

  No one seems to have been particularly discouraged by all this, however. Along toward the end of March the lake was deep enough for the clubmen to go ahead with their plan to stock it. The first of the small steamboats was being assembled and the clubhouse was close to being readied for the grand opening. In early June the fish arrived by special tank car from Lake Erie, 1,000 black bass, which ended up costing the club about a dollar apiece by the time the last expenses were paid. According to the Tribune, which noted these and all other bits of news it could uncover concerning the club, only three of the fish died, “one of which was a huge old chap, weighing over three pounds.”

  The Tribune had also reported earlier that the Pennsylvania was planning to build a narrow-gauge spur from South Fork to the lake and that the clubmen were shopping about for land downriver from Johnstown where they intended to establish a private deer park of 1,500 acres. Neither claim was true, but both seemed perfectly reasonable and fitted in with the picture most Johnstown people had of the club and its members. Would not even the high and mighty Pennsylvania Railroad gladly provide any number of special conveniences for the likes of such men? Was not a deer park a fitting aristocratic touch for their new mountain domain? Certainly money was no problem. Were not the members of the club millionaires to the man?

  The plain truth was that a goodly number of them were; quite a few of them, however, were not, and two or three of them were a great deal better than millionaires. But by the standards of most men, they were, every last one of them, extraordinarily rich and influential. Yet, one of the curious things about the club is that the make-up of its membership, exactly who was who at the lake, was not generally known around Johnstown. If the club appears to have been rather cozy about its name, it was even more so about publicizing who belonged to it. Not until well after the events of May 31, 1889, was a full list of the membership published publicly. And quite a list it was.

  The membership of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, according to its initial plans, was never to exceed one hundred sportsmen and their families. The membership fee was $800. There was to be no shooting on Sundays; and those members who did not have cottages of their own were limited to a two-week stay at the clubhouse. As the summer season of 1889 was approaching, there was a total of sixty-one names on the membership roster.

  The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, it should be kept in mind, was a most unostentatious affair by contrast to such watering spots of the time as Newport, Cape May, or the lavish new lakeside resort in New York, Tuxedo Park. There was no opulence. There were no liveried footmen, no Tirolean-hatted gamekeepers such as at Tuxedo, no “cottage” architecture to approach the likes of Newport. There was not even a comparison to be made, unless the South Fork group was to be measured by the per capita worth of its members—or the industrial and financial power they wielded—which, everything considered, was often the way such things were measured. On that basis the little resort on Lake Conemaugh was right in the same league.

  One Pittsburgh newspaper called it the “Bosses Club,” and aptly so. Carnegie’s name by itself on the membership list would have been reason enough. And the same holds for Henry Clay Frick, for much had happened to the young “Coke King” since he had first joined with Benjamin Ruff to launch the club.

  In 1881, while in New York, Frick had stopped by the Windsor Hotel on Fifth Avenue to pay a call on Carnegie and his mother and to talk a little business. (Frick happened to be on his honeymoon at the time, but he was not the man to let that, or anything else, stand in the way of progress.) When the meeting was over, he and Carnegie were partners in the coke trade, and from then on it did even better than before. By 1889 the H. C. Frick Coke Company was capitalized at $5 million; it owned or controlled 35,000 acres of coal land and employed some 11,000 men. Moreover, in January of that year, Frick had been made Chairman of Carnegie, Phipps & Company, which meant that he was commander in chief of the whole of the Carnegie iron and steel enterprises, which were by then the biggest in the world.

  Carnegie by this time had said something to the effect that he was not much interested in making more money and was spending no more than six months a year at his business. He wanted someone who could manage things. In Frick, whom he did not especially like and whom no one seemed quite able to fathom, he found exactly the right man. By 1889 this humorless, solitary, complex son of a German farmer, who was then still six months from turning forty, was the most important man in Pittsburgh.

  Along with Frick, the club roster included Henry Phipps, Jr., Carnegie’s partner since the earliest days of the business, before the Civil War. A pale, painstaking man who stood no more than an inch taller than the five-foot-two Carnegie, Phipps was the financial wizard of Carnegie, Phipps & Company. In the early days he had won certain acclaim for his ability to borrow money for the struggling ironworks and for an old horse he owned, which, according to Pittsburgh legend, was capable of taking him on his rounds of the banks without any guidance whatsoever. By 1889, however, Phipps was one of the three or four top men in the steel business and one of the wealthy men of the country.

  Besides the big three—Carnegie, Frick, and Phipps—the Carnegie empire was also represented at South Fork by John G. A. Leishman, the vice-chairman of the firm, and by Philander Chase Knox, a bright little sparrow of a man, who was the company’s number-one lawyer as well as the personal counsel for both Carnegie and Frick.

  Then there were Robert Pitcairn and Andrew Mellon, two excellent friends to have if you were doing business in Pittsburgh. Pitcairn ran the Pittsburgh Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which, as jobs went in those days, was a most lofty position indeed. In terms of pure power and prestige, few men outranked him.

  Mellon was a shy, frail-looking young man, still in his thirties, and exceedingly quick-witted. Along with his father, old Judge Mellor, he was in the banking business, T. Mellon & Sons, and up to his elbows in the financial doings behind much of Pittsburgh’s furious industrial growth. It had been the Mellons
who lent Henry Frick the money to buy his first coal land, and who backed him again (with something like $100,000) during the panic of 1873 when he wanted to buy up still more. (One story has it that Judge Mellon, who was a staunch Methodist, made the loan only after Frick implied that he would use his influence to have the Overholt distillery shut down.) Frick and young Andrew were not far apart in age and became fast friends, traveling to Europe together, dealing in business for years, but never calling each other anything but Mister Frick and Mister Mellon.

  James Chambers and H. Sellers McKee ran what they claimed was the largest window-glass works on earth. Durbin Home and C. B. Shea ran Pittsburgh’s leading department store, Joseph Home and Company. D. W. C. Bidwell sold DuPont blasting powder for coal mining. Calvin Wells, A. French, James Lippincott, and John W. Chalf ant were in the steel business in one way or other.

  And so the list went. It included names from the Pittsburgh “Blue Book” (Thaw, Laughlin, McClintock, Scaife) and from the lists of directors of several Pittsburgh banks (Schoonmaker, Moorhead, Caldwell). There were among them the founders of the city’s new business club, the Duquesne Club, and the new preparatory school for young men, Shady Side Academy.

  There were also among them, it is interesting to note, a future Secretary of the Treasury (Mellon, who would serve under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover) and a future Secretary of State (Knox, who would be Attorney General under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt before taking over the State Department under Taft). There was one future Congressman (George F. Huff, who was a banker and coal operator), a future diplomat (John G. A. Leishman, who would be America’s first Ambassador to Turkey), and a future President of the Pennsylvania Railroad (Samuel Rea).

  Frick and Mellon would not only go on to amass fortunes of spectacular proportions, but would also demonstrate surprisingly good taste in putting together two of the world’s finest private art collections. Carnegie, who was already worth many millions, would wind up with more money than any other American except old John D. Rockefeller and would give away well over $300 million of it with no little fanfare.

  In 1889, however, all that was still a good way off. The Carnegie whiskers had not as yet turned their glistening white. No palaces had been built for Carnegie or Frick on New York’s Fifth Avenue. No Rembrandt’s had been bought, no daughters married off to titled Europeans, no parks donated, no foundations established. Carnegie thus far had built only one of his free libraries, in Braddock, near Pittsburgh and the site of his gigantic Edgar Thomson works, which he had named after his old friend Thomson, who also happened to be his best customer. At the dedication of the Braddock library in March of 1889, Carnegie used the opportunity to say that he would certainly like to build another one in Homestead someday, but that there had been really far too much labor trouble over there. The implication was pretty obvious and suggested that the purpose behind these earliest benefactions at least may not have been altogether altruistic.

  Good works, public service, and any ideas about giving away surplus money were all still things of the future.

  It was in fact during the month of May 1889 that Carnegie was finishing up a magazine article to become known as “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which he said, and much to the consternation of his Pittsburgh associates, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” The gist of the article was that the rich, like the poor, would always be with us. The present system had its inequities, certainly, and many of them were disgraceful. But the system was a good deal better than any other so far. The thing for the rich man to do was to divide his life into two parts. The first part should be for acquisition, the second for distribution. At this stage the gentlemen of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were attending strictly to the first part. Business was the overriding preoccupation for now, and business in Pittsburgh, either directly or indirectly, meant the steel business, which in 1889 was doing just fine.

  True, orders for steel rails had tapered off some. Breakneck railroad building in the west had meant palmy days in the accounting offices along the Allegheny and Monongahela. Seventy-three thousand miles of track had been put down in the 1880’s, or more than twice as much track as there had been in the whole country when the war ended at Appomattox. Steel production had more than tripled during those ten years. But now there were also orders for all sorts of architectural steel, huge beams and girders for totally new kinds of buildings called “skyscrapers” which were going up in Chicago. In 1887 the Government had made its first order for American steel for ship armor. A new kind of Navy was being built, a steel Navy, including, in 1889, a battleship called the Maine, the biggest thing ever built by the Navy, for which Carnegie, Phipps & Company was making the steel plates.

  And if the rail business was not quite as good as it had been, the United States was, nonetheless, producing about two tons of rails for every one made in England. As a matter of fact, for three years now, the United States had been the leading steel producer in the world. Pittsburgh, which before the war had not had a single mill as big as those in Johnstown, was now throbbing like no other industrial center in the land. The sprawling complex of mills in Chicago had been providing serious competition of late. Prices were not as high as the steel men would have liked to see them (they never were), and there was more talk among them every week about cutting wages. But if the labor leaders could be dealt with (and there was no reason to think they could not be), then there was every reason to believe that Pittsburgh would keep booming for years.

  As far as the gentlemen of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were concerned no better life could be asked for. They were an early-rising, healthy, hard-working, no-nonsense lot, Scotch-Irish most of them, Freemasons, tough, canny, and, without question, extremely fortunate to have been in Pittsburgh at that particular moment in history.

  They were men who put on few airs. They believed in the sanctity of private property and the protective tariff. They voted the straight Republican ticket and had only recently, in the fall of 1888, contributed heavily to reinstate a Republican, the aloof little Harrison, in the White House. They trooped off with their large families regularly Sunday mornings to one of the more fashionable of Pittsburgh’s many Presbyterian churches. They saw themselves as God-fearing, steady, solid people, and, for all their new fortunes, most of them were.

  Quite a few had come from backgrounds as humble as Carnegie’s. Phipps and Pitcairn were Scotch immigrants who had been boyhood pals with Carnegie in what was known as Slabtown, one of the roughest sections of Allegheny, across the river from Pittsburgh. Leishman grew up in an orphanage. Frick, despite the wealth of grandfather Overholt, had started out in business with little more than a burning desire to get rich.

  They and the others were now living in cavernous, marble-floored houses in the new East End section of Pittsburgh. Several made regular trips to Europe, and those who did not always stopped at the finest hotels in New York or wherever else they went. They now considered themselves, each and all, as among the “best people” in Pittsburgh. They pretty well ran the city. They were living the good life as they thought the good life ought to be lived. But never for very long did they take their eye off the real business of the human condition as they saw it—which was business. That they should spend some time together in the summer months, away from Pittsburgh, but not too far away, mind you, seemed, no doubt, a perfectly natural extension of the whole process.

  The reaction in Johnstown to their doings on the mountain was mixed. That the Pittsburghers with all their money should think enough of the country around Johnstown to want to summer there was, of course, terribly flattering. As far back as the 1850’s there had been some discussion in Johnstown about the area’s potential as a summer resort. One Tribune editor decided to set forth Johnstown’s charms in no uncertain terms. “Our scenery is grand beyond description,” he wrote, “the atmosphere cool, and invigorating; trout in the neighboring streams large and numerous; drives good; women beautiful and accomplished; men all g
entlemen and scholars, hotels as good as the best.” For all anyone knew, the South Fork venture might lead to other resort developments in the area. The valley might become famous; property values would mount. It was not an unpleasant thought.

  The club had already provided a lot of work in the South Fork area, and much to the irritation of the club’s management it had also provided some excellent sport for local anglers. Slipping onto the property in the early morning or toward sundown was no problem for a local man or boy. The well-stocked lake and streams provided any number of suppers in the neighborhood from the time the dam was first restored. The grounds were well posted, but that discouraged nobody especially. If anything, it only added to the fun.

  When the club responded by putting in fences over the best trout streams, the fences mysteriously disappeared. Relations then deteriorated fast, with the club authorities threatening to shoot any invaders caught on the grounds after dark. During a flood in 1885, one farmer named Leahy, whose property adjoined the lake, decided to rent out fishing space on some of his submerged acreage. The clubmen said he ought not to do that and threatened to take him to court. This had no effect on Leahy, so they tried to buy him out, but he said he was not interested in selling. It was only after an intermediary was brought in, and lengthy negotiations transacted, that the farm was purchased for $4,000 and the fish thereby further protected.

  Any love lost locally by such tactics apparently bothered the club management not in the least. A classic undeclared war between poacher and country squire went on for years. It never became a shooting war, despite the threats, but it did leave widespread resentment in the area around the lake that would one day come back to haunt the clubmen.