Shy, perhaps, but also curious. After Peter Van Amburgh married, Jay asked in a letter that Van Amburgh provide him with “a chapter or two on matrimonial felicity, that strange uneven sea of human existence upon which I never expect to embark myself. So tell us the secrets, Peter, and much joy to my old and true friend; indeed, you have my best wishes for a long and prosperous life and a ripe old age, which your industry and prudence so well deserve, and if you ever get in trouble I will divide my last shirt with you.”7 For the moment, marriage seemed not even a distant possibility. Simon Champion remembered that Jay “was not given to running with girls much or at all when he was with me. . . . I was a single man too then, and we never talked over the question of marriage.”8
Still, Jay got at least some rhetorical practice in the romantic arts. As his sister Bettie would recall, Edward Burhans “had an Irishman as a sort of man of all work around the store, and this man had a sweetheart somewhere at a distance. He could not write and Jay used to write his love letters for him–whole sheets of foolscap full of the most endearing terms.” Bettie remembered that Jay “exhausted the list of adjectives and adverbs to tell her how sweet she was . . . and the man would be so delighted that he would show [the letters] all around before he sent them. He would ask Jay to use lots of such words, and the more superlative they were the more he was pleased.”9
As for Jay and Maria Burhans, if there was ever anything between them, a business disagreement between Edward Burhans and Jay Gould–this featuring the classic hint of betrayal for which Gould would later become notorious–undoubtedly put an end to it. Early in 1856, heirs to several small local land parcels came to the store seeking Ed Burhans, a dabbler in real es- tate to whom they wished to sell their properties. But Burhans was not about, and Jay, recognizing a bargain in the price being asked, moved swiftly to preempt him. Combining his savings with a few hundred dollars supplied by his father, Jay bought the properties himself.
According to Hamilton Burhans–both a devoted friend of Jay’s and an envious business rival of older brother Edward–not long after Gould purchased the lots he sold them again to adjoining farmers at what Burhans described as “a handsome profit.”10 In fact, after Jay repaid his father, some $5,000 remained, a lordly sum for one not yet twenty. The profit probably made the true cost of the transaction–Edward Burhans fired him–seem more than worthwhile. Although quite legal, Jay’s move to edge out the man who paid his salary was hardly ethical. In time, as Gould’s notoriety grew on other fronts, an unfriendly press would cite this land deal as the point at which young Gould became a financial predator.
In between these speculations, Jay at last finished his book. The volume, a dense one, sat complete by April 1856. Although the project had been underwritten in part by the New York State Agricultural Society, Jay himself was responsible for its publication. The young man sold subscriptions for several hundred copies. Then he commissioned a Philadelphia printer-binder to bring the volume to press. All was in place, and Jay’s manuscript had arrived at the Philadelphia publisher, when word came of tragedy: a catastrophic fire at the printer’s offices in which all had been lost. “I am under the unpleasant necessity,” he wrote James Oliver, “of informing you of the total destruction by fire of my History of Delaware County.” Not only was the manuscript incinerated, but so were the printer’s plates. “I shall leave for Philadelphia in the morning to ascertain the exact state of my affairs. If nothing less can be done, I shall set myself hard to work to rewrite it, as you know I am not in the habit of backing out what I undertake, and shall write night and day until it is completed.”11
Sifting through the wreck of the Philadelphia plant, Jay and his printer were able to salvage only a few proof sheets, which Jay carried back to Roxbury. Through May and June, Gould, now twenty, devoted long hours to reconstituting his opus. In this work he relied heavily on the pitifully small pile of salvaged proofs, his notes for the original draft, and a few fragmentary extracts published previously by Champion in the Bloomville Mirror. The book finally appeared in September 1856 under Jay’s homegrown Roxbury imprint. But he was not there to see it. He had by that time departed the town–a place he would never again call home–intent on making his fortune.
Of Jay’s old friends only John Burroughs and John Champlin–the latter ending his days as chief justice of the Michigan State Supreme Court–wound up so cowed by Gould’s bad press that they failed to maintain communication. (When in his dotage, Burroughs became chummy with Gould’s eldest daughter and only at that point learned of Jay’s vigorous, oft-stated fondness for his books.) “I never saw Jay after the Roxbury days–not to speak with him,” Burroughs commented in 1919. “Our paths lay far apart. I never followed his career very closely.” Once during the late 1860s, at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., the Deputy Comptroller brought in some officers from a bank in New York and asked the would-be writer Burroughs–then supporting himself as a department clerk–to show the gentlemen the vault. Gould was one of the party. “He did not recognize me, though I knew him instantly. I showed them the vault, but did not make myself known to Jay.”12
Twenty years later, Burroughs–by now a well-known author–encountered Gould one last time. “I was walking up Fifth Avenue, when I saw a man on the other side of the street, more than a block away, coming toward me, whose gait arrested my attention as something I had known long before. Who could it be? I thought, and began to ransack my memory for a clue. I had seen that gait before. As the man came opposite me I saw he was Jay Gould. That walk in some subtle way differed from the walk of any other man I had known. It is a curious psychological fact that the two men outside my own family of whom I have oftenest dreamed in my sleep are Emerson and Jay Gould; one to whom I owe so much, the other to whom I owe nothing; one whose name I revere, the other whose name I associate, as does the world, with the dark way of speculative finance.”13
Others of the Roxbury crowd remained in touch, each of them receiving brief surprise visits from Gould every few years. Accompanied by a small army of lieutenants and usually in a friendly rush, the financier would arrive like a welcome storm out of the blue, most often while passing near one or another of his old associates’ homes on the way to some more significant destination. James Oliver, who had migrated to Kansas, received numerous visits from Gould during the latter’s inspection trips of his western railroad properties. As well, whenever Gould found himself within striking distance of Roxbury, he called on Hamilton Burhans (who owned and operated a number of retail establishments after selling the Gould farm to one of Rice Bouton’s cousins) and Peter Van Amburgh, who farmed. Gould also called on Simon Champion, who spent his life as the editor of various obscure Catskills newspapers, and Abel Crosby, who found success as a jobber of hardware, iron, steel, and mill supplies just south of the Catskills at Rondout, New York.
Similarly, Jay kept tabs on Rice Bouton. Following a two-year stint (1858–1860) as president of Missouri’s Chapel Hill College, Rice commenced a three-year tenure (1860–1863) in the president’s post at Macon College in the same state. After that he returned to Roxbury, where he took McLaury’s place as principal at the Roxbury Academy, remaining until the school’s closure in 1869. Thereafter, for the next fifteen years, Rice oversaw Methodist congregations in the Catskills towns of Bovina, Windham, Stamford, Franklin, and Coeyman’s Hollow. Gould and Bouton saw each other sporadically during this time but were destined to reconnect more solidly in 1884, at which point Rice moved to Manhattan after having been called to take over the famous Five Points Mission in what was then the worst of New York’s slums. After 1884 and until Rice’s death in September 1891, Jay favored him with occasional unsolicited checks for the mission and equally occasional invitations to dinner at his Fifth Avenue home.
In mid-1875, John McLaury, who had lost contact with Gould after they both left Roxbury, dropped in at Jay’s Manhattan townhouse. The two had not seen each other in at least fifteen years. (During the intervening time McLaur
y married a girl from Harpersfield in the Catskills and relocated to North Carolina, where he chaired the department of mathematics at Charlotte College, now the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.) “[ Jay] received me very cordially,” McLaury recalled. “He had changed in his appearance but the change was not as much as I expected.” The mogul insisted his old friend stay to dinner and meet the family. Afterward, as McLaury prepared to depart, Gould in a hushed voice inquired to know whether everything was “all right” with him. “Which indeed it was,” McLaury remembered. “I’m pleased to say I required nothing more of Jay than a hearty handshake and a fond remembrance.”14
Chapter 7
GOULDSBORO
SEVEN YEARS BEFORE he married Sarah Gould, George Northrop had embarked upon a partnership in a Pennsylvania tannery with two other Catskills businessmen. Gilbert and Edward Palen–Northrop’s brothers-in-law by his first wife, Caroline Palen–hailed from Palenville, a village in the Catskills where their forebear Jonathan Palen had set up a large tanning enterprise in 1817.1 By mid-1856, after nine years of earnest effort, the Northrop-Palen speculation in the Pocono Mountains, 160 miles southwest of Roxbury, had begun to look a success, and the three partners announced plans to move their households closer to their investment.
The neighborhood of the Northrop-Palen enterprise, on the east side of Brodhead Creek in Pennsylvania’s Monroe County, had originally been known as Frogtown. But now Gilbert Palen christened the place with a classier moniker: Canadensis, the name being taken from the hemlock tree Tsuga canadensis, whose bark contained a variety of tannic acid particularly suited for the conversion of raw pelts into sole leather.2 Given the great hope and anticipation with which Northrop and the Palens were preparing to uproot their lives and embrace their futures, Jay Gould must have heard and seen a great deal about the money to be made in leather manufacturing.
This was a promise that shone no more in the Catskill Mountains. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Catskills had been known as the blue mountains. This name derived from the dense “blue” stands of hemlocks that dominated the region’s northern and eastern slopes. Indeed, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Catskills boasted numerous ancient forests sheltering hemlocks that were not uncommonly one hundred feet tall, four feet wide, and two hundred years old. These forests came down over the course of just five decades, as the leather markets of New York and Boston grew, and the single-minded “bark peelers” destroyed more and more of the ancient stands. In 1835, approximately 40 percent of New York State’s tanneries operated in the Catskills counties of Delaware, Greene, Orange, Schoharie, Sullivan, and Ulster. By the time Northrop and the Palens launched their operation in Canadensis, the hemlock forests of the Catskills and the tanneries that had fed on them were just memories. (Henry David Thoreau, on a visit to the Catskills in 1844, looked at one of the denuded mountainsides and, borrowing a phrase from his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, compared it to a “sucked orange.”3) Thus men like Northrop and the Palens–although settling for inferior alder or oak bark when they had to–did not hesitate to move like locusts, following the increasingly distant chain of untouched hemlocks north into the Adirondacks and southwest into the Alleghenies and Poconos.
One who participated in this economic migration was Zadock Pratt, famous in his day as the “Greene County Tanner.” Pratt’s hometown, Prattsville (the former Schoharie Kill) lay some twelve miles from Roxbury. Sixty-six years old in 1856, Pratt possessed a massive tanning-based fortune.4 His father, Zadock Pratt, Sr.–one of the earliest Catskills tanners–had set up shop in the town of Jewett, Greene County, in 1802. Ten years later, in 1812, Zadock, Jr., made his first great killing in business when he sold the U.S. Navy 100,000 ash-wood oars hewn from the otherwise useless forests that dominated his home region’s southern and westward slopes. Twelve years after that, in 1824–having sold his interest in the family business to his two brothers for $14,000–the thirty-four-year-old Zadock started his own tanning establishment on the banks of the Schoharie Creek.
Pratt’s tannery eventually grew to become one of the largest operations of its kind. In peak years, it produced as many as 60,000 sides of sole leather, these processed by nearly one hundred Pratt employees. (According to Pratt’s precise record-keeping, his tannery turned out a total of more than 1.5 million sides over twenty years. Writing in the early 1850s, a few years before his association with Jay Gould, Pratt calculated that–up to that point, at Prattsville and other tanning centers in which he had an interest–he had cleared 10,000 forest acres, used 250,000 cords of hemlock bark, employed 40,000 men, and formed more than thirty partnerships, all of which he “closed . . . in peace.”5) The operation at Prattsville thrived until 1845, at which point the master finally closed his shop, with the ten square miles surrounding the town thoroughly stripped of hemlock, and similar forests within forty to fifty miles having also been plundered.
Like all tanners, Pratt continually sought new hemlockrich areas in which to invest. But unlike his peers–who routinely abandoned their settlements as ghost towns once the hemlocks ran out–Pratt sought to restore and reuse exploited lands. (Reportedly, when he first made his investment in the region of the Schoharie, Pratt assured those who already lived there that he intended to “live with them, not on them,” thus making a long-term commitment to the place as a citizen.6) As Pratt brought down the forests of the Schoharie Valley, he converted the fertile ground into prime agricultural space and, in anticipation of closing his tannery, took care to finance farms for his workers. Pratt also encouraged and financed other businesses (such as a blacksmith shop, a chair- and cabinet-making workshop, a hat-making workshop, machine shops, foundries, and small factories) to support and serve the posttanning community he envisioned for the future.
As well, Pratt built more than one hundred homes (each ornamented with pilasters and sunburst gable windows), endowed the Prattsville Academy, saw to the construction of three churches (Dutch Reformed, Methodist, and Episcopal), planted 1,000 shade trees (hickory, maple, and elm), installed ornamental ponds in the village’s downtown, and put down bluestone sidewalks. He himself wound up owning a 365-acre dairy farm on the banks of the Schoharie. A social visionary who sincerely cared for the welfare of those he employed, Pratt created one of New York State’s first great planned communities: a picturesque, idyllic garden of a place that in his own time was praised by the press as “the gem of the Catskills.”7
Once he closed his tannery, where he had been an active on-site manager six days a week for two decades, Pratt devoted some of his newly found free time to politics. After stints as justice of the peace and town supervisor, he served two terms in Congress and was offered the Democratic nomination for New York governor in 1848, an honor he declined. While he dabbled in public office, Pratt also continued his long association with the local militia, in which he eventually rose to the rank of colonel. (In 1825 he had commanded the brigade that escorted LaFayette into the town of Catskill during the French general’s triumphant tour of the United States.) Possessed by a great love of military history, Pratt was known to spend long Sunday afternoons reenacting famous battles with his men: Pratt always in command, playing Napoleon or some other likely general.
Though Pratt enjoyed great fortune in his professional life, his private life was laced with tragedy. He buried three wives–the sisters Beda and Esther Dickerman, followed by Abigail Watson–in just eighteen years. Abigail lasted long enough to give the colonel three children, one of whom died in infancy. Abigail’s sister Mary, whom the colonel married in 1838, raised Pratt’s surviving son and daughter, apparently moving deftly from the role of aunt to that of mother. After Mary also died in 1868, the elderly Pratt would marry yet again. In 1869, two years before his death, the seventy-nine-year-old took as his wife Suzi Grimm, a twenty-eight-year-old secretary from the offices of the Manhattan trade journal Shoe and Leather Reporter.
Like many people of great accomplishment, Pratt was somewhat
eccentric and also possessed of a powerful ego. When he invested $50,000 and opened his own bank in 1843, all of the notes bore his likeness. That same year, when an itinerant stonecutter passed through town, Pratt employed the man to carve his profile on a massive rock outcropping five hundred feet above the rich valley of the Schoharie. Once this was done, the artist went on to chisel various emblems from Pratt’s life: his favorite horse, a hemlock tree, the tannery, the Pratt coat-of-arms, and so forth. Pratt even set him to carving a regal tomb that went unfinished once water started to leach into the chamber. (Many years after the initial work, Pratt funded more carving at the site to memorialize his son, George Watson Pratt, a Union Army officer who died one week after being wounded at the second battle of Manassas, also known as Bull Run.) “Pratt’s Rocks” remain to this day, perched high above Route 23 on the eastern approach to the village Pratt loved so much.
Jay Gould first encountered Pratt–forty-six years his senior–during the summer of 1852 while Gould was working on the map of Ulster County, where Pratt and one of his many partners controlled the tanning outpost of Samsonville. In January 1853, once the Ulster project was done, Gould wrote Pratt–whom he was obviously eager to cultivate–with a proposal that the colonel commission a similar map of Greene County. Pratt declined to fund that project but pronounced himself impressed by Gould and promised he would keep him in mind for future tasks.
Writing in the 1890s, J. W. McLaury recalled the chilly, rain-soaked spring morning in 1856 when “an old gray haired man, tall, erect, booted and spurred, his boot tops extending above his knees, mud bespattered over his clothing from head to feet,” arrived in Roxbury and loudly asked for Gould. “He introduced himself as Col. Pratt [and said he] wanted Mr. Gould to make a survey of his farm.”8 In the coming weeks Gould not only surveyed Pratt’s acres at Prattsville but also attempted to make himself useful in other ways, at one point proposing to write the tanner’s biography. What Pratt thought of this idea is not on record, but the book never emerged.
Dark Genius of Wall Street Page 6