When the Civil War started, the H&SJ was so important that Ulysses S. Grant’s first assignment for the Union army was to guard it. But in September 1861, it was attacked; the Platte River Bridge that the H&SJ crossed just before reaching St. Joseph was sabotaged, and an entire train, with over one hundred passengers aboard, flipped over and fell thirty feet into the water, killing seventeen and injuring dozens of others.
In such a challenging business environment, Captain Ford needed all the help he could get to keep his packet boats running on time. And he knew his friend Fred needed a job. So they made a deal, and the young Harvey family moved to the tiny postal boomtown of St. Joseph: population 8,932, one-eighteenth the size of St. Louis.
Fred quickly learned about life on the silty, temperamental Missouri River, “the Big Muddy,” which was prone to freezing every winter, indiscriminately flooding or drying out every summer, and generally presenting endless challenges to Captain Ford’s packet boats. There were passengers to feed and entertain—many of the boats had impressive restaurants and saloons—as well as cargo to care for and schedules to meet. It was a demanding and intriguing business, which showed Fred a world—worlds, actually—he had never seen living in two of America’s largest cities. The Missouri River was the border between the fast, new, hulking trains, billowing with smoke and soot, and the squeaky stagecoaches and horse-drawn carriages—and the Missouri packet boats shuttled back and forth between the future and the past. Messages came into the Western Union station in St. Joseph using the fastest technology known to man, and left in the satchel of a Pony Express rider on horseback.
Life along the Missouri was full of such fascinating, dizzying extremes. There were also plenty of risks, including disease, and soon Fred became gravely ill, diagnosed with typhoid fever. There were no effective treatments available, and he came close to death. His recovery was slow, and he was lucky to be working for a friend, Ford, who was so patient. Yet while he survived the worst of the typhoid, it wreaked permanent havoc on his body, especially his gastrointestinal system. In a photo taken of him after his recovery, he appeared to be a different man—alarmingly gaunt, even a bit haunted, with chin whiskers dangling beneath his flat-lined, expressionless mouth. His wavy hair was combed forward on the sides and swept up in the front, in an attempt to obscure his receding hairline and widow’s peak. He looked as if he had been riding packet boats on the River Styx.
By the time Fred finally returned to work, life in the fast-paced world of St. Joe had changed dramatically. The Pony Express had shuttered its stables after only eighteen months in business. Its demise was blamed on Western Union’s historic new telegraph line from St. Joseph all the way to Sacramento; it was completed on October 24, 1861, enabling telegrams to be sent instantaneously from sea to shining sea. But in fact the Pony Express had been doomed for some time. It wasn’t a business so much as a publicity stunt, meant to help its financially strapped parent company—the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express—snare from another firm the $1 million ($25.2 million) government contract to handle all the stagecoach mail delivery to the West. While the Pony Express lost money, as expected, the service attracted huge national press attention, and papers regularly published news stories “from California by the Pony Express.” But after the government decided not to fire its current carrier, the Butterfield Overland Mail Company, the challengers were grateful for any excuse to put the Pony Express out to pasture.
Regardless of the new telegraph capabilities, letters were still the main form of communication, so the operation of the St. Joseph post office remained vital to war-torn America. As Fred’s strength returned, he went back to work for Captain Ford and even took on a second job—because Ann was pregnant again and they would need extra money. He was hired as a government postal clerk in February 1862, and soon found himself involved in an experiment that proved much more important than the Pony Express: the nation’s first traveling post office.
Since the United States began postal service in 1776, mail was allowed to be sorted only when it reached a local post office. But Fred’s boss, assistant postmaster William Davis, convinced his government bosses to let him test a specially equipped train car on which mail could be sorted en route. Fred was assigned to the project, and the new mail cars were first tested in late July 1862 along the Hannibal & St. Joseph.
The railroad had grown even more “Horrible & Slow-Jolting” as the war limited supplies and materials for proper repairs. There were no more of those breakneck runs from the early days of the Pony Express, which one roadmaster fondly recalled because “it simply rained hogs. The engine would hit them, knock them in the air and pass them before they struck the ground.” But the H&SJ could still be a pretty wild ride. Fred and his fellow mobile mail clerk, John Patten, were glad their boss had thought to have iron rods attached to the ceiling of the car so they could hang on.
Once the kinks were worked out, though, the postal-sorting car was a huge success, dramatically reducing the time it took to get mail to California. It became the prototype for the national Railway Mail Service, a model that prevailed for over a century.
With his postal service job and his ongoing work with the packet line, Fred was developing a sense of safety and security again. Even though the Civil War was raging, there had been no violence in St. Joe since the tragic Platte River Bridge sabotage, and the conflict’s main effect on life in St. Joseph was to provide steady business.
He and Ann could feel cautiously optimistic about bringing another child into the world. Charles Harvey, named for Fred’s father, was born on October 6, 1862. Like his older brother, he had blue eyes and tufts of curly blond hair. He was apparently a healthy baby, but there were complications with the delivery, and Ann became gravely ill.
At that time, almost one percent of all births in America resulted in the death of the mother, mostly from puerperal fever or unstoppable bleeding. In the fall of 1862, Ann Harvey became part of those tragic statistics. She was only twenty-seven years old.
WITH AN INFANT and a twenty-month-old to care for, Fred had little time to mourn. He had learned some things over the years as a businessman—important jobs, he knew, should not remain unfilled. So, despite his grief, after being widowed for only four months, he married again.
His new wife was Barbara Sarah “Sally” Mattas, the eldest child of a large working-class family recently emigrated from the town of Pilsen in Czechoslovakia, first to Montreal and then to St. Louis. Just nineteen years old—eight years Fred’s junior—Sally Mattas was a lively, diminutive woman with big, pinchable cheeks, kind gray eyes, and a sturdy build. She had been working in St. Louis as a seamstress, spending much of her time helping her mother take care of a brood of five young children.
Little is known about how Fred met Sally, because he purposely fictionalized their past for the sake of his children. He even went so far as to write a fake wedding date in the Harvey family Bible to make it appear that Sally had been Eddie and Charley’s mother. In fact, the couple actually married on February 20, 1863, at the St. Joseph courthouse. According to their marriage record—only recently discovered, in a weathered, handwritten St. Joseph city ledger—ex officio Justice of the Peace M. L. Harrington officiated at the ceremony.
Fred first got to know Sally in St. Louis, where she may have been a waitress in his restaurant. But how they came to be married in St. Joseph is unclear. Perhaps he had been fond of her in St. Louis and returned for her after being widowed; or she may originally have been hired to help Fred with his children and saw her role in his life mushroom over those challenging months. Either way, there was some economic aspect to their union, because Sally’s family was in desperate straits. Her father, Martin, a day laborer, had volunteered at the age of forty-one to fight for the Union with the Second Regiment of the Missouri Infantry. He served for a year and was discharged with a battle-related disability and pneumonia—and he was on his deathbed when Sally married Fred.
It was hardly an idea
l way for a young couple to start their life together: more like a desperate business deal than a love connection. Still, it was a good deal. And within the confines of those staid Victorian times, Fred and Sally developed a certain affection for each other. Somehow, they made it work.
In the great tradition of celebrated Americans who started out in the mail room, Fred was able to parlay his time aboard the H&SJ postal-sorting car into a position with the railroad itself: as a sales agent for passenger tickets. It was a job better suited to his talents, and to the contacts he had already made working with Captain Ford’s packet boat business. Even with the war raging in the East, the H&SJ was doing a small but steady business carrying passengers on trains that, for the most part, existed to transport the mail and other freight.
Fred sold passenger tickets for the H&SJ from St. Joseph for over a year, developing a reputation that caused railroad executives to take notice. In early 1865, he was offered a better job as a sales agent for the North Missouri Rail Road, a sister line of the H&SJ. But the North Missouri insisted he relocate. In anticipation of the war ending, everyone realized that St. Joseph, Missouri, wasn’t going to be the last stop on the railroad too much longer. The North Missouri wanted Fred to work from Leavenworth, the first city on the Kansas side of the river, and the one most likely to be the first connected to the East when the war was over and railroad construction began again.
Leavenworth was only fifty miles downriver from St. Joseph. But in many ways it seemed like another country.
CHAPTER 3
A GENTLEMAN AMONG THE BLEEDING KANSANS
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.
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