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.
CHAPTER 4
RAILROAD WARRIOR
WHILE HIS FRIENDS IN LEAVENWORTH WERE CRUSHED TO get only a branch line, Fred saw the new train solely as a business opportunity. He immediately changed the name of his business at the Planters’ House to “Central Railroad Ticket Office” and advertised through tickets to New York, Boston, Washington, and “all points in the United States and Canada.” He also began training a young man to replace him day to day in Leavenworth, so he could start using the train to broaden his business horizons. He arranged with his bosses at the Joy System to sell passenger tickets in Kansas for all their railroads, including the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, which was the dominant line out of Chicago. And he informed the publisher of the Leavenworth Conservative that he could now solicit ads for the paper all over the state—and anywhere else the trains could take him.
Fred Harvey turned himself into a railroad warrior. He began traveling relentlessly not only in Kansas but in Missouri, up to Chicago, and eventually all the way east to New York. He sold the West to Easterners and the East to Westerners, along the way making numerous friends and business associates—which, to him, were pretty much the same thing. Soon he hired a second young man to work with him on the road so they could canvass cities more quickly and efficiently, making collections on newspaper ads and dropping off ticket vouchers. Then, as business improved, he hired even more traveling employees so he could be represented in more places. The most dependable of this group was a young man from Leavenworth named William “Guy” Potter, who took his mentorship with Fred very seriously.
Within a year, Fred was so successful as a traveling salesman that his clients started giving him healthy advances just to keep their part of his well-divided attention. In 1868, his bosses at the Leavenworth Conservative offered him a contract paying an annual advance of $3,000 ($47,000)—about fifteen times the average per capita income in the nation.
It was a good deal, but Fred had been learning a lot about negotiating during his travels. He was bolder now, more self-assured, and he understood how American businessmen thought. He had learned, as one friend put it, “how to ask for things … You should have seen Fred when he was building up. He used to ask for everything! He asked and kept on asking and finally got it.” But he asked in such a way that all parties involved felt they were getting more.
Even as he was shaking hands with the publishers of the Conservative to clinch the deal, he was—according to a handwritten account of the meeting in his datebook—already angling for something else.
“Once I’ve sold an ad for you,” he asked, “would you mind terribly if I solicited for another paper in another town, one that doesn’t compete with the Conservative?”
The clients thought about this for a moment. It was a request both audacious and completely logical, as long as Fred could be trusted.
“Well,” said one of the owners, “I guess as long as you don’t neglect us. I just want to do what’s right.”
So, with another handshake, he was also free to sell ads for the St. Joseph Herald, the Kansas Farmer, and several other publications. And none of them ever regretted it. “Fred Harvey was the best newspaper solicitor I ever knew,” said his boss at the Conservative.
Fred went on to develop similarly complex and fruitful arrangements with the railroads and the adjoining packet boat lines. Several of them put him on monthly retainer because he brought in so much business. The deals weren’t all as big as the one with the Conservative—the Missouri River Packet Line, for example, paid him only $40 ($625) a month—but it all added up.
Fred kept track of all his deals in a bulging brown leather wallet with his name embossed in gold on its well-worn front. Inside was a datebook, a sleeve for his cash, and, tucked into the innermost flap, a hidden treasure to remind him that there was more to life than business. It was a small card he and Sally had printed up for their son’s first Christmas season. It showed two cherubs kissing beneath a full moon and, below them, the words “Happy New Year, Fordie Harvey.”
The datebooks he carried had a standard format, a full page for each day, but Fred would use the same book for several years. Sometimes he would write short descriptions of his business day, including reports on the weather and how hard he had worked. (“Still in Pittsburgh, worked very faithfully this morning in trying to get ads, but could do nothing. Weather very mild.”) He also noted whenever he got a letter from Sally, and whenever he gave her money (in ledger form, “Wife, $5” or “Mrs. Harvey, $10”). But often he communicated with himself by jotting down lists—not every day, but rather when the listing spirit moved him. He crammed a month’s worth of household expenses—pew rental fees, payments to the “servant” and the “washerwoman”—onto one page. He made lists of newspaper ads and train tickets for which he was owed a commission, business expenses to submit to his assorted employers, and moneys owed to his assorted employees. He kept track of the loans he made—including the money he gave to his perennially broke sister and brother-in-law in St. Louis, which he knew he would probably never see again. And he kept tabs on his investments.
With so much free time spent on the trains and in hotels, Fred read voraciously. He devoured newspapers, magazines, and books, “not for mere pleasure or pastime,” according to one admirer, “but for the acquisition of profound knowledge.” But he also read with an eye toward finding new business opportunities.
He wanted every penny he made to work for him. He invested in real estate and made private mortgage loans. He even made one foray back into the restaurant business—a silent partnership in the American House in Ellsworth, Kansas, a resilient young cattle town just reached by the railroads. The popular hotel and restaurant was right on Ellsworth’s “Snake Row,” the raucous part of town frequented by Wild Bill Hickok.
In the summer of 1868—when Fred’s investment in the American House peaked—Hickok was running for sheriff of Ellsworth, hoping to cash in on his newfound fame. An article about Hickok in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine caused outrage in the West because of its wild claims about the many hundreds of men he had gunned down. In response to the furor, he gave another interview to set the record straight, telling the St. Louis Democrat he had killed “considerably over hundred men,” but never “without good cause.” The stories became the cornerstone of Hickok’s legend, and one of the earliest examples of national media hype about cowboys. Yet despite all his celebrity, Wild Bill lost the election, and soon moved on from Ellsworth. As did Fred, once his investment of $4,485.22 ($70,100) was repaid with interest.
FRED’S STAMINA AS a railroad warrior was all the more astonishing given his uncertain health. While he was energetic and driven, his bout with typhoid as a young man had left him less than robust, and he had been excused from the draft during the Civil War because of “physical disability.” He suffered from a variety of chronic ailments of the gut and head, referring to his main problems as “neuralgia” and “headaches,” although it was never clear whether he was talking about migraines, or a form of nerve pain in his body or extremities, or what today would be called clinical depression. Perhaps all three.
He suffered frequently from insomnia during
his train rides—although he was probably not alone in that. The trains were extremely noisy, but the engines threw off so much smoke and soot, and the moving cars kicked up so much dust that passengers were left with a no-win choice: Either leave the windows open and deal with the smoke and dirt or close them and survive the stultifying heat and stale air. Still, Fred fell ill more often than others, and would lose entire days of work lying in a hotel bed waiting for his misery to lift. And, being Fred, he kept a running tally of his sick days in his datebook. (“Started out this morning but had to return in consequence of being sick,” he wrote one day in Cincinnati, “have been in bed all day sufferd [sic] very much with my head. Weather mild.”)
He tried all sorts of remedies—including many of the patent medicines for which he sold newspaper ads—and he was forever jotting down recommendations for new cures. His datebooks were peppered with notations to try a “linimint” made with “equal parts spirits of camphar, oil of peppermint, fluid extract of bella donna,” or “podophylium 60 g, letandrin Sanguinnat … and pure caryenne, each 30 grams,” which would be made into “60 pieces with a little soft extract of mandrake or dandelion.” He also consulted numerous doctors and near-doctors, including a “spiritualist” in Chicago.
But nothing provided long-term relief, and he came to see his toils as his treatment as well as his torment. “His nervous disposition made it almost imperative to load himself with work,” one family member observed. “Yet this very excess of work … made him more nervous, setting up a vicious cycle.”
Actually, there was a new medical theory concerning Fred’s condition. Dr. George M. Beard, a prominent young New York physician, published a study in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in April 1869 about a revolutionary new diagnosis. He called it “neurasthenia” or “nervous exhaustion,” and said its victims experienced not only fatigue, headaches, and neuralgia but anxiety, depression, and impotence. His theory was that neurasthenia was caused by depletion of the energy reserves of the central nervous system in the brain or the spinal cord, comparable to the way anemia depleted blood. Neurasthenia, he claimed, caused “more distress and annoyance than all forms of fever combined, excepting perhaps those of a malarious origin. Fevers kill, it is true, while these neuroses do not. But to many, death is by no means the most disagreeable of the many symptoms of disease.”
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