In his travels across Kansas, Fred saw people raking up piles of live grasshoppers, or using plows or sheets of metal smeared with tar as makeshift “hopper dozers,” or mixing the insects into the cement for the foundations of new buildings—and all anyone could do was laugh at the absurdity of the situation. While the plague was devastating, the humor helped them get through. Kansans developed an even greater resolve to overcome the nation’s economic woes and their own agricultural nightmares, reassuring one another that 1875 would be a great year, a landmark year.
CHAPTER 6
SAVAGE AND UNNATURAL FEEDING
AS FRED HARVEY’S FORTIETH BIRTHDAY APPROACHED, HE WAS faced with the realization that while he was by any measure a successful man, he still had a burning desire to achieve on a grander scale. It couldn’t really be called a midlife crisis, because most American men didn’t live past their early fifties. Technically, Fred had already reinvented himself for midlife back when he married Sally and started selling for the railroads. But he yearned for a third act. For inspiration, he would re-read a list of “Maxims for Business Men” he had clipped from the newspaper and pasted on the front of his datebook:
NEVER FAIL TO TAKE A RECEIPT FOR MONEY, AND KEEP COPIES OF YOUR LETTERS.
DO YOUR BUSINESS PROMPTLY AND BORE NOT A BUSINESS MAN WITH LONG VISITS.
LAW IS A TRADE IN WHICH LAWYERS EAT THE OYSTERS AND LEAVE THE CLIENTS THE SHELLS.
CAUTION IS THE FATHER OF SECURITY.
HE WHO PAYS BEFORE-HAND IS SERVED BEHIND-HAND.
IF YOU WOULD KNOW THE VALUE OF A DOLLAR, TRY TO BORROW ONE.
NO MAN CAN BE SUCCESSFUL WHO NEGLECTS HIS BUSINESS.
DO NOT WASTE TIME IN USELESS REGRETS OVER LOSSES.
SYSTEMATIZE YOUR BUSINESS AND KEEP AN EYE ON LITTLE EXPENSES SMALL LEAKS SINK GREAT SHIPS.
AN HOUR OF TRIUMPH COMES AT LAST TO THOSE WHO WATCH AND WAIT.
WORD BY WORD WEBSTER’S BIG DICTIONARY WAS MADE.
SPEAK WELL OF YOUR FRIENDS—OF YOUR ENEMIES SAY NOTHING.
IF YOU POST YOUR SERVANTS ON YOUR AFFAIRS THEY WILL ONE DAY REND YOU.
BE SILENT WHEN A FOOL TALKS.
GIVE A FOOLISH TALKER ROPE ENOUGH AND HE WILL HANG HIMSELF.
ROTHSCHILD, THE FOUNDER OF THE WORLD-RENOWNED HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD & CO., ASCRIBED HIS SUCCESS TO THE FOLLOWING:
NEVER HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH AN UNLUCKY MAN.
BE CAUTIOUS AND BOLD.
MAKE A BARGAIN AT ONCE.
Still, while the Rothschilds, the emperors of European investment banking, certainly represented an international standard of financial achievement, the businessmen Fred envied were closer to home. And nobody loomed larger than Pullman.
George Mortimer Pullman was just a few years older than Fred and had come to the Midwest to seek his fortune around the same time. But he was now a millionaire many times over, his name synonymous throughout the world with luxury train cars for sleeping and dining.
Pullman had grown up in Albion, New York, and after showing little aptitude for cabinetmaking, his father’s trade, he went into the family’s side business—which was moving buildings. Literally. He moved some buildings to help with the expansion of the Erie Canal and then relocated to Chicago, where his technique made him famous. In the late 1850s, it was becoming clear that much of Chicago was slowly sinking, the muddy ground along Lake Michigan turning into not-very-quicksand. Most buildings needed new foundations, which meant either moving them somewhere else on massive rollers or just lifting them temporarily so new structures could be created underneath.
The Matteson House hotel was the largest building anyone had ever tried to lift in Chicago, measuring some eighty by ninety feet, as well as the most prominent, sitting at the corner of Dearborn and Randolph, arguably the most valuable block in town. Since Pullman knew the owner, he was able to beat out local contractors for the job. And in late March 1859, the city watched in amazement as the twenty-eight-year-old Pullman, with his chubby cheeks and manicured beard, orchestrated a massive industrial ballet. He had eight hundred screw jacks placed under the building and then had eight hundred workmen crank the jacks, simultaneously, a quarter turn at a time, on his whistle commands.
This performance lasted for ten days. At the end of the process, the building was five feet off the ground—which allowed new piers and a basement to be built beneath it—and George Pullman was in business. Over the next year, his company helped lift an entire Chicago block of buildings (the job so delighting onlookers that shops reported dramatic increases in sales while their premises were elevated) and eventually was hired to lift the massive Tremont Hotel from its one-acre plot.
But, while raising buildings was a good business, Pullman had another enterprise in mind. Just before moving to Chicago, he had taken a train from Buffalo south along Lake Erie to Westfield, New York, to visit family and got a chance to experience the latest innovation in railroad service: the first generation of sleeping cars. He paid $1 ($26.98) for a bed and discovered that the cars were like rolling tombs—the berths were stacked three high, and when the unventilated cars were heated with stoves, “the atmosphere was something dreadful,” he recalled.
During the trip, which was mercifully only sixty miles, he lay awake in his cramped upper berth dreaming up ways to build a better sleeper. He struck up a friendship with an executive at the Chicago, Alton & St. Louis Railroad who allowed him to experiment on some old cars. The first one debuted in 1859 and was remarkable primarily for its innovative top bunk, which could fold flat up against the ceiling when not in use. He continued to tinker with a dozen more retrofitted cars over the next several years—interrupted by a foray to Colorado to try his hand at gold mining—and after the Civil War he unveiled his first sleeper built from scratch.
The Pioneer—actually, the “Pullman Pioneer” because his name became part of the sales pitch—was longer and higher than any previous train car, and was so luxuriously appointed that it was as if he had taken a fine Victorian mansion and put it on cushioned wheels. The finishes on the wood-grain interiors were so lustrous that trainmen started referring to private cars, and the fancy people who rode in them, as “varnish.”
The Pullman sleeper was an immediate sensation, not only because of its opulence—the murals on the ceilings, the chandeliers, the marble countertops in the bathrooms, and the exotic carpeting (on which no man would consider spitting)—but also because of its technical wizardry. There were various patentable contraptions that allowed the berths to be easily transformed into seating or storage space during daylight hours, and the ventilation system let in fresh air while keeping out the dust and cinders.
By the time Pullman decided to incorporate his company in 1867—a relatively new way of setting up a business, already popular with the industrialists whose ranks he was joining—he had built four dozen of these sleepers and had launched his first “hotel cars,” which had drawing rooms and round-the-clock full-service kitchens. But the more luxurious cars he built, the more he realized there was a huge problem with his enterprise.
The railroads did a poor job taking care of passengers. They were good at laying and maintaining track, buying and maintaining cars, handling boxcars. But there was a reason that trainmen often joked “freight doesn’t complain.” Passenger service was terrible, and railroads did not have the kind of staff needed to take care of wealthier customers. Train conductors did not make good butlers or waiters. So Pullman decided to staff all his own cars and not use railroad employees at all; the extra fare Pullman passengers paid went to him, not to the railroads. His cars were like rolling hotels—attached to the trains, yet separated from them.
Pullman also decided that his new staff should be exclusively black. His porters quickly became the first major workforce of free black men in the country, eventually forming the foundation for America’s black middle class. This did not necessarily reflect any particular progressiveness on Pullman’s part. Some historians believe he chose to hire black men primarily because they
were cheap and available—and because he and his white customers didn’t regard them as full-fledged human beings. Since porters might be around white women disrobing or white men stumbling drunk back into their berths—perhaps from someone else’s—Pullman wanted an employee, according to one scholar, “whom passengers could regard as part of the furnishings, rather than a mortal with likes, dislikes, and a memory.” He hired only the most dark-skinned men and, especially in the early years, left them largely nameless—they were often referred to as “boy” or generically as “George.” That said, this was still one of the best and best-paying jobs for black men in the country. So the opportunity to be a “George” was highly coveted, and the Pullman service on the trains was uniformly excellent.
As his business grew, Pullman went into partnership with the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, which assured him greater access to capital and the two biggest contracts in the world of trains: He was hired to build all the sleepers not only for the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the dominant lines in the East, but also for the Union Pacific’s new transcontinental railway. By the 1870s, the Pullman name had become synonymous with traveling in comfort.
YET THERE WAS ONE area of the passenger service business that eluded Pullman, and that was food. Pullman built fine dining cars—the first one was called The Delmonico, with menus created by chefs from that renowned restaurant—but they weren’t nearly as successful as his sleepers. It wasn’t his fault. At that time there were still no vestibules allowing passengers to walk between cars, so one couldn’t go to the dining car while the train was moving or leave it after eating until the train stopped at a station. While moderately popular on shorter eastern rides, dining cars were considered impractical for longer-distance trains.
This meant that even the most “varnished” of Pullman’s passengers still had to rely on the restaurants at train stations—which were, by and large, dreadful. The New York Times had recently bemoaned the situation:
If there is any word in the English language more shamefully misused than another, it is the word “refreshment” as applied to the hurry scurry of eating and drinking at railroad stations … Directors of railroads appear to have an idea that travelers are destitute of stomach; that eating and drinking are not at all necessary to human beings bound on long journeys, and that nothing more is required than to put them through their misery in as brief a time as possible. It is expected that three or four hundred men, women and children … can be whirled half a day over a dusty road, with hot cinders flying in their faces; and then when they approach a station and are dying of weariness, hunger and thirst, longing for an opportunity to bathe their faces at least before partaking of their much-needed refreshments, that they shall rush helter-skelter into a dismal long room and dispatch a supper, breakfast or dinner in fifteen minutes. The consequences of such savage and unnatural feeding are not reported by telegraph as railroad disasters, but if a faithful account were given of them, we are afraid they would be found much more serious than any that are caused by the smashing of cars, or the breaking down of bridges.
Fred Harvey knew this all too well. In his years riding the rails, he had probably eaten more stomach-turning depot meals and stayed in more filthy depot hotel rooms than anyone else in America. He knew there was a reason the food was called “grub” and the hotels “fleabags.” It was a special kind of hell to have tasted the best of the restaurant and hotel business from both sides of the counter—as a manager and a patron—only to be trapped in the hospitality-challenged American West before the invention of effective antacids.
It wasn’t that the rest of the country was eating all that much better. “American cookery is worse than that of any other civilized nation,” declared Chef Pierre Blot, the Julia Child of post–Civil War America, who ran a popular French cooking academy in Manhattan and was beloved for his best-seller What to Eat, and How to Cook It. Ironically, in a nation that was becoming the world’s largest producer of food, few cooks had access to fresh ingredients or the slightest idea what to do with them. West of the Mississippi, the food was particularly distressing. Almost everything was prepared with canned or preserved ingredients, and given the scarcity of even rudimentary refrigeration, eating fresh meat could be life threatening.
But the worst food in town was always served at the railroad “eating houses”—which were spaced roughly every one hundred miles, since that was how long a locomotive could go before it needed a stop for fuel and water. Depot eating houses not only had lousy food and skimpy portions but also didn’t give passengers any time to eat. Food preparation was often deliberately dragged out so diners wouldn’t be able to finish—or sometimes even start—their meals before the half-hour meal break was over. As soon as the caboose was out of sight, restaurant employees would scrape the uneaten food back into containers to be served to their next unsuspecting victims. For those who couldn’t afford one of these horrid sitdown meals, there were vendors who worked the platforms or came through the cars selling overpriced, skimpy sandwiches and wizened fruit from handcarts. They were called “butchers.”
While the first generation of travelers out west had put up with these culinary indignities, Fred Harvey believed that the next wave would not and should not. He suspected there was money to be made if he could just figure out a way to dependably deliver palatable food at fair prices without any bait and switch. The railroads certainly weren’t going to solve the problem. Even though ridership was increasing and the economy was recovering from the 1873 depression, the rail companies were still too strapped for cash to invest in food service. The railroads had made George Pullman rich with sleeping cars and dining cars that they could easily have built and managed themselves. It was only a matter of time before somebody got “railroad rich” by running good depot restaurants.
In fact, Fred was certain it was possible to serve the finest cuisine imaginable along the train tracks in the middle of nowhere. In the early days of eastern railroading, there was a legendary eating house along the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Logan House hotel in Altoona. As a young traveling salesman, Fred had often eaten at this homey Delmonico’s of trackside dining.
And he also had seen the photos, read the menus, and heard the stories about the most ambitious trackside meals ever served in America. They were the highlight of “The Grand Excursion,” the greatest promotional junket and gustatory extravaganza in the young nation’s history.
Back in the fall of 1866, when the Union Pacific tracks from Omaha reached the 100th Meridian in south-central Nebraska—a contractual milestone that allowed the railroad to exercise the rest of its land grant and keep building to connect with the California Pacific—everybody who mattered in the government and the train industry was invited to celebrate at the newly established end of the line. More than two hundred dignitaries, elected officials, and captains of industry—along with their wives and families—were brought by train to the Missouri River. Back then it was still unbridged, so they traveled by packet boats up to Omaha, where they met the new trains.
Fred heard from his old pal Captain Rufus Ford—whose packet boat the Colorado was one of many hired for excursionists—that the level of wining and dining on the river was unprecedented. The onboard dinner menu offered over sixty different entrées, including braised bear in port wine sauce, baked pike in oyster sauce, two kinds of tongue (beef and buffalo), two kinds of antelope (steaks with a sherry wine sauce, or larded with sauce bigarade), stuffed calf’s head, filet of beef with Madeira sauce, rabbit potpie, quails on toast, and chicken salad “young America style.” There were also more than two dozen desserts, including English plum pudding with white sauce, meringues with peaches, vanilla bonbons, cranberry tartlets, ladyfingers, apple pie, and pyramids of macaroons. But while the menus on the boat were sybaritic, it was the food service and entertainment during the excursionists’ ride through the Nebraska wilderness that made hospitality history.
In the middle of a prairie—where most rail men would have been happy
sleeping under the stars and dining on a fresh buffalo steak seared in the engine’s hot firebox—the Union Pacific set up a lavish tent city, with hay mattresses and buffalo robes for the guests, and imported a feast that would be expected only in the best hotels of New York, Chicago, London, and Paris. For after-dinner entertainment, the railroad hired one hundred Pawnee Indians to perform their colorful war dance. In reality, it was all rather tame, one observer said, noting the visitors were “only too glad to know that the Indians were entirely friendly, and catering only for the amusement of the company, instead of being enemies, dancing and gloating over their scalpless bodies.”
Yet the next morning, as they awoke to the terrifying sound of Pawnees on the warpath raiding the camp, the excursionists were no longer so sure of their safety. When the guests began shrieking more loudly than the Indians, their hosts let them in on the joke. Those marauding Pawnees were also on the Union Pacific payroll, hired to fake an attack.
An especially sumptuous breakfast was served straightaway.
Then, as the sated excursionists headed back toward Omaha, they were given one last spectacular scene to remember. A prairie fire, with flames extending in an unbroken line for fifteen miles, had been set deliberately—just for their entertainment.
Historians would later note that the hugely popular Wild West Show of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a Leavenworth native, was basically a traveling version of the theatrics staged by the Union Pacific for the Grand Excursion. In fact, some of those same Pawnee Indians, unable to return to their tribal ways after the trains came through, ended up working in Buffalo Bill’s show.
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