William Barstow Strong was an ambitious, dynamic railroad man with piercing eyes and a beard only a beekeeper could love. Every strand of hair emanating from his face had been left to grow straight down until it reached his collarbone. It was a bold statement even during the bad-hair years of the late nineteenth century, but he was a bold man. Fred had been friendly with him for years, since Strong had worked at several of the lines on the Joy System. Two years younger than Fred, Strong had grown up in Vermont and Wisconsin, got started in railroads as a station agent and telegraph operator, and was considered one of the most underappreciated executive talents in the business. Now he was getting his big break.
By hiring Strong, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe signaled that it would no longer be content as just another successful regional line. Its leaders hoped to extend the railroad—which currently ran from Kansas only as far as La Junta, Colorado—not just to Santa Fe, New Mexico, but all the way to the Pacific, competing with the other big transcontinental players. But unlike those players, who had gone from business heroes to “robber barons” after the 1873 market crash, the Santa Fe planned to be the white hat in western railroading, building without scandals or government subsidies of any kind. They would be the good guys, the independent railroad, and they thought Strong was the man who could take them to that next level.
He immediately laid out plans to aggressively expand the AT&SF west, through Colorado to the Pacific. And within days of his arrival at the Santa Fe’s main operations office in Topeka, Fred Harvey was there negotiating with the railroad to take over more eating houses in Kansas—starting with Florence, the most important restaurant and hotel on the line.
Florence was the primary meal stop for AT&SF passengers in eastern Kansas and also attracted sportsmen, since the hunting and fishing nearby were spectacular. Taking over the operation there was complicated because the Santa Fe, as an experiment, had actually sold its eating house and depot hotel to a local entrepreneur, rather than leasing it. The railroad had the right to replace him but only if he was bought out. And at the moment, the Santa Fe was cash poor, because every dollar was being spent on new tracks in Colorado.
Strong told Fred he could run the Florence eating house and hotel, but only if he laid out all the money himself to purchase the building and its contents—the price was $5,275 ($117,448), more than half of his life savings. The Santa Fe promised to buy the Florence building back, and to let him manage it rent free like Topeka, when conditions improved. It was a huge gamble for Fred, who was accustomed to seeking leveraged comfort in more conservative investments. But William Strong had a way of daring associates to be great.
STRONG LED BY FEARLESS EXAMPLE. He stunned the railroad world by ambushing the Raton Pass—which was considered by many to be the single most important and strategic mountain pass in the West. It was, at the time, clearly the best way to get a train from Colorado—where the Rockies made construction a nightmare—to California. And there was only room for one company to build train tracks over the pass, which had always been the Santa Fe Trail route through the treacherous Sangre de Cristo Mountains from Colorado into New Mexico, but in recent years had become America’s quirkiest toll road.
The Raton Pass was actually privately owned by an odd bird named Richens “Uncle Dick” Wootton, who had bought the mountain land and improved the old trail, digging out and leveling sections by hand. He and his wife lived in a small hotel he built high up on the Colorado side of the pass, right next to where he had slung a locked chain across the trail. He made his living by charging $1.50 per stagecoach or carriage, twenty-five cents per horseman, and a nickel a head for livestock to cross over. Indians, Mexicans, and posses chasing horse thieves passed for free.
Several railroads wanted to control the Raton Pass, but Strong’s main competitor was the feisty Denver & Rio Grande. In fact, the D&RG intercepted and decoded cables that Strong sent to his chief engineer telling him it was time to go make a deal with Uncle Dick. So on February 26, 1878, there was a showdown. Both railroads had teams on the same train to El Moro, Colorado, the tiny town closest to the pass. The Santa Fe engineers kept a low profile during the ride, and when the train pulled in to the station well after dark, they lagged behind their competitors until they saw them check into the depot hotel for the night. Then they bolted into action, hiring a carriage and horses to head off into the pitch-black to ride twenty bumpy miles to Uncle Dick’s hotel. When they got there, a teen dance was in full swing, and Uncle Dick was about to call it a night. But they were able to keep him awake long enough to talk him into a handshake deal allowing the Santa Fe to build along his pass.
They agreed to work out the details later because the process of grading—digging out a rail bed so the wooden ties and steel rails would lie flat—had to begin immediately in order to solidify their legal claim to the pass. Quickly, they hired a ragtag group of teenage boys from the dance, and in the dead of night this motley crew hiked up the mountain carrying lanterns, shovels, and picks to mark off the route that the train tracks would take.
After the Santa Fe crew had been working for half an hour, the D&RG engineers and their large grading team arrived, hoping they could make a deal with Uncle Dick. When they found out that the Santa Fe had beaten them to it, several members of the crew pulled out pistols. But eccentric Uncle Dick made it clear that not only was the Santa Fe first, but he liked them better anyway. Somehow the dispute was settled without a shot being fired.
Six weeks later, however, plenty of shots were fired when the railroads clashed again at the Royal Gorge, a canyon cut by the Arkansas River west of Pueblo, which was crucial for building through to Denver, an alternative route to the Pacific. This time, when the Santa Fe team got to the site first, the D&RG brought a small army to fight them. Strong countered with a militia of his own.
He wired Bat Masterson, the sheriff of Dodge City, to hire one hundred of his meanest friends to come fight for the railroad, even sending a special Santa Fe train to pick them up. Each side dug bunkers and built forts to protect workers not only from gunfire but all manner of guerrilla tactics: Boulders would come rolling down at workmen, temporary bridges got blown up, and large pieces of equipment kept falling, mysteriously, into the gorge.
The fighting went on for over a year in Colorado and even in Washington, D.C., where the legal issues involved were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. But eventually, the D&RG was beaten by a force even more formidable than William Strong—the volatile equity markets in the East. The railroad went into receivership. The cowboy brawl at the Royal Gorge of Colorado was eventually settled in a fancy financial office in Boston. It was, after all, just business.
WHILE STRONG FOUGHT his battles in Colorado, Fred took over the depot hotel in Florence, Kansas, and soon received his first review. The Florence Herald reported that the new proprietor “has no cards and we don’t know his name—but he sets a square meal all the same. Everybody takes breakfast and supper there.”
For a restaurant where the food had previously been inedible, that was a rave. Yet Fred, emboldened by the daring of his bosses at the Santa Fe, wanted to try something more ambitious, almost absurdly so. He decided to turn the Santa Fe depot in Florence—a town of eight hundred that no travelers would ever visit unless they had to—into a boutique hotel, a destination restaurant. For that, he needed a big-city celebrity chef.
William H. Phillips first made his mark on the culinary world by feeding 500,000 people during the centennial celebration in Philadelphia. The effusive chef—known for charming customers with what one London paper called his “beaming, rubicund, jolly British face”—accomplished this feat as food manager of The Globe, a massive hotel erected alongside Fairmount Park for the tourism onslaught of 1876. Originally trained at the Cardiff Arms in Wales, he currently held one of the top jobs in the hotel world, running the food service at the Palmer House in Chicago.
That was where Fred Harvey first met him, and made the preposterous suggestion that he quit an
d come to Kansas.
Fred lured Bill Phillips to Florence with the same inducements still used today to entice chefs to leave large institutions for improbable specialty ventures: the promise of a large salary and the freedom to create an oasis in his own image. Together, they began inventing the standards of cuisine, efficiency, and hygiene that Fred Harvey would impose throughout the West.
The two English-born restaurant men immediately upgraded the table settings by ordering Irish linens from Belfast, china and stemware from London, and silver plates from Sheffield. The hotel’s dinner menu was also dramatically rethought, creating special meals of ambitious fish and game dishes that brought European cooking styles to the vast varieties of meats and produce available only in rural America. Phillips let it be known that he would pay top dollar to local fishermen, hunters, and farmers for the best of their catch and harvest. And hotel guests who came to hunt and fish—the woods were filled with grouse and quail, the rivers and lakes teeming with black, striped, and spotted bass, pike, carp, buffalo fish, and catfish weighing up to one hundred pounds—were encouraged to allow Bill Phillips to prepare them their own personalized feasts.
The first major press coverage of the resurrected Florence depot hotel—beyond the praises of the local Herald—appeared in London. A sporting newspaper called The Field had an American correspondent, Samuel Nugent Townshend, who roamed the West seeking ecstatic experiences in shooting, fishing, and eating, and then filing ludicrously overwritten reports under the pseudonym “St. Kames.” He was so taken by the cuisine and comforts of Fred’s new hotel that he kept inventing excuses to revisit Florence.
When he had traveled on the Santa Fe the previous year, “the management of the refreshment rooms … was shocking,” Townshend wrote. But now that Fred had taken over and installed Bill Phillips, the food was “splendid,” with fish and game breakfasts, dinners, and suppers that were “marvels of luxury and neatness … suited to the most exigent or epicurean taste.” He would often find himself in another western city, in a cramped hotel room with “a nasty bed,” wondering if it was possible “to reach Florence and our compatriot Phillips in time for breakfast.”
While in Florence, Townshend spent some time chatting with Fred about hunting. Fred was respectable with a shotgun and an able horseman. As his son Fordie got older—he was now twelve—Fred often took him bird hunting, and they did some fishing as well. But Fred did have his concerns about the addictive nature of the sport. He told Townshend about the jocular retiree “Uncle Joe” Irwin, whom they had hired to take hotel guests out hunting and fishing. While it was all well and good that Uncle Joe could regale guests with the story of how he caught 202 pounds of bass in one day, the only reason the old man needed the job was that he had squandered his considerable earnings and acumen.
“In the midst of the most intricate and urgent business,” Fred explained, “he would never sacrifice a good day’s shooting or fishing, hunting or boating. And this brought him to ruin.”
The Florence depot hotel quickly became so successful that its rooms were constantly sold out. Since it was only a hundred miles from the main office in Topeka, Santa Fe executives brought their wives and clients there. Locals were so enthralled with the food that they were able to overcome their annoyance at train passengers receiving preferential treatment. While the restaurant was open to the public, all service to local customers was put on hold whenever a Santa Fe train approached, which happened five times a day, sometimes on schedule, sometimes not. The number of train passengers planning to eat in the dining room or the lunchroom was telegraphed ahead from the previous station, and their places were set for them before the train arrived. If too many local people were dining at the time, some were asked to give up their seats; the others had to wait until the passengers had eaten before being served.
Local patronage was important, but above all else the trains had to be fed.
Fred was so impressed by how quickly Bill Phillips made a major impact on his business that he decided to give him a contract and a share of the profits. The deal reportedly made Phillips the best-paid man in Florence, earning more than even the local bank president.
With Phillips in place, Fred expanded the Florence hotel and restaurant even further, adding not only more dining space but also offices, hotel rooms, and large “sample rooms” where traveling salesmen could show their lines to local customers. He also gave the place a proper name; instead of the Santa Fe depot hotel and eating house, it would now be known by the more elegant appellation “The Clifton.” Fountains and a new sign were installed out front; inside were luxuries Florentines had yet to enjoy—even indoor plumbing.
“Every Tuesday and Friday, the ladies of Florence can have use of the bath rooms at The Clifton Hotel,” the Herald proudly announced. “This will be a luxury which will be duly appreciated. All other days the bath rooms are open to gentlemen.”
CHAPTER 9
COWBOY VICTUALER
LAKIN, KANSAS, WAS ONE OF MANY DUSTY WESTERN TOWNS willed into being by the arrival of the railroad. In fact, it was one of the first in which the Santa Fe acknowledged its creationist powers, naming the hamlet after one of its employees, D. L. Lakin, who ran the department that sold the land on either side of the Santa Fe’s tracks.
While The Clifton Hotel in Florence got most of the attention, Fred was also transforming another Santa Fe depot hotel way out west in Lakin, the last stop beyond Dodge City before reaching the Colorado border. The Lakin hotel didn’t have the same epicurean ambitions as Florence, but it still featured excellent service, imported table settings, and consistently good, fresh food, making it the best place to eat and sleep in the Wild West.
The Lakin depot hotel quickly became Fred’s western home away from home. He even had family working there, his niece and nephew from England. His sister Annie had visited America with her children after her marriage to Charles Baumann, a Swiss count, went sour. When twenty-one-year-old Charles and his seventeen-year-old sister, Florence, decided they wanted to stay in the United States, Uncle Fred gave them both jobs.
In Lakin, Fred also got involved with ranching, a business that had intrigued him since he first started working with cattlemen as a freight agent. He found a herd for sale called the XY: ten thousand head of cattle with an “XY” brand on the left side and a signature cropping of the left ear. He spent $4,000 ($89,000) for a one-quarter interest in the herd, and an option to purchase the rest. But he decided to use that option for a more inventive investment in his own future. He reached out to William Strong at the Santa Fe and offered his boss the chance to be his partner in the deal.
Fred had become wiser in the ways of the train industry. He understood that if he wanted to play the game at a higher level, it couldn’t hurt to be in business with his bosses. While the Santa Fe was considered one of the more scrupulous of the railroads, its executives were not above getting a taste of a side venture.
Soon Harvey and Strong were partners in the XY herd, along with another well-placed Santa Fe executive who was invited to buy in. They were looking forward to being ranch owners—as close as three guys who wore waistcoats and watch fobs would come to being cowboys. Strong even wrote excitedly to Fred about the prospect of coming west so he could watch “the roundup” of his own cattle.
FRED ENJOYED LAKIN so much that in the summer of 1879, he brought his family there and invited the entire town out for a Fourth of July picnic.
Fred and Sally’s family had grown. They now had five children: Ford, Minnie, May, Byron, and a brand-new baby daughter, Sybil. Besides the kids, three servants, and a rotating cast of dogs in the house and horses in their small stable, they had Sally’s mother, Mary Mattas, living with them now. The tiny Czech woman still spoke little English, but she communicated her love for her grandkids in other ways, such as praying for each of them in front of their bedroom doors each night.
The whole family came along on the trip to Lakin, as well as Sally’s younger sister Maggie from St. Lou
is, who, at twenty-three, was more than ready to find a husband.
Fred chose Chouteau’s Island for the Fourth of July picnic, which was hosted by him and Sally and catered by his hotel. Prominent politicians, businessmen, and ranchers from all over southwestern Kansas flocked to the lovely spot in the Arkansas River, a Santa Fe Trail landmark since the early nineteenth century, when a small band of trappers were said to have held off an attack by several hundred Pawnees.
The very young town of Lakin did not yet have an American flag for the celebration, so a group of local ladies volunteered to make one. Led by Mrs. Carrie Davies—a housekeeper at Fred’s hotel and the wife of rancher “Wild Horse” Davies—they hand stitched the stripes and all thirty-eight stars. On the day of the event, the entire Davies clan proudly rode together, on horseback and in coaches, behind their flag bearer, C. O. Chapman. His mettle was tested, however, when the section of the Arkansas River they needed to ford to reach Chouteau’s Island turned out to be deeper in the middle than expected. Suddenly Chapman and his horse were completely submerged. He was barely able to hold the flagpole above his head until someone could rescue it—and then him.
Among the guests at the picnic was Colonel R. J. “Jack” Hardesty, one of the richest ranchers in the West. Hardesty lived in nearby Sargent, but his cattle, branded with a half circle over a lazy S, grazed farther south in “No Man’s Land,” the thirty-four-mile stretch that had remained unclaimed when Texas declared statehood in the 1840s and later became the odd little panhandle of Oklahoma. (The town of Hardesty, Oklahoma, was named for him.)
The Kentucky-born Hardesty had made his first fortune going west to mine in the 1860s, and he invested that money, including $10,000 ($252,000) worth of gold he claimed to have carried in his belt, in Texas cattle. He had a reputation for being a gentleman rancher—his cowboys knew better than to swear in front of him—and a generous host. Hardesty often sponsored grand parties: His Christmas ball in Dodge City was considered the social event of the year. But except for his golden retriever, Tick, he was alone at age forty-six, one of the most eligible bachelors west of the Mississippi.
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