Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  Until he met Fred Harvey’s sister-in-law Maggie Mattas.

  After the picnic, everyone went home to change for the July 4th gala at the Lakin depot hotel, for which a band was imported from Pueblo. As the ball began, Fred and Sally Harvey were asked to lead the Grand March. At one point in the evening, Sally saw her petite sister dancing with muscular Jack Hardesty—who looked every bit the western gentleman in his full beard, Stetson hat, and highly buffed cowboy boots—and knew that Maggie had finally met a man who would change her life the way Fred Harvey had changed hers.

  Only months later, the couple was married at the Harveys’ home in Leavenworth. They moved into a fine new house in Dodge City, just a block away from the town’s most infamous tourist attraction—the Boot Hill Cemetery, where all the desperadoes from the early days were allegedly buried with their boots on.

  WHEN THE SANTA FE asked Fred to expand into a fourth eating house, in La Junta, Colorado, he decided it was time to end his involvement with the competing Kansas Pacific. This meant finally admitting that he and his old friend Jepp Rice should formally dissolve the languishing partnership that had so strained their relationship over the past few years. It also meant that Fred was walking away from a steady source of income, but he had many others: He was still General Western Freight Agent for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and he had money coming in from the Santa Fe eating houses, the XY ranch, his investments in real estate and private mortgages, and other deals he was juggling.

  So, on a Thursday in early October 1879, Fred strode around the corner from his Leavenworth office to the redbrick building of the First National Bank, where he waited in line to see his regular teller. Fred handed the young man one last deposit of $1,398.91 ($31,100) for Harvey & Rice and then told him to close out the account.

  “Give me half,” he told the teller, “and place the other half to the personal credit of Rice. Here and now, the firm of Harvey & Rice ceases to exist.”

  Fred also moved his growing XY herd closer to the Santa Fe tracks. He and his partners bought huge tracts of land, consolidating two of the biggest ranches in southwestern Kansas and adding a horse farm. Their XY range now spread over four thousand square miles, bounded in the north by the Arkansas River and the Santa Fe railroad near Lakin and Garden City, extending down through the Oklahoma Panhandle and into Texas, where it was bounded in the south by the Canadian River, not far from Amarillo. This made the XY ranch almost as big as the state of Connecticut. (It also meant that Fred Harvey owned what later became the town of Holcomb, the site of the infamous Clutter murders that inspired Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.)

  During roundup time, there were often more than two hundred cowboys roaming Fred’s land, looking for XY cattle or others that had strayed from nearby herds. At night there would be huge campouts where cowboys would drink and share stories, some of which may have even been true. They howled over the yarn about young Eli “Romeo” Hall, who turned in two rustlers, “Longtoed Pete” and “Cross-Eyed Swiggett,” for stealing Fred Harvey’s cattle, and then turned down the $1,000 ($22,265) reward because Hall said he would rather just have a job on the Harvey ranch.

  Ironically, even though Fred now owned several thousand head of cattle, they did not provide him easier access to meat for his restaurants. Since the West had few slaughterhouses and scant refrigeration, cattle were still being shipped live on railroad cars back to Chicago or Kansas City to be butchered. So, the farther out his eating house chain extended, the harder it was to find dependable local sources for the amount of beef he needed. This was a considerable problem, since most of his patrons had become accustomed to eating steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One of the dramatic touches Bill Phillips had initiated in his dining rooms was to have the headwaiter emerge from the kitchen holding a large silver platter of sizzling steaks high in the air, which he served to each customer himself.

  Fred made a deal to buy beef for all his locations—and, in so doing, may have invented the practice of large-scale centralized purchasing for national restaurant chains. He chose Slavens & Oburn, the oldest and most successful meatpacking firm in Kansas City, and ordered an entire year’s worth of tenderloin steaks at twelve and a half cents ($2.78) per pound. For the first ninety days, he committed to buying at least 15,600 pounds of steaks—a minimum of 1,200 pounds of steaks per week. He would then see if he needed more than that.

  With this single steak order, Fred dramatically improved dining west of the Mississippi. Before his arrival, few Westerners had ever been served pink meat. They didn’t know quite how to react. One story circulated about a cowboy who was served his first Fred Harvey tenderloin—rare—and didn’t know whether to eat it or to brand it.

  “I’ve seen many a critter be hurt worse than that and get well,” he quipped.

  CHAPTER 10

  VIVA LAS VEGAS

  LAS VEGAS, NEW MEXICO—THE ONLY LAS VEGAS THAT AMERICANS knew at the time, since the one in Nevada didn’t exist until 1905—had already been transformed once by cutting-edge transportation. It had been an important stagecoach stop on the Santa Fe Trail since the 1830s, and grew even larger when it was annexed by the United States after the Mexican-American War, its population an unusual mix of immigrants from Mexico and, later, from Germany and China.

  But nobody in Las Vegas was prepared for the impact made by the first Santa Fe railroad trains coming over the Raton Pass in the summer of 1879. Within weeks, the best and worst of the Wild West began migrating there from Dodge City. “Doc” Holliday, the infamous desperado dentist, even moved there from Dodge to set up a practice.

  Dr. John Henry Holliday had trained in Philadelphia at one of the nation’s first dental schools (now part of the University of Pennsylvania) and was practicing in Atlanta in the early 1870s when he contracted tuberculosis. He came west hoping the climate would be curative, and when his hacking cough did not endear him to patients, he found he could make a much better living using his other natural talent—gambling. To defend himself, he learned how to shoot a six-gun, and found his medical training came in handy when deciding where to plunge a knife.

  While he had done much more gambling and fighting than dentistry in Dodge City—knocking out more teeth than he ever fixed—Doc Holliday saw the new train to Las Vegas as a chance to give his dental practice one last try. As a backup, he also opened a saloon. And it wasn’t long before Holliday killed his first Las Vegan. He got into a fight with a local gunslinger named Mike Gordon, who didn’t know any better when Doc Holliday asked if he wanted to step outside and settle their differences. Holliday told him to start shooting whenever he was ready. Within seconds Gordon lay dead on the street with three bullets in his belly.

  When the lynch mob came for the trigger-happy dentist, he decided that maybe Las Vegas wasn’t the best place for him after all and hightailed it back to Dodge. But other shady characters like Holliday kept pouring into Las Vegas. The crime rate grew so alarming that a group of men, calling themselves “Vigilantes,” took out an ad in the local paper, addressed to “Murderers, Confidence Men, Thieves”:

  The citizens of Las Vegas have tired of robbery, murder, and other crimes that have made this town a byword in every civilized community. They have resolved to put a stop to crime, [even] if in attaining that end they have to forget the law and resort to a speedier justice than it will afford … The flow of blood must and shall be stopped in this community, and the good citizens … have determined to stop it, if they have to HANG by the strong arm of FORCE every violator of the law in this country.

  Fortunately, none of this deterred many law-abiding citizens from pouring into Las Vegas as well. They found a town with a growing merchant community and a vigorous sense of itself and its place in the West, which was reflected in its lively newspapers. The Las Vegas Optic was especially opinionated and often spit-take funny, romanticizing even the creepiest aspects of western life. Its stories were sometimes picked up by national newspapers and clearly inspired the writing style of the
dime novels that later popularized legendary gunfights. It was the Las Vegas papers that renamed William Bonney—a local boy gone bad, who had grown up outside of nearby Roswell—Billy the Kid and turned him into the first rock-star bandit. (“We are informed that a purse of three thousand dollars has been raised to effect the recapture of The Kid,” the Optic reported one Tuesday. “Here is an opportunity for some daring man to engrave his name upon the roll of dead heroes.”)

  Fred was asked to establish a temporary restaurant in Las Vegas before the Santa Fe had even built a proper depot, so he had his staff work out of three old Santa Fe cars parked on a rarely used side track. One veteran railroader remembered them as “the worst-looking boxcars … the company and Harvey could scare up … [but] when travelers entered the big side door … they gasped with wonderment at what met their gaze. The walls were shiny with fresh paint in the gaudy Indian colors, the tables were spread with heavy milk-white Irish linen and napkins the size of pillow slips, the silverware shone like a French plate mirror, the clean clear glass goblets were filled with ice and nice clear water, and on the tables were large vases filled with wonderful fresh flowers.”

  But Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe had bigger plans for Las Vegas than retrofitted boxcars, or even another conventional depot eating house. They wanted to cash in on a growing trend in the hotel business: health tourism.

  For years, eastern doctors had been sending patients west in the hope that tuberculosis and other illnesses could be cured merely by being in the sunshine and fresh air. (The Stetson cowboy hat, that mainstay of western apparel, had been invented by one such health tourist: John B. Stetson, who came up with the idea while recuperating out west, and revolutionized his family’s Philadelphia hat business.) In addition to the therapeutic climate, doctors had a lot of faith in the healing waters of mineral springs.

  Six miles north of Las Vegas, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, there were naturally occurring hot springs that had long been believed to have curative powers. In the 1840s, the U.S. Army had even treated soldiers from the Mexican-American War at the Las Vegas Hot Springs, building an adobe hospital and bathhouse that remained in use until the Civil War. It was reopened in the late 1870s, with a new Hot Springs Hotel and a bathhouse in which the hot mineral water was piped into long, coffin-like metal tubs. Among the guests at the Hot Springs Hotel was Jesse James, who spent a relaxing week there in the summer of 1879 and was reportedly joined for dinner on the evening of July 27 by Billy the Kid.

  Within weeks after the first Santa Fe train pulled in to Las Vegas station, the AT&SF bought the Hot Springs and all the land and buildings around them for $102,000 ($2.3 million). The railroad took over the small Hot Springs Hotel, but also set to work planning a massive new facility: one of the nation’s first grand health resorts—part spa, part sanitarium. The project was soon wildly off schedule and over budget. Since the AT&SF was having so much success with Fred Harvey’s management of its depot properties, Strong asked him to step in and manage the existing hotel while helping oversee the construction of the new resort, which was to be called the Montezuma. When it was completed, Fred’s company could run that, too.

  The Montezuma project was a huge commitment. It would be bigger and more ambitious than all the properties Fred was managing combined. There was also irony and risk in the idea of a health resort being run by a man struggling with his own chronic illness, a man who could put on a brave face in business situations but was privately still keeping tally in his datebooks of how many days he lost to headaches or neuralgia, and compulsively scribbling down new treatments he wanted to try and medical books he wanted to read.

  But the Montezuma was an opportunity Fred could not pass up. The Santa Fe was rapidly building farther west into New Mexico and would want more depot eating houses as the tracks were completed. Besides, Strong had done so well as general manager of the railroad that the board of directors in Boston had decided to elevate him to president of the Santa Fe. If Fred did not commit fully to the fast-growing railroad, he knew Strong could find someone else who would.

  Fred, now in his mid-forties, decided to take the big gamble. He gave up his lucrative day job with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy and devoted himself to turning his four eating houses into a hospitality empire along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe.

  DURING THE NEXT YEAR and a half, Fred basically commuted between Leavenworth, Kansas, and Las Vegas, New Mexico. The trip was more than eight hundred miles and took at least three days each way. It was a stunning ride across America’s better half, but like any commute, it was exhausting, life-sucking. Fred would ride through the gloriously flat state of Kansas, stopping only to scrutinize his eating houses. He liked to hop off the train while it was still rolling into the station, so he could dash ahead and do a quick inspection before the passengers got off.

  When he strode into one of his eating houses, the waitstaff was already standing at attention behind fastidiously set tables in the main dining room or curved wooden counters with spinning stools in the lunchroom. They were poised awaiting the ceremonial gong, which the headwaiter would take out onto the train platform and strike to let passengers know the dining areas were open. It was a dramatic flourish Fred had borrowed from the Logan House in Altoona, the trackside eating house he had so admired as a young railroad warrior.

  At the sounding of the gong, the staff was to begin serving dozens of full-course dining room meals—with all the trimmings and table-side preparations, including handmade salad dressings—and just as many hundred flawless lunchroom meals, all within thirty minutes exactly. It was an Olympian culinary feat that had to be repeated, as if effortlessly, every time the train rolled into each of his locations.

  During his inspections, Fred stalked through the rooms of his eating houses, peering everywhere and running his hand across random surfaces. If he found anything out of place—a crack, a crease, or the mere smudge of a partial fingerprint—he grabbed one of those costly linen tablecloths and yanked it as hard as he could, sending eight complete place settings flying and shattering on the spotless floor.

  “You know better than this,” he would say in his clipped British accent, and then withdraw to the manager’s office, while the staff scrambled to clean up the mess and reset the table, the headwaiter still poised on the train platform with his mallet in the air, awaiting word that it was safe to bang the gong.

  After the long, level ride across Kansas, the train began the climb into Colorado—where Fred stopped to inspect his house at La Junta—and then continued west to Pueblo before heading due south, with the Rocky Mountains visible out the window to his right. At Trinidad, the engine was changed because the ride up into the mountains to the Raton Pass was the steepest and toughest in all of American railroading and required maximum steam. The Santa Fe had commissioned the most powerful engine ever built from the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia to make the roller-coaster climb; it was engine #2403, nicknamed the Uncle Dick. As the engine chugged high into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Fred could see sections of the old Santa Fe Trail alongside the tracks. At the very top of the Raton Pass, an elevation of almost eight thousand feet, the train slipped into a pitch-black tunnel, almost half a mile long through solid rock and only slightly wider than the cars themselves. He could actually stick his hand out the window and touch the rough-hewn wall.

  Just as his eyes adjusted to the dark, the railroad car emerged from the tunnel, and he was confronted with a view of the biggest sky imaginable. From the peak of the Raton Pass, he could see mountains and valleys, forests and deserts, and even several different weather systems hovering over the astounding landscape.

  The first stop on the other side of the pass was Raton itself, a small mining and ranching town, and from there it was literally all downhill to Las Vegas. By the time he arrived, he was often so depleted that he spent the next day in a hotel bed—where the ever-nosy Optic invariably would report he was holed up sick. And then he would get back
to work.

  There was so much to do in New Mexico. Besides the Montezuma health resort up in the mountains outside of Las Vegas, the Santa Fe was building a new trackside hotel and eating house right in town while rapidly grading land and laying tracks westward to Albuquerque and south to Mexico. In 1881, with construction still lagging at the Montezuma, the railroad wanted Fred to open three more eating houses in New Mexico.

  Ironically, there was not going to be a Santa Fe eating house in the railroad’s namesake city, Santa Fe. For reasons that were never entirely clear—some combination of the terrain and the local politics being too challenging—the AT&SF bypassed the capital of New Mexico. Instead, its tracks ran some twenty miles south of Santa Fe, stopping at the hamlet of Lamy on their way to Albuquerque.

  The railroad did build a small branch line that connected Santa Fe to the High Iron at Lamy—and with that, its twenty-year mission to replace the old Santa Fe Trail with train tracks was completed. But Santa Fe, suddenly no longer a major transportation hub, was left to rethink and reinvent itself.

  Fred opened a small eating house in the new Lamy depot in 1881 and took over the trackside restaurant and hotel in Raton, the Mountain House. He also set up operations in the dusty new depot in Deming, a tiny town just thirty miles from the Mexican border.

  The Deming house was particularly difficult to manage. The location was incredibly isolated, and the few people there were either railroad workers, miners, or criminals on the lam. Almost from opening day, the Deming eating house was repeatedly robbed at gunpoint.

  Actually, Fred was trying to establish order and civilization in New Mexico during a time that would later be looked upon as a watershed moment for guns and gunslinging in America. In the course of just a few months, two of the most legendary dramas in cowboy history unfolded in or near the cities where he was working. Billy the Kid, already sentenced to hang for murder, killed two prison guards and escaped, heading first to Las Vegas, where the newspapers carried so many stories of sightings that it seemed as if the sheriff was the only one who hadn’t seen him. Finally, after two months, he was tracked down to a house in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, by the hard-bitten sheriff of Roswell, Pat Garrett. The twenty-one-year-old outlaw was killed by a single shot that pierced his heart, and in death he became as famous worldwide as he had been in Las Vegas. The shooting was covered in newspapers all over the United States and Europe, and several books were immediately published about the life of “the Kid,” including one by Sheriff Pat Garrett himself: The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, the Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona, and Northern Mexico.