Only months after Billy’s death came the “Gunfight at the OK Corral” in Tombstone, a small mining town just across the Arizona border from the Deming eating house. Sheriff Wyatt Earp, his deputized brothers Morgan and Virgil, and Doc Holliday had a showdown with five unruly cowboys who reportedly were “parading the town for several days, drinking heavily and making themselves obnoxious”—and then refused to surrender their weapons to the lawmen. Thirty seconds and thirty bullets later, three of the cowboys lay dead, a fourth was wounded, and the other had run away. Within days the gunfight was front-page news across the country. “Daring Desperados,” the Leavenworth Times headline blared, “Three Cow Boys Bite the Dust.”
In the middle of all this romanticized Western gun drama, the president of the United States was shot in Washington in early July. James Garfield survived, but one of the bullets was lodged so deeply that it could not be found—even by Alexander Graham Bell, who was enlisted by the White House to invent some sort of magnetic metal-detecting device. The president seemed to be recovering over the next few weeks, but then succumbed in mid-September at the age of forty-nine. While his wife claimed he died peacefully, it was later revealed that he had suffered horribly, his medical care from the nation’s best doctors nearly as hazardous as the shooting itself. Along with high doses of quinine and morphine, and frequent sips of brandy, he was treated with calomel, a diuretic later banned as toxic because its active ingredient was mercury. But the most likely cause of the president’s torturous demise was the doctors’ inability to remove the bullet and close his wound. Originally three and a half inches, the wound was probed so many times by the germy fingers of so many physicians that by the time Garfield died, it was almost twenty inches long, deeply infected, and festering.
FRED CONTINUED TO HAVE troubles in Las Vegas. The doctors at the Hot Springs Hotel—increasingly anxious for the big new Montezuma to be done so they would have more paying patients—were at each other’s throats. The Santa Fe had hired a shiny new Harvard-trained physician, William Page, but he clashed with local favorite Dr. N. J. Pettijohn, who had roots in the Las Vegas community. According to accounts in Page’s diaries, the two constantly quarreled over patients. One day they got into a screaming match over which one of them was treating Mrs. Charles Bush, a New Orleans socialite.
“If you do not stop talking to her, I will fix you!” Pettijohn yelled. “I believe you to be a god-damn old fraud!”
“I know you to be such!” Page shot back to the “scoundrel.”
Actually, employee unrest was a problem for Fred all over New Mexico. He had Bill Phillips come down from Florence to help—still running the hotel there, the jolly British chef had now become Fred’s culinary adviser for the entire chain—but nothing seemed to work. New Mexico was a much wilder West than he and the railroad had ever experienced, and the old Santa Fe Trail towns resisted the changes brought by the railroads. In Kansas and Colorado the railroads created many of the communities, but in New Mexico the AT&SF was going into old cities and literally replacing the centers of town. In fact, the area around the Santa Fe depot in Las Vegas was called New Town. Local residents had a love/hate relationship with the railroads, and Fred’s restaurants, so visible a symbol of what the trains brought to town, were often the targets of local frustrations. Competing restaurant owners resented Fred because they knew he got better, fresher ingredients than they did—and paid less for them, because the railroad waived his freight charges. There were often breakins at the eating houses or the parked refrigerator cars: not for cash, but to steal those gorgeous aged steaks.
Some customers also resented the dress code Fred was instituting in his eating houses: While almost any outfit was allowed in the lunchrooms, men had to wear jackets (which were provided if they didn’t have one) in order to eat in the main dining rooms. In dress-casual New Mexico, this rule was particularly rankling.
More than ever before, Fred was finding out he had his share of enemies—who were all too happy to run to their friends at the local newspapers whenever they heard about difficulties at his restaurants. One day the Las Vegas Optic reported histrionically that Fred was losing control of his entire operation:
“Eating Establishment Excitements: Whooping It Up in Sad Shape for a Well-Known Hotel Proprietor,” the headline blared on September 12, 1881.
“Fred Harvey … is having a terrible time of it and seems to be gaining an unsavory reputation,” the Optic went on to explain, noting that the manager and night clerk at the Las Vegas depot hotel had quit, and at the Hot Springs Hotel, Fred had “acted so outlandishly ‘off” that his manager there was also leaving.
In Deming, not only had Fred fired the manager; he reportedly heaved him out the front door and onto the train platform, “and the dining room equipment followed after him in quick order.” The mercurial Englishman was also blamed for the “grub” in Deming being so poor that “the beef stake was fairly alive with little crawling things commonly called maggots.” He was accused of “a lack of proper decorum,” and the Optic hoped “for the sake of his reputation, that things will run smoother in the future and that his name will not be contaminated by town talk, as it has been.”
Fred immediately contacted the paper to tell his side of the story, and the next day, under the headline “Harvey Heard,” he explained that the trouble was “incited by chronic howlers,” and it was only a question of whether he or his employees would “dictate management of the houses.” He made it clear that the employees were fired because they were incompetent and had disobeyed orders. “It’s no easy task to operate hotels in New Mexico, so far distant from each other,” he said. “But I believe I have the ability to get along with detrimental circumstances about as well as the next fellow. And that’s all.”
Still, keeping his staff in line remained difficult. Several days after the news stories, he visited the new hotel doctor seeking treatment for “a blow on the right temple.” The injury was caused by a servant opening a door into Fred’s head. It was charitably described in the physician’s log as “accidental.”
CHAPTER 11
WE ARE IN THE WILDS, WE ARE NOT OF THEM
BACK IN KANSAS, SALLY AND THE CHILDREN WERE HAVING A hard time with Fred’s absences. They had become accustomed to his periodic travels as a freight agent, but looked forward to the long bonding times at home between trips. Now he was gone more than ever, and returned more enervated than they had ever seen him.
“Papa, when are you coming home?” his daughter Minnie, now ten, wrote to him in Las Vegas. “Mama cried all day Sunday because you was not home.”
He was missing important milestones in his family’s life, not just birthdays, anniversaries, and school pageants, but other memorable moments. Cities across the country were just starting to offer rudimentary home phone service, but Fred wasn’t home the day the Harveys got their first telephone in the dining room. He was also away when Leavenworth finished installing its first electrical generator, and for the first time electric lights were visible in a few commercial buildings.
Ford was already away at prep school in Racine, Wisconsin. Fred had missed the tail end of his eldest son’s childhood. It even fell to Sally to send Ford off with words of wisdom, as she inscribed his photo album: “Desire not to live long, but to live well; How long we live, not years, but actions tell.” And the other kids were growing up largely without their father.
By now, Sally had grown accustomed to attending Leavenworth social events alone. Her biggest distraction was playing cards, especially euchre. The game was all the rage across the country, a form of light gambling acceptable even in religious communities, the shift from poker to euchre a sign of becoming more “civilized.” Euchre was so wildly popular in Leavenworth that the society columns were beginning to read like sports coverage, reporting not only what people wore to card parties and what they ate but who took the prizes in the “progressive euchre” tournaments. Sally played in those, but also had other housewives over for more casual
games, and perhaps a drink or two.
Fred did manage to get home for major holidays, though, and these were warm and memorable. The Harveys traditionally celebrated Christmas with Byron Schermerhorn’s family, and they always had a raucously good time. The younger children would go wild together: Schermerhorn’s daughter Nell would never forget little Byron Harvey shouting down to Sally, “Mother, make the girls put some clothes on! They’re running all over upstairs without any.”
Fred’s Christmas gift from his best friend would be a barrel of pure corn whiskey, which was put out in the stable and siphoned into bottle after bottle during the visit. After a few drinks Byron would start making jokes about Fred’s dogs. He got along fine with Charlie, the elderly King Charles spaniel with halitosis, but he was scared to death of Fred’s Old English bulldog Crib, which was descended from a famous bullbaiting dog of the same name. He claimed that if he ever met up with Crib outside of the Harveys’ yard, “I’d certainly cut off one of my arms and throw it to him.”
In fact, one year Byron conspired with Fred’s neighbors to lobby for the dog’s exile. He arranged for almost half of Leavenworth to have their servants carry identical holiday messages over to the Harvey home.
“If you will remove that bulldog from the front steps,” each handwritten note read, “we would like to call on you.”
JUST AFTER CHRISTMAS 1881, Fred walked briskly over to his bank to offer his favorite teller, twenty-two-year-old David Benjamin, a position that would change both of their lives.
Cherubic, charming, and quietly assertive, with wire-rim glasses, black hair parted just off the middle, and a neatly trimmed mustache, Dave was bright and ambitious and, much to Fred’s delight, loved talking about their common homeland, Great Britain. The Benjamin family had left London when Dave was young, relocating to Leavenworth, where they became cornerstones of the large local Jewish community centered at Temple B’nai Jeshurun, the first synagogue in Kansas. Dave was the eldest of three close brothers, who by their teens were already impressing business leaders in Leavenworth. As Dave worked his way up at the First National Bank of Leavenworth, where Fred Harvey and other prominent men sought his counsel, his middle brother, Alfred, was becoming a protégé of one of Fred’s closest friends, Colonel Abernathy, in his large furniture business. The youngest brother, Harry, was a rising attorney at the prominent Leavenworth firm of William C. Hook and Lucien Baker.
Fred came to Dave’s window and made a withdrawal. While passing currency through the steel bars at his station, they started to chat.
“Do you really plan to be a banker for your entire life?” Dave would later remember Fred asking.
“Yes, sir, I have always intended to be a banker.” It had, in fact, been Dave’s childhood dream.
“Lots of bookkeeping experience?” Fred asked.
“Lots of it.”
“I need a good general accountant for my business. I think you would like that better than a bank.”
“Yes,” Dave said, surrendering his dream for a better one without a moment’s hesitation. “I think I would.”
Fred no longer had much of a business presence in Leavenworth; he had long ago sold his ticket operation there, and just maintained a small office in the Hannibal & St. Joseph depot. His books had been kept by a railroad accountant at the Santa Fe general office in Topeka, J. J. Blower, but he knew it was time he had his own business manager, somebody to oversee the numbers for his growing chain the same way that Bill Phillips in Florence was overseeing the food.
He also knew that with all the time he was spending away from his family, especially now that Ford was away at college, it might help the situation if he had a trusted associate in Leavenworth. Dave could not only do his books, he could help him stay in better touch with Sally and the kids when he left civilized Kansas and returned to the pistol-packing patrons of the Southwest.
AFTER SEVERAL GRUELING weeks back in New Mexico in early 1882, Fred appeared to have finally made some progress at the Hot Springs Hotel. The Optic reported that “things are now in such a shape that the guests are beginning to murmur, because they have nothing to grumble about.”
With the construction at the Montezuma looking as though it might actually come to an end soon, both the railroad and the local physicians began publicizing the place, especially the curative powers of the hot springs. The water itself was frequently analyzed by different experts, and each time a new element was found, it was added to the list at the top of the letterhead and on all the promotional materials. One day a visitor, Professor Hally, announced that “the waters are especially adapted to the ailments of the left kidney.” But the resident physician, Pettijohn, went a step further. According to the Optic, he claimed the waters “will cure anything from a sore thumb to unrequited love. He even goes so far as to say that three straight drinks of the water per day will keep a man on good terms with his mother-in-law.”
After inspecting the Montezuma, Fred headed back east for a cross-country shopping spree, picking out furnishings, cookware, dishes, silver, and stemware for his new hotel dining room. He also visited his favorite hotels in St. Louis, Chicago, and New York and shopped for staff, pulling aside chefs, concierges, maître d’s, waiters, and housekeepers he liked to let them know of the wonderful opportunities at the Montezuma. In Boston, he met with the corporate executives at the Santa Fe office there, which also gave him a chance to spend time with his favorite coffee purveyors, Caleb Chase and James Sanborn—later known just as Chase & Sanborn—who roasted a special blend that was being used in all of Fred’s restaurants.
As the last touches were being put on the Montezuma, the railroad built a six-mile branch line from town so that guests could be brought by Santa Fe train all the way from the Midwest to the front entrance of the new hotel. And on the morning of Sunday, April 16, 1882, several dozen well-dressed men and ladies took their places in four lavishly appointed Pullman cars at the Kansas City station. Among the passengers were Sally Harvey, the Harveys’ close friends Colonel and Mrs. Abernathy, Elizabeth Custer (George’s widow), and Kansas City meat magnate S. B. Armour and his wife. They were joined along the way by well-known Mexican-American politician and businessman Don Miguel A. Otero and editors from newspapers in Chicago, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Topeka, and Leavenworth.
Also on the train was that inevitable, junket-loving American correspondent for The Field, Samuel “St. Kames” Townshend, who over the years had become good buddies with Fred Harvey and Bill Phillips. Townshend was part of the in-train entertainment, as he and a half-dozen other guests amused themselves by putting on a “sacred concert … in which all the familiar camp meeting melodies were grandly rendered,” according to the Optic. “The singing was kept up until 11 o’clock and there was little sleep in any of the Pullmans until it subsided.”
When the guests arrived at the new Montezuma hotel depot, they were met by a flock of bellmen who whisked away their bags, leaving them to stroll leisurely across the Gallinas River footbridge and along a small path from which the hotel was barely visible for the trees. Then, suddenly, the massive 270-room, four-story wooden structure loomed on their left—and when they were done staring, a turn to the right revealed a broad, lush park with fountains, footpaths, lawn tennis courts, archery ranges, even a miniature zoo.
That evening, there was a banquet in the main dining room, a forty-by-seventy-foot hall with floor-to-ceiling windows topped with stained-glass transoms. It was lit by eight massive crystal chandeliers, each with four gas jets, and adjoining it was a separate serving room equipped with carving tables and built-in steam to heat the trays.
The feast began with bluepoint oysters, followed by a consommé of green sea turtle—made from turtles harvested in the Gulf of California and kept alive in a man-made pool outside the hotel. Then came an array of succulent dishes: fresh California salmon and mountain trout; spring lamb with French peas; tenderloin of beef with truffles and stuffed tomatoes; sweetbreads braised with mushrooms; pâté; asp
aragus with butter sauce; deer with currant jelly and watercress; and broiled teal duck. The dessert spread included Queen’s pudding; lemon, coconut, and apricot pies; various jellies; Muscatine ice; California fruits; and a dazzling array of cheeses.
And after the meal, of course, came the toasts, dozens of them. The first ones were “to the press … men of brains, energy and education” whose words were disseminated by “the greatest and grandest medium through which intelligence is conveyed to a civilized world.” There were similarly effusive toasts “to the railroads”—which William Strong and the assembled Santa Fe brass accepted warmly—and “to the doctors.” This included not only the physicians caring for hotel guests but the Montezuma’s special medical friends around the globe who presumably would be prescribing the hot springs “cure” and New Mexico’s healing climate. They went on to toast the great territory of New Mexico and the American hotel industry.
Appetite for America Page 10