Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  And then they raised their crystal glasses one last time, with all eyes turned to a proud but depleted Fred Harvey. He acknowledged their accolades with a pursed smile and eyes full of weary relief.

  “Entertainment is the soul of my business,” he said, “and I can only hope that we have so satisfied everyone here tonight that they know they can always expect a courteous reception here at the Las Vegas hot springs.”

  And with that, the dining hall was cleared of tables, Professor Helms’ Famous Fourth Cavalry Orchestra set up and sounded the Grand March, and the Montezuma Ball was under way. While there were only fourteen numbers listed on the printed dance card, the frolicking started at 9:30 p.m., and the band was still keeping “feet in a bustle” until sunrise.

  Fred, however, had retired early, long before his usual bedtime of 11:00 p.m., and the next morning was unable to leave his room, or even get out of bed. The Optic, which sometimes appeared to be receiving more medical information about high-profile patients than the patients got themselves, reported that Fred was “dangerously ill … no visitors are admitted to his room today.” Fortunately, he recovered within a day or two, because the hotel was booked solid.

  MANY OF THOSE reservations were the result of a new American social phenomenon: group tours called Raymond Excursions. Organized in major cities by the Boston-based Raymond & Whitcomb vacation company, they were the latest thing in leisure travel.

  England’s famed Thomas Cook travel agency had made its name booking European Grand Tours, which cultured people were expected to take at least once. They were both a travel experience and a social one, since it was common for groups who had “Grand Toured” together to remain close friends, hold lavish reunions, and even privately publish accounts of their journeys.

  Raymond & Whitcomb had started out organizing regional trips—a group from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Washington would travel together to Niagara Falls or even the coal country of western Pennsylvania, which was considered an exotic tourist attraction. But now the hot Raymond Excursion was the grand tour of America, back and forth across the country over fifty-nine days, for an all-expenses-paid fare of $450 ($9,777).

  A group of 150 Raymond “excursionists” had left the Boston area on Pullmans two weeks before and arrived at the Montezuma on April 21, 1882, at six in the evening, in time for dinner and perhaps a soak in the mineral baths. They were off the next morning—Montezuma porters complaining about their meager tips—and headed south to Deming, where the Santa Fe met the Southern Pacific, whose tracks hugged the Mexican border across Arizona into southern California. From there, the Pullmans carrying the Raymond excursionists continued north to visit Yosemite and later stay at the only western resort in the same league as the Montezuma: the Del Monte, which the Southern Pacific had built in Monterey. Finally they connected with the transcontinental railway heading east through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska, crossing the Missouri River, and returning to civilization. As they headed home, other groups of Raymond excursionists were already departing from Boston and Philadelphia to become American grand tourists.

  The Montezuma attracted all kinds—the well, the “worried well,” and the truly ill—from America, Europe, South America, even Asia. One of its first celebrated international guests was British army officer Captain Henry John Brinsley Manners, the eighth Duke of Rutland. When Captain Manners arrived, he immediately announced his intention “to live on the grounds in a tent, in the manner of the wild, free trappers and hunters of the region.”

  Fred did his best to talk the duke out of it.

  “Captain Manners,” he said, “while it is true we are in the wilds, we are not of them.”

  When Manners insisted, Fred let him pitch a tent, but only under two conditions. The captain had to take his meals in the main dining room—and, like all the other men, wear a jacket while eating. He also had to answer nature’s call in the hotel’s handsomely appointed bathrooms, and not among the bluegrass and shade trees they had labored so diligently to grow in New Mexico.

  After the hotel had been open for six months, Fred hosted a group at the Montezuma who were on a junket to Mexico—organized by the Santa Fe and his former employers at the Burlington, and led by his friend and fellow Burlington freight agent Edward Payson Ripley. In fact, Fred met the train in Pueblo and rode with the large group of agents from railroads all over the country down to Chihuahua—or “Che! Wah! Wah!” as the dozens of jovial excursionists called it. The entire trip was documented by journalist George Street, who was voted the group “historian” and made it very clear in his account how much the large group of men enjoyed meeting captivating dark-eyed “señoritas”—including several dozen local women who came onto their private train to tour the luxurious Pullmans. Fred had to laugh as the men literally tripped over themselves rushing to offer guided tours.

  Some excursionists decided to stay one night in a Mexican hotel, rather than in their Pullman berths, and had quite an adventure: Several of them went out to a local casino and then found themselves locked out of the inn, so they had to sleep on park benches. Others who stayed in the hotel slept with their clothes and boots on, their money and prized belongings in their pockets, because the doors had no locks and the windows were wide open.

  They were all relieved when the train returned them to New Mexico so they could luxuriate in Fred’s hospitality at the Montezuma, where “adjectives fail to express the excellence of the dinner” and the railroad agents danced all night with “as fair partners as ever graced a ball-room.” At 2:00 a.m., the orchestra ended with “Home Sweet Home,” and as they left, several members of the group broke into a rousing rendition of “Good Night Ladies.” The next morning, they got a complimentary visit to the bathhouses for Turkish baths, Russian baths, mud packs, and other treatments they had never even considered, let alone tried. They walked through the baths wrapped in sheets and then were shown into their individual rooms, where they sat on small stools and the doors closed behind them. Then:

  a thousand jolts of hot water suddenly strike you like needles, from all directions … and the boiling process begins. You gradually feel yourself melting away, and wonder how much of you will be left to take home to your family; but before you are entirely evaporated, the attendant makes his appearance, asks you how you feel, just to see if whether you can speak yet, opens the prison door and leads you to the next room. There you are put through a course of spouts. Hot and cold water are fired at you alternately; you are laid on a marble slab, drenched with soapsuds, scrubbed with a brush until you think that the able-bodied attendant has mistaken you for a pine floor, shampooed until your skin is as smooth as the marble slab you are lying on, spanked with a paddle or some other weapons till you are sore; your joints are all pulled, twisted and bent, dislocated and re-set, and after being drowned once or twice more you are rubbed down with dry towels, taken into a warm room and put to bed, where you may stay till you have recovered and feel well enough to get up and dress. Going again in to the open air, you feel like a bird, fly across the bridge, prance around the balcony, and then enjoy the best and biggest breakfast you have ever had.

  After breakfast, some of the excursionists went hiking in local ravines or watched Indian women wash their clothes in one of the bubbling hot springs. Others remained at the hotel, chatting with the ladies in the parlor or retiring to the basement to play billiards or try their hand at the bowling alleys. There was yet another banquet that night, and they departed in the morning. Fred took the train with them as far as Raton and bid them farewell, but the group had a hard time getting his hospitality out of their minds. They voted to create an association to commemorate their ten days together, and meet for dinner once a year. They named it the Montezuma Club, and after electing officers, and drafting a resolution thanking the Santa Fe railroad, they broke into song, ending with their war chant:

  “Che! Wah! Wah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”

  CHAPTER 12

  HARVEY GIRLS

&n
bsp; WHILE THE MONTEZUMA’S LARGE, WELL-TRAINED STAFF WAS earning accolades, Fred’s problems were mounting all over New Mexico. One day, he received a wire from his manager in Lamy, requesting help after a “gang of gamblers and confidence men” had taken over the town and robbed all the Santa Fe employees. Actually, the thugs were now ordering all their meals at the Santa Fe eating house and then refusing to pay. When the manager finally got up the nerve to tell the men he wouldn’t serve them anymore, they pulled their guns and told him to get out of town.

  Fred arrived in Lamy on the next train, accompanied by his scariest-looking employee in Las Vegas: John Stein, the hulking cashier at the Montezuma. They were sitting in the restaurant the following morning when a dozen desperadoes entered, demanding to eat. When refused service, they asked for the manager.

  Fred approached them. “What do you want with the manager?” he asked.

  “We want to hang him,” they said.

  “Well, I hope you won’t do that, because he’s a good manager and I need him to run the place. However … I don’t need him,” he said, turning his gaze to the massive Stein, “and you can hang him as often as you like. But as long as he’s alive, you pay for your food or you don’t stay.”

  Big John Stein stared at the men, unblinking, until they tossed some money on a table and left. Then he and Fred had breakfast and waited for the eastbound train to take them back to the Montezuma.

  By this point, Fred was no longer surprised by the holdups; a certain number of Santa Fe trains and depots were always going to be robbed, it was just the cost of doing business. But what he could not abide were the continuing racial problems he saw at his new eating houses.

  Western restaurants commonly hired black men as waiters and busboys. But many cowboys were former Confederate soldiers who had fled the South because they could not imagine living in peace among freed slaves. The cowboys’ prejudice against black workers was often more extreme than any tensions they had with Indians—whom they at least feared, and sometimes grudgingly respected.

  The truth was that Fred Harvey’s black male waiters in New Mexico got little respect and often lived in fear. They had every reason to believe that, at any time, they might need to defend themselves against their own customers.

  “A colored waiter at the Depot dropped a huge revolver from his hip pocket to the floor of the dining hall at the supper hour last evening,” the Optic reported. “It is being discovered daily that hotel waiters are a persecuted class, and to keep off their enemies they are required to pack big guns around with them.”

  In the early spring of 1883, Fred received word of a drunken fight among the beleaguered all-black waitstaff at his eating house in Raton. The manager reportedly told Fred there had been a midnight brawl and “several darkies had been carved beyond all usefulness.” There was also a more elaborate version of the story circulating, in which the intoxicated waiters had not only fought each other with knives and guns but accidentally shot and killed a Mojave spectator. Tribal leaders were supposedly demanding the life of a waiter in return. When told the shooting was accidental, the Indians declared they “would be satisfied to shoot one of the Harvey waiters by accident.”

  Fred jumped on the next train to Raton. He was traveling with young Tom Gable, a family friend from Leavenworth whom he had watched grow up. The Gables and the Harveys lived on the same block of Linn Street; Fred had been friendly with Tom’s late father, Barnabas, a successful farmer, and Sally was still very close to his mother, Mary. Fred had known Tom as smart and able from the time he started working in the Leavenworth post office as a teenager. Now thirty-one, with a wife and a baby, Tom had let Fred know he had ambitions of finally leaving Leavenworth, and hoped there might be a place for him in the eating house business.

  In Raton, Tom watched in fascination as “old Fred lit like a bomb,” instantly firing the manager and the waitstaff. As Tom would later recall it, Fred then turned to him and said he should become the new manager in Raton and move his young family there.

  “I had no restaurant experience,” Tom said, “but one did not argue with Fred Harvey.”

  The two of them talked about how the situation in Raton might be improved, and Tom insisted he would take the job only if Fred would let him try something completely different. He wanted to replace all the black male waiters with women—but not local women. He wanted to import young white single women from Kansas. He thought they would be easier to manage, less likely to “get likkered up and go on tears.”

  It was a radical idea. Still, one of the things Fred relished most about management was acting on the brainstorms of his employees. He had always hired some female servers for less hostile locations—his houses for the Kansas Pacific had a few waitresses, and so did the original Santa Fe eating houses, starting with The Clifton Hotel in Florence. One of the original waitresses there had been Matilda Legere, a sixteen-year-old from Belgium, who never forgot the first thing Fred Harvey ever said to her: “Don’t throw the dishes so hard or you’ll break them.” In fact, as early as 1880, when Lakin, Kansas, was still the “far West” for the Santa Fe, there were young women on the waitstaff, including Fred’s niece, Florence.

  Still, while female servers may have worked in Kansas, it was considered far too dangerous to have single women waiting on tables in forward positions in New Mexico. There were, according to the old joke, “no ladies west of Dodge City and no women west of Albuquerque.” But that was exactly why Tom Gable believed Fred should try it. He thought the move could have a positive, calming influence, first and foremost on the men working at the eating house and the train depot but also, perhaps, on the customers as well. The women could help alleviate racial tensions, and maybe even make the cowboys a little more gentlemanly.

  They would also be a welcome addition to the community, because the West was desperate for women. Recent stories in the Omaha Bee and the Laramie Boomerang had bemoaned “The Scarcity of Women Out West,” citing data from the recently tallied U.S. census. Overall, there were one million more men than women in the United States. While the eastern states had “large excesses of females,” the farther west one traveled, the more the numbers painted a man’s world, and a lonely man’s world at that. Some of the western states had a two-to-one “surplus of males.”

  Fred agreed to let Tom Gable try his idea. They sent cables back to Kansas—where Sally, Tom’s mother, Mary, and his wife, Clara, and Dave Benjamin and his wife, Julia, started reaching out to local single women who might agree to be trained by Fred Harvey for a good-paying job.

  “And that,” Gable later explained, “is how I brought civilization to New Mexico. Those waitresses were the first respectable women the cowboys and miners had ever seen—that is, outside of their own wives and mothers. Those roughnecks learned manners!”

  AMONG THE FIRST HARVEY waitresses with the courage to serve in Raton was Minnie O’Neal, a beautiful eighteen-year-old from Leavenworth whose father worked on the railroad. When she first showed interest in the job, her mother forbade it—waitressing, especially out west, was not an occupation for a “good girl.” But then her parents separated, and the family suddenly needed the money. Fred was offering $17.50 ($388) a month, plus tips—decent pay, especially considering that he was also offering to provide room, board, and transportation.

  Leaving home for the first time in her life, Minnie took the train from Leavenworth to New Mexico, stopping along the way for meals at Fred Harvey eating houses, where she began to understand what would be expected of her. After three days on the train, she was treated to the roller-coaster ride over the Raton Pass and then the big sky of New Mexico, until the brakes brought the train to a shrieking halt at the Santa Fe depot in Raton. It was a small, two-story red building in the middle of a mountainside frontier town of wood-frame saloons, stores, and houses.

  The moment Minnie arrived, Tom Gable laid out the rules he and Fred were developing. She would live with the other waitresses in a dormitory attached to the hotel, and they
had hired a female live-in chaperone to keep a watchful eye on them. They had to be in bed by eleven o’clock—except on Friday nights, when the eating house sponsored a town social. That was the only time Minnie was allowed to be seen in the hotel in street clothes. Otherwise, she was required to wear a uniform: a plain black long-sleeved, floor-length woolen dress with a just-short-of-clerical “Elsie” collar, along with black shoes and stockings. To complete the outfit, she would wear a starched white apron from neck to ankle, which had to be changed immediately whenever the slightest spot showed. Her hair was to be kept plain and simple, preferably tied back with a single white ribbon. Makeup was forbidden: The house manager would take a damp cloth and wipe it over each girl’s face to make sure. Minnie had to be dressed this way during her entire waitressing shift—twelve hours a day, at least six days a week—and whenever an off-schedule train arrived in the middle of the night.

  She also had to sign a contract that Fred had drawn up, requiring her to remain on the job, and stay single, for at least six months. If she made it that far, she would receive a vacation with free train travel anywhere on the Santa Fe, after which she could be invited to return for another six-month tour of duty.

  Minnie ended up working at the Raton eating house for a full year, and during that time became friendly with two of the restaurant’s best customers—Stephen Dorsey, a former Arkansas senator, and his wife, who had relocated to a cattle farm near Raton. Eventually, the Dorseys asked Minnie to leave the Harvey eating house and come work for them in their thirty-five-room stone mansion. This was a bit unusual—Fred’s main problem was losing waitresses who decided to marry Santa Fe trainmen or local ranchers. But Minnie didn’t remain single much longer. She fell for the foreman at the Dorsey ranch, George Washington Gillespie. They married and raised five sons.