The irony of all this negotiating was that Hearst was notorious for ignoring his Fred Harvey bills. Schweizer and his boss, John Huckel, had numerous discussions and letter exchanges—all copied to Ford because of the delicacy of the matter—concerning the risks of trying to make the publisher pay his bills. Yet Hearst was relentless in demanding more and more.
“I will bet you two huge Mexican dollars that you haven’t shown me your real treasures,” he wrote. “Out with them now Mr. Schweizer or I shall feel that I am not being treated fairly.”
IN THE LATE FALL of 1904, Ford went back to the Grand Canyon to oversee the end of construction at the South Rim. He slept in one of the rustic rooms at the old Bright Angel next door, which now looked like a run-down carriage house for his new hotel complex.
Regardless of the myriad delays and budget overruns, Ford was pleased with El Tovar. It was the ultimate Fred Harvey oasis, in every way honoring President Roosevelt’s plea not to deface the canyon. It was an intriguing combination of styles and materials, a cross between a log cabin castle and a Swiss château, its dark wood floors, walls, and ceilings decorated with an occasional Indian rug or moose head. The long, narrow building had 125 guest rooms, and a massive square-helmeted turret rose above its three-story center staircase—an architectural feature that served to hide the water tower inside the roof, which would be filled several times a week with water carried to the canyon by railroad car. But its architecture, ultimately, was less impressive and surprising than the simple fact of its location—it was hard to believe that a luxury hotel could be built so far from civilization, and so close to the edge of the Divine Abyss.
Just across the circular driveway from El Tovar was a similarly counterintuitive structure, dreamed up by Mary Colter—a more ambitious version of the Indian Building at the Albuquerque depot. This time, she had convinced the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey to let her replicate an actual Indian building—a full-scale, brand-new, eight-hundred-year-old pueblo, authentic to the smallest detail, where the Indians who were hired to do art demonstrations and dances would actually live. Inspired by buildings in the nearby reservation city of Oraibi, it was called Hopi House.
Colter and Harvey ethnologist Henry Voth drove local workmen crazy trying to recreate perfectly imperfect surfaces, inside and out. Colter brought in an old wooden bench that had been dug out of a shiny denuded log, and insisted that every piece of furniture and support beam have the same weathered sheen, as if nature had been buffing them for centuries. There was, by design, hardly a straight line in the entire structure. The exterior was built of irregular slabs of Coconino sandstone, endlessly stacked until they created three towering stories, with tiny, slightly skewed rectangular windows. The cement floors were poured to resemble mud, and the walls were irregularly plastered like adobe. The sloping ceilings were made of peeled logs with smaller branches laid across them, and there were several working fireplaces whose chimneys were fashioned from new, old-looking clay pots with the bottoms freshly broken out. The native ambience was so “real” that one easily forgot the dim rooms were ingeniously lit with hidden electric lights.
The star attraction of the Hopi House was Nampeyo, the forty-three-year-old Hopi woman who was considered the most important native potter of her generation and had been featured at several world’s fairs. Nampeyo agreed to become a “Fred Harvey Indian,” living, working, and performing at Hopi House, along with her large family.
The cost of the two new buildings—trumpeted in the promotional materials because it was higher than the price of the Northern Pacific’s Yellowstone hotel—was $250,000 ($6.3 million). Another $50,000 ($1.3 million) was invested in stables for the horses that guests would ride along the rim and the mules on which they would descend into the canyon. While the railroad owned the buildings, Fred Harvey was responsible for buying, training, and maintaining the livestock, as well as running the on-site farms where fruits and vegetables were grown for the restaurant.
But El Tovar and Hopi House, while extraordinary, were not the main selling points. The first Santa Fe ads, which started running across the country well before the opening, promised nothing less than the chance “to see how the world was made … deep down in the earth a mile and more you go, past strata of every known geologic age. And all glorified by a rainbow beauty of color.”
El Tovar made its debut on January 14, 1905—a soft opening in the dead of winter when the canyon often got an abundance of snow, so there would be plenty of time to work out the kinks before the anticipated throngs of summer. To manage the hotel, Ford brought back into the Harvey fold one of his father’s favorite employees: Charlie Brant, the heavyset Russian immigrant who had been Fred’s maître d’ at the opening of the Montezuma. Trained at Delmonico’s in New York and the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans, Brant had left the Montezuma after the original building burned down, and went on to a distinguished career running hotels and private clubs in Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and Mackinac Island, Michigan. Now in his mid-fifties, he and his wife, Olga, were looking for one last great challenge in the hospitality business. Nothing could be more challenging than running El Tovar and becoming de facto mayor of the little tourism town growing at the edge of the canyon.
The large Fred Harvey staff immediately doubled the number of people living along the canyon. The influx of Harvey Girls was especially welcome. They represented more single women than had ever been seen in northern Arizona, and the tour guides and miners particularly enjoyed their regular Friday night socials, chaperoned by the large and formidable Miss Bogle, the housemother of the Harvey Girl dormitory. Miss Bogle always kept her eye on the Kolb brothers—Emery, Ellsworth, and Ernest—a randy trio who ran the local photography studio but were best known for their off-camera exploits with the ladies, which they referred to as “rimming,” their code word for finding a secluded place along the canyon edge to make out. When Ernest Kolb danced too wildly and too close to a Harvey Girl, Miss Bogle would simply walk over, lift him up, look him in the eye, and say, “Stop your jiggling, you hear?”
Yet while everyone enjoyed the influx of Harvey Girls, there were deep suspicions about their boss. To this ragtag bunch of former miners and adventurers who had made nice little businesses for themselves, the arrival of Ford Harvey, who had enough muscle and money to buy and sell them many times over, was frightening. Ford wielded the full force of the Santa Fe, which had given him its complete proxy on the South Rim. Every entrenched small-time businessman there was either quaking in fear or preparing for battle—although, being pragmatic, they were also calculating their buyout prices so they would be ready when the inevitable offers came.
As the inaugural summer tourist season arrived, the first newspaper reviews were ecstatic. The Los Angeles Times called the hotel “magnificent”:
Reared upon the very brink of the dizzy gulf of the gorge, the view afforded the guests from its windows and balconies is something to live long uneffaced in the memory. One may flip the butt of his cigar from his chair on the veranda of the hotel down through space for a distance of more than 7000 feet, considerably more than a mile. He requires a field glass to the ground below his bed-chamber window. He cannot afford to be a somnambulist unless he carries a parachute strapped under his arms. To live in El Tovar is like enjoying the sensation of occupying a room in the top floor of a hotel more than 400 stories high, or in the pinnacle of seven Eiffel Towers piled one on top of the other, but fortunately without the inconvenience of having to send to China for a bell boy every time one rings for water.
El Tovar and Hopi House drew more people to the Grand Canyon than had ever visited before. The hotel was crowded, and initial business was good.
But the same had been true of the first tourist season at the Montezuma, so Ford maintained his reserve. In fact, when he and Ed Ripley made the deal for Fred Harvey to run the Grand Canyon properties, Ford hedged his bet. Instead of just splitting the profits evenly with the railroad—as he was doing now at all the other eating hou
ses and hotels—he took a smaller percentage of the profits and insisted that the Santa Fe guarantee Fred Harvey would be reimbursed for all net losses. Just in case El Tovar turned out to be another sinkhole.
CHAPTER 25
TRAINIACS
IT WAS THE FASTEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE TRAIN RIDE IN HISTORY: Walter Scott, former Buffalo Bill sideman turned boastful gold prospector, offered the Santa Fe $5,500 ($139,000) in cash for a private train and a chance to break the speed record from Los Angeles to Chicago. But if he was going to do it, he wanted to make the wild ride in style: His “Coyote Special” included not only a Pullman sleeping car but a fully stocked Fred Harvey dining car.
Chef Geyer, a Harvey veteran from Germany, was picked for the assignment, and his wife was frantically trying to talk him out of it. She reminded the chef he had four children at home and begged him “to let some other man break his neck” on the swiftest train ride ever.
“Und I say to her,” the chef reportedly explained, “if dot man in der enchine [engine] can stand it to pull der train, I can stand it to ride behind him, yet.”
As the Coyote Special pulled out of Los Angeles, the saltshakers danced across the tables and cookware rattled on the steel kitchen counters as Chef Geyer started preparing the first meal. Cost was no concern, since Scott—known as “Death Valley Scotty” because of the location of his gold mine—had agreed to pay an extra $1,000 ($25,240) for the Pullman dining service. They started with caviar sandwiches—because Scott regarded simpler canapés as “dude food”—and an iced consommé. The diners were Scotty, his wife, and Los Angeles sports-writer Charles E. Van Loan, who had been chosen to write onboard dispatches for the Associated Press.
The first courses were going well until just before Needles, California, when the train hit a curve at sixty miles an hour. Everything on the table went flying, leaving the diners grateful for the prescient wisdom of Chef Geyer for choosing a clear chilled soup.
After the dishes were removed from the table and the soup from the wall, the entrées were served as the train flew at speeds of seventy, even eighty miles an hour. Geyer called his special dishes “Porterhouse Steak a la Coyote, two inches thick and a Marvel of Tenderness,” and “Broiled Squab on Toast, with Strips of Bacon au Scotty,” and he served them with succulent stuffed tomatoes. For dessert, there was freshly made Fred Harvey ice cream with “colored trimmings,” followed by a cheese plate, coffee, and, naturally, cigars.
Although no more food flew, there was one airborne Harvey waiter: During the delicate run through the curvy Glorieta Pass, near Pecos, New Mexico, he was hurled into a dining car window, smashing it with his shoulder.
After getting past the mountainous areas and into Kansas, the train barreled ahead at unheard-of speeds, peaking at 106 miles an hour. From the Dodge City Harvey House—while stopped briefly for fuel—Scotty wired President Roosevelt: “An American cowboy is coming east on a special train faster than any cowpuncher ever rode before; how much shall I break the transcontinental record?” The president didn’t respond, but the press did, filing dispatches from each Santa Fe depot about whether Scott’s train was running ahead of the record or behind. On July 11, 1905, at 11:54 a.m., Death Valley Scotty’s Coyote Special pulled in to Dearborn Station in Chicago, after traveling 2,265 miles in just under forty-five hours—more than seven hours faster than the previous record.
The ride received enormous media coverage, as did Chef Geyer’s gutsy performance. “Any man who can cook like that at sixty miles an hour,” wrote one Kansas City reporter covering the trip, “is worthy of a place in the culinary hall of fame!”
Death Valley Scotty ended up becoming more famous for the record than for the gold mine he used to pay for it—which turned out to be a fraud, and the train ride an attempt to distract his investors. But the trip would forever be a highlight of the last golden age of the railroads, before government regulation altered their world forever.
Trains had been changing life in America for nearly fifty years, but it was just after the turn of the century that the railroad business reached its peak of economic and cultural influence, independence, and power. There were already several thousand gas-powered automobiles puttering around the country, and the Wright Brothers had already made their first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk. But in 1905, the nation’s railroads dominated every aspect of national life as no industry ever had—and, in the estimation of some, no industry has since.
And each time the trains became faster, America seemed a little more intimate, more manageable, a nation paradoxically getting bigger and smaller at the same time.
In the first six years of the twentieth century, the Pullman company filled more orders for “private varnish”—each car costing at least $50,000 ($1.3 million)—than it had in the previous twenty years. There was great competition over the opulence of the decor and the technological perks: Some cars had working fireplaces, and a few even had pipe organs driven by steam from the engine. And those who didn’t want the hassles of ownership could rent from the growing Pullman fleet.
For those who couldn’t afford such luxuries, the train stations also provided a popular form of entertainment—as compelling and regularly scheduled as radio, movies, and television would come to be.
“It was a great deal to us kids, watching the trains come in,” recalled one Midwestern woman who grew up to be a Harvey Girl. “Everybody in town did it, every single day. Mama showed us where to stand, and we’d go down there every afternoon after school and watch all the people and activities around the depot. There was one railroadman who knew us, and he’d take us into the Harvey House for some of their homemade ice cream. We were just little girls. There was nothing like it in the world, nothing!”
FORD’S BUSINESS WAS certainly surging with the railroads, and was only expected to get better as the Santa Fe built him more large hotels along the High Iron. But he had some major life decisions to make. The ten-year contract between the railroad and Fred Harvey—the last deal made while his father was still alive, and the one that Fred’s will was written to protect—had less than a year to run, expiring in September 1906. At the same time, Ford and Ripley were both approaching milestone birthdays. Ripley, his walrussy mustache graying, was turning sixty, an age when most railroad executives considered retiring. Ford was about to turn forty, the same age at which his father had rethought his life’s goals and started the eating house business. And he was faced with a similar window of opportunity. When the contract ended, the promises he made to his father and the company—to honor the obligations made during Fred’s lifetime—would all be fulfilled.
Ford and Ripley had been discussing the gravity of this moment. Ripley was extremely proud of what the railroad and Fred Harvey had been able to accomplish in the past ten years. But he also truly cared for Ford, almost as if he were another son: He had two of his own, but they were more interested in oil and steel than railroading. Ripley’s relationship with Ford was special. He once wrote to him: “To be ‘nice’ to one’s friends is comparatively easy—to be equally ‘nice’ to one’s father’s friends is a much rarer quality and one (among others) that has made you conspicuous … You cannot know the satisfaction a man of my age has in the friendship of one twenty years or more his junior.”
Ford knew that if he chose to, he could parlay his success into a high-profile position in business or politics. He had watched his longtime colleague Paul Morton, Ripley’s first vice president, leave the Santa Fe to join Roosevelt’s cabinet as secretary of the navy and then take one of the top financial jobs in the world: president and chairman of the board of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, in New York. Ford had offers every day for Fred Harvey to take over management of top hotels and restaurants across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which would dramatically broaden the scope of his empire—and perhaps lessen his reliance on the Santa Fe. Or he could simply take all the money he had made, sell the company, and start over.
It was a tough decisi
on because there were signs that the golden age of railroading could soon be coming to an end. Teddy Roosevelt was becoming increasingly aggressive about regulating the railroads—and all aspects of “big business.” This included trying to “bust” the powerful New York–based financial trusts whose leaders—especially New York financier J. P. Morgan, along with heirs to the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt fortunes and railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, the so-called captains of industry—sat on the boards of most major railroads as well as the largest companies that shipped by rail. In 1903, Roosevelt signed the Elkins Act, which beefed up the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission and made it illegal for railroads to offer discounts on published rates. His attorney general also successfully prosecuted and broke up the Northern Securities Company, run by Morgan, Harriman, and John D. Rockefeller, which controlled a number of competing railroads in the Midwest and the West.
Now the Roosevelt administration was pushing through two more pieces of groundbreaking legislation to reinvent the power of the federal government to regulate business. One was a bill Ford Harvey very much supported: the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which created the first national standards for the safety of food and the safety and efficacy of medicines. But the second act, passed the same week, made everyone in the railroad business crazy: The Hepburn Act gave the Interstate Commerce Commission unprecedented power to regulate and infiltrate almost every aspect of the industry. The bill allowed the ICC to actually change any shipping rates deemed not “just and reasonable.” It forced the railroads to adopt standardized accounting procedures so their books could be easily examined by government inspectors. And it completely disallowed discounts or any other preferential treatment for better shipping customers. Under the new rules, the government could also regulate train terminals, express companies, and sleeping cars, which brought it uncomfortably close to being able to directly regulate Fred Harvey.
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