While the inaugural team of twenty Couriers faithfully memorized all the material in the manuals during their monthlong training, they did stage a revolt against the outfits chosen for them: men’s shirts, riding breeches, high-laced boots, and straight-brimmed hats. The college girls urged the company to costume them in more stylishly feminine attire, and new uniforms were quickly tailored in Albuquerque. They featured velveteen blouses in jewel colors and elaborate squash-blossom necklaces; the skirts were dark with a walking pleat, accented with a silver concha belt, and they could wear either walking shoes or boots. There was also a soft-brimmed cloche hat with a silver thunderbird symbol—a copy of an image Herman Schweizer had once sketched at an Indian ruin. Except for the hat, the Courier uniform quickly became a look that tourists wanted to emulate, and to this day many female visitors to Santa Fe are delighted to return home with their own updated version of this outfit.
The first group of detourists arrived on May 15, 1926. An editorial in the Albuquerque paper optimistically predicted that the Indian Detours would bring fifty thousand visitors a year to the state’s three major cities—which was almost as many people as lived in those cities combined.
FORD’S WIFE, JUDY, was preparing for her annual midsummer trip to the West, accompanied, as usual, by Kitty and Mary Perkins. While their excursions always ended at the family home in California, on the way they liked to find new places to explore and shop. Since the debut season of the Indian Detours was already in full swing, they decided to visit Santa Fe and do some private detouring of their own.
Before departing on July 14, Judy Harvey did what she had always done before leaving town—she went to Mass and received Communion. Afterward, she visited the bishop of Kansas City, Thomas Lillis, in his residence to say goodbye for the summer. Bishop Lillis was pleased that she was so excited about her trip, but as always he looked forward to her return. With her generous donations of time, money, social networking, and energy, she made his life, and the life of Kansas City, much easier.
The three women left Kansas City in a private Santa Fe railcar, which they rode to Trinidad, Colorado, where they were met at the Fred Harvey hotel, the Cardenas, by one of the plush new Harveycars and a private driver. They drove over the Raton Pass and then enjoyed a scenic route through northern New Mexico that train travelers never saw, hugging the base of the majestic Sangre de Cristo Mountains until reaching Taos Pueblo. From there, they drove down a breathtaking mountain pass—now called the Taos High Road, but back then the only road. When they reached downtown Santa Fe, an entire team of La Fonda bellmen were bucking for the privilege of carrying the bags of the boss’s family.
The next morning, the Judy Harvey party was properly fussed over during breakfast at La Fonda before riding, with their own private driver and Detours Courier, about forty miles to the Santa Clara Pueblo to visit the Puye Cliff Dwellings. As a younger woman, Judy had taken vigorous trips with her children, including a camping trip into the Grand Canyon with Kitty and a group of her friends not long before the war. At fifty-nine, however, she was no longer in good enough shape to keep up with her athletic daughter. To reach the Puye Cliff Dwellings—seven hundred roomy niches carved into a two-hundred-foot-high volcanic ridge—visitors had to walk up a steep, rough trail. Judy gamely tried to keep pace with Kitty and Mary. But then she started to feel faint.
The next thing Kitty knew, her mother was having a massive stroke. They were hours away from medical care.
As soon as Ford heard the news, he summoned the family physician, and they boarded a private car on the next Santa Fe train. By the time they reached La Fonda on Tuesday morning, Freddy had already arrived and was with Kitty at their mother’s bedside. Judy was being treated with stimulants in a desperate attempt to bring her back to consciousness, but nothing helped. By Wednesday evening, her kidneys were failing. After staying up with her all through the night, Ford emerged from the hotel suite bleary-eyed at 5:30 a.m. with the painful news that his wife of thirty-eight years had died.
Word spread rapidly through La Fonda as well as in the town, where the Harvey family had many friends. Everywhere they went, in the hotel or on the street, someone approached to express sympathy. The railroad arranged for two special cars to carry the body and the mourning family back to Kansas City as quickly as possible. Bishop Lillis issued a heartfelt statement about his friend, whose faith “was as simple as that of a child.” He could not believe that after seeing her just a week before, when she appeared to be in the best of health, he was now writing her eulogy.
Three days later, Judy’s casket was carried into St. James Roman Catholic Church, escorted by a Girl Scout “guard of honor” made up of representatives from all the various troops across the city that she had supported. Bishop Lillis gave a moving eulogy, mirroring the editorial about her that appeared in the Kansas City Star.
“Seldom has a woman not in public life had so wide an acquaintance and so broad an influence,” the paper wrote, and then quoted Robert Louis Stevenson: “So long as we love, we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say we are indispensable.”
Ford was beside himself with grief. His friends knew that while he was stoic and patient in business matters, he didn’t believe in hiding his emotions concerning death. They remembered how long and intensely he had grieved for his father, and later his mother. Given how close he was to Judy, and how unexpectedly she had been taken, there was no telling how long he would mourn.
THE INDIAN DETOURS became so popular so quickly that La Fonda’s fifty-five rooms were not sufficient. The overflow of guests were booked into other downtown hotels, although some spent the night in nearby Lamy, where Fred Harvey had a small depot hotel, El Ortiz. When that filled up, the railroad would arrange for multiple Pullman cars to be parked at Lamy, as an expandable trackside hotel with all the amenities.
Mary Colter was told to start planning for a dramatic expansion of La Fonda. Besides the Indian Detourists arriving by train, Ford believed the hotel would soon need to accommodate a new and growing breed of motoring tourists.
They would arrive on U.S. Route 66, the government’s first transcontinental “highway,” which became the most popular and romanticized route from Chicago to Los Angeles, the “Mother Road” for exploring and traversing the American West. Route 66 officially opened only six months after the Indian Detours, on November 11, 1926 (along with the rest of the fledgling federal highway system). The largely unpaved road went from Chicago to St. Louis, then southwest into Oklahoma and northern Texas, crossing into New Mexico near Tucumcari. From there, it pretty much followed alongside the Santa Fe tracks all the way to California, with one major deviation. Unlike the railroad, Route 66 came directly into downtown Santa Fe, just as the original Santa Fe Trail had. Motorists pulling off Route 66 found themselves less than a block from the entrance to La Fonda.
CHAPTER 32
A WONDERFUL LIVE TOY TO PLAY WITH
AFTER THAT SUCCESSFUL FIRST SUMMER OF THE INDIAN DETOURS, both Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe railroad began investing even more heavily in southwestern tourism. They also dramatically increased the use of Indian imagery to brand their companies—which they had been doing piecemeal for many years, ever since railroad advertising manager William Haskell Simpson started a nationally distributed Santa Fe Railway calendar in 1907, featuring original paintings and drawings of Native scenes. An increasing number of top artists in Santa Fe and Taos—many of them transplanted realists from New York’s Ashcan School who wanted to paint something other than ash cans and gritty urban scenes—supported themselves in their cowboy Bohemia by doing illustrations for magazines, the railroad, and Fred Harvey.
In the fall of 1926, the Santa Fe started a faster daily train service that cut the ride between Chicago and Los Angeles by more than five hours, to just under sixty-three hours total—“only two business days.” Previous high-end trains always used names employing words such as “special” or “limited,” but this new train was simply ca
lled “the Chief,” and all its advertising featured a stylized drawing of a powerful, looming Indian leader.
For the inaugural run of the Chief, the cast of the new MGM Western War Paint rode between Chicago and Los Angeles in costume. While the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific started competing fast train service the same day, their ceremonies and photo ops featured only executives and starlets christening engines with champagne bottles. (During Prohibition, champagne bottles could be broken, as long as nobody drank.) The Santa Fe ceremony featured young Chief Yowlachie, one of the stars of War Paint, in full headdress.
Even as they agreed to let the railroad use them as promotional tools, the professional Indians were debating the dilemmas of marketing “noble savagery.” The performers who participated in the debut of the Chief were the same ones trying to organize Indians in Hollywood to lobby for fairer treatment and better parts. They didn’t want to be stereotyped—but if this was going to happen anyway, they wanted to at least make certain that all Indian roles were played by actual Indians. Thirty tribes with members in the movies—bolstered by the dozens of Indians brought in from Wyoming to make War Paint—came together to form a loose Native actors’ union, the “War Paint Club.” Chief Yowlachie was a leader of the group and performed at its first public fund-raiser: a “pow-wow” held on the set of the film.
This love/hate relationship with the marketing of Indian imagery and rituals extended to the artists who painted the pictures, and even to the tourists. While outsiders had been visiting Indian pueblos for decades, the runaway success of the Indian Detours—and the omnipresent advertising for the auto tours—brought many more people to see the snake dances and buy curios, and it became a lightning rod for national attention to the issue of exploitation. This was exacerbated by all the artists and writers drawn to Santa Fe and Taos, who had their own mixed feelings about being ethnological tourists.
Author D. H. Lawrence was a perfect example. Spirited to New Mexico in the mid-1920s by Mabel Dodge, the wealthy artist collector who moved her high-society salon from Greenwich Village to Taos, Lawrence went to see the snake dances like everyone else. He promptly wrote a magazine essay about how horribly exploitative it was: “The Southwest is the great playground of the white American … [and] the Indian, with his long hair and his bits of pottery and blankets and clumsy homemade trinkets, he’s a wonderful live toy to play with. More fun than keeping rabbits, and just as harmless.” Then, a week later, Lawrence wrote another, better-known essay about the beauty and profundity of the very same dance. It was the quintessential experience of the self-loathing tourist—fascinated and repelled by the pueblo dances and the way they were marketed, outraged by tourism without really acknowledging that he, too, was a tourist.
As more creative people came to visit Santa Fe and Taos, or to live there, these mixed feelings received more artistic and well-written expression—especially after the 1927 publication of novelist Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, which was set in Santa Fe, invoked many of her experiences there, and made many Americans want to visit. (Georgia O’Keeffe arrived not long after and quickly became part of the artistic and communal life of the area: She socialized with the Harveys in Santa Fe, and her picture appears in family photo albums from that time.) But there were an equal number of well-known detractors who felt the Indian Detours were exploiting, and possibly even destroying, the “last vestiges” of the “real America” they were selling.
Ashcan School painter John Sloan did a wickedly satirical etching after his detour, depicting eight earnest Indians trying to dance surrounded by a dozen big Harvey buses and hundreds of distracted, well-dressed tourists, some lined up at a nearby Harvey buffet.
The great cartoonist W. E. Hill made one of his beloved full-page illustrated journals for the Chicago Tribune titled “The Great Southwest.” Under his drawing of a fetching Courier guide, he wrote:
Indian detour couriers are smart girls. A Girl guide taking a party of inquisitive tourists on a sightseeing trip must have her geology, zoology and languages right at her tongue’s end. She must know enough about geological formation to be able to point and say, “Look! That’s a mountain.” And she must have a smattering of Mexican and Spanish so that when visiting an Indian pueblo, she will be able to say, “Why, Manuelito, aren’t you ashamed to charge two dollars for that!”
Under a drawing of well-dressed society ladies exploring cliff dwellings near Santa Fe, he wrote:
Mrs. Mosher and Mrs. Haverstraw are discussing a certain problem that sooner or later a tourist taking the Indian detour trip just has to face. “What,” asks Mrs. Mosher, coming up from the deserted kiva, “are you going to do about the courier girl when you leave? She’s a college graduate, you know, and I should hate to offend her by offering her money. Besides, this courier tells me she’s cousin to an Earl!”
And under a drawing of a very uncomfortable little Indian girl, he wrote, “Indian child being coaxed, to no avail, by a lady tourist who wants a snapshot.”
But, love them or hate them, the Indian Detours quickly became a popular cultural touchstone, the closest thing America had to Disneyland in the 1920s. Even though they were still a relatively small part of Ford’s empire—and, while successful, still not all that profitable—they brought a disproportionate amount of attention to the entire Fred Harvey experience. A flurry of well-known America writers chimed in on their Harvey House exploits. F. Scott Fitzgerald complained in his 1927 journal, “It takes so long to get to California, and there were so many nickel handles, gadgets to avoid, buttons to evoke, and such a lot of newness, and too much of Fred Harvey so when one of us thought we had appendicitus [sic] we got out at El Paso.”
Humorist Will Rogers, on the other hand, said he couldn’t get enough of Harvey food. In his syndicated “daily telegram,” he wrote:
Wild buffalo fed the early traveler in the West and for doing so they put his picture on a nickel.
Well, Fred Harvey took up where the buffalo left off.
For what he has done for the traveler one of his waitress’s pictures (with an arm load of delicious ham and eggs) should be placed on both sides of every dime. He has kept the West in food—and wives.
During this same year, the young food writer M. F. K. Fisher was having a transformative experience in a Fred Harvey dining car during her first-ever train ride. She was nineteen at the time, traveling on the Chief with her beloved Uncle Evans, and she would later claim her meals on the trip triggered the first stirrings of her career as America’s premier culinary scribe. Uncle Evans, who rode the Santa Fe often, was a lifelong Fred Harvey fan. “The only test of a good breakfast place is its baked apple,” he told his niece. “The Harvey girls never fail me.” She went on to describe the experience:
Uncle Evans knew where to ask the dining-car steward to put things like live trout, venison, fresh corn, melons. They were served to him at our twinkling, snowy little table in the restaurant car, at noon and at night, and I paddled along happily in the small sensual spree my uncle always made of his routine travelings. I probably heard and felt and tasted more than either of us could be aware of.
One time when he looked at me over his menu and asked me whether I would like something like a fresh mushroom omelet or one with wild asparagus, and I mumbled in my shy ignorance that I really did not care, he put down the big information sheet and for one of the few times in my life with him, he spoke a little sharply. He said, “You should never say that again, dear girl. It is stupid, which you are not. It implies that the attentions of your host are basically wasted on you. So make up your mind, before you open your mouth. Let him believe, even if it is a lie, that you would infinitely prefer the exotic wild asparagus to the banal mushrooms, or vice versa. Let him feel that it matters to you … and even that he does!
“All this,” my uncle added gently, “may someday teach you about the art of seduction, as well as the more important art of knowing yourself.” Then he turned to the waiter and ordered two wi
ld asparagus omelets. I wanted for a minute, I still remember, to leave the dining car and weep a little in the sooty ladies’ room, but instead I stayed there and suddenly felt more secure and much wiser—always a heady experience but especially so at nineteen. And I don’t believe that since then I have ever said, “I don’t care,” when I am offered a choice of any kind of food and drink. As Uncle Evans pointed out to me, I either care or I’m a dolt, and dolts should not consort with caring people.
CHAPTER 33
POISED FOR TAKEOFF
AS MUCH AS YOUNG FREDDY HARVEY WAS EXCITED ABOUT HIS role in the company’s Santa Fe expansion, his head was still in the clouds. While Ford kept urging him to cut back on his flying—wasn’t polo dangerous enough?—Freddy kept telling his father that America’s future was in aviation. In fact, a proper airport was being built in Kansas City—right in town, not far from Union Station. He would be able to take off whenever he wanted.
By the spring of 1927, Freddy’s obsession with planes no longer seemed so unusual. All over America, people were becoming fascinated with aviation as pilots announced they intended to fly across the Atlantic and finally claim the Orteig Prize. Back in 1919, Raymond Orteig, a Frenchman who owned two major hotels in New York, offered $25,000 ($311,131) to anyone who could fly nonstop between New York and Paris. A pair of flyers was poised to try the flight from France: socialite Captain Charles Nungesser, a highly decorated World War I flyer whose many broken bones were rumored to have been replaced with platinum, along with his one-eyed navigator, Lieutenant François Coli. There were three other American pilots jockeying for the prize. Two were similarly well-financed war heroes; the third was a bold young mail-plane pilot from St. Louis named Charles Lindbergh.
Freddy knew Lindbergh from the air corps—the young flyer had attended a two-week reserve officers camp in Kansas City in 1925, where he impressed Harvey and his fellow aviators by flying brilliantly and single-mindedly, refusing to drink, smoke, or even joke around with the others. Freddy had also known Lindbergh’s backers for years—they were the wealthy members of the flying club in St. Louis, the closest major club to his own group in Kansas City. Lindbergh had been giving flying lessons to prominent St. Louis banker Harry Knight, who in exchange helped him put together a syndicate to raise the money to build a new plane for him—the Spirit of St. Louis. Their hope was that if Lindbergh made it across the Atlantic alive, his flight would bring attention to aviation in their hometown.
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