The moment provided a nearly perfect illustration of the differences between Harriman and Pierpont Morgan in their approaches to business and to their avocations outside business. At the same time when Harriman was making arrangements for his Alaska trip, Morgan was preparing for an expedition of his own—in his case a pleasure cruise to Europe. Morgan boarded the liner Majestic, bearing a shopping list of books, manuscripts, and artworks for acquisition, on April 5, only a few days after Harriman had materialized in Merriam’s doorway. For the next ten weeks Morgan “had a grand time” in the marketplaces, Herbert Satterlee reported. He bought two entire libraries—of the private collector James Toovey and of the late third Earl of Gosford—and numerous other antiquarian rarities, including books printed on vellum and illuminated manuscripts from the fifteenth century. He spent his idle hours shopping and dining out, and before the end of the month he had reached Aix-le-Bains, his favorite watering hole in the South of France. Harriman was also on a collecting spree—but his quarries were scientists and scientific knowledge.
As for business matters, Morgan occupied himself in the final years of the millennium with extending the principles of industrial consolidation he had applied to the railroads to new industries, such as steel and electric lighting (efforts soon to culminate in the creation of United States Steel and General Electric). Harriman’s work was devoted to consolidating his own railroad holdings rather than casting his net wider.
In so many ways, Harriman and Morgan seemed to be following divergent paths in this critical period. But their courses would soon converge—and dramatically.
* * *
THE PERIOD SPANNING the last half of 1898 and the first few months of 1899 had been the most productive of Edward Harriman’s railroad career. His dominating concern at the time was the Herculean reconstruction of the Union Pacific—replacing equipment, realigning tracks, and shoring up its finances—following his election as its chairman in May 1898. But he also extended his influence deeper into the railroad industry through his involvement in three major reorganizations.
The first was the Chicago & Alton, a once-proud road connecting Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City that had fallen far behind its competitors in construction and maintenance. By 1898, when a group of discontented shareholders invited Harriman to take it over, the road was facing extinction. As an expert who examined its condition observed, the Chicago & Alton “had not added one mile of road in seventeen years” and had “little or no reserve capacity to conduct a larger business.” With his new partners—James Stillman of the City Bank and Jacob Schiff—Harriman set the line back on the path to profitability, albeit via a financial restructuring that later would be condemned by his critics as more an act of plunder than of improvement.
Around the same time, Schiff invited Harriman to join the board of the Baltimore & Ohio, the nation’s oldest trunk line, which ran from Baltimore west to St. Louis, with spurs to Detroit and New York, and which also was in a demoralized state. There Harriman first encountered the northwestern railroad tycoon James J. Hill, who would become one of his chief adversaries in the chapter to come. During their joint tenure on the B&O board—which Schiff told Hill he had arranged so “you and Mr. Harriman should . . . join hands” to ensure the success of the property going forward—their relations appeared to be cordial. The good fellowship, however, was at best superficial.
Then there was the Kansas City Southern, which ran from Kansas City south to the Gulf of Mexico and which a maladroit group headed by the steel-wire tycoon John “Bet-a-Million” Gates had tried to reorganize. Gates, a flamboyantly profligate gambler, quickly discovered that he had no aptitude for the railroad business and turned the enterprise over to Harriman, in the prelude to what became one of the most exasperating deals of the latter’s career.
All those transactions were overshadowed by a plan just over the horizon—Harriman’s quest for the Southern Pacific, an immense California railroad. This acquisition would be his biggest of all, with the capacity to catapult him into the forefront of the railroad industry.
But first, Alaska beckoned. At the urging of then–secretary of state William Seward, the government had purchased the vast territory from Russia in 1867; its moniker of “Seward’s Folly” only recently had begun to fade with the discovery of gold in the neighboring Yukon Territory of Canada and the raising of hopes that a similar discovery might be made in Alaska. Still, at the moment, its main interest was still for naturalists intrigued by the prospect of new discoveries of flora and fauna in a land near the very limits of human exploration.
* * *
The steamship George W. Elder carried Harriman’s 1899 expedition to Alaska; when it returned to Seattle after the two-month trip, laden with artifacts including a sixty-foot-tall totem pole and a variety of insect specimens, a reporter described it as “a floating curiosity shop.”
* * *
Harriman’s impetus for the expedition was a bit murky. Harriman himself later described its original purpose as “a summer cruise for the pleasure and recreation of my family and a few friends.” His youngest son, Roland (who was three years old when the Elder set sail with him aboard), reported years later that his father had been advised by his doctors to take a rest cure from overwork. The true motivating force, however, may have been Harriman’s insatiable curiosity about the world around him—which is where Merriam came into the picture.
Despite his formal training as a medical doctor, Clinton Hart Merriam’s fascination with ornithology as a child growing up in New York’s Adirondack mountains had steered him into a career as one of the foremost naturalists in America. One of the thirty-three founders of the National Geographic Society in 1888, Merriam had been appointed chief of the United States Biological Survey (later the US Fish and Wildlife Service), a body that commanded nationwide scientific respect at the time even though it formally comprised only himself and two assistants.
Harriman’s name was a blank to Merriam, but calls to a couple of industrialists of his acquaintance—for the visitor had mentioned that he was in the railroad business—filled it in. Within the industry, he learned, Harriman was known as “a man of means and a rising power in the railroad world.” Merriam could not have known it at the time, but the trip that Harriman was planning would soon solidify his reputation outside the railroad industry to complement the respect he had gained within it.
That evening, Merriam invited Harriman and his personal physician, Lewis Morris, to dine at his Washington home, where he listened with growing interest to a proposal for a unique scientific venture. Harriman disclosed that he already was refitting the steamship George W. Elder for the Alaska voyage and collecting an onboard library of books, treatises, and maps relevant to the expedition. “He thought there should be two men of recognized ability in each department of natural science,” Merriam recollected—“two zoologists, two botanists, two geologists, and so on,” as though he were assembling a veritable Noah’s Ark of scientific talent. When Merriam mentioned that few scientists could meet the expenses of such a trip, Harriman revealed that all the members would be traveling as his guests.
Despite Harriman’s generosity, Merriam had some trouble filling out the passenger manifest. One holdout was the world-famous naturalist John Muir, who was also unfamiliar with the Harriman name. Muir would confess later that he was “unwilling to accept the hospitality of a person of whom I knew little,” at least before learning what services would be demanded of him in exchange for free passage. Muir hesitated until the last moment, finally signing on when told that the voyage would take him to parts of the Alaskan coast he had missed on his two earlier expeditions to the region. He remained skeptical even after agreeing to go, writing to his fellow naturalist Charles Sprague Sargent, with whom he had explored the forests of northern New England during the previous summer: “Pray for me . . . I wish I were going to those leafy woods instead of icy Alaska.”
The preparations for the two-month, nine-thousand-mile trip underscored
Harriman’s aversion to doing anything by half measures. The Elder was equipped with a steam launch, two “naphtha launches” fueled by a sort of kerosene, several small boats and canoes, and a full complement of canvas tents and sleeping bags. The library Harriman had mentioned to Merriam numbered five hundred items. The passenger list of 126 included Harriman, his wife, their three daughters and two sons, Mrs. Harriman’s cousin William Averell and his wife and daughter, and three servants. A cow was brought on board to provide fresh milk for Roland, the baby of the Harriman household. The academic and professional passengers comprised twenty-five renowned scientists; three artists, two photographers, and two stenographers; a surgeon, his assistant, and a nurse; a chaplain; eleven hunters, packers, and camp hands; and sixty-five officers and crewmen. Reviewing a roster of scholars from three museums of natural history, six universities, and four government scientific bureaus—many of whom had national reputations in their fields and some of whom were known even to the lay public—Harriman’s authorized biographer George Kennan judged that “no more distinguished body of American scientists was ever gathered together for an expedition of this kind.”
Harriman transported the East Coast contingent from New York to Seattle, the disembarkation point, on a special train. On the first day of the transcontinental leg he called together the scientists traveling with him to inform them that he was placing the details of the expedition’s itinerary entirely in their hands and to encourage them to form a committee to map out the route.
The Elder left port on May 31. As it made its way into the Alaskan spring, the zoologists were delighted with the abundance of birds and other wildlife, the botanists with a coastline “abloom with wild geranium, columbine, Jacob’s-ladder, iris, cypripedium, shooting star, rhododendron, bluebells, primroses, and forget-me-nots.” And all were enthralled by the sheer beauty of the land. “Day after day,” recorded the naturalist John Burroughs, the expedition’s official rapporteur, “a panorama unrolled before us with features that might have been gathered from the Highlands of the Hudson, from the Thousand Islands, the Saguenay, or the Rangeley Lakes in Maine, with the addition of towering snow-capped peaks thrown in for a background . . . It was along these inland ocean highways, through tortuous narrows, up smooth, placid inlets, across broad island-studded gulfs and bays that our course lay.”
Early in the trip, Muir sounded a few discordant notes. The Elder stopped at Kodiak Island to afford Harriman an opportunity to achieve one of his personal goals, the shooting of a Kodiak bear. He managed to bring down a giant female along with her cub, to Muir’s intense distaste. (The adult animal’s pelt would be repurposed as a rug for Harriman’s office.) A day or two later, a still grumpy Muir listened to his fellow scientists talking “of the blessed ministry of wealth, especially in Mr. Harriman’s case, now that some of it was being devoted to science. When these wealth laudations were sounding loudest I teasingly interrupted them, saying, ‘I don’t think Mr. Harriman is very rich. He has not as much money as I have. I have all I want and Mr. Harriman has not.’”
Someone reported the remark to Harriman, who sat himself next to Muir at dinner that night. “I never cared for money except as power for work,” he told Muir. “What I most enjoy is the power of creation, getting into partnership with Nature in doing good, helping to feed man and beast, and making everybody a little better and happier.”
Muir was unaccustomed to rubbing shoulders with the wealthy, even less so with industrialists who could talk so candidly of aspirations beyond the getting and spending of money. From that point on the skeptical naturalist felt himself being won over by his host. “I soon saw that Mr. Harriman was uncommon,” he would recall. “He was taking a trip for rest, and at the same time managing his exploring guests as if we were a grateful, soothing, essential part of his rest-cure, though scientific explorers are not easily managed, and in large mixed lots are rather inflammable and explosive, especially when compressed on a ship.” But Harriman was as good as his word. The Elder followed the route the scientists dictated; periodically a group would be dropped ashore with provisions for land exploration, and picked up later on schedule.
On the way north they stopped at Muir Glacier, discovered by its namesake in 1879. Muir regaled the group with what Merriam suspected was a “fairy tale about the abundance of wolves in a little snowy valley” some eighteen miles deep into the glacier, which Muir called “Howling Valley.” His curiosity stoked, Harriman organized a hunting foray for himself, Merriam, Dr. Morris, and two companions. (Muir himself begged off, on the grounds that he was “no hunter.”) The men, each carrying a pack weighing twenty pounds, disappeared into the frosty mist, tramping over ice and snow into which they sank first to their ankles, and soon up to their knees. Harriman positioned himself “always either in the lead or near the front,” Merriam recollected. On the first day they hiked until midnight, roped together for protection against hidden crevasses, then rested in their sleeping bags flat on the ice until the penetrating cold forced them back on their feet and on their way. Finally they reached the valley, finding it completely buried in snow and devoid of wolves. Having made it as far as Muir’s valley, Harriman ordered an about-face. The party reappeared at main camp at nightfall on the second day, footsore, chilled to the bone, but unanimous in their admiration for Harriman, who at the age of fifty-one and without having had a day’s training away from an office desk had led them on a thirty-six-mile trek with only a few hours’ sleep.
Back on the Elder, they sailed deep into Prince William Sound, where they discovered a new arm of the waterway, promptly christened Harriman Fiord. Eventually they turned west into the treacherous, fogbound Bering Sea. There the outbound journey should have ended, but Mrs. Harriman had conceived a desire to set foot in Siberia. So they continued on, reaching a settlement known then as Plover Bay and today as Provideniya, where all the travelers disembarked for a few hours to pick flowers and buy trinkets from the local Eskimos. (More than four decades later, in September 1942, when Averell Harriman, Edward’s elder son, was part of an Anglo-American mission to Moscow to discuss supplying the Soviet army against an invasion by Hitler, he confided to Joseph Stalin that he was making his second visit to Russia. The first, he explained, he had made without a passport as a seven-year-old during that stop at Plover Bay. “Oh, that was under the Tsar,” Stalin replied. “You couldn’t do that now.”)
The George W. Elder returned to Seattle on July 30, two months after its departure, laden with samples of six hundred species of flora and fauna previously unknown to science, five thousand photographs, and maps of four glaciers “never before seen by white men,” as recounted in the New York Times. Upon the craft’s landing, an Associated Press dispatch pronouncing the expedition “an entire success . . . both from a scientific and pleasure point of view” ran in newspapers coast to coast. The Elder, it reported, “resembled a floating curiosity shop, stocked with everything Alaskan from a totem-pole five feet through and sixty feet high, to the minutest insect.”
The scientists immediately started sharing their findings with the public. Henry Gannett, a glacier expert from the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, expressed the view that “the glaciers of Alaska are gradually retreating, due . . . to climatic changes.” Dr. George B. Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream, passed along an observation from Alaska fishermen that “the salmon in the streams of the Territory are being rapidly exterminated” and advised that “some steps for the preservation of this fish should be taken before it is too late.” For years, specialists in natural history and the natural sciences would mine the material, which was compiled into thirteen illustrated volumes. As for Edward H. Harriman, after nearly a decade of his rising renown in the railroad industry, the remarkable expedition had made him a household name.
* * *
HARRIMAN HAD BARELY settled back into his office routine after the Alaska expedition when he was forced to unwind the mess that Bet-a-Million Gates had made of the Kansas City Southern. This railroad
had a colorful but dispiriting history—one to which Gates had been contributing prolifically.
The Kansas City Southern was originally the brainchild of a handlebar-mustached entrepreneur named Arthur Stilwell. The eccentric Stilwell was perennially in the grip of what he sometimes described as “hunches” and sometimes as ideas planted in his head by fairies or “brownies” visiting him in his sleep. Some of these intuitions were plausible enough, but they were invariably confounded by poor execution. That was the case with Stilwell’s Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf Railroad, which ran 778 miles from Kansas City to the Gulf of Mexico at Port Arthur, Texas, a depot Stilwell built and named after himself on the site of a settlement that had been wiped off the map by a hurricane.
Stilwell’s goal had been to capture some of the freight that was either being monopolized by the Illinois Central, the only north-south road in the region, or carried east directly to the Atlantic seaboard. This was a promising plan, initially well-capitalized thanks to Stilwell’s adroit salesmanship. But Stilwell was fundamentally a real estate promoter. Rather than entering population centers his railroad skirted them, on his reasoning that the towns would expand toward the rail line, affording him lavish profits in land speculation. He not only saddled the railroad with uneconomical curves and unserviceable grades, but built it on the cheap—embankments too narrow, bridges and trestles too light, water supplies too meager. A venture that might have succeeded under different circumstances was unable to turn a profit, and in April 1899, when its trains had been running for only a few months, what was then known as the Kansas City Southern went bankrupt.
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