Fast Horse Outta Town: Trollheart Explores the Legend of the American West

[Trollheart]

John M. Larn (1849 - ?)

A salutary tale showing why a good vigilante does not make a good sheriff, Larn was elected to the post in Fort Griffin, Texas, in 1876, and immediately set about abusing the trust of the people of the town in him. Looking back over his career to that date, it’s obvious why he was never going to be a good upholder of the law, as he was mostly on the wrong side of it prior to this. When his boss, a rancher in Colorado, accused him of stealing one of his horses in 1869 he shot the man and fled to New Mexico, where, believing the man was after him, he shot and killed a sheriff. While working for another rancher, Bill Hays, on a cattle drive back to his old stomping grounds in Colorado in 1871, he shot and killed three more men, two of them Mexicans.

By now he was established in Fort Griffin and considered a pillar of the community, having married one of the local powerful family’s daughters, and then he got involved with the vigilante group The Tin Hat Brigade (sounds like someone who believes the CIA are monitoring our communications and aliens are trying to infiltrate our brains, doesn’t it?) and turned on his old boss, leading a posse against Hays on a charge of cattle rustling (true or not, I don’t know) instead of bringing them in, killed every last one of them. Notwithstanding this - or who knows, maybe due to it - he was made sheriff three years later, and entered into a contract with the local garrison to supply them with cattle.

However he decided the least expensive way to fulfill this contract was to take cattle from the herds of other ranchers, and so became a cattle rustler, something of which he had been privately suspected prior even to pinning on the tin star. He would not wear it long though, and whether due to pressure from the town or in order to concentrate fully on cattle rustling, he resigned the next year and with his ex-deputy went fulltime into the business of raiding herds. He continued to supply the fort, and stepped up his tactics of intimidation, waylaying ranchers and cattle men, shooting at their houses and shooting their horses, and generally prosecuting a reign of terror across the territory. Showing how little the authorities knew or cared about his extracurricular activities, he and Selman were made hide inspectors of Shackelford County, which gave them easy access to cattle - foxes in charge of the henhouse, indeed.

His crimes eventually came to light and he was arrested, though later released, but when he shot and wounded a rancher a warrant was issued for his arrest. Shackled to the floor of the cell to deter any attempts by his supporters to free him, it was in fact his old friends the Tin Hats who stormed the jail, not to set him at liberty but to hang him. As the chains made that impossible, they opted for shooting him instead.

Edward “Ned” Bushyhead (1832 - 1907 )

A Cherokee miner, Ned was seven years old when his family joined the infamous “Trail of Tears” as the Native Americans were forcibly resettled as the West began to open up to the white man. They ended up in Oklahoma, where Ned took a job as apprentice on the local newspaper, The Cherokee Messenger, later moving to Arkansas where he worked as a printer. In 1850 he and his brother heard the call of gold and headed to California, but three years later Ned was running his own newspaper in San Diego. He became a fixture there, well respected, and after selling his interest in the paper he became deputy sheriff in 1875 and sheriff in 1882, a post he would hold for two terms.

In 1899, on the very cusp of the new century, he became Chief of Police, and remained in that post until four years before his death in 1907. He was described as intrepid, brave, courteous, patient and sagacious, all qualities very much required in any good lawman.

Fred Dodge (1854 - 1938)

A man with an appropriate name for an undercover detective, Dodge worked for the Wells Fargo Company in such places as California, Arizona and Nevada. It was in fact while working in Tombstone that he recommended the services be sought of Wyatt Earp to guard the stage line. He became friends with Earp and stood with him and his brothers against the Clantons and was later himself elected constable of Tombstone, while still working undercover for Wells Fargo. He helped US Deputy Marshal Heck Thomas track down the famous Doolin-Dalton Gang. In 1906 he moved with his family to Texas, where he bought a ranch and to which he retired.

George Maledon (1830 - 1911)

Perhaps not strictly a lawman, it can’t be denied though that the end of many a convicted criminal ended with the hangman, and Maledon, with a name like some sort of devil out of Goethe or something, was acknowledged as one of the best. As in the case of every practitioner of the deadly art, no real blame can be attached to Maledon, as he merely carried out the lawful orders of his master, Judge Isaac Parker, the so-called Hanging Judge of Arkansas, whose motto was “permit no innocent man to be punished, but let no guilty man escape” and “Do equal and exact justice”. Of German descent, Maledon came to America with his family when still a child, and they settled in Detroit, Michigan. He moved to Arkansas as a young man, enlisting in the military when the Civil War broke out, having previously been a police officer there.

He cut far from the imposing figure you might associate with a hangman: short, with a little beard, dressed in black and very quietly spoken, not really the kind of person you would tremble before (for his own sake) on your way to the gallows. But soon after the war ended and he returned to Fort Smith, he was appointed as “deputy with special charge of the execution of condemned prisoners”, in other words, the prison hangman. What surprises me is that, unlike later English hangman such as Albert Pierrepoint and John Ellis, Maledon does not seem to have received any sort of basic training, needed no qualifications and was in no way any different to other turnkeys in the prison, so why he was chosen as the hangman is a mystery to me, particularly given his diminutive stature (five feet five inches). Maybe nobody else wanted the post, and because he was said to be a mild-mannered and quiet man, the authorities didn’t expect any resistance from him?

At any rate, he soon became known as “the Prince of Hangmen” and this being a time when hangings were a public spectacle, his fame spread as more and more people attended the hangings at which he officiated. At one point, in September of 1875, he hanged six men at once, before a crowd of almost five thousand fascinated onlookers. The men had of course been condemned by Judge Parker, this event earning him his epithet, and bringing his court the unofficial title of “Court of the Damned”. I’m sure they didn’t, but someone could apparently just as easily have hung a sign over the door to the court reading “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” There certainly seemed to be no hope for anyone who went into Parker’s court, as any man found guilty ended up dancing his last dance in air.

Though Maledon was famous, he was really more infamous, and people shunned him, as they would mostly with hangmen down the centuries, association with them being seen as an omen of bad luck, the stink of death believed to cling to them, and perhaps some of the blame for the deaths of the criminals too, as it had been he who had launched them into the afterlife, even if the decision was most decidedly not his and he was merely a tool of the justice system. If he had not done it, someone else would have.

In 1878, though hanging was very much still legal, and would remain so well into the next century, it became more a private affair, by invitation only, and a large fence was constructed around the gallows. Spectators were now limited to about fifty, usually the relatives and friends of those the criminal had killed, maybe his own family, officers of the court, dignitaries from the state and so on. Though dedicated to his art, Maledon did evince human feeling when he refused to execute his friend, US Deputy Marshal Sheppard Busby, who was accused and found guilty of shooting another marshal whom he had tried to arrest. Quite why this should be seen as a hanging offence, when it seems clear Busby was only carrying out his duty, I don’t know, but he was sentenced to swing (maybe just unlucky that the Hanging Judge was in town) and Maledon would not drop him. It’s not as if it saved the marshal’s life: Maledon was just replaced for the hanging by another man.

After giving twenty years of his life to the prosecution of state killing, Maledon retired in 1894, but he was not to have a quiet retirement. His daughter, having fallen in with a thief and cheat who turned out to be already married, was shot by the man, Frank Carver, and killed. Though Judge Parker passed the sentence of death upon him, by now the appeal process was in force and Carver’s lawyer successfully argued the death penalty down to life imprisonment. As a man who had meted out final justice to what he surely believed to be deserving men, the overturning of the judge’s verdict sickened Maledon, who believed the system was going soft on criminals. He took to the road with a sort of carnival of the dead, displaying his hangman paraphernalia, telling stories of those he had hanged and showing their pictures.

If, for most of his life, Maledon was a quiet, reserved and mostly unremarkable man, he died as he had lived really. He became seriously ill as he entered his mid-seventies and moved into an old soldiers’ home in 1905, where he died six years later, in 1911.

Thomas “Bear River” Smith (1840 - 1870)

Whereas I remarked earlier that the idea of a man chosen to be sheriff casting his badge down in the dust, for it to be left there until some stranger riding into town picked it up seemed to me to be nothing but Hollywood hokum, it appears I don’t know s**t, which will come as no surprise to most of you. How come I don’t know s**t? Well, because it happened, that's why, at least once, in the rough and dangerous Texas “cowtown” of Abilene. What was a cowtown? One of the stops along the way for the great cattle drives that took place every summer as ranchers drove or paid for their herds to be driven up north to be sold in the cattle markets. Small towns, dependent on the passing trade from cowboys (literally, the guys who herded the steers and bulls were called cowboys, and that’s where the name came from) and their trail bosses, hosted these cattle parties as the drovers passed through on their way north, availing themselves of gambling dens, brothels, saloons and dance halls. Things could, and did, get mighty rowdy when the boys were back in town, and it would be a brave or foolhardy man who would stand up to them and try to instigate, never you mind keep law and order there.

Such a man was Thomas “Bear River” Smith, one of the few who would take the job (another famous marshal having looked into it and said no thanks, heading out on the next train anywhere) and he would pay for it with his life. A professional boxer in his youth, Smith had served in the police force in New York but had to retire when he accidentally shot a fourteen-year-old boy, and took up a post with the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868, which took him to Bear River, Wyoming (presumably from which his nickname sprang). He soon became city marshal, and had to deal with vigilantes who had hanged a member of the railroad who had killed a man. A tense confrontation ensued and the army was called in.

Smith left Wyoming and made his way down south, ending up in Abilene. He took the job as the town’s marshal, and quickly made his name known as “No gun marshal”: having banned all weapons from the town, he utilised his boxing skills to subdue lawbreakers with his fists, but his edict of banning guns was unpopular in the rowdy town, where cowboys liked to ride around shooting off their pistols, settling disputes with hot lead, and generally raising hell. He survived two attempts on his life, but when he went to arrest a local man for having killed a farmer, he was ambushed and shot. His cowardly deputy fled, instead of standing to help him fight off two men. Unfazed, Smith returned fire, but the lawbreaker’s partner grabbed an axe and buried it in Smith’s head. He had lasted less than a year in the job, and would be succeeded by a real legend of the West, Wild Bill Hickok.

No less a personality than President Eisenhower himself later paid Smith homage, saying

“According to the legends of my hometown, he was anything but dull. While he almost never carried a pistol he…subdued the lawless by the force of his personality and his tremendous capability as an athlete. One blow of his fist was apparently enough to knock out the ordinary ‘tough’ cowboy. He was murdered by treachery.”

 

[Trollheart]

Cowboys and Angels: Bringing the Word to God’s Country

In Ireland it was once said, and quite truly, that even the smallest villages whose population numbered in the tens would always have two things: at least one pub, and a church. And so it was in the West too. While men and women - though mostly men - wanted saloons and whorehouses and gambling dens to allow them to blow off steam after a hard ride across the range, or day in the mines, or chasing bad guys in a posse, or even just serving customers in the general store, they also needed to be close to their god. I heard somewhere, I can’t recall where, recently, the phrase “Saturday’s for drinkin’ and fightin’, Sunday’s for repentin’!” And that’s very apt. For men, certainly - very few women would be drinkin’ and fightin’ - the idea of expiating their sins on a Sunday appealed; to many, it was essential. The biggest, baddest, meanest hombre in a cowtown would still believe himself a child of God, and want to beg forgiveness for all the trouble he had caused. Faith was one exceptionally strong thread running through, and binding together the tapestry of the lives of the folk who moved out into the West.

But a church without a preacher is just an empty building, the same as a saloon without a barkeep, so men had to be sent out to take control and ownership of these places of worship - in some cases, even build them or have them built - and tend to the souls of their flock where they were in the greatest need. No matter that I’m not a believer and have no time for priests, I can recognise the incredible bravery and fortitude of these men, sent forth by their bishop or church to act as shepherd to the lambs who had headed out into the vast unknown. Those pioneering families who had chosen to leave the towns of the east and head in the opposite direction had done so with the intention of starting up a whole new life, and the husband at least would have been armed for the journey. While a priest might certainly have carried a gun, or more likely travelled with a party who were armed, his magical cloak of protection, which constrained folks to treat him with honour, respect and even fear in the civilised towns, would be of little use to him out on the range.

Bandits who attacked the wagon train might, possibly, baulk at hurting a preacher; indeed, his very presence might deter them from attacking at all. Not always of course; many desperadoes had as much respect for God’s ministers as they had for the local sheriff or a rattler, but some would defer to his authority, perhaps in their ignorance feeling that they would actually be offending the Big Man himself were they to go after his preacher. But there was one group who were more likely to prey on the settlers, and they would have no respect for, nor fear of the man in black. Indians, to whom this man would be a natural enemy, mocking their sacred rituals and denying their gods, trying to convert them to his ways, would hate and loathe preachers, or else would see them as no different from any other invader. Threatened with the wrath of God if they were to touch him, they would most probably laugh, assuming they could understand him, which they probably could not: their gods were more mighty and powerful than the man on the cross whom this man wore around his neck for protection, and his admonitions would mean nothing to them.

Unlike the early disciples of Christ, it’s doubtful the preachers of the Old West were in any great hurry to martyr themselves, and so if they were taken prisoner and tortured, while their faith may have sustained them for a time, they might certainly have cause to regret having travelled to the frontier. Amongst the savages, they could expect no better treatment than any other prisoner, and might indeed fare worse, their very presence seen as an insult to the native gods. As well as this, they would not on the whole have been fighting men. It’s a rare thing when a priest has to break up a fistfight or draw his gun (if he has one) and back home, just about everyone gave way when the man in black appeared, or else ignored him. It would be a brave man indeed who would lay hands on a preacher, an action which would most assuredly have him watching the world through a grille of iron bars for at least a day.

But out here, the priest was on his own. Well of course he would say he was not: everywhere he went, God went with him. But God could not pull a Colt 45 on assailants or cut the rope that tied the preacher to a stake as Indians danced around it, or stop his horse if it bolted after being spooked by bandits. Sure, if he wanted to believe God was with him, then technically he was not alone. But in reality, he was. He might have a wife, he might have children, but they all depended on and looked to him for their comfort and safety, and he would have nobody to speak for him. In time, yes, he would be welcomed by the community and become a valuable and respected member of it, but first he would have to earn that place, and while in general a preacher was welcomed, in some of the more lawless and dangerous towns, he would be about as welcome as a skunk in an outhouse.

Now here I think we need to make a distinction between two types of religious figures. While preachers generally stuck to their own people, tended to their flock or at least attempted to bring others of their own race over to their side from whatever heretical faith (Calvinism, Catholicism, Anglicanism etc) they held, missionaries were the type of people who couldn’t or refused to keep their god to themselves, and had to go around trying to convert “savages” who had followed their own paths for thousands of years before the palefaces ever set foot on their land. Many of these were doomed to failure, and most did more harm than good. Which leads me to

My View on the Missionary Position (sorry)

Personally, while I can certainly acknowledge the bravery and dedication of men and women who went forth among the uncivilised masses to try to get them to back their horse rather than the one they were betting on, to vote for God V2.0 as it were, the new improved deity that everyone who was anyone was worshipping, I have never had time for missionaries. I don’t see the point in anyone trying to force their philosophy, much less their religion on someone who hasn’t asked for it. At a very basic level, it’s rude and it’s also arrogant. Why do these people think they’re better than these people they call heathen? What gives them - us - the right to say to another race “Nah mate, yer doing it all wrong. Let me help you. Here’s a god you can really get behind. I promise, son, stick with me and I’ll see you right.”

Isn’t it strange that when white men visited any Indian tribe those tribes almost never tried to convert the white men to their religion? What stories or accounts exist of say a Sioux or Blackfoot or, hell, Seminole chief saying “Look, white brother, you got to worship the Great Spirit otherwise we no do business”? Never ever happened, did it? Because Indians and other so-called “savage” peoples didn’t want white interlopers getting, to somewhat use the language of the street, all up in their s**t. They didn’t want the whites worshipping their gods, they didn’t proclaim they were the only gods you could worship; they just said, tell you what, brother: you keep your gods and we’ll keep ours, is that a deal?

But it wasn’t a deal. For reasons that can only be traced to incredible arrogance and a sense of superiority and disdain, white men wanted - and still mostly want - everyone to kneel down at the altar of the Christian god. And even that wasn’t enough, as we’ll see further on: it had to be the right Christian god. If you were a Protestant, forget that stupid papist Catholic god, he’s s**t. Worship our good Protestant god and you’ll be in clover. And of course, behind the encouragement, the carrot so to speak lurked the stick. Reject our god (our good Protestant/Catholic/Presbyterian/insert stupid religious faction here god) and, well, we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you. Almost a kind of religious protection racket: nice god(s) you got there. Be a real pity if you kept worshipping them. Yeah. Anything could happen. Oh sorry! Was that one of your sacred relics? How clumsy of me!

Of course, it wasn’t quite that, as these tribes for the most part weren’t meek and mild, and often laughed at, derided or sometimes plain ignored the missionaries. That’s when they pointedly didn’t ignore them, and some proud clan mother might have a new skull cup to drink out of. The point being that while the Native Americans might, and almost certainly would, have been happy to have shared the country with this new god, either welcomed him as one of the lads, or just put him in a corner, over there somewhere, don’t bother us, just keep it buttoned, the reverse was definitely not true of us. We wanted one god, and it had to be our god.

And if they didn’t play ball, things were going to get very nasty.

But before we start looking into these busybod - I mean, brave and pious missionaries, let’s check out the kind of men who stayed on their side of the fence, so to speak, but were no less brave for all that.

Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show: Keeping the Faith with Circuit Preachers

Just like judges in the Old West, preachers were constantly on the move, going from town to town dispensing the word of the Lord to people hungry for salvation as effectively as His Honour would dole out justice to the deserving. And just like trials and disputes would wait for the arrival of the Circuit Judge, so too would weddings, baptisms but obviously not funerals be timed to coincide with the arrival of the preacher. In the early days these men were real sort of gunfighters of the church, armed and usually quite young, single men, often without any religious training but plenty of fire in the belly. They would preach in houses, schools or barns, even fields, and occasionally those “dens of iniquity”, the saloon and the dance hall, would be cleansed by a fire-and-brimstone sermon - no doubt returning to their sinful ways as soon as the preacher had packed up and left town.

Though these preachers could be of any religious denomination - or none - by far the largest percentage of them, at least around Texas, were Methodist. They had plenty to rail at: out here on the frontier people took what pleasure they could, and as per usual with the church, anything that gave the slightest bit of comfort was looked down upon by God, apparently. Drinking, gambling, lying, stealing, cheating, womanising, fornication and even the taking of snuff (the devils!) were all seen as affronts to God, and preached against. This of course would have hardly made the preacher popular, but in many ways this was not his job. He didn’t particularly care if people liked him, as long as they did the right thing and followed God’s laws. Perhaps slightly comparable to a doctor who you don’t like but who makes you better as long as you follow his or her advice, although in this case it wasn’t the person’s body the preacher was attempting to save but their soul.

As per usual, too, it was sometimes do as I say, not do as I do, or to put it another way, some of these men literally did not practice what they preached. In Wilbarger County in 1899 George Morrison, a Circuit Preacher, fell in love with another woman and poisoned his wife. Whether, as he believed he would, God forgave him is unknown, but what is known is that he hung for the offence. Murder was murder, regardless of what colour coat you wore or how close you were believed, or believed yourself to be to God.

“Ain’t nothing out today but crows and Methodist preachers.” - Old West saying

Preaching was not something you got into to make money. Like the early marshals we spoke of previously, payment was poor, and preachers often relied on the time-honoured collection plate to raise any sort of money on which to live. People were generally as generous as they could afford to be, but most of them having left everything behind to come to the West and yet to make their fortune, there was seldom much to go around. Most preachers died an early death, few making it into their thirties. Perhaps they received their reward in Heaven? Perhaps not.

 

[Windshadow]

I have a distant relative in my family tree that was an exploring god botherer, Famly tradition is that he was eaten somewhere in Africa... but Personally, that sounds like an embellishment to wow us with the story when we were kids... He had a great name and I named a dog after him... Mungo Park Was his name 1771 -1806 I have always detested the whole concept of going exploring to impose your religion onto others who in most cases had their own equally valid belief systems.

 

[Trollheart]

One thing that sometimes drove preachers of the Methodist or other Protestant persuasion west was the increasing influence of Catholicism with the influx of Irish and Italian immigrants to America. Feeling somewhat marginalised in the bigger cities of the east, many preachers decided there were “better souls to save” out there in the wilderness, God’s own country, and headed west either alone or with their families. One such was Joseph Powell, who came to Ohio with the image of Welsh Calvinists working in Jackson, Ohio smelting iron for the railroad. A native of the land of the dragon himself, Joseph believed these men would benefit from his preaching, but he ran almost headlong into a feud which was boiling towards a conflict that would spread out across the country and divide the newborn land in two, raging for six years.

Ohio borders Kentucky, one of the then-slave states, and escapees were constantly crossing over into the free state, on the run from their masters, who had not always as easy a time retrieving their absconded “property” as they might have wished. A cadre of white abolitionists had arisen in Ohio, and they faced down any slaveowner who tried to recapture escaped slaves, often leading to bloody clashes between both.

Circuit preachers also acted as a kind of messenger or news service, carrying information on births, deaths, accidents and diseases, and every other sort of titbit of reliable intelligence they could impart to the townsfolk, who had few other ways of knowing what was going on in the next town, never mind the rest of the territory. Sometimes he would carry copies of - by now well out of date - newspapers, and hand them out, and offer advice, perhaps also books for the edification of those who could read, and afford them. He would be given shelter by families, fed by them and would in return preach the word of God to them, offering them the biggest and best bargain he had in his saddlebags: absolution from their sins and acceptance into the good graces of the Lord - as long as they repented, of course.

Rev. Ralph J. Hall (1891 - 1973)

A genuine Texas-born cowboy, Hall had a different approach than most ministers arriving in a new town. Aware that his appearance was likely to annoy and rile the cowboys rather than placate their souls, he kept his religious affiliations hidden, introducing himself merely as a cowboy, and earning his spurs, so to speak, by taming wild horses, roping steers, drinking and all the other things cowboys do. By the time he began to speak about God and his ministry, the men had got to know and respect him so much that they listened to what he said without discounting it right away, and so he converted, or ministered, by stealth. Many of his contemporaries back home, thinking “I’ll try that” tagged along with him on his next visit, and were quickly disillusioned about the believed romantic and glamorous life of a cowboy. As they examined their rope-burned hands through which many a steer had pulled the harsh cord, or sat with aching backs or arms tired from herding cattle, they definitely had second thoughts, and a lot more regard for the man who had brought them there, and with whom they had ridden along, a man to whom such harsh and long work days were the norm. Clearly, not everyone could pull this off.

Francis Asbury (1745 - 1816)

One of the first circuit riders in the United States, a sort of holdover from the original missions, most of whom legged it when the colony went to war against Britain, Asbury was born in the West Midlands, but moved to America - then still a colony - when he was twenty-two, and gave his first sermon at Staten Island. He worked as a circuit rider on behalf of the Methodist missions, continuing the work he had begun back home in England and assisting John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. When war broke out eight years later, only he and one other minister remained in America. His job was not easy, and he walked a religious and political tightrope as things shifted fundamentally in the former British colony:

"During his early years in North America, Asbury devoted his attention mainly to followers living on the eastern shore between the Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay. Bishop Asbury was a good friend of the Melsons and was their guest many times on his rounds. When the American revolution severed the traditional ties between the American Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain, Bishop Asbury, in the interest of his religious tenets and principles and in an attempt to remain aloof from the political and military fervor that swept the country, announced he would, to keep the embryonic Methodist congregations neutral, refrain from endorsing either Great Britain or the newly formed United States of America government and urged all his followers to do the same. This request placed almost all of his followers, especially those living in Maryland, in an untenable position. The State of Maryland had enacted a law requiring all citizens to take an Oath of Allegiance to the newly formed American Congress. In addition to this, it stipulated all non-residents within its boundaries also had to take and sign an Oath of Allegiance. Those refusing were summarily incarcerated for treason. Asbury, after proclaiming his neutrality, fled to Delaware, where taking an oath of allegiance was not a requirement. His adherents in Maryland suffered the rancor of the proponents of the Oath."

As a result of this Asbury had to emulate Irish Catholic priests during the time of Cromwell and the Reformation, and go into hiding while the war of independence raged across the continent. By 1780 though things were calming down and he was able to venture forth again, and met “Black Harry” Hosier, a freed black man who would become a famous preacher in his own right, and the first African American to preach directly to a white audience. Hosier was able to memorise entire passages of the Bible despite being illiterate, and he became Asbury’s driver and guide. In 1784 Asbury and Henry Coke were given the responsibility by Wesley of leading all the Methodists in America, work Asbury engaged in for a further thirty-two years, up to his death.

Asbury preached anywhere and everywhere he could: courthouses, public houses, tobacco houses, fields, public squares, and rode approximately 6,000 miles every year - that’s almost twice the entire distance from eastern seaboard to west coast - but you can’t keep that kind of pace up forever, and in 1814 he began to sicken, and so took two years off from preaching. He returned to give a sermon on March 24 1816, but it would be his last, and he died the following week, having increased the new Methodist Church membership from a mere 1200 to over 214,000 during his lifetime.

He had been, according to all sources, a powerful speaker and a dazzling preacher. One of his biographers noted raptly "If to speak with authority as the accredited messenger of God; to have credentials which bear the seal of heaven ... if when he lifted the trumpet to his lips the Almighty blew the blast; if to be conscious of an ever-present sense of God, God the Summoner, God the Anointing One, God the Judge, and to project it into speech which would make his hearers tremble, melt them with terror, and cause them to fall as dead men; if to be and do all this would entitle a man to be called a great preacher, then Asbury was a great preacher." Not in any way a vain man, he apparently hated publicity - other than for his church - and was not sold on the idea of personal popularity either, believing the message was its own reward. He suffered from bouts of depression and could be very sarcastic and cutting, even in his prayers.

"Lord, we are in thy hands and in thy work. Thou knowest what is best of us and for thy work; whether plenty or poverty. The hearts of all men are in thy hands. If it is best for us and for thy church that we should be cramped and straitened, let the people's hands and hearts be closed: If it is better for us; for the church,—and more to thy glory that we should abound in the comforts of life; do thou dispose the hearts of those we serve to give accordingly: and may we learn to be content whether we abound, or suffer need".

He rose at five every morning to read the Bible, and did not suffer fools gladly. He came to America with a heavy heart, leaving his beloved England behind, but said that the call of God could not be ignored. The many things and places named in his honour are too numerous to note, but as you might already have guessed, the town of Asbury, New Jersey, was named after him, as was the park made famous by Bruce Springsteen on his debut album.

 

[Trollheart]

Spreadin’ the Disease: If You Build It, They Will Come

While itinerant preachers arriving in town on horseback and preaching in fields or schools was all well and good, and possibly all the community could hope for at the time, the main aim of the church has always been to, rather like a foreign military power in a hostile land, establish a permanent presence, and it traditionally has managed that through the building of churches. Once a church existed, there was a physical reminder of God’s presence, and of the power and authority of the Church (with a capital C); like a stern parent overlooking the town, frowning down on the saloons and whorehouses, the church would be a moderating influence on the townsfolk, a warning that the punishment of perdition was always just waiting for those who slipped into Satan’s unholy grasp, and that if the good citizens believed they had been tempted, or had succumbed to temptation by the evil one, there was only one place they were going to be safe, so they had better get down to the church double quick.

It stands to reason that the building of a church in a town or village also heightened its social status; a town with a church was a God-fearing town and didn’t mind showing it, was proud to, in fact, and its inhabitants might look down on other towns not so similarly blessed. It also did away, of course, mostly the need for travelling preachers, as a house could be built beside the church in which the preacher could stay, where he could live, and he would hold all his sermons, masses and celebrations in the newly-built church. It’s possibly likely too that the building of a church by one denomination - let’s say the Methodists, as they have been cited as being the busiest of them in this period - might dissuade or at least demoralise those of another, let’s say maybe Mormons, who had planned to erect their own. The Methodist church might silently say “this is a Methodist town, move on, boy. Nothing for you here” to visiting preachers of other religions. Of course, conversely, it might have the opposite effect, and lead to determination by that other faction to build their church.

Whichever, it meant that churches began to pop up all over the frontier, as the power of God was demonstrated physically. Between 1887 and 1913 Methodist ministers built over 1,500 churches in rural America, nevertheless circuit preachers, now rebranded as mobile ministries and driving cars instead of riding horses, survived well into the 1950s, as preachers brought the comfort and absolution of God to those who could not get to church: the sick, the old, the weak and the disabled.

Hassling the Heathen: Missionaries in the Old West

But of course the problem with America was that there were those who just didn't want a church - of any denomination - unless it was built to worship the Great Spirit, and even he wasn't too fussed. Mountains, rivers, valleys, fields and plains were good enough for him; no need for some ugly squat building with a spire reaching up like a accusing finger to the heavens. Yep, the vast majority of the American West was inhabited by what white settlers - especially Christian ones - would refer to as "the heathen" or "savages", quite more often simply, and inaccurately, as "Indians".

And these guys needed to be converted. They just didn't realise it.

The boys to take on this job were an entirely different class to your itinerant wandering circuit preachers, or even your by-now-settled ones. The former had no real need to convert anyone; they filled a requirement for the people. The good folk needed a preacher, here was one, and each was happy with the bargain. But the heathen? They didn't want, or feel they needed God, and certainly had no time for His interfering messengers and errand boys, which made the mission of these men (and some women, as we will see) that much harder.

See, a missionary is called that for a reason. He - or she - sees saving souls as a mission, and a sacred duty that has been entrusted to them. They don't really take no for an answer, and with the already long established religions of the American West firmly entrenched in the peoples of the plains, their job was not going to be that easy.

But then, nobody became a missionary because it was a doddle, did they? It took special men and special women to face down an Indian tribe and tell them outright their gods were a load of steaming Tottenham, a steaming pile of hotspur, and they should get with the programme and come over to the winning side. Men and women like these.

Pierre-Jean de Smet (1801 - 1873)

A man who would be instrumental in brokering peace treaties among warring factions, and who would step in to negotiate on behalf of the Native American tribes, particularly the Sioux, De Smet was born in Belgium and came as a missionary to the USA when he was twenty years old, with the idea of converting the natives. After six years he was ordained as a priest and founded religious academic institutions, such as seminaries, in Missouri, but in 1833 he had to return to Belgium due to poor health, and would not return to the United States until 1837. When he returned he settled in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which you may remember would become one of the main points along the transcontinental railroad, thirty years later. Seeing the danger the trade in whiskey with the Native Americans was wreaking, he set out to stop it and also helped map the upper Missouri River.

After certain tribes learned of Christianity, believing that the Christian God had the power to save their sick and dying children, they sent delegations to St. Louis requesting visitations from priests, or as they called them, rather appropriately, “black robes”. For whatever reason, the first two requests were ignored, and the third delegation ran into the Sioux, their mortal enemy, who slaughtered them. Fourth time lucky, thought the indomitable Indians, and this time their party not only reached St. Louis alive, but managed to convince the bishop to send priests, who then met up with De Smet in Council Bluffs. Having obtained permission from the bishop to make this a missionary, he baptised over three hundred people. No records exist to tell whether or not he cured any sick children. Two years later he was back, and this time they founded the St. Mary Mission in Bitterroot Valley.

Having convinced more tribes to convert and invited them to his mission, he sent back word to St. Louis that supplies and housing were needed to stop these peoples from having to be wandering nomads, a state in which it made it tough to civilise them. Cattle, the tools needed to farm the land, seed and the necessity to gather them together in villages were all, he said, vital. Perhaps he hadn’t heard that the US Government was already forcibly relocating thousands of Indians in hundreds of tribes to make way for their own white asses?

Not just a preacher but a true adventurer, De Smet then headed to the Rockies where he travelled extensively, meeting tribes such as the Cree, Chippawa and Blackfoot, crossing into Canada and returning in 1845 to Fort Edmonton, where he spent the winter. The next year he established missions in Montana and Idaho, ending up at Fort Vancouver, having covered over a thousand miles. Despite all these amazing achievements though, he is best remembered for being the first white man to successfully treat with the great Sioux war chief Sitting Bull, who had previously vowed to kill any white man coming into their territory. He so impressed the great chief that Sitting Bull was convinced to send a delegation to talk to the US peace commissioners, which led to the signing of the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868.

This was to be one of his last triumphs though, as he died in St. Louis in 1873. Almost a hundred years later, he had the honour of being one of the few preachers to be inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He had streets, a school, mountain range and a lake named after him, and in South Dakota, his name was on the city and county seat of the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who would go on to become famous through her Little House books, which would be later televised and loved as the series Little House on the Prairie.

Henry Spalding (1803 - 1874)

Now there’s a man who looks like a preacher! You can almost see the brimstone sparking behind his eyes, can’t you, and that impressive beard, which might have made ZZ Top envious, would have added to his dramatic, almost dreaded aspect. I can just see him standing there holding court from his pulpit, thumping the bible and warning all of his congregation that they were going to Hell! Never quite got that: why go see someone rant on about how damned you were, how you had no chance and were going to burn in an eternal fire? Kind of ruins the atmos, doesn’t it? But that’s religion for you I guess.

Spalding was a Presbyterian minister, who worked, along with his wife Eliza, among the Nez Perce peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Spalding was a native New Yorker, and met his wife through a pen pals arrangement (ask yer da) before meeting her in person, with marriage quickly following as they realised they were both zealous about bringing religion to the heathen. Oddly, for such on the face of it sanctimonious people, Eliza was the daughter of cousins - her mother and father were first cousins - which seems a little, I don’t know, unconventional for a man of the cloth to accept? But as I’ve said before, and will say again, what do I know? Times were different I guess, and maybe that sort of thing went on all the time.

In those days, it seems if you wanted to civilise someone you had to go through some red tape, and the holders of that red tape was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which seems something of an unnecessary mouthful, but again, WDIK? Applying, the Spaldings were assigned to the Osage tribe in Missouri, but on meeting Narcissa (seriously, now!) Prentiss (ah come on!) Whitman and her husband Henry, they decided to go instead to what was then known as the Oregon Country, basically the same area wherein operated Pierre-Jean De Smet. These people were so devout that they even changed steamships in order not to have to travel on the Sabbath! Ah yeah, I’ve done the same thing myself hundreds of times. Not.

They travelled through much of the same region which De Smet would later explore, he remarking some years later that the Presbyterian way of preaching had not been altogether successful and made the Nez Perce wary of preachers, though that could of course have been merely his view of an opposing religion. Having travelled part of the way with traders from the Rocky Mountain Fur Company for protection, the Spaldings and the Whitmans split up, the former going on to Idaho while the Whitmans headed off to try their luck in Washington. This would turn out to be a very bad move for them, as we will see in the next section. But back to the Spaldings. Settled in Idaho, and making history as the first whites to live there, they introduced the first ever printing press into the state, and despite the grumblings of De Smet later, Henry seems to have got on very well with the Nez Perce, converting and baptising many of their leaders, and even translating parts of the Bible into their own language.

Ah. No. I see. He wasn’t actually that well liked, as he was, being a strict Presbyterian and all, down on liquor, gambling and other fun activities the Nez Perce, being human, enjoyed, and in fact they quite disliked and even ridiculed him. They surely disliked him mightily when he whipped them or (it says here) instructed them to whip each other for having broken God’s laws. But his often brutal treatment of them was ameliorated by his wife, whom the Nez Perce loved, especially the women, who thought her very brave and strove to emulate her example. Henry’s inflexible attitude towards his, um, flock, led to the American Board dismissing him in 1842. Not that he took a blind bit of notice, just continued doing what he was doing until, maybe with a sense of fatalism, realising there wasn’t really any way they could stop him, him being out in the wilderness with savages and all, they shrugged and rescinded their decision.

When they learned of the massacre of their friends the Whitmans (see further) the Spaldings, thankful that their daughter, who had been staying at the mission, had survived, holed up at Fort Walla Walla (shut up, I’m serious) and, I guess to his credit despite what I said about him above, Henry petitioned the bishop to convince the army not to step in, as it was believed further Indian uprisings and attacks were expected. Oh but again, I should read all the way ahead before writing, as it seems once they reached safety Henry’s attitude changed and he advocated for reprisals. So, just looking after his own skin then. Anyway, the Board decided the last thing they wanted was to get involved in a Pacific Northwest war with Indians - Indians whom, after all, they had gone there to convert, and I don’t mean into piles of bones - and got the f**k out of there, ceasing all missions in the area.

Safe now in Oregon, and fuming that all his work was to go for nothing, Spalding decided to do what every good Protestant has done since Martin Luther nailed his Grievances to the cathedral door: he blamed the Catholics. Well, it made sense, didn’t it? Didn’t it? Of course it did. In a nineteenth-century version of the “stab in the back theory” that galvanised support for World War II and brought Hitler to power, Spalding decided that the bishop who had advised halting all missions in the area - and who was of course a Catholic - had somehow orchestrated the massacre of the Whitmans and their mission for reasons. I mean, come on! But though the bishop is reported to have thought him “most ungrateful”, Spalding does not seem to have been censured or punished in any way for spreading his lies. How Trumpian, eh? Instead he settled in Oregon and became pastor of the Congregational Church, while his wife took a post as a teacher. She died in 1871 and Henry was married again in 1873, taking the sister-in-law of another preacher whom we’ll be looking at too, John Smith Griffin.

Six years later he was back with the Nez Perce, though his mission seems to have only lasted less than a year, and once again he had Catholics in his sights, so much so that he travelled on the new transcontinental railroad back to the Big Apple and on to Washington where he testified before Congress as to the role they and the federal government had played - supposedly - in his failure. He died three years later, having founded a federally funded school for Indians and continued his missionary work in Idaho and Washington up almost to his death.

Narcissa Prentiss Whitman (1808 - 1847) and Henry Whitman (1802 - 1847)

As we’ve seen in the account above, husband and wife joined up with Henry and Eliza Spalding to attempt to convert the Nez Perce Indians of the Pacific Northwest, but at one point in the mission their paths diverged from those of the Spaldings, as they headed for Washington with their friends going towards Idaho. This was the beginning of the end for the young couple, but where did it all begin? Like Spalding, Narcissa Prentiss was born in New York and at the age of twenty-eight decided she wanted to be a missionary. She was married the next year (1836) to Marcus Whitman, taking his name and also keeping her own, which I think may have been somewhat atypical for the time and may have shown her to be rather independent, though I doubt she was any sort of feminist. Marcus had wanted to be a minister but was unable to afford the school fees. He trained as a doctor but felt the pull of the west, as did his new wife. Marcus had already answered this call in 1835, travelling with fellow missionary Samuel Parker to northern Idaho and northwestern Montana where he ministered to the Nez Perce Indians.

The done thing seems to have been to have got married and then almost spent your honeymoon telling natives how great your god was, and why they should worship him. Worked for them anyway, and also the Spaldings, who set off on the same journey after having been only recently married too. The Whitmans, having crossed the Rockies with the Spaldings and thereby Narcissa and Eliza becoming the first two women to do so, they set up their mission in the hilariously-named Walla Walla, in Washington. Narcissa at least saw her role as not just converting the heathen, but teaching them white American values, such as chores, making candles and soap, and baking.

The typical white sense of superiority towards what were considered savage and uncivilised peoples shows in Narcissa’s letters, where she declares the natives, the Cayuse, are "so filthy they make a great deal of cleaning wherever they go ... " and goes on to lament "we have come to elevate them and not to suffer ourselves to sink down to their standard." Thanks lady: I don’t think they asked you to step in with your bloody wooden cross and your posturing and pontificating. ****ing Christians. The Whitmans further instructed the Cayuse to build a place of worship for themselves, and when the Indians wondered what was wrong with the one they had already, Narcissa muttered icily in her letters that "we could not have them worship there for they would make it so dirty and fill it so full of fleas that we could not live in it." Charming. Segregation already in their minds: one church for us, one for those “dirty” natives. That’s how to convert them to the love of God, all right.

Samuel Parker had made promises to the Cayuse that they would be compensated for the land on which the white men built. When this payment was not forthcoming, their chief, Umtippe, made dire warnings, especially when his wife fell ill. He told Whitman "Doctor, you have come here to give us bad medicines; you come to kill us, and you steal our lands. You had promised to pay me every year, and you have given me nothing. You had better go away; if my wife dies, you shall die also." Further tensions arose when the Catholic Church sent its representatives, including Bishop François Norbert Blanchet to compete with the Protestants for the souls of the Cayuse, and the natives, not surprisingly, played each against the other. Henry Spalding would later, as already related, blame the Catholics for the coming massacre, as well as the closure of all missions in the Pacific Northwest. No evidence exists to support or refute this, but historically the two denominations have always hated and tried to thwart each other, so I’d say it’s perhaps not outside the realm of possibility.

Tragedy struck in 1839 when Narcissa’s only child, her daughter Alice Clarissa, was drowned when she fell into a pool, but this did not stop her striking out on her own to visit other towns and settlements when her husband headed back home to gain reinforcements, but unbeknownst to him, the mission itself was on borrowed time, as were they. Like the Spaldings, Whitman believed that the alteration of the natives’ nomadic habits, and settling them in villages while teaching them European-based agriculture would make them easier to convert, or perhaps to put it more bluntly, a stationery target is easier to hit.

The Cayuse shrugged and said they didn’t see what the problem was, so to speak. They had been a nomadic people for thousands of years, and weren’t about to change now. Incensed at their stubbornness and reluctance to change, that is, to remodel their lives to shape his vision and for his convenience, Whitman raged again against the Papists: “The novelty of working for themselves and supplying their own wants seem to have passed away; while the papal teachers and other opposers of the mission appear to have succeeded in making them believe that the missionaries ought to furnish them with food and clothing and supply all their wants.” Complaints and accusations that were echoed in part across the water in England, and which led to the setting up of workhouses.

Rather oddly, it seems to me, in order to safeguard melon patches from which the Cayuse had been, cartoon-animal-like, stealing the fruits, William Gray, another pioneer who would go on to eventually more or less set up the provisional government of Oregon, had poisoned them. Just a little, not to kill but just to deter the Cayuse from taking the melons. Now, if you’re already having problems with natives and are trying to gain their trust, I don’t think poisoning their food, even a little bit, is the smartest move, especially when they’ve already accused you of bringing bad juju in the form of diseases into their community.

In 1847 an epidemic of measles swept through Washington, and the natives, having no natural immunity to the disease, died while the whites mostly survived. While Whitman and the other missionaries did what they could for them, things went from bad to worse when a half-breed Iroquois called Joe Lewis, who had recently joined the mission, spread it about that the white men were poisoning, not treating the patients. Given that they had suffered poisoning before - and deliberate poisoning too - this then was not hard for the natives to believe.

They did, and all hell was set free.

Marcus was the first to go, taking an axe in the head when he was asked for medicine and taken by surprise, then shot in the neck. As the camp erupted in violence, Cayuse swarmed all over the mission and death was everywhere. Narcissa died soon after her husband, and so ended the mission of the Whitmans to civilise the Cayuse. Soon afterwards their mission was abandoned, and shortly after that the ABCFM declared there would be no more missions authorised into the Pacific Northwest. Neither Narcissa nor Marcus would live to see the results of their interference in a culture, as the Cayuse War exploded across the area, resulting in the decimation of the tribe and leading, along with other Indian wars, to the forced resettlement of the tribes on reservations while white people took their land. I’m sure God would have been proud.

America certainly was (which might be the same thing to some people). Not only was Whitman (Marcus, that is) commemorated in the name of schools and colleges, a forest and a glacier, he has (or had, until it was removed recently in the wake of BLM protests) a statue in the Capitol and even has a day dedicated to him, September 4 being Marcus Whitman day. There is also a hotel and conference centre with his name.

Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814 - 1888)

At the extreme other end of the country, we have this guy. French born, he arrived in America in 1839, about the same time as the Whitmans and the Spaldings, but went to the mission in Cincinnati, and worked in Ohio and Kentucky until 1850, when he was appointed by the Pope as Bishop in New Mexico. This seems to have come as a surprise to him, and I can’t say why he was chosen, whether it was due to reports of his good works or whether in fact it was a poison chalice doing the rounds at the Vatican that Pius XII had to unload on someone. Either way, he arrived way down south in Sante Fe in the summer of 1851, but though the governor welcomed him, the Spanish priests already there did not. They refused to recognise his authority, and he had to go personally to their bishop to confirm the diocese was now under his control. The Spanish priests probably said something similar to “We don’ need no steenking Frenchman telling us what to do,” but had to accept his authority, as their bishop had said “sorry hombres, is how it is,” or something.

With his authority no longer in doubt - the Pope trumps any bishop you may care to name - Lamy set about reforming the New Mexico Church, building schools and making new parishes, and of course building churches. He made himself unpopular by ending the custom of concubinage, by which the local priests, forbidden to marry, could still get their end away with the local talent, and also broke up many brotherhoods, secret and exclusive religious societies. Let’s just say he wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular from the off. Nevertheless he was successful in moulding the Catholic faith in New Mexico, and he had the St. Francis Cathedral built, but he died in 1888 from pneumonia at the age of seventy-four.

Thomas Starr King (1824 - 1864)

Here’s one we haven’t come across before. Unitarians apparently believe that God is one being, not a trinity (sounds somewhat more logical than Christianity) and so while they are prepared to believe Jesus was a prophet, an emissary of God, they do not accept that he was God too. Which again I have to say makes far more logical sense, but probably made it hard for King to convince those who were not of his faith to switch. Oh, look! Unitarians also reject the idea of Original Sin and the infallibility of the Bible. I like these guys more and more. Another native of New York, King doesn’t appear to have attended any seminaries or schools, leaving his education in fact at the age of fifteen to support his family, and taught himself to be a minister.

He made his name in Boston, in the church on Hollis Street, of which he was made pastor in 1849, and also on the lyceum circuit, his speeches making him one of the most famous preachers in New England. An abolitionist and an environmentalist, he moved to San Francisco in 1850 and gave sermons on the beauty of Yosemite, for which he would lobby and eventually achieve the status of a national park. During the Civil War he was credited by Lincoln as “the man who saved the Union”, by speaking fervently and at length as to why California should not secede.

"I pitched into Secession, Concession and (John C.) Calhoun (former U.S. vice president), right and left, and made the Southerners applaud. I pledged California to a Northern Republic and to a flag that should have no treacherous threads of cotton in its warp, and the audience came down in thunder. At the close it was announced that I would repeat it the next night, and they gave me three rounds of cheers." ... King covered his pulpit with an American flag and ended all his sermons with "God bless the president of the United States and all who serve with him the cause of a common country."

He set up the Pacific branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the Red Cross, which raised money for wounded soldiers, but the constant grind of the lecture circuit took a toll on his health and he died of diphtheria and pneumonia in 1864. Like other missionaries, he is commemorated in schools, parks, mountains, streets, even a giant Redwood, and he has his own statue in the Capitol, though it was replaced by Republicans in 2006 with one of Reagan. Right. Reagan. Okay.

 

[Trollheart]

Buffalo Gals: Women in the American West

Part I: A Man’s World: Where No Woman Had Gone Before

It took a special kind of woman to face the new frontier. Perhaps it could be said to have been at least partially responsible for a shift in attitude among women in America towards the middle of the nineteenth century. No longer would it be enough to be demure, elegant, soft-spoken and retiring, allowing men to direct every aspect of their lives. That might have worked in the big - and small - cities of the east, but out here in the West, out on the prairie or in the boom towns a woman would have to consider being able to look after herself. While she would almost certainly leave her home accompanied by a man, it was a long and dangerous journey, and there was no guarantee she would arrive at her destination with that man alive, if she reached it at all. But if she did reach it, having lost her man or men to anything from bandit raids or accidents to diseases or sunstroke or exposure, she would have nobody to fall back upon. Assuming she was not heading to already-established relatives, she would be alone and would have to carve out her own future in this brave new world. Nobody was going to help her, and if anything, any man she might encounter would be more likely to try to take advantage of her, so she would need to be able to take care of herself.

While the legend of the West does not lack entirely for female figures - who does not know Annie Oakely or Calamity Jane? - it kind of centres around those two figures, and if you ask anyone who isn’t a student of either feminism or the American West for other names, most will scratch their heads in puzzlement. I know I did. Overall, women in the West seem to traditionally fall into two broad (no pun intended) categories: gunslingers and whores or madams. But of course there were many, many brave women who accompanied their husbands out to the new frontier and made their homes there, and many who made a name for themselves, names which have been all but erased and ignored by history, as generally speaking, the Wild West was a man’s world, and its writers, to a very large degree, were and are men, and to be brutally honest, in these men’s view, women don’t belong on the range.

But belong or not, ignored or not, pushed to one side and told to hush up, they stubbornly refuse to be forgotten, and many books have been written (mostly, unsurprisingly, by women) chronicling their lives and adventures, and trying to place their contributions to the legend and history of the west into context amid all the gunsmoke, thundering of hooves and whooping of injuns. While the above two ladies certainly deserve their place in history, as do the likes of Belle Starr, Susan Anderson, Eleanor Dumont and Cathay Williams (the first African American woman to serve in the US Army), and they will be covered and given their voice in other sections, here I want to concentrate on more unsung heroes (yes, even less sung than these women, who are at least remembered slightly grudgingly, but are still remembered for all that) who have been completely excluded from the story of the west.

But as Winifred Gallagher puts it in her book New Women in the Old West: From Settlers to Suffragists - An Untold American Story, the new frontier actually, almost paradoxically, provided and opened up new opportunities for women. “Women’s status also benefited from conditions in the West’s so-called settler society, which by definition was simpler, more forward-looking, and less encumbered by tradition, precedent, and an entrenched, oppositional establishment. During the hardscrabble settlement era, as in most of America today, it took two industrious partners to support a family, which increased women’s work and its value. In agrarian areas, unmarried women had their pick of suitors among men loath to homestead without a wife to handle the house and garden and earn much-needed cash from her “home production,” whether selling eggs and bread or taking in sewing or boarders.

In mining towns, women used those same domestic skills to make what seemed like small fortunes by marketing hot meals and clean laundry to the overwhelmingly male population. Some settlers also increased women’s civic profile by moving from the private into the public sphere as the “town mothers” who organized many of the West’s first schools, churches, and charities. These homemakers and community builders could not achieve economic much less political parity with men in the patriarchal system, but their record of hard work and dedication won respect and made them a force, albeit nonelectoral, to be reckoned with.”

In fact, equality for women would come sooner in the west than back in the east, where the worth of, and reliance on women was seen to be more important than was admitted by the comfortable city gents in their furnished houses with all their modern appliances and easy lifestyle. When you’re facing a harsh winter or a bleak summer without food or provisions, it’s surely an immense comfort to have the little woman there beside you, to share your tribulations as well as your triumphs. So why should they not be able to vote? Why should they be unequal? Despite the picture drawn by our old friend Hollywood of the woman of the west being a weak, ineffectual, often hysterical female who had no real role other than to be exploited or protected, depending on your protagonist(s) and the theme of the particular movie, respect for women grew exponentially in the west, leading to states such as Wyoming (the first in the USA), Utah (though later temporarily rescinded), Colorado and Idaho passing suffrage resolutions before the century was out.

The Homesteader Act, already mentioned earlier, did not differentiate between the sexes: man or woman could own land as long as they went to the west and cultivated it, and this was a huge step forward for women, who up until the passing of this act had been unable to own property if married. Another major development was the Morrill Land-Grant Act, passed a month later, which set up tuition-free colleges and universities, enabling women to study for careers traditionally dominated by men - law, medicine, journalism - and allowing them for the first time to be other than mere homemakers. This sudden influx of highly-educated and capable women (who could of course be, and were, paid less than their male counterparts) also opened up lucrative opportunities for employers, who had until then had to advertise all their positions for men only, and who probably, in most cases, found the idea of women working in their establishments a more attractive prospect.

A sort of reverse backlash in the east, too, meant that women who had until now been confined to the home could seek education in these new colleges and go into waitressing, work in factories, as secretaries and many other occupations previously denied to them for lack of education. The balance of power, work-wise, began to shift dramatically as women, almost en masse, entered the workplace and threatened the dominance of the male. In some ways, these two acts of Congress could be said to have galvanised a sort of female revolution, symbolically striking from them the chains that had held them imprisoned and restricted for so long, and, to carry the analogy slightly further, releasing them into the wild.

Homesteaders, cowgirls, saloon keepers, all the women who kept the men on the straight and narrow (or failed to, or did exactly the opposite) and stood shoulder to shoulder with them against attacks and adversities. They deserve to be recognised and celebrated, and for my source on this I’m using Erin H. Turners’s Wild West Women: Fifty Lives That Shaped the Frontier. Obviously I can’t feature all of them, but I will try to give a reasonable and varied cross-section.

Clara Shortridge Foltz (1849 - 1934)

Showing her streak of independence at an early age, Clara eloped with her lover when only fifteen years old, but as their family grew he found it difficult to support them. She, for her part, was able to do so by writing articles for newspapers such as The New Northwest and the San Jose Mercury. After thirteen years her husband abandoned her, leaving her with five children to support. She did so by studying law in a local judge’s office thanks to the patronage of Sarah Knox-Goodridge, a local suffragette, and by giving lectures on suffrage. She managed to get a bill through which changed the requirement for lawyers to be white males, and so became in 1878 the first woman in California, indeed the first on the west coast, to pass the bar. However having been but poorly educated (given that she ran off to have babies at 15) she wanted to study to improve her knowledge of the law, and immediately ran into another obstacle set up by the male-dominated society.

Applying to Hastings College of Law, she was refused admission due to being a woman. With her ally, Laura deForce Gordon, she authored a bill which argued that if women could practice law (a right she herself had procured) then it made no sense for them not to be able to study it. Her bill suggested that "No person shall, on account of sex, be disqualified from entering upon or pursuing any lawful business, vocation, or profession." At a time when women’s rights were beginning to be taken seriously, she was able to convince the judge and gain admission to the college for all women. Ironically, the long and protracted legal battle had exhausted her funds, and she was unable to attend the college herself, returning to practicing rather than studying the law. She practiced in San Diego, San Francisco and New York.

Originally a supporter (though not allowed to vote) of the Republican party, she spoke publicly for them in four elections, but switched her allegiance after 1886, lecturing now for the Democrats in Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. She became a leading figure in the women’s voting rights movement, working with the suffrage movement for over half a century and gaining many essential rights for women. In 1893 she suggested the radical idea of a public defender, a system which is now in use across the USA and most of the world, but which then wasn’t even considered. This was certainly another first, and Foltz’s life would be characterised by pioneering attempts and ideas and firsts.

She was the first female clerk for the State Assembly's Judiciary Committee (1880); the first woman appointed to the State Board of Corrections; the first female licensed Notary Public; the first woman named director of a major bank; and, in 1930, the first woman to run for Governor of California, at the age of 81. She also became the first woman deputy District Attorney, and authored the Women’s Vote Amendment for California in 1911. Despite her heavy workload, she never neglected those five children (she did not marry and had no more) and again, despite her prominence in the women’s suffrage movement, was keen to stress the importance of the domestic role in women’s lives.

When she passed away in 1934 from a heart attack at the age of 85, her coffin was carried by federal and state judges, as well as the Governor of Los Angeles. Although she never got to study at Hastings, under pressure from its female members the college granted her a posthumous degree in Law in 1991. In 2002, the Criminal Court in Los Angeles was renamed in her honour.

Susette La Flesche aka Inshata Theumba (1854 - 1903)

Born to the son of a French fur trader and his Ponca wife, Susette was educated at a white school in New Jersey after the Presbyterian mission school on the reservation closed. Her parents favoured assimilation with the white people, believing it held the best prospects for their children, and perhaps seeing the writing on the wall as the white man moved west. As regards education, their instincts proved right, as Susett’s sister, Susan, was to become the first ever Native American physician, while her other sister, Rosalie, became a financial manager for her tribe. Susette though was more interested in politics and so ensured she could learn the English language, which would be vital if she were to pursue such a career. Having graduated, she returned to the reservation where she wished to teach the Omaha, whose chief, Big Elk, had adopted her father as his son and where her family now lived. She ran into problems of a legal and bureaucratic nature though.

She was told by the Indian Commissioner that she could not teach on the reservation without a certificate, in order to obtain which she requested permission to leave the reservation, was refused, left anyway, and got her certificate. On her return though she was further baulked when the Commissioner said she needed also a “certificate of good moral character”. She got this from her school in New Jersey, but now the Commissioner was just simply ignoring her calls. She threatened to go to the newspapers about his intransigence and the clear impression that he simply did not want her teaching here, and he gave in, unwilling to be a part of any investigation, much less a scandal.

She travelled to Oklahoma, where her people, the Ponca, had been forcibly relocated and reported on the poor conditions of the camp, putting into action her earlier threat of using the newspapers to get her point across. Nearly one third of the tribe had already died due to the conditions and the journey to get to the reservation, and malaria was rampant while supplies were scarce, despite the government having promised to furnish them. Further, when the chief of the Omaha, Standing Bear, left the reservation for Nebraska to bury his son, who had died on the journey down, in his native land, he was arrested and put on trial. Susette interpreted for the chief, testifying as to the dismal conditions on the reservation, bringing media attention to the trial and confirming for the first time the rights of Indians as US citizens.

After he won his case, Standing Bear travelled throughout the eastern USA, accompanied by Susette as his interpreter, speaking about the rights of Native Americans. They later took their tour across the Atlantic to England and Scotland. Susette had by now married Thomas Tibbles, the editor of the Omaha Herald, who had been so instrumental in bringing the needed attention to her cause through his newspaper coverage. On their return to America, the couple wrote about the incipient Ghost Dance movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee, in which almost three hundred Lakota were slaughtered by the US Army in 1890. She also wrote and lectured about Native American women’s issues. She died in 1903, having just barely seen the new century in, and eighty years later was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame, with entry to the National Women’s Hall of Fame following in 1994.

Sarah Jane Cummins

You couldn’t call it the ideal honeymoon, could you? Picture the scene: jammed in with the rest of your family and your new husband into a ten foot by three space, jolting and banging along the dirt tracks and across onto the prairie known initially as the Great American Desert, and later renamed as the Great Plains, up the steep inclines of the Rockies and across those mountain ranges, following the trail mostly laid down by Native Americans in earlier times that led to the New Promised Land, sleeping out under the stars because there was so little room in the wagon, and when forced by bad weather to endure the cramped conditions, sharing it with tools, meat, provisions and other worldly goods which had all been piled on and packed into the wagon at the beginning of the journey, and which would not be unloaded until the destination was attained. Sunup to sundown, constantly on the move; hot, sweaty, aching in every bone, apprehensive of bandits or Indians along the way, unsure of even arriving safely, or if you did, of making a success of your new endeavour, and homesick already for the life left behind.

Such was the situation sixteen-year-old Sarah Jane Cummins found herself in when, along with her new husband of barely weeks, Benjamin Walden, she and her family set out from Missouri in search of a better life on the new frontier. Sarah found that she was forced to grow up very quickly during the journey, and traditional gender roles began to mix and turn fluid as everyone did what they could, regardless of sex, to ensure the success of the venture. Sarah had been used to travelling and moving, as her father had followed the opportunities in each territory as he saw them unfold, moving first to Ohio and then Illinois, but this was to to be the longest and most gruelling journey her father would ever take her on, lasting four months over wet, rocky, and at times arid and scorching terrain with no small amount of danger on the way. I suppose she must have thought that if she and Benjamin lasted through this ordeal, they would be together forever.

Sarah showed herself more than willing to do men’s work, as she disdained the practice of ladies riding “side saddle” and rode her horse like a man as she guided her husband’s wagon past ruts and pitfalls, also noting the vast wilderness as she rode, taking in all its rugged beauty and composing lyrical descriptions of the trail in her journal. However, as with most of the missionaries written about in the previous piece, there was no real regard for the Native Americans whom, by their incursions into what was their ancestral lands, Sarah and her family, along with all the other settlers, were displacing. Rather, she seems to have taken great umbrage - through her entry in her diary - at Cayuse and Walla Walla parties who caused “a night of terror” as they harassed the wagons trains passing through their homelands, only placated by strong coffee brewed by the invaders.

Sarah turned seventeen during the journey, and by the time they arrived in the Williamite Valley in Oregon and had staked their claim, it became clear that tough as the journey had been, the end point was not like arriving at a hotel or someone’s house where you could stay for the holidays. There was nothing at the end of this particular dusty rainbow other than the land - precious though it was, and given free of charge - and everything that they wished to create there they would have to mould with their own hands, from building a home to tilling the land and raising cattle and other livestock. This was definitely a new life that came, to use a twentieth-century expression, with some assembly required. Hard work was the order of the day, and there was no time for rest, chiefly because all that awaited them at their destination was a pretty basic shack or cabin, and it would take real effort to turn it into anything resembling a home they could live in.

I began writing this piece, learning as I went and wondering what great contribution to American history Sarah Jane Cummins made. The answer, I found out, is nothing really, but then in another way everything. She didn’t become a lawyer or a doctor (though she did dabble in real estate, something few women back east had the chance or opportunity to engage in) and she didn’t single-handedly (so far as I know) hold off any bloodthirsty bands of native savages. Her husband lasted forty-odd years with her, so she wasn’t left alone to fend for herself in the new wilderness. In many, most indeed ways she was nothing remarkable.

And yet, Sarah Jane stands as an example of the kind of eastern girl who very quickly became a western woman, adapting to her new life and the challenges of the frontier, making a home for herself and her family (she eventually had five children, though only two survived) and proving that women were more than the sum of their parts. She set, if not a trailblazing path, then at least a marker down for the women who would follow her and colonise the west, the women who would dare to dream of a better, more exciting, more profitable - both in terms of money and of personal betterment - life out beyond the fringes, over the Rockies and across the plains, and, as someone once said, into the West. Proof, indeed, that not all the women who went out to seek their fortune and make a new life were heroines, but they all had courage and determination, and sometimes that’s all you need.

 

[Trollheart]

Chapter II: Driving the first spike: the long and winding road

“The day is not far distant when the Pacific will be bound to the Atlantic by iron bands that shall consolidate and strengthen the ties of nationality and advance with giant strides the prosperity of our country.” (Speech by Governor Stanford, January 8 1863, Sacramento)

I: Fire-breathing demons from Hell

As in so much of history, it happens that before we can go forward we must look back, back to a time when America, a pretty fledgling nation at this point, was about to grapple with the idea of railroads. As pointed out in the introduction, most of America - at least, the West, the new frontier - was, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, devoid even of roads. Rude paths had been hammered out, mostly by humans or horses trampling down the grass in certain areas, and ultimately failed experiments had been made to introduce toll roads, or turnpikes as the Americans called them. A combination of ingenuity by those who wished to avoid paying the toll and dishonesty on the part of those entrusted to collect it ensured that turnpikes would never work, and the invention of the steam engine in England would herald a slower but no less impressive industrial revolution in the States which would, within a few short decades, see steam-powered paddle liners chugging up the Mississippi and a system of canals being dug to accommodate other routes.

It cannot, of course, be forgotten that not only the steam engine, but the steam locomotive, indeed the very first railway in the world owes its existence to British genius like Matthew Boulton, James Watt and James Stephenson, and that in this, as in so much else during the time of the Industrial Revolution, Britain led the way. America, by contrast, was slow to pick up on the advantages of steam for railway locomotives; truth to tell, English people had been hard enough to convince at the beginning, with dire warnings of sheep in the fields being turned black, the atmosphere itself being choked by the noxious fumes spewing forth from the thundering beasts as they hammered along at a breakneck twenty miles an hour down the iron rails, and the inevitable horror stories of engines exploding, some of which were, sadly true, but this is almost always the case when dealing with any new technology. Many brave men died before powered flight was achieved, and there were plenty of automobile accidents in the early days of the birth of the motor car.

So why, you may ask, if people feared it so much, did they readily consent to board steam ships with barely an eyelid batted? I think that has to do with the sort of idea that goes “out of sight, out of mind”. Steam ships, paddle ships, were all rather large and luxurious, the internal workings of the engines that drove the vessel hidden in its bowels, where no passenger went, or needed to go, or see. The only real evidence that the ship was steam-powered were the plumes of black smoke furling out of the stacks, and there was little to no noise. In addition, these steamers, though faster than sailing ships certainly, moved at a rather sedate pace, ambling on down the river as if in no particular hurry to reach their destination. And they sort of weren’t: steamers did not tend to build their reputation so much on speed as on luxury. You drifted, but you drifted in style.

Now contrast that with the first steam locomotives. All shining steel, the engine (the locomotive itself being called the engine, or steam engine, something of a misnomer but it stuck) clearly visible in front of you, the comparatively harsh lines of the thing making it seem wild, untamed, dangerous. The steam from the stack would blow backwards over the carriages, most of which had no windows that closed, so the interiors would quickly fill up with thick black smoke, which, while it would disperse out the other open windows, was quickly replaced by more as the infernal engine manufactured a constant supply of the choking vapour, and the faster it went the more smoke it made, and consequently the more you breathed of the stuff.

Add to this the fact that America - sorry to keep saying it but - a fledgling country, had little in the way of heavy industry at this time. Unlike Britain, whose skies were thick with the excreta of the factories, particularly in the north, and also where heavy fog was commonplace, so smoke would not be seen as too much of an inconvenience by most (not to mention the fact that it rained so often, which would disperse and thin out the smoke), America was at that time unused to industrial pollution. So this was something new, and, like almost all new things, carried a certain amount of fear and trepidation with it. Some visitors, looking at the fearsome steam locomotive static on display, were in terror of it: : “The steam, the smoke, the sparks emitted from the belly of the monster were quite sufficient to invoke anxiety, if not downright terror, in timid souls who drew nigh the early demonstration trains.”

Some feared them, yes, to others they were a nuisance. Witness the story of the maiden voyage of the first American-built steam locomotive, the Best Friend, which ran on the southern Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, when a fireman (I’m not sure if he was part of the crew or travelling as a passenger, though I suspect the former, to be in the position he was), annoyed by the whistling sound the safety valve on the steam engine made every few minutes, sat on it. Blocking the release of pressure, he caused it quickly to explode, losing his life and getting the engineer scalded into the bargain. Due to this - possibly apocryphal - story and others, and general fears engendered by scaremongering, perhaps put about by stagecoach companies and others who stood to lose business, even livelihoods if the railroads took over, most of the embryonic railroads that sprung up from about 1820 to 1830 tended to go the safer route, and have horses pull the wagons rather than steam locomotives.

You knew where you were with horses. You could talk to them (after a fashion), understand when they were scared or rebellious, quiet them down, force them onwards. There was a symbiosis, an understanding between man and beast that had existed for most of humanity’s history. Steam locomotives did not respond to cajoling, punishment, threats or pleas. If they stopped, they stopped, and on general principles, horses tended to explode a lot less than steam engines were said to. No matter the technology, the new will always be treated with suspicion and fear. Many households refused to install the new-fangled electricity, preferring the “safety” and comfort of gas. Of course, much of this had to do with the war of words that had gone on between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, each claiming his product was safe while that of his rival was not, and even in the twentieth century, many balked or laughed at buying a personal computer in the early 1980s, believing them pointless and an expensive luxury. Even the “fad” of television was scoffed at in its infancy.

But of course, progress can only be made if the new technology is taken advantage of; horses could only pull wagons at a certain speed, and they tired, and had to be replaced, and could not cover long distances. True, they did not emit thick black smoke from their heads, but on balance the advantages of steam powered locomotives over horses were obvious, though it would take some time before the people, including those who ran the first railroads, could be convinced of this. There’s even a story that, after the untimely demise of the Best Friend (due to no fault of its construction, operation or mechanics, but down entirely to human stupidity and stubbornness) passengers had to be reassured they were protected from future explosions by the addition of a “barrier car” to the train, packed with cotton. As if that would matter, but it seemed to set their minds at rest.

Understanding finally came when a small engine built by inventor Peter Cooper, the Tom Thumb, almost successfully outran a thoroughbred horse in a race to see which was faster, the locomotive only failing due to a mechanical failure which caused it to stop. Prior to the mishap though it had well outdistanced the horse and its rider, and railroad bosses were convinced that the future lay in steam, not (excuse me) horse power.

While we are talking essentially about the wild West here, the term denotes pretty accurately the procedures anyone who wanted to start a railroad had to go through. There was little cohesion, the government was not initially involved and left it to individual states to sort their own railroads out, each state demanding a charter be applied for and issued before any work could begin or any land be allocated. This worked on the principle of “eminent domain”, which essentially meant that, once a charter had been granted, if a railroad company wanted your land because it was about to build through it, they got it. You’d get compensated, but would not be able to refuse to sell. The right of eminent domain didn’t just get handed out though: railroad companies had to lobby for it and fight for it in court, opposed by vested interests such as turnpike operators, steamship lines and stagecoach companies, as well as hostile farmers who weren’t too happy about losing part of their lands, no matter what compensation might be offered. And then there were canal operators and tavern owners, both of whom stood to lose business if the railroad companies got their way.

But the opposing factions were destined to lose. Representing a fading way of life, an out-of-date and outmoded form of transport, they were about to be kicked savagely in the nuts by the bright new technological marvel of the century. As one court ruling in New York put it, “Railroads are not only of great public use in the ordinary business transactions of the citizen, but they may be more advantageously used than turnpike roads for national purposes; . . . they tend to annihilate distance, bringing in effect places that are distant near to each other: tending in their magic influence to the extension of personal acquaintance, the enlargement of business relations, and cementing more firmly the bond of fellowship and union between the inhabitants of the States. Next to the moral lever power of the press should be ranked the beneficial influence of railroads in their effects upon the vast and increasing business relations of the nation, and promoting, sustaining and perpetuating the happiness, prosperity and liberty of the people.”

Start talking in glowing terms, in a newly-independent country, of the happiness, prosperity and most importantly liberty of the people, and you had the public on-side, anyone grumbling about the railroads now looking like a sore loser (which they were, mostly) trying to stand in the way of progress. And we all know what happens when you try to stand in the way of progress, don’t we? Progress just rolls right over you and keeps going. There is no stopping it. And there would be no stopping it. Trains and railroads were the future, steam was the future, speed and power and convenience and comfort all beckoned from that shining twin silver track winding away into the distance of the American imagination, and the idea was decided forever.

Of course, the railroad companies still had to pay. Charters were expensive and hard to attain, but now that eminent domain had been enshrined in the history of the railroad, once they had the charter they had the right to take whatever land they needed, as long as they compensated the owner. It surely goes without saying that with state involvement (and, perhaps tacitly, or even covertly, federal too) the scope for corruption was widespread, from monopolies granted to certain railroads by their states to tax exemptions and lotteries to attract private investors. As the railroad later grew, and the transcontinental began to be more than just a pipe dream, this corruption would grow too, earning the railroad bosses the dubious reputations that had dogged cattle barons and later oil barons. Some of the larger states even supported or financed railroads in other states, but with strings attached. Boston sponsored the Western Railroad to the tune of nearly four and a half million dollars, while the Erie Railroad in Pennsylvania received three million from New York, but had to agree to route the railroad through a sparsely populated area on the border between the two states, which was hoped would stimulate growth. New York financed many other railroads, in fact being one of the biggest investors in the system, outlaying a total of nine million dollars to ten different railroad companies.

 

[Trollheart]

Chains of Misery: The Dark, Infernal Engine of Oppression

In a typical attempt to rewrite history, most, though not all, books written on the railroad tend to gloss over or even ignore entirely the shameful practice prevalent in the southern states of America during the early years of its creation. While slavery had been a dark part of man’s history for hundreds of years, by the nineteenth century most countries had outlawed and banned it, with a few exceptions, America of course being the most prominent. They must surely have known their time had come, but the southern states of America clung to their belief in, and their perceived right to slavery like the last ragged gasps of a hated old man dying, with nobody to miss him and nothing left to live for, refusing to die, holding on to life just for spite. It was, and had become, a way of life for them, and generations had grown up knowing no other way, but it would be churlish to suggest they resisted because they didn’t know any better. Of course they did.

But without going into a whole treatise on the idea of slavery itself, as I already noted in another section, it seems to me that I owe it to the memory of all those brutalised, killed, raped and whose freedom was trampled on as if it were nothing to remember them and report the dreadful conditions in which they laboured. Seen as nothing but property of course, they were hired out to the railroad companies by the plantation owners, and hey, if they didn’t return, who cared? The slave bosses could always buy more slaves. So there was really little to keep the construction foremen from working the slaves to death, all in the name of progress and, more importantly, profit. And, naturally (!), of showing the black man his proper place.

This may account for the poor quality of the railroads built there, and their limited success. Quite apart from the misery of being a slave, I imagine it is hard to motivate one to work on a project on which they are forced to labour. In the northern states, men would work on the railroad with a sense of pride, a feeling of accomplishment, a desire to be part of history. And, of course, for money. Slaves would know that the railroad was for whites only, that they would never ride it, that it would never be of benefit to them, that all it would do, in essence, would be convey the fruits of their backbreaking toil to the ports for sale. Hard to get excited or patriotic about such an endeavour.

Of course, there were the terrible working conditions to take into account too. White men on the northern railroads might think they were hard done by and poorly paid, but slaves weren’t paid at all, and while free men could go on strike - or threaten to - to increase wages, such avenues were not open to the slave. Not that he needed them, since, as I’ve just said above, he didn’t get paid. But that wasn’t in any way the worst of it. With no regard for their safety and no care for their wellbeing, railroad bosses forced the workers to endure the harshest of regimes, feeding them food that was little better than offal (when they fed them at all), leaving them prey to attack by insects, snakes, wild beasts and diseases in the swamps and jungles through which they rammed their rails. Scarlet fever, cholera and malaria swept through the camps, which were not much to speak of in terms of accommodation. Here’s an example.

The Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad kept the slaves “in a square pen, made of pine poles, through which one might thrust his double fists, [with] no shutter on the door . . . no chimney and no floor, no bed clothing and no cooking utensils.” In fact, the conditions were known to be so bad that plantation owners often turned down large sums in exchange for hire of their slaves, not because they feared for their safety, but because they didn’t want to lose their valuable property. Considering how bad life on the plantations was, it’s telling that many slaves preferred (not that they had a choice) to remain there rather than go into the service of the railroad companies.

After they lost the Civil War, with the Emancipation Proclamation forcing them to free their slaves, southern states made covert deals among each other and had prisoners shuttled over borders and pressed into work gangs to labour on the railroad. They may have been treated marginally better than the slaves, though not much.

Although most railroads in the north crossed from state to state, it was a different matter down south, where each state ruled that its railroad stay within the boundaries of its own state. Most of these were short, slow and badly built, and serviced the cotton industry, running from plantations to ports, with not too much interest by the state in the line carrying passengers.
In the north (and presumably the south too) fears of the burgeoning new technology were allayed by almost homily-like dissertations on how the railroad would cure everything from poverty to homelessness, provide people a better life and a brighter future, and how everything good would come of it, and nothing bad. Of course, along with those promises came, as in the church, the outstretched hand, as people were asked to invest their paltry savings in this or that railroad, not all of which prospered, though many did.

A rather prescient prediction, however, that was to come true came in 1832 from a writer on railroad matters, Charles Caldwell, when he spoke in glowing terms of a state which was at the time little more than a mostly uninhabited swamp, and declared that the railroad would soon be ““enabling and inducing invalids, and people of feeble constitutions, to migrate from the south to the north, in summer, and from the north to the south, in winter.” A man somewhat ahead of his time, it would seem. Railroads were to be seen, too, as the great leveller, as the rich and the poor should both be able to afford to travel on them (whether the idea of different classes of travel on the trains - a virtual segregation by class - was envisaged at this time or not I don’t know), though it was quietly agreed that this situation might not suit the more well-off, who might be offended at having to share the same train as those below their social station, no pun intended.

Ironsides and Bullseyes: Isaac Dripps, Matthias Baldwin and the birth of the American locomotive

American railroads owe much to a young engineer who, without any plans for one and without ever having seen such a thing before, assembled in a matter of weeks the John Bull, a Stephenson locomotive that had been shipped to the US in parts. He then became chief engineer of the Camden & Athboy Railroad, and set about improving the design of the John Bull, then designing his own locomotives. He added many features, including something unique to US trains, the cowcatcher. This, it must be said, was a heinously cruel attachment, originally intended to impale any cattle who wandered onto the unfenced track, and later to knock them out of the way, but whichever method was chosen, the cow or bull or sheep or ox was not going to survive the impact. The cowcatcher did not catch cows at all, but slew them, and its inventor had no interest in saving or protecting the cattle, merely ensuring that impact with them did not derail the train.

Another amateur engine designer, a jeweller by trade, Matthias Baldwin had put together an engine as a hobby, and was asked by the owner of a museum to build a small locomotive to pull around some cars in a display in the museum. Local railroad bosses saw it, and approached Baldwin to make a locomotive for them. He produced “Old Ironsides”, a big, heavy, slow machine that often needed the assistance of horses as it regularly rocketed around at one mile an hour, but he worked on it and made improvements, and was soon in the business of making locomotive engines. In a relatively short space of time, American locomotives took on distinctive characteristics that set them apart from the British and European ones, such as wide chimney stacks with sparkcatchers to reduce the likelihood of fires being started by stray sparks and cabs for the crew. The wider wheels too, vital for transport along the wider and heavier American rails, helped make the engines more robust, true workhorses, and they in time attained a grace of their own that bordered on their being seen as works of art.

Carriages, however, were another matter. The first ones were nothing more than old stagecoach bodies on flat trucks linked together by loose chains, and jerked and buffeted the passengers so badly that few early trips ended without bruises and the odd bout of concussion. People carrying umbrellas, in the hope they would protect them from the smoke, found them catching fire and also being whisked over the side by the violent motion of the train. One difference, however, between European and American carriages was the lack of any first-class, or other class segregation, as all carriages (called cars in America) were open and without compartments. This did not always suit passengers, as people liked their privacy, but one thing remained, even in the supposedly liberal north: black people had to travel in their own carriages and were not allowed mix with the whites.

In contrast to Britain and Europe, American railroads worked on the principle of “build ‘em fast and cheap and get ‘em earning”, which meant inferior materials were used, less tunnels bored and less stations built, and of course little attention given to safety issues, something which would come back to haunt the American railroads down the line. Sorry. But while there were now railroads in operation in the US, it wasn’t anything like a network, with small lines running from this town to that mine, and no further, or slightly larger lines serving one or two towns directly along its path. I suppose they could all but be called local or even internal lines; services that provided transport from a specific place to a specific place, often with no stops along the way, bringing to mind the vision of a child’s toy train set running endlessly round in circles, or down a straight lenght of track, unable to go anywhere once it reached the end and having to be returned to its starting point, the locomotive version perhaps of a shuttlecock constantly going from one fixed point to the other, and back.

Although the railroad began to take America by storm between the late 1830s and the early 1840s, it was new technology, and like all new developments people weren’t quite sure where it was going exactly. Many saw it as a novelty, a day out, somewhere to take the kids - wagon to the train station, ride the train to its terminus (next town probably, or some point within the same town even) and back, then hop into the wagon and home. Few actually envisaged it as any sort of potential replacement for their wagons, and almost nobody foresaw the idea of not only towns but cities being linked by the iron horse, much less a national network that would, in time, stretch right across the country from coast to coast. What happened in 1837 did not help matters.

 

[Trollheart]

A Country in Crisis: the Panic of 1837

Any new economy is going to be slowly rising on shaky feet, and it should not be forgotten or underestimated that America was at this point less than sixty years old, counting from the time it became a nation independent of Great Britain. Several factors came together to plunge the country into a half-decade-long depression from which it struggled to recover. As is almost always the case, the crash was preceded by a time of booming economy, when slaves, land and cotton all commanded a high price, and business was good. Relying somewhat on loans extended from Britain, America was hit by a plague of Hessian fly, which decimated wheat crops and, as we’ve seen from the examination of the first Irish Famine in my History of Ireland journal, when the supply is reduced the demand is increased and as a result the price skyrockets, as it did, leaving many American families (presumably mostly poor ones) to starve.

Banks like to speculate. They always have done, and, despite the many many dire and terrible warnings served up to them from the Great Crash of 1929 to the Financial Collapse of 2008, they probably always will. After all, it’s easy to gamble when it’s not your own money you’re risking. And so in the 1830s British banks had speculated in risky ventures, some of which included the American transportation networks, and as a result, as is always the case eventually, their reserves began to be depleted. And as always happens when this is the case, they began to call in their loans. The demand for cotton dropped (I don’t know why) and as this was perhaps the largest export, America found itself in big trouble.

Certain banking decisions made by the federal government exacerbated the problem, and eventually triggered a real estate crash, leading to something of a perfect storm as the American economy began to approach the U-bend. New York banks lost over one hundred million dollars (back then; around the three billion mark today) between them, and almost a third of the banks in the USA went out of business. States defaulted on their bonds to British banks, and America was for a time forced to withdraw from the international money market. Naturally, the fall in cotton demand was felt most keenly in the south, where many plantation owners, having spent their profits in advance, were forced to sell up. What happened to their slaves is, sadly, anyone’s guess.

The crisis began to peter out around 1842, and with the discovery of gold in California and later silver in Nevada, the economy bounced back and America began to chart its own financial destiny, no longer reliant on other powerful countries such as Britain for loans. The Panic did however have the long-lasting and far-reaching effect of dinting people’s confidence in banks and financial institutions, a nervous relationship between the two which has persisted to this day, and with good reason. As alluded to above, it does not seem that banks learn from their mistakes; when they overreach, and are about to pitch forward into the abyss, the hand of government is always there to catch them, and even when that hand was withdrawn in 2008 and some huge American banks allowed to fail, the others who were bailed out did not take this as a warning, but licence to continue on as they had been, a temporary blip on their entitlement to lose people’s money and shrug, while pension funds and life savings vanished into an all-consuming chasm.

By the time the Panic of 1837 had faded to memory, American railroads were up and running, but even during that turbulent time, some managed not only to get built, but to expand, including the first ever proper rail network.

Leading the way: The Erie Railroad

Proposed as an alternative to, and mirroring the route of, the Erie Canal, the railroad was of course opposed by the operators of that canal, quite aware they were going to lose business if it was built. But protests by locals, many of whom had no access to the canals and therefore no transportation, quieted them and the building went ahead. In 1832 the governor of New York granted the railroad the charter to lay track from the Hudson River at Piermont (north of the Big Apple) westward to Lake Erie at Dunkirk. Construction began in 1836 and in 1841 permission was granted for the railroad to cross over into Pennsylvania on the west side of the Delaware. At 450 miles in length, it was easily the largest railroad in America at the time. However, to paraphrase the Bard slightly, the course of the American railroad ne’er ran smooth, and the New York & Erie Railroad, as it was originally called, suffered many setbacks during its construction, and actually went bankrupt not once, but five times!

As in all such projects, while many may welcome the new pathway to other cities, there were those who, while not necessarily opposed to it, saw a chance to cash in on the great American dream and do what humans have been doing from time immemorial: make a fast buck. Land had to be bought from farmers and plainsmen, frontiersmen and hillbillies, and they all demanded as high a price as they could get. Even some Native Americans - with whom we will deal extensively later, as their role in this shining new venture has, like that of the slaves in the south, been mostly airbrushed from the history of the American railroad - were canny enough to make money out of it. A Seneca chief, demanding ten thousand dollars for the right of way through his ancestral lands, answered the bluster of the foreman, who claimed the land was good for nothing else and was not worth such a price, that whatever else it was not good for, it apparently was good for the railroad. Hard to argue with that kind of logic.

A more religious or superstitious person might have claimed God did not want this railroad built. After advancing a loan of three million dollars, the city of New York was beset by a terrible and tragic fire that razed the financial district to the ground, and bankrupted investors. As I say, the first time the railroad went bust, but by no means the last. When it rose again there was a new president in charge, and he took advantage of the labour of immigrant Irish workers, who had come to America on the infamous “coffin ships”, fleeing the Great Famine and hoping to find a new life. Though wages were absurdly low, they were better than nothing, and if there’s one thing an Irishman does well, it’s backbreaking hard labour. As a result, Irish workers became part of the very structure of the railroad building, and would remain so as it developed across the nation into a coast-to-coast network.

Of course, one other thing an Irishman does almost better than anyone else is pick fights, and if there’s no foreigner to fight with, why then fellow Irishmen will do. Labourers from Ireland were divided into two camps, those who hailed for Cork and Munster, the south and southeast of the country, called the Corkonians, and those who came from Connaught, Galway and such places, who for some reason called themselves the Fardowners. When the Corkonians agreed to work on the railroad for twenty-five cents less than the going rate, the enraged Fardowners attacked their camp - mostly a big barn - toppled it and made every Corkonian swear not to work on the railroad. Then, still spoiling for a fight, they made for a group of German workers, but they, though outnumbered, gave the Irishmen a bloody nose, and the militia had to be called into re-establish order. Talk about Gangs of New York!

Irish or German though, Corkonian or Fardowner, the railroad worker’s natural enemy did not discriminate or take sides. The cruel icy snow that blanketed the tracks up to five feet in depth was hated by all, and in some begrudging form of co-operation the two crews would work together to clear the lines and allow further construction. This would become an increasingly difficult job in the years ahead, as the railroad network moved up into the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges, where the snowfalls would not be just irritating and inconvenient deposits to be cleared away by the sweat of one’s brow, but deadly, constant and life-threatening blizzards that could destroy track and wipe out whole camps of labourers at a stroke.

Errors plagued the building of the Erie Railroad, which, given it was one of the first - if not the first - is perhaps understandable, but some of the decisions are hard to fathom, such as the refusal to take the opportunity to buy the Harlem & New York Railroad, necessitating a steamer ride downriver for the passengers, the decision deliberate, as it was envisioned that the people might enjoy a trip on the river! Also the gauge chosen for the track, in the mistaken belief it was the same as the one used in Britain, and the usage of piling to support the tracks, an endeavour abandoned after an outlay of a quarter of a million dollars showed it was useless.

Whether all states did this, or whether the southern states took their cue from that of New York, or whether, indeed, it was mere coincidence I don’t know, but the Erie Railroad was expressly prohibited from crossing state lines so as to protect New York’s jealously-guarded status as a trading port. This decision would later be seen to be wrong, and would have to be reversed, at massive expense for the state. The failure - not only on the part of the Erie, but all American railroads - to settle on a universal gauge standard meant that connections between different railroads were at first impossible, as the gauge (distance between the tracks) of one would be different to another, and the trains from the one could not roll on the tracks of the other, making each railroad isolated to its own route.

The odd thing is, most people wanted this, even the normal folks. Riding on a train to get somewhere was all very well, but nobody wanted to invite those from other cities into theirs, in communities that had been, until the advent of the railroad, largely isolated and from which people seldom if ever tended to travel, with a kind of innate distrust of “the world outside”. Not to mention farmers and other traders, who, while they enjoyed using the convenience of the train to get their product to market faster, realised rather belatedly that this was a two-way street (or, to be more annoyingly accurate, a two-way rail) and that now people from outside of town could bring their produce to the markets these people served, up until now, as sole supplier. This mighty new sword, poised to cut through the previously inaccessible American countryside and open up new vistas and opportunities, was proving indeed to be double-edged, and sharp.

 

[Trollheart]

Telegraph (Rail)Road

An almost by-product of the rise of the railroad was the sudden influence and acceptance of a system that had been frowned upon, mistrusted and even laughed at when first trialled. The spread of the telegraph would almost be down to one man, and he was in charge of the Erie Railroad.

Charles Minot (1810 - 1866)

As would be proven time and time again, running a railroad was a tough business, and not for the faint-hearted. It required big men with big voices and big ambitions (and big pockets) who would be hands-on, banging the boardroom table or sometimes even banging, literally or figuratively, heads together to get things done. No shrinking violet, no man afraid to raise his voice or swim against the flow, or speculate where others feared to invest, was likely to ever have a successful business, so much more so in that of the new cattle drive, the railroad. Such a man was Charles Minot, a barrister-to-be, son of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, but whose head was turned not by the law but by the locomotive. A man who got interested in engineering and worked for the Boston & Maine Railroad, where he got to grips with the telegraph, one of the first men to master it. He moved on from the Boston & Maine to the Erie Railroad, becoming its General Superintendent in 1850.

Minot had an odd way of dealing with insubordination. If he called a man to his office to chew him out, and another man looked in before him, his quick temper would explode and be expended on that man, leaving the - usually blameless - man in question wondering what he had done to deserve such treatment, and no doubt retreating in a hurry, while the actual focus of his anger, when he appeared, would be waved off without a word.

Minot was one of the first to work with the telegraph, as mentioned, and also possibly the first to see its potential for use in communicating with his trains. Prior to this, the only way of finding out whether a train was on the way or not was by looking out for the smoke from the stack, usually visible just above the horizon, and often only discernible through a telescope utilised by a station manager who had climbed up a special pole in order to get the necessary height to spot it. There was no such thing as switching and all trains ran on the same track, so for two trains to be on the same line at the same time, without adequate distance between them, could spell disaster. Often, trains would be required to pull in to a station and wait for the one due to pass before they could again use the track.

Minot changed all this. He had long lines of telegraph poles built along the route at the side of the tracks, and though it took some coaxing, demonstration and bullying to get the drivers to trust the contraption, eventually his innovation was praised in 1855 by the state’s Engineer and Surveyor in his report:

The telegraph has been in use on the Erie since 1852 [meaning practically]. By the concurrent testimony of the superintendents of the road, it has saved more than it cost every year. There is an operator at every station on the line, and at the important ones day and night, so placed that they have a fair view of the track. They are required to note the exact time of the arrival, departure, or passage of every train, and to transmit the same by telegraph to the proper officer. On each division there is an officer called train despatcher, whose duty it is to keep constantly before him a memorandum of the position of every train upon his division, as ascertained by the telegraphic reports from the several stations. The trains are run upon this road by printed time-tables and regulations. When they become disarranged, the telegraph is also used to disentangle and move them forward. When trains upon any part of this road are delayed, the fact is immediately communicated to the nearest station, and from there by telegraph to every station on the road. Approaching trains are thus warned of the danger, and accidents from this cause are prevented.

When one or more of the trains from any general cause, like that of snow storms, etc., have been retarded and are likely to produce delays on the other trains, the train despatcher is authorized to move them forward by telegraph under certain rules which have been arranged for that purpose. Having before him a schedule of the time of the passage of each train at its last station, he can determine its position at any desired moment with sufficient accuracy for his present purpose, and can adopt the best means of extricating the delayed trains and of regulating the movement of all so as to avoid any danger of collision or further entanglement. He then telegraphs to such stations as are necessary, giving orders to some trains to lay by for a certain period, or until certain trains have passed, and to others to proceed to certain stations and there await further orders.

To prevent any error or misunderstanding between the despatcher and the conductor of the train, he is required to write his order in the telegraph operator's book. The operator who receives the message is required to write it upon his book, and to fill up two printed copies, one of which he hands to the conductor of the train, and one to the engineman. The despatcher then transmits a message to the conductor, asking him the question : " How do you understand my message?" To which the conductor must make reply in his own words, repeating the substance of the message as he understands it, to detect any error which may be made by the operator, or of his own understanding of it. If this is satisfactory to the despatcher, he telegraphs, "All right, go ahead!" and until this final message is received, no trains can be moved on the road by telegraph. Time is saved by using abbreviations for stations and messages, trains, etc.

In this way, if a passenger train is delayed an hour or more, all freight trains which would be held by it at the several stations under the general rules are moved forward to such other passing places as they are certain to reach before the delayed trains could overtake them, and thus it frequently happens that in a single day the trains which would otherwise be delayed, are moved forward by telegraph, the equivalent to the use of two or three engines and trains.

Not surprisingly, soon after this the telegraph became the standard way of communicating with trains, of scheduling and dispatching them, and, in time (sadly) of communicating news of crashes or other delays that might occur along the line, as well as weather reports and other items of interest to the driver.

Daniel McCalllum (1815 - 1878)

If Minot got it done, pushed it through, another man made sure it kept being done. Hailing from Scotland, Daniel McCallum came to America when his family emigrated to New York when he was only seven years old. Another civil engineer, he began his career designing buildings then moved on to bridges, where he pioneered a new concept which resulted in the McCallum Inflexible Arched Truss Bridge, able to take much heavier loads than other bridges of its time. In 1854 he succeeded Minot as General Superintendent of the Erie Railroad, where he had very specific ideas about management, explained in a report to the stockholders in 1856:

"A superintendent of a road fifty miles in length can give it's business his professional attention and may be constantly on the line engaged in the direction of its details; each person is personally known to him, and all questions in relation to its business are at once presented and acted upon, and any system however imperfect may under such circumstances prove comparatively successful.

In the government of five hundred miles in length a very different state exists. Any system which might be applicable to the business and extent of a short road would be found entirely inadequate to the wants of a long one. and I am fully convinced that in the want of system perfect in its details, properly adapted and vigilantly enforced, lies the true secret of their [the large roads’] failure; and that this disparity of cost per mile in operating long and short roads, is not produced by a difference in length, but is in proportion to the perfection of the system adopted..."

McCallum was the first, not just railroad man but businessman to see a way to delineate and delegate responsibilities to staff, so that certain people were authorised and tasked with certain areas of the business only, everything got done properly and, perhaps as importantly - leaving Charles Minot’s rather novel approach to one side - when something went wrong, it was easy to apportion blame. He also invented what is generally believed to be the world’s first organisation chart, and his model of business management set the standard other businesses across America were to adopt, so in some ways he could even been seen as the father of business organisation in America. He explained his chart thusly:

"By inspection it will be seen that the Board of Directors as the fountain of power, concentrates their authority in the President as the executive Officer, who in that capacity directly controls those officers who are shown on the Diagram at the termini of the lines diverging from him, and these in their turn, through all the various ramifications down to the lowest employee control those who terminate the lines from them.

All orders from the Superior officers are communicated in the above order, from superior to subordinate to the point of desired; thereby securing despatch in their execution and maintaining proper discipline without weakening the authority of the immediate superior of the subordinate controlled by the order thus transmitted. Each individual, therefore, holds himself responsible only to his immediate superior.”

He had more ideas too:

"A system of operations to be efficient and successful should be such as to give to the principal and responsible head of the running department a complete daily history of details in all their minutiae. Without such supervision, the procurement of a satisfactory annual statement must be regarded as extremely problematic. The fact that dividends are made without such control does not disprove the position, as in many cases the extraordinarily remunerative nature of an enterprise may ensure satisfactory returns under the most loose and inefficient management..."

McCallum presented the following general principles for the formation of such an efficient system of operations, reprinted in Vose (1857)

First. A proper division of responsibilities.

Second. Sufficient power conferred to enable the same to be fully carried out, that such responsibilities may be real in their character.

Third. The means of knowing whether such responsibilities are faithfully executed.

Fourth. Great promptness in the report of all derelictions of duty, that evils may at once be corrected.

Fifth. Such information to be obtained through a system of daily reports and checks that will not embarrass principal officers nor lessen their influence with their subordinates.

Sixth. The adoption of a system, as a whole, which will not only enable the general superintendent to detect errors immediately, but will also point out the delinquent.

About the core principle of management, he summarized:
"All that is required to render the efforts of railroad companies in every respect equal to that of individuals, is a rigid system of personal accountability through every grade of service..."

Vose (1857, p. 416) added, that all subordinates should be accountable to, and directed by, their immediate superiors only. Each officer must have authority, with the approval of the general superintendent, to appoint all persons for whose acts he is held responsible, and to dismiss any subordinate when in his judgment the interests of the company demand it.[/I]

In 1977 business professor Robert Chandler had this to say about the man and his system:

"McCallum's principles and procedures of management, like his organization chart, were new in American business. No earlier American businessman had ever had the need to develop ways to use internally generated data as instruments of management. None had shown a comparable concern for the theory and principles of organization. The writings of James Montgomery [a British textile manager with American experience] and the orders of plantation owners to their overseers talked about the control and discipline of workers, not the control, discipline, and evaluation of other managers. Nor does Sidney Pollard in his "Genesis of Modern Management" note any discussion about the nature of major principles of organization occurring in Great Britain before the 1830s, the data at which he stops his analysis...Poor had McCallum's organization chart lithographed and offered copies for sale at $I a piece. Douglas Galton, one of Britain's leading railroad experts, described McCallum's work in a parliamentary report printed in 1857. So too did the New York State Railroad Commissioners in their annual reports. Even the Atlantic Monthly carried an article in 1858 praising McCallum's ideas on railroad management...

(all the above copied verbatim from Wiki, as I’m a lazy git and I don’t really understand it anyway)

 

[Trollheart]

Other railroads were springing up, as the Erie proved the concept. The Pennsylvania Railroad ran from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, almost as long itself as its competitor (though strictly speaking they weren’t, as the Pennsylvania Railroad was built to shuttle between the two cities, and no more) at 137 miles. Unlike the Erie though, the Pennsylvania was never in danger of going bust, returned fine financial dividends to its investors, and generally avoided many of the mistakes made by its predecessor. Much of that was due to one man; where the Erie had Charles Minot, the Pennsylvania had John Edgar Thomson.

John Edgar Thomson (1808 - 1874)

A civil engineer like his father, who had built the first experimental railroad in America, John travelled to Britain, unlike many of his contemporaries, studying the railway systems there, and brought back invaluable knowledge and experience he would put into practice when building his own railroad. He worked for the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad and later for the Camden & Amboy, and was only twenty-four when he made his trip across the Atlantic. Two years later he was taken on as chief engineer for the Georgia Railroad, and his expertise soon made him a household name and much sought-after. By 1845 he had laid down the longest railroad of the time, at 174 miles, longer even than the Erie, and when he moved to take charge of the newly-chartered Pennsylvania Railroad he shone in the task, indispensable to the company, even creating the “horseshoe curve”, a system of three curved tracks which greatly increased efficiency and safety. He was the first to switch from wood to coal as fuel for the locomotives, a move copied by every other railroad and which increased the demand for coal in the USA. You could say in some ways he virtually put Pennsylvania on the map, or at least returned it to what the state must have seen as its rightful place, after it had begun to lose ground to other transport operators and was in fear of being left behind.

He led a takeover of the railroad in 1852, becoming its president and setting about making it more profitable and efficient, his flair for figures and management style being imitated by other railroads, and other companies. Pennsylvania Railroad quickly became a powerhouse, and later it expanded beyond the borders of the state, moving into Ohio and then New York (surely a rival to Erie Railroad at this point?), on into New Jersey and eventually as far as Chicago. He negotiated for steel to replace the old wooden bridges and iron rails, making his railroad sturdier and able to bear heavier engines. Becoming one of the US’s largest and most profitable railroads was not enough for Thomson though, who had his eyes ever on expansion, and with the nascent transcontinental in mind, bought an interest in the Union Pacific Railroad.

Benjamin H. Latrobe (1806 - 1878)

Another major figure in the evolution of the early American railroad, Latrobe was a native of Pennsylvania but it was in Baltimore, Maryland that he studied to be a civil engineer like his father, and to which he moved back after having completed his studies at Georgetown, Washington. In 1820 he was engaged by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to survey and plan the Washington leg of the route, and he designed the Thomas Viaduct, which at the time was the largest bridge in America. He was appointed chief engineer in 1842.

Philip Evan Thomas (1776 - 1861)

Another one born in the year America won her independence, Thomas was one of the architects behind the Baltimore & Ohio, and has been called “the Father of the American Railroad”. He was related by marriage to the founder of Johns Hopkins University, which is still in operation today. Along with other investors he attained the charter in 1827 for the Baltimore & Ohio, which would be America’s first railroad, and one of the first in fact in the world. Construction began in 1828 and the first train was running two years later. He was one of the few railroad executives who did anything for Native Americans, heading the Society of Friends Indian Affairs Committee, and representing the Six Indian Nations in Washington.

George Brown (1787 - 1859)

A native of County Antrim, in Northern Ireland, Brown emigrated at the age of 18 to Maryland, where he joined the militia and helped defend Baltimore against the British in the War of 1812, later joining the family business of investment banking, then started his own bank, which is one of America’s largest private banks even today. Together with Evan Thomas and others, he proposed and then financed the building of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, being elected its treasurer. Another philanthropist, he was in charge of the House of Juvenile Offenders from 1849 until his death ten years later, and served as president of the Baltimore Association for the Improvements of the Conditions of the Poor.

Although the first American railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio was not the most progressive, being left well behind by the Erie and others as they refused to commit to the new technology of steam locomotives, insisting on relying on horse power for several years. It would take a demonstration, as already detailed, by Peter Cooper’s tiny Tom Thumb to convince the bosses at B&O that steam was the way to go, though they would still take several years to implement the change. They would however be the first railroad to use the new technology of the telegraph, while it would be the Erie’s Charles Minot who would use it to its fullest.

While we can - rightly and with full justification - deplore the southern states for their policy of slavery, it should not be forgotten or removed from history that slavery went on in the northern states too, at least until the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, and slaves from Maryland were said to have been transported on the railroad (probably in baggage or freight cars) to the southern states and anywhere else to which they were sold. As the railroad did not run as far as the south though, and as southern railroads were all restricted to operating within their own borders, slaves would be taken by rail to the terminus of the B&O, the Ohio River, and then transferred onto riverboats to complete their journey to a life of misery.

Further shame - seen through the lens of history and with hindsight - accrued to the B&O when it helped put down the insurrection of abolitionist John Brown, in 1859. Not only did the railroad telegraph details of the uprising to its head office, which then contacted the White House, but they allowed their trains to carry US Marines and guns to put down the rebellion, in which ten men died, and another seven were later executed after trial. It’s somewhat telling, and should - and hopefully is, though I doubt it, more likely swept under the carpet of history - be a lasting subject of shame and dishonour that the main concern of president John W. Garrett after the uprising had been brutally put down was for his property: thank God there was no damage to his trains or equipment, he sighed. Cunt.

What the Dickens! England’s foremost author of the time gives his impressions

When the legendary Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, like his queen, he was not amused at the state of the American railroad, comparing it most unfavourable to that from his homeland. The idea of there being no compartments, as already mentioned, in the early cars annoyed him, as he was a private man and was forced to share space with about fifty other passengers, most of whom (being American, duh) spoke loudly on many subjects to each other. He did however approve of the provision of a special carriage for ladies, that they might not be subjected to such ignominy, nor have to breathe the foul fumes that swirled around the men’s carriage, as almost every man smoked. He wrote about his experiences on the railroad, and other aspects of his American trip, in American Notes, published later that year. His observations ensured there would be a fractious relationship between the author and his American fans.

Dickens, who regularly criticised the government and the class society in England, deplored the mindless nationalism of Americans, who seemed to believe, then as now, that their country was the greatest in the world and could do no wrong. For a nation barely seventy years old at this stage, Dickens probably thought they were pushing it. The loud voices and strange accents (mispronouncing, as he believed, common English words) got on his nerves, as did the less than professional attitude of the conductors, who did not wear a uniform and walked with their hands in their pockets. He was shocked that black people were not allowed to ride in the same carriages as white people, and, too, at the “hulking box” that they were provided for their transport on the train.

He hated the habits of “uncultured” Americans who would chew tobacco and spit it on the floor, and probably loathed as well the vendors of sweets, cigarettes, newspapers and other items who roamed the carriages hawking their wares, something that surely was not cricket back in good old England. The crude heating system on the early trains was no more than a stove placed in the middle of the carriage, which meant that those who were closest to it were roasted while those furthest from it froze, and of course they were a safety hazard as the carriages, as already mentioned, tended to bump and jolt along the track, and though it’s not said in the account I read, I can assume that the stoves were not bolted down in any way. Additionally, if the windows were opened stray sparks from the fire could be caught by the wind and set people’s clothes on fire, while leaving the windows shut meant risking being suffocated. Here’s an extract:

There is a great deal of jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell. . . . Except when a branch road joins the main one, there is seldom more than one track of rails; so that the road is very narrow, and the view, where there is a deep cutting, by no means extensive. When there is not, the character of the scenery is always the same. Mile after mile of stunted trees: some hewn down by the axe, some blown down by the wind, some half fallen and resting on their neighbours. . . . Now you emerge for a few brief minutes on an open country, glittering with some bright lake or pool, broad as many an English river, but so small here that it scarcely has a name; now catch hasty glimpses of a distant town, with its clean white houses and their cool piazzas, its prim New England church and schoolhouse; when whir-r-r-r! almost before you have seen them, comes the same dark screen: the stunted trees, the stumps, the logs, the stagnant water.

The train calls at stations in the woods, where the wild impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out, is only to be equalled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of there being anybody to get in. It rushes across the turnpike road, where there is no gate, no policeman, no signal: nothing but a rough wooden arch, on which is painted “When The Bell Rings, Look Out For The Locomotive.” On it whirls headlong, dives through the woods again, emerges in the light, clatters over frail arches, rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on hap-hazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road . . . on, on, on—tears the mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars; scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its wood fire; screeching, hissing, yelling, panting; until at last the thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink, the people cluster round, and you have time to breathe again.

Other things that amazed the author were the fact that the railroad often ran down main streets, which was never the case in England, the rails always running parallel to any town or village, but never through it, and how few passengers waited at the equally few stations along the line.

Which brings us to…

A Hard Station: Europe vs America

When we think of railway stations today, we think of grand, sumptuous buildings, often with several floors, lifts (or elevators for you Americans), majestic winding staircases, places where we can get a coffee, or even a full meal, perhaps an entire shopping mall. Naturally, in the beginning train stations were nothing like this, but it’s a fact that the ones built in Britain and Europe were less geared towards function only and more to cater to comfort and service, whereas certainly in the early days at least, American stations, or depots, as they called them, were little more than sheds or barns through which a train would run and where the passengers could be offloaded and then fuck off. There were no amenities, no connecting transport, often no staff. It would almost be like getting kicked off the train for not paying your fare, with no particular thought or concern given to where you were forcibly disembarked.

This could have been due to many factors, most likely paramount among which was the class system in England, where railway passengers expected a certain degree of decorum, a modicum of comfort and that the railway people gave, or seemed to give, a damn about them. It was a case of ensuring the passenger became a regular one, and treating him as a customer rather than a piece of freight. The American way, on the other hand, was all about the dollar, and how few of them the railroad companies could spend compared to how many they could make. Stations cost money of course, and without such a thing in American history before, as the railroad was entirely new, unless someone had visited Britain or the Continent (and how few Americans ever left their home town, never mind state, and forget about crossing the ocean?) nobody was any the wiser.

So costs were kept to a minimum, and stations few. Even the ones that were built, as I said above, were the rudest of sheds, almost like the sides of a tunnel into which the train would go, stop and let the passengers off, and go on again. After they got off, how they got to their actual destination was their lookout: no connecting wagons, boats, anything like that. No service to call on, no telegraph unless they were very lucky, and nobody there to help them. A shed in the middle of nowhere, basically. A few had the luxury of (gasp!) doors, but even then it happened that trains would crash through them, so many did not. So they were mostly cold and cheerless, but even so, better than what some rail stops could offer; many times a train simply stopped on the corner of a street to collect or let passengers off, and might have to be waved down to be stopped anywhere else. Occasionally there was a ticket office built along the line, and here lucky passengers could shelter while waiting for, or having alighted from, the train, though there would of course be no facilities for them.

Contrast this with the graceful lines of stations in England like the terminal at Liverpool’s Crown Street or Paddington Station in London, or the oldest surviving railway terminal in the world, Liverpool Road terminal, which still stands today. Bold lines, high vaulted ceilings, sturdy platforms and ticket booths made these places to be admired, to be happy to go to, to explore, to relax in. Not a simple dumping or loading point for passengers as if they were cattle on the way to market, these were proper stations, beautiful buildings, well designed and protected from the elements, offering all sorts of amenities.

As for the French, well, they were hardly going to be outdone by the British, were they? The old enemy? Mais non! France in fact boasts today some of the most stunning and beautiful architecture in the world, and much of it went into train stations built in the 1830s. The Saint-Lazare, the Gare de l’Est, the Gare de Lyons and especially the Gare du Nord, which has twenty-three professional sculptures, all show how Paris took the lead in the field. Other countries would not be left behind either, with stations more resembling cathedrals really in places like Antwerp, Budapest and Milan springing up in the latter parts of the nineteenth century. Americans would finally get it of course - witness Grand Central - but until the need for an actual building and not just a shed was realised, they’d had to put up with these rickety structures. Which, by the way, were made of wood and, well, when a steam engine hammers through a structure made of wood… The Massachusetts Eastern Railroad learned this to their cost in 1836 when, on the very first day of operation, their East Boston terminal burned down. Oops! An inauspicious start, to say the least.

 

[Trollheart]

It must have been fun trying to get a train in the 1830s and 1840s: no information on train arrival or departure time was initially available, no timetables, no signs announcing arrival or departure, so while the railroad were compelled to provide some sort of basic sustenance for their passengers at the “depots” - given the lengths of the train journeys and before the “newsbutchers”, as they were called, the men and boys who walked the length of carriages selling such things as sweets and tobacco, started up, leaving passengers otherwise to starve - there was no announcement as to when the train was leaving again, and seats could not be reserved. This then necessitated bolting down the (not exactly wholesome) food and legging it to the platform in the hope of gaining a seat, leading to rather a lot of cases of indigestion and that sort of thing. But hey, at least these people had a terminal.

States had to fight to get the railroads to put up any sort of depot, as in general they seemed to be happy enough to take passengers at the first departure point and dump them at the terminus, without stopping in between. The kind of thing we call today “express services”, except it was to be every one. Now consider the position of the hapless station agent. He was the face of the company at the depot, the man who sold tickets, dispatched the trains and looked after the passengers (as best he could), and as is always the case, he was the one who faced the wrath of those passengers when circumstances entirely outside of his control delayed trains, or when anything else went wrong. The conductor, on the other hand, was far from the smiling (or unsmiling) functionary who would go around asking for tickets, and checking same. No, this man was more of a drill sergeant, keeping a watch on the passengers, disciplining their children if they go out of hand (how that was carried out I can only imagine!), settling disputes and keeping control of his own people. He also sold tickets. Ah yes, tickets.

Well now, the thing about tickets on the American railroad was that from the start, rather like almost everything else including railway gauge and mode of transport, there was little if any uniformity. Some tickets were sold at the ticket office (if there was one) some were sold on board. Tickets ranged from being coloured pieces of cardboard to metal discs, and, which might seem amazing to us today, none of them were numbered, so it was easy to scam people and pocket the money while handing over bogus tickets, or even none at all. This practice was called “knocking off”. Right. As I mentioned, a ticket did not guarantee you a seat, merely passage on the train, and if you got on with a false one, issued due to no fault of yours by a scheming, unprincipled conductor, then tough. You’d have to buy a real one or get kicked off the train.

This practice was so widespread that an honest conductor taking over from a dishonest predecessor would face the kind of opposition and resentment that might attend the election of a union boss who wasn’t interested in kickbacks, or a new police chief who refused to take bribes. Someone trying to “do the right thing” could put all the chancers and scammers under a glaring spotlight they would rather avoid, and so when Harry French took over as conductor on the Oregon Railroad & Navigation Company in the 1890s, he was warned that if he didn’t keep up the accepted practice of knocking off he would make many enemies. He ignored the warning though and sure enough, due to his honest dealing with passengers and with his employers the railroad was suddenly taking in much more revenue that it had done up to then.

The railroad was delighted, but the scammers were not, and even the ticket agents became Harry’s enemies, as they got no commission on tickets they sold, but due to his honesty were suddenly having to issue a lot more than they had been before. But there were more serious aspects of French’s job on which he expounded in his book, Railroad Man, such as the time he got involved in a bank robbery. Having heard of three men who had robbed a bank in Roslyn, Washington, and had shot one of the cashiers dead, French noticed a warning on the wire, intended for the sheriff’s office, that they expected the desperadoes to cross at Arlington, which was his route. And so they did. The robbers got on his train, and French, noting their suspicious behaviour, telegraphed the sheriff’s office at the next stop, advising him that he had the robbers on board and that the sheriff should come loaded for bear, as it were.

Though expecting that he and his crew might be the next victims of the raiders, French waited in the luggage car with a gun belted on, ready for trouble, but when the train reached its next stop some passengers told him the three hoodlums had jumped, and the sheriff was disappointed when the train rolled into the station. The men were eventually caught, and French, known to have spent so much time with them on his train, was asked to identify them. He agreed - whether the fact that there was a two thousand dollar reward for bringing all three men to justice figured in his decision or not, I leave it to you to decide, though I feel he was a public-spirited man and would have made the identification in any event - and went with the detective to see if these were indeed the men who had ridden on his train that day.

They weren’t.

Despite the fact that they had been indicted as suspects, these were the wrong men. French knew them well, and told the detective they were not the same men he had seen on the train. Delighted, the defence lawyer agreed that the three men were being framed, and told French his testimony had “removed the noose” from around the neck of one of the men, who had already been wrongly convicted of being the one who shot the cashier. The prosecutor was enraged, but there was nothing he could do. These men were innocent, and released. Some months later, the real robbers paid the ultimate price when they were shot during another attempted robbery, and one of them, believing himself to be dying, confessed that they three were the ones who had held up the bank in Roslyn.

There was, sadly, no happy ending for French though. Infuriated at losing his third of the reward money, the two grand he would have split three ways with French and his baggage man (who was nervous and jumpy and shit-scared, and had identified the men as being the robbers without really looking too closely, and probably blinded by the promise of more money than he could have made in years), the detective conspired to have the conductor fired, which he was, over the alleged theft of… thirty-six cents.

Health and safety was all but unknown in the early days of trains, at least in the USA. People would sit wherever they pleased: in the caboose, in the luggage car, even in the locomotive itself. They would sit on the roofs of the carriages (imagine their surprise when a tunnel came along!), hang their arms and legs out of windows, and jump on and off the train whenever and wherever suited them. Many a passenger was left behind when they headed off to answer a call of nature at a scheduled stop, only to come back and find the train had left without them! There was no organisation, no counting of passengers, no warnings that the train was moving off, no way to ensure everyone was back on board. Truly, in at least a figurative sense, the wild West.

For a long time, they did what they liked: cursed, fought, abused the conductor, refused to pay for their passage. Believe it or not, it took state legislature to afford the conductor - or captain as he was initially known - the right to throw people off who had not paid, or refused to pay, or paid the wrong fare. Even the authority to issue tickets had to go through court. What the railroads were thinking I don’t know: how can you expect to make money if you can’t compel your customers to pay for the service you offer?

The first conductors seemed to prize politeness above all other aspects of their job. Eben E. Worden (a somewhat appropriate name, given how the conductor had to marshall and placate the passengers) was by all accounts a small, slight man with impeccable manners, and was the first conductor on the Erie Railroad, therefore we can assume the first conductor on a passenger train in America. Whether the job was too much for him, or due to other considerations, he only lasted two years in the position, dying two years after he retired, in 1844, of consumption (Tuberculosis). His replacement could not have been more different.

Henry “Poppy” Ayes (1800 - 1880)

A huge, bluff teddy bear of a man, Ayres (affectionately known as “Poppy”) started work with the Harlem Railroad as a conductor and then moved to the Erie in 1842 on the retirement of Worden. His appointment initially was opposed by friends of John S. Williamson, a man who had been expecting the post when Worden was assigned, and on his departure could see no reason why he would not be his replacement. But Ayres shone so in his job that he became a legend among railroad workers, and passengers, and became part of the history of the American railroad.

Surprisingly perhaps, he wasn’t even a native of the state, but came from Boston; nevertheless, he made himself a confidante and friend of everyone he came in contact with (Williamson’s and his friends aside, I imagine) and there are many stories and anecdotes of his kindness and professionalism. One such relates the tale of an old lady who left a precious family heirloom, an ancient umbrella, on a steamboat and as she was returning on the train realised it was left behind, and burst into tears. Having ascertained the problem, Poppy Ayres assured her he could get it for her by the telegraph, in just a few minutes. The telegraph was entirely new then, and people had only the vaguest ideas about how it worked - probably seemed a little like magic to them, being able to send, and receive, messages to and from miles away - so Poppy must have decided to have a little gentle fun with the lady.

He knew from experience that when the steamboats were checked after passengers had alighted, stewards would forward any item left behind to the baggage car of the train, and of course this is where he found the old lady’s umbrella. Producing it with a theatrical flourish, he amazed her, she believing it had somehow magically travelled there by telegraph!

A less enlightening story runs about a man who, having travelled to his destination via various trains on the one ticket, was told by Poppy that he couldn’t travel on his, as it had been “punched” already. The man refused to budge and was put off the train. He then took Poppy Ayres to court for throwing him off the train (in which Ayres was only doing his job, following company policy) and was awarded 250 dollars against him. Judges, huh? Then there’s the story of how, it would seem, he invented the emergency cord to be pulled when the train had to be stopped. At least, he was the first in America to work out the idea, and possibly the world, I don’t know.

How it went was this: when passengers became belligerent or refused to pay the right fare, had no ticket or for some other reason Poppy saw the need to eject them from the train, there was no way to signal the driver. So he set up a length of twine and ran it up to the engineer’s cab at the front, connecting it to a piece of wood. When he wanted the train to stop he would pull on the string, the wood would be raised and the engineer would know to stop. Except, at first, he didn’t. Not that he didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to take orders from a conductor! So said Jacob Hamel, and he ignored the bell pull twice, cutting the twine so as not to be bothered. Poppy warned him if he cut it again, they would duke it out when the train arrived at its destination. And so he did, and so they did, and Hamel, refusing to come down out of the cab and face the much burlier conductor, received a punch that knocked him from the cab. After that, he paid attention when Poppy Ayres wanted him to stop the train. Ayres worked for the Erie for over thirty years, hardly making a single enemy, and passing into the history of both that railroad and American railroads in general.

 

[Trollheart]

Death on the tracks: early fatalities

In the very early days derailments were common, but as the trains hardly ever reached a speed of more than twenty miles an hour, these were mere inconveniences and did not result in any loss of life or serious injury. In most cases, a general call would be put about the train to have the male passengers haul the car back onto the track, and away the train would go. The first real death on the railroad, excepting those who blundered out in front of the trains, occurred on the Camden & Amboy line, when a train broke an axle and two people died, everyone else on the train including actor Tyrone Power (yes, that one) was injured, the only one to escape unscathed being former president John Quincy Adams. Future railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt broke his ankle and swore never to ride on the railroad again. He obviously changed his mind, considering how much money the railroad would end up making for him.

Once trains began running at night, or overnight, the problem of how the driver was supposed to see the track in front of him became an issue. Crazy as it may seem, an early idea, proposed - and used for a short time by - the South Carolina Canal Railroad Company, was to set fire to a wagonload of sand and wood and strap it to the front of the locomotive. Unsurprisingly, this was quickly ditched as being too damned dangerous. Next various lamps were tried out, first oil and then kerosene, which proved better suited to the purpose, with large mirrors to reflect the light. In Britain, with the railway enclosed by fences and running on their own track, not through any town’s main street, these were not so much a priority, and only came into use much later. But in America, where the oft-sung phrase “don’t fence me in” held sway, and animals and sometimes people could wander in front of the train - especially hard to see at night - it was vital the driver be able to see ahead of him through the dark.

Animal magic: Farmers on the warpath

While animals were by far the largest percentage of casualties on the early railroads, and could easily derail a train, railroad companies fought a running battle with farmers who had developed an instinct for making money off them. The idea was that they would be paid generously by the railroad if any of their livestock was killed by their trains (despite the fact that it could only have been the fault of the farmers) and so they decided to start taking their least healthy and oldest animals closer and closer to the tracks, sometimes even feeding them on the rails themselves. Then, when the animal was hit and killed by a train, they would claim handsome compensation from the railroad company. What happened if there were human fatalities, or damage to engine or cars, I don’t know, and it seems the farmers didn’t care as long as they got paid.

But as time went on, like all schemes this one began to unravel, as the railroad bosses became wiser to the tactics of the unscrupulous (and, it must be said, cruel and heartless towards their cattle) farmers, and reduced the amount they were prepared to pay for animals killed on the railroad. This infuriated the greedy farmers, who began a running war with the railroad. They obstructed the lines, tampered with the switches and threw stones and rocks at the trains, and were in the process of plotting to set fire to one when the railroad, having infiltrated their ranks, caught them in the act and had them arrested. Twelve men were sentenced and jailed.

Sleep on it: George Pullman, inventor of the first proper sleeping carriages

George Pullman (1831 - 1897)

Early railroad travellers had a lot to thank George Pullman for. Even travellers today owe him a debt of gratitude, as they ride in the luxury sleeping cars that bear his name still. Until he came along, sleeping on a train was a dangerous and uncomfortable business, and unlikely to yield much in the way of rest. The first of the lines to provide any sort of sleeping accommodation for their passengers was the Cumberland Valley Railroad, and all it did was split a normal day car into two, add some basic padding and throw in a stove to heat the place. There was no bedding - bring your own with you or sleep in your clothes - and the stove was, of course, not fastened down or secured in any way, so you had a pretty good chance of burning to death if the train rounded any sudden curves or stopped suddenly. Carriages of this sort were, it will be readily understood, for men only, as there was no privacy and several men would sleep to a car. Americans would endure discomfort and sleeplessness for another thirty or so years.

I read a little ahead and see this man was no saint. In fact, not to put to fine a point on it, he appears to have been a heartless, tyrannical bastard who cared more about his bottom line than the people who worked for him. So, a typical American businessman then. Let’s be fair, and remove that word. A typical businessman of the time, like so many others, out to make a profit and piss all over anyone who got in his way. But his achievements and his contribution to the history of the railroad can’t be ignored, so let’s not do that, while at the same time let’s throw his despotic behaviour and his shameful treatment of his workers into the harsh light of non-revisionist history.

As a young engineer, only in his twenties, Pullman arrived in Chicago and immediately set about creating a reputation for himself by working out how to raise hotels and other buildings off the ground, for foundation work or to just raise it to a new street level. Apparently he did this using thousands of jacks, hand-operated by hundreds of men, raising the building an inch at a time. Taking his cue from the packet boats he used to travel as a kid on the Erie Canal, Pullman designed the first proper sleeping car, though history says he was not its inventor, that honour going to a Theodore Woodruff. However such cars have borne his name right up to this day, and he may as well be said to be the father of the sleeping car.

Pullman cars, as people quickly came to know them, stood for two things: luxury and comfort. And a third, of course: expense, but then, you don’t get the finer things in life without paying for them, and people were very much prepared to pay up to FIVE TIMES as much for a Pullman coach as for a normal one. The difference was staggering, and you’d have to say the extra outlay, if you could afford it, was certainly worth it. Lush carpeting, comfortable bunks, gilded ornamentation, chandeliers - these cars were as close a relative to the early sleepers as the Wright Bros flyer is to a 747 Jumbo Jet. Improved suspension, a quieter - and above all, safer ride, the Pullmans would have been worth it on these improvements alone.

But there was more.

Pullman decided his sleepers should be like mobile hotels, and to that effect engaged recently freed black men to serve as combination porters, stewards, valets and waiters. They would show the passenger to their carriage, have the bed made (no cold plank for resting your head on here, and forget bringing your own bedding: all provided for, and the best quality too), settle them as they wished, call them when dinner was ready… oh yeah, there was an attached kitchen! These men, though better paid than they had been as slaves, obviously, were reportedly not that well paid, and made up most of their income via tips from the wealthy passengers, which they were allowed to keep.

Although there was of course no union, Pullman porters were still required to contribute to “group insurance policy”, which so far as I can see was of no benefit to them at all, as there was no compensation forthcoming for any who died or were injured in the service, and there was no retirement or pension plan. They were required to turn up for work two hours before the train departed, but did not get paid for this time, as their working period was seen to begin only when the train departed. Moreover, every Pullman porter had to be assigned to a car - there were none who were entitled to one regularly - so they could stand around for a whole day waiting to be given one, and if it didn’t happen, they went home without being paid. In some ways, these men must have felt almost as if they were still slaves.

Still, membership of the Pullman Association did carry with it some benefits, if only in terms of recognition and reputation, and the porters had a high social standing in their own black community, where many ex-slaves (or freedmen) struggled to secure any sort of employment after the war. Pullman’s fortune, basically, was made with the assassination of President Lincoln, which seems a harsh thing to say, but when the president’s body was toured throughout the States on a train, so that everyone could get a chance to pay their respects to the great Emancipator, it was in a Pullman car he made his last trip, and the fame of the car - and its maker - spread far and wide. Soon, everyone who could afford to do so wanted to emulate the president (though without the inconvenience of being dead, obviously) and demand for the Pullman cars peaked, as did prices, following the indefatigable law of supply and demand. By 1875, ten years after the first one was produced, Pullman had over seven hundred cars in operation with the railroads.

And then came Pullman, Chicago.

I can’t say if this was the first company town ever, but it seems to have been one of the first. Pullman bought 4,000 acres in Chicago near Lake Calumet on the Illinois Central Railroad and set an architect, Solon Spencer Beman, to design a town in which his employees could live. It proved to be one of the most successful towns of the age, with good housing, indoor plumbing, with shops, theatres, parks, hotels, but pointedly no bars, no casinos, no whorehouses, nowhere where “undesirable behaviour” could flourish. It was his hope to avoid the violence and drunkenness prevalent in many American towns, and which led to unrest and trouble. And mostly it did.

But Pullman wanted complete control over his new town, and prohibited independent newspapers, town meetings, public speeches or open discussion. All the inhabitants - his workers and their families - had to conform to rigorous standards set down by him, behavioural and hygienic, and anyone who did not come up to the mark could be fired and ejected from the town. He also banned charitable organisations and, as nobody would pay rent to use the church, it was an empty shell. His running of the town was compared to the iron grip of Count Otto von Bismark in Germany, or, as one anonymous Pullman employee put it: “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.”

Quite contrary to his intentions, or expectations, such total repression was only going to fuel the fires of unrest and rebellion, and when, as a result of falling demand for his cars during the Panic of 1893 (yes, another one; there were quite a few, it seems) he cut wages, but did not lower rents in his town, or the price of any of the amenities, the stage was set for bloody confrontation.

Comments on Pullman’s inhuman tactics ran to "I have seen men with families of eight or nine children crying because they got only three or four cents after paying their rent."

Another described conditions as "slavery worse than that of Negroes of the South".

Many of the workers joined the recently-formed American Railway Union, which instigated a boycott on Pullman’s cars, refusing to allow trains to carry them or their workers to work in them. The Great Pullman Strike of 1894 had begun.

Pullman was not interested in negotiating with the strikers. On the day the strike began he locked up his home and business and left town. One of his contemporaries thundered at his refusal to even talk to his workers: "The damned idiot ought to arbitrate, arbitrate and arbitrate! ...A man who won't meet his own men halfway is a God-damn fool!"

Three days into the strike things began to go bad. Strikebreakers, many of them black, had been enlisted by the railroad to take the place of the striking workers, and at a meeting to rally support for the strike things exploded. It was supposed to have been a peaceful meeting, but like most of these things, agitators within the crowd shouted the loudest and buildings were burned, a locomotive derailed, and other transport workers came out in sympathy, enlarging the strike and calling it to the urgent attention of the authorities. They of course responded with peace mediators and offers of recompense, and everyone sat down around the table and worked it… yeah. Right.

The President himself gave the order for an injunction to be issued, commanding the workers to return to their posts, and when that was ignored, sent in the troops. Thirty strikers were killed and fifty-seven wounded. Support among railroad workers other than those in the ARU was divided: many wanted their trains to run, many saw the workers’ grievances as legitimate. The public, as is usually the case, didn’t care; they just wanted to be able to travel on the trains, and besides, weren’t all these men black, recently-freed slaves? How ungrateful! The newspapers played on this, calling the workers “aliens” and “immigrants” (which in a lot of cases was true, but irrelevant to the reasons for the strike) and ignoring the very real fact that this was more a clash of rich versus poor, big business versus the little guy, and very much a case of playing politics with people’s lives.

In the aftermath, Pullman was ordered to sell his town and it became just another suburb of Chicago, if one with a chequered past. He did not survive long past the infamous strike, his reputation destroyed by his intransigence and the memory of the workers who had been killed by the troops. He died in 1897, and his family were so concerned that vengeful employees might dig his body back up that he was buried in a lead-lined coffin sealed in a block of concrete, and surrounded with more concrete, a network of steel bars and yet more concrete. The entire burial process took two days. Twenty-eight years later, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became one of the first, and most influential African-American unions in the USA.

By George! That’s not my name!

Oh, hilarious history looks us in the face once again and sticks its tongue out at us, though in this case it’s almost more tragic-comic. The practice on slave plantations had been to call every male slave by the given name of the slavemaster or owner. So if they were called, for instance, Tom, every slave would be known as Tom. When Pullman began recruiting porters, whether with or without his knowledge or approval, passengers called every Pullman porter George, after him. This obviously irritated the porters, but it was not their place to speak up and correct the white folks, so they had to take it. Eventually, there was a placard placed on each Pullman car advising the name of the porter, and the practice died out.

However (and this is the funny/tragic part) other people named George took offence at their name being used for Pullman porters, and the Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters George was born. No, really. Well, initially apparently it was a joke, but at its height it boasted over 31,000 members, including (it was claimed) Babe Ruth and King George V. Apparently you could join the SPCSCG as long as your first or last name was George. Nobody in the society (all exclusively white of course) cared about getting a measure of dignity for the porters, just that their names not be used (presumably if they had all been called James none of the Georges would have cared - whether a new society might have sprung up called SPCSCJ or not is another matter) but their efforts did obliquely change the practice, and soon porters were being referred to by their given name. Oh, white privilege! What lessons you teach us!

One man who swam against the flow though was the famous comedian Jackie Gleason, as related by Biggs, son of a sleeping car porter, in the book The Pullman Porters: From Servitude to Civil Rights: “One of the most remarkable stories I liked hearing about was how when Jackie Gleason would ride ... all the porters wanted to be on that run. The reason why? Not only because he gave every porter $100.00, but it was just the fun, the excitement, the respect that he gave the porters. Instead of their names being George, he called everybody by their first name. He always had like a piano in the car and they sang and danced and had a great time. He was just a fun person to be around.”

However, historian Greg LeRoy describes how most customers, and the company, saw them: "A Pullman Porter was really kind of a glorified hotel maid and bellhop in what Pullman called a hotel on wheels. The Pullman Company just thought of the porters as a piece of equipment, just like another button on a panel – the same as a light switch or a fan switch."

 

[Trollheart]

Crossing the Rubicon. Or, if you prefer, the Mississippi: Rivermen strike back

It was mentioned earlier that the railroad had its enemies from the beginning, and most staunch among them were those who stood to lose the most, the canal operators and the riverboats. When the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad built a bridge into Iowa over the Mississippi, despite strong protests from Mississippi riverboat men, a steamer rammed into it at full speed, destroying the bridge. It was likely no accident, as a banner soon appeared proclaiming “Mississippi bridge destroyed! All rejoice!” The case over who had precedence over the river went to court, and the railroad’s position was argued by a young, unknown lawyer who faded out of history, some guy called Lincoln.

An ex-pilot himself, Lincoln knew the river and walked a legal tightrope to prove his case, which was that while he acknowledged (while surely knowing it was nothing of the sort) that the collision had been an accident, the needs of Americans to have free passage into the west was paramount, and he won the case. Or rather, the Mississippi boatmen did not win it, the jury being tied, and the later decision of the Supreme Court was that the bridge did not constitute a hazard to navigation, and must remain. This was more or less the end of any organised opposition by the rivers to the railroad, and the future rode forward on the shiny rails and puffing smokestacks of the iron horse.

Engines of war: the role of the railroad in the Civil War

How naive we can be! When railroads first appeared they were lauded (mostly, it must be said, by their creators and supporters) as the device by which war would be forever removed from the landscape of America. With stunning lack of foresight and understanding, and a sense of almost painful innocence, quotes as far off the beam as the one which called World War I the war to end all wars abounded: Henry Poor, author of the American Railroad Journal, gushed that the railroad would be “the agent of national peace” and that “the certain prevention of foreign war . . . will be one of the numerous advantages of the railroads.” What his reasoning for this was is known only to himself. A joint project to link the railroads of Cincinnati, Charleston and Ohio promised that “the North and South would, in fact, shake hands with each other, yield up their social and political hostility, pledge themselves to common national interests, and part as friends and brethren.” The Cincinnati Daily Chronicle saw the railroad “dispelling prejudices and cementing friendships, calculated to perpetuate the institutions under which we have risen from a mere handful.”

Right. This was in 1843. Less than two decades later, as the railroads reached their height, the country would be at war. Not just at war, but at war with itself, in the bloodiest conflict the USA had seen in its short history, making the War of Independence and the War of 1812 seem good-natured fist fights between friends in comparison. By the time it was over, the south would be in ruins and almost a million Americans would be dead on both sides, military and civilian, free and slave, Union and Confederate, and the country would suffer from a divide in its politics whose legacy it is still struggling with today.

And trains would be right up there in the thick of it, helping to bring death, destruction and misery to millions. So much for the metal harbingers of peace.

As is almost always the case, the military got involved with railroads early in their history, the trains ferrying troops to Harper’s Ferry and to Pullman, but the first time they really saw what the new technology could do for the war effort was during the Mexican-American War of 1846, when they were able to use trains to transport troops to Texas. However this had limited success, due mostly to the poor state of southern railroads and the fact that Texas had none. But when war broke out between American and American, they had a proper chance to test out this new system as a prosecutor of war.

It did not disappoint.

In fact, it’s true to say that without the railroads the Civil War might have ended sooner, had a shorter reach and resulted in less deaths. The possibility of moving troops and weapons and supplies around from state to state in relatively fast order made the waging of the war much easier, at least for the Union, who had the better railroad lines. In addition to this disadvantage, the south had less lines, and the ones it had were all, as has already been noted, kept separate from each other, operating in their state only. There were few if any lines connecting to one another, and even if there had been, the south was also behind the north with regard to wheel gauge, some states using one and some using another, so there was no standard and anyone wanting to go from one state to another would most assuredly have to change trains, which is not something you want your troops worrying about.

The south was also severely lacking in entrepreneurs. No people like Pullman, Vanderbilt, Minot or Huntington to aggressively promote the railroad there. In fact, their only real pioneer and supporter of a networked railroad (he envisaged one line linking Charleston to Memphis) died suddenly in 1839, and with his death nobody else seemed willing to take up the torch he had dropped. The insular mindset of the south, the distrust of the railroad and the worry about slaves escaping or being taken to safety perhaps on these new engines of freedom kept each state protecting its own small railroad and rigidly prescribing its limits, cutting it off from other railroads, even ones which were ostensibly friendly. This told very much against them during the war, when the Union, whose two major lines, the Erie and the Pennsylvania, possessed more rolling stock than all of the south put together, unleashed the power of their new war machine.

If only they had listened to the words of Frederick Law Olmstead, architect of Central Park: “There is nothing that is more closely connected, both as cause and effect, with the prosperity and wealth of a country than its means and modes of travelling.” Many northern workers had come to the south to build roads (and, possibly, though I’m not sure, railroads) and of course once war broke out they went back home to fight, leaving the south with a critical shortage of labour. The south’s intransigence towards central government told against them too, as they were unable or unwilling to instigate a unified policy of operating their trains for the military effort, unlike the north, where Lincoln passed legislation to create the United States Military Railroads. This mean that certain strategic, important or powerful lines came directly under the control of the government, assisting the war effort and making things like movement of troops easier. In the south, the USMR repaired broken lines, laid track and took control of operational railroads in captured enemy territory.

However incompetent and pig-headed the southern effort may have been with regard to the railroads, it shouldn’t be taken that they failed utterly. In fact, at the Battle of Bull Run, one of the first major conflicts of the war, southern railroads helped turn the tide of a battle the Confederacy should have lost, when troops were sent via the tiny Manassas Gap Railroad to relieve the siege of Richmond, allowing the rebels to win the day. But not only that, the unexpected victory for the south shook the confidence (some might say overconfidence) of the Union, who had expected to win a quick victory and bring the war to a speedy conclusion. The setback showed them they were in a proper one, and it would drag on for years.

However much of the failure of the south to prosecute, never mind win the war was down to the stubborn self-interest of individual states and the fear of acceding to a centralised government, even their own, rebel one. An extract from The Great Railroad Revolution illustrates this perfectly: “Early in the war, William A. Ashe, who headed the Railroad Bureau, demanded that the Western & Atlantic, which was owned by the State of Georgia, supply six locomotives and seventy wagons to move freight out to eastern Tennessee. However, not only did Georgia’s governor, Joseph E. Brown, turn down the request, but he threatened to send troops to fight any Confederate officials who tried to commandeer the rolling stock.

Farther south, the head of the Florida Railroad, David L. Yulee, was no more helpful. Although his railroad was unable to operate because it had suffered damage, he refused to allow its rails to be lifted and redeployed to create a connecting line between Florida and Georgia, which was essential to keep the Confederate army supplied with beef. In yet another failure of wartime cooperation, promises made by railroads to provide transportation for free soon proved to be empty. The Richmond & Petersburg, for example, immediately raised its charges when the company realized the line was a vital part of the military buildup for the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. “

But nobody ever said stupidity and naivete was restricted to the rebel side. Listen to this: having captured a stretch of line around Wheeling, on the Ohio River, General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson told the Union they could continue to run their freight trains on it, but only between the hours of 11 am and 1 pm, using the laughable rationale that the passage of the trains at any other hour would wake his troops. 11 am, all right, maybe, but what in the hell did the Union Army think the Johnny Rebs were doing sleeping from noon into the afternoon? Yet, they fell for it, and deservedly reaped the rewards of colossal stupidity as Jackson led what was known as the Martinsburg Raid on June 14 1861, trapping the Union trains by destroying the track before and behind them, his men then destroyed 42 locomotives and 386 freight cars, then attacked the machine shops and warehouses in Martinsburg, taking 14 locomotives and forcing the closure of that section of the Baltimore & Ohio, which was a big blow to the Union war effort.

Perhaps with something of a slight lack of foreplanning though, they had to transport the stolen engines by road as, well, there was no track, since they themselves had torn it up. Unfortunately for Jackson though, the raid angered the citizens of Maryland, who had seen the B&O as their railroad, and they switched sides to the Union, which helped keep the rest of the Baltimore & Ohio open. Lincoln, aware, unlike most of his contemporaries in government, of the power of the railroads and how vital they would be to the war effort, appointed Daniel McCallum, of whom we have already read, as military director and superintendent of the railroads. McCallum, as we’ve seen, was a man who could get things done, and, crucially for a commander in times of war, took no shit from anyone. His military rank, though only honorary and only to last till the termination of the war, ensured he had the authority to order the Union forces to carry out his commands. With him was Herman Haupt.

Haupt, about whom we have also heard, as in collaboration with McCallum he helped design the “horseshoe bend” for the Pennsylvania Railroad, actually had had a military commission, having passed through West Point, but resigned his commission in order to pursue a career in engineering and bridge-building. His skill, intelligence and understanding of engineering concepts made him the perfect man for the job, and earned him the title of the “war’s wizard of railroading.” His skill in repairing broken bridges and torn-up rails earned him the admiration of the President when Lincoln visited to survey the bridge he had built across the Potomac, erected in just nine days: “That man Haupt has built a bridge across Potomac Creek . . . and upon my word, gentlemen, there is nothing in it but beanpoles and cornstalks.” Haupt was not a happy man when his trains were delayed, especially when this was due to the arrogance of certain officers.

On finding that four trains had been delayed arriving in Piedmont, Haupt discovered that the trains had been held up because one was blocking the line. This turned out to be because the general in charge had wanted his wife to get a good night’s rest in a nearby farmhouse, and so held the train overnight, preventing others from using the line. Haupt was livid when he visited the scene and saw the lady responsible make her way back to the train. “I did not display extra gallantry on the occasion, nor even offer the lady assistance. She had detained four trains in three hours in a period of urgency, and I was not in an amiable mood.” Know what you mean, mate. I’d have given her a slap. Him, too. Because of this, and other unacceptable incidents where officers treated trains as if they were their own personal property, an order was issued that declared “No officer . . . shall have the right to detain a train, or order it to run in advance of schedule.” Nevertheless, some officers persisted: one had to be kicked out of a car he had set up in a siding as a personal office rather than send it back to be reused.

Haupt’s knowledge of bridge-building techniques allowed him not only to erect better ones, but to more easily and quickly destroy existing ones. He developed a system whereby a single trooper, carrying what were called “torpedoes”, eight-inch long cylinders filled with gunpowder, could drill holes in the supports of a bridge, insert the torpedoes, wind out the two-foot-long fuse and light it, giving him time to retreat before the bridge came down. A popular phrase in the war had been “the Union can build bridges faster than the Johnny Rebs can blow them up”. Now, they could destroy them faster and more efficiently too.

But let it not be said that the south had no heroes. William Fuller, a conductor on a train known as The General, foiled a plan by the Union to sabotage the main line at Chattanooga (yeah, yeah I know) by chasing after the locomotive which the Union forces had hijacked - wait for this, it’s like something out of a cartoon - on foot for two miles until he got hold of one of those railroad trolleys (you know the ones, push up and push down and they move along like a pump on wheels) till he came to a gap where the track had been broken, managed to find a locomotive, steamed this up and pursued the General until he again came to broken track, got off and ran again until he saw a train going the other way, stopped it, commandeered it and kept up the chase. Eventually the General ran out of fuel, and the Union raiders, thwarted, jumped off and disappeared across the fields. Later they were caught and hanged. Th-th-that’s all folks!

 

[Trollheart]

As we approach our return to the unfolding history of the transcontinental railroad (forgot what you were reading, did you?) the state of all America’s railroads at the time of the Civil War, not just those of the south, can be summed up in this passage detailing troop movements in 1863, the largest single movement of men during the war: “At Culpeper, on the Rappahannock River, the troops took the Orange & Alexandria to Washington and then the Baltimore & Ohio to the Ohio River just below Wheeling. A ferry ride over the river to Bellaire in Ohio connected them with the Central Ohio Railroad to Columbus, then the Indiana Central to Indianapolis, and then the Jeffersonville, Madison & Indianapolis Railroad to Jeffersonville on the Ohio, opposite Louisville. Having recrossed the river using a pontoon, a combination of the Louis ville & Nashville and the Nashville & Chattanooga took them to their destination.”

General William Sherman, one of the heroes on the Union side, understood entirely the role the railroad had played in the war, as he recounted in his memoirs years later: : “That single stem of railroad supplied an army of 100,000 men and 32,000 horses for the period of 196 days, from May 1 to November 19, 1864. To have delivered that amount of forage and food by ordinary wagons would have required 36,800 wagons, of six mules each . . . a simple impossibility in such roads as existed in that region.”

Though they greatly facilitated the loss of huge numbers of lives, the railroads saved many thousands too, being used as ambulances to ferry the wounded out of enemy territory and back to friendly bases. However this process was very much in its infancy, and such things as mobile hospitals amounted often to injured or even dying men being dumped on the floors of freight cars, with no medical attention possible until - if - they reached their own side. But mostly the trains were used as weapons, armoured against attack and/or carrying mounted guns, and certainly helped the Union win the war, but also by default led to the deaths of more men and women than would have been possible in a war without them.

The Civil War ended in 1865, but almost before the dust had cleared, a new struggle was manifesting itself. This would, however, entail not conflict but co-operation, bring the country closer together than ever before, and finally united the disparate states of America.

We'll I'll Be a Chinaman! Following the Yellow Railroad

In the event, those who had put down the chances of the railroad succeeding must have been smiling smugly to themselves as many of their predictions came to pass, including the huge expense incurred of transporting machinery, locomotives, material across from the east via first train and then steamer, but none of these, even a heavy downpour of rain that morning, could dampen the party atmosphere that attended the gala opening of what would be the Central Pacific Railroad as the first spoke was hammered in on the morning of January 8 1863. Significant events had also unfolded that week, with the Emancipation Proclamation going into effect, freeing slaves in the southern states (although it was ignored, as it had been passed by a government now seen as the enemy and with which the south was at war) and, perhaps less encouragingly, a major defeat being dealt to the Union cause at Fredericksburg in Virginia.

Construction would not begin for another ten months, the opening ceremony largely symbolic, as most of the material was still being shipped from the east, and in addition to this, nobody wanted to work on the railroad and labour was in short supply. Any able-bodied men who had emigrated to California had done so in search of gold, not wooden sleepers in the Sacramento dust, or the freezing snows of the Sierras. Labour was not available in the west, and in the east men had an annoying habit of dying all the time: the war, which never touched California, was extracting a brutal toll on the flower of American manhood, on both sides, and there was none to spare to pursue the late Theodore Judah’s dream.

Worse was to come. Despite the obvious need for diversifying their work force, the railroad refused to hire any but white men, believing that only they had the necessary intelligence and strength of character (as well as of physique) to undertake such work. But white entitlement is not something new: even in the mid-nineteenth century, white men and women believed themselves superior to other races. Perhaps not as much as southern people did, certainly when concerning blacks, but they still maintained they were God’s chosen, the “true Americans”, and by virtue of this, better than other peoples. This entitlement translated to a lack of loyalty to, or even professional pride in, the railroad, and when silver was discovered in Nevada, most of the workers simply downed tools and headed for the new dream of wealth and fortune.

Desperate, Charles Crocker, then the head of construction, floated the idea of bringing in Chinese workers. About forty-five thousand Chinese had come over to California in search of gold, but unable to compete with the ruthless native whites, they had had to settle for basically the scraps that were left behind when the others had finished. In order to supplement their tiny incomes (no Chinese person - or Chinaman, as they were somewhat racistly called at the time - had ever struck it rich in the gold mines) they took menial jobs as house servants and odd job men, and basically became slaves in all but name, earning a pittance for their work and also the enmity of the locals, who refused to live beside them and drove them into what were all but ghettos.

Crocker’s foreman, James Strobridge, was dubious, believing the Chinese too weak and frail for the hard work of railway building, and also doubting their moral character, but he could see there was little choice. Things of course went smoothly, and the white workers welcomed the new Chinese with open arms. Well, not quite. The Irish were the most vociferous in their protest - typical, really, as they would have suffered the same prejudices as these new workers, but hey, there’s always room for some more deep-seated racism, right? And few people do racism like we do. Luckily, hardly any of the Chinese spoke English, though surely the gestures needed no interpreting. At any rate, they ignored the insults, smiled and worked on. Considering the tension between the two groups, it was thought best to keep them working in separate gangs.

Despite Strobridge’s doubts, the Chinese turned out to be excellent workers. They toiled without pause or complaint, drank only a sip of lukewarm tea - the whites drank water, which was often contaminated and led to sickness among their crew - and in fact laid more track in the same time as the whites did. This led to a race between the two gangs, as the Irish and other whites refused to be outdone by a bunch of “chinks”, all of which of course benefited the railroad. Though it had not been his plan to create competition between the gangs, it seemed that Crocker’s foresight had been good, and the Chinese workers, who were of course paid less than the whites but more than they could get at the other jobs they did, were happy to work harder than any railroad worker ever had.

The Chinese workers were canny, demanding their payment not in dollar bills, but in gold, and insisting the railroad bought their food, which gave their brothers in San Francisco extra business, as the railroad dealt with them in such items as bamboo shoots, dried oysters and cuttlefish. Their uncomplaining, industrious nature soon won them favour, other than that of the white workers on the railroad of course, and led Leland Stanford to declare, in April 1865 that “The greater portion of the laborers employed by us are Chinese. … Without them it would be impossible to complete the western portion of the [transcontinental railroad]. As a class they are quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious, and economical—ready and apt to learn all the different kinds of work required in railroad building. … They soon become as efficient as white laborers.”

However, plagued by debts, both from uncooperative stockholders who did not wish to honour the payments due on their subscriptions and grandiose plans designed by Judah which siphoned off money from the railroad funds for such things as bridges which turned out to be unstable, culverts that the rain destroyed and washed away, and majestic stations that were surely too soon, with hardly any track laid, the Central Pacific, first to begin the mammoth task of constructing the transcontinental rail network, did not have an easy time of it. Judah’s death in November removed some of the problems the Big Four were wrestling with, and allowed them to put into practice schemes he would have had major problems with, but which helped finance and keep the railroad growing.

The first CPRR locomotive, the Gov Stanford, carried its first passengers and freight eighteen miles from Sacramento to Roseville in April 1864, and two months later the track was completed as far as Newcastle, linking up with the Comstock Lode (the silver mines in Nevada) by way of the Dutch Flat Toll Road, a toll road for wagons which both provided transport for stock and materials and also connected with the growing rail route. By the summer of 1865, the railroad had advanced fifty-five miles east of Sacramento, when it came up against the most formidable of barriers, the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Cuts had to be dug, gullies and ravines filled in, and most time-consuming and dangerous of all, tunnels had to be blasted through the mountains, the longest of which measured over one and a half thousand feet. Here again, Crocker’s inspiration in hiring Chinese workers would pay off, as the Chinese were far more used to hanging off cliffs with gunpowder, having had, in their ancestry, built clifftop fortresses for warlords. And, of course, gunpowder had been invented by them, so every Chinese boy was familiar with it, unlike the whites, who handled it gingerly and with not a little fear.

The Chinese wove baskets out of reeds, which they then climbed into and had lowered over the cliff face so as to work in them more safely. Of course, safety was not a word you associated with such work, no matter the precautions taken, and it only took one of these baskets to snap, or hit a rock, or any of a hundred other reasons that would send it and its passenger tumbling down the cliff and into the mighty river. Won over finally by the bravery and ingenuity of the Chinese, the whites began to afford them grudging respect, and even work with them, and the two sides became more or less integrated, as white men took lessons from Chinese on how best to blast the cliffs without blowing themselves to Kingdom Come.

But up in the high Sierras, falling to your death or being blown to bits was not the only hazard, and one of the greatest enemies was the cold. Winter that year was particularly severe, so much so that construction had to be halted. Snow covered the camp to its rooftops, and fierce blizzards were known to wash away entire populations, whose bodies would not be found until the spring thaw. But that spring held both promise and threat. In April 1866 the Civil War finally came to an end, which, while it freed up more labour from the east, also allowed the resurgence of efforts by the Central Pacific’s great rival, the Union Pacific Railroad. As Washington paid by mile of track laid, the profits the CPRR had expected to make looked likely now to diminish, as the Union Pacific began its efforts in earnest. It was now a race to the finish line.

 

[Trollheart]

How the West Was Lost: Those Who Tried and Failed to Save It

I certainly don’t have to explain to any of you, I’m sure, how badly treated the Red Man was by ourselves as the settlers moved West, and how their lands were taken, promises to them broken like bottles made out of papier mache, how they were cheated, lied to, confused, derided, murdered and raped, and all but made extinct as a race, all in the name of white expansionism. As a white man myself, though I wasn’t born for another century and even then was many thousands of miles from the scene of such savagery and betrayal, I nevertheless consider myself to bear a small part of the shame this sin stains, or should stain, every one of my race, and so I don’t point the finger and say “they did it” while smugly looking down from on high, but try, in so far as I can, to use the collective “we” and accept my part of the blame.

As a nation historically oppressed by others, and as one torn apart by differences both political and religious, I should be able to say I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end, but the truth is I don’t. I’m the equivalent of a man living, during the time of the West, in say Canada or New York, well removed from the carnage and the massacres, in no danger. While my people (Catholics) were being killed and driven out of Northern Ireland by the Protestants, I was safely in the Republic, where the population was overwhelmingly Catholic, and so never faced any kind of oppression for my religion, never mind that I don’t even believe. On the streets of Londonderry or Belfast or Armagh, pleading not being a practicing Catholic was no excuse and offered no escape; to Protestants (well, to the loyalist paramilitaries and their supporters) if you were baptised as a Catholic, or “Papist”, then that was what you were.

Naturally, this worked in reverse too. A Protestant caught in a Republican area, or picked up by the IRA, would not get out of it by saying he (or she) was non-religious. To each side the other was the enemy, and it didn’t matter if you were a mother of five or a old man, a schoolchild or a priest; there were only two sides, and if you weren’t with them, you were against them. Not to mention that if you somehow did escape your fate by declaring against your own side, or purporting to be outside of the conflict, the chances you would be seen as a traitor by your own side and punished by them were not inconceivable. Again, on both sides, you were either with them, or us, or against them, or us. No middle ground.

But if anything positive can be said about the sectarian conflict between Catholic and Protestant that raged for over thirty years over the border (and it really can’t), it can at least be admitted that there was a kind of brutal honesty there. Loyalist paramilitaries did not trick you into believing they were your friends, Republican punishment parties never pretended they would be all right with you living in their area. You were the enemy, you knew you were the enemy, they knew you were the enemy, and everyone knew where they stood. Or, quite possibly, knelt, with their hands on their head, waiting for the bullet that would end their life.

One of the greatest hypocrisies (and there are many) of the treatment of the Indians, as they were then called, in the American West is that the US Government and Army did not come right out from day one and say “we hate you, we have no use for you, there is no room for you in this new world we are going to force upon this land, and we are going to kill you all, or at worst, shove you all into ghettos.” Had they done so, it would not in any way have lessened the horror of what happened, but at least the tribes would have known what to expect. When Hitler had the Jews herded into ghettos prior to being transported to the camps, it’s a safe bet that none of them thought they would be allowed live. They knew where they stood. But with the Indians, it was so much more insidious and underhand.

Much of this, of course, came from political exigency. As settlers moved West and, to be blunt, wanted the lands that belonged to the Indian tribes - had been promised them by their government - the president and his cabinet had to renege on their promises, or part of them, pushing back the demarcation line which was supposed to encompass what were to be known as Indian Territory, until finally the borders of that land shrunk to a few reservations, while the white people trampled all over the Indians’ sacred ancestral hunting grounds. As in all things, the white man came first. It had been so from the time when the first white man had stepped onto the land that was later to be known as America, and imposed his and his country’s, and his race’s values upon what he saw as “savages”. White America wasn’t really that bothered about imposing values on these savages, they just wanted their lands, and if they had to kill a few million of them, well they had no problem with that.

The pages of the history of the American west - but mostly, not the silver screens of movie theatres, for obvious reasons - are filled with massacre after massacre of Indian tribes, and not just the men. The US Cavalry seems in general to have made little to no distinction between warriors or braves, and their women and children. All were cut down with the same lack of human compassion or regard, families slaughtered in bloodbaths the likes of which we would not see again till World War I, and which had been recently witnessed through the dripping, scarlet eye of the Civil War. Nobody cried over these innocents, at least, nobody that counted. Often there was nobody left of the tribe to mourn them, as they were all wiped out together. And these were no orderly military campaigns either; at best, Indians could muster rifles, but usually defended themselves (assuming they got the chance to; many of these were sneak attacks, which would have been loudly proclaimed as underhand and cowardly in the US Senate had they been carried out by the Indians) with axes, bows and arrows and spears. The US Army had artillery, rifles and the precursor of the dread of the trenches, the machine gun, in the Gatling gun, which could kill many men at a distance like some chattering goblin of destruction.

There was no comparison, and no chance for the Indians, even assuming they knew what was coming and could prepare for it. Fire, too, was used by the white man, as the Indians almost to a man lived in hide-covered tepees or wigwams, hungrily devoured by flames in an instant, and like the thatched cottages and shacks callously burned by the Normans and others down through history, one man with a single torch could realistically destroy an entire settlement, camp or village in moments. Once the panicked denizens rushed out, seeking safety, weapon fire would cut them down, or else brave cavalrymen would ride in and slice them to pieces, taking, it should be noted, scalps often as trophies, emulating the practice of some of the more warlike tribes.

Sadly, but a single example of such a massacre, but so rooted in not even misunderstanding, but a sense of entitlement, arrogance and pure good-old-fashioned violence in response to a reasonable request was the account below that I feel it incumbent upon me to relate it. To place it in context, it came as the result of a horse-race was disputed by the Navajo tribe, who believed - and it seems correctly - that they were cheated. Approaching the fort to air their grievances, one man was shot and then all hell broke loose. The below report is by Captain Nicholas Hodt of the US Army.

“The Navahos, squaws, and children ran in all directions and were shot and bayoneted. I succeeded in forming about twenty men .... I then marched out to the east side of the post; there I saw a soldier murdering two little children and a woman. I hallooed immediately to the soldier to stop. He looked up, but did not obey my order. I ran up as quick as I could, but could not get there soon enough to prevent him from killing the two innocent children and wounding severely the squaw. I ordered his belts to be taken off and taken prisoner to the post .... Meanwhile the colonel had given orders to the officer of the day to have the artillery [mountain howitzers] brought out to open upon the Indians. The sergeant in charge of the mountain howitzers pretended not to understand the order given, for he considered it as an unlawful order; but being cursed by the officer of the day, and threatened, he had to execute the order or else get himself in trouble. The Indians scattered all over the valley below the post, attacked the post herd, wounded the Mexican herder, but did not succeed in getting any stock; also attacked the expressman some ten miles from the post, took his horse and mail-bag and wounded him in the arm. After the massacre there were no more Indians to be seen about the post with the exception of a few squaws, favorites of the officers. The commanding officer endeavored to make peace again with the Navahos by sending some of the favorite squaws to talk with the chiefs; but the only satisfaction the squaws received was a good flogging.”

Now consider that the above massacre - you can’t really call it anything else - was sparked by one of the men asking for reparations, for justice, not to be cheated, and when the gate of the fort was rudely slammed in his face, trying to force entry. He was immediately shot. I mean, it’s somewhat overkill, isn’t it? And then it led to a total slaughter as what I suppose cops today in America might call an “unlawful gathering” were treated with the full, terrible and repressive hand of the law of the West, American law, white law. I suppose that could as easily have been a bunch of black people today.

Of course, there are worse, some famous, some not, many hushed up, excused and in some cases even gloried in, but the one above does serve to show just how little the white soldiers and their commanding officers thought of these people who mistakenly believed they were dealing with friends, kindred spirits, reasonable men. While in my History of America journal I can and do go on at length about the various tribes, their customs, deeds, achievements, daily lives, this is all before we white men set foot on the continent, and since then, the story of the American Indian, or the Native American, whichever you prefer, has been slowly and then with increasing speed charging down a hill like a stampede of wild buffalo, heading for extinction. In a very real way, the appearance of the white man in America can be likened to the unwelcome intrusion of Satan into the Garden of Eden. Of course, Indians would not make that comparison as they’re not Christian, which just shows how most allegories don’t hold up very well to close examination. But it’s certainly true to say that the second half of the nineteenth century sounded the death knell of the freedom of the Red Man, the end of his ownership or guardianship of the plains, the severe dwindling of the buffalo and the first chapter of his own personal version of Paradise Lost.

While there are huge names in Native American lore, giants who stand like titans astride the history of the West, so compelling and memorable that they cannot be stricken from the record or buried with the dead, men who fought against the might of the white man’s army - and in some cases, at least temporarily, won - these people will be dealt with where they deserve to be, in the annals of those who contributed to the history of the West. They can’t be relegated to a section on Indians, these names that call to us down through almost two hundred years and remind us of our sins. Red Cloud. Tecumseh. Crazy Horse. Geronimo. And of course, Sitting Bull. These men’s resistance to the white ethnic cleansing ring loudly through the lore of the West, and should make us shrink from their courage and their determination to preserve their people, even if this proved to be a hopeless task.

No. Here, in this section, I want to look at some of the lesser-known names, those who have been forgotten by or erased from history. The ones who stood up and said no, the ones who gave their lives to save their fellows and their families, the ones who refused to move off their land, granted to them by their gods and the spirits of their ancestors. There are many, many stories of heroism and bravery, rugged determination and stubborn resistance buried in the bones of the mountains and the soil of the earth, drowned in the rivers and looking down from the hot skies, and while we can’t bring them back, they should not be allowed to be forgotten.

 

[Trollheart]

Part I: Spirits in the Material World: Ghostdancing on the Precipice of History

“If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Indians.”
--WAMDITANKA (Big EAGLE) of the SANTEE SIOUX

Little Crow* (Ta-oya-te-duta)

A chief of the Mdewkantons, a branch of the Santee Sioux, itself part of the great Sioux Nation from which Indian legends like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse would emerge, Little Crow was not a happy man. He it was who had signed two treaties on behalf of his people, giving away almost ninety percent of their land along the Minnesota River in return for which his people continued to be cheated by the white man, refusing to pay up. The Mdewkantons had been reduced to basically living on a sort of almost welfare set up by the white agency traders who now all but controlled the land. These men stiffed them on every count, and made them feel interlopers in their own country. Big Eagle once noted “Many of the whites always seemed to say by their manner when they saw an Indian, 'I am better than you,'” and it was indeed typical of the way white men (and possibly, probably in fact, women) looked down on the Indians as beneath them.

In fairness to this proud warrior chief, he had done everything asked - or demanded - of him by the white man. He had dressed as they deemed fit, converted to Christianity and become an Episcopalian, built a house and begun to farm, but still it wasn’t enough. Still the Great Father (President Buchanan) continued to trick and cheat him and treat him as if he were a small child. The Civil War was taking a huge toll on America, and when Little Crow and his people went to collect their annuities at the Upper Agency on Yellow Medicine River they were told their payment had not yet arrived, and possibly might not, as the coffers of Congress were somewhat bare from having had to fight the war. Little Crow asked the trader chief, agent Thomas Galbraith why they could not have some of the provisions already in the warehouse? Their money was due; could he not supply them on credit? In response Galbraith had soldiers guard the warehouses.

Incensed, and starving, Little Crow sent his own men, outnumbering the whites five to one, to take what they needed, and Galbraith, at the insistence of and persuasion by the captain, who did not want a bloodbath on his hands over some flour, to which the Indians were in any case entitled, refused to fire upon them. Little Crow persisted though until Galbraith promised to also supply the chief’s people at Lower Agency, further down the river, where his own camp was. Whether in retaliation for being, as he saw it, humiliated while the Indians emptied his warehouse and made a mockery of his efforts to protect the merchandise, the agent kept Little Crow waiting for days, and when it became clear he had no intention of supplying the Mdewkantons, Little Crow issued this warning: "We have waited a long time. The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry they help themselves."

Showing complete contempt for the hungry Indians, the traders were immovable and one of them even went so far as to suggest they could eat grass, or their own shit. Not surprisingly, this ended the council and Little Crow departed in anger. Revenge for this grave and callous insult would soon be visited upon this man, when later he would lie dead on the ground with his own mouth stuffed with grass. I suppose he was lucky that was all it would be stuffed with! Even so, Little Crow knew he was bound by the treaties he had signed not to make war upon the white man, and while that white man seemed to care about as much for the truth as the eagle cared about the rabbit, Native Americans had their honour, and their word was their bond. He found events moving faster than he had anticipated though, and carrying him along on a wave of resentment and hostility as he learned that some of his men had killed white men and women in a futile game of who’s-the-bravest, and his council advised him that it would be best to strike first, as history showed that when one of his number was killed by an Indian, the white man did not make any distinctions between Indians, and all were seen as guilty. To make things worse, women were among the casualties, and this would only inflame the white men more.

Still Little Crow pushed for calm, and peace, even though he knew his men were right: the white man would exact a terrible toll for this day’s work, and he would spare nobody. But when the hated word “coward” was shouted out, Little Crow faced his people sternly: "Ta-oya-te-duta is not a coward, and he is not a fool! When did he run away from his enemies? When did he leave his braves behind him on the warpath and turn back to his tepee? When he ran away from your enemies, he walked behind on your trail with his face to the Ojibways and covered your backs as a she-bear covers her cubs! Is Ta-oya-te-duta without scalps? Look at his war feathers! Behold the scalp locks of your enemies hanging there on his lodgepoles! Do you call him a coward? Ta--oya-te-duta is not a coward, and he is not a fool. Braves, you are like little children; you know not what you are doing.

"You are full of the white man's devil water. You are like dogs in the Hot Moon when they run mad and snap at their own shadows. We are only little herds of buffalo left scattered; the great herds that once covered the prairies are no more. See!--the white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one--two--ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one--two--ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.

"Yes; they fight among themselves--away off. Do you hear the thunder of their big guns? No; it would take you two moons to run down to where they are fighting, and all the way your path would be among white soldiers as thick as tamaracks in the swamps of the Ojibways. Yes; they fight among themselves, but if you strike at them they will all turn on you and devour you and your women and little children just as the locusts in their time fall on the trees and devour all the leaves in one day.

"You are fools. You cannot see the face of your chief; your eyes are full of smoke. You cannot hear his voice; your ears are full of roaring waters. Braves, you are little children--you are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon of January.

"Ta-oya-te-duta is not a coward; he will die with you."

And so Little Crow was committed. He had already lost face in the eyes of his people by signing the treaties and giving away the land of the Mdewkantons, and had elected another to speak for them in his place. If he did not fight, despite his reservations (sorry) he would bear up the charge of being a coward, and perhaps a traitor too. Yet he foresaw dark times for his people if they did attack. There was however no choice at this point, and so, while some of the Mdewkantons went to the trading post in the morning to warn those they had come to regard as friends, and save their lives, most were slaughtered and so began a war between Little Crow’s people and the oppressors who had tricked them out of their land. As the survivors fled back to the fort they met a company of soldiers who ignored the warnings of the priest, Reverend Hinman, who advised them to turn back, and they were ambushed and half their number killed.

Flushed with their success, Little Crow’s people marched on Fort Ridgeley itself, their numbers swelling as other chiefs, tired of their mistreatment and of watching their people starve, joined the attack. Discipline, however, proved a problem, as most of the warriors just went where they liked and did what they wanted, some heading off to a nearby village, and the proper assault on the fort was delayed to the next day. It was quite quickly seen that taking a US Army fort was next to impossible: the Indians’ favourite tactic of shooting fire-arrows into the building in order to burn it down would not work, as the fort was constructed of stone, and though they shot at and through the windows, there was no real way to know if their shots hit the targets, while the men in the fort could see the attackers clearly, and were of course better armed.

With reinforcements, a second attack the next morning was more successful, as the warriors used camouflage to creep close enough to the fort to set the thatched roofs of the stables on fire, causing great confusion. But again they were driven back, and with such losses that Little Crow worried they would not be able to mount a third assault. In addition to this, word had come of over 1,400 reinforcements on the way from St. Paul, fresh fighting men who would bolster the defence of the garrison and vastly outnumber the decimated Santee. Wounded, Little Crow lay in his tent while Manako, another war chief, led an attack against the village which the warriors had tried to take the previous day. Again they were repulsed, though they did kill over a hundred men and retired with twice as many prisoners in women and children. By now the US reinforcements had arrived, and the Santees found it expedient to withdraw to the mountains, where Little Crow, recovered from his wounds, tried to enlist other war chiefs to his cause.

But due to the lack of discipline exercised by his men in the indiscriminate slaying of not only soldiers and traders but blameless civilian settlers, and more to the point, his failure to take the fort, he had few takers. Nobody wanted to join the losing side. Nevertheless, what had been put in motion could not now be stopped, and Little Crow knew he had two choices: hide and wait for the Army to find and kill him and his people, or go out fighting and taking as many of them with them as they could. He decided to go on the offensive, and take on the army led by Colonel Henry Hasting Sibley, an ex-trader who was now a cavalry officer. Indiscipline again reared its ugly head though, as many of his warriors, particularly those who had seen how difficult trying to take Fort Ridgeley had been, wanted to go for softer targets, attacking the villages and settlements where there were few if any soldiers. Little Crow, believing the Santees’ beef was only with the army, refused to allow this and his force split into two along the lines of those who remained with him to attack the soldiers (the lesser of the two) and those who decided to go their own way and take down the civilians. From that point, the Santees’ attempts were doomed to failure.

Big Eagle had more success, and killed many soldiers, but it was all mostly as a rearguard action and the Santee disappeared into the forests, unable to make any real gains. Sibley tried to force Little Crow into a parley, demanding he return the prisoners he had taken, but the Santee were worried about the edict of extermination that had gone out from Governor Ramsey, and though Little Crow left a note to explain why the Santees had made war on Sibley’s men, he refused to bring back the prisoners, distrustful of the man. Many of his contemporaries were for suing for peace though, believing the return of the prisoners would be the end of it. Another Indian, who held the same views as Little Crow, voiced his opinion thusly:

"I am for continuing the war, and am opposed to the delivery of the prisoners. I have no confidence that the whites will stand by any agreement they make if we give them up. Ever since we treated with them, their agents and traders have robbed and cheated us. Some of our people have been shot, some hung; others placed upon floating ice and drowned; and many have been starved in their prisons. It was not the intention of the nation to kill any of the whites until after the four men returned from Acton and told what they had done. When they did this, all the young men became excited, and commenced the massacre. The older ones would have prevented it if they could, but since the treaties they have lost all their influence. We may regret what has happened, but the matter has gone too far to be remedied. We have got to die. Let us, then, kill as many of the whites as possible, and let the prisoners die with us."

And every word he said was true. But as ever down through history, such matters are often settled by treachery, and so this one too. Washaba, one of the other chiefs, sent a secret message to Sibley, anxious to end the war and obtain forgiveness for his people. He arranged to meet the colonel and hand over the prisoners. After a final assault had again failed, Little Crow withdrew and Sibley marched into the Santees camp, aided by Wabasha and took back the prisoners. He then made every remaining Santee his prisoner, and began a kangaroo court which ended in death sentences for many, though these were held off while President Lincoln was requested to ratify and authorise the sentences, which he refused to do. Ramsey and General Pope, Sibley’s immediate superior, to whom he had passed the responsibility of pronouncing deaths on what was said to be over three hundred Indians, were angered by the President’s delay, and swore to take revenge themselves with or without his permission. Lynch mobs also attacked the prisoners as they were marched to a new prison camp.

In the end, Lincoln’s explicit orders saved the lives of most of the Santees, as he declared that only thirty-odd of the warriors should be executed, those who could be proven to have been guilty of murder. The rest were to be imprisoned. Among them was Big Eagle, and the son-in-law of Wabasha, who had betrayed the tribe, was hanged, though he had not taken part in any violence, and had tried to stop the war. Little Crow tried to rally reinforcements from the other tribes, showing them what the white men had done, but they were not interested, believing their best option was to move out of the way. Little Crow crossed over the border into Canada, to seek the help of the British there, but had no luck, and when he decided to go back to Minnesota and take horses from the white men in recompense for the land he had signed away, and never been paid for, he was shot and killed by bounty hunters.

* Little Crow, Big Eagle: you have to wonder if there was a Medium Raven or an Enormous Buzzard knocking around in that tribe, don’t you?