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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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Every time I see this thread I think of Tom T. Hall's "Faster Horses."

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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.

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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.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018