Trollheart

II: The Face Behind the Badge: Famous Lawmen of the Old West

There are names of course that we all know by now, whether through movies or games or television, or even an accidental or otherwise encounter with history - Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, Tom Horn - but given the massive area these officers of the law operated across, and the timescale involved, it will come as no surprise that there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of men who upheld the law in a lawless time of whom we know virtually nothing. We can’t talk about hundreds or thousands in this journal, but let’s look at a few of the perhaps lesser-known ones.


Bud Ballew (1877 - 1922)

I imagine almost every lawman, be he sheriff, town marshal, US Marshal or justice of the peace even, carried in them days. Ballew certainly did, gaining fame as both a gunfighter and a lawman. Born David Monticello in Texas in 1877, he acquired the nickname “Bud” from his father, Bryant Bellew having been called this himself, and his time as a young boy helping out on the family ranch gave him an easy familiarity with animals, especially horses, and with the handling of firearms too. Not one to hang around on the farm though, Bud left at the tender age of thirteen years and headed to what was then known as the Indian Territory, land which had been ostensibly set aside for the resettlement of the Native Americans, and which by 1890 had been reduced to what is now the state of Oklahoma. There he built his own ranch and was in fact joined there three years later by the rest of his family. Eight years after that he met the woman who was to be his wife.

The marriage was blessed with two sons, and by 1910 Bud’s ranch was humming along so nicely that he began to get bored, and looked for other work. He found it in prosecuting and defending the law. When Buck Garrett, sheriff of Carter County and nephew of the famous Pat, offered him a job as his deputy, he accepted, beginning a career in law enforcement which would last over a decade. At the same time, he continued ranching and even had time to do some speculating in Texas Tea, or oil as we call it.

Bud Ballew presented the kind of image of a deputy that became almost a caricature of the type in the hands of Hollywood producers. Tall for his time - an inch off six foot - he wore a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, out of which burst his shock of fiery red hair, and he had a deep, booming laugh, wore cowboy boots, carried a pistol on each hip and was frequently seen in or around the environs of the local saloons and gambling dens. Anyone looking into his cherubic, good-humoured face though and taking him for a sap would be placing themselves very much in danger, as behind those twinkling eyes and the ready smile lurked a man who was ready to kill in the name of justice, and who would, by the end of his twelve-year career, have notched up eight kills to his credit. Not quite one a year, but for a lawman that’s a pretty decent return, I think you’ll agree.

Though himself shot in the stomach by outlaw Pete Bynum, he was not fazed and returned fire, killing Bynum and another man with the unlikely name of Alison (don’t know if that was his first or surname) who was sleeping in the next room. I also don’t know if this Alison character was allied with Bynum or if he was just an unlucky piece of collateral damage. Steve Talkington was next on his list, but when this guy tried to resist arrest, Ballew shot him dead. When he then tried to collect his pay from the town marshal, he found himself caught in the middle of a dispute. Highnote (where did they get these names, honestly?) had been fired but refused to go, and furthermore, told Ballew what he could do with his demand for his commission. So Ballew did what he did best, and shot and killed the ex-marshal. He doesn’t appear to have paid any price for the killing, so I suppose it must have been seen as justified, though how refusing to pay a man could be grounds for shooting him I don’t know. Well, it was the Wild West I guess. I suppose it’s possible that Highnote was seen as acting illegally, both in refusing to step down and in failing to hand over the reward, so maybe the deputy was within his rights.

Another outlaw tried to outrun justice by jumping from the train by which he was being taken to trial by Ballew and another deputy, but both men fired at the prisoner as he ran off and Ballew’s bullet found its mark. He later saved his boss’s life when Garrett, engaged in a gunfight with one of two highway robbers, needed his help when he, Garrett, was busy with the first robber while the other tried to circle round and get a shot at him. Ballew, coming up behind him, forced him to turn his attention on the deputy, who shot him dead. Even other lawmen were fair game for Ballew. He had a long-standing feud running with Deputy US Marshal Dow Braziel, who was angry that neither Ballew nor his boss seemed too inclined to enforce the recent Prohibition laws. As he and Ardmore Chief of Police Les Segler responded to shots fired early in the morning of January 31 1919, they found Braziel in a cafe and for whatever reason he started firing at them. Ballew returned fire and shot him dead. End of feud.

Determined to preserve the law though, and show that it applied even to those who enforced it, the Chief of Police had Ballew arrested, though later on his (the Chief’s) testimony it was made clear that Deputy Ballew had only been defending himself, having been fired at first, and he was released without charge. An interesting point here is that the account I read notes that Ballew “emptied his pistol, hitting Braziel six times”. Assuming his gun was the usual six-shooter, that means that every single bullet the deputy fired hit its mark. What a shot!

Even this impressive feat though was as nothing compared to what happened two years later, in November 1920. A wealthy oil baron known as Jake Hamon, slated for a post in President Warren Harding’s cabinet, died of a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound he said occurred when he was cleaning his gun. Despite his dying confession though, suspicion quickly fell on his lover, Clara Smith, whom it was believed had shot him, either because he was abusive to her or because he wanted to break off their affair (one assumes Hamon was married, though it doesn’t say). Accused of the crime (on what evidence, I don’t know: circumstantial at best surely) she was tried and quickly found not guilty.

Well I thought that was going to be far from the end of it, but colour me surprised: that was the end of it. The point seems to have been that during the trial the reporters from various newspapers were almost more interested in the colourful antics of Ballew and Garrett, the latter of whom, though respected was not liked, mostly due to his habit of riding through the town shooting off his gun and yelling. Far from embarrassing the deputy though, the news reports seem to have made him determined to live up to the image, and he got worse. The end was already looming for Bud Ballew however, as he resigned in support of his sheriff when Garrett was investigated for, charged with and relieved of his post for the unlawful release of prisoners and what was called non-enforcement of the law, in 1922.

Time to go out in a blaze of glory then. Ballew, with other ex-Garrett men, was involved a few days later in a fistfight with their replacements, a fistfight that rapidly became a gunfight, and in which Ballew took a bullet in his thigh. But a mere slug in his leg was not going to stop the notorious Bud Ballew from raising hell, and he headed to a rodeo in Wichita Falls, Texas, with his son, where, after being reported by the captain of the Texas Rangers to the Chief of Police, he refused to surrender and come quietly, instead reaching for his gun in a domino parlour (I know, I know!) and was shot down dead, proving I guess that even if you’re a lawman the old adage holds true: don’t fuck with Texas.

A postscript however maintains that the story was embellished if not actually a lie, as the county coroner in Ardmore, to which Ballew’s body was flown back, determined that all five shots that took the deputy down had been from behind, which disputed the official story. Nobody was ever charged, but to his dying day Buck Garrett maintained that his deputy had been murdered.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Raymond Hatfield Gardner (1845 - 1940)

Who ever heard of a lawman in the American West living to be almost a hundred? You would assume most if not all of them had short, violent lives, but this guy seems to have survived okay. Mind you, the odds were against him from the start. Kidnapped at only two years of age by Comanches, he would surely not have been expected to have survived, but for whatever reason the Comanches held on to him and then traded him to the Sioux, among whom he grew up. When he reached age fifteen he escaped (you’d have to wonder where he was escaping to and from what; at age two he surely couldn’t have had any memory of his white parents, and so life among the Indians would have been all he remembered) and joined the US Army, riding for them as a courier and, later, for the Pony Express.

He rejoined, or joined properly, the army again when the Civil War broke out and served four terms, his knowledge of Native American ways and tactics proving invaluable later when he served as an Indian scout. He acquired the nickname “Arizona Bill” and fought against the Apache, and later joined another, more famous Bill in his Wild West Show. Later still he moved into law enforcement and served both as a US Deputy Marshal and as an Arizona Ranger. He even had his own radio show in the 1930s. He died after a long illness on January 29 1940 and was interred first in a pauper’s grave (not sure what the pauper thought of it!) and later, when evidence of his extensive military service came to light, his body was moved to the Fort Sam Houston Military Cemetery, where he rests today.



John Peter Gabriel (1838 - 1898)

No, no, I kid you not! His name really was Peter Gabriel. Well, John Gabriel, but that’s not half as much fun is it? Anyway, it seems everyone knew him as Peter, or Pete. Another Arizona lawman, Gabriel was actually born in Germany, his family moving to America in 1847, when he was only nine years old, settling in Wisconsin. Luck was not with the family though and his father died only two years later, leaving his wife with six hungry mouths to feed and no way to feed them. I don’t know whether she farmed them all off, or how it happened, or if he was the only one (seems unlikely: just as hard to feed five kids as six) but John was taken in by a lawyer who caught the gold bug and headed to California in 1849. When he was old enough to support himself, John moved to Arizona, where he worked at mining and in law enforcement on and off.

Pinal County Sheriff Peter Brady must have been kicking himself when, having appointed him as deputy in 1877 he was then defeated by Gabriel in the next year’s elections, and his deputy took his job. Gabriel established himself as one of Arizona’s finest and most successful sheriffs, taking no shit from lynch mobs, tracking down stagecoach and horse thieves, killers and cattle rustlers. Friends however became enemies when, having hired his old buddy Joseph Phy as his deputy, he had to fire him for being drunk and disorderly, and later had to arrest him for assault, The year Gabriel left office, 1886, Phy came back onto the scene, ran for the office (actually with Gabriel’s initial support, though it was later withdrawn) and got the job, but the two friends-then-enemies-then-friends had once again become bitter enemies, and it would all end in the rising smoke from the barrel of a gun two years later.

The two met in a saloon in Florence, where an argument erupted between them and quickly spilled out, in true Hollywood style, into the street, where both men drew. Both were wounded, but Gabriel survived whereas Phy died from his wounds. Gabriel had to stand trial but was acquitted on the grounds of self-defence that then prevailed in the West. His own end would be much longer in coming, but equally tragic. Having spent the next ten years mining around Arizona and down as far as Mexico, it was in his old stomping grounds that the Grim Reaper came to collect. Having drunk some water laced with arsenic (used in mining) at the Monitor Mine on Mineral Creek he lay alone and in agony for a week in his cabin until finally his mining partner happened by and discovered him. He died the next day and was buried near the mine.

“Big Steve” Long

I subtitled this section “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Law Enforcement”, and here’s one of the bad ones. Steve Long (known as “Big Steve”, don’t ask me why but you can make some educated guesses I’m sure, some clean, some perhaps not so much) was said to have been a “Johnny Reb”, which is to say he fought on the losing side of the Civil War, and after the defeat of the South he took up gunfighting, wandering from territory to territory until he ended up in Wyoming in 1866. There, with his half-brothers Ace and Con Moyer, who had founded the town of Laramie, and on their own authority proclaimed themselves justice of the peace and marshal, he was deputised to help his two siblings. But a gunfighter does not generally make a good lawman (though some might), and whereas our friend Bud Ballew killed eight men in twelve years, Long had notched up that many in two months!

The brothers proved more dictators than any kind of lawmen, ruling with an iron fist and crushing all who opposed them. They forced ranchers to hand over the deeds to their lands and miners to sign over their claims to them in literal backroom deals, where resistance or reluctance was met with a bullet, and the shrugged excuse that the man had gone for his gun. Well, who was going to say otherwise, when the men who ran the town’s justice system said so? Other victims quickly followed, including those who objected to the rigged card games run by the brothers at the saloon, and within a year Long was claiming to have shot and killed thirteen men, suspected of another seven, though this could not be proven. The saloon in question began to acquire the epithet “The Bucket of Blood”, and a local rancher, fed up, like most of the townsfolk, with the tyranny of Long and the Moyers, began to organise a vigilante group to take them on.

You’ve got to love these names. Long ambushed and killed a prospector called Rollie “Hard Luck” Harrison, intending to rob him, but got a bullet for his pains. As his fiancee treated the wound he confessed to her what had happened and, presumably sick of all the violence (given how brutal Long was, it doesn’t stretch the imagination too far to reason that he often took out his temper on her) she reported to N.K. Broswell, the rancher mentioned above. Accordingly, the “Bucket of Blood” was stormed and an angry lynch mob dragged the three evil siblings out into the street, where they were strung up.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My View on the Missionary Position (sorry)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

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

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

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


Rev. Ralph J. Hall (1891 - 1973)

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


Francis Asbury (1745 - 1816)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

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

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

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

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

Hassling the Heathen: Missionaries in the Old West

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

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

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

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

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


Pierre-Jean de Smet (1801 - 1873)

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

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

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

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

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


Henry Spalding (1803 - 1874)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

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



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

I: Fire-breathing demons from Hell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Chains of Misery: The Dark, Infernal Engine of Oppression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

A Country in Crisis: the Panic of 1837

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

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

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

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

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

Leading the way: The Erie Railroad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Telegraph (Rail)Road

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

Charles Minot (1810 - 1866)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel McCalllum (1815 - 1878)

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had more ideas too:

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

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

First. A proper division of responsibilities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018