Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

A sample Pullman car – in the Texas Transport Museum

Work continues – at a rather slow pace, admittedly – on the two books I have currently under construction, while I do research reading for them (in a small way) and work on projects to do with the Tiny Publishing Bidness. Which has just had two old corporate clients appear out of the woodwork; I don’t know how much we can do for the second, as the electronic files for their project are nonexistent, as their corporate history was produced and printed in about 1990. Thus technology marches on. I am wracking my memory, to see if I can come up with my own estimation as to when electronically-composed documents became the norm. I would guess around that time. I used to go back and generate training documents and various reports on a computer which also ran the automated music channel at EBS-Zaragoza in the late 1980s. This usually involved two large floppy disks (one for the operating system, one for my document archive) and a tiny screen of brilliant green letters on a black background. This writing process usually had me seeing white objects in shades of pink for at least an hour afterwards.

The other client is much more flexible regarding requirements for their project: a straight republication of their company history, which involved a tedious but not complex matter of taking apart one of the printed copies, carefully scanning page by page, and then reassembling a series of cleaned-up and resized photos in order. This brought me to meditating on technology generally, how things changed radically within a brief span of living memory. This last publishing project could now be done with scanner-copiers available and affordable for the home market trade – very unlike the printer/copier at one of my early military assignments; a behemoth the size of a VW bug, which probably cost about half the price of a small trainer jet.

Yes, in this precariously-blessed technological age, technology marches on. What was once a dream became a reality – and with such speed, between one decade and the next! I had a project a while ago, transcribing a series of letters from a young Yankee gentleman doing the 1850s version of the Grand Tour. Whilst in Paris, he ventured an off-the-cuff speculation that he would so much like to have a portable pocket telegraph, so that he could communicate more or less instantly with his family … of which he was very fond. This very same gentleman, upon accepting an offer of employment with the husband of his sister, was translated to the far frontier of New Mexico within a year or so of his stay in Paris. Likely he would have relished possession of his portable pocket telegraph, or a cell-phone even more. Such a device wouldn’t happen until a century and a half later … but as a mid-19th century man he was already looking to the bright future of technology, although I don’t think he realized quite how thoroughly advances in communication and transport would change everything about American life within two decades of penning his simple, homesick plaint.

The railway and the telegraph radically reshaped the American frontier and the lives of those who lived on it, as it existed between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast in those years between the Civil War and the turn of the century. The Civil War accelerated the process – in that the transcontinental telegraph itself was completed under a certain sense of urgency at the start of the war, and the question of a route for a transcontinental railway was ultimately settled in the political secession of those who had favored a Southern route, which permitted those partisans of a northern or central route to plunge ahead. Of course, regular commerce with the Far West had been unknown: trading ships around the Horn to the west coast and the Gulf coast, river steamers up and down the Mississippi-Missouri, and regular caravans of freight wagons moved goods of every kind from staples to luxury goods to Santa Fe, to the Mormon settlements in Utah Territory, California and Oregon. But such traffic was slow, subject to seasonal interruptions, the occasional Indian raid, and prohibitively expensive besides.
All of this changed within a relatively short space of years, once the great surge of railway construction in the West wove cities and settlements into as close a net as the East had been. Now it was possible to accomplish a transcontinental journey in days, for a fraction of the cost, and in relative comfort. Manufactured goods from the East and raw material from the West moved just as readily. Witness the boom in Western beef cattle, facilitated by the advance of various branches of the transcontinental railroad. The railways themselves encouraged settlement along their various routes. Life in a Western settlement no longer meant isolation, hardship and crushing boredom. Entrepreneurs as diverse as Fred Harvey, Aaron Montgomery Ward, and George Pullman made fortunes in relation to railway service and inestimably improved the quality of life for westerners in general.

Consider this; a solitary rancher, mine-owner, farmer or small-town entrepreneur could now receive mail weekly or even daily, rather than once a month, or whenever a ship came into port. They could order furniture from a mail-order catalog and see it delivered in weeks, rather than years. Diners in restaurants as far removed as Tombstone, Arizona, and Galveston, Texas, could dine on fish fresh-caught in the Great Lakes, seasonal fresh vegetables from the mid-west, and drink orange juice from California cooled on ice harvested from New England lakes, as they read the latest New York newspaper – and all of this facilitated by rail and telegraph services. The Fred Harvey system sent their all their restaurant and hotel laundry to be done at a single corporate facility, maintained their own dairy and ranch … and had train conductors telegraph ahead, alerting the Harvey House at the next stop how many passengers planned to dine in the restaurant and lunchroom. The editor and publisher of a news magazine in Waco, Texas could build a nation-wide following – in part because of the ease of railway transportation. The working and middle classes in the west had wider horizons because through the railroad – and well-to-do easterners also had the opportunity to indulge in tourism, exploring spectacular scenery and entrancing local customs, while lapped in luxury and comfort. The world widened, in a way that that I think was only duplicated by the internet, offering access to information, people, and to places – even if just vicariously. Discuss.

All righty – everyone still interested? This is the rest of the story, of Fred Harvey and his hospitality empire, which not only is given popular credit for ‘civilizing’ the Wild West, but also for supplying that stretch of the Southwest between the Mississippi-Missouri and the Sacramento with excellent food and drink, splendid service, and a constant stream of wives – for many of the women recruited as waitresses in the track-side station restaurants married right and left; to railroad men, co-workers in the Harvey establishments, and to customers they met in the course of their duties. A comparison between Harvey Girls and stewardesses in the glamorous days of commercial flight has been made now and again; both groups were composed of relatively young, independent and adventurous women, carefully selected and trained, and working in a setting where their attractive qualities were shown at an advantage.

But the restaurants and lunchrooms, as appealing and as well-organized as they were – were only part of the Harvey brand. In many locations along the AT&SF, the trackside restaurants and lunchrooms metamorphosed naturally into hotel to succor the weary traveler. Making the journey substantially more comfortable, and bringing high standards of cookery, service and organization to the trans-Mississippi west was just the first step. Fred Harvey thought big and to the benefit of the ST&SF in attracting a bigger share of the footloose public – by making the West a destination for the pleasure traveler in the last decade of the 19th century and the first two of the next. Come and explore the scenic and fascinating west – now that such an exploration could be done in perfect safety and luxury. Essentially, almost a hundred years before Disneyland and Disney World, Fred Harvey created the destination resort. One of the first was a grand and luxurious edifice in Las Vegas, New Mexico, built to take advantage of scenic mountain landscapes and a cluster of hot springs nearby: the Montezuma Castle. It was the first building in New Mexico to have electric lighting. Guests were pampered with the usual Fred Harvey level of expert service and excellent food, served with a lavish and incredibly valuable silver service. Other in-house amenities featured bowling alleys and billiard tables. The grounds around the hotel were beautifully landscaped and adorned with fountains. Guests of the Montezuma included presidents, kings, war heroes and the merely prominent. The building itself burnt twice – and was rebuilt. (A number of Fred Harvey establishments fell to fire – the Harvey House in Barstow, California burned at least three times. Wood construction and injudicious use of cook-fires in a dry desert area will create that kind of hazard.)

Fred Harvey’s health declined precipitously in the late 1890s – he would die of complications of intestinal cancer in 1901– but he had trained up his sons Ford and Byron in every aspect of the business, and they carried on without any discernible change in focus or standards. The Fred Harvey name was a brand, and a solid one. The company renovated and expanded their existing locations and added new ones. One of their distinctive features was a careful attention to local architectural styles, as well as artistic traditions. The Harvey hotels were a great popularizer of what we now know as ‘Southwest style’ – lots of adobe, rounded arches and arcades, local stone and rough-hewn wood, folk-art tile and pottery, ‘vigas’ ceilings of poles and exposed rafters, Navaho rugs and blankets. The in-house architect and designer was Mary Jane Colter, who was first offered a job to decorate the interior of the Alvarado hotel in Albuquerque in 1901. Over the next thirty years she worked full-out in designing hotels, lodges and concession buildings, including the complex at the El Tovar (for which she had done the interior decorating) and the Bright Angel lodge, located at the very rim of the Grand Canyon. La Posada, in Winslow, Arizona, is considered one of Colter’s finest. She designed everything for that establishment, from the building itself, down through the furniture, fittings and china, the gardens and the staff uniforms.

At least as well-known, and with the good fortune to be in the heart of a town with a centuries-long history, is La Fonda (which means ‘the inn), in Santa Fe. The present spectacular building was put up by the Fred Harvey company in 1922, but the site – at the terminus of the old Santa Fe Trail – had been the location of an inn since the earliest days of Santa Fe, three centuries previous. It is still popular, not least for the number of specialty shops selling local art, pottery and jewelry … for that was another aspect of Fred Harvey’s refinement of the Wild West experience; encouraging the purchase of southwest Indian art and artifacts to tourists – and yes, even to hiring craftsmen and women from the various tribes to demonstrate their arts. A number of the Harvey hotels, starting with the Alvarado in Albuquerque, included a kind of private museum, and a craft demonstration and sales area, where visitors could purchase reproductions. Yes, Fred Harvey (the company) may also have invented the museum shop.

And the company likely inspired the Southwest fashion style for women, with another female-driven inspiration based in the new La Fonda. This was called Southwest Indian Detours – one –two- or three-day bus and automobile tours of significant Indian pueblos and ruins, artist’s studios and spectacular scenic vistas – conducted by young women called ‘couriers’ – or tour guides. They dressed in outfits designed after traditional Navaho women’s dress: full dark cloth skirt over boots, a jewel-colored velveteen blouse ornamented with a concho belt and a silver squash-blossom necklace. The heyday of the Detours was relatively brief, owing to the Depression.

The company had one last fling during WWII, when La Fonda was the chosen hang-out for scientists working on the atom bomb, and the Harvey Girls worked overtime feeding troop-trains passing through. On any number of occasions, there was no time for the soldiers to de-train and eat, the Girls just passed sandwiches in through the windows. The Judy Garland movie, The Harvey Girls brought the awareness of all things Harvey to anyone who just might have escaped knowing about them … but the sixty-year run was already nearly over. Increasingly, people preferred traveling by automobile, or by airplane. The houses that Fred built, all along the tracks of the AT&SF were repurposed, or torn down. Some serve as museums, or city offices, or stand derelict and crumbling. A handful, like La Fonda, El Tovar and El Posada are still hotels, although not operated by Fred Harvey.