Читать книгу Quest Biographies Bundle — Books 26–30 - Wayne Larsen - Страница 4

Once he dropped out of school, William Van Horne began to study telegraphy seriously at the city office. He knew that he now had to master a trade that would provide him with full-time employment. Perhaps he also realized that this method of communication would open career doors for him. Certainly he impressed the adults he met. One of those who recognized the potential in the precocious but still slight, young teenager was a railway man who observed in a letter:

My dear young friend, yours of a few days since came duly to hand and we were glad to hear from you and that you are doing so well…. You are young now and by proper conduct can grow up to be a good man, if not a great one. Your destiny mostly lies in your own hands.. What you will at your age by perseverance and determination you can greatly accomplish. So aim high. What is this life without accomplishing some great good, which altho you do not directly see it extends far and wide. Have some grand and glorious object in view and not live as some live to eat drink and sleep.

A few months later, when Van Horne was fourteen, the Joliet telegraph operator found employment for him as a telegrapher with the celebrated Illinois Central Railroad Company. Founded in 1851, it had already completed seven hundred miles of track to make it the single longest railway in the world. In the years to come, it would play an important role in converting much of unoccupied Illinois into a settled, prosperous area.

Van Horne enjoyed his new job in the mechanical superintendent’s office, located in Chicago, but he did not last long in the position. Once again, his love of practical jokes proved his downfall. One day, he ran a ground wire from a storage battery to a steel plate in the rail yard. Then he amused himself by watching the contortions of the yardmen who stepped on it. Unfortunately, the local superintendent also trod on the wire and, being knowledgeable about the principles of electricity, quickly realized what was up. In no time at all he was in the perpetrator’s office, where Van Horne promptly confessed that he was the culprit. The superintendent fired him on the spot. With this sudden dismissal, the teenager returned to his mother’s cottage in Joliet, a chastened and more mature young man.

Fortunately, one of his good friends, Henry Knowlton, was the son of the assistant superintendent of the Cut Off, a forty-five-mile-long line that ran from Joliet to Lake Junction, Indiana, and was operated by the Michigan Central Railroad. Through this connection, Van Horne was soon able to obtain employment as a messenger and freight checker for the company. In his new job he frequently came into contact with local businessmen, whom he invariably impressed with his industriousness and shrewd intelligence. Captain Ellwood was one such man and, years later, in 1916, he recalled: “I remember him in 1854, a thoughtful little fellow, so frail that I thought he would never be strong. But when I came back from the military academy in France a few years later he astonished me. He looked stronger — healthy even, and he was already being talked about in Joliet as an unusual young fellow.”

After holding his new position for only a few months, Van Horne convinced his boss that the Cut Off should have an independent telegraph line and that he should operate it. The line was duly installed, and the teenager immersed himself in his duties as a telegrapher. With constant access to the telegraph, Van Horne was able to perfect his skills to the point where he could decipher incoming messages merely by listening to the instrument’s clicks and clacks and had no need to “read” the tape. He became famous as the first operator in his district, and one of the first in the country, to master this feat. And while he was chalking up these distinctions, the new technology was taking him far beyond the boundaries of his town and introducing him to a wider world.

Van Horne’s duties as a telegrapher did not claim all his attention. He was already familiar with the storehouse, but now he set out to learn how other operations on the Cut Off worked. Ever the inquisitive youngster, he began to make drawings of illustrations in the draughtsman’s books during his lunch hour and at night to understudy the duties of the accountant, the cashier, the timekeeper, and the other men around him. He did so while deliberately cultivating his already remarkable memory. Whenever he had a moment he would challenge those around him to contests in which they all tried to memorize the numbers on the cars of long trains that passed through the yard. Van Horne was usually the winner.

Up to this point, Van Horne’s boundless energy and ambition seemed to be unfocused; he just wanted to learn as many railroading skills as he could. When he was eighteen, though, he decided on a particular goal — to run a railway. The trigger was a visit the general superintendent (the chief executive) of the Michigan Central Railroad made to the Cut Off one day. His opulent private car and the ceremony surrounding his arrival made such a forceful impression on Van Horne that he decided on the spot that he wanted that job.

Having promised himself that he would manage a railway system rather than create one, Van Horne set out with single-minded determination to meet his goal, convinced that “he who makes an ambitious time-table is likely to run by it.” He thought that a general superintendent must surely know everything about a railway, so he gave up all the holiday time that was owed to him and worked weeknights and Sundays to inform himself about the details of every department.

These were certainly propitious years in which to launch a railway career, as railways were expanding rapidly. In fact, by 1860 the United States had a larger rail network than all the existing networks in the rest of the world combined. The most spectacular growth occurred in Van Horne’s part of the continent, the old Northwest, where railway mileage had increased about eightfold during the previous decade. While the railway revolution was making itself felt, the telegraph was shrinking the world with its fast, regular, and dependable means of communication. Both of these marvels would profoundly alter American life, but none more so than the railway. Belching smoke from their large funnel-shaped chimneys and showering sparks, steam locomotives roared through the countryside, knitting cities and towns closer together, opening up wilderness areas, and providing the transportation so essential to high-volume agricultural and industrial production.

Although Van Horne was dedicated to his job and his advancement, he still found time to pursue his interest in paleontology — an area of study that, like railway management, makes extensive use of categorization. In addition to reading widely on the subject, Van Horne, sometimes accompanied by a few of his friends, tramped the countryside around Joliet and even further afield in search of new specimens. His collection would eventually boast nine previously unclassified specimens — they were named after him and have the descriptive suffix Van Hornei in paleontological encyclopedias.

Inspired by the establishment of the Illinois Natural History Society at Bloomington, Illinois, Van Horne and his comrades founded the Agassiz Club of Joliet in 1859, named after Jean Louis Agassiz, a famous geologist, naturalist, and teacher. Members were expected to go on weekend trips to places as far distant as twenty-five miles away. When not scavenging the countryside for new fossils, Van Horne and his pals carried on an extensive correspondence with geology authorities and arranged their collections, carefully observing the Smithsonian Institution’s directions for the care and preservation of specimens. But Van Horne was the only real leader of the group: once he moved away from Joliet, the club dissolved, and with it his dream of establishing a local museum. Decades later, however, his own fossil collection would be given to the University of Chicago.

Van Horne was working as a telegrapher in the dingy Cut Off office when the American Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861. Before this bitter conflict ended four years later, it would devastate a third of the country, claim more than six hundred thousand lives, and hopelessly maim thousands of others in body or mind. In the early days of the war, however, it would never have occurred to most Americans, including Van Horne, that the conflict would turn the entire country into “one vast central hospital,” as Walt Whitman, America’s renowned poet, described the war’s impact. Like so many young people of his day, the combative Van Horne was stirred by tales of battle. Even late in life he argued that universal peace was neither “possible nor desirable” and that “all the manliness of the civilized world is due to wars or the need of being prepared for wars.”

Illinois and the other free states were gripped by a groundswell of patriotic fever when the Confederate flag was raised over Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 14, 1861. Predictably, when news of the fort’s surrender reached Joliet, its citizens acted with shock and outrage. An old fairground was quickly converted into a camp, and by mid-May it boasted a full regiment, including two companies from Will County. Almost four thousand men from that county alone volunteered for service in the war, and more than five hundred of them would die in battle, from wounds or disease, or during internment in prison camps.

Among those eager to assist the Union cause was eighteen-year-old William Van Horne. One morning, without consulting anyone in the Cut Off office, he enlisted for service in the federal army. As soon as the news reached his work place, however, the assistant superintendent interceded to have his registration cancelled. He was determined that Van Horne would remain on the job: not only was he the principal support of his widowed mother but, as an exceptionally capable telegrapher, his services were indispensable to the Cut Off office.

Despite this praise, Van Horne became alarmed early in the war when rumours began to circulate that the declining traffic and drop in earnings caused by the conflict would force the Michigan Central to lay off some of its workers. But when Van Horne’s boss realized that the office was fast becoming an important centre for troop transportation, he decided that his telegrapher was an essential staff member. The young man was so relieved to keep his job that, when the assistant superintendent asked him how much additional work he could take on, he promptly replied that he could do any task at all. He immediately set out to prove himself: drawing on his ample store of initiative and knowledge of the office, the shops, and the yards, he quickly became the assistant superintendent’s right-hand man.

His new responsibilities should have kept Van Horne more than fully occupied, but they did not. He still needed outlets for his surplus energy and inventiveness, and every so often he played practical jokes on his work mates or even the townspeople. Unfortunately, some of them were in bad taste. On one occasion he sent an authentic-sounding telegram announcing a great Union victory on the battlefield. When the excited citizens heard the news, they hastened to run up flags and celebrate. The festivities ended abruptly once the Chicago newspapers arrived and the war-weary residents realized that they had been duped. An angry party went in search of Van Horne at the Cut Off office, only to discover that he had wisely headed for home.

Van Horne climbed another step up the railway ladder in 1862, when he accepted an offer from the Chicago and Alton Railroad to become its telegraph operator and ticket agent at Joliet. The substantial increase in salary that came with the job reflected just how demanding his duties and responsibilities were. This was especially true of the telegrapher’s job, which required an even-tempered individual with superior organizational skills and the ability to cooperate and work effectively with a whole team of people.

In this new position, Van Horne quickly demonstrated his resourcefulness. He noticed that butter deteriorated when it was left in a warm storage shed while awaiting shipment, so he arranged for it to be stored in a primitive cold-storage chamber he designed. He reasoned that if cold temperatures preserved the quality of the butter, farmers would obtain higher prices for their product and ship more of it by the Chicago and Alton, thereby increasing the railway’s earnings. His resourcefulness and foresight paid off — and the company quickly introduced his invention at other freight sheds on the line.

Two years later, in 1864, Van Horne was promoted to train dispatcher at Bloomington, a Chicago and Alton divisional point located in a rich agricultural area in central Illinois some ninety miles southwest of Joliet. This new position represented a considerable advance in his railway career, as it paid much better than the one he had held at Joliet. The Civil War was still raging, and trains were busy hauling troops, foodstuffs, horses, forage, ordinance, lumber, equipment, and supplies southward and returning soldiers and prisoners northward. Van Horne was therefore kept extremely busy helping to direct the flow of people and supplies from Chicago to St. Louis on the one main line then operated by the Chicago and Alton. Some twenty years later, during the North-West Rebellion of 1885 in Canada, he drew on the valuable experience he had acquired during this earlier wartime period.

In the early days on the railways, before messages could be sent by telegraph, train schedules and other orders were communicated verbally by the managers and then memorized by the crews. The system worked reasonably well so long as everything went as planned. When a train could not keep to its assigned schedule because of mechanical failure, a shortage of fuel, track damage, or some other unexpected development, however, no one except those operating the train knew exactly where it was on the line. Once the telegraph became a common communication tool in the 1860s, a dispatcher could establish the location of any train in his jurisdiction at all times. Skilled telegraphers like Van Horne were therefore much in demand.

Van Horne’s exceptional abilities led his superiors to assign him the night shift, normally worked by only the most competent dispatchers. Between 6:30 p.m. and 5:00 a.m., he watched and directed the movement of up to twenty trains at any one time on almost three hundred miles of track. When all the trains were “on time,” there was little, if anything, to do; but when one or more of them fell behind schedule, he had to plot new locations and times for trains running at different speeds, or in opposite directions, or both. It was exacting, complicated work that he likened to playing a game of chess, though not nearly so fascinating. Still, he was quick to agree that a single error in dispatching could pose a serious threat to life and property, or both, and result in an abrupt end to a dispatcher’s career.

Van Horne had a lot going for him by now: an impressive expertise in telegraphy and train dispatching, plus a wide knowledge of the workings of other train departments. These skills, together with his personal magnetism and wit, helped to make him a recognized leader on the railway. Whenever disputes arose involving the interpretation of train rules and other related matters, he was always asked for his opinion. Such respect, of course, fed his self-confidence and made him feel at ease in his relationships with his superiors.

One day he was in the room as the Chicago and Alton’s general superintendent devised a new railway schedule: the system back then was to arrange strings and pins on charts to indicate where trains should run and cross paths. When he could no longer contain his impatience with this laborious display, Van Horne muttered, “That’s a hell of a way to make a time-sheet.” Getting to his feet, the superintendent replied, “If you can do it better, take the job.” Van Horne immediately took over — with excellent results — and the arrangement of train schedules was thereafter assigned to him.

When Van Horne moved to Bloomington it was a mere prairie town, noted for its railway shops and its corn, but not for its civic amenities. For a young man who loved to visit Chicago’s museums and art galleries and who delighted in attractive surroundings, Bloomington was a most unlovely place: a blue-collar town with a smoke-belching powerhouse and an abundance of grime. It is no wonder that he described it as “outside the limits of civilization.” Perhaps even more distressing, his home was a rented room located in a working class section. In these circumstances, he turned to watercolour painting in his few leisure hours and indulged his interest in science. The demands of his job allowed him little time for fossil hunting, although he did manage a few thirty-five-mile treks in search of new specimens.

Even more important, he developed a friendship with the multitalented John Wesley Powell, a professor of geology and curator of the museum at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. Powell, who became noted for his pioneering classification of North American Indian languages and his survey of the Rocky Mountain region, was probably responsible for putting Van Horne in touch with his idol from Joliet days, Louis Agassiz. When he heard that the great man would be passing through Bloomington on a particular train, Van Horne met it, introduced himself, and travelled with the celebrity for some distance. Their conversation culminated in a correspondence that lasted until Agassiz’s death in 1873.

Geology was not the only science that got Van Horne’s attention. He also pursued an interest in chemistry and botany, sometimes setting aside a Sunday to “review his chemistry lessons.” Astronomy was another field that intrigued him, so much so that he drew up elaborate charts to follow the progress of a comet sighted in Bloomington on April 16, 1868.

By now, though, the greatest personal interest in Van Horne’s life was not art or science, but an attractive and well-educated young woman, Lucy Adaline Hurd.

Van Horne was still based in Joliet when he met the young woman, affectionately known as Addie or Adda, who would become his devoted wife. Born in 1837 into a middle-class family that revered education and placed ideals before material possessions, she had studied music, taught Sunday school in the Universalist Church of America, and cultivated an interest in literature. What really set her apart from the other young women of her era, however, was her education. When she was nineteen, she had graduated with a B.A. from Lombard College, a liberal institution founded by members of the Universalist Church and located in Galesburg, Illinois — her birth place. Addie Hurd was six years older than Van Horne, and she undoubtedly took some pains to hide it.

When Adaline’s father Erastus, a civil engineer, died in 1857, the family was plunged into poverty. To satisfy creditors and make ends meet, they sold much of their property and Addie went to work as a music teacher. Family lore has it that the young couple first met in the early 1860s in Joliet, where Adaline and her widowed mother were living. Their chance meeting occurred at the train station, where Addie was stranded without a ride home after her train arrived late from Chicago. Although William was normally very shy in the presence of women, he gallantly offered to escort her home. They set off, but not before he shoved the pipe he was smoking into his jacket pocket. As he walked on, absorbed in conversation, he suddenly detected the smell of burning wool. He then remembered that his pipe was still alight and quickly smothered the embers as best he could.

It was probably Adaline’s refined beauty that made the most forceful impression on Van Horne that day. If he considered her beautiful, he was not alone. His friends were completely smitten by her looks. A future clergyman, the Reverend E.P. Savage, confessed that when he and some other friends heard that Van Horne was to marry Miss Hurd, “It just took our breath away. All the rest of the boys in the Agassiz Club liked parties and girls except Will. And here he was engaged to the most beautiful girl we knew.” Van Horne was probably also captivated by Addie’s dignity and reserve — two qualities that were later remarked on by others. The well-known British journalist and diarist Henry Beckles Willson, for instance, described her as “a quiet, intelligent woman, of simple manners and entirely devoted to her husband and family.”

By the fall of 1864, when the South was being pummelled by Union forces, the couple were exchanging letters, as William had by then moved to Bloomington. Two years later, the friendship had blossomed into a true love affair that saw him shuttling back and forth by passenger or freight train between Bloomington and Joliet. When they were apart, as happened most of the time, he took every opportunity to write to her, frequently filling his letters with affectionate concern for her well-being. “You must be very careful, dearest, and not in any way endanger your health,” he advised on her forthcoming trip to Vermont to visit relatives. “I fear you are not sufficiently cautious in that respect.… And in travelling you must not hesitate to call upon the conductors for any information or assistance that may be conducive to your safety and comfort.”

In his longing to be with Adaline, William convinced himself that only marriage would put a permanent end to the “aimless, cold, loveless and mechanical existence” of his life without her. He hoped that he and Addie would marry in the fall of 1866, but for some reason the ceremony did not take place that autumn. Clearly Addie was in love with the taciturn young man who, despite occasional spells of melancholy, seemed headed for great things. “I thought of you constantly & was only happy in closing my eyes & transporting myself to the time when I could again be with you & relive the only true pleasure which your presence alone can give,” she wrote to him in the summer of 1866.

Despite this love for her fiancé, Addie was apprehensive about marriage. Her “insecure health,” as she ambiguously expressed it, seems to explain some of this hesitation. Her mother’s unflattering view of marriage probably also played a role. Moreover, because Addie had her own career outside the home, she may also have harboured some reservations about relinquishing her independence. Whatever the explanation, the delay caused William considerable suspense and anxiety. Finally, on a cold, wet, March 26, 1867, they married in Christ Church in Joliet — the day after William obtained a marriage licence and, perhaps significantly, while Addie’s mother was away in Vermont visiting her relations.

Shortly after the marriage, Addie’s mother, Anna, as well as William’s mother, Mary, and his unmarried sister, Mary, moved to Bloomington to share a large rented home that Van Horne had repapered, whitewashed, and painted. This was a highly unusual arrangement, even for Victorian times, but, fortunately, the extended family got on well together. With all these women to minister to his needs, Van Horne could look forward to enjoying a warm, serene home environment — something he craved. Although he realized that his life would be buffeted from time to time by adversity, he knew that he could always look to his home for comfort and solace from the pressures of a job with irregular hours and frequent changes of residence. This assurance would prove extremely important to him as he continued his steady progress up the railway hierarchy.

Mrs. William Van Horne in 1889. The Canadian novelist William A. Fraser described her as “the most gracious woman I ever met in my life.”

Courtesy of the Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal, 11-89974.

Meanwhile, he had friendships and leisure pursuits to cultivate in Bloomington, a far more appealing place now that he had his own home and family there. Along with the well-known professor of natural history, chemistry, and botany, Dr. J.A. Sewall, he also struck up a close relationship with W.A. Gardener, who, like Van Horne, rose to meteoric heights in the railway world. At this time Gardener was a telegraph operator in Bloomington, but by 1912 he was president of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway and the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha Railway. Another friend from Bloomington was Peter Whitman, a lumber dealer who went on to become a large manufacturer and, finally, a bank president. But men on the rise seldom have the opportunity to stay long in one place and, all too soon, Van Horne was on the move again — this time to Alton, Illinois, to take up a new job with the Chicago and Alton.

By the time that he left Bloomington, Van Horne had established a solid foundation for his railway career. He was not only rising in a cutting-edge industry that was strategically situated in both the American economy and the Midwest, but he had attained that most desirable of all Victorian goals — bourgeois respectability. As the son of a middle-class, professional father, and now a married man with a family himself, he was ready to capitalize on his exceptional skills and advance quickly up the railway hierarchy.