CHAPTER 9From Sea to Shining Sea
When the first transcontinental railroad opened to great fanfare and high expectations on May 10, 1869, it held huge symbolic significance for Americans, much of it overwrought. It was not the first American transcontinental because that honor belonged to the 1855 Panama Railroad bisecting the isthmus and it did not reach either the Atlantic or the Pacific.1 Shoddily built, its operational limitations were immediately apparent and its corrupt developers had benefitted personally from the inflated costs of construction. As a symbol of Gilded Age capitalist chaos, the transcontinental could hardly be bettered, but as a moment of intense optimism it imprinted itself on the American psyche.
Ranging through terrain unpopulated by white Americans, demand for its services proved miniscule, profits elusive, and winter shutdowns commonplace. Only one passenger train and two freights ran in each direction, and even those stopped when snow covered the line.2 Laid quickly to earn government land grants and subsidies, most of the transcontinental needed to be rebuilt within a few years of opening. Poorly constructed bridges could not be trusted to bear the weight of trains in bad weather. When the raging Weber River threatened viaduct foundations, for example, passengers had to detrain and walk, from tie to tie, across it. The empty train then slowly made its way to the western bank and its occupants, relieved it had not crashed into the waters below, reboarded with trepidation.3
The new road did raise hopes for luxury long-distance travel, epitomized for the wealthy by stories comparing Pullman cars to “a first-class steamer—state-rooms with spring-beds, and meals served to passengers upon tables completely furnished.” Seamless journeys would shrink the country, at least for the rich, who could “take a state-room, go to bed at night, and have breakfast, dinner, and supper on board the train while flying across the continent.”4 Journalists wrote about eating at “tables covered with snowy linen and garnished with services of solid silver” and sleeping “on luxurious couches.”5 These and other descriptions, accompanied by line drawings of Pullman comfort, became standard fare in American newspapers and magazines. Publicized images of easy, enjoyable, and relaxing travel across empty deserts and majestic mountains to the Pacific coast sowed seeds Pullman planned to reap.
A month after the ceremonies at Promontory, Utah, a Pullman excursion consisting of three cars—two sleeping cars and a combination dining and sleeping car—ran from Omaha, Nebraska, to the West Coast. On this June 1869 trip, Albert took a group of railroad executives to Sacramento, California, with visits to San Francisco, the Napa Valley, Menlo Park, and Calistoga while the group remained in the Golden State. The frescoed ceiling and carpeted floor, mirrored walls and powerful ventilation system, with beds “as good as those in a first-class San Francisco hotel,” reified the image of Pullman comfort.6 The tour allowed Albert to show off Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC) cars to Governor Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, John Corning, and other Central Pacific Railroad officials and politicians, earning him an inscribed silver brick for his efforts. The Pullman cars were flaunted on daily runs from Sacramento to Junction (soon renamed Roseville). Pullman waiters served dinner to invited guests, and porters tended to their needs. The return to Chicago was unintentionally enlivened by a slow-speed derailment in Nevada during a rainstorm, but despite that mishap, reporters worked hard to allay fears that torrential rains would wash away the rails.7
On this particular run, and for one of a handful of times in the newspapers, Albert was styled “Colonel Pullman.” It is unclear whether this was a rank he had bestowed upon himself, the result of a misunderstanding, or simply a journalistic error. It does raise the fascinating question of how, as someone who had purchased a substitute instead of fighting in the Civil War, Albert felt about being surrounded by veterans. The glory attached to wartime service deepened as the conflict receded, and it is possible Albert sensed his exclusion.8 Given his propensity to bluster, it is possible Albert offhandedly referred to himself as “colonel” while in the company, or the shadow, of such luminaries. Whatever the truth, his sudden appointment vanished almost as soon as it materialized.
Sensing a unique marketing opportunity, Albert and George decided to mount a publicity stunt by running a Pullman sleeping car from San Francisco to New York City. In July 1869, the vehicle, attached to regularly scheduled services, carried thirty passengers on a journey that included the car being switched onto new trains along the way and ferried across rivers. Arriving in New York City ten days after leaving the Pacific coast, it became the first railroad car to traverse the continent and was opened to the public in the Hudson River Railroad depot.9 Employing the customary pinch of hyperbole, the New York Times claimed Pullman had eclipsed all previous luxury travel and provided passengers “with as much comfort as they can enjoy at any-first class hotel in our City.” A return trip west along the same route with a second set of passengers attracted far less attention, the novelty having already worn off.10 This would prove the Achilles heel of some of Albert's initiatives: when the initial rush of enthusiasm passed, sustaining the excitement, and hence profit, proved difficult. But the excursion from Sacramento to New York had not been a true transcontinental journey because the run was broken at various points when the car switched from one scheduled service to another. That seamless journey would soon occur.
Albert's work on the transcontinental brought him into further contact with Californians. In September 1869, because of his labors on the Golden State excursion, he helped to entertain a group of Californians visiting Chicago.11 This “exceptional gathering” of leading politicians, editors, bricklayers, and mechanics visited New York City and Boston before arriving in Chicago to advertise and celebrate their state.12 Such activities gave Albert access to prominent individuals, and he would prove adept at connecting with them to enter the worlds of finance, manufacturing, and mining. This was another way in which Albert solidified his national reputation as the public face of the Pullman Company in a manner that the more reclusive George would achieve only by suppressing Albert's role after these first two decades.
Alert business leaders understood how adventurous excursions earned extensive and desirable press coverage. When George Denny proposed a direct rail journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific, his startled but excited fellow members of the Boston Board of Trade immediately appointed a committee to organize the trip. Hoping to cement commercial relations with California businesses, two members met with George Pullman. He offered to negotiate passage on the railroads along the way and to build a train of new Pullman cars for the excursion. The jubilant deputation accepted his offer and the trip was planned for May 1870, with the cars being built simultaneously in four different locations.
Albert oversaw preparations for this, the first railroad train to run directly from coast to coast as an unbroken service. He rode with six of the new cars from Aurora to Detroit, where another two were added to the consist. After a full inspection, the train continued east, pausing near Buffalo to pick up George, who was there on business. Arriving in Boston on May 21, 1870, as many as fifty thousand curious people visited Pullman's newest marvel. The passengers, 126 members of the Board and their families accompanied by “two clergymen, two barristers, a physician, an artist, and … representatives of other cities,” then boarded the train.13 Each passenger paid $600 for the privilege of taking the monthlong trip, a cost and a calendar excluding half of the planning committee, including Denny. Albert gave each traveler a souvenir ticket issued by the railroads over which the excursion would travel.14 A celebratory poem penned for the occasion and printed on posters displayed in Boston proclaimed:
Pullman's train shall give us pleasure
Naught like it was known before
All its comforts we shall treasure
Ere we reach the golden shore.15
The use of the phrase “golden shore” was appropriate: comparisons to an ocean voyage peppered reports of a trip designed to generate business.
The train, its cars adorned with the legend “Pullman's Pacific Car Company,” consisted of a baggage car; a smoking car with a barber and “a regular American bar”; two hotel cars with kitchens, dining rooms, and sleeping berths; two salon cars with drawing rooms and small organs; and two commissary cars combining dining facilities with sleeping berths. Two additional cars were added along the way, another baggage car to store souvenirs picked up by passengers and an observation car for viewing the spectacular landscape of the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada.16 The wine room, according to news releases, had few equals, and the salons proved cozy and inviting. One widely reprinted report heralded the Pullmans as “the most convenient and elegant cars ever seen in the world.” The train also carried an Associated Press telegraph, a small printing press, and 10,000 stamped envelopes. The press and the envelopes were to publish and mail the Trans-Continental, a daily newsletter written, printed, and distributed along the way to advertise the trip.17
This grand ensemble, aptly dubbed the Pullman Hotel Express, left Boston on the morning of May 23, 1870, pulled by two new Boston & Albany locomotives and cheered on by a large crowd. The railroads over which it traveled gave the excursion priority to avoid unnecessary delays to so well-publicized a trip.18 As would become all too common, however, the train was forced to make unscheduled stops to allow the journal boxes—the small enclosures at the end of each axle containing lubricants to allow the wheels to turn freely—to cool. As the Board of Trade president wrote, this “hot box” problem “would detain us so often on our journey.” Fast running may have contributed to the overheating: at one point, if his observation is to be believed, the train covered twenty-three miles in twenty-five minutes, an average of almost sixty miles per hour.19
The journey took the excursionists into Canada at Niagara while Canadians were celebrating Queen Victoria's birthday with “a cheerful display of flags.” After traversing Ontario and reentering the United States at Detroit, the excursion crossed Michigan and arrived in Chicago, where the passengers stayed overnight in hotels while the train was thoroughly cleaned and switched from the Michigan Central to the tracks of the Chicago & North Western. The next day, members of the Chicago Board of Trade entertained their Boston counterparts with reports of the city's growth and a tour of the Central Business District. A delegation from the Board of Trade traveled as far as Sterling, Illinois. There, the train stopped to allow the Chicagoans, including George Pullman, to return home. Albert then took sole charge of one of the most prestigious railroad journeys in US history.20
Covered closely by newspapers receiving regular wire reports and publicized by the Trans-Continental, the excursion traveled across Iowa to Council Bluffs, where boats ferried the carriages over the Missouri River. At Omaha, Nebraska, the wide-eyed excursionists got their first taste of the West, an open-carriage tour of the city. The train soon resumed its journey across the prairies and the plains toward the mountains. Passengers passed their time reading, playing games, following the twin telegraph wires paralleling the tracks, watching the vast countryside unfold outside plateglass windows, and writing home to describe the dramatic vistas and interesting people they encountered. They noted small towns platted at regular intervals for engines to take on water, chatted with locals at stops along the way, and learned about territories most had previously encountered only in books and magazines. Albert circulated continuously, inquiring after the passengers’ needs, joining in card games, or playing the organ.
The weight of the train slowed progress through the mountains of Utah and California. The locomotive proved unable to restrain the “unusually heavy” cars on the descent into the Uintah Valley and the train accelerated downhill “at a terrific rate of speed,” kicking up ballast and thrilling those in the observation car with “the thundering shock of our passage.”21 At Ogden, the excursion detoured south to Salt Lake City over the Utah Central Railroad, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but operated on its behalf by the Union Pacific. Opened a few months before the Board of Trade excursion arrived, it replaced the stagecoach trip involving “five hours of cruel jolting” along “an abominable road.”22 At the territorial capital, Brigham Young himself addressed the excursionists on the subject of his wives and children while regaling them with stories of the many advantages of doing business with Utah.23 After this no-doubt eye-opening presentation to the Puritan New Englanders, a quiet day of walking in the capital ensued. While his passengers wandered around Salt Lake, Albert entertained Young and other Mormon elders onboard the train.24 The next day, traveling through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the excursionists thanked Albert “for his personal attention, and for his unceasing endeavors to promote our convenience and enjoyment,” sentiments flashed across the country by wire services and the onboard newspaper.25
Though the Bostonians generally met with a favorable reception along the way, not everyone welcomed them. Lambasting the “Puritanical representatives from Massachusetts” and their “lean, lank cadaverous” wives who appeared to have “arisen from the tomb of the Capulets,” an Elko, Nevada, newspaper claimed that a Union Pacific agent at Ogden had refused to find a band to welcome the “simpering lot of old maids and matrons” because “our duty is to get you away from here as soon as possible.”26 Regardless of that printed show of regional antipathy and masculine prejudice, however, the train departed late because a crowd of cheering Ogdenites “assembled to greet the passengers and to view the luxurious carriages in which they traveled.” And there was a band.27
The train reached San Francisco on Saturday, May 28, six days after leaving Boston and four days faster than the previous year's coast-to-coast Pullman-carriage trip. So that the visitors could have a grand entrance to the city, the train did not travel directly to Oakland—where the cars would have to be ferried across the bay—but dropped south to San Jose and then up the peninsula to San Francisco. Again hot boxes caused “repeated delays” and the train arrived several hours behind schedule.28 Once there, the Pullman Hotel Express became the first and only passenger service to run—carefully—down the horse-car tracks on Market Street. Halting in front of the city's largest hotel to allow the Bostonians to detrain, it made a spectacular sight. The first half of their journey, covering 3,526 miles by rail at an average speed of 24 miles per hour, had come to an end.
The next day the Pullman cars were switched onto a spur near the bay, and nearly fifteen hundred people walked through them after Albert “threw the train open” to the public.29 While their conveyance was being inspected by locals, the Bostonians went to the beach, where they followed a precedent set by officers of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad who wanted to unite eastern with western Missouri. Arriving at St. Joseph in 1859, they poured water from the Mississippi into the Missouri River.30 Now, just eleven years later, the Bostonians put a taste of the Atlantic into the Pacific. Emptying the bottle half way and filling the balance with a sampling of the Pacific Ocean, they created “a literal blending of the waters of the two oceans … symbolizing a unity of the people of America in ties of interest and brotherhood.” The bottle was passed from person to person like a holy relic and some of it was used to baptize the daughter of a San Francisco businessman.31
The excursionists remained in California for fifteen days. While there, the group split up, some paying visits to local entrepreneurs to generate business while others went sightseeing in Yosemite and investigated some of the original 49er gold mines. Receptions hosted by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the city's mayor enlivened proceedings and forged links between East and West, as did boat trips to Alcatraz Island and an extended excursion to San Mateo. At the latter, the visitors met William Ralston, president of the Bank of California, “who lives and entertains like a European nobleman.” Ralston, “the Napoleon of Speculators,” gained national notoriety five years later when he met his Waterloo in the Pacific Ocean, drowning shortly after his bank failed amid charges of fraud and careless bookkeeping.32 To his guests, however, he was a gracious host living in a large, unfinished mansion where they dined and danced.33 On a visit inland to Stockton, the excursionists held a dinner in Albert's honor at which he played up the hazards and obstacles he faced. He told the assembled guests that the expedition, “unprecedented in magnitude … has carried with it to me correspondingly increased anxieties” that the group's “uniform kindness and forbearance” mitigated. He then magnanimously promised “to see you safely back to Yankee land.”34
After staying in hotels across Northern California, the excursionists departed on June 13 for the return trip. Noting with commendable foresight that California would become known more for its “vineyards and orchards … than either its wheat fields or its auriferous deposits,” the Boston Board of Trade reported in detail on the wealth and economic potential of the Golden State.35 Delays caused by hot boxes added forty hours to the trip from Oakland to Chicago, causing consternation as the train halted in the middle of what appeared to passengers to be a desolate wasteland. The excursion traveled from Council Bluffs to Chicago over the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad, but hot boxes continued to thwart the best efforts of the railroad to expedite their journey by protecting grade crossings and halting other trains. Pullman's service stopped as planned at Riverside, Illinois, the Chicago suburb designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, for a tour and arrived nine hours late in the Windy City.36 Before departing for Boston, one of the Pullman sleepers was replaced, thus eliminating the faulty journal box.
The remainder of the trip passed at full speed and, following their return home on June 23, the excursionists thanked Albert “for preparing so beautiful and commodious a train of cars.”37 In its annual report, the Board of Trade praised the Pullman brothers “for making such arrangements as secured the convenience and comfort of all the passengers during the entire trip.”38 The publicity further elevated the profile of PPCC and helped to cement the association of the Pullman name with comfortable and safe long-distance railroad travel. Public reports of the excursion never once mentioned the hot-box problem. Given a complex and important assignment, Albert came through with flying colors, his musical talent, his love of conversation, and his joy in cardplaying endearing him to the excursionists riding the richly appointed but regularly delayed train. He also managed to keep the kitchens supplied, the linens clean, and cars comfortable. In another example of PPCC creating a demand for its services, the Trans-Continental celebrated the journey as “the longest ever yet attempted by an entire train” and showed how Americans on opposite sides of the country could enjoy “a friendly visit by a single ride.”39 For Albert, a month in the company of Boston business leaders gave him a chance to listen and learn about finance and trade, knowledge he would put to good use in his investment career.