CHAPTER 7Into the Great Western Desert

The 100th meridian, 250 miles west of Omaha, Nebraska Territory, is a symbolic dividing line between the fertile East and the arid West. In late October 1866, barely visible from the nearby Platte River across the wind-scarred plain, stood a temporary, rickety wooden sign, an antler-festooned locomotive, and several boxy railroad cars. A few passengers stepped into the gray sunlight of the autumn day, stretched, and lit cigars. Directors of the Union Pacific Railroad, they walked to the front of the train where a waiting photographer, his equipment primed, arranged them and took a picture for posterity. Investors, politicians, and railroad officials followed, as did Albert Benton Pullman. By then, on the tenth day of the trip, the stop and the shot had become a recognized ritual. The scheduled image captured, the dignitaries returned to the comfort of the new Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) cars. The glass negatives became stereographs bringing visions of the West to the rest of the country, a West that would vanish over the next few decades as capitalism shadowed the railroad and planted people with an aggressively instrumentalist attitude toward nature.¹ The railroad, known as the transcontinental, was still seven hundred miles and three years from completion, but the fanfare it generated was already four years old. Passenger trains were a rare sight in that barren terrain, a scarcity that proved pivotal to the transformation of Albert Pullman from regional notable to international luminary.²

Building elegant cars and demonstrating them to a national audience was a Pullman imperative in the decade between 1866 and 1875. Albert was critical to this project. He and George set their sights on the distant horizon and played what might be called the long game. The first Chicago-area excursions served as trial runs for ambitious outings along the transcontinental railroad. Authorized by federal legislation signed in 1862 and 1864, two different railroad companies, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, constructed the first line to link East and West. Building from Sacramento, California, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, respectively, they met in Utah and formally declared the line finished on May 10, 1869. This did not mean it could immediately bear heavy traffic. Incentivized to work quickly, contractors rushed to lay track to claim federal land and fiscal subsidies. As a result, much of it washed away in storms or collapsed from the weight of the trains running over it and had to be replaced almost immediately. Nevertheless, the opening of the first transcontinental railroad—even though it did not technically span the continent—provided an important symbol of national reunification following the discord of the Civil War.

Pullman excursions into the trans-Mississippi West sold a particular vision of the region to curious Americans and foreign visitors even before the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific at Promontory, Utah.³ American national identity demanded expansion into the Great Western Desert, as the press often styled lands west of the Missouri River. The frontier moved toward the Pacific Ocean and optimism flourished. The open territory met many objectives: promise for those without hope, mineral resources for continued economic expansion, land for immigrants to cultivate, a return to the agrarian values threatened by urban growth, an opportunity to reassert Republican values, and an obvious statement of national greatness. The Pullman Company and the UPRR capitalized on the idea of a limitless horizon in a land of unimaginable wealth to attract the influential and the important to take a luxurious ride and see for themselves.

In what became an annual rite, Pullman contributed to trips to the end of the advancing Union Pacific line for railroad and government officials, investors, and other business leaders. Convincing politicians to continue to underwrite the transcontinental was vital to its completion. The first of these trips occurred in 1866, dignitaries traveling to the 100th meridian at the request of UPRR vice president Thomas C. Durant. Arranged by newly appointed chief engineer Grenville Dodge, the fanciful invitation list included nearly every Union general, New York banker, highly regarded businessperson, literate editor, famous journalist, and friendly politician Durant could think of. Not all of them took up the offer, of course, but many did.

Attaining the 100th meridian was a milestone of great significance, giving the Union Pacific the legal right to claim primacy in the race to meet the Central Pacific. As a result, the Union Pacific Eastern Division, simultaneously building from Kansas City, could no longer use the name Union Pacific and would be transformed into the Kansas Pacific Railroad, a wilting branch reaching fitfully across the plains in the general direction of Denver.⁴ Crossing the symbolic divide between East and West was a public relations coup for the Union Pacific. Durant envisioned the 1866 excursion as a celebration of national reunification, as a public show of his line's new status, and as an advertisement for the land his company needed to sell. He planned the occasion in meticulous detail, paying Pullman $1,735 for the use of their newest cars and praying for a successful show.⁵

The outing originated in New York City in mid-October. Two of Wagner's Silver Palace sleeping cars carried excursionists to Chicago, where they spent the night in hotels before their number doubled to two hundred.⁶ Joining Albert and George Pullman was the photographer John Carbutt, hired by the Union Pacific to document that trip. An assistant and several crates of equipment accompanied Carbutt, an early promoter and user of celluloid film. Also boarding in the Windy City were the Great Western Light Guard Band and the Elkhorn social club. The train consisted of three Pullman sleeping cars, a Michigan Central Railroad day car, and a baggage car, all pulled to the Missouri River by a Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (CB&Q) locomotive. Herbert M. Kinsley catered the affair from beginning to end with his “brigade” of Black cooks and stewards.⁷

The journey opened at a slow pace and barely gathered speed. Unwilling to miss any opportunity to advertise his wares, George Pullman halted the train thirty miles west of Chicago to allow his guests to inspect new Pullman cars being built by the CB&Q at its Aurora shops. This allowed the Pullman brothers to show off a hotel car in which separate compartments with seats and bunks would be served by dedicated waiters. Water stops at Mendota and Kewanee enabled Carbutt to test his photographic equipment while passengers examined the quality of the local coal.⁸ At Quincy, the final halt in Illinois, a few excursionists stayed overnight in hotels, but the majority remained on board after Pullman clarified that the sleeping cars and the catering were free of charge. Crossing the Mississippi River by ferry, the excursionists then continued across the state of Missouri to St. Joseph, where they transferred onto two steamboats for the trip up the “turbid, snaggy, … winding” Missouri River, enduring “the usual incident of sticking fast for a couple of hours on a mud bank” along the way.⁹

George returned to Chicago while most of the group traveled forward by river. Twenty-three members, including Albert, journeyed by rail, stagecoach, and ferry across Iowa to Omaha. That group included Joseph Medill, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and (like George) a director of Chicago's Third National Bank, and Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the slain president. Fireworks and cannon rounds greeted them when the two groups reunited at Council Bluffs. In Nebraska, speeches of welcome from the territorial governor and other dignitaries concluded with a prophecy that the national capital would soon be transferred from Washington “to the vicinity of Omaha, to the very centre of the creative and productive power and wealth of the land.”¹⁰ Contradicting this prediction was Durant's assistant George Francis Train, who claimed that Columbus, Nebraska—where he owned eight hundred acres of land—would earn that distinction.¹¹

A one-time shipping magnate and full-time Gilded Age eccentric, Train is often credited with being the inspiration for the global circumnavigation fictionalized in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. Train's first experience with railroads had occurred more or less in concert with the Civil War. In 1859, acting on a tip from a Philadelphia banker, he traveled to Great Britain to investigate investing in street railways. His work facilitated the creation of tram lines in several English and European cities and in Sydney, Australia. Those efforts, along with Train's self-glorifying accounts of them, piqued Albert's interest in street railways.¹² Train, loath to allow his activities to be restricted by scruples or laws, created the Credit Mobilier finance company, which built the UPRR. Credit Mobilier was owned by the principal investors in the Union Pacific, who pocketed the difference between the real cost of construction and the invoiced totals the company paid.¹³ He would assist Albert with several Union Pacific excursions before running for president of the United States in 1872, somewhat bizarrely charging admission to his rallies.

In Omaha, the Union Pacific made up two trains for the 1866 trip. The first, a supply train transporting materials and food for the expedition, ran ahead to test the strength and reliability of the tracks.¹⁴ Following behind was the nine-car excursion train drawn by two locomotives, the first of which bore elk antlers. At the rear of the consist was the Union Pacific director's car, its luxurious interior and open-air platform made available to members of Congress. The vehicle in which President Lincoln's coffin had actually journeyed from Chicago to Springfield, owned by Durant and occupied by his friends and their families, ran immediately in front of it. Four UPRR coaches, a kitchen car, a baggage car equipped with tables for dining, and a supply car completed the assemblage. As agents of colonization witnessing a land in the process of being conquered, the passengers wrote home about the progress of the railroad as it snaked across Nebraska, commenting on the soils they saw, estimating the fertility of the land, and describing the flora and fauna they encountered. The highlight of the trip occurred at the 100th meridian, where “the celebrated viewist, Professor Carbutt,” arranged his shots.¹⁵ The train proceeded a further thirty-three miles west to “Camp Durant,” the mobile tent city pitched for the laborers who built the line. Having reached the end of the railroad, the group returned to Train's Columbus, where the Union Pacific treated its guests to another fireworks display, “the crowning glory to the grandest excursion the world has ever seen.”¹⁶

For Albert and the other travelers, the West was territory to be tamed and settled, a violent frontier peopled by savages in desperate need of civilizing. The land through which transcontinental railroads were built had been ceded to Indigenous peoples as white settlement spread beyond the Appalachians and into the Mississippi valley. Cajoled and displaced by the pressure of in-migration, the presence of federal troops, and the national government's legal monopoly, many Indigenous peoples moved to the open spaces of the plains and assumed they would be left in peace. The transcontinental, the so-called iron horse, wrecked that belief, and the federal government violated its earlier treaties by permitting railroads to build west, destroying the material basis for Indigenous cultures.¹⁷ Americans asserted that inefficiently exploited natural resources and unused open territory should be taken from Indigenous peoples to fuel inevitable and desirable economic expansion by whites.¹⁸ The magic of capitalism demanded its Manifest Destiny even if the costs to some outweighed the benefits to others.

To entertain the important visitors from the East and emphasize the subordinate status of Indigenous peoples, the Union Pacific arranged for a Pawnee “war dance.” Living in reservations near the Union Pacific line in Nebraska, the Pawnee were an obvious choice. At the conclusion of the Civil War, the federal government raised four companies of Pawnee scouts to guard the railroad as it extended west, earning praise from one Union general as “the best of troops for this border country.”¹⁹ That Pawnee scouts assisted federal soldiers and protected Union Pacific track-laying gangs and were therefore deserving of respectful treatment did not occur to the conquerors. The war dance began with what newspaper reports called a “low, monotonous humming” that slowly rose to “a din” during which the warriors danced with “an ungainly step” while holding their weapons. The braves, some of whom would later feature in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows, circled a young man performing what newspaper reports referred to as “his little pantomime business” of tracking enemies and preparing for battle as his fellows “howl in discord and sing songs with neither rhyme nor melody.”²⁰

As was so often the case in colonial adventuring, ignorance proved no barrier to parody. The Elkhorns, “a club of our jolliest Chicago men … dedicated to fun,” decided that the bonfire in front of Kinsley's catering headquarters was the appropriate place—and midnight the best time—to pay homage to the Pawnee. Engaging in a “wild and uproarious, fast and furious” imitation, the group marched to the Pawnee camp, which they “raided,” with the assistance of purloined whiskey, by imitating wild animals and pretending to threaten Pawnee tents before repeating their own version of the war dance. This caricature was intended to put the Indigenous peoples in their place and ceremonially marked victory for the excursionists in the ongoing subjugation of the continent. Further firework displays and a demonstration of phrenology, one of Train's obsessions, concluded the celebrations as the excursion wound its way back east.²¹

The 1866 trip set a pattern for subsequent annual outings. Press announcements would list the names of distinguished guests and explain their relevance to the itinerary. The travel arrangements would be described in detail and the railroad companies over whose tracks the train traveled would be thanked. The sheer strangeness of the West would be highlighted by visits to Indian camps and those staged Indigenous ceremonies or sightings of native groups. These appeared next to breathless reports of the dangers avoided and the results of bison or antelope hunts. And Albert Pullman would be praised for his efforts, gaining considerable prestige and reinforcing his position as the national face of the Pullman Company while George quietly pursued the business of corporate expansion.

Western excursions allowed passengers to watch wilderness from the safety of a comfortable, warm railroad car. Excursionists saw what the historian Joy Kasson called “the illusion of an intimate, life-and-death encounter with the wild nature of the frontier, much like the shows Buffalo Bill and the Pawnee would later stage around the world.²² The threats to passengers—real and imagined—added to the attraction for thrill-seeking travelers. When the 1867 Pullman excursion stopped overnight at Julesburg, Colorado Territory, guests slept with pistols under their pillows after a cavalry commander warned them that “murders and robberies have been of frequent occurrence” in the settlement. One of the so-called Hell on Wheels towns built to serve Union Pacific contractors, Julesburg boasted the usual complement of gamblers, sex workers, gunslingers, and alcoholics, the categories often overlapping.²³

The bison hunt formed another regular feature. In 1867, the chase began at Fort Kearney. Encountering a herd, a cavalry detachment chased the beasts toward the armed and waiting Easterners, who killed ten in three hours without shooting each other or the troops.²⁴ On that occasion, appreciative passengers voted a resolution of thanks to the “popular Superintendent, Mr. A. B. Pullman” who “made it possible to take this long journey without fatigue and with the luxury of sleeping while travelling, by generously furnishing these splendid cars, whose invention will be a constant source of gratitude to the traveler.”²⁵ More detailed renditions of the same resolution, published after the trip, lauded “A. B. Pullman, Esq., Superintendent of the Palace-Car Company, and his employees … [for] their unvarying courtesy and personal attentions to us all, even in anticipation of our slightest wants.” The 1867 version concluded, “may the prosperity and success they so abundantly deserve ever attend them.”²⁶

Preparing for transcontinental service included refining several features of the Pullman experience. Fine food and abundant alcohol were crucial, but early excursionists ate at their seats. To fix this awkward problem, Pullman introduced hotel cars, beginning with President, in 1867. Hotel cars had a small kitchen with a coal stove that greatly expanded the range of meals offered. A pantry and an icebox stored ingredients while a wine cellar kept passengers lubricated. Travelers did not need to leave the car for food or beverages. Waiters placed hidden tables into sockets for meals and seats converted into beds for overnight trips. Porters brought out and stored linens and plates as needed. The key was for the cars to retain the hallmarks of Pullman luxury and service.²⁷

Hotel cars did not please every Pullman passenger. They had limited menus and lingering odors. That changed in 1868 with the introduction of Pullman dining cars. Sitting at linen-dressed tables set with silver cutlery and eating food served on China plates enhanced comfort and convenience for wealthy travelers. No longer catered, multicourse meals could be prepared onboard. The first Pullman dining car, the Delmonico, took the name of a restaurateur known for hosting New York's fashionable balls and banquets.²⁸ The car consisted of two dining rooms, one at each end, with the kitchen in between. The dining areas were served by two waiters who equipped the tables with sterling silver place settings stored in small cabinets dotted along the carriage wall. The kitchen was a mere eight square feet in size, but it was later moved to one end of the car because the smell of cooking proved impossible to contain. The range could simultaneously accommodate baking, broiling, and boiling. Supplies and implements were kept in storage areas beneath the car, where two tanks carried water. These facilities allowed staff to prepare and serve 250 meals a day, though conditions were cramped and hot in the kitchen. For diners, however, the experience of eating good meals at high speed proved exhilarating.²⁹

The first Delmonico journey took railroad officials, newspaper editors, merchants, and bankers from Chicago to Aurora and back.³⁰ Albert supervised an excursion from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to St. Louis, Missouri, featuring the new dining car for the Wisconsin Editorial Association. The newspaper publishers and editors praised the Delmonico for enabling passengers to eat in comfort at forty miles per hour. At the end of the run, the group presented Albert “with an elegant silver ice pitcher and goblet, together with decanters and glasses,” commending him for his “personal attention” and making the trip “one of surpassing ease and comfort.” The editors recorded how “his unremitting attention and gentlemanly deportment will ever be remembered with gratitude and pleasure by one and all.”³¹ These and other encomia became standard fare in printed reports of excursions, keeping Albert prominently before the public while the introduction of dining cars offered Pullman rhetoric another standard trope.

Adding dining cars to the variety of Pullman vehicle types helped the company dominate the luxury railroad car business. Though the company continued to build hotel cars for a dozen years, Delmonico and its siblings soon transcended them, in part because of Albert's clever marketing.³² Pullman's location in Chicago, the eastern terminus of railroads meeting the transcontinental, and the publicity provided by the Union Pacific excursions gave Pullman a decided advantage. Add to that Albert's showmanship and George's ferocious desire to monopolize luxury travel, and a showdown with other sleeping-car providers loomed. Pullman fought to create what the directors predicted would be “an unbroken line of its own Cars from the Atlantic seaboard, to connect with the Pullman's Pacific Sleeping Car lines.”³³