Last Train to Paradise (7 page)

9

Charting the Territories

Company records indicate that since reaching Miami in 1896, Flagler had been making tentative moves southward, feinting here and there like a fighter waiting for the right time to wade in for real.

In 1903 he had added a twelve-mile extension of the FEC along an ancient limestone formation running southwestward from Miami and known as the Cutler Ridge. At scarcely ten feet above sea level, the “ridge” was more of a barely perceptible rise, dotted with outcroppings of palmetto scrub and slash pine. But its elevation made enough of a difference, agriculturally speaking, to allow for flourishing fruit and vegetable crops in the area south of the growing city, and Flagler took quick advantage of this by adding freight service to the area.

In 1904 Flagler extended the Cutler line another sixteen miles southward, establishing a tiny settlement in a place known as Homestead, which constituted, to all intents and purposes, the last reliably dry land on the continent. And it was here that Flagler’s line languished, while he pondered the final decision on which direction his railroad would take to Key West.

The options were essentially two. The first was to go straight south from the Homestead terminus, building roadbed a few miles out along a narrow isthmus, and then jump by bridge across narrow Jewfish Creek to Key Largo, at a point about a quarter of the way south along that island’s span. From there the route would follow the line of the Keys, leapfrogging where necessary across the open waters that separated them, though in some cases, Flagler theorized, dredging operations could actually succeed in joining the islands that were closest together, making two keys into one where feasible.

The other choice involved building his road southwestward from Homestead, across the very tip of the Florida mainland, to an outpost known as Cape Sable, where the road would leave the continent and strike out over forty miles of uninterrupted open water to join land somewhere in the Lower Keys. To investigate this route, Flagler dispatched a civil engineer named William J. Krome, whose name still graces the westernmost avenue in far-flung Dade County.

Krome and his surveying party were to encounter the same daunting conditions that James Ingraham and his men met while crossing the Everglades in the opposite direction a decade before: endless stretches of marshland and muck, dense stands of ten-foot-high saw grass with edges as sharp as razors, clouds of stinging insects so thick “you could swing a pint can about on the end of a string and come up with a quart of mosquitoes.”

Modern-day travelers can get a hint of what Krome was up against by following the forty-mile road that winds from just outside Homestead to Flamingo, near where Flagler hoped to send his route. The route is circuitous, following a twisting “ridgeline” through veldtlike pastures interspersed with marshlands alive with shorebirds and alligators and the ever-present mosquitoes, which descend in literal clouds upon the unwary.

A distance that can be traveled by car in an hour or so today took Krome and his men thirteen days. “I found a most Godforsaken region,” he wrote in a report to his supervisor. “But of keys, bays, rivers and lagoons there is no end, and it is going to take us much longer to get a survey than I had expected.”

Krome did press on, often forced to drag the shallow-bottomed boats they had brought along over terrain that was an indefinable mix of peat and muck and water, sucking at every footstep, yet not liquid enough to cross by boat. The men were tortured by heat, humidity, and insects, and often lost their way in the featureless landscape. If not for the aid of the occasional backcountry hunter or member of the native Miccosukee tribe, Krome’s only memorial might have been a long-forgotten pile of bones.

But Krome managed to find his way to open water, and lived to warn his employers against any notion of sending a railroad to follow in his footsteps. Though he did conclude that a route might be feasible down the eastern edge of the cape, the costs would still have been excessive, especially when the jumping-off point would have been situated much farther away from the Lower Keys than Flagler desired.

According to Carlton Corliss, an engineer who worked on the project for many years, Flagler also considered the possibility of bridging a set of narrows across Baines Sound, near the present-day Card Sound Bridge. The extension would go no farther than the northern tip of Key Largo, where a deep-water port would be dredged and docks constructed at Turtle Harbor. That plan had the distinct disadvantage of leaving Key West out of the equation, however.

In the end, both the Turtle Harbor and Cape Sable routes were rejected, and Flagler turned his attention to the route down the Keys, the path that Jefferson Browne had outlined in his
National Geographic
article of a decade before. According to Browne, such a route had actually been surveyed as early as 1866, by a civil engineer named J. C. Bailey, who had been employed by the International Ocean Telegraph Company to chart the course of a telegraph line from Miami to Cuba. To Bailey it seemed a natural adjunct to lay a rail line along the same path.

It might have seemed logical to Browne and Bailey, but a glance at the actual terrain to be crossed makes it clear why Flagler hesitated before choosing. Of the more than one hundred miles that remained from Jewfish Creek to Key West, about half were over open water. Some of the spans were a few hundred yards. Others stretched for miles.

Still, to a pragmatist like Flagler, the route seemed possible. When questioned how he would cross those mammoth stretches of open water, Flagler replied, “It is perfectly simple. All you have to do is to build one concrete arch, and then another, and pretty soon you will find yourself in Key West.”

In any case, by January of 1905, Flagler felt that there had been enough of data gathering and surveying. He called his general manager, Joseph R. Parrott, into his office and announced that it was time a decision be made.

“Joe, are you sure this railroad can be built?” Flagler is said to have asked.

Parrott, whose job it had been to evaluate the endless series of reports and surveys, said, “Yes, I am.”

“Very well, then,” Flagler said. “Go to Key West.”

Late that month, Flagler traveled to Key West along with Parrott and other FEC executives and announced to a group of the town’s leading citizens that he would indeed bring his railroad to their city. Back in Tallahassee, Senator E. C. Crill of Palatka introduced S.B. 11, granting the Florida East Coast Railway rights and privileges to build the Key West Extension and granting the company a two-hundred-foot right-of-way down the Keys. The bill became law on May 3, 1905.

In the ensuing months, newspapers from Florida to New York were abuzz with details of Flagler’s plans. Not only would the FEC build the railroad extension down the Keys, it would also construct twelve piers in Key West to handle the expected shipping traffic. Each pier would be two hundred feet wide, with covered storage, and would extend seaward eight hundred feet, flanked by docking basins two hundred feet wide, allowing berthing space for four oceangoing freighters or passenger ships. All this was to be completed, Flagler asserted, by January 1, 1908, or scarcely two and a half years later.

Meanwhile, Flagler had placed advertisements in a series of newspapers nationwide, soliciting private bids for construction of the railroad itself, and he was taken aback to find that only one proposal had come in, and that was a cost-plus bid, wherein the contractor would be guaranteed reimbursement for whatever expenses were incurred, plus a previously agreed-upon amount for profit. Flagler balked at such a deal, of course. All his life he had taken risks, and the idea that anyone should shoulder none himself, while expecting a handsome return, was simply unacceptable.

He and Parrott thus determined that the job would be undertaken in-house, and they began a search for a likely project engineer. Flagler was confident that he had plenty of men on staff who were capable of building roadbed and laying track on dry land. He’d been at such projects for two decades now. But since half of the Key West Extension involved laying track over water, it was obvious he would need a master bridge builder to oversee this project.

Eventually the search led them to Tampico, Mexico, where a young engineer, Joseph C. Meredith, had spent two years in charge of a massive $3.5-million, half-mile-long pier construction project undertaken by the Missouri Valley Bridge Company for the Mexican government.

Ralph Paine, who wrote a lengthy piece on the project for
Everybody’s,
a popular magazine of the day, described Meredith as “a taciturn, almost diffident person,” but he was also an expert in the use of reinforced concrete, a construction medium Flagler had first been intrigued by when building the Alcazar in St. Augustine.

Bridging some of the endless stretches involved in this project using conventional ironwork was out of the question, but as Flagler had suggested in his earlier comments, a series of poured columns and arches, built in the manner of the ancient Roman viaducts, seemed feasible. And Meredith, who might have been “fragile-looking,” but nonetheless had the reputation for taking on projects that seemed too big or problem-filled for others, seemed the perfect person for the job.

In an interview, Meredith remembered being summoned directly from Mexico to St. Augustine for his interview:

They told me about the Key West extension. Not a word about cost or possible profits; merely the matter of engineering feasibility. Mr. Flagler wanted either to fill in or to build a viaduct, for he hates makeshifts. Permanence appeals to him more strongly than to any other man I ever met. He has often told me that he does not wish to keep on spending money for maintenance of way, but to build for all time. . . . [A] corporation, especially where the country has to grow up and the paying traffic is all in the future, will do barely enough to supply the pressing needs. They make improvements gradually, as the profit comes in. But that is not Mr. Flagler’s way.

Their interview was brief and to the point. Once Meredith had assured Flagler that nothing about his plans seemed impossible, the matter was settled.

“When can you start?” Flagler asked Meredith, fully expecting that he might ask for a month or so to settle his affairs.

“I’m ready to go to work this afternoon,” Meredith told him. “But I’d like a few days first to go home to Kansas City, pack some things, and see my family. I’ll have to be on this job for several years.”

“All right, my boy, see your family,” Flagler told him, and then echoed what would become a familiar refrain: “Then go to Key West.”

10

Jumping-Off Point

There were many who applauded Flagler’s announcement, of course. As former secretary of war Elihu Root wrote: “I regard it [the Key West Extension] as second only to the Panama Canal in its political and commercial importance to the United States.”

But when Flagler confided to his old friend George M. Ward, a Presbyterian minister and president of Rollins College, that he had hired a supervising engineer and embarked upon the project at long last, Ward’s reply was less than encouraging. “Flagler, you need a guardian,” Ward said, a sentiment regarding his sanity that would be shared by many others of the day.

“Flagler’s Folly” was the epithet most fondly used by Flagler’s detractors, and evidence suggests that even Flagler himself was not always so sure of his intent. Flagler biographer Edward N. Akin notes that in a version of his will penned in 1901, the great man expressly enjoined the use of his estate for the building of any railroad extension south of Miami, a provision he would ultimately be required to obviate.

But by 1905, Flagler had made his decision, and no amount of public derision was about to sway his course. Company-generated public-relations material of the time resounded with its founder’s resolve and sense of greater purpose:

As has been intimated, the assurance of the Panama Canal made the world look at the Keys of Florida and Key West from a new point of view. The canal opens in a moment tremendous vistas and pushes our commercial horizon across the seven seas. Key West is almost three hundred miles nearer the eastern terminus of the canal than any other of our Gulf ports. At the same time it is the natural base for guarding and protecting the canal on the east and our great Gulf coast. That the island should be closer to the mainland had been the dream of generations. The dream had become a necessity to our commerce, our national interest, and our national safety. But could the dream come true, could the necessity be met?

The financiers considered the project and said, Unthinkable. The railway managers studied it and said, Impracticable. The engineers pondered the problems it presented and from all came the one verdict, Impossible. . . .

But, strange as it may seem, there was a financier with the courage of Columbus, a railway manager with the administrative grip of a Menéndez, and an engineer as brave and as far-seeing as the pilots who brought the caravels of Spain through miles of unknown and uncharted seas. . . .

Thus did Flagler, apparently characterized as Christopher Columbus, undertake his “folly” aided by Parrott, his Menéndez, and his Cortez, Joseph C. Meredith. Overheated rhetoric aside, the project was an undeniably grandiose one. Some writers noted that the route was longer than that of the hundred-mile-long Suez Canal, which had taken ten years to build. Just as remarkable was the announcement that all work on the project would be carried out by the FEC itself—nothing would be contracted to others.

And the costs were unprecedented as well: the 742-mile California link of the Union Pacific Railroad, joined by the driving of the “golden spike” at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, had cost $23 million. Total budget for the Overseas Railroad—estimated by some analysts of the day at $50 million or more—would soar well beyond $27 million.

The sum had to seem formidable to Flagler himself. All his years of doing and building in the state barely totaled as much. The best estimates suggest that by 1905, Flagler had invested about $30 million in his Florida enterprises, $12 million in hotel building, and another $18 million in railroad building. Much of the cash for the investments had been raised from loans issued against his Standard Oil Stock. In turn, the various business units listed Flagler as the prime creditor, paying off their debts to him out of revenues. In turn the business units, as well as the vast landholdings that came along with right-of-way development, were often used as collateral for further development.

To begin such a task as this, then, at the age of seventy-five, suggests that the man could not have been concerned primarily about taking his fortunes with him. He had overridden the advice of a number of financial analysts within his own company, after all, and had firsthand evidence that no other builder in the world was willing to share in the challenges that lay ahead.

Henry Flagler, it seems, had grown far beyond his place as a mere businessman, at least in his own mind. In a letter written to a clergyman friend, he described his feelings for the citizens of Florida in a telling manner: “I feel that these people are wards of mine and have a special claim upon me.”

If the letter is suggestive of a benevolent despot’s self-aggrandizement, Flagler did not strike most observers that way. Even at his age, Flagler had a bearing that would make it difficult to imagine anyone calling him crazy to his face. Edwin Lefevre, then a leading financial writer for the
New York Sun,
was sent to interview Flagler for a story in
Everybody’s,
and described him this way:

His hair is of a clean, glistening silver, like the cropped mustache and the eyebrows. They set off his complexion, which is neither ruddy nor baby-pink, but what one might call a virile red. He has a straight nose and a strong chin. . . . The eyes are a clear blue—some might say violet. They must have been very keen once; today their expression is not easy to describe—not exactly shrewd nor compelling nor suspicious; though you feel they might have been all of these, years ago . . . eyes that gleam but never flame. . . . A handsome old man! Under his fourscore years his shoulders have bowed slightly but there is no semblance of decay.

Lefevre, who embarked upon his assignment ready to deliver a portrait of a robber baron facing his just, fin-de-siècle desserts, was to spend several weeks inspecting Flagler’s vast holdings and several more days in conversation with the man; he came away with a vastly revised assessment. Toward the end of his series of interviews with Flagler, Lefevre reflects:

You realize that you are before a man who has suffered and has never wept; who has undergone intense pain and has never sobbed; who has never bent under stress and has never hurrahed! . . . Your great man is apt to be one with certain faculties over-developed, and classifies easily. But Flagler is not like any one else and withal is not eccentric.

He is without redeeming vices, without amiable inconsistencies, without obsessions. He simply does not “classify.” You cannot accurately adjectivize him. He does not defy analysis; he baffles it. . . . Whether [his veins] run red blood you cannot tell; but you are certain it is not ice water. What color is it, then? That is the mystery of the soul of Henry M. Flagler.

Such speculation may have intrigued others, but Flagler showed little awareness of any mystique surrounding him. He might have been a rich and powerful man, but his own preoccupations seemed to center on what he might accomplish of a day. His old friend Reverend George Ward would recall that Flagler rarely read history, for he was interested primarily in the present and, most of all, the future.

In a letter written to an associate at the time he was about to announce the undertaking of the Key West Extension, Flagler provides a glimpse of his own self-image at the age of seventy-four:

I was born with a live oak constitution, and it is only within a year or two that I have known of the possession of any organs. My diet has always been simple and the only excess I believe I have indulged in has been that of hard work. I have however one ailment (old age) which is incurable, and that I am submitting to as gracefully as possible. I am quite sure, however, that I possess as much vitality and can do as much work as the average man of forty-five.

Hard work, energy, and accomplishment. For Flagler it seemed to be all he knew, all he need know.

If Flagler’s innermost thoughts remained an enigma to his contemporaries, certain details of his plans for the work that lay ahead were perhaps more revealing of his singleminded determination. As Meredith heard during the first meeting of the two, Flagler saw no reason why dredging operations could not be used to lighten their task. The waters surrounding the shoal-like Keys were shallow in most places, and it would be a far simpler, less expensive proposition to simply dig up the surrounding sea bottom and use the material to fill in the gaps between islands than to build bridges.

Initial surveys suggested that only six miles of typical bridge spans would be needed along the more than 100-mile route. The rest of the fifty-plus miles of open water could be filled in, or traversed by the series of arches that Flagler envisioned. In fact, one of the preliminary studies suggested that the entire route could be constructed atop a solid rampart that could wind its way down the line of the Keys like a version of the Great Wall of China.

The environmental issues raised by such an approach would today stop a project dead in its tracks. And even at the beginning of the century, government scientists were concerned about the potential for disrupting the natural tidal flow between the Gulf of Mexico on the west of the Keys and the Atlantic Ocean on the east.

Some went so far as to predict that the planned impediments, even with arched viaducts replacing the solid ramparts, would affect the character of the nearby Gulf Stream as it surged up from Cuba, thereby changing the climate of the Keys and all South Florida. In the end, Flagler’s submitted plan called for six miles of open-water bridges, and upon that note of compromise, construction would begin. Jefferson Browne’s decade-old declaration that “a railroad to Key West will assuredly be built” had finally been proven correct.

In April of 1905, a contingent of several hundred laborers, most of them Southern blacks, began the process of building up a roadbed across the last miles of marshy land south of Homestead. While there was no open water to cross, the terrain was typical of the Everglades: soggy at best, too wet to be considered land and not wet enough to be called water. Mule-drawn carts were useless, as was conventional motor-driven equipment.

To cope, Flagler’s engineers devised a pair of shallow-bottomed dredges, each with a steam-powered excavating shovel mounted on its deck. Once the tangle of mangroves and brush had been cleared, the machines advanced on either side of the roadbed-to-be. Each scooped out the muck in front of it, thereby creating a canal for the machine’s continued passage. The muck and limestone that had been removed were deposited in between the two roaring behemoths, to be graded into roadbed by the trailing laborers.

It was an ingenious solution, one of a series that would be required over the years to come, but the problems were just beginning. The combination of heat, humidity, insects, and isolation had its effects upon the workmen. It was, after all, no accident that the terrain Flagler’s road was crossing had remained virtually uninhabited over the course of all known history.

One worker recalled that the dredge operators would return to their machines in the morning to find that alligators had occupied the decks during the night. The creatures had to be driven off into the swamps before work could begin again.

The simple fact was that no one had ever attempted to perform the arduous labor that railway or any other major construction required under conditions such as these. Exhaustion, heatstroke, and disease would soon take its toll, even among a workforce long accustomed to harsh conditions.

By the time Flagler and a team of FEC executives made an inspection tour in late July of 1905, the roadway had scarcely made its way to Key Largo—still 110 miles from Key West—and the original contingent of more than 400 workers had dwindled to fewer than 150. Flagler had made the trip to the construction site aboard a paddle steamer from Miami, the party accompanied by Russell Smith, an engineer researching a story for the
New York Herald.

Smith’s account began with a lyrical description of the waters just off Key Largo—“Going over shoals and through such narrow channels that the boat touches both sides at once, the bottom of the sea is always visible, with its jelly-like sponges and beautiful branching coral. . . . ‘Skipjacks’ continually jumped out of the water and rode on the surface for hundreds of yards. . . . Flying fish left the water and flew for a quarter of a mile before returning”—a passage virtually as accurate today as it was a hundred years ago in evoking the charms of the nearby open waters.

But soon enough Smith’s view of things changed. No sooner had the
Biscayne,
Flagler’s paddle-wheel steamer, tied off at the houseboat serving as field headquarters for the project than the insects descended.

“Here is experienced the most serious problem to overcome this great undertaking,” Smith wrote. “The mosquitoes on this key are almost unbearable, and the problem is to persuade laborers not to run away, for it means certain death as there is no possible outlet to the mainland.”

The plaguing insects did drive the inspection team away, forcing the
Biscayne
to anchor a mile and a half offshore, where the captain assumed they would find relief. But as anyone who has spent a summer’s night anchored within cannon-shot of land in the Florida Keys might have told the party, such was not the case. Once they’d had a taste of blood (or, more accurately, the human exhalations of carbon dioxide), the mosquitoes simply followed the party over the water like tiny flying bloodhounds.

Smith writes that no one on board the
Biscayne
was to get much sleep that night, least of all himself: “I lay down on a canvas cot with a double thickness of blanket, thinking this too thick for the pests to bite through. . . . I reckoned wrong, for they attacked from below and bit through the canvas cot.”

The trip made a profound impact upon Flagler, who understood that a steady supply of labor was crucial to the success of his undertaking. Labor shortages, which had always plagued his road building efforts in sparsely populated Florida, would be greatly exacerbated here. As one manager would lament, “One of our most trying problems has been to take a big body of low grade men, take care of them, and build them into a capacity for performing high class work.”