Last Train to Paradise (8 page)

Every mile that the road pushed southward from Miami was another step from civilization. And if the principal workforce, most of them men descended from slaves, were finding the going on this project tough, it did not bode well.

From the outset, then, Flagler stressed to his managers that living conditions should be made as comfortable as possible. To lessen the difficulty of finding suitable campsites, large barges were dispatched from Miami to serve as portable work camps, some of them floating two- and three-story wooden dormitories that could be towed down the coast of the Keys as the line moved ahead.

Field kitchens were also stationed on such barges, to which “food of only the best quality . . . in abundance” was ferried three times a week and more. “Camps are clean,” wrote a reporter for the
Chicago Daily News,
“food good, pure ice and water supplied to each camp, no liquor sold in or near.”

Smudge pots, burning a mixture of kerosene and oil, cast a pall of largely ineffectual smoke over all the work sites and common areas, and workers who wanted them were issued head nets, though the description of the latter, as given by William Krome, by that time Meredith’s assistant chief engineer, provides a vivid picture of the struggles the men had to undergo where even the most basic issues were involved: “[The best] was one adapted from Cape Sable squatters [suggesting that Krome’s death-defying trek through that wilderness had provided at least one positive]. It is built for use over a stiff rimmed hat and consists of a band of canvas fitting closely around the crown of the hat. To this is sewed a strip of close mesh copper wire netting extending down the back and curving over the shoulders to the level of the chin. Cheesecloth is taped around the bottom of the copper gauze and tucked beneath the coat, which is buttoned over it.”

While there is no reason to doubt Krome’s claims of the item’s relative effectiveness, it is another thing to imagine trudging through ninety-degree heat and equal humidity, swinging a twenty-pound sledge or manhandling a precarious wheelbarrow full of sloshing marl, with such a getup around one’s head.

Still, one worker recalled that most of the men did wear screened hats when they were working, as well as gloves and long-sleeved shirts. They covered their bodies in oil and carried palm-leaf switches to try and drive the insects away, he said. But mostly they stayed inside as much as possible. “We rarely went outside after five
P.M.
,” he said.

Aside from the debilitating nature of the work itself, maintaining a steady supply of fresh water constituted another major problem. Other than cisterns used to store and collect rainwater, no supply of fresh water was to be found anywhere on the Keys, then or now. The company drilled test wells as deep as two thousand feet, but found nothing but salt water.

Finally a system was devised whereby fresh water was pumped out of the Everglades to large holding tanks near Homestead. Each day, two trains made up of flatcars carrying huge water tanks fashioned from cypress planks ferried the precious commodity down the line to supply workers and their machines. By the time the line was nearing its latter stages, water was being hauled well over one hundred miles to men surrounded by a sparkling blue ocean that might as well have been an endless stretch of desert sand.

Ever mindful of the yellow-fever outbreak that had quarantined his new city of Miami scant years earlier, Flagler was concerned that a similar outbreak might strike his Keys workforce. Every work camp had a pair of trained attendants on duty, and those workers sick enough to require a doctor’s attention were transported by rail back up the line to Miami or by ship south to Key West, where the company maintained hospitals and provided medical services free of charge to its workmen.

Dehydration, influenza, and an occasional rattlesnake bite, along with the fractures and lacerations common to heavy construction projects, made up the bulk of the medical referrals. Despite Flagler’s concerns, no plague or tropical fever ever swept through his camps.

Of far greater concern to the workforce than housing standards and quality of medical care were the rigors of the work itself, especially when coupled with the isolation they would undergo. Flagler, who had been drawn to Florida because of its paradisiacal nature, after all, did what he could to alleviate boredom in the camps. Once the project had extended to Marathon, a tennis club was erected for the amusement of the engineers and supervisors familiar with that game.

But for the rank and file, the types of diversion they were accustomed to in less far-flung territories proved hard to come by. Flagler, perhaps because of his conservative upbringing, was no drinker, but even if he hadn’t been restrained in his own habits, his absolute prohibition against liquor in the camps would have made for sound labor-management practice.

Women, too, were in short supply. However, in the later stages of the project, an upper-echelon employee such as bridge-building expert and division engineer C. S. Coe might be able to quarter his family in company housing at one of the larger work camps, though such permanent arrangements were rare, and for a laboring man they were out of the question.

Flagler did permit periodic visits by family members of workmen, however, and as the camps developed, he provided limited accommodations for visitors. One of the “boarding camps” he built along the way, set aside for the enjoyment of the families of skilled workers on the gangs, later evolved into the Long Key Fishing Camp, which would ultimately prove a popular destination for Flagler’s more affluent clientele.

Such diversions would remain out of the reach of the average worker, however, and it was not long before American ingenuity proved itself equal to the task of providing diversion for Flagler’s minions. Enterprising local residents were often able to supplement a hardscrabble livelihood in farming or fishing by smuggling in “hootch” to thirsty workers, and one group of the more visionary went so far as to refit an ancient freighter and give it a new life as a floating saloon-cum-bordello to which a desperate man might catch a ride via skiff for an evening’s entertainment.

Such excursions were anathema to Flagler and his top brass, of course, and district supervisors were under strict orders to keep the booze out of the camps and the men safely in their quarters at night, an ideal that might have made sense in the cool boardrooms of St. Augustine, but one hard to live up to for the manager of a far-flung labor camp where men were always on the verge of desertion, even if it meant risking one’s life. Managers often looked the other way, then, when overloaded skiffs slipped away from the “quartersboats,” headed toward the distant lights of a party ship, and even a number of the company stewards were not above supplementing their incomes by dealing in black-market whiskey.

One division engineer wrote to Meredith, pleading for some discretion. “I have found great difficulty in the prevention of the liquor traffic . . . ,” he said, adding, “The worst that we have had to contend with . . . was the unfaithfulness of our own steward in the matter.” Another difficulty he bemoaned was the fact that often men in a camp as strictly run as his own knew full well how easy liquor was to obtain in another camp up or down the line.

This supervisor went so far as to suggest that the railroad attempt to control the situation by establishing its own system of “canteens,” but the proposal was dismissed by Flagler, who felt that it would be tantamount to official capitulation on the issue.

Another company supervisor, W. R. Hawkins, wrote in his diary of the periodic need to round up workers who had defected upon hearing stories of “oil finds” up and down the right-of-way. Crew superintendents investigating the claims would invariably find a group of excited workmen surrounding an upwelling of sulfurous swamp gas that had spread its oily residue over the nearby waters.

At any rate, the difficulties in finding and keeping laborers led to an ever-increasing set of recruitment efforts by company officials, who turned their sights on every likely source, including Bowery bums, Greek sponge divers, Italian steelworkers, and a considerable number of native workers from the Caribbean, who were more familiar with the climate and the terrain.

One of the most dependable groups turned out to be natives from the British Cayman Islands. The Caymaners would arrive at the work sites in their own boats early each January and work steadily until just before Christmas, with no complaining and few desertions. According to Benjamin Grinwell, a longtime Extension employee, the men were a mixture of British and West Indian, many with sandy complexions and red or blond hair, but with otherwise Negroid features, and “no more than three or four surnames among the hundred or more of them.” Whatever their lineage, the Caymaners proved to be expert helmsmen and soon became the backbone of Flagler’s varied fleet.

By the time crews had hacked their way the twenty miles or so to Jewfish Creek and began serious work down the spine of Key Largo, the workforce had grown significantly, averaging some three thousand men at a given time, reaching four thousand at the project’s most fevered peak. If, at times, the camps resembled a staging area for the Tower of Babel, relations among the various groups remained largely placid, perhaps because the men were forced to unite against the difficulties of the work and the environment in which they lived.

Flagler, who had been called before his share of investigative panels in connection with the workings of Standard Oil, had been spared such scrutiny for the most part during his days in Florida. But with the eyes of the world turned upon the Key West Extension, things were sure to change.

One of the main controversies arose over the activities of labor recruiters who contracted independently with the FEC. These men, or
padrones,
as they were called in the Italian communities, did much of their work in urban centers of the Northeast, including New York and Philadelphia.

Such a contractor was technically an independent agent, an arrangement that critics said was set up to shield the company from any improprieties in the recruitment process. The contractor would promise to deliver a certain number of “able-bodied men” to FEC offices in Miami, in return for cash—sometimes one dollar a head, sometimes as much as three dollars—or in some instances, a grant of land from the vast right-of-way holdings which had been amassed.

The recruits, who hired on at rates that ranged widely according to their skill levels (skilled carpenters might get two to three dollars for a ten-hour day) and the degree of their desperation, came to Miami aboard FEC trains, with the understanding that the twelve-to-fifteen-dollar ticket charge would be deducted from their first month’s check. In Miami they would be transferred to trains bound for the work camps themselves, where they would be housed either in one of the floating camps or in one of the land-based dormitories. Some of the larger structures might sleep as many as 350 men in a series of bunks four shelves high, though most of the buildings were far more modest, with forty or fifty workers housed in each. The floating quartersboats were somewhere in between in capacity, usually housing as many as 150 men.

While the circumstances the men were to encounter at the camps were daunting, exploitation of a sort worked both ways. One of the headaches for the recruiters and company officials alike was the proclivity of their recruits for disappearing along the way from New York or Philadelphia to Miami. One internal company memorandum complained that as many as half of the men recruited in New York during the early days of the project had vanished from the train before reaching the work camps.

In one of his diary entries, a company supervisor offers some insight into the problem in a description of a trainload of new recruits that reached Marathon: “Two hundred sixty-nine [of 345 that boarded the train in New York] mostly pretty tough looking customers, though most anyone would look tough after a trip from New York in day coaches with no chance to wash and not much chance to sleep nor eat.”

Men took advantage of their deferred fares simply to walk off the trains in Jacksonville or Palm Beach or even Miami, there to seek work in more hospitable circumstances and avoid that twelve-dollar transportation charge. Others, claiming that they had been deceived by the trumped-up claims of the
padrones
—no mention of the transportation charges, their promised wages wildly inflated to as much as $1.75 a day (most common laborers actually received $1.50 for a day’s work)—demanded immediate passage back north.

The claims and counterclaims began to attract attention, especially since the railroad’s founder had been previously characterized as a robber baron by certain quarters of the press during the Standard Oil hearings. The result was a series of well-documented investigations by governmental agencies into claims of slave-labor conditions in the Flagler camps.

A special assistant U.S. attorney named Mary Quackenbos, who had been appointed to investigate similar labor-practice claims in agriculture and other industries in the frontier state, was quick to turn her sights on Flagler’s recruitment operations. Attorney Quackenbos secured a deposition from one recruiter who claimed that the railroad had agreed to pay his firm three dollars apiece for laborers delivered to Florida. To recoup the costs of this extraordinary bounty, the company deducted two dollars from each of the new hires’ pay, disguising it as part of transportation fees.

According to the deposition, the recruiters’ efforts were centered on the most luckless of the available labor pool in New York City: the homeless, the charity wards, and ethnic relief agencies. The men, the government charged, were promised ideal working conditions, inflated rates of pay, and, in some cases, supervisory or skilled positions that never existed. Most were not told that the work took place on isolated islands from which the only way back was by company train, nor were they aware that return passage would be blocked until they had worked sufficient weeks or sometimes months in order to satisfy their debts to the company.