Preview excerpt of Over the Edge: Fred Harvey at the Grand Canyon and in the Great Southwest

$ 22.00

Over the Edge SC+flaps.indd 1

The Colt .45 revolver may have “Won the West,” but Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe Railway civilized it.

In the late nineteenth century, the Santa Fe opened up a strange, spectacular new territory to travelers. Harvey followed, establishing restaurants, hotels, and shops to make them comfortable.

Over the Edge reveals in vivid detail how Harvey and the Santa Fe together created a vision of the Southwest that still works its magic today.

For anyone interested in the Santa Fe Railway, the Fred Harvey Company, and the development of tourism at the Grand Canyon and across the Southwest’s Indian Country, this book is essential.

— JIM BABBITT

A must-have for anyone interested in Grand Canyon history or southwest tourism.

— ERIK BERG , past president of the Grand Canyon Historical Society

Between 1880 and 1940, the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway made the Grand Canyon the popular attraction it remains to this day. They made travel and accommodation easy, comfortable, and affordable. From a lunchroom in Topeka, Kansas, to the Indian Department in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Over the Edge is the story of the people and events that invented the Southwest.

Though well known to Native Americans, the Canyon was first mapped

by John Wesley Powell in 1867. Visitors then arrived by stagecoach and later by railway and automobile. Eccentric prospectors, entrepreneurs, photographers, and Native artists helped define the territory. And the Fred Harvey Company was born.

As you read about the Kolb Brothers, Mary Colter, Joe Secakuku, William Haskell Simpson, Herman Schweizer, Elle of Ganado, the famous Harvey Girls, and the iconic railway that brought visitors in droves, see the amazing photographs, postcards, pamphlets, menus, calendars, advertisements, and even matchbook covers that evoke the adventure and joy of that special time and place.

RIO NUEVO

Tucson, Arizona www.rionuevo.com

owner of La Posada and La Castañeda Hotels

OVER THE EDGE

D IANA P ARDUE is Curator of Collections at the Heard Museum, where her work has included historic and contemporary Native American arts. She received the 2009 Curatorial Excellence Award from the Apple Valley Foundation in California for the exhibit Mothers & Daughters: Stories in Clay. Her publications include Native American Bolo Ties:Vintage and Contemporary Artistry (with Norman Sandfield, 2011), Shared Images:The Innovative Jewelry of Yazzie Johnson and Gail Bird (2007), Contemporary Southwestern Jewelry (2007), Inventing the Southwest:The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art (with Kathleen Howard, 1996), exhibit catalogues, and journal articles. After moving to Arizona, hiking and camping became a favorite pastime with one memorable 1987 hike down the Kaibab Trail to Phantom Ranch.

HOWARD / PARDUE

I loved Over the Edge! This book plays an invaluable role in keeping this fascinating history and these great buildings alive. Bravo!

— ALLAN AFFELDT,

K ATHLEEN L. H OWARD is a Research Associate at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. She earned a Masters and PhD in History from Arizona State University. Her research interests include the history of the American Southwest and its Native cultures.

Her publications include Inventing the Southwest:The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art, co-authored with Diana Pardue (1996), Photographing Mesa Verde: Nordenskiold and Now, with William G. Howard and Douglas J. Hamilton (2006), plus numerous journal articles. For Kathy, the Grand Canyon has always been a mythical and magnetic place. Splendid sunny days and star-filled nights spent backpacking in dusty boots on inner Canyon trails, and day hiking and running the Canyon rim-to-rim-to-rim have left indelible memories.

12/29/15 10:52 AM

OTE text.indd 2

12/18/15 5:33 PM

OVER THE EDGE FRED HARVEY at the GRAND CANYON and in the Great Southwest

By Kathleen L. Howard and Diana F. Pardue

OTE text.indd 3

12/18/15 5:33 PM

Rio Nuevo Publishers ® P. O. Box 5250, Tucson, AZ 85703-0250 (520) 623-9558, www.rionuevo.com Text © 2016 by Heard Museum title page photo : T. Harmon Parkhurst, Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, 004011 managing editor : Aaron book design :

Downey David Jenney Design

Printed in Korea.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or likewise copied in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher, excepting quotes for review or citation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Howard, Kathleen L., author. | Pardue, Diana F., author.

Title: Over the edge : Fred Harvey at the Grand Canyon and in the great Southwest / by Kathleen L. Howard and Diana F. Pardue.

Other titles: Fred Harvey at the Grand Canyon and in the great Southwest Description: First edition. | Tucson, AZ : Rio Nuevo Publishers, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015040360| ISBN 9781940322117 (pbk.) | ISBN 1940322111 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Grand Canyon National Park (Ariz.)--History. | Fred Harvey (Firm)—History. | Indian art—Southwest, New—Marketing. | Indian handicraft industries—Southwest, New. | Souvenirs (Keepsakes)—Southwest, New. | Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Company—History. | Tourism—Southwest, New—History.

Classification: LCC F788 .H75 2016 | DDC 979.1/32—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040360

OTE text.indd 4

12/18/15 5:33 PM

CONTENTS prologue VII

CHAPTER 1

Settling the Grand Canyon 1 CHAPTER 2

The Santa Fe Sells the Grand Canyon 23 CHAPTER 3

The Fred Harvey Indian Enterprise 41 CHAPTER 4

Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe at the Grand Canyon 63 CHAPTER 5

Mary Colter Designs the West 93 epilogue 117 notes 121 bibliography 129 aCknowledgements 135 indeX 137

OTE text.indd 5

12/18/15 5:33 PM

Louis Akin’s painting of El Tovar was published as postcards by Fred Harvey News Service, Kansas City, Missouri, 1906.

Using artistic license, Akin relocated the Canyon’s edge making it closer to the buildings than it actually is.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

OTE text.indd 22

12/18/15 5:34 PM

CHAPTER 2

THE SANTA FE SELLS THE GRAND CANYON The Santa Fe Railway was the most significant force in shaping the region’s visual identity through image building.

— r i C h a r d f r a n C aV i g l i a 1

T

s a n ta f e r a i lway ’ s ca p t i v e m a r K e t developed as the general public began to have leisure, means, and resources for independent travel. In 1876, the Santa Fe was forging south and westward from Chicago along the route previously surveyed by government exploring parties along the 35th parallel. When it was completed in 1882, the line put the Santa Fe Railroad within striking distance of Pueblo and Athabaskan-speaking peoples, as well as spectacular geologic features like the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, and the Rocky Mountains. This combination had all the romantic elements for the invention of a largerthan-life Southwest. Under the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey companies, the vision of a mythic Southwest germinated and blossomed for travelers and tourists “on the way to California.”

Definitions of the Southwest are numerous—sometimes inclusive and exclusive of territory, depending on point of view. It has been described as an area ranging from Durango, Mexico, to Durango, Colorado, and from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Las Vegas, New Mexico. Cultural geographer D. W. Meinig observed in his book, Southwest:Three Peoples in Geographical Change, “the Southwest is a distinctive place to the American mind, but somewhat blurred on American maps.”2 For purposes here, the Southwest is defined as the southwestern quadrant of the United States, specifically the states and areas along and near the historic Santa Fe Railway route through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Southern California. In the midst of this vast landscape is one of the seven natural wonders of the world—the Grand Canyon. he

Photograph album Scenic Treasures of California including Grand Canyon of Arizona, made for Fred Harvey, Kansas City,

by Tom Jones Publisher, Cincinnati, 1906.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

23

OTE text.indd 23

12/18/15 5:34 PM

24

over

the

edge

The Santa Fe’s 1876 timetable, From the River to the Mountains, described the “new direct route” to “all points in Colorado, six hundred miles of River, Plain and Mountain Scenery” (Figure 1). The timetable touted affordable land in Kansas open to settlement. The Santa Fe offered two and a half million acres of its land for sale as farms and homes. The “toiling millions in the East” were offered “every facility for erecting these comfortable homes, furnishing the land on easy terms.” Buffalo hunting was described next to a photograph illustrating the physical beauty of Colorado Springs’ Garden of the Gods, a natural wonder filled with picturesque boulders. The timetable also promoted San Juan Mountain mines as regional attractions. It would be several more years before the Santa Fe tracks made their way through Raton Pass into northern New Mexico and Albuquerque, then west to their ultimate destination, the Pacific Coast.

Advertising the Great Abyss The Santa Fe Railway first published an elaborate, hardbound, 211-page, Guide to the Pacific Coast, detailing the rail journey from Chicago to Los Angeles, in 1890. This guide presaged thousands of books, pamphlets, displays, and other ephemera that formed the core of one of the most extensive and successful advertising campaigns of the first half of the twentieth century. The format followed that of earlier immigrant guides, providing details on the Santa Fe wagon trail. In 2005, Amtrak issued a one-page tri-fold sheet, Information & Route Guide. Printed back-toback on a colorless sheet of ordinary printer paper, this recent version

OTE text.indd 24

FIGURE 1

An 1876 timetable for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

( B e l OW ) Santa Fe Railway trains leaving Los Angeles, 1920s.

BILLIE JANE BAGULEY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES, HEARD MUSEUM, RC1:133.

12/18/15 5:34 PM

t h e s a n ta f e s e l l s t h e g r a n d c a n yo n

Atchison,Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Time of Trains, Sleeping Car Schedules and other Information, August 10, 1905. A Navajo blanket design was used as the cover illustration.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

(right) This 1915 Grand Canyon pamphlet included a train schedule with fee listing, abbreviated trail guide, and list of hotels. It was produced for the Santa Fe Railway by Rand McNally & Company.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

Karl Moon’s studio logo on a photograph card packet, 1920s.

BILLIE JANE BAGULEY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES, HEARD MUSEUM, RC303(4):22.

OTE text.indd 25

25

depicts the same progression. Railroads and their advertising budgets have dramatically changed during the intervening years. With the initiation of Santa Fe rail travel, trackside towns sprouted. Many have since grown, withered, and died; industries have come and gone and the landscape has yielded to the development of the West.Yet the theme of the 2005 publication, though much smaller and less elaborate than its 1890 counterpart, persists in its format and the use of evocative phrases such as “The Great Southwest” and “The Grand Canyon.”

By 1892, as the Santa Fe’s market matured, it shifted focus from luring settlers and mining activities to tourist advertising extolling adventure trips to the Grand Canyon and other Southwest sights. The company engaged the services of pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson to depict in pictures what travelers could experience on their stagecoach journey from Flagstaff to the Canyon’s edge. That same year, the Santa Fe published Grand Cañon of the Colorado River.

Publications emphasized Southwestern vistas and Native American cultures. Handsome images of Native American people, many of them taken by famous photographer Karl Moon, became synonymous with Santa Fe print advertising. Santa Fe marketers understood travelers’ psychology well. After all, why would anyone choose a railway line that did not offer glimpses of Native American life and views of the magnificent Grand Canyon, when they could have it on the Santa Fe? It was a formula other rail companies could not beat.

Moon offered romantic photographs of the Southwest and Native peoples.

In 1910, Fred Harvey Company published a small booklet titled Photographic Studies of Indians for Moon’s photographic studio at the Canyon (Figure 2). The booklet included twelve pages of photographs of Apache, Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo

12/18/15 5:34 PM

26

over

the

edge

FIGURE 2

Karl Moon was known for romantic depictions of Native Americans, such as this one of Marie Chiwiwi, c. 1910.

BILLIE JANE BAGULEY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES, HEARD MUSEUM, RC1:430.

(left) Hand-tinted color photo card of Marie Chiwiwi, c. 1910. Photograph by Karl Moon.

BILLIE JANE BAGULEY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES, HEARD MUSEUM, RC1:429.

OTE text.indd 26

12/18/15 5:34 PM

t h e s a n ta f e s e l l s t h e g r a n d c a n yo n

27

The Grand Canyon of Arizona

contains fifteen photographs taken by El Tovar Studio for Fred Harvey.

BILLIE JANE BAGULEY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES, HEARD MUSEUM, RC39(9A):44.

4

To California and Back, 1899, shows Victorian

sunbathers at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

This booklet by C. A. Higgins is one of myriad publications describing what a traveler could enjoy “on the way to California.”

HOWARD COLLECTION.

OTE text.indd 27

people. The introductory comments indicated that the photographs had been taken over a six-year period and an assortment had been carefully selected for inclusion. The final two booklet pages consisted of a list of photographs that could be purchased in three different sizes. The cover of the booklet included a sketch of a Native American woman with pottery on her head, an image used on the studio’s sales envelopes and on a Fred Harvey bookplate. Working from El Tovar Studio on the rim of the Grand Canyon, it was also possible for Moon to take photographs that emphasized the Canyon’s landscape and trails. One photographic album produced by Fred Harvey for El Tovar Studio and titled Story of the Grand Canyon highlights the splendor and natural wonder of the Canyon.

A visit to the Southwest was a fitting prelude to the final destination in Southern California where developers hoped a majority of visitors would purchase land and settle and establish new communities. Adventure travel was heavily promoted. Once on board a westbound train, tourists followed a scheduled route through “Indian Country” to Williams, Arizona, where by 1901 travelers could detour by rail to the edge of the Grand Canyon and back. Returning to Williams from the Canyon, they

12/18/15 5:34 PM

28

over

the

edge

then boarded the next train for Los Angeles. Their exposure to exotic scenery and cultures “along the way to California” was slanted to entice them to purchase land and establish homes in the West.

Many authors wrote of their travel experiences. In her 1916 crosscountry trip, Emily Post wrote the following:

California and the Grand Canyon of Arizona, 4th edition,

published by Fred Harvey La Grand Station, Los Angeles, California, 1919, contains a collection of sixty color photographs of the Grand Canyon.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

All through New Mexico and Arizona you are in a strange land, far more like Asia than anything in the United States or Europe. A baked land of blazing sun, dynamic geological miracles, a land of terrible beauty and awful desolation, and then the sudden sharp ascent to the height of steep snow and conifer covered mountains, looking even higher than the Rockies because of their abrupt needle-pointed heights. And finally, the greatest contrast climax of all, the sudden dropping down into the tropically blooming seasoned gardens of the California shore.3

C. A. Higgins—Praising the Canyon in Prose Many Santa Fe and Fred Harvey publication images were drawn from paintings commissioned by the Santa Fe Railway as it built its magnificent art collection. Famous artists Thomas Moran, Louis Akin, E. A. Burbank, and others created paintings that the Santa Fe reproduced by the hundreds of thousands on advertising ephemera. As early as 1892, the Santa Fe invited Thomas Moran to the Grand Canyon. The

OTE text.indd 28

This Santa Fe Railway ad entices travelers to take a trip down the Bright Angel Trail, n.d.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

12/18/15 5:34 PM

t h e s a n ta f e s e l l s t h e g r a n d c a n yo n

Grand Canyon brochure, 1909, produced for the Santa Fe Railway by J. Bond, San Francisco.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

FIGURE 3 ( r i g h t ) C. A. Higgins, as pictured in Grand Canyon of Arizona, 1906.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

FIGURE 4

Grand Cañon of the Colorado River, Arizona.

Published by The Henry O. Shepard Company, Chicago, 1900.Thomas Moran created the painting on the cover.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

OTE text.indd 29

29

Santa Fe provided travel, lodging, and food in exchange for the copyright to one of Moran’s paintings to use in advertisements.4 The Santa Fe also produced framed chromolithographs of Moran’s paintings of the Grand Canyon and hung them in railway stations and hotels all along the line. Other illustrators created sketches of people and scenes to enhance publications. All of this made travelers aware that the Santa Fe was the best way to reach their primary destination—California—from the Midwest.

Many early Santa Fe Railway advertisements featured the Grand Canyon. Much credit for advertising and other promotional printed material belongs to Charles A. Higgins (1858–1900), Assistant General Passenger Agent of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway (Figure 3). Higgins was an advertising master. He personally accompanied artists and photographers on their journeys to paint Southwestern scenes.

Like so many of those who discovered this magic land, he was smitten by diverse Grand Canyon scenes, hiking on all of its trails and camping for weeks along the rim and in the inner gorge.5 In 1892, Higgins initiated the Santa Fe Railroad’s publicity focus on Southern California and the Grand Canyon in preparation for the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition and the inauguration of its first luxury passenger train, the California Limited.6 He was moved by his Canyon experiences and described its history, geology, and human cultures in irresistibly colorful and compelling language in his booklet titled The Grand Cañon of the Colorado River Arizona, Season 1892 (Figure 4).

After the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, enamored by what he had experienced during his Western adventures, Higgins collaborated with the Field Columbian Museum curator, George A. Dorsey, the first anthropologist to earn a doctorate in the United States.

The two headed to the Hopi mesas in 1899, collecting ethnographic objects and shipping crates of material to Chicago on the Santa Fe. In 1900, they created a display of Native American cultural arts in the window of the Santa Fe’s Chicago ticket office. Higgins spent a long night arranging objects in the display and wrote to Dorsey that he

12/18/15 5:34 PM

30

over

the

edge

had set up a “curio collection” in the window. This was a precursor to other Native art displays in Kansas City, St. Louis, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.7 In 1900, the Santa Fe reprinted the pamphlet Grand Cañon of the Colorado River and featured illustrations by Thomas Moran, H. F. Farney, and F. H. Lundgren. These images were accompanied by effusive language describing the spectacular landscape. An insert in the September 1900 brochure notes the cessation of the “tri-weekly stage line” between the Canyon and Flagstaff. In September 1901, a spur rail line from Williams to the Canyon replaced the stage, making the trip in less than five hours. For the next fifty years, the Santa Fe Railway produced beautifully illustrated advertisements promoting travel across the Southwest to Southern California. The final destination was always California, and many brochures and pamphlets featured the phrase “on the way to California.”

Sadly, in 1900, at the age of forty-one, Higgins died unexpectedly of typhoid pneumonia.8 This was a huge loss to the Santa Fe Railway, yet publications appear with Higgins’s name as the author long after his death. In 1903, To California and Back was published by Doubleday.

Its red hardback buckram cover displays a California mission in front of the setting sun. The 317-page book focuses on a description of travel through New Mexico and Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. The appendix contains a detailed description of side trips to points in the Southwest. Subsequent editions of this book were published for the Santa Fe and distributed for decades.9 Traces of Higgins’s legacy persist at the Grand Canyon. Today, if you face the north porch of El Tovar with the Canyon’s edge at your back, and look up at the first-floor fascia board, you will see the words of the final sentence of Higgins’s Titan of Chasms, “Dreams of mountains, as in their sleep, they brood on things eternal.” The words seem a fitting remembrance of Higgins. As contemporary travelers come and go, they pass under his prose, inspired by the scenes that brought him joy near the Canyon’s edge more than a century ago (Figure 5).

“California is the most delightful of lands.

One leaves it with sincere regrets, always intending to soon return.” “The California Limited” cover and title page produced by Rand, McNally & Company, Chicago, 1903–1904.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

FIGURE 5

This copy of Titan of Chasms was printed in 1908 by the Passenger Department of the Santa Fe Railway but written by C. A. Higgins much earlier.The text was reprinted many times and in various formats.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

OTE text.indd 30

12/18/15 5:34 PM

t h e s a n ta f e s e l l s t h e g r a n d c a n yo n

31

A self-described “picture book of tourist life, summer and winter,� this 1938, 94-page brochure promoted travel west to California from the Midwest via the Santa Fe Railway.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

OTE text.indd 31

12/18/15 5:34 PM

32

over

the

edge

William Haskell Simpson— Marketing and Advertising Genius Higgins’s assistant, William Haskell Simpson (1858–1933), became his successor in August 1900 (Figure 6). Prior to his death, Simpson managed Higgins’s Chicago operations. Simpson expanded on the solid promotional foundation established by his predecessor. He had an eye for style and design and a keen sense of what appeals to the traveling public. It was Simpson who first used images of Native American people and the art they created as Santa Fe icons. His compelling images caught the imagination of travelers through illustrated newspaper ads and other media. Booklets produced by Simpson during 1901 and 1902 were highly regarded in advertising circles for their elegant, understated style.10 Design elements introduced in them are integral to today’s concept of the “Santa Fe style” (Figure 7).

William Haskell Simpson was born January 19, 1858, in Lawrence, Kansas. He spent his childhood in the turmoil of the free-soil, slave-state period before and during the Civil War known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

Five-year-old Simpson was at home on the August day in 1863 when William Clarke Quantrill and 450 mounted men (among them Jesse James) rode into Lawrence, Kansas, to plunder and burn the town. He and his family hid all day long in a cornfield. They had no water and nothing to eat but green corn. All family members survived.

Undeterred by early traumatic experiences, Simpson attended the University of Kansas but left before he graduated. In 1880, he joined the staff of the Kansas City Journal, but a year later was working for the Santa Fe Railway in Topeka, Kansas, where he worked closely with George T. Nicholson, the railroad’s president. In 1895, he transferred to Chicago to begin his work in the advertising department of the Santa Fe Railway. He served under Higgins’s direction, and when Higgins died unexpectedly in 1900, Simpson replaced him.

Simpson had a successful career, receiving

OTE text.indd 32

FIGURE 6

Portrait of William Haskell Simpson as a young man.

COURTESY OF CHARLES GOOD.

4

FIGURE 7 ( l e f t ) W. H. Simpson during his research trip to New Mexico and Arizona in 1901.

NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES.

12/18/15 5:34 PM

t h e s a n ta f e s e l l s t h e g r a n d c a n yo n

FIGURE 8

A Colorado Summer was written by

W. H. Simpson and produced by the Santa Fe Passenger Department in 1903.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

FIGURE 9

(right)

Arizona Winter was the Santa Fe Railway’s 1929

counterpart to a Colorado summer.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

OTE text.indd 33

33

many accolades for his professional work. As general advertising manager for the Santa Fe, Simpson ran an extensive publicity program. The Santa Fe New Mexican called it “the most elaborate, ambitious and effective program of development-publicity ever inaugurated by any railroad. The Santa Fe Company has led the field in style and character of its printed business propaganda, selling Santa Fe service, and the mid-west and southwest territory, its resources and opportunities to the world.” Simpson was described as a “slight, shrewd, humorous, modest and delightful personality whom to know was a privilege.” He had the reputation of a man who loved New Mexico, and he was closely identified with the development of the territory and later the state.11 Simpson enjoyed a professional correspondence with author Mary Austin. He provided photographs and helped her edit the manuscript for her novel, Land of Journey’s Ending, which would later be carried in Fred Harvey newsstands at Santa Fe depots.12 Simpson also wrote poetry. He authored all the poems in Along Old Trails: Poems of New Mexico and Arizona, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1929. Other poems appeared in the journal, Poetry, edited by Harriet Moore, and in Spud Johnson’s Laughing Horse. Simpson’s obituary noted, “His feeling for this old, sunny Spanish and Indian land, its tradition, its pueblos and placitas, and its soul, was very deep and understanding, as revealed by the little book of beautiful verse he published some years ago.

Nothing finer has ever been inspired by this country.”13 In 1901, Simpson wrote a 55-page publication entitled Colorado Summer (Figure 8).

The cover depicts two women on a mountain hike. One stands at a cliff edge looking across the valley while the other ascends, hiking pole in hand, to enjoy the view. A later brochure, Arizona Winter, offered a counterpoint to Colorado Summer (Figure 9). Simpson described the audience and

12/18/15 5:34 PM

34

over

the

edge

intent for Colorado Summer as “pleasure seekers, no detailed mention is made of mines, ranches and orchards or of other business enterprises.”

The narrative continues, describing the salubrity of the clear mountain air and spectacular vistas of Pikes Peak and mountain resorts that would appeal to genteel readers. Left unsaid was the fact that at least one in four people in the West were health-seekers, many suffering from tuberculosis.

Frequently, Colorado visitors seeking “the cure” at spas promenaded in the clear, sunny mountain air, stopping to drink from springs that bubbled up along the walking route. The most popular site for this activity was Manitou Springs, Colorado, which Simpson describes in great detail in Colorado Summer. Here, tourists and health-seekers walked along a trail that eventually reached the top of Pikes Peak. The centerfold of the book contains a photograph of Pikes Peak with the Garden of the Gods in the foreground.

In another brochure, New Mexico Health Resorts, the Santa Fe advertised “health and pleasure resorts.” This publication immediately addressed the issue of health on its first page: “Naturally, the invalid struggling with consumption, bronchitis, asthma, etc., has a better chance for recovery where the external conditions are helpful.” A complete chemical analysis describes the minerals consumed when quaffing spring water. Testimonials from noted physicians on the “Efficacy of Climate Cure” appear at the back of the booklet.

In May 1902, when the Indian Department at Albuquerque’s Alvarado Hotel opened, the Santa Fe’s publishing focus shifted from clear air, gurgling water, and snow-capped mountains to the display and sales of Native-made objects in museum-like displays. The target of Santa Fe publishing efforts moved south and west, focusing on inhabitants of that region, their history, and their cultures. Simpson led the publishing effort with innovative print advertising and marketing campaigns.14 Simpson was one of the earliest promoters to grasp the idea of a sense of place. Rather than locomotives, tracks, and passenger cars, his publication materials focused on the appeal of scenes viewed from windows of Pullman cars and accessible by short excursions from depots. Touting the idea of a romantic adventure, tourists were besieged with every type of

OTE text.indd 34

William Haskell Simpson included images of Native peoples on promotional booklets as early as 1903.

This one has a design of a Hopi manta or garment.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

Hopi manta with design similar to that of the 1903– 1904 booklet produced by the Santa Fe Railway.

FRED HARVEY FINE ARTS COLLECTION, HEARD MUSEUM, 276BL.

12/18/15 5:34 PM

t h e s a n ta f e s e l l s t h e g r a n d c a n yo n

35

visual image one could imagine “along the way from Chicago to the Pacific Coast.”

Simpson continued Higgins’s initiated practice of hiring artists to paint Western landscapes, particularly those depicting the Grand Canyon. He also asked them to make paintings of Native Americans. These artistic renderings were used in many published forms including annual calendars and railroad advertisements.

Fred Harvey also benefitted by using the artists’ paintings on menu covers, postcards, and a range of booklets and books that featured Native peoples.

Painting the Majestic Grand Canyon

( A B OV e & r i g h t ) Santa Fe Railway advertisements promised encounters with Southwestern Native peoples and grand vistas.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

OTE text.indd 35

In 1903, Simpson contacted New York artist Louis Akin (1868–1913) and offered to cover transportation costs to Arizona if Akin would live among the Hopi people and make paintings of them and their surroundings. Akin had studied art at the New York Art School. At the time Simpson contacted him, Akin was working as an illustrator. Akin accepted Simpson’s offer and moved to the Hopi village of Oraibi, where he lived among the Hopi people for more than a year, painting scenes of everyday life, and occasionally, ceremonies. Akin’s 1904 oil painting In Oraibi Plaza depicted blanket-wrapped people with their faces partially concealed while the multistoried ancient village appeared in the background. The painting was exhibited by the National Academy in 1906 and was reproduced as a lithographic print by the Detroit Publishing Company, a firm used regularly by the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey for postcard production. Akin’s lithographs were sold at Harvey stops along the Santa Fe. Akin portrayed Hopi people as both mysterious and exotic, a concept

12/18/15 5:34 PM

36

over

the

edge

that the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey used in their multifaceted print media. In George Dorsey’s book, Indians of the Southwest, written while employed by the Fred Harvey Company in Albuquerque and on leave of absence from his curatorial position at the Field Museum, Dorsey parroted this theme in a passage about the Hopi villages. “The writer must confess that when he trod these streets for the first time six years ago, the sensation was not only indescribable, but utterly unlike that produced by a visit to any other Indian town either before or since.”15 Akin left Oraibi in September 1904 and took up residence at the Grand Canyon where he painted many images of the area. His paintings of the Canyon were used in a variety of promotional media, including one example that stretches over the back and front cover of the 1909 Santa Fe Railway-published book of essays titled, The Grand Canyon of Arizona: Being a Book of Words from Many Pens, About the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in Arizona. The Santa Fe Railway emblem visually disrupts the view of the Canyon on the back of the book (Figure 10). In this painting, Akin also includes a Hopi maiden in a Canyon scene. This is not unusual since Hopi people were key employees at the Canyon throughout the first half of the last century. Akin’s paintings depicting a Hopi mother and child wrapped in a blanket and walking toward El Tovar appeared on Fred Harvey postcards.

Akin’s interest in Native Americans, and Hopi people in particular, was surpassed only by his fascination with the Grand Canyon. Although Akin traveled to other spectacular venues, including British Columbia,

OTE text.indd 36

FIGURE 10

Louis Akin’s 1906 painting spanned the front and back covers of the Harvey Company book, The Grand Canyon of Arizona, published by the Passenger Department of the Santa Fe Railway in 1909.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

12/18/15 5:34 PM

t h e s a n ta f e s e l l s t h e g r a n d c a n yo n

37

he found the Canyon to be most compelling. He wrote to Simpson from British Columbia in 1909 stating, “This is getting further yet from the Desert— but it too has its charms. . . . It’s full of beauty in many ways—but I can’t believe the most inspiring of it can bring to one anything like the awe that the Canyon inspires—it can’t hold me indefinitely as the Canyon can.”16 Simpson continued to lead advertising for the Santa Fe until he passed away “in harness ” (still actively working). Simpson’s obituary appeared in the June 13, 1933, edition of The Santa Fe New Mexican: For half a century the late William Haskell Simpson, veteran official of the Santa Fe Railway Company, who died yesterday, devoted himself untiringly to the building up of New Mexico and all the vast empire known as the Santa Fe Southwest.

All the galaxy of “Santa Fe states” will pay their meed of affection and appreciation now that he is gone— and none more sincerely than New Mexico.17 During both Higgins’s and Simpson’s tenures, publications played a critical role in the Santa Fe/Harvey strategy to promote tourism in the Southwest. Between 1892, when the Santa Fe Railroad published the first booklet on the Grand Canyon, and November 1930, when the last Harveycar Indian Detours booklet appeared, both companies generated a wealth of enduring and ephemeral pieces promoting the region’s wonders. Publications were promotional in nature, and many contain

OTE text.indd 37

12/18/15 5:34 PM

38

over

the

edge

FIGURE 11

Indians of the Southwest

was written by George Dorsey working with other ethnologists for Fred Harvey Company in 1903.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

information written by scholars such as John Wesley Powell, George Dorsey, and others who had studied and worked in the Southwest.

Together with the Santa Fe’s Simpson, Fred Harvey’s vice president J. F. Huckel, and Herman Schweizer, principal purchasing agent, launched a multifaceted publishing venture that lasted some forty years.

Unlike Huckel, who had a background in publishing, Herman Schweizer had no publishing experience but was considered to have a keen eye for attractive publications, as well as an understanding of what the traveling public would buy. Santa Fe and Fred Harvey publications, sometimes jointly issued, ranged from lengthy anthropological works like George A. Dorsey’s 223-page Indians of the Southwest (1903) to short, informative brochures and pamphlets and virtually text-free souvenir volumes of photographs. Published by the Santa Fe Railway, the overt purpose of Dorsey’s book was to encourage travel to the Southwest by describing the lives, artwork, and ceremonies of its Native peoples, while its covert purpose was to promote sales of Native American cultural arts in the Harvey Company facilities. Through his own field experiences and those of his colleagues, it was possible for Dorsey to develop this extensive softcover book, which sold for fifty cents (Figure 11).

OTE text.indd 38

The 75-page booklet, Story of the Grand Canyon of Arizona: A Popular Illustrated Account of Its Roads and Origin, was written by N. H. Darton and published in several editions by Fred Harvey.This 2nd edition, published in 1919, contains several photographs of Grand Canyon trails and campsites.

BILLIE JANE BAGULEY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES, HEARD MUSEUM, RC39(9A):22.

12/18/15 5:34 PM

t h e s a n ta f e s e l l s t h e g r a n d c a n yo n

39

The best examples of Santa Fe/Fred Harvey ephemera were created between 1882, when the rail line was completed, and the 1940s, when automobiles began to dominate travel. The Harvey–Santa Fe partnership added menus, playing cards, postcards, stereopticon views, and lavishly illustrated brochures and books to their visual catalogue of the Southwest. In contrast to earlier paintings that emphasized Indians of the Southwest is a remote and somewhat forbidding 12˝ x 8½˝ portfolio of prints of Southwestern encounters with Native American paintings and hand-tinted photographs scouts or warriors, the new images published by Fred Harvey, n.d. portrayed welcoming, domestic HOWARD COLLECTION. Pueblo “olla maidens” and Navajo weavers, often in the company of their children.

Images of women and children were often featured on advertising materials to give the traveler the concept of a safe journey.This California Limited brochure was produced in 1908–1909.

HOWARD COLLECTION.

(right) The seat covers in this 1930 –1940 Santa Fe Railway compartment were based on Navajo textile designs.

BILLIE JANE BAGULEY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES, HEARD MUSEUM, RC1:88.

( B e l OW r i g h t ) Navajo textile, c.1870–1875.

FRED HARVEY FINE ARTS COLLECTION, HEARD MUSEUM, 271BL.

OTE text.indd 39

12/18/15 5:34 PM

$ 22.00

Over the Edge SC+flaps.indd 1

The Colt .45 revolver may have “Won the West,” but Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe Railway civilized it.

In the late nineteenth century, the Santa Fe opened up a strange, spectacular new territory to travelers. Harvey followed, establishing restaurants, hotels, and shops to make them comfortable.

Over the Edge reveals in vivid detail how Harvey and the Santa Fe together created a vision of the Southwest that still works its magic today.

For anyone interested in the Santa Fe Railway, the Fred Harvey Company, and the development of tourism at the Grand Canyon and across the Southwest’s Indian Country, this book is essential.

— JIM BABBITT

A must-have for anyone interested in Grand Canyon history or southwest tourism.

— ERIK BERG , past president of the Grand Canyon Historical Society

Between 1880 and 1940, the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway made the Grand Canyon the popular attraction it remains to this day. They made travel and accommodation easy, comfortable, and affordable. From a lunchroom in Topeka, Kansas, to the Indian Department in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Over the Edge is the story of the people and events that invented the Southwest.

Though well known to Native Americans, the Canyon was first mapped

by John Wesley Powell in 1867. Visitors then arrived by stagecoach and later by railway and automobile. Eccentric prospectors, entrepreneurs, photographers, and Native artists helped define the territory. And the Fred Harvey Company was born.

As you read about the Kolb Brothers, Mary Colter, Joe Secakuku, William Haskell Simpson, Herman Schweizer, Elle of Ganado, the famous Harvey Girls, and the iconic railway that brought visitors in droves, see the amazing photographs, postcards, pamphlets, menus, calendars, advertisements, and even matchbook covers that evoke the adventure and joy of that special time and place.

RIO NUEVO

Tucson, Arizona www.rionuevo.com

owner of La Posada and La Castañeda Hotels

OVER THE EDGE

D IANA P ARDUE is Curator of Collections at the Heard Museum, where her work has included historic and contemporary Native American arts. She received the 2009 Curatorial Excellence Award from the Apple Valley Foundation in California for the exhibit Mothers & Daughters: Stories in Clay. Her publications include Native American Bolo Ties:Vintage and Contemporary Artistry (with Norman Sandfield, 2011), Shared Images:The Innovative Jewelry of Yazzie Johnson and Gail Bird (2007), Contemporary Southwestern Jewelry (2007), Inventing the Southwest:The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art (with Kathleen Howard, 1996), exhibit catalogues, and journal articles. After moving to Arizona, hiking and camping became a favorite pastime with one memorable 1987 hike down the Kaibab Trail to Phantom Ranch.

HOWARD / PARDUE

I loved Over the Edge! This book plays an invaluable role in keeping this fascinating history and these great buildings alive. Bravo!

— ALLAN AFFELDT,

K ATHLEEN L. H OWARD is a Research Associate at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. She earned a Masters and PhD in History from Arizona State University. Her research interests include the history of the American Southwest and its Native cultures.

Her publications include Inventing the Southwest:The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art, co-authored with Diana Pardue (1996), Photographing Mesa Verde: Nordenskiold and Now, with William G. Howard and Douglas J. Hamilton (2006), plus numerous journal articles. For Kathy, the Grand Canyon has always been a mythical and magnetic place. Splendid sunny days and star-filled nights spent backpacking in dusty boots on inner Canyon trails, and day hiking and running the Canyon rim-to-rim-to-rim have left indelible memories.

12/29/15 10:52 AM