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Building Railroads for the Kingdom: The Career of John W. Young, 1867-91
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 48, 1980, No. 1
Building Railroads for the Kingdom: The Career of John W. Young, 1867-91
BY M. GUY BISHOP
THE POST-CIVIL WAR PERIOD in American history, often labeled the Gilded Age, produced numerous enterprising young men who were exceptionally blessed with the ability to promote their own ideas and projects. Numbered among these famous capitalists were Jay Gould, the railroad speculator; Andrew Carnegie, who built a steel empire; John D. Rockefeller, the oil magnate; J. P. Morgan, the financial wizard; and a handful more who amassed huge personal fortunes during the late nineteenth century.
Utah Territory also nurtured several able businessmen during this period, but none could surpass the promotional talents of John W. Young. The son of Utah's "founding father," John W. was destined to become one of the territory's premier businessmen and promoters.
Nearly all of the financial barons of the Gilded Age were born just before or very shortly after 1840, and such was the case with John W. Young. He was born in Nauvoo, Illinois, on October 1, 1844, the third son of Brigham Young and Mary Ann Angell Young. While still a very young boy, he participated in the Mormon emigration to the Salt Lake Valley. Although his early education was received in the local schools of Salt Lake City and from private tutors in his father's home, John W. was really educated most fully in the broader school of experience and travel, an education many of his contemporaries felt allowed him to attain a "development and culture almost phenomenal."
An energetic and intelligent young man, his natural talents led him early in life to the propagation of large enterprises. He began as a railroad promoter at twenty-three years of age by acquiring a portion of the subcontracting work for the Union Pacific Railroad in 1867. Many members of the Young family were involved in the construction of the railroad, which Brigham initially espoused as a godsend to aid the Mormons' economic development. Therefore, it was natural for John W. also to be involved in railroad-oriented ventures.
Following the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Brigham and his sons immediately embarked on building the Utah Central Railroad to link Salt Lake City with the Union Pacific line at Ogden. Much of John W. Young's organizational and promotional abilities matured through his labors with the Utah Central. He served as secretary of the company, and as such he controlled all the financial matters and directed most of the tracklaying crews in construction of the road.
A very congenial relationship seemed to exist between Young and the laborers. He often urged the workers on with exhortations that tied the Utah Central to the building up of the kingdom of God, as witnessed by the following bulletin of December 1869:
This message accompanied a statement from John W. to the employees notifying them that the Utah Central could not, at that time, guarantee when wages would be paid. Because of this shortage of capital, a problem Young was frequently to encounter in his railroad projects, the company sought mainly employees who owed the LDS church money for expenses incurred while emigrating to Utah and thus could be allowed to work off their debts in lieu of any cash settlements. This arrangement was possible because the Utah Central was actually more of a cooperative church project than a private enterprise.
Although constantly embattled with financial problems as secretary of the Utah Central, a position more likely to make enemies than friends, John W. Young managed to retain the personal loyalty of most of the workers whom he supervised. Upon completion of the line, the tracklayers for the company published this testimonial to Young:
We the brethren employed in laying track on the Utah Central Railroad, take this present occasion of congratulating you on the speedy and successful termination of the greatest enterprise of the age, which we feel is mainly due to the energy and spirit displayed by you.
Not only did John W. gain in great measure by polishing his managerial skills with the Utah Central, but he was also able to become acquainted with some of the most powerful men associated with the Union Pacific Railroad. Early in 1871 he accompanied John Sharp, another Mormon with a great interest in railroads, to New York City to recover money owed to the church in Utah by the Union Pacific from past-due construction contracts. Not only was this duo successful in securing the much-desired monetary aid, but John W. established good rapport with influential railroad builders such as Oliver Ames, Sidney Dillon, and John Duff of the Union Pacific hierarchy. These and other financial links in the East were later to prove invaluable to John W. Young in his own railroad promotion in the West.
In the fall of 1870 the Utah Central found itself in dire financial straits, and Brigham Young decided to sell his interest in the company. As evidence of John W.'s growing circle of wealthy acquaintances, one of the first people he contacted concerning the sale of the line was Collis P. Huntington, the financial and intellectual muscle behind the Central Pacific. Huntington was very interested in purchasing the Utah railroad, and in October 1870 John W. Young wrote to him stating that he felt a sale could be effected.
Although the Central Pacific eventually lost the purchase to their Union Pacific rivals, John W. developed a very valuable relationship with Huntington. Fifteen years later the railroad magnate who had helped form the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads penned a recommendation for his Utah counterpart:
Following his disassociation with the Utah Central, John W. next turned his promotional interests to the building of the Utah Northern Railroad. There existed widespread interest in a railroad to serve northern Utah and southern Idaho, especially among the residents of Cache Valley and the Bear Lake region. In the summer of 1871 William B. Preston of Logan wrote to Brigham Young concerning the prospects of a rail line to that area. Brigham encouraged church leaders in northern Utah to proceed with the planning, and he then directed John W. Young to initiate the project.
John W. was a logical choice for his father, since he now had railroad promotion and construction experience in his work with the Utah Central and he had begun to make impressive financial friendships in the East. Brigham knew as well as anyone how important these connections would be to Utah's developing transportation industry.
Almost immediately after receiving this calling, John W. Young journeyed to New York City to seek monetary support for the proposed railroad. Once in New York he contacted Joseph and Benjamin Richardson, wealthy eastern financiers, who earlier had professed interest in backing a railroad to service northern Utah. The Richardson brothers agreed to pay for material (iron and rolling stock) for the road, and John W. agreed to arrange for labor to construct the line. The people of Utah, especially William Preston who had so strongly advocated the project, expressed a fear of these "foreign" investors' involvement in the local railroad. But the apprehensions were soon allayed as Brother Brigham gave the arrangement his approval.
After financial assistance had been secured, Young returned to Utah to become the infant railroad's most active spokesman. After he toured northern Utah to discuss the venture, seventeen ecclesiastical leaders from the LDS church in Cache Valley vowed to "go to work and build the railroad" and take stock in the line as payment for their labors. With this strong local support, the Utah Northern was soon transformed from a dream to a reality.
On August 23, 1871, the Utah Northern Railroad Company was officially formed with John W. Young appointed president and general superintendent. In organizing the board of directors, John W. showed great wisdom by providing a seat for a prominent member of each community along the line, thus ensuring support for the railroad in each locale.
Expenditures for the railroad soon proved to be much higher than had been anticipated, and by spring 1874 the local company was forced to call on the Richardson brothers for additional capital. The eastern financiers provided the much-needed funds but began to exercise more personal control of the company. Young also arranged for a loan from Jay Gould of the Union Pacific in return for a large share of Utah Northern stock. The increased eastern control of the line marked a decline in John W. Young's interest in the project.
The reasons for this shift of interests were not stated at the time of his resignation as president of the company in October 1875. He merely announced that there were "considerations in themselves sufficient to justify" the departure. The letter was, interestingly, written on Union Pacific stationery, perhaps indicating some pressure from the eastern capitalists. However, the main reason was probably that John W. found himself too deeply involved financially with a number of enterprises and felt it would be best to abandon any further expenditures with the Utah Northern.
Shortly after John W. Young's separation from the line, Jay Gould forced the faltering company to incorporate into the Union Pacific system, resulting in the formation of the Utah and Northern Railroad. This new line eventually became an integral link in the Union Pacific chain.
One of the projects that encompassed much of John W. Young's attention and money at the same time as the Utah Northern was the Salt Lake City Railroad Company. John W. was elected president of this line, chartered in January 1872, and was, along with William Riter of Salt Lake City, its principal promoter. Financial problems plagued the endeavor almost from its inception, and in April 1873 Young sold his interest in the company to his father. Under this new arrangement the line was eventually completed, with funding coming from the LDS church and Brigham Young's private coffers. During his short affiliation with the line John W. had established a very sound reputation for good management and service, and many residents of the city felt that the road was never operated as efficiently after he left the company.
By spring 1873, when he left the Salt Lake City line, John W. Young was involved in yet another railroad promotion in Utah Territory. This project, the Utah Western, had initially been started by a group of non-Mormon businessmen who had named it the Salt Lake, Sevier Valley, and Pioche Railroad. The project had been a financial catastrophe from its outset, and the founders were more than willing to sell the controlling interest to Young. As was his custom, John W. went immediately to the East to draw on his greatest asset — his numerous financial connections. After a brief sojourn in New York City, he was back in Utah with monetary aid for the Utah Western.
John W. hoped to promote his newest enterprise in two ways: first, as a means of shipping ore from the mines of eastern Nevada to the smelters in Salt Lake City; and second, to transport tourists to the Great Salt Lake for swimming and bathing. The latter aspect paid the greatest dividends for the Utah Western, and in the cultivation of Utah tourism John W. Young found yet another avenue for his public relations genius.
Early in 1875, in order to promote tourism on the Great Salt Lake, John W. purchased the lake steamer City of Corinne, renamed it the General Garfield, and offered a round-trip excursion to the lake on the Utah Western, coupled with a three-hour cruise on the steamer, all for $1.50. Reportedly, large numbers of people, including internationally known celebrities, took the trip in the years after its inception.
Young was able to get dual service from the General Garfield by using the ship to connect the Utah Western with the Central Pacific terminal at Corinne and thus transship freight and passengers across the lake. In this instance, as in many others, he was able to serve numerous purposes by an innovative approach to the transportation business.
From this point in time on through his later railroad ventures, John W. Young retained his vision of Utah's potential market for vacationers. He told the board of directors of the Utah Western:
In sponsoring Utah tourism, he recognized that industry's growing importance to the nation and to the people of the territory. As John W. saw it, the promotion of recreation could give his railroad, in this case the Utah Western, an advantage over its competitors:
Although the Utah Western suffered financial death in 1880, it had attracted many well-known investors during its peak period of operation in the mid-1870s. Among those listed as stockholders at various times were the Richardson brothers, J. Pierpont Morgan, and P. T. Barnum, testifying to the broad scope of Young's fiscal acquaintances.
The 1880s found John W. Young spending a great amount of time outside of Utah Territory. At the start of that decade, he became involved in the construction of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad across northern Arizona. This project rapidly soured, and the circumstances surrounding it caused him to lose grace with the hierarchy of the Mormon church.
Young had convinced the church leaders that it would be an economic windfall for the Saints to allow him to subcontract construction on the railroad in Arizona using Mormon manpower for the project. This was agreed to by the First Presidency of the church in Salt Lake City, who were to be the ultimate overseers of the venture.
However, John W. chose to take a larger contract than the First Presidency had recommended, overlooking implicit directions sent by John Taylor, and soon found himself in financial difficulties and unable to meet his payroll. He seemed to have had good intentions in dealing with the Mormon laborers but simply felt less pressure to pay his brethren, whom he had encouraged to enter the project, than to meet his outside obligations. Full restitution was continually promised to the workers, and there is no evidence that anyone doubted Young's promises.
For what was considered to be misuse of his trust and stewardship in the Arizona railroad undertaking, John W. Young was called before the Quorum of Twelve Apostles and the First Presidency of the LDS church to make an accounting of his actions. In his statement to this body, John W. argued that he had misunderstood the instructions and that he felt he was being unfairly judged. In his summation to the church leadership, he issued the following statement:
The leaders seemed at least partially to accept Young's account of the problems in Arizona and his remorse for failing to follow their directions. He was ordered to make full restitution as soon as possible and admonished to act in a more prudent manner in the future. While outwardly all seemed to have been forgiven, John W. Young, who had earlier held many high ecclesiastical positions in the church, was never again to be viewed in such high esteem by the Saints.
In fact, a very strange relationship developed between the Mormon leadership and John W. — one of mutual need more than true understanding. The more involved John W. Young became in the temporal world of business and speculation, the harder it became for the church leaders to relate to him. The church continued to maintain close ties with Young because of his influence in the East and his aid to Utah's development, and John W. needed church connections to successfully promote his projects in Utah. But the relationship was often very strained.
Throughout a large part of the mid-1880s, John W. did represent the church and the territory in the East as he headed a group lobbying against the Edmunds-Tucker Act and the attacks on polygamy. As a practitioner of the Mormon concept of plural marriage, and having once been arrested on charges of polygamy, Young may have had a personal interest in fighting the act. But whatever private reasons he had, he was the logical choice for the church's representative. It was evident that no Mormon of that period had any greater influence in the East than did John W. Young.
Young served his church and territory in that location from May 1887 until May 1888. Although the Edmunds-Tucker Act did pass Congress and was instituted in Utah, John W. was able to recruit some very influential supporters for the Latter-day Saints. In fact, Young's intimate acquaintance with Grover Cleveland resulted in a presidential pardon for D. K. Udall, an Arizona Mormon who had been imprisoned for polygamy in 1885.
In the late 1880s, as his political mission in the East was drawing to a close, John W. again began to promote railroads in Utah. This speculation involved one road intended to serve mainly the Salt Lake City area, incorporated as the Salt Lake and Fort Douglas Railway — and one line, the Salt Lake & Eastern, which was planned on a much grander scale. Young intended the Salt Lake & Eastern to eventually link the Salt Lake Valley with Denver and areas farther east. Again drawing upon his numerous financial connections, he received monetary backing for the Salt Lake & Eastern, largely from bankers and industrialists on the East Coast and in England.
As he had done with the Utah Western, Young used tourism to promote the Salt Lake and Fort Douglas line. In a circular to the bondholders of the road, he wrote:
Not only would the Salt Lake and Fort Douglas Railway boost the tourist trade of the valley, but John W. saw it as serving a civic duty as well. At that time, the people of the Salt Lake Valley obtained their ice from the Jordan River, which was also the receptacle for most of the city's sewage. Young told the railroad stockholders:
He then proposed that the railroad company construct several ponds at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon for ice in the winter and recreational use, such as boating and fishing, in the summer. Once again, with an eye for innovative means of promoting his enterprises in the most profitable manner, John W. advanced the Salt Lake and Fort Douglas Railway as a blessing to local welfare and tourism for the valley — two reasons hard for any potential investor to overlook.
When interviewed by the Salt Lake Herald in the fall of 1888, John W. Young said of his "little roads" that "the same object which has led me to build other roads to benefit the country and the people of this territory" had motivated the construction of the Salt Lake & Eastern and the Salt Lake and Fort Douglas railroads and that the purpose of the lines was to facilitate trade and commerce and to promote tourism in the Salt Lake Valley.
By the latter part of 1888 and early in 1889, Young was once again plagued by financial difficulties, this time with the Salt Lake & Eastern. On September 26, 1888, Joseph Richardson had assumed the title of president of the line, probably under the directives of the eastern investors. However, John W. was still supervising the construction of the road.
The escalating monetary problems of the line were seen by the businessmen of Salt Lake City as a community problem and not just John W. Young's personal dilemma. John Mills Whitaker, who was employed as Young's personal secretary at the time, reported that:
Quite obviously from this observation by Whitaker, much of the financial community of Salt Lake City was either dependent upon Young's enterprises to bolster their own economies or realized the value of his transportation projects. Furthermore, John W. was not the only local businessman who was suffering financially at the time.
The cause of Young's problems, and those of many of his associates, was a financial panic among eastern capitalists in late 1888 and the first part of 1889. Many of these investors had been ruined by falling stock prices, and consequently loans were very difficult to obtain. The panic rapidly spread from the East to the West, and Salt Lake City was hard hit by the monetary drought. Whitaker noted conditions in the city's financial world: "Men unable to meet their obligations are taking bankruptcy, disowning their obligations, some are taking their lives. . . .
By the spring of 1891 John W. had withdrawn from active participation in both of the local lines and had embarked on what was the grandest railroad promotion idea of his life. In alliance with W. Derby Johnson, a Mormon bishop at the settlement of Diaz, in northern Mexico, Young began to lay plans for the construction of the Mexican Northwestern Railway. The proposed venture was to be a fifteen-hundred-mile line through northern Mexico to link the Mormon colonies in Chihuahua with Deming, New Mexico, to the north and Guaymas, on the Mexican Pacific coast, to the southwest. The immediate goal of Young and Johnson was to build a line from Deming through Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and part of Sonora in order to provide employment and prosperity for the Saints in that region (and undoubtedly a handsome profit).
As was his custom, John W. had probed in numerous areas for financial support. His reputation was, evidently, quite widespread, for the Deseret Evening News printed this excerpt from a paper in London:
Despite the confidence in the Mexican enterprise that was expressed in London, the line failed before a single track had been laid due to a lack of capital. In fact, in northern Mexico it came to be known as the "Mafiana Railway" because of repeated delays of promised payrolls.
Although nearly all of John W. Young's railroad promotions seemed to end in financial disaster, this was not necessarily a reflection on his business prowess. In a frontier setting capital was scarce and numerous enterprises failed for monetary reasons. For example, many local railroad projects with which John W. had no connection, such as the Utah Eastern, an attempt to link Salt Lake and Park City in the 1880s, also ended in failure due to a lack of assets. Although John W. Young did have many unsuccessful ventures, the Salt Lake Journal of Commerce noted of him:
In the same article, Young said of himself:
John W. Young was very much a paradox in the Mormon society of Utah. He was a man who professed deep religious convictions and yet was a constant reminder, by his life-style and circle of friends, of the secular world his church disdained. And though, while many questioned Young's faithfulness in promoting the kingdom of God in Utah Territory and charged him with manipulating the church for his own ends, John Mills Whitaker, who probably knew John W. as intimately as any man, said:
Whitaker himself was a very active member of the LDS church and had close associations with many of its leaders during his lifetime. In a personal letter to Whitaker, John W. said of himself:
In the Utah environment in which John W. Young did his railroad promotion, it was impossible for him to separate religion and business. Much of his local financial support and, perhaps more importantly, his labor force were drawn from the Saints. As an unavoidable consequence of this practice of linking church and business so closely, he found that a large number of both his friends and his enemies were from within the church (possibly depending upon the success or failure of a certain project he promoted).
During his business career he rose in time to be the most wellknown railroad promoter in the history of Utah. Not only did he promote railroads, but, more importantly, he promoted Utah. He was a key figure in the development of the territory's transportation facilities and natural resources. Young's reputation and dynamic personality promoted Utah in the East, at times even representing the territory to members of Congress and to the president of the United States.
Although John W. fell from grace within his own religious denomination, and due to numerous financial reverses spent the final decade of his life as an obscure elevator operator in New York City, he nevertheless had a tremendous impact on Utah. Regardless of the many enemies he acquired, the reviling of his motives, and his questionable obedience to LDS church leaders, he had, in his own mind and in the opinion of many of his fellow businessmen, rendered Utah much service. Morris R. Locke, a business associate of many years, perhaps best summarized John W. Young when he said: "Mr. Young is a gentleman in every sense of the word, and a man of extraordinary ability, and will do far more for Utah and the Western Territories than anyone I know of."
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