Lewis Saum | Phocion Howard Examines the Northern Pacific Railroad, 1873 | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the JGA online. About 674 words from this article are provided below; about 3079 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the Journal of the Gilded Age, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the Journal of the Gilded Age, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase this article in PDF form for $10.00.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of the Gilded Age (1.1-present).
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Lewis Saum | Phocion Howard Examines the Northern Pacific Railroad, 1873 | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.4 | The History Cooperative

Phocion Howard Examines the Northern Pacific Railroad, 1873

By Lewis Saum, University of Washington

Editor's note: In its October 2004 issue, this journal published a vivid account by Lewis Saum, the well-known historian of the nineteenth-century press, of the dispatches and misadventures of Chicago reporter James "Phocion" Howard during the Black Hills gold rush of 1875. A complete product of an age when news correspondents made no pretence of detachment and no effort to avoid becoming part of their stories, Howard, through what he wrote and what he did, was the sort of reporter who contributed mightily to the image of the post–Civil War era as a Gilded Age. This brief account follows Howard back a little in time, to 1873, when he was noisily bursting illusions along the line of the Northern Pacific Railroad just at the moment when that line's bankruptcy hurled the country into its worst economic collapse in decades.

Once past the Civil War, this country saw some of its most compelling aspects and actions in the rush of railroads westward. That rush received a great deal of approval, but not always. Both political and intellectual contests loomed large, and Robin W. Winks, in a book about railroad leader Frederick Billings, summarized ably the "two competing views of the great railroads of this time":

One was that the men associated with them were heroes of capitalism, the epitome of American get-up-and-go. The opposing view, already developing in the 1870s, was that the railroads represented, or revealed, the worst abuses of capitalism, that railroad men ruthlessly pillaged the public purse purely for personal gain, that the lines held helpless farmers in thrall, destroyed the landscapes through which they passed, and made possible the Gilded Age, the robber barons, and a time of untold political corruption.¹

In 1873, with the very new Northern Pacific Railroad beginning its lurches westward, Minnesota received a visit from a man interested in observing and assessing things along that line. He brought with him a capacity for describing things in arresting ways, and those ways would extend to some of the aspects of Robin Winks's formulation quoted above. Observing and writing for the Chicago Tribune, James W. Howard, using the sobriquet, Phocion, was gaining a good deal of journalistic attention. The name of that ancient Greek general and statesman probably seemed puzzling to some and humorous to others. This latter-day Phocion was gaining a considerable reputation for reportorial sorties into frontier reaches. Two years after his uncharitable assessment of the situation between Duluth and Bismarck (recounted in this essay), Howard, reporting then for the Chicago Times, would accompany a military excursion across Nebraska and into Dakota Territory near the Black Hills. His account in 1875 would compare events in the Black Hills to the bungled schemes of Colonel Mulberry Sellers, the memorably daft schemer in Mark Twain and Charles D. Warner's novel, The Gilded Age, the stage version of which had just opened to enthusiastic audiences who recognized themselves and their age in Sellers. The man of Sioux Falls imagined himself, Howard would remark, "a Col. Mulberry Sellers who saw millions in it." A year later, in 1876, Phocion would again venture west, into Dakota and Montana to describe the aftermath of the Little Big Horn disaster.²

Phocion's 1873 trek along the line of the Northern Pacific did not have the intrinsic drama of those two and three years later, but he made the best of what he had. His sponsoring paper, the Chicago Tribune, placed the following as a front-page headline on September 19:

JAY COOKE &; CO
OVERLOADED with $85,000,000 of
NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILWAY
BONDS, the FIRM COLLAPSES.³

Suspension of payments and "SMASH-UP" informed what followed in this nervous account, and the panic and depression of 1873 followed in fact.

Eight days after the above headlines, the Tribune offered on page 7 correspondence from its reporter with a mordant headline:

DULUTH.
"What a Wonderful City We Have, Sir!"

. . .

There are about 3079 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.