Last Train to Paradise, page 8
Characteristically, Flagler attempted to keep his plans close to the vest, in order to avoid driving up the price of right-of-way acquisition, among other things. Though previously he had had the luxury of choosing a number of alternative routes in considering the exact location of his railroad-building projects, his options in the case of the Key West Extension were not nearly so broad. And experience had taught him what obstacles the avarice of local speculators might create.
In the 1890s, when Flagler had announced his intention to extend his line along the central coast to Palm Beach, a group of landowners from the then-prosperous town of Juno had formed a consortium, pooling their holdings in order to force up the price Flagler would have to pay for right-of-way. The group was certain that Flagler would have to meet their inflated price in order to avoid sending the line through a broad swath of marsh that would drive the cost of construction through the roof.
Presented with the consortium’s demands, Flagler ordered his railroad built exactly where his foes had assumed it could not be done. At tremendous expense, Flagler’s railroad went southward to Palm Beach, nonetheless, and the town of Juno, then the county seat of all South Florida, withered and died.
With this experience in mind, a glance at the topography of the Florida Keys made it clear to Flagler that the possibilities for locating his line were, literally, quite slender.
The Keys had been described by one writer of the day as “worthless, chaotic fragments of coral reef, limestone, and mangrove swamps . . . and have been aptly called the sweepings and debris which the Creator hurled out to sea after he had finished shaping Florida.”
Key Largo, northernmost of the Keys and nearly forty miles from tip to tip, is by far the largest in the chain, but even that island is a few hundred yards wide or less in many places. Farther south, the Keys shrink dramatically in size, some mere dots of “land” the width of a football field in spots, many of them separated by miles of open water.
As a consequence, Flagler spent a great deal of time and money investigating just what route his “impossible” railroad might take. And while he awaited word from his project managers, there had been plenty to attend to during the period from 1898 to 1905.
Though his activity in the company had diminished significantly, he was still a member of the board of directors of Standard Oil, the largest corporation in the world. And as the chief executive officer of the Florida East Coast Railway and its various subsidiaries, he was called upon to oversee a vast network of undertakings that stretched the entire length of Florida, including extensive freight and passenger operations, the management of a wide variety of hotels and resorts, the direction of a massive land sales and development operation, and much more. He had built a hotel in Nassau, for instance, calling it the Colonial, and had formed a shipping line—the Peninsular and Occidental Steamship Company—to service his offshore holdings, as well as provide freight and passenger service to Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean.
And, as usual, there was always the unexpected to deal with. In Miami, where Flagler’s three-year-old city was finally gathering steam, a yellow fever epidemic broke out in the fall of 1899, spread by infected ticks brought ashore on a cattle boat from Cuba. Hundreds fell ill and the entire city was quarantined, with all boat and train traffic halted immediately.
Once again Flagler was pressed into service as savior of his “domain.” Since the local economy was utterly dependent upon tourism and trade, Flagler poured his own money into an extensive program of public works, giving employment to a sizable labor force engaged in road and sidewalk building, port improvements, and the expansion of health-care facilities. By the spring of 1900 the epidemic had been controlled, and the quarantine lifted. Miami was on the road to a startling recovery: nearly written off by some observers at the beginning of the century, by 1910 “the city that Flagler built” would be hosting more than 125,000 visitors during its tourist season.
Meanwhile, with Spain removed from the equation, intricate U.S. diplomatic negotiations concerning the location of a canal linking the Caribbean and the Pacific had been moving forward, slowly but surely. In February of 1904 the United States Senate voted 66–14 to ratify the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, putting to an end the nearly thirty-five years of controversy and uncertainty surrounding the issue of where to build a canal joining East with West.
The bill secured the agreement of the newly formed government of Panama that the canal would be built across Panamanian soil by the United States, which, in exchange for a payment of $10 million, would hold virtual sovereignty over the ten-mile-wide “canal zone” in perpetuity.
The agreement also provided for a payment for French holdings in Panama amounting to $40 million, which was the largest real-estate transaction in all history. The fact that the government had paid more for the rights to build and control the Panama Canal than had been expended on the Louisiana Purchase, the Alaskan territory, and the Philippine Islands combined is some measure of the excitement generated by the culmination of the decades-long effort to forge an intracontinental connection between the world’s great oceans.
Adding to the intrigue was the fact that Theodore Roosevelt had secured such favorable terms for the deal only by agreeing to back Panama’s secession from Colombia. It was an arrangement typical of the egocentric Roosevelt, but one that did not sit well with his own cabinet.
“I took the Isthmus,” President Theodore Roosevelt was to declare often, pointing to the treaty as his most important action in office. It may have been Roosevelt’s most profound achievement, but it was scarcely without controversy.
As Elihu Root, Roosevelt’s secretary of war, observed, “You certainly have, Mr. President. You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”
In any event, the Hay treaty gave Flagler the practical justification he needed to go forward. With the canal’s future assured, it seemed that Panama would become, in Simon Bolívar’s words, “the emporium of the universe,” and Henry Flagler would be poised to take advantage of it. He would build his railroad to Key West, where his planned deep-water port and storage facilities would replace Tampa as the closest deep-water port to the new canal, by more than three hundred miles.
In addition to servicing the veritable flood of shipping to and from the canal, Flagler contended that his new railroad would also provide a necessary link in an increased traffic—tourist and trade alike—with the liberated nation of Cuba. As it turns out, Flagler had met with Canadian railroad magnate Sir William Van Horne, and had come away impressed with Van Horne’s plans to deploy a wide-ranging network of freight lines to service the island’s pineapple-, sugar-, and tobacco-growing regions.
Furthermore, as the only naval station located on the Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts, and a mere ten miles distant from the main shipping channels, Key West was also ideally located as a coaling station for Navy ships patrolling the strategic waters of the Caribbean. In short, Flagler argued, Key West would become the foremost port on the Atlantic coast of the United States.
Whether Flagler believed his own rhetoric is debatable. By 1904 the Florida East Coast Railway had yet to turn a significant profit on any of its operations, with losses running anywhere from $100,000 to $400,000 in a given year. His string of hotels showed erratic returns, just about breaking even at best.
Though company records are often murky on the issue, it is certain that had Flagler been content simply to plow his dividends back into Standard Oil stock, his fortunes would have prospered exponentially. According to figures in his own statistical diaries, with upwards of thirty thousand shares in his name, Flagler’s income from dividends was as much as $150,000 a month during the first part of the decade.
But by this time Flagler was seventy-four years old, and was accustomed to his place as savior, if not outright ruler, of his domain. In his second career, he had inarguably left behind his status as an accumulator to become a builder, certainly the most prominent developer in the Florida frontier, and, according to some, the man who singlehandedly created it as a modern state.
He had husbanded Florida’s economy through at least two natural disasters, and had established every one of the glittering, world-famous beach resorts that ran the length of its eastern shores. By the time he had reached Miami, some might have assumed Flagler was at a natural stopping point.
He could retire at long last, one might have conjectured, there to join his new bride and—by all accounts—boon companion, Mary Lily, at their fabulous home in Palm Beach, where he could rest and enjoy the fruits of his storied labors.
Instead, he continued on.
That Flagler chose the latter path says more about the man than any other action undertaken in his lifetime. In choosing to build his railroad to Key West, Flagler was tackling a project that in some ways outdid the prospect of the Panama Canal. For at least in that instance there was general accord that such a giant ditch could indeed be dug, if one were to expend sufficient energy and manpower and money and materiel to see the job through. In the case of the railroad across the sea, however, few were as sanguine as that.
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.
