John Frank Stevens: Civil Engineer

STEVENS

ONE

A Boy of West Gardiner

J. Franklin Stevens was born on April 25, 1853, in a small white clapboard house located on the road between French’s Corner and Hallowell, Maine. He and his brother were the third generation in the family homestead. It gave all appearances of being in the country, but it was listed in the crossroads town of West Gardiner. Situated on the south side of the road, the Litchfield Road, it lay just across from a small leather tannery owned and operated by his father. It was an agreeable rural setting, if – for some – far more attractive in summer than winter.

The second son in the family, he was baptized in the nearby Free Will Baptist Church as J. Franklin, named after the then-famed British Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, who just a few years earlier had lost his life (as did his entire crew) while searching for the elusive Northwest Passage to the Orient. Throughout his youth he was Frank to his family and his close peers and, like his namesake, grew up touched by an inchoate yearning for travel, adventure, and fame. His elder brother, Eugene Chapin Stevens, was only five years his senior, close enough they could share experiences but far enough apart they could escape intense sibling rivalry, although they had the usual squabbles. They remained good and close friends throughout their lives.

Little in his early childhood could lead one to predict his later career or, for that matter, his mature personality. One writer late in Frank’s life spoke accurately of a rather common-place boyhood.¹ The best bet would have had it that he would remain in Maine as a small farmer or, even more likely, as a tanner of modest expectations or, perhaps, as a poorly paid secondary school teacher. But in spite of the rural location of his family home, he was not the farm boy of proverb inured to deprivation and hard labor. Quite the contrary. Neither his parents’ nor neighboring farms were much more than subsistence economies, producing little more than enough for the family table and to feed the few livestock they kept. The Stevens farm was about sixty acres, much of it forested, meager for a dairy farm that far north. Frank was not called upon for much arduous field drudgery, his contributions being mainly sawing and splitting firewood. His father tried him out on milking, but Frank recalled years later that to get out of it I purposely made such a racket and spoke so harshly to his pet cows that he released me from that disagreeable task.²

The principal source of cash money income for the family, the tannery, was one of several such enterprises in the vicinity, and it succeeded well enough to cover the small family’s needs and the modest post–public school education of both Frank and Eugene. Later Frank characterized the tannery (the tanyard, as they called it), which processed mainly sheepskins, as well-to-do, at least as contrasted with the others he knew. If he did little work on the family farm, Frank did play a role in the tannery. At some manual tasks, such as nailing the skins to drying racks, his father found that young Frank and his brother could perform more swiftly and better than grown men. The tanning process also required grinding dried hemlock bark into small particles by a tanbark grinder that was powered by a horse plodding in a tight circle. The process had to be closely watched, and fresh bark periodically shoveled into the grinder. Eugene later described this as not hard physical work but it was a dull and uninteresting job.³

Frank followed his brother in the local little red schoolhouse down the road within easy walking distance. There was little offered beyond the basics – reading, writing, some arithmetic, and introductions to grammar and geography – but for Frank and Eugene these sufficed. Frank did, though, succeed in resonating well with two teachers: Lucy Spear (Fairbanks), whom years later he tried to locate when he visited West Gardiner and Lewiston, and Susanne Sawyer (Brown), who taught Frank when she was only sixteen and he twelve. Sawyer thought that even then he had a mathematical mind that compelled her to spend many evening hours learning enough of numbers to keep up with him. Frank remembered himself as an ordinary student who generally contrived to be up somewhere near the head of my class, saving him the embarrassment of being whipped in school. During one summer term he succeeded in getting his ears boxed, which led to his departure by an open window, and neither coaxing nor threatened sterner measures got me back inside the schoolhouse again that term. At fourteen he moved on briefly to the nearby high school.

Frank compensated for the limited classroom offerings by frequent use of the small library in Hallowell, somewhat over four miles away. For a fee of two dollars a year that permitted two books a week, he and Eugene expanded their literacy and distanced their horizons. For several years Frank was a member, and he remembered walking there and back to consume, sometimes, four books a week. His reading fare included the then very popular Nick Whiffles adventures by Dr. John Hovey Robinson, also a Maine native whose last years were spent in Minnesota. These tales were the germ of Frank’s later wanderlust, a permanent feature of his personality that he later called the somewhat morbid craving to be always on the move. In his adolescence he also soaked up the travel descriptions of one of my boyhood heroes, Bayard Taylor. Even in his elder years he remembered Taylor’s scenes of the midnight sun, the glowing desert, the Holy Land, and the mountains and valleys of our own beautiful West. And he loved particularly several long, complicated, and wordy historical novels, such as R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor (1869) and G. J. Whyte-Melville’s The Gladiators: A Tale of Rome and Judaea (1863), rereading them in later years. Few today have the patience for a first reading of them. Much later he termed this a bizarre education.

Other than avid reading, Frank’s pastimes were typical of his time and place, mostly outdoors when weather permitted: in winter sledding and skating, in warmer weather swimming in the old pond about half a mile from his home, exploring the woods in all directions, and climbing trees. The last activity resulted in a very serious injury at the age of five when he fell from a cherry tree onto a fence, where a picket penetrated his abdomen and exposed his intestines. Frank later described it as a ghastly wound. Two neighbors harnessed teams to go in opposite directions to persuade a doctor to make the journey, one going to Purgatory or Litchfield and the other to Hallowell. Dr. John Hubbard of Hallowell came and patched Frank up, and he came out as good as new. His brother later wrote that recovery was a nip-and-tuck battle, but the doctor’s skill and the Stevens vitality won. Frank remembered Hubbard as a large man, large frame and very portly. But despite his large hands and fingers he was a wonderfully delicate surgeon. In the long, severe Maine winters, life got confining. Card playing and dancing were taboo in his somewhat strict family, but he later remembered learning sinful games like euchre and casino hidden in a barn away from parental oversight. He never learned to dance, not even the Money Husk, the Virginia Reel, and the exuberant square dancing so popular elsewhere.

Strictly speaking, Frank was raised in the church. His mother was a confirmed and enthusiastic member of the Hard-Shell Baptist Church only a few miles away. Both he and his brother fidgeted their ways through every Sunday service, but beyond a few biblical references and quotations, little seemed to rub off. Frank remembered his father as a passive religionist, willing to take part perfunctorily to please his wife but never interested enough for an active role. That seems to describe Frank also throughout his long life.

Not yet eight years of age when the Civil War began, Frank nonetheless was aware from the excitement shared by his family and chums that some great conflagration had been visited on the nation. Later on he learned that his father (already well over fifty) tried several times to enlist but was turned back because of age. As elsewhere in small-town America, he and other boys his age and older organized a military company, modeled on the Lewiston Light Infantry, in which his uncle Jesse T. Stevens was a captain. They armed themselves with wooden swords and guns and emulated their seniors in close-order drill. Our one fear was, that the war would end before we were old enough to go to the front. But it did.

Within a radius of twenty miles or so lived a number of relatives, his father having been one of five and mother one of eight. As Frank and Eugene matured they visited relatives nearby from time to time, especially the families of three uncles in Lewiston, only twenty miles by hard road, where the occasionally unruly Androscoggin River powered prosperous cotton mills. To a country boy, the town of 10,000–15,000 inhabitants seemed, of course, like a major metropolis. And his maternal grandmother lived with the Stevenses in West Gardiner until she died when Frank was sixteen. Although he spent most of his later years many miles distant, Frank cherished his family nest, and as often as a busy railroad construction engineer could manage, he returned to visit. It caused him some distress that he was unable to get back when his father and mother died.

The boy did, however, anticipate the man in many other ways. Raised by parents busy with the heavy and time-consuming demands of husbandry and housekeeping, Frank had more than ample opportunity to fashion his own activities. He was not burdened with mind-deadening chores or field labor, yet he grew up in a rural environment largely safe and absent of corrupting temptations. He learned to rely on his own resources. He could and did roam on foot across the countryside around the small family home and through the dense pine forests, developing early a love of nature and the outdoor life. In travelers’ accounts and rich novels he found exotic places and characters to populate his fantasy life. He laid the basis for a dedication to the peripatetic life, even as he kept dutifully to the requirements of a son of a lower middle-class family without evident aspirations for a fate different from that meted out to him.

Given the limited prospects of his youth, and the clear insistence of his parents that their boys obtain education sufficient to qualify them for some career other than field hand or tanner, first Frank and then Eugene turned to a course of study at the State Normal and Training School at Farmington, about fifty miles north and west. The low cost, Frank recalled, dictated the choice of school. Although only sixteen, he got a leg up by teaching five terms in several little red schoolhouses like his own. Successful enough, he entered a two-year course at Farmington in 1870, during which time he developed a considerable and permanent infatuation with geometry, trigonometry, and numbers in general. And this is also the first recorded instance in which he altered his baptismal name to his satisfaction: he matriculated as J. Frank Stevens rather than J. Franklin Stevens.

He also received some lessons in class distinction and social distance when his school competed in baseball against the boys of the prominent Abbott School, also located in Farmington. He contrasted himself, a son of horny handed toil, with the privileged preppies of the Little Blue School, concluding that they were of a higher social order than he and his mates. Although Frank took pride in – usually – besting these young swells in athletics, the encounters helped him to solidify in his outlook a measure of sensitivity to his modest origins and to grow a chip on his shoulder about it, both of which served him throughout his life. Ever after he took pleasure, usually quietly and modestly, in excelling beyond the accomplishments of those of sophisticated background or enviable education. He liked to expose the conceits of the pompous and self-anointed.

Frank’s formal education ended in June 1872 when, as one of twenty-five graduates in only the eighth class of the school, he completed his two years in Farmington Normal (since 1968 known as the University of Maine at Farmington) with no strong urge to teach beyond the several terms required of him to offset his free tuition. He put in ten weeks each in Westport, near Sheepscot Bay, and Manchester, close to the town of Winthrop, just west of Augusta, both small towns. From his teaching in a winter term in Winthrop township prior to his graduation, he received a fine report:

[He] did well. . . . He is thorough in his teaching, wide awake, and energetic. . . . Government was good and the exercises systematic. . . . His object is . . . to dig deep, get down to the principle.

This description could well have been made of him at nearly any decade of his life. Still, one of the main things he learned was that he didn’t want to spend his life in the classroom.

Through one of his Lewiston uncles Frank wangled a few months’ summer work at a wage of 75¢ a day with a private engineering company in Lewiston that was doing surveys for mills, industrial canals, and, Frank recalled years later, for a building on the campus of the state school at Farmington. With his board costing $4.50 a week he could break even only by working six days of the week. What he did gain, for some occult reason, was an urge to engineer. In good weather he carried the surveyors’ equipment and cut and set stakes; on inclement days he sharpened pencils and rubbed ink for the draftsmen and even split firewood on rainy days for his chief’s kitchen stove. It all led Frank to think that surveying and maybe even engineering might be more interesting endeavors than secondary school teaching, but ones that required him to leave home. Being a surveyor’s gofer in an established local economy was too slow a way to become an engineer. Still, many years later, he said, Just why I chose Civil Engineering as a life’s work, I do not myself now remember.⁴

J. Frank Stevens at nineteen on his graduation on June 28, 1872, from the Farmington (Maine) State Normal and Training School, his last formal education.

That autumn of 1873 Frank visited the new Maine State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts at Orono (since 1897 the University of Maine) for two days and talked with professors who thought he would probably pass the mathematics exams and thus could enter a year earlier than otherwise. But at the impatient age of nineteen he decided he could not wait that long to begin remunerative work. A lady cousin who lived in a Boston suburb wanted him to come there and offered to pay his expenses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but through a false sense of independence I declined to accept her offer. As soon as his teaching obligation ended, he left West Gardiner and Maine in April 1874, having just turned twenty-one, not to return for seven years, even for a visit. Later Frank also blamed the 1873 business recession for convincing him that there were few opportunities for him to advance a surveying or engineering career in the East.

I was exactly like millions of other boys in this country who have to make their way in the world unaided, he mused in his later years, perhaps giving himself a shade more credit than he deserved in using the word unaided. I had no more [than] a year of this. I felt that I had learned to do it about as well as I ever would. I became restless. The West drew me.⁵ Without knowing it, he followed the famed advice of John Soule, editorial writer of the Terre Haute Express, when he said, Go west, young man, and grow with your country, a refrain popularized by Horace Greeley. He joined thousands of other young people in pursuing the siren call of opportunity in the open expanses of the West.

Frank learned, probably from the local Kennebec newspaper, of the dramatic bridge and hydraulic engineering of James Buchanan Eads, whose eponymous bridge at St. Louis was then nearing completion. This was not the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi (the first had been in use between Rock Island and Davenport since 1856), but it was the iconic one heading west; it was then the longest arch bridge in the world, the first to use only cantilever supports, and it rested on some of the deepest caissons ever sunk. Frank wrote to Eads asking for employment and received in return a rather friendly letter regretting that at this juncture Eads could do no hiring, but he encouraged Frank to come west. About this time Frank received a letter from his uncle Jesse Stevens – then employed as engineer for the St. Anthony Falls Water Power Company and credited with saving the Falls and Minneapolis electrical power by engineering an apron that succeeded where others had failed – assuring him that, were he to migrate, Jesse could arrange for a job with the city engineer of Minneapolis. Frank leaped at the opportunity.

Frank rode the Portland & Kennebec Railway from Hallowell to Portland, the Boston & Maine to Boston, the Boston & Albany to Albany, the New York Central to Buffalo, the Canadian Southern (later the Michigan Central) to Detroit, the Michigan Central to Chicago, the Northwestern to Camp Douglas in Wisconsin, the West Wisconsin to St. Paul, and finally the St. Paul & Pacific (later the Great Northern) to Minneapolis. All of these are now fallen flags. Nine railroads, eight changes, and six days after leaving home, he knocked on the front door of Uncle Jesse’s house, where Frank was to reside for the next two years. It was his first real experience with living and working in a small city of about 17,000, yet it was a metropolis in the wide eyes of a poor ignorant boy.

His uncle had not misled him, and Frank quickly set to work for the city of Minneapolis, albeit modestly as timekeeper on the reconstruction of the Saint Anthony Falls Dam, which had failed five years earlier. Little did he suspect that the Twin Cities area would be locus of his work and life for much of the next thirty years. Little in his life experiences before reaching his majority could have led the casual spectator to predict Frank’s crowded and accomplishing days and months for the next seventy years. But there were hints. His peripatetic juices ever fermenting, not until his last years when he was beset by painful arthritis would he relinquish the urge to be on the move. And the young Frank sensed a strong streak of competitiveness in his makeup. Further, he was conscious that beneath his placid exterior he nurtured a considerable temper. Years later he recalled an episode from his early teaching days when he got into a fistfight with one of his students, bigger and older than he. Although he would have preferred to remember it as his victory, he had to admit that it was a draw at best. The real cause of this [fight] was, that I lost that uncertain thing, my temper. It was not for the last time.

Whether he consciously realized it or not, Frank Stevens had a proclivity for the practical and pragmatic, for physical labor in a natural world with its beauties and wonders waiting to be improved on by human ingenuity. He was little drawn to the purely theoretical, the highly abstract, and the speculative, much less the emotional or spiritual. Still he had a glimmering, but only a glimmering, of the amount of fortitude and concentration and self-discipline he would need to teach himself all of the knowledge, practical skills, and social mores he would need in his quest.

TWO

Beginnings

By the end of his first summer in Minneapolis Frank had learned enough of surveying to be promoted from ax man to rodman and levelman at the grand salary (to him) of $65 a month, double that of an ax man. His confidence grew equally with his skills. Although he kept busy during warm months, there was too little work to go around as soon as it turned Minnesota-cold, and Frank hunkered down to serious book study of the engineering knowledge he needed. There was plentiful material to keep him bent over his desk for several months in the winter of 1874–1875. His Minneapolis roommate, George W. Knowlton, later described Frank’s dedication to his self-improvement:

He was at work every night while the rest of us were playing. Coming home late, I would find him still at it – poring over those dry textbooks, filling sheets of paper with figures and plans of things that I knew nothing about. I’ve seen him sit for hours with his feet cocked up, smoking and thinking. He wouldn’t speak a word, so thoroughly absorbed would he be in some problem or other.¹

Several times in later years Frank remarked that it was not an easy thing to break into the engineering game: It was like trying to navigate a ship without any knowledge of navigation, where, unless an unusually favorable Providence intervened, nothing but a wreck could be expected.² One wonders how often he regretted turning his back on Orono and Cambridge: probably rarely.

When spring opened, Frank later wrote, I was ready to conquer fresh fields. This dedication to abundant preparatory study stuck with Frank thereafter. Even when he made the wrong decisions, it was rare that he did not dig as deeply as he could into the issues before committing himself carefully and evenly weighing the alternatives.

Throughout the work season of 1875 he kept busy in and around Minneapolis, time passed quickly, and Frank judged his experiences completely successful both in wages and professional growth. He is credited with contributing to a suspension bridge on Hennepin Avenue and with helping lay out streets in Minneapolis’s residential neighborhoods.

But another winter came, and again he learned the lesson that he was to learn many times in the passing years: the long winter months were slim pickings while his wages of warm months were still on the low side. And when snowed and iced in, he found that his feet grew itchy, an intermittent but persistent pathology from which he suffered the rest of his days. In Minneapolis he worked under able engineers, both of whom were Civil War veterans, Colonel J. B. Clough and General Thomas B. Rosser, and both of whom went on to successful stints with the Northern Pacific as engineers of that line west, yet Frank yearned for quicker and bigger returns on his commitment. His ambitions grew more defined, his eagerness mounted, and his focus sharpened.

For by this time, another element of his maturation pressed for his attention and spurred his drive for success at a faster pace than appeared possible were he to remain in the environs of the Twin Cities. Across the street from Uncle Jesse lived a man with two daughters of eligible age. Frank was soon smitten with the elder, Harriet Townsend O’Brien, a comely lass less than a month older than he (she was born March 28, 1853), known as Hattie to her family and close friends. With her father and sister she had moved from Boston not long before. Her father passed away; Frank’s aunt and uncle took in the orphaned girls, and Frank’s romantic life took a big step forward. He was thoroughly captivated. Now more than ever he needed steady employment with enhanced prospects.

In the spring of 1876 he regained his job with the Minneapolis city engineer but grew restless. When an opportunity came his way to work as a surveying instrument man on a railroad north of the city, probably the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, he seized it.³ This, his first experience surveying for a railroad, whetted his appetite for more and, as things turned out, narrowed his attention and focused his energies. He still had a very long way to go to qualify for the simplest railroad location engineering job, and unfortunately this was only a brief experience. His wanderlust overcame, for the moment, the attractions of sedentary marriage and any non-railway job of poor future promise. Drawn by tales of great gold lodes and Northern Pacific Railway (NP) construction, Frank made his way to Bismarck in the Missouri River Valley of the Dakota Territory. Bismarck was still a raw frontier town, founded only a few years earlier as Edwinton by an NP engineer, Edwin Johnson, but its name was quickly changed to honor the great German chancellor in hopes thereby of attracting sturdy German immigrants.

The U.S. Seventh Cavalry, commanded by George Armstrong Custer, was garrisoned at Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Mandan side of the Missouri across from Bismarck, and the buzz in Bismarck had it readying to campaign against the Sioux. Having no better alternative and still young enough to relish the likelihood of adventure under the limitless skies of wide prairie country, Frank rode to the garrison to offer his services, even as a valet to the mules. He was peremptorily turned down and invited to leave the encampment. Had his offer been accepted, he wrote much later, he would most likely have ended up under one of those little white stones up on the little Big Horn.

Returning to Minneapolis, Frank decided to give it a try on his own. In Glencoe, a small city about sixty miles west of Minneapolis, he hung out his shingle as a general surveyor. He stretched his budget and the literal truth to print and distribute a flyer:

J. F. STEVENS, CIVIL ENGINEER, AND LAND SURVEYOR

Being supplied with new and improved instruments,

I am prepared by a long practice to make surveys in an accurate manner.

Old lines retraced, Corners established, surveys and plats of farms made.

Glencoe, Minn., Sept 1st, 1876.

Office on Franklin St. over the Jewelry store.

The town proved too small and the immigrants, principally Poles, too poor to provide Frank with even a decent meal ticket. Again he moved on. Having read, while up north, of a proposed new railroad in Texas, he sent in his application, and to his surprise he received a rather vague, but on the whole encouraging reply. Without a moment’s delay and taking the visionary promoters at face value, he departed for Texas before the autumn of 1876, not relishing another cold and lean northern winter.

If he hadn’t suspected it beforehand, he knew as soon as he landed in the tiny town of Lawrence in Kaufman County, about five miles northwest of Terrell and thirty miles east of Dallas on the Texas & Pacific Railway (TP), the only Texas rail line then to have a charter from Congress, that he had taken a huge gamble, not only on himself but also on the venture. The town came into being only with the arrival of the TP in 1872, and when Frank arrived there were still fewer than two hundred residents, although they did boast of three stores, a post office, a hotel, a school, and a church. The principal promoter and president, J. E. Burwell, earlier of Illinois, met him. They worked closely and became longtime friends. If nothing else, Frank as a young man was amply supplied with audacity diluted by only occasional self-doubt, a cornerstone of his later career and adventures.

He was amazed to discover on reaching Lawrence that not only had he joined a railroad engineering department, he was the only member of that department, and he thereby had unintentionally achieved the first rung on his career ladder – engineer-in-chief of a promising railway location and construction project! (Indeed, somewhere along the line, and the idea probably originated here in Texas, Frank consciously set as his life goal, the summit of my ambition, to become the chief engineer of a major American railroad, an ambition that Hattie shared early on.) The plan was to run a narrow-gauge line from Denison on the Red River, north of Dallas, in a southeasterly direction through Beaumont to Sabine Pass, adjacent to Louisiana, a distance of about 340 miles. All of his prior experience and book study cobbled together hardly prepared him to lay out a railroad largely on his own. (I suppose I was about as well qualified at that time to locate a railroad, as I was to calculate an eclipse of the moon.) But once there he had little choice. He arrived in Texas virtually strapped, and he had to press ahead with the calm, undisturbed assurance of youthful ignorance. He was to receive wages of $60 a month. Ultimately, he later wrote, he received a total of $60 for more than a year’s work! As a matter of fact I never had money enough to buy a ticket as far as the state line.

Still, for a year Frank drove himself hard to make a go of the venture. He toiled long hours in all kinds of weather up and down the projected location line. Not uncommonly, he rode thirty to fifty miles on horseback just to reach a work location. But he did not accustom readily to the weather, the summer flies and fleas, and the winter chills, and he suffered repeated bouts of ill health he later blamed on malarial fever.⁴ To dampen his spirits even more, his personal plan – to marry the elder O’Brien girl – seemed to him to grow more and more distant as his tribulations mounted.

So after the 1877 Christmas holiday season, one in which he must have found little joy, Frank abruptly and capriciously took matters into his own hands, borrowed ten dollars from a friend, and telegraphed Harriet in Minneapolis to come to Texas as quickly she could. She received his instructions about 8 AM on Wednesday, January 2, 1878, while sitting in the parlor with her sister Nellie after breakfast. They certainly came as no surprise; as her sister wrote, She was already, and has been for several days.⁵ Harriet departed the city on the 3:45 train, a small trunk following her. One of the Stevenses, Sam, accompanied her as far as Quincy, Illinois. Three days after leaving and riding part of the way in a caboose, Hattie arrived in Dallas, worn and weary but greatly relieved that Frank was waiting for her, in spite of her train being badly delayed by a wreck on the tracks. They talked animatedly until the wee hours in her Windsor Hotel lobby when Frank finally pulled himself away to go to his room at the Lamar house. The next morning, Sunday the sixth, they were married at 10 o’clock by the Methodist minister, the Reverend J. P. Borland, at his house and finally reached Lawrence after another three and one-half hour train journey. Going directly to Mr. Burwell’s house, they collapsed of near exhaustion and high excitement.

If Frank’s working world was a litany of struggle, privation, and frustration, life for Hattie was no bowl of cherries. They lived in one room of a boarding house with little furniture and few divertissements. Their cash income was close to nil, and Frank had already exhausted his small pre-Texas savings; he had exactly 50¢ to his name after returning to Lawrence. It is apparent from the diary she kept for their first six months of marriage that they pinched by only because of small remittances from her family and his parents and brother Eugene. Hattie speaks of amounts of five to twenty-five dollars, most of which seems to have been owed already for lodging and meals. And had not Frank been handy with a rifle and shotgun bagging rabbits, quail, and other small game, there were many days and weeks, he remembered, when there would have been no meat on their table.

Their main recreation was reading. Harriet brought with her some of the fashionable novels of the day and devoured them, and the Minneapolis kinfolk sent copies of the popular magazines, Scribner’s, Leslie’s, Harper’s Bazaar, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press weekly magazine. She mentions Georgiana Chatterton’s Leonore, A Tale; May Agnes Fleming’s Silent and True; George Eliot’s Silas Marner; the widely read Charles Reade novels Foul Play, A Simpleton, and It’s Never Too Late to Mend. As his time permitted, Frank also enjoyed these. The romance and adventure of these fictive tales, most of which were far distant in space or time from raw Texas, coupled with the rich description of which Victorian writing often boasted, provided both Frank and Hattie with a wide contrast to their humdrum daily existence of, and meager returns on, this first stage of their marriage. Their reading buoyed them, though, and time and again rejuvenated flagging spirits beset by the ordinariness of their lives.

With their boarding house companions they played evening card games – casino and euchre and a local game called Pedro – although the boarding house evidently had only one deck of cards, for they had to take turns to play solitaire. And when spring came there was croquet on the grass, and Hattie planted flower seeds – pansies, sweet peas, and morning glories. And she improved on her sewing skills, helped by a young girl in her house to cut out a calico sack that she then basted and finished. She took up quilting. She was very proud of her new skills.

But those dour and dreary winter months proved a challenge for Hattie, and one suspects for Frank as well, although he was rarely one to reveal much of his inner feelings, especially self-doubt. Hattie found Texas cuisine different and difficult. The sauerkraut at nearly every meal nearly unnerved her, not to speak of the pork and hominy that was standard fare, with only occasional beef and Irish potatoes. People in the South don’t live much as northern people do, she confided to her diary. It is also likely that by March 1878, when she wrote that line, she was pregnant. Her diary records days of feeling emotionally down and under the weather, especially when Frank had been out on the road for days or weeks. On May 12 she wrote, I had a good cry. . . . I never spent such a miserable, lonesome day in my life. It was one of those days when Frank left for distant work, but she seems to have bounced back readily. Like Frank, she was not one to give in to lengthy despondency or self-indulgence.

Harriet and Frank attended some services in the town’s Baptist church. The best she could say was that the Church is new and very tasty and neat inside. The singing was horrible and the girls dressed in the poorest taste I have ever seen. They also on occasion attended Presbyterian services. Salted throughout her diary we can find the seed grains of the social climbing and career ambition that later characterized Harriet in St. Paul, Chicago, and large cities of the East.

By April things came to a head. The very survival of the Texas railway project was at stake. Philadelphia investors who promised adequate funding never came through. There had already been an attempt by local interests to replace Burwell, and by mid-May he wrote to Frank recommending that he find other work until things picked up, if they did. From this point on, Frank took on whatever remunerative work he could find regardless of pittance wages. He later remembered that he was for brief periods a railroad section hand at $1.10 a day (the only white man in the gang), a fireman in a saw mill, a top man in a pile driver gang, a cotton gin laborer, and, when he could find it, a land surveyor. At one point he rode horseback to the plains west of Weatherford, itself some sixty or seventy miles west of Dallas, where it was said the Texas & Pacific was making initial surveys, but he could still find no work. As he remarked later, Texas proved no El Dorado for him and Harriet; it was the most difficult period of their life together.

Years later Stevens’s principal assistant engineer in Panama, on hearing of the $1.10 a day wages, scoffed within his hearing that the old man has told that story so many times he believes it. Another engineer present related the conversation to Mrs. Stevens the next day, and with a wan smile of recollection she said, Well there was more truth than poetry in it. They did come to own, however, one share of Sabine Pass Railway stock with a face value of $100, probably given to them by Burwell to mark the birth of their firstborn. They kept it always; it was both a reminder and an inspiration.

Harriet had become pregnant probably in late February or March, just as Frank’s employment turned precarious and the pressure on him escalated. She didn’t carry full term, and the son she bore in July died as an infant on October 15, 1878. A physician diagnosed cholera infantum, an archaic term for a summer complaint with symptoms similar to cholera. The child was interred in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Terrell, Kaufman County. He would have been John Frank Stevens, Jr., Frank having completed the alteration of his birth name when he and Harriet married. Although he continued to be called Frank by Harriet and others close to him, to the outside world he was now and hereafter John Frank Stevens. He was certain that his father, then seventy years of age, would have approved of John Frank now carrying his given name.

The loss of their firstborn, needless to say, was shattering for both parents, although they quickly resolved not to let that all-too-common nineteenth-century tragedy discourage them for long. Together with John Frank’s bouts with malarial fevers and Hattie’s fairly rough patch of minor maladies and melancholia, the loss of their first son persuaded them that John Frank should take the first good opportunity to locate elsewhere.

He had given a year and a half to the Texas dream. In early 1879, on hearing that the Denver & Rio Grande (D&RG) planned considerable line extensions in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, he again applied, and to his great delight and immense relief was hired. His wallet flat empty, again he borrowed enough from friends to cover his expenses. With mixed feelings of relief and regret, they decided it wiser, for the moment, for Hattie to return to Minneapolis where she could be with John Frank’s extended family and her sister Nellie. He left to report to Pueblo, south of Colorado Springs. His railway location and construction career was now and finally genuinely under way. He had spent seven lean years struggling to acquire knowledge and skills, and now for the first time he began to do civil engineering as I had conceived it to be when I adopted it for my profession.⁶ This was the turning point in our fortunes, for while we never had an excess of this world’s goods afterwards, we ceased to hear the wolf’s scratch at the door. I was never without work after that time excepting during the winter months.

In Pueblo he received orders to push on to Alamosa, just north of the New Mexico border. As one of the freshly minted assistant engineers, he was called on for the first time to assemble a work group to begin surveying prospective lines of railroad development. Initially they located a line on the high plateau south of the San Luis Valley and in the Rio Grande River Valley. Moving west the small band worked down the western slope of the Continental Divide mountains and along the San Juan River. All of this consumed the 1879 warm season. They then returned east of the