1884-1886 — On My Own Account

I was drawn West in my twenties—good with ledgers, and better yet, I knew how to cook—my mother, Mercy K., had seen to that. My father filled my head with dreams and the notion that the country’s future lay there. So I left Maine and went to meet it.

There was no better way for me to see the breadth of the continent and put my talents to good use than on the rails. After I had gained experience in railroad schedules, accounts, and the feeding of a horde of hungry men, I came under the employ of Mr. William W. Keefer, who had charge of a construction gang on the Utah & Northern Railroad.[1]

My charge was provisions and accounts. The boarding car housed and fed the crew, and so it fell upon me to procure supplies, keep the inventory, manage the books, and see that the commissary did not run short. I collected boarding fees and made certain the main line delivered what was needed for a smooth operation.

We did not ride the railroad as the passengers and freight did, nor belong to the train crew who came and went by timetable. We were not bound to stations, but to the work itself—bridges to be repaired, new trestles to be built, and the line kept from falling to ruin in flood or frost.

Where the work went, we went. The boarding and equipment cars were set off upon a siding near the place of labor, and there I kept house for the crew. I cooked for them and kept what order could be kept in a camp of working men. We might remain for days or for weeks, and when the work was finished, the cars were taken up again and carried on to the next section where the track, trestle, or bridge required repair and fortification.

At times we were perched on the edge of a canyon, or set near the summit of the Continental Divide. No matter where we were left to the side, it was my charge to see that Keefer’s men were well fed—meat, heaps of potatoes and beans, coffee, bread, desserts, and plenty of banter besides. A man on the gang earned his hunger.

The Utah & Northern’s track was only three feet from rail to rail in those days—narrow of gauge, and not inclined to mercy.[2] It was slow, unsteady, and given to a kind of lurching gallop, as though the rails themselves could not settle it.

On the main body of the train, the engine came first, always, snorting and hissing like a creature that could not decide whether it meant to live or explode. The engineer sat high and steady, his hand on the throttle as though he held the temper of the whole contraption in his grip. Beside him, the fireman labored without cease, shoveling coal into the firebox, his face and shirt blackened, his eyes always on the water and the steam. If he failed, the engine failed, and if the engine failed, all of us stopped where we stood—whether in snow, mud, or worse.

Behind them came the rest—the conductor, who was master of everything that followed the engine, and knew it. He carried the accounts, the tickets, and the responsibility, and there was not a man aboard who did not answer to him in the end. If there was trouble, it came to him. If there was order, it came from him.

Then there were the brakemen—boys, some of them, though the work made men of them quickly enough. They rode the tops of the cars in all weather, setting brakes by hand as the train slowed, running from car to car while the whole line lurched beneath them. I have seen them come in white with frost, soaked through with rain, or so caked in dust that they looked carved from the road itself. It was said a man might lose a hand or a foot at that work, and no one called it unusual.

There was no part of the train that did not demand something of a body.

Freight and passengers rode together more often than not, and there was little comfort for either. A man might sit beside a crate of tools or a sack of flour and think himself lucky to be riding at all. If a traveler wished to eat, he brought his provisions or waited until the train stopped long enough to find a meal wherever it could be had.

At the stops, or near enough to the track, there were always kitchens if the place amounted to anything at all—boarding houses, rough eating rooms, sometimes only a stove and a table—but passengers would come off that train hungry, and they would eat what was set before them without complaint if it was hot and honest.

For the construction gang, however, that is where I stepped in. The boarding car was its own kitchen set upon wheels, but the work is the same whether the walls stand still or move.

In winter, the line froze hard and mean. Snow gathered along the cuts and drifted over the rails until the track vanished beneath it. The men shoveled it clear and set to work. At times it snowed so deep that it took three engines to get us from Dillon to Garrison.

In spring, the thaw came all at once. The ground softened, the rivers rose, and the track itself seemed uncertain of its footing. Bridges were inspected, culverts strained, and footings had to be reinforced.

In summer, the dust of Idaho’s prairie lay thick as flour over everything. I was accustomed to the heat of the kitchen, and when we held camp long enough for me to set up my cooking outside, I saw to it.

Through all of it, the work did not lessen.

We were the section gang—our duty to see that the track held true, that the ties were sound, the spikes firm, and the rails in their proper place. Without that, no train could safely pass, no matter how fine the engine or how steady the engineer.

Sometimes a crew went out upon the line by handcar—a small, low thing set upon the rails, worked by a lever which they pumped up and down with their own strength. It looked almost a kind of sport at a distance, but it was not.

There was no protection upon it. No railing to speak of, no guard between a man and the wheels beneath him. If the car jolted, or the rail shifted, or a man lost his footing, he went where the motion of it took him.

And the wheels did not stop.

It was told in the papers of a day in May of 1885, at Beaver Canyon, that a handcar had gone out from the siding at Grayling, ten miles east of Dillon, to their day’s work. Two men sat at the front of the car—the foreman, Mooring, and another, named Miller. Whether by misstep or sudden lurch, they were thrown from the front.

The car ran over Miller before it could be checked.

He lived only until the afternoon.

Mooring was caught beneath the body of the car and crushed about the chest. They said he might recover, though such things were never certain. When the main line came through, he was taken on to Ogden, where there was better chance of a doctor. [3]

It was told plainly, as such things always were. No one made much of it in print beyond the facts. There was no room for more.

But those who knew the work did not need it explained.

The handcar had no mercy in it. It gave back exactly what was put into it—strength for motion, and care for safety. But a moment’s misstep, or a rail not set as it ought to be, was enough to turn it against a man.

And still they went out each morning, for the line would not keep itself.

The Utah & Northern carried speculators, miners, prospectors, camp followers, entrepreneurs, and tourists—and on November 20th, 1884, it carried me, unpaid since May.

A woman may endure much for the sake of work—but not without end.

I came into Butte, secured housing and employment and then sought assistance through the courts. By March of 1885 I had a judgment against William W. Keefer for $240 in wages, legal costs, and interest accruing.

On April 8th the following began to appear in the Butte Weekly Miner and ran for successive weeks:

Summons.
In the Probate Court

in and for the County of Silver Bow, Territory of Montana.

Anna C. Graves, Plaintiff, 
vs.
William W. Keeler, Defendant.

The people of the Territory of Montana send greeting to William W. Keefer, Defendant.

You are hereby required to appear in an action brought against you by the above named plaintiff, in the Probate Court in and for the County of Silver Bow, Montana Territory, and to answer the complaint filed therein, within ten days (exclusive of the day of service), after the service on you of this summons if served within this County; or, if served out of this County but in this District, within twenty days otherwise within forty days, or judgment by default will be taken against you according to the prayer of said complaint.

The said action is brought to recover from you the sum of Two hundred and forty (240) dollars, with interest thereon at the rate of 10 per cent per annum from the 20th day of November, A.D. 1884, alleged to be due and owing from you to plaintiff on account, for Work, Labor and Services of plaintiff performed at the request of the defendant in Managing, Superintending and Supervising the Boarding Car on the Utah & Northern Railroad between Garrison in Deer Lodge County, M.T., and McCammon in the Territory of Idaho, from the 20th day of May 1884, to the 20th day of November 1884, and for costs of suit, all of which will more fully appear by reference to plaintiff’s complaint on file herein.

And you are hereby notified that if you fail to appear and answer said complaint as above required, the said plaintiff will take a default and judgment against you in pursuance of the prayer of plaintiff’s complaint in the sum of Two hundred and forty (240) dollars with interest as aforesaid and costs of suit.

Given under my hand and the seal of the Probate Court in and for the County of Silver Bow, Montana Territory this 8th day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and eighty-five.

CALEB E. IRVINE
Probate Judge and ex-officio Clerk

Sharp & Napton, Attorneys for Plaintiff.

I was only able to shake a hundred dollars out of Keefer, but I still had a judgment worth $130.20 more.

By June 17, 1885, a column titled City Whisperings appeared in the Daily Town Talk, written in a lively and observant voice.[4]

By the end of 1885, I had a plan for my future and Butte was in it.[5]

Butte was a peculiar place—the largest city in the mountain West.

The first miners came into Silver Bow County for gold and silver in the middle 1860s, when I was but a child of ten.

By 1881, copper had been discovered—just in time, it seemed, for the electrification of the country. Soon Butte was being called the Richest Hill in the World, and people poured in faster than the town could hold them—men in number, but women too.

Now I found myself among them—ledgers, hungry men, and a city that had grown faster than anyone could have guessed, the largest in Montana Territory, rivaling San Francisco to the west and Chicago to the east.

People came from across the world to work in Butte, but the Irish dominated the town. Gaelic could be heard as often as English—more often than Italian, Cornish, Chinese, Spanish, or Russian combined.

The Butte Miners Union had 1,800 members, and other crafts organized too, joining together as the Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly, which represented over 6,000 workers. Silver Bow County earned the nickname “the Gibraltar of Unionism.”

The trains brought in laborers and machinery. They rolled out with refined copper, lumber, grain, cattle, and produce bound for the Midwest and beyond.

Every ethnic community staked a corner of town. The Irish crowded Dublin Gulch and Corktown. Eastern Europeans built homes in the McQueen Addition. Italians settled Meaderville. Cornish miners raised their Queen Anne cottages along Butte Hill in Centerville—houses that outlasted nearly everything else. Roughly ten percent of Butte’s population was Chinese, with gardens, shops, and homes filling five blocks below Reeder’s Alley. The wealthy gravitated to North Rodney Street, near the courthouse, where the air was thinner and quieter.

As for me, I opened my own restaurant on Utah Street between Granite and Broadway on March 1st, 1886.[6] I advertised my establishment as the “neatest family resort in the city” because I wanted the women to know that they were welcome, and so were their children. After six weeks of advertising, word of mouth carried my business well enough thereafter.

It was there, amid the smoke and clang of Butte, that I met James A. Callahan, who hailed from New York. Jimmy stayed at the Centennial Hotel from time to time that March—not that he was a stranger to the city.[7]

He came to my restaurant more than once, and not just for a meal.

Jimmy was a year older than I was, stood just shy of five foot six, and we made a handsome couple. He was Catholic, I was Protestant, but both of us had good educations and shared interests.

On June 17th of 1886, we recorded our intent to be married.[8]

On September 7th, we exchanged our vows.[9]

A few weeks later, I closed the restaurant, and James A. Callahan and I headed toward Salmon City, leaving my faithful clientele to wonder where I had gone.[10]

Salmon City had been on the map for twenty years, built to serve the placer mines of Leesburg where thousands once washed gold from gravel-choked streams. Leesburg’s heyday had passed but new discoveries kept Salmon City alive. In 1882 quartz had been discovered west of the North Fork of the Salmon. The town of Shoup sprang up in response and by 1886 it was four years old.

It was the middle of October that Jimmy and I gathered on the riverbank just off Main Street where the freight boats were built.

On the morning of its launching, the novelty of it had not worn off. Crowds still lined the banks, but that day carried extra interest—the first woman to ride the rapids was waiting on shore.

I’d been warned that the river current was treacherous. Boulders jutted high through the deep canyon ahead. Sandbars shifted, especially in October when the river ran low. A trip that should take two days could stretch to three—or end in disaster if the boat grounded or capsized.

The flat boats were called “steamers,” but only in jest. They were powered only by the Salmon River current, steered by sweeps fore and aft. The boats were thirty-four feet long and eight wide, built to ride high and fast. Once a boat reached Shoup, it was dismantled for timbers and walls. Nothing floated out once it floated in.

I stood watching the men make their final preparations—ropes coiled, cargo secured, the sweeps set in place. There was no part of it that allowed for hesitation.

When the time came, I stepped aboard.

The current took us at once.

There is a moment, just as the bank begins to slip away, when a person may still think to turn back. After that, the river has you.

The canyon closed in around us, the water quickening beneath the hull. The men worked the sweeps without pause, calling to one another over the sound of the current. The boat rode high, then dipped, then struck forward again, as though testing each stretch of rapids before committing to it.

I had been warned, and I believed it. But I had not come so far to stand on the bank.

When we landed at Shoup on the second day out, the men came clamoring down to the water’s edge and stood astonished to see a woman step from the boat as if she had every right to be there.

I was joining only two other married women living downriver then—Elizabeth Merritt and Mary Sweeney, who had come in by pack trail in 1883. No woman had ever arrived as I did, in the current.[11]

From that moment on, I belonged to the river.

NOTES

[1] William W. Keefer was reared in Pennsylvania and came west in 1879, settling at Eagle Rock (now Idaho Falls), where he assisted in building the railroad shops. A carpenter by trade, he later had charge of a construction gang on the Utah & Northern Railroad for approximately six years. History of Idaho: The Gem of the Mountains, ed. James Henry Hawley (1920), Vol. 3, p. 36.

A “boarding car” was a mobile kitchen and bunk facility attached to railroad work crews, providing meals and lodging at remote work sites. While women were often employed in boarding houses and hotel kitchens throughout the West, the management of a mobile railroad boarding car serving a construction crew was an uncommon role for a single woman. Such positions were more typically held by married couples or men, as the work required living in close quarters with an all-male crew and moving frequently to remote work sites.

[2] Narrow-gauge railroads, typically three feet between rails, were cheaper to build and better suited to mountainous terrain but were less stable and more prone to rough travel than standard-gauge lines

[3] The Butte Miner, May 26, 1885, p. 4.

[4] An exploration of a possible connection between Annie C. Graves and the City Whisperings column appears in “City Whisperings,” Field Notes, SECrie.com.

[5] “Advertised Letters List,” Butte Miner, January 4, 1886, p. 4; March 1, 1886, p. 2, listing Annie C. Graves. These published lists named individuals with unclaimed mail held at the post office.

[6] “Mrs. A. C. Graves has opened a restaurant on Utah street, between Granite and Broadway, at which strictly home cooking is done. The price of a single meal is 25c, and a meal ticket entitling its owner to 21 meals can be had for $5.” The Daily Town Talk, March 1, 1886, p. 1.

Utah Street was a one-block street between Granite and Broadway west of Main; it was renamed Hamilton after the construction of the Hamilton Block in 1892. See The Verdigris Project, Butte, America’s Story, Episode 226: “Street Names,” https://www.verdigrisproject.org/butte-americas-story-blog/butte-americas-story-episode-226-street-names.

[7] J. A. Callahan, listed as “of the city,” appears among the guests at the Centennial Hotel in The Daily Town Talk, March 12, 15, and 23, 1886, p. 1; and Butte Miner, March 16, 24, and 31, 1886, p. 4.

For additional background on the Centennial Hotel, see The Verdigris Project, Butte, America’s Story, Episode 57: “Centennial Hotel,” https://www.verdigrisproject.org/butte-americas-story-blog/butte-americas-story-episode-57-centennial-hotel.

[8] Silver Bow County, Vital Records; recorded June 17, 1886

[9] Butte Miner, September 8, 1886: “The Rev. J. R. Russel did a land office business in the matrimonial line yesterday. He united the following: James A. Callahan and Annie Graves…”

[10] Butte Weekly Miner, October 9, 1886, p. 3: “The place that knew Mrs. Callahan shall know her no more. When the boys came to have their tickets punched this morning for breakfast they were sadly disappointed as the place was closed. Loud were their prayers for her welfare.”

[11] “Shoup and Pine Creek: Early History of the Mines and Original Locators and Purchasers,” by J.A.C_K (Annie Crie Graves Callahan), Idaho Recorder (Salmon, Idaho), January 1, 1890, p. 3.