it would depend to a great extent on his own efforts.
To help support his family, William worked whenever he could out of school hours, splitting logs and delivering telegraph messages from Joliet’s telegraph operators. While waiting for the messages, he listened carefully to the tapping instrument and watched the tape slowly unwind as it spelled out the message in dashes and dots. Later he wrote: “I was put on the station service and as I was very young, the men didn’t mind my asking questions, and what is more, they answered them and told me things.” He learned more than anyone realized at the time, and it is quite probable that this new technology subtly but effectively gave him a sense of the larger world beyond Joliet.
Despite his intelligence and superb memory, William was easily bored at school. To fill the hours, he often drew caricatures of his teachers and the students sitting near him. In the schoolyard he enjoyed brawling with the other boys, offered to take on all comers, and usually won. But all these boisterous hijinks came to an end the day he was caught caricaturing the school principal. The punishment he received was so severe that, although he was only thirteen, he chose never to return to school. By then, however, he had acquired quite a good education by the minimal standards of the day. He could read, write, and reason well. More important, he was curious about many things and he loved to learn. These qualities served him well as he left his boyhood behind and entered the adult world of work and responsibility.
2
Early Career
Once he dropped out of school, William Van Horne began to study telegraphy seriously at the city office. He knew that he now had to master a trade that would provide him with full-time employment. Perhaps he also realized that this method of communication would open career doors for him. Certainly he impressed the adults he met. One of those who recognized the potential in the precocious but still slight, young teenager was a railway man who observed in a letter:
My dear young friend, yours of a few days since came duly to hand and we were glad to hear from you and that you are doing so well…. You are young now and by proper conduct can grow up to be a good man, if not a great one. Your destiny mostly lies in your own hands.. What you will at your age by perseverance and determination you can greatly accomplish. So aim high. What is this life without accomplishing some great good, which altho you do not directly see it extends far and wide. Have some grand and glorious object in view and not live as some live to eat drink and sleep.
A few months later, when Van Horne was fourteen, the Joliet telegraph operator found employment for him as a telegrapher with the celebrated Illinois Central Railroad Company. Founded in 1851, it had already completed seven hundred miles of track to make it the single longest railway in the world. In the years to come, it would play an important role in converting much of unoccupied Illinois into a settled, prosperous area.
Van Horne enjoyed his new job in the mechanical superintendent’s office, located in Chicago, but he did not last long in the position. Once again, his love of practical jokes proved his downfall. One day, he ran a ground wire from a storage battery to a steel plate in the rail yard. Then he amused himself by watching the contortions of the yardmen who stepped on it. Unfortunately, the local superintendent also trod on the wire and, being knowledgeable about the principles of electricity, quickly realized what was up. In no time at all he was in the perpetrator’s office, where Van Horne promptly confessed that he was the culprit. The superintendent fired him on the spot. With this sudden dismissal, the teenager returned to his mother’s cottage in Joliet, a chastened and more mature young man.
Fortunately, one of his good friends, Henry Knowlton, was the son of the assistant superintendent of the Cut Off, a forty-five-mile-long line that ran from Joliet to Lake Junction, Indiana, and was operated by the Michigan Central Railroad. Through this connection, Van Horne was soon able to obtain employment as a messenger and freight checker for the company. In his new job he frequently came into contact with local businessmen, whom he invariably impressed with his industriousness and shrewd intelligence. Captain Ellwood was one such man and, years later, in 1916, he recalled: “I remember him in 1854, a thoughtful little fellow, so frail that I thought he would never be strong. But when I came back from the military academy in France a few years later he astonished me. He looked stronger — healthy even, and he was already being talked about in Joliet as an unusual young fellow.”
After holding his new position for only a few months, Van Horne convinced his boss that the Cut Off should have an independent telegraph line and that he should operate it. The line was duly installed, and the teenager immersed himself in his duties as a telegrapher. With constant access to the telegraph, Van Horne was able to perfect his skills to the point where he could decipher incoming messages merely by listening to the instrument’s clicks and clacks and had no need to “read” the tape. He became famous as the first operator in his district, and one of the first in the country, to master this feat. And while he was chalking up these distinctions, the new technology was taking him far beyond the boundaries of his town and introducing him to a wider world.
Van Horne’s duties as a telegrapher did not claim all his attention. He was already familiar with the storehouse, but now he set out to learn how other operations on the Cut Off worked. Ever the inquisitive youngster, he began to make drawings of illustrations in the draughtsman’s books during his lunch hour and at night to understudy the duties of the accountant, the cashier, the timekeeper, and the other men around him. He did so while deliberately cultivating his already remarkable memory. Whenever he had a moment he would challenge those around him to contests in which they all tried to memorize the numbers on the cars of long trains that passed through the yard. Van Horne was usually the winner.
Up to this point, Van Horne’s boundless energy and ambition seemed to be unfocused; he just wanted to learn as many railroading skills as he could. When he was eighteen, though, he decided on a particular goal — to run a railway. The trigger was a visit the general superintendent (the chief executive) of the Michigan Central Railroad made to the Cut Off one day. His opulent private car and the ceremony surrounding his arrival made such a forceful impression on Van Horne that he decided on the spot that he wanted that job.
Having promised himself that he would manage a railway system rather than create one, Van Horne set out with single-minded determination to meet his goal, convinced that “he who makes an ambitious time-table is likely to run by it.” He thought that a general superintendent must surely know everything about a railway, so he gave up all the holiday time that was owed to him and worked weeknights and Sundays to inform himself about the details of every department.
These were certainly propitious years in which to launch a railway career, as railways were expanding rapidly. In fact, by 1860 the United States had a larger rail network than all the existing networks in the rest of the world combined. The most spectacular growth occurred in Van Horne’s part of the continent, the old Northwest, where railway mileage had increased about eightfold during the previous decade. While the railway revolution was making itself felt, the telegraph was shrinking the world with its fast, regular, and dependable means of communication. Both of these marvels would profoundly alter American life, but none more so than the railway. Belching smoke from their large funnel-shaped chimneys and showering sparks, steam locomotives roared through the countryside, knitting cities and towns closer together, opening up wilderness areas, and providing the transportation so essential to high-volume agricultural and industrial production.
Although Van Horne was dedicated to his job and his advancement, he still found time to pursue his interest in paleontology — an area of study that, like railway management, makes extensive use of categorization. In addition to reading widely on the subject, Van Horne, sometimes accompanied by a few of his friends, tramped the countryside around Joliet and even further afield in search of new specimens. His collection would eventually
