home, Van Horne was blackened from head to foot, but safe. Addie and the rest of the family had also been spared. He immediately gathered up some bedding and clothes and, assisted by his mother, loaded them onto a grocer’s wagon he commandeered and dispatched it to the shivering refugees camped in a nearby park.
Soon after the Chicago fire, Van Horne accepted an offer from the Chicago and Alton to manage one of its smaller subsidiaries, the struggling St. Louis, Kansas City & Northern Railroad. He became superintendent of the five-hundred-and-eighty-one-mile-long road on July 15, 1872, at an annual salary of $5,000. At the young age of twenty-nine he had realized his dream of becoming a railway superintendent — perhaps the youngest railway superintendent in the world.
For the next two years, St. Louis, Missouri — Chicago’s archrival in the Midwest — became the family home. A cosmopolitan community and a commercial metropolis, St. Louis had been the leading city in the region before the Civil War. With the advent of hostilities and the cessation of Mississippi River traffic from the South, however, it lost ground to Chicago. By the time the Van Hornes took up residence in the summer of 1872, though, the city boasted a population of more than three hundred thousand and was expanding rapidly in all directions. It was also experiencing a golden age that would last until the turn of the century.
In what had become an established practice, Van Horne went ahead of the family to scout out a new home. He settled on an elegant new house in a “very good neighbourhood,” with ten rooms, two storeys, and a mansard roof. It was, he reported, “as good as any in the city.”
House hunting, of course, was only a diversion. Most of the time Van Horne was preoccupied with settling into his new job. He wrote to Addie, “I leave early tomorrow morning by special train for a trip over the line with the genl frt. agent, chief engineer & asst. genl supt. Mr. Blackstone will go part way with us & Mr. Mitchell will join us tomorrow somewhere on the line. My advent at the North Mo. office caused something of a sensation among the fossils. Everything promises well.” Evidently, the young superintendent’s innovative methods and no-nonsense approach to doing things were starting to make waves.
Later that summer Van Horne was the central figure in a little drama whose outcome would further embellish his growing reputation. He was on an inspection trip in the Midwest when four seedy-looking young men began slapping a small, petrified black child who had begun wailing in response to their loud, boisterous conversation. The terrified mother pleaded with them to stop, but to no avail. Van Horne, who had been watching the altercation with mounting fury, leapt out of his seat, grabbed one of the assailants by the collar, and pulled him into the aisle. “Leave that child alone,” he barked.
“All right, Capt’n,” sputtered the ruffian as he made his way back to his seat. By the time the train pulled into the station, however, this unsavoury character had regained his nerve, and he turned on Van Horne belligerently. His companions intervened and dragged him off the train just as the conductor suddenly appeared and warned Van Horne to duck down. “Don’t you know who these men are?” he whispered. “That’s Jessie and Frank James and the Young brothers. Stay where you are or they may decide to aim a shot or two at you as the train leaves.” Although somewhat shaken, Van Horne pretended that he had not just encountered the well-known American outlaw and that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Once installed in his new job, Van Horne tried to make the railway’s equipment more efficient, to save money and to get the best performance out of his employees. He badgered the owners to purchase steel rails, which were far more durable and had a much higher load capacity than the standard iron ones. He also demanded that his employees adopt money-saving measures whenever possible and perform to the best of their ability. However, although he was a strict disciplinarian and a hard taskmaster, Van Horne was no bully. He never asked an employee to put in as many hours of service as he did himself. Moreover, he sympathized with the plight of those railroading men who had to spend long periods of time away from their families. To make them comfortable when they were on the road, he established clubs and reading rooms at divisional points. But he had no sympathy for a drunken employee. When this kind of misbehaviour occurred, he would “cuss out” the offender with great energy and effectiveness.
On one occasion he dismissed a St. Louis, Kansas City & Northern engineer for being drunk on the job, and immediately the Brotherhood of Engineers went on strike. When Van Horne hired an efficient substitute, the union labelled him a strikebreaker and a scab. Despite the uproar, Van Horne refused to discharge him or to reinstate his predecessor. He informed the union leaders bluntly, “The Chicago and Alton have had their nose brought down to the grindstone too often, and they are not going to do it this time if I can help it.”
In the long and bitter struggle that followed, the strikers often indulged in ruthless sabotage. Van Horne, who enjoyed a good fight, refused to back down. For weeks on end he worked inhuman hours, astounding staff by his ability to function with so little sleep. Fortunately, the strike ended in a complete victory for him and the company. Nevertheless, peace brought no slackening of discipline. “A railway,” he reminded the men, “was no reform school.”
On more than one occasion, Van Horne learned of employee misbehaviour by listening to the tapping of a telegraph machine when he was visiting a small station. He was able to decipher the incoming dots and dashes so accurately and administer punishment so swiftly that he earned a reputation for uncanny powers. Years later, when he stopped by the Canadian Pacific Railway’s New York telegraph office, he demonstrated these celebrated powers by deciphering an incoming communication that was addressed to him. “Here is your message,” said the clerk.
“Yes, and here is my answer,” Van Horne immediately replied. He had been composing his reply as the message came in.
At this stage in his life, Van Horne looked much as he would for the rest of his life. Although not handsome, he was a striking man with fine features and penetrating blue eyes. His nose was small and chiselled, and his short, immaculately trimmed beard suggested a rock-hard jaw beneath it. His hair had already receded back from his high forehead to the middle of his skull, and he would become completely bald in later years. A contemporary described Van Horne as “rather heavy set.” With the passage of time he would become decidedly corpulent, but never would his bulk suggest softness. Van Horne, no matter how old, would always radiate strength and power.
Despite his grave manner, Van Horne still retained an impish sense of humour and a love of pranks. When the family lived in Bloomington, he put his artistic talents to work transforming figures in one of his mother’s fashion journals into a collection of freaks. In St. Louis he took liberties with some of the artwork reproduced in copies of Harper’s Magazine that he intercepted before they reached the women at home. He once altered a series of portrait sketches of American authors by Canadian artist Wyatt Eaton in such a way that they appeared to be pictures of cowboys and Indians. The transformation was so convincing that his mother and mother-in-law were thoroughly deceived, protesting that it was scandalous that the editors had allowed esteemed writers such as Longfellow and Emerson to be ridiculed. Even Eaton was deceived when somebody showed him the distorted illustrations.
When the family was living in St. Louis, Addie came down with smallpox — then one of the most deadly and loathsome of diseases. In the nineteenth century it was customary to isolate smallpox patients in a “pesthouse,” but Van Horne would have none of that for his beloved wife. Putting an end to all discussion, he proceeded to care for her himself in the attic study where he kept his fossil collection. As long as the illness lasted, he whiled away his days in this sanctuary, devotedly nursing her and amusing himself with his fossils. When night came and she slept, he changed his clothing, thoroughly disinfected himself, and set off for his deserted office to attend to the day’s work. That done, he would return to the study in the early hours of the morning to snatch some sleep himself. It was a punishing regimen, but Van Horne had the satisfaction of seeing his wife make a splendid recovery with few, if any, disfiguring scars. Moreover, because of the
