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A Dream of Coal-Fired Benevolence
William Jackson Palmer, a wiry man five feet ten inches tall with wavy, reddish brown hair, a neatly trimmed moustache, and an aristocratic bearing that seemed at odds with his twin creeds of Quakerism and republicanism, had honed a daunting array of talents during his thirty years of life. Engineer, executive, soldier, romanticâeach role played a part in leading him to traverse southern Colorado and northern New Mexico in the summer of 1867. Yet what mattered most during these weeks of intensive exploration was Palmerâs oracular way of finding meaning in coal outcrops.1
To most people, rocks were just rocks: solid, unyielding facts that sat unnoticed and insignificant. To Palmer, the study of rocks opened windows onto an ever-changing past. A self-taught geologist who supplemented gleanings from the most current scientific treatises and lectures with practical knowledge gained on journeys through Britain, France, and the eastern states, Palmer saw rocks as repositories of history that not only recorded the past, but held clues to the future. He prided himself on his ability to discern these clues from outcrops of sandstone and shale, basalt and limestone and coal. And on this rugged southern Colorado frontier in the tumultuous wake of the Civil War, the prospects Palmer read seemed to tell of boundless power that could overcome the limitations of a stubborn land and create an industrial utopia.
William Palmer had been born in the Delaware countryside and had come of age in midcentury Philadelphia. An exemplary student, he nonetheless left Central High School before graduating, swooped up like many of his classmates at the elite public institution by an appeal to his ambition from one of the cityâs counting houses. Clerking failed to excite young Palmer, though, so he left the city. It was most likely while he was working as a surveyor for the Hempfield Railroad in the Alleghenies that the three guiding passions of his lifeârailroads, coal, and wildernessâfirst coalesced. More than any other career, engineering promised to unite these obsessions.2
A common thread ran through the biographies of many of Americaâs small but growing pantheon of great engineers. Like many of the nationâs painters and patricians, they had embarked on the pilgrimage to Europe. Inspired by their example, William Palmer set sail in 1855 for a grand tour of the engineering marvels of Britain and France.3
The eighteen-year-old tottered down the gangway of the Tuscarora and onto a Merseyside quay on a summerâs day. In the nine months that followed, Palmer traced a snaking path through Britainâs main industrial districts, as well as Paris and its hinterlands. Occasionally he rode the train; more often he walked, carrying only what he could fit into a knapsack and bearing letters of introduction from such distinguished figures as Lucretia Mott, who described Palmerâs family as âwarmly interested in our anti-slavery movement.â4
Palmerâs favorite uncle had loaned him money to pay for his passage. He met most of his other expenses by writing twenty-one long travel letters for the Pottsville Minerâs Journal, the most influential newspaper in Pennsylvaniaâs anthracite region. Published a decade after Friedrich Engelsâs Condition of the Working Class of England and a year after Charles Dickensâs Hard Times first appeared in serialized form, each letter printed above the initials W. J. P. or the pseudonym Carbon earned the traveler four dollars. More valuable by far, however, were the contributions each made to Palmerâs burgeoning reputation as a keen observer of British industrialism. J. Edgar Thomson, the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the preeminent entrepreneur of the day, found them so impressive that he arranged to meet their author on his next business trip to Britain.5
After disembarking in the âdouble-distilled Pittsburghâ that was Liverpool, the eager young Palmer rode a packet ship to Manchester, griping along the way that âthe pretty Irwell which had flowed through green fields and scented meadows grew black and thick with the refuse from factory gutters untilâ the once pastoral river âresembled more a sewer than the winding watercourseâ of its upper stretches. After this introduction to the environmental damage inflicted by Britainâs industrial revolutions, Palmer approached one of the factories responsible for polluting northern Englandâs air and water.6
1.1. William Jackson Palmer, ca. 1870. Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, F-20207.
The Wigan cotton mills filled Palmer with awe. In a lengthy letter to his uncle, Palmer wrote that the gargantuan factory had given him âa more exalted opinion of the power of machinery and of the genius of the great inventors . . . than all the panegyrics I could have read.â Inside Palmer found â1,100 men, women and childrenâ busily âguiding the almost automatic machines that perform with so much ease the manual labour. A thousand horsepower endlessly at work at as many different trades, varying in importance from the carrying of men and cotton up and down stairs to the setting in motion 800 looms, weaving the fabric so fast that you can hardly follow it with your eye.â Wherever Palmer looked, he saw machines âconducting with perfect system the entire duties of the manufacture with slight superintendence from the pigmy race who brought them into life.â The self-acting mule that spun cotton into thread struck the young American as âthe most astonishing machine I ever saw,â while the sight of the weaving room âlooms doing their masterâs work with a regularity and speed that nothing but steam power could produce,â he said, would âremain in my memory as one of the few things worthy of being remembered though everything else fail.â As for the engines driving these machines, Palmer proclaimed them âundoubtedly the finest pieces of mechanism I have yet seen. Feeding their own coals[,] turning their own valves, pumping their own water into the boilers, registering their own force by guages [sic] . . . , providing themselves for the safety of their attendants in case of accidents, and giving motion besides to all the innumerable machinery and contrivances within the rooms of the factories, one could get a better idea of omnipotence . . . than the strongest imagination could otherwise furnish him with.â7
Palmer found the scale, scope, and âperfect systemâ of the mills nothing short of sublime. Nowhere in the United States could he have witnessed anything like it. Yet even as the romantic in Palmer trembled in the presence of this modern wonder, the realist in him resolved to trace back to its earthly source the seemingly supernatural power that vitalized the millsâ âinert matter.â The next day, Palmer âoccupied the hours of daylight in descending and ascending deep coal mine shafts in the neighborhood of Wigan and in crawling about with back and legs at an angle quite as acute as the pain thereby caused through underground passages that were apparently constructed for some lilliputian race yet to be discovered.â Though he derided âcolliers and collieriesâ as âdecidedly the most unpleasing things,â the traveler nonetheless focused most of his subsequent tour on the frequently unpleasant subject of coal. Palmer even published most of his letters under the wry title of âUnderground Walks in England.â8
The dawning realization that the sublime and the infernal aspects of British industrialism were intimately interrelated troubled the young Americanâs Quaker morals, romantic love of nature, and republican distaste for fixed class distinctions. Tramping south from Lancashire to the Midlands, Palmer found farming and grazing âentirely sacrificed, for the fields beneath are more valuable than those at the surface.â The sky in what Britons called the Black Countryââno name,â sniffed Palmer, âcould be more appropriateââremained âalways obscure and dustyâ no matter how âbright the sky or sunny the day a few miles remote.â Beneath the smoke and haze stretched a buckling, heaving landscape scarred by âabundant records of the work that has been going on below.â Here in the Black Country, it seemed to Palmer, âno other business [was] thought of . . . than that of mining the Coal and Iron ore which underlie it and converting them to purposes of utility.â9
The young American noted how coal and the industries it powered put not only the land, but also workersâ lives and health in jeopardy. The sickly appearance of Sheffieldâs coke handlers appalled him; they looked âas though their lungs had become too familiar with sulphuretted hydrogen and . . . too ignorant of the pure, fresh air from which they are daily excluded.â Worse still were conditions in the collieries which powered the British economy. Palmer expressed amazement at the policies and technologies that operators used to guard their employees against the hazards of mining; at the âfieryâ Incehall colliery, for instance, he marveled at âthe strict surveillanceâ carried out by mine officials called âfiremen, who sit as if in judgment on benches near the foot of the pitsâ and at the steam engines responsible for âdraining a mass of water which is never exhausted, in order that men may work and live in what would otherwise be only a vast pond.â Yet despite such measures, acute and chronic dangers nonetheless lurked wherever Palmer ventured on his âunderground walks.â He decried such âfearful sources of danger and disease to the workmanâ as the explosive methane emitted from the coal seams into a Sheffield colliery with a âloud singing sound very much like that of a tea-kettle, close to the boiling point.â He also recoiled at the complaints of colliers secreted away from âwholesome sunshine and the light of Heaven,â who spoke to him âof the crouching, confined position which their labor necessitated.â10
Most shocking of all to the young American, however, was the use of female and child labor in and around the mines. Depicting mining women as âa stout, muscular race, equipped with heavy boots,â Palmer huffed that he had to take âa second look to assureâ himself âthat they [were] not in reality what they seem[ed] to be, men.â Palmer was more sympathetic to the trapper boys who had to remain âsitting the whole livelong day without any light but such as would flash by them in the hands of the passing colliers,â by no means âa pleasant substitute for the race over the green fields, the playground sports and attendant sunlight, in the midst of which an English lad is usually inducted into his teens.â Mine work seemed to turn boys into drones, women into men, and manly laborers into âan inferior class of beings.â11
Appalling as Palmer found the travails of British laborers, though, he was equally concerned about the tactics workers were using to improve their lot. After attending the meeting of a colliersâ pit committee, Palmer grumbled that âthese âUnionsâ never stop with the redress of those wrongs which first caused them to be established.â Palmer ardently believed that colliers deserved relief from poor ventilation and other occupational hazards. And yet his sympathies extended only so far. âThe question of wages,â he ominously warned, âwill surely be entertained by those who have found that in âUnion is strength.ââ Once miners began to feel their oats, strikes âwith all their attendant evilsâ would inevitably âcome to afflictâ the industry, an eventuality that would deny workmen their wages, capitalists their profits, and consumers their fuel.12
Together, Palmerâs dispatches reflected the future business giantâs dawning recognition of coalâs centrality to the industrial revolution. Palmer knew that the âomnipotenceâ so evident at the Wigan mills was possible only because of the âunpleasingâ collieries below, just as he called coal âthe real creator of all the wealth and prosperity we now witnessâ at Birmingham, the driving force that had turned this small town into âthe iron depot of Europe and lined her streets with the shops and dwellings of princely manufacturers.â Palmer had embarked on his tour of subterranean Britain largely because he needed material to fill his Minerâs Journal letters. The more he saw of the leading industrial economy in the world, however, the more he became convinced that the real story of Britainâs success was rooted as much in the collieries as in the engineering marvels they fueled. 13
Thus William Palmer began to teach himself the art and science of reading coal strata. Palmer returned to Pennsylvania in the spring of 1856 intent on leveraging the knowledge he had amassed on his tireless wanderings through British collieries and coal-consuming industries into a career at the frontlines of Americaâs nascent fossil-fuel-driven economy. He had already begun to court J. Edgar Thomson, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and one of the first American railroad executives to embrace the coal age. Thomson, described by one historian as having done âmore than any one man who ever lived to establish, create, and perfect the railway system of the American continent,â had taken note of Palmerâs dispatches to the Minerâs Journal and had even found time on a busy trip to London to squeeze the young American into his schedule. For the remainder of his trip, Palmer had provided Thomson with detailed reports on how British railroads used coal and coke. Once back in the states, Palmer began conducting extensive surveys of American coal properties for Thomson. Two years later, he performed a series of experiments that helped convert Pennsylvaniaâs locomotives to coal from wood, which was fast becoming scarce and expensive in the Northeast. Even as these accomplishments earned Palmer membership in Philadelphiaâs prestigious Franklin Institute, he was supplementing his geological skills with business acumen. In 1857 he became secretary of the Westmoreland Coal Company at the early age of nineteen. Shortly thereafter, Palmer began a job that would change the course of his life, a four-year tenure as Thomsonâs private secretary, during which time Palmer worked closely with Thomas Scott and Andrew Carnegie.14
Lincolnâs election in 1860 and the Southâs secession brought Palmer, raised like many of his fellow Quakers as an ardent opponent of slavery, to take up arms. He organized a âpicked body of light cavalryâ in the fall of 1861 and served as its commander for the duration of the war. Named the Anderson Troop, after Fort Sumterâs defender, and later mustered into service as the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry, Palmerâs special forces regiment swept down the Mississippi in 1862, then back to Pennsylvania for drilling and reorganization. As Robert E. Leeâs army withdrew following the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Palmer volunteered to spy behind enemy lines. Though captured in civilian clothes, Palmer managed to avoid summary execution by playing the role of W. J. Peters, a Baltimore-based mining engineer of Palmerâs invention. After several months in the Confederate prison in Richmond known as Castle Thunder, as he related after the war in a Harperâs article entitled âThe Generalâs Story,â Palmer was freed in an exchange of prisoners. He went on to lead his men through two more years of fierce fighting in eastern Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. The soldier who ânever expected to come backâ from the fighting finished the war holding a brevet commission as brigadier general, making him the highest-ranking Quaker in either army.15
And though he laid down his arms at warâs end âwithout a scratchâ on his body, Palmer would always be marked by the war. Soon after returning to his regiment from prison, Palmer detailed to his father the new philosophy of life he had adopted at Castle Thunder. âIf we do what seems for the best at the time, I think nothing further is required of us. Let Providence attend to the rest.â This cast of mind, as Palmer would later admit, rendered him âtoo reckless to care for consequences, or the opinions of people.â Foremost among the people whose âopinionsâ he dismissed were his troops, many of whom grumbled at their commanderâs merciless drilling and haughty demeanor. His republican and Quaker tenets now hardened by militarism, Palmer set out to make his mark in the world with the self-assurance of a man who had served his country and cheated death while many of his friends were serving themselves.16
Even before the war ended, J. Edgar Thomson had offered Palmer a position of considerable authority and responsibility, as secretary-treasurer for the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division, renamed the Kansas Pacific (K.P.) in 1868. Thomson and his associates at the Pennsylvania Railroad had invested both their hopes and their money in this now forgotten transcontinental pathway, destined to become one of historyâs great losers when the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific linked up in May 1869. Soon after acceptin...