American rascal, p.2
American Rascal, page 2
Gould was short—almost elfin—and frail. But when he wrestled with friends, he surprised them with his determination. One friend was John Burroughs, who grew up to become a famous nature writer. “He was very plucky and hard to beat,” Burroughs wrote. “He was made of steel and rubber.”3 Gould was bright, articulate, and thoughtful. His most remarkable quality was precocity. To pay tuition and board at his new school, Hobart Academy, he taught himself basic accounting and kept the books for a blacksmith. A year after leaving for Hobart, his old school in Roxbury hired a new teacher. Jay heard good things about the teacher and, perhaps feeling homesick, came home. In an assignment for the new instructor, Jay wrote an essay that detractors later mocked for its irony, but was more noteworthy for its deft use of language. He called it “Honesty Is the Best Policy.” Gould warned readers that “we should not acquaint ourselves too much with the world” and observed that “conscience is not the voice of thunder, but a voice gentle and impressive.”4
Two years later, Gould was rising at three to study by firelight. His area of interest was surveying. He hated the drudgery of farming and believed surveying was his way out. He got on with a draftsman who planned to make and sell a map of Ulster County, one of the counties in the Catskills. The draftsman told Jay not to worry about food and shelter because his credit was good. He assured that farmers along the way would provide for him; he would pay them later. On Jay’s third day on the road, he was turned down everywhere he went. The draftsman had exhausted his credit. Jay was hungry, miles from home and alone. He walked into the woods, sat by a tree, and fell into sobs. “It seemed to me as though the world had come to an end,” he said later.5
The tears restored him. He approached another farmer and asked what he could do to earn a night’s stay. The farmer offered him 50 cents to use his surveying tools to make a noon mark, a simple sundial that indicated midday. With that, Jay was in business. Sustaining himself with noon marks, he traipsed the roads of Ulster County, surveyed the whole thing, and sold the maps himself. He earned a few hundred dollars. “That was the first money I made in business,” he said.6
He agreed to map other counties and soon had a modest but thriving business. He gathered surveys from correspondents in three states, drew up maps, made copies, and sold them to farmers, road contractors, and schools. “Look at Gould,” marveled the father of one of his friends. “Isn’t he a driver.”7
Gould’s shortcoming was an inability to slow down. While other farm children mended fences and threshed hay, Gould filled his teenage years with deadlines, sales calls, and personnel decisions. Consumed by work, he ate poorly and slept little. His friends were hardly astonished when, during the summer of 1854, he collapsed into bed with chills and stomach pains.
The doctor diagnosed typhoid fever. After the fever passed, Gould rushed back to work. Like an injured ballplayer who returns too soon, he fell ill with a bowel infection. He took morphine to numb the pain. His sisters feared for his life. “You know this disease terminates one way or the other, soon,” wrote his sister Polly to their sister Sarah.8 He couldn’t keep down food and lost weight. When he recovered, he attended Sarah’s wedding looking like death.
The doctor told him to lay off work. He tried but couldn’t stop thinking about his neglected projects. Polly complained that relaxing “seemed to make him even worse.”9 After spending months in bed, he grew impossibly restless. Winter was approaching and frost already covered the mountains. He dragged himself up on a horse and rode off on one of his map ventures. He was on the road only a few days when pneumonia struck. He recovered, but, at the about the same time, his sister Polly took ill and died of tuberculosis.
Her death was a wake-up call. He resolved to stay at home until he was back at full strength. Not that he was idle. He took the time to finish another piece of work. At the behest of a local agricultural organization, he wrote a history of his home county of Delaware. He sent it to a printer shop in Philadelphia that picked that time to burn down. From his notes, Gould rewrote the 426 pages. “As you know,” he said to a friend, “I’m not in the habit of backing out of what I undertake, and I shall write night and day until it is completed.”10 Years later, in an otherwise scathing profile of Gould, The New York Times grudgingly conceded that his opus, History of Delaware County and Border Wars of New York, was “admirable,” and not just because it was written by an eighteen-year-old.
About this time, Gould hopped on the Hudson River Railway for a visit to Manhattan. He was heading to the Crystal Palace in Bryant Park for the Exhibition of Industry. He had work to do. His grandfather had invented a rat trap and asked Jay to display the device at the show and sell the license. President Franklin Pierce opened the event. Walt Whitman supplied a poem. Elisha Otis debuted his new elevator. The crowd gasped when Otis boarded his contraption and ordered the cables slashed in confidence that his new safety brake would stop his fall. Jay sold the rat trap and earned a few dollars but not before an encounter with a pickpocket who stole the trap. Jay grabbed the thief by the leg and held on until the police came. The New York Herald devoted half a column to “the plucky visitor’s” apprehension of the thief.11
Gould toyed with the idea of college and took prep courses in Albany. He visited Rutgers, Yale, Harvard, and Brown. After seeing the students darting to class and the professors sauntering the commons in their gowns, he concluded college was an expensive indulgence. Why bother with college when he could teach himself from books?
Back home, Gould joined a reading circle that explored spirituality. Gould wasn’t religious but he searched for answers after the loss of his sister Polly. Contemplation of the afterlife served to drive him harder. “As regards the future world, except what the Bible reveals, I am unable to fathom its mysteries,” he wrote to a friend, “but, as to the present, I am determined to use all my best energies to accomplish this life’s highest possibilities.”12
There is another story from Gould’s youth worth noting. During his long convalescence from the bowel infection, Gould worked in a store owned by the most successful merchant in town, Edward Burhans. Gould took a liking to Burhans’s daughter Maria. One day, a farmer walked into the store and told Gould he wanted to talk to Burhans about some land he had to sell. Gould knew the property and a good idea of its worth. He offered to buy the parcel on the spot and closed the deal before Burhans had a chance. Gould flipped it for a $5,000 profit, an amount equal to about $100,000 in current dollars. Burhans was enraged. He fired Gould and made sure Maria had nothing more to do with him. When it came to love or money, Gould chose money.
TWO
THE SEDUCTION OF ZADOCK PRATT
On a rainy spring morning in 1856, the famous gentleman rose early and rode an hour through the mountains, tied up his horse, and walked into the Roxbury Hotel. An onlooker recalled his appearance. The visitor was an “old, gray haired man—tall, erect, booted and spurred.”1 He announced himself as Colonel Zadock Pratt. He had a question. Where could he find Jay Gould?
Pratt didn’t need to introduce himself. Everyone knew Zadock Pratt. Merchant’s Magazine, the Fortune magazine of the day, once compiled some biographical sketches to inspire the young. It included chapters on Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and Washington Irving. More ink was spilled for Zadock Pratt. Pratt was an inspiration. Born in 1790, Pratt began his career traveling town to town as a saddle maker. Then he ran a country store, worked fourteen-hour days, and saved money by sleeping under the counter at night. He had his first big commercial success selling oars to the military in the War of 1812. Looking for a bigger opportunity after the war, he was riding through the countryside when he happened upon a site along the Schoharie River, not far from Roxbury. He instantly recognized it as a perfect location for a tannery. From the moment he signed the deed, his fortune was secure.
Leather was big business. The country needed shoes, boots, machine belts, leather breeches, and, as Pratt well knew, saddles. Tanners made the leather by soaking cowhides in the tannic acid found in tree bark. No tree produced more tannin than hemlock. No place in America had more hemlock than the Catskills. Tanneries were popping up all over the mountains. It was a dirty business. The stench of hides filled the air. Rotting remains fouled the rivers. The tanners themselves were rough, drinking men despised by the locals, and notorious for leaving behind shantytowns, unpaid bills, and acres of decaying logs and tree stumps.
Pratt vowed to do it better. Promising to “live with the local people and not on them,” he said he would build a sustainable community and stay after the hemlock was gone.2 Upon finding his site, it took him less than three months to build the biggest tannery in the country. Pratt was soon buying hides from as far away as Buenos Aires and turning them into high-quality leather that he mostly shipped to New York City. Pratt ate meals with his men. To minimize employee turnover, he encouraged them to bring their families upstate. Instead of letting the felled trees go to waste, he cut it into lumber. He built schools, houses, and churches. He removed tree stumps to ready the land for planting. Other Catskills communities were unorganized collections of farms united only by a church, a store, and places like the Roxbury Hotel. Pratt’s community, which he dubbed Prattsville, was a fully formed, economically diverse city with a neatly arranged center of shops and homes. New Yorkers called it “the gem of the Catskills.”
If Pratt had a business card, it might have said something like “data scientist.” He doubled his leather output by experimenting with different boiling times, tannin concentrations, and hide size while recording every data point in a book. He vertically integrated with an in-house blacksmith and used his own men to fell trees instead of the usual contract laborers. Other tanners guarded their secrets. Pratt, eager to advance best practices, published his.
Pratt was drawn to politics. He ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1836 and won by an impressive three thousand votes. During his two terms, he never missed a day on the House floor. His bills cut postage rates, advanced the transcontinental railroad, and created the federal Bureau of Statistics. He commissioned the Washington Monument.
Pratt was eccentric. On the Fourth of July, he’d put on a fur coat and drive a sleigh through town. He liked playing soldier. With real gunpowder, he reenacted famous battles. More than once, he blew up a barn and reimbursed the owners. A phrenologist, a practitioner of the quackery then in vogue, examined Pratt’s skull in 1848. The phrenologist pronounced the skull’s occupant “peculiar, isolated and detached from the species.”3
Pratt’s life was marked by sadness. His son George was the youngest person ever elected to the state legislature. An army colonel, he was shot dead in the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pratt buried four wives—one more than John Gould. His fifth wife was a young writer with Leather and Shoe Reporter. He was seventy-nine and she was twenty. She survived him.
Pratt had a weakness: pride. Calling his little tanning community Prattsville was defensible. There were plenty of villages named after their founders. Nor was it unusual when he started a bank and called it Prattsville National. It got strange with the banknotes. Banks issued their own notes in those days, backed by their own credit. They adorned the notes with images of milk maids, schooners, and beehives. For his bank, Pratt used a portrait of a middle-aged gentleman with a calm gaze, a firm jaw, a chinstrap beard, and a bow tie. There was a good reason for that, he’d say. Who wouldn’t accept a banknote graced with an image of Zadock Pratt?
His portrait shows him with three medals around his neck. He commissioned a stone cutter to sculpt his likeness on the rocks overlooking Prattsville. Pratt Rocks stand to this day as a Catskills Mount Rushmore. He commissioned another reporter from Leather and Shoe to ghostwrite his autobiography. In it we learn that Pratt was the best marksman, the fastest runner, and the strongest horseman around. We discover that lesser men have neither the skill nor stomach for big business, thus it was Pratt’s obligation, like it was for “the founders of the House of Medici,” to assume the burden himself.4
Some years before Pratt rode into Roxbury, Gould, then sixteen, had tried to sell Pratt a map. Pratt didn’t need a map. But he liked Gould’s spirit and promised to keep him in mind. Gould made sure of it by sending him letters and telling him about his maps and other projects. Then came the rainy morning when Pratt went looking for Gould.
Gould rushed to the hotel. Pratt asked Gould to survey his farm. By now Gould was sick of surveying. He instead told Pratt about an idea he had. Gould’s brother-in-law operated a tannery in Pennsylvania and knew about a hemlock forest near the Lehigh River. It was the ideal spot for a tannery. Not only was it on a river but a crew was building a train line nearby to haul coal. Once the railroad opened, New York would only be a day away from the hemlocks. Gould wanted to build a tannery there and asked Pratt to back him.
Pratt had retired from tanning. After clearing all the hemlocks within ten miles of Prattsville, he had switched to farming. He was now grazing cattle. Gould’s idea struck him as fishy. Although he had once owned a Pennsylvania tannery, he had never heard of the El Dorado Gould described. Pratt wanted to see it. Gould promised to take him but first he had to find it himself.
Gould grabbed his compass and surveying tools, and rode over the mountains through wild country. Bears and wolves roamed the hills. Mountain lions screamed for their mates. Gould saw plenty of oak and pine in eastern Pennsylvania but little hemlock. He eventually came to what seemed like a promising area not far from Wilkes-Barre. He looked up a mountainside. There they were, hemlocks as far as the eye could see. They stretched across the mountain and down into the valley. They bounded over streams and rocks. There was enough hemlock to keep a tanner busy for years. He returned with Pratt. They rode together, the slight young man with no money and a tall, rich, sixty-five-year-old with money to burn. Pratt saw the hemlocks. He and Gould became partners.
Just like that, Gould was an industrialist. After choosing a spot by the river, he hired a crew, picked up an axe, and joined the men to fell trees. Vats for boiling tanning solution arrived along with the two-handled knives for shaving bark. Gould and his men built a dormitory in two days, then a tannery. They dubbed their little encampment Gouldsboro. Gould wrote to Pratt about the dedication ceremony sounding like a kid sending his parents a note from camp. “I have moved into a new boarding house,” he wrote. “It is small but commodious affair.” He slipped in some flattery. “Three hearty cheers were then proposed for Hon. Zadock Pratt,” he wrote. “A more hearty response I am certain this valley has never before witnessed.”5
A happy pattern developed between Pratt and his acolyte. Pratt offered an idea. Gould praised its brilliance. Pratt sent a check. Gould acted on the idea. Pratt suggested building a church and a school for workers and their families. Gould replied, “Pride in community will encourage and inspire our men.”6 Pratt suggested maintaining detailed records. Gould replied: “The most successful men are invariably the most careful about small things.”7 Pratt told Gould where to buy cowhides. Gould replied: “I am under many obligations for your good advice.” Pratt offered an idea for shipping tanned hides to New York. Gould replied: “I am much obliged.”8
If Pratt noticed insincerity, he never said so. Gould showed no concern about crossing the line. If anything, he became more of a sycophant. When Pratt told Gould about his idea for an autobiography, Gould recommended that the introduction declare Pratt a model for mankind. Wrote Gould, “Col. Pratt has arisen by his own untiring industry from comparative obscurity to become the most eminent and most useful man in the world.”9 Pratt loved it. And the more flattery Gould delivered, the more money flowed from Prattsville. By and by, Pratt sank $120,000 into the tanning venture. For his part, Gould contributed no cash, only labor.
One day a wagon rolled up to the tannery carrying a large crate. Inside the crate was a metal contraption with a wheel on the side. Gould and his colleagues unloaded the thing and gave it a look. It was a steam engine. Pratt had read in Leather and Shoe about a new way to make tanning fluid. The key ingredient was hemlock bark ground into small pieces for boiling in water. The article advocated a steam engine for grinding the bark instead of a water wheel. The benefit was year-round production. Whether or not the river was frozen, it could keep on grinding. And it was powered not by expensive kerosene but by setting fire to the boiled tree bark after it dried. It sounded good on paper.
After some fiddling, Gould’s men attached the engine to the grinding mill, fed the fuel bin with bark, and started it up. The bark didn’t catch fire so much as it smoldered. They let the bark dry some more and tried again. This time the engine wouldn’t turn over. The engine was junk. Gould sent it back. While waiting for a new one, he learned that the manufacturer had gone out of business. He’d have to find another one.
One of Gould’s remarkable characteristics was an ability to project good cheer in dark hours. But he was in a hurry because every lost day was another day without a profit. He let his frustration slip in a letter to Pratt. “I am inclined to think that my original suggestion—building a water-wheel as a backup to the more modern plan—may have saved us time, expense and frustration.”10
Gould made up for lost time by driving himself and his men harder. Once the new engine arrived, he worked nonstop. The tannery was soon up to capacity and shipping as much leather each month as Pratt had shipped from Prattsville. For Gould, it had been a year of furious effort punctuated by maddening delays. As the cash rolled in, he had reason to cheer. He had a half interest in a profitable tanning operation supplied with enough hemlock to last for years. He was twenty-two years old. He could see the day when he would be rich just like he had predicted.
