Someday you may walk the prairie not in the soft light of a dreamscape but in actual fact; if, then, you want to see te-hu-to-hi or tdo-ke-wi-hi or mon-kon-ni-ki-sin-ga, or other flower nations that gave life for eight thousand years to people living in a land never even remotely close to being used up, seek them in an overgrown cemetery. But if you stay in a white man’s old burial ground long enough, this darkness must come to you: his way of life is the land’s death and his way of death is the land’s life.
Via the Short Line to China
Being dreamed about is not the same thing as walking in someone else’s dream, the latter much more rare, but one day when I was rambling along three miles east of the Falls and not far north of Gladstone, I stepped straight into a fellow’s dream and felt it full upon me for several hours. It came about through the progression of these details: a list of murders, a serendipitous hike, the flight of a heron, and a man long dead who laid through the county a rail route to China on the advice of pixies. The pursuit of such progressions is a good way to travel: start with a single, near destination, follow it to the next one revealed, and continue until things lay out their own map for you, something you see in Indian file over your shoulder rather than in front of you beforehand.
That morning I went into the courthouse to try to draw up a list of every murder committed in the county, got daunted when I saw the volumes I’d have to pore through, but, before I quit, learned that James Fisher, the first settler in Chase and an eccentric bachelor, had been bludgeoned to death with an iron bolt and robbed in his cabin at the juncture of the South Fork and the Cottonwood. Here is the 1871 account in the Leader:
About 4 o’clock in the morning [James Fisher] fell asleep, when he was struck a violent blow on the head. He sprang upon the floor, and a violent struggle ensued, in which the assailant succeeded in so disabling Mr. Fisher as to suppose him dead. He then wrapped him in a blanket and pushed him under the bed and endeavored to conceal the blood upon the floor by covering it with ashes; Mr. Fisher however so far recovered as to creep to the door and call for help, bringing his neighbors to his assistance.
I came out of the courthouse into an early spring day of deeply blue sky not yet yellowed by pasture burning, and it crossed my mind to let the wind blow the dust of ledgers off me, so I headed out to look for Fisher’s cabin site. Hoping for a foundation corner, a hearthstone, something, I found nothing, and I ended up idling by the cold meeting of the waters, and I realized how little of the Cottonwood you commonly see because of its deep, narrow, wooded channel through the county. I clambered up the bank and began breaking my way through the tangles along it in a kind of river hike. Just west of the railroad bridge over the Cottonwood, I came out onto a tall and massive and marvelously laid stone abutment with a matching one on the bank opposite, the cut rocks as big as any you can find here. It was apparent the abutments were old yet never used and that somebody had gone to considerable expense for no purpose. I’m as susceptible as anybody to the romance and mystery of hidden ruins, especially ones in rock. I made my way back to the road and got asked the usual question by a fellow in a pickup, Trouble? and I told him about the abutments, and he said, It’s the old Orient line, and moved on, and I thought, Old Og again, the ignis fatuus. I walked and considered, and finally I said, find it or bury it.
I headed down to Matfield Green where, allegedly, Og showed on the land like a faint shadow, and I pulled over near Perkins Spring: even in the light of noon, the old farmstead lay in a forbidding murk, an evil looming again, and I decided not to go in to fill my canteen. (That night when I was drinking a Guinness in Emporia with Joe Hickey, the Thurman anthropologist, I told him Perkins Spring was the only spot in the county where, for no apparent reason, my flesh starts creeping, and he said, There’s a story that when the Perkins place was an old-style tavern on the stage line to El Dorado and Wichita, guests got waylaid there. And one of the Perkins boys said his mother put up Jesse and Frank James one night. Waylaid? I asked. Murdered, he said, but I haven’t found any evidence, and I said, I have.)
I walked up old 13, surprised by how far the leafless trees let me see into the woods along Mercer Creek, and I began anticipating a good look at the heronry—the season was perfect for visibility and activity. At the Jack’s Creek bridge, I stopped to watch a great blue step fastidiously along a shoal, but when I tried to edge closer it jumped and somehow got its six feet of flapping wings up the tree-encumbered creek. Following its flight, I saw a strange, narrow, earthen, truncated pyramid usually covered by foliage; behind me in the roadcut lay the same form, each with some perfection to its angles. Although I was noticing it for the first time, I knew what it was: Old Og, my will-o’-the-wisp, the Orient grade broken open by route 13; I’d driven and walked right through it a dozen times before. In front of me, here in the middle of Kansas, lay a trackbed leading to Cathay—from Kansas to Kansu. Sometimes it’s more invigorating to have your disbelief broken than to have it confirmed. In this most unlikely of places, the Chase County prairie, I’d found an overgrown and almost forgotten route to the court of Hung Wu; to the Hall of Luminous Benevolence, redolent of tables laid with sliced eels caught by cormorants; to eunuchs serving ginseng pickled in rice wine, lotus-seed mooncakes, Fungi of Immortality; to rooms with carved walls hung with scrolls painted in inks made from gamboge and powdered pearls; to hidden closets holding jade vials of dragon-bone elixirs; all in a land of the Sixty-four Hexagrams and the Five Poisons; a land with the drunken Wu Wei fingerpainting bold pictures of cats capable of driving out rats; a place sequestered by a great stone wall filled with rubble and clay and the pounded-in bodies of dead workers.
In the intoxication of discovery, I climbed the grade of Old Og and set off down the Orient Road now thronged with the exotic purplescence of redbuds, yet knowing, somehow, I was still in Chase County. Later, when I tried to describe to a cynical friend my hike down another man’s dream, he said, Is that the secret of happy travel in Kansas—imagining somewhere elset Two-dimensional Rand McNally travelers who see a region as having borders will likely move in only one locality at a time, but travelers who perceive a place as part of a deep landscape in slow rotation at the center of a sphere and radiating infinite lines in an indefinite number of directions will move in several regions at once. But to him I could think only to say that there are 140 ways to spell Kansas.
The man who raised twenty million dollars to build this Orient Road to tap the agricultural wealth of the American Southwest and the mineral resources of northern Mexico along a route to a new Pacific port, Arthur Edward Stilwell, was a devout Christian Scien tist who took his moral tutelage from churchmen and his business counsel from imps in the dark, whom he called the Brownies. One night he awoke suddenly when he heard them advising him to make the terminus of a railroad he was building (today called the Kansas City Southern) not Shreveport, Louisiana, but a new town he would build on Sabine Lake in Texas: to my knowledge, Port Arthur is the only American city founded on the advice of gremlins.
A few years later, in 1900, he lost control of that railroad to “Beta-Million” Gates, a man of easy ethics, and Stilwell, forty years old, despaired so much from his setback that he considered shaving off his large sideburns, things of pride to which he attributed some of his early success because of the air of gravity and maturity they gave him. Casting about for reasons for his failure, he read in a newspaper this sentence by George Ade: If a man is cross-eyed it is a great detriment; if a man is humpbacked it is an act of God; but if a man wears side whiskers it is his own fault. Stilwell deliberated and then acted. Some years later he said of that moment, I stood at another crossroads in my life—on one side the wisdom of George Ade and on the other my beautiful whiskers, locked in a death grip. Ade won. But I decided no profane hand should participate in the final rites over this facial appendage which had played its part in constructing the Kansas City Southern, and that I myself should officiate. (As Port Arthur is the only city founded on the advice of pixies,
so is the Southern the only railroad founded, in part at least, by sidewhiskers.)
Soon after, an acquaintance met the freshly shaved Stilwell on the street and said in surprise, I’ve heard about your trouble, but I didn’t know it was anything as serious as this. In truth, it was no longer so serious because the dream voices had spoken again. At a testimonial dinner to lift Stilwell’s spirits (he undoubtedly knew this to be a double entendre) at the old Midland Hotel in Kansas City, the encomia went on until one o’clock in the morning; then he took the podium among the potted palms and American flags. He was later to say of that moment, I had been for a long time perfectly conscious of my reputation for making rather unexpected moves, and, to utilize a modern expression, I was now playing this presumed faculty off the boards. He accepted a silver loving cup and said a few predictable words about losing the Southern, and then, abruptly, he stunned the large audience: I have designed a railroad sixteen hundred miles long which will bring the Pacific Ocean four hundred miles nearer to Kansas City than any other present route. His friends said: He’s lost both his railroad and sidewhiskers, and now he’s talking about bringing oceans to the prairie. His troubles have unhinged him. But the next day he raised a half million dollars to found one of the last long railroads built in America.
He planned to construct his Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway to the natural harbor at Topolobampo, Mexico—to be renamed Port Stilwell—on the Gulf of California. If voices spoke the notion to him at night, they were apparently lifting ideas from other people, especially the civil engineer Albert Kimsey Owen, who had built a utopian community at Topolobampo and settled it, in part, with Kansas farmers unhappy about the growing social destruction caused by big American corporations. For some years, various men had advocated a route from the middle of America to a West Coast port closer than San Diego, Los Angeles, or San Francisco—even if it was, like Topolobampo, farther from China. But these other men lacked not so much the counsel of spirits as the capacity to move men to believe in a nearly mad dream of Columbian proportions: to make Kansas City the eastern terminus of a trade route with the Indies and Orient. They also lacked Stilwell’s capacity to sell speculative securities and to manipulate reporters and editors. In his youth, he learned his trade by peddling his own patent tonic, and later he made good money selling to laborers cheap housing on an installment plan like insurance (the press loved his slogan: You can live in your endowment policy and raise chickens in its back yard.)
In face and figure and force of personality, Arthur Stilwell might have been the son of Prince Otto von Bismarck: large, Teutonic, great mustache, the power to rouse in men a lust for lucre. In fact, he was the son of a Rochester, New York, jeweler, Charles Stilwell, a business failure as unlike his son as Charles was his father, Hamblin, an owner of Erie Canal packet boats, an investor in the New York Central Railroad, and a vigorous and wealthy man who liked to tell his grandson stories of the building of the canal and the Central. Arthur grew up measuring his achievements not with a jeweler’s calipers but with a railman’s odometer. One of the last things he wrote in a career full of books, articles, poems, songs, photoplays—all dictated by his Corps of Spirits—was this concluding paragraph to a six-part autobiography in the Saturday Evening Post called “I Had a Hunch” (editors discouraged talk of Brownies): When I was twelve years old, I told my grandfather I would go forth and build a railroad. I did not tell him I would go forth and build seven or eight. But in those days of long ago my hunches, like myself, were in their infancy. It must be a mark of some success not to know for certain how many railroads one has founded. In fact, he built four, two of them minor lines.
Stilwell’s plan for the “Orient Short Line” was to acquire right-of-way from Kansas City to Topolobampo immediately but begin building between Wichita and Presidio, Texas, on the Rio Grande so he wouldn’t arouse competitors in Missouri. Although he drove the first spike on the Fourth of July, 1901, at Emporia, the track ran west just a mile to a long dirt grade through Chase and on toward El Dorado in Butler County; eastward to Kansas City the railroad existed, as it does today, only as a dotted line on maps; but between Wichita and Alpine, Texas, and in places in Mexico the track went speedily down. Stilwell made a deal with a transpacific shipping company, and the railroad began earning money, although not enough to offset construction expenses. He knew the Orient line and the land it opened for speculation (where he could make huge profits) would be of little worth until the railroad could be linked to the ocean: preeminently standing in the way were the Sierra Madres and the instability of revolutionary Mexico. If nocturnal voices proffered inventive ideas, they didn’t give any guidance in management, apparently never counseling him to treat one of his contractors, Pancho Villa, with respect; of him Stilwell said, Whenever I met him on the railroad I carefully avoided inviting him into my private car. I could never quite reconcile myself to any close contact with Villa. He was a horrible-looking fellow, always greasy and dirty. There is a well-known photograph of the revolutionary—in a suit, shoes shined—sitting on the steps of an Orient day coach, taken about the time he blew up Stilwell’s Mexican silver mine; to the day of his death, the American never understood why Villa did not simply expropriate the mine, as he did everything else.
In 1912 the Orient went into receivership and Stilwell went out as president. That year, before Congress began enacting its great antitrust legislation, he and his wife, Jennie, who had never failed him, moved to New York City, and he gave a speech in Carnegie Hall to a thousand people. He said, The money trust has been chasing me for fifteen years because I was successful, and at last they have thrown my road into the hands of receivers. I tell you, gentlemen, this country could be ruined within two weeks if the group of men who control the currency of the country in New York wanted to do it. It is perfectly awful to think that in this country, supposed to be free, that a man trying to be on the level and do the right thing is persecuted and almost ruined by this system. Because I had the idea that a railroad was built to serve the people, I was hounded and persecuted. The New York financial interests who have been fighting me knew I was a dangerous man. For sixteen years I have been followed by detectives. Every friend I meet is given a note telling him to have nothing to do with me. If I go to a club with a friend, that friend is handed a note saying I am no good. My only object is to have the Golden Rule dusted off and put back into practice—that’s all I ask.
To a degree, Stilwell was right that Wall Street had helped block his success, and he was also correct when he said a few days later, Building and running railroads in Mexico is a terrible thing. (Especially if you pay more heed to Brownies than to Pancho Villa.) And there were other problems: the lucre of the Orient, at least then, was more fable than fact, and the wealthy American and British investors underwriting the project were more interested in making money than in building a railroad; as they began backing away, even the force of Stilwell’s salesmanship, the primary asset of the Orient line, could no longer buy the time the project required.
Soon after his railroad went into receivership, a New York elevator fell with Stilwell in it, leaving him an invalid, a symbolic accident a nineteenth-century novelist would cherish. He withdrew from business and spent his last years writing, his books advocating what were then ideas on the fringe: trust breaking, the abolition of the Monroe Doctrine, pacifism (he urged in 1915 that a first step toward disarmament would be the sinking of all warships on Christmas Day), a Jewish state in Palestine. He at last confessed to attending voices in his dreams, and, about himself, he wrote, “Is the Author a spiritualist?” In the common acceptance of the term he is not a spiritualist and he has read very little on the subject, [but] he is a spiritual-list. He lists for spiritual messages. The New York press, seeing good copy in such parlance from a railroad magnate, came to him for many interviews; even to the end, Stilwell could talk himself into the news. After admitting to his sprites, he wrote a verse:
Do you wish to know where the Brownies stay,
Who romp all night and in moonlight play,
A merry happy little band?
They live on the shores of Slumberland.
They live on the shores of Slumberland.
From their apartment in the Esplanade Building on West End Avenue, Arthur and Jennie watched the Orient struggle along under its receivers, men of small daring and without advice from night messengers, but men with some savvy; William Kemper, of the famous Kansas City banking family, personally made several million dollars by buying out jumpy stockholders cheap and later selling the railroad to the Santa Fe in October of 1928. Except for the Sierra Madre portion and one other in Mexico and a seventy-mile section just north of the Rio Grande, Stilwell’s Orient Short Line was then complete from Wichita to the sea. The Santa Fe soon finished the American gap and then sold the Mexican trackage, and a third of a century later, Mexico surmounted the Sierra Madres and opened its line: Stilwell’s dream route was complete except for a hundred and some miles across the Flint Hills and into Kansas City, a portion the Santa Fe had already laid its own rails over, in places nearly touching the old Orient grade.
Arthur Stilwell, whose Brownies had also given him advice on how to live to be 140, died halfway there, and he missed by twenty-five days seeing the Santa Fe take over his dream, and so did Jennie (whom the night had revealed to Arthur some half century earlier). Immediately after Stilwell died, she called upon the spirits to help her reach him. A few days later, she stepped out of a twelfth-story window of the Esplanade; her note said, I must go to Arthur. Some reports held that Stilwell had only a thousand dollars at his death, while others claimed he was a millionaire, but a will has never been found, nor have the cremated remains of the couple, despite a long search by officials in Port Arthur (someone finally suggested, Has anyone checked with the boys from Slumberland?). I know nothing about the whereabouts of Stilwell’s ashes, but I know where the monument to his oriental dream is: it’s a pair of massive cut-stone abutments on the Cottonwood River in Chase County, Kansas, which never carried a single locomotive.