Ten years from the close of the war Colonel Jewett was at the head of one of the most promising railroads in the country. Prosperity followed peace, the West began to build up, the Pacific Railroad was completed, and the little Galena line, with a new charter and a new name, had become an important link connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific.
For nearly half a century Jewett has been at the front, and has never been defeated. The discredited captain of that promising company of car-boys has become one of our great "captains of industry." He is to-day President of one of the most important railroads in the world, whose black fliers race out nightly over twin paths of steel, threading their way in and out of not less than nine states, with nearly nine thousand miles of main line. He has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams; and his success is due largely to the fact that when, in his youth, he mounted to ride to fame and fortune, he did not allow the first jolt to jar him from the saddle. He is made of the stuff that stands.
THE MILWAUKEE RUN
Henry Hautman was born old. He had the face and figure of a voter at fifteen. His skin did not fit his face,—it wrinkled and resembled a piece of rawhide that had been left out in the rain and sun.
Henry's father was a freighter on the Santa Fé trail when Independence was the back door of civilization, opening on a wilderness. Little Henry used to ride on the high seat with his father, close up to the tail of a Missouri mule, the seventh of a series of eight, including the trailer which his father drove in front of the big wagon. It was the wind of the west that tanned the hide on Henry's face and made him look old before his time.
At night they used to arrange the wagons in a ring, in which the freighters slept.
One night Henry was wakened by the yells of Indians, and saw men fighting. Presently he was swung to the back of a cayuse behind a painted warrior, and as they rode away the boy, looking back, saw the wagons burning and guessed the rest.
Later the lad escaped and made his way to Chicago, where he began his career on the rail, and where this story really begins.
It was extremely difficult, in the early days, to find sober, reliable young men to man the few locomotives in America and run the trains. A large part of the population seemed to be floating, drifting west, west, always west. So when this stout-shouldered, strong-faced youth asked for work, the round-house foreman took him on gladly. Henry's boyhood had been so full of peril that he was absolutely indifferent to danger and a stranger to fear. He was not even afraid of work, and at the end of eighteen months he was marked up for a run. He had passed from the wiping gang to the deck of a passenger engine, and was now ready for the road.