Made In America - Bill Bryson [106]
With the arrival of train travel, the stagecoach was instantly eclipsed, and little wonder. Trains were not only faster and increasingly more comfortable, but also cheaper. From coast to coast the trip took eight to ten days at an average speed of about 20 m.p.h. (rising to a giddy 35 m.p.h. on the faster stretches). The one-way fare from Omaha to Sacramento was $100 first class (plus $4 a night for a berth in one of the new Pullman sleepers), $75 for second class, $40 for third.
Pullman cars, originally Pullman Hotel-Cars, were named for George M. Pullman who developed them in 1865 and dining-cars in 1868. To accommodate his 12,000 workers, Pullman built a model community, Pullman, Illinois (now part of Chicago), where workers lived in company houses and shopped at company stores, thus ensuring that most of what they made returned to the company. That Pullman porters were nearly always black was not a result of enlightened employment practices, but a by-product of abysmal pay. The custom of calling porters ‘George’, whatever their name, was apparently taken from Pullman’s own first name.19
Among railway terms that have passed into general familiarity were caboose, iron horse, cow catcher, jerkwater town, to featherbed, to ball the jack, to ride the rails and to ride the gravy train. A gravy train was a good run, either because it paid well or wasn’t too taxing. Surprisingly it isn’t recorded before 1945. To featherbed, meaning to employ more workers than necessary, is also recent. It isn’t found before 1943. Caboose is much older. From the Dutch kabuis, it was used to describe various parts of a ship, notably the galley, long before it was appropriated by the railways. A jerkwater town was literally that – a place, usually desolate, where trains took on water from a trackside tank by jerking on a rope. To ball the jack, to travel quickly, even recklessly, is entirely uncertain. It may have some connection with high ball, a signal to proceed.
Two other terms more loosely associated with railway travel are bum and hobo. Hobo was first attested in a newspaper in Ellensburgh, Washington, in 1891, but no one has ever come up with a certain explanation of its etymology. Among the theories: that it is a contraction of ‘homeward bound’ or that it has something to do with the salutation ‘Ho! Beau!’, which sounds a trifle refined for vagrants, but in fact was a common cry among railway workers in the nineteenth century and would certainly have been familiar to those who rode the rails. Bum in the sense of a tramp appears to be a shortening of the German Bummler, a loafer and ne’er-do-well.
Though we tend to associate urban congestion with the automobile and the shortcomings of our own age, horse-driven traffic clogged cities long before cars came along. In 1864 New York City built two miles of underground tunnels through Central Park to try to keep things moving, and dubbed them sub-ways. The British still use subway in the sense of a subterranean passageway (or, a cynic might add, public housing for vagrants) but in America that sense lasted just twenty-nine years before being usurped by the new urban underground railways in 1893.20 The automobile may have its drawbacks, but at least it doesn’t normally attract flies or drop things you need to step around. The filth of horses was a constant problem for cities well into this century, one that we can barely imagine now. In 1900 some dedicated official in Rochester, New York, calculated that the manure produced by the city’s 15,000 horses would in a year cover a one-acre square to a depth of 175 feet. Often kept in insanitary conditions and worked hard through all weathers, horses not only drew flies but dropped like them. At the turn of the century, 15,000 horses a year died on the streets of New York, 12,000 on the streets of Chicago.21 Sometimes they were left for days. Between the flies, the manure and the steaming corpses, there