Business: Gold and Iron

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It was a sad affair. Their friendship, outwardly one of those lonely and grand alliances between ambition and aristocracy, was in fact a bond of respect, affection even; Mr. Harriman died soon after the quarrel; Mr. Fish did not return; the Illinois Central slipped from dullness to corruption. Petty officials went about their cheating" in a mist of intrigue behind which huge expansions waited unannounced. The Panama Canal was to be built and the Illinois Central, as the mainland end of the Canal traffic, was to become the greatest north-and-south artery, its Panama Limited, perhaps the best train of the continent; the Illinois Central was to acquire the Yazoo & Mississippi; the Central of Georgia; the Indianapolis Southern; the Chicago, Memphis & Gulf; the Gulf & Ship Island Railroads; and to have (in 1924) 63,090 employes, besides proposing to lease the Alabama & Vicksburg; Shreveport & Pacific; Southern Illinois & Kentucky Railways, but things were in a parlous state with the Illinois Central when, in 1881, a man named Charles Markham got a job as a section hand on the Santa Fé.

He was broad and deliberate and 20", with spatulate fingers, attentive eyes, and the gnarled, binding muscles of a man who has swung a pick before he was grown. Born in Clarksville, Tenn., he had run away from school at 14; at least, he had run as far as the station where, wrapping his legs around the rods of a freight car, he followed Horace Greeley's advice and the course of the sun. After a few months he hired out to the Southern Pacific as la.borer and general utility man around the station at Deming, N. M. He stayed there for six years; six years had shown him what a station agent had to do and he got a job as agent at Lordsburg, N. M., then agent at Benson, Ariz., then agent at Reno, Nev., and, in 1897, agent at Fresno, Calif.

The people at Fresno liked him. He could get them more privileges from the railroad than anyone else, they found, because he knew how to present things to the officials. At Fresno he made a little discovery, a new way to pack wine-barrels in a freight car. The general manager, interested, asked him to see what he could do with the problem of packing wheat. He thought of a way that would fill 99% of the car instead of 66%. He was sent out to solicit freight and passenger business. He got so much business that he was promoted to assistant freight manager. In 1901 he became general manager and vice president of the Southern Pacific and when J. T. Harrihan, president of the Illinois Central died in a train wreck, the Harriman interests, still looking for another Fish, asked him to be president.