Gold and Iron

Charles H. Markham, 65, for 16 years president of the Illinois Central, had a new position made to order for him last week--Chairman of the Board of Directors. He had been ill for four months and his associates, "desiring to preserve his health and his services for the I. C.," voted Lawrence Aloysius Downs, now head of the Central of Georgia Railroad, to succeed him as president.

Railroad men have a way of being self-made. Lawrence Downs is thoroughly a part of this tradition. After graduating from Purdue he went to work as a rodman for the I. C., rose steadily through the engineering department. A heavy man, mentally and physically, his particular talent is a blunt, wholehearted affability which endears him to all members of a profession in which this gift is the norm of social intercourse. "Handling men," he has said, "is largely a matter of getting them to like you." Charles Markham has said the same thing; Stuyvesant Fish said it too in the days when he was president of the Illinois Central. Presidents Fish, Markham, Downs--successively they built their lives into a railroad.

Once there were steamboats on the Mississippi. Writers, thinking about those boats, fancy a certain gallantry, lost now, in the passengers who used them; the names of the boats, too, were beautiful and proud--The Anna Linington, Belle Zane, Magnolia, The Doubloon, The Fashion, The Great Republic. And it is true that people on shore could hear music blown over dark waters from the frail and lighted decks; niggers were fiddling there, gamblers in tall hats were playing faro, planters and belles and bankers swept down the river; they are gone. ' But who shall say that another age, because it happens to be over, is prettier than our own? The proud boats carried produce as well as gallantry; the niggers who fiddled helped, in their off moments, to carry bales aboard; and when the boats quit the river it was because a new and quicker freight had joined Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico. Some Eastern financiers had built the Illinois Central.

The undertaking flourished from the first. The river boats offered little competition and had pretty well disappeared by the time Edward H. Harriman was looking for a Chicago entrance for his Union Pacific trunk line from Council Bluffs. He had bought his way into the Illinois Central which Stuyvesant Fish controlled. Now Mr. Fish was a gentleman who tempered empire building with elegance; he did not believe that a person of quality need handle a railroad less gracefully than he would a cravat. His cigars, acumen, and the atmosphere of success and imported cologne that enveloped his person charmed all the southerners with whom he had occasion to come in contact. But he made one blunder. He quarreled with Mr. Harriman, was fired.

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 Fe.

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.