(Mil

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE PIONEER
"He is swart from the glow of the merciless sun,
And his muscles are sore from the work he has done;
He has builded his home where the prairie wolves
roam —
He's the Hewer, the Blazer of Trails.
"He is crude with the strength of the seeker of toil;
From the hot, barren wastes he is gathering spoil
For a nation that lives from the bounty he gives —
He's the Builder, the Winner of Ways.
"Where the silent wastes bake in the summer's hot
glow,
Where the forests are choked in the shroud of the
snow,
By his brain and his brawn a new nation is born —
He goes forward to conquer new realms.
"And the world has its heroes of lace and gold braid,
That are honored and wined for the waste they have
made;
But the world little knows of the debt that it owes
To the Hewer, the Blazer of Trails."

ALBERT E. HUMPHREYS

THE PIONEER
A BIOGRAPHY

BY
ROBERT FROTHINGHAM

ttbe fmtcfterbocfcer press
NEW YORK
J920

^

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. — Ancestry  1
II. — A Prophet without Honor . 8
III. — A Hazard of New Fortunes . 21
IV. — The Builder at Work . . 31
V. — The Mesaba Trail Blazers . 40
VI. — Under a New Flag . . 49
VII. — Back to the Southland . . 59
VIII.— The Story of Talt Hall 71
IX. — The Call of the West . 79
X. — The Romance of Big Muddy . 94
XI. — Honor's Debt Paid in Full . 101
XII.— The Old Brown Suit .110
XIII.— The Awakening . .121

ILLUSTRATIONS
Albert E. Humphreys' Photograph
Frontispiece
The Humphreys' Homestead at Sisson-
ville .....
The Old Grist Mill at Sissonville
Mining Iron Ore in the Mesaba
On the Pocataligo River .
Log-driving on the Pocataligo .
Mt. Zion Church and the Humphreys
Burial Plot ....
Union Mission Camp in the Hills
Union Mission Camp Swimming Hole

10 16
40
6080
116
122
128

vii

THE PIONEER

CHAPTER I
ANCESTRY
"I shall not ask the High Gods
For aught that they can give;
They gave the greatest gift of all
When first they bade me live.
Great gift of dawn and starlight,
Of sea and grass and river;
With leave to toil and laugh and weep
And praise the sun forever."
In that matchless allegory by Charles
Rann Kennedy, The Servant in the House, he
paints a thrilling picture of the upbuilding of
the Church of the Brotherhood of Man in the
following words :
"You must understand, this is no pile of
stones and unmeaning timber. It is a living
thing. 1

THE PIONEER
"When you enter it you hear a sound, a
sound as of some mighty poem chanted.
Listen long enough, and you will learn that it
is made up of the beating of human hearts, of
the nameless music of men's souls — that is,
if you have ears. If you have eyes, you will
presently see the church itself — a looming
mystery of many shapes and shadows, leap
ing sheer from floor to dome: the work of no
ordinary builder!
"The pillars of it go up like the brawny
trunks of heroes: the sweet human flesh of
men and women is molded about its bul
warks, strong, impregnable: the faces of
little children laugh out from every corner
stone : the terrible spans and arches of it are
the joined hands of comrades; and up in the
heights and spaces there are inscribed the
numberless musings of all the dreamers of
the world. It is yet building — building and
built upon. Sometimes the work goes for
ward in deep darkness : sometimes in blinding
light : now beneath the burden of unutterable
anguish: now to the tune of a great laughter
and heroic shoutings Uke the cry of thunder.
Sometimes, in the silence of the night time,
2

ANCESTRY
one may hear the tiny hammerings of the
comrades at work up in the dome — the com
rades that have climbed ahead."
This is the picture that rises before my
mind's eye as I commence this biography of
my friend and companion Albert E. Hum
phreys, that courageous soul of the Southland,
that lover of liberty and his fellow man who
has kept his faith without a stain amid a sor
did world. It is easy to speak good of the
dead; it is correspondingly difficult to write
restrainedly of the living whose name still
stands as a synonym for deeds accomplished,
who has always taken the part of the weak
against the strong, who plays the game of life
in a big, clean, manly fashion, and of whom
it may be said that unselfishness is his virtue
and human dignity his religion.
A rich heritage of self-reliance, the char
acteristic product of a Scotch-Irish ances
try, and practically nothing beside, awaited
young Humphreys' advent into the world in
January, 1860. The little hamlet of Sisson-
ville, on the banks of the Pocataligo River,
Kanawha County, not far from the city of
Charleston, Virginia (now West Virginia),
3

THE PIONEER
was probably as desirable as any spot in the
State for the birth of a man-child who was
destined to become, successively, a prophet
without honor and a citizen of whom his
native State would one day be proud. So
runs the world away!
Mr. Humphreys' father, Ira A. Humphreys,
was born at the foot of the Blue Ridge
Mountains near Charlotteville, Virginia, in
1834; his mother was a Dawson, born in 1833
of sturdy Kanawha County stock, known for
generations throughout the Sissonville coun
tryside; both attained length of years and
went to their final earthly rest in the old Mount
Zion burying ground at Sissonville. Hum
phreys' grandfather was Spicer Humphreys,
also a Virginian, and a collateral descendant of
Joshua Humphreys, the designer of the Con
stitution and other famous frigates of the
War of 1812, and commonly known as the
"Father of the American Navy." Spicer
Humphreys was a prosperous planter and a
wholesale dealer in tobacco, which latter
brought him a tidy fortune and finally ruined
him, which calls for no particular comment at
this late day, except as to its bearing on an
4

ANCESTRY
incident which changed the whole course of
his life and doubtless that of his descendants
as well. In addition to being an enterprising
business man, he was somewhat of a mechani
cal genius and a constructing engineer. He
invented and built the first threshing machine,
commonly known in that day as a chaff-piler,
of which the threshing machine of to-day is
practically a duplicate with the exception of
the separator, fan, and stacker which were
added by Cyrus McCormick after Spicer
Humphreys' death, and which laid the foun
dation of thegreatMcCormickfamilyfortune;
and thereby hangs a tale.
Spicer Humphreys' partner in the tobacco
business was a speculator with Napoleonic
aspirations as a tobacco financier. He tried
to corner the market and, for a time,
succeeded. Incidentally, he endorsed the
notes of a large number of tobacco growers
with whom his firm dealt. In those days
they used to haul tremendous loads of "the
weed," drawn by four-horse teams, to the
Richmond and Baltimore markets. When
Spicer's partner cornered the market by
buying up the tobacco crop and holding it for
5

THE PIONEER
higher prices, it looked as if they had the
world by the tail, and Spicer had equally
roseate visions of financing his chaff-piler
and making a barrel of money. He didn't
know, however, that his partner had endorsed
all those nice little notes. And when the
crash came, as crashes have a way of coming,
without regard to periods of time and the
human equation, Spicer Humphreys' dreams
of revolutionizing the grain threshing indus
try of the country vanished into thin air.
Crushed by his failure, he gathered up the few
belongings that were left and, with his wife
and six children, moved into the mountains
and located a little home on Craig's Creek, a
tributary of the James River, where he died
a few years later, in the fall of 1852. It was
just about this time that Cyrus McCormick
appeared on the scene, added his improve
ments to Spicer Humphreys' chaff-piler, and
sailed into fame and fortune.
With that characteristic pride of the
Southerner, Spicer Humphreys' widow,
handicapped as she was by her advancing
years, decided to move even farther away
from the scene of her husband's failure.
6

ANCESTRY
Not long after his death she shook the dust of
Craig County off her feet and, with her five
sons, who had arrived at man's estate, and
one daughter, crossed the Alleghany Moun
tains, headed for the western part of the State,
followed down the Greenbrier, New, and
Kanawha rivers, and settled in the Uttle
town of Sissonville, on the PocataUgo River,
in Kanawha County: a sparsely settled
county, covered with virgin forest and filled
with wild game. It was amid such primeval
surroundings — a priceless heritage to his
creative instinct and self-reliance — that the
subject of this sketch was born.

CHAPTER II
a prophet without honor
" Not for the glory of winning,
Not for the fear of the night;
Shunning the battle is sinning —
O spare me the heart to fight!"
Like most of our forefathers who were
trained to work with their hands, Spicer
Humphreys in his younger days was a first-
class carpenter and builder. He beUeved
that every man should learn a trade, and he
brought up his boys accordingly. His son
Ira, who was an expert millwright, could go
into the woods with an old-fashioned scratch-
awl, a square, an adz, a broad-axe and a
chalk-line and hew out the frame for a build
ing of any size, as constructed during his
lifetime in that part of the country. After
he was sixty years of age, he hewed out the
timber for a mill, four stories in height, which
is still standing near the old home at Sisson-
8

A PROPHET WITHOUT HONOR
viUe. The timber was hauled to the mill
yard and there laid out with a square and
chalk-line, the mortices and the pins being
hewed out after the manner of the con
struction of the Mormon Tabernacle at Salt
Lake City by the pioneers of that early day.
The settlement of the family at Sissonville
in the early fifties was followed by the con
struction of a home, then a mill, then a store,
all of which was the handiwork of Ira A.
Humphreys and over which he presided for
many years until his death. During the
period of reconstruction following the Civil
War, there was apparently little ahead for
the boy Albert but to follow in his father's
footsteps and — bar those few months out of
each year which were devoted to a common
school education — he learned to run the
mill, "tend store" and occasionally pilot a
log raft down the Pocataligo River, collo
quially known as the "Poca," this latter by
reason of his father's having successfully
embarked in the lumber business with which
the youngster had become quite as familiar
as he was with the store and the mill.
When a little past fifteen, the boy Albert
9

THE PIONEER
decided that he wanted to become a school
teacher. That mechanical genius which had
manifested itself in the life of his grandfather
Spicer Humphreys, had "broken out" in the
boy in the shape of a passion for mathe
matics; as his schoolmates put it, he "just et
compound fractions and could do sums in his
sleep." Accordingly, his father sent him for
a term at Marshall College at Huntington,
West Virginia, that being all the training
necessary to capture the job of teaching the
district school at Sigmond's School House,
Poca District. Just to put on a little polish,
he attended the County Teachers' Insti
tute at Charleston, West Virginia, where he
secured a Teacher's No. 2 Certificate in
September, 1876. The first Monday in
November of that year found him duly
installed at Sigmond's, five miles from Sisson
ville, age sixteen, salary twenty-five dollars
per month, boarding at the house of the
trustee who got him the job at the H. C. of
L— $1.25 per week.
Now, it happens down in that particular
part of the country — or at least it did in
those good old days — that all country elec-
10

¦XX

A PROPHET- WITHOUT HONOR
tions are held in the district schoolhouses.
On Tuesday, therefore, following the first
day of his incumbency, the school was dis
missed and Sigmond's fount of learning was
turned into a brawling election booth. His
tory doesn't say whether the young professor
resented the profanation or whether the
trustee raised the rent on him after the first
day's board; at any rate — young Albert, on
going down to the schoolhouse on the morn
ing of election day, decided that he didn't
want to teach school any longer. Having
paid his board one week in advance, however,
he stuck it out to the end of the week when
he walked back to Sissonville and resumed
his place in the store, the mill, the log-rafts,
and the home. "Sic transit gloria mundi!"
His father smiled indulgently as the young
lad returned to the paternal roof-tree and
took his old place as the chief assistant of
the whole outfit. Incidentally he showed
his appreciation by taking his son into
partnership. He is a wise father who knows when to let
the reins lie loose over the dashboard and
when to check the young speedster up sharp.
11

THE PIONEER
Apparently Ira Humphreys knew his boy
pretty well for from that time young Albert's
development, both physically and mentally,
was rapid enough for the most ambitious
father. During the next three years he shot
up to over six feet in stature, being built in
proportion. He became a shrewd trader.
He knew how to deal with the people in his
territory. He became a keen student of
human nature and developed exceptional
salesmanship ability in addition to his
shrewdness as a buyer. There was one
thing he never forgot, however, and that was
the capacity to put himself in the other man's
place and judge accordingly. Fairness was
his cardinal virtue and his reputation went
before him wherever he had deaUngs. His
word was as good as his bond and deals
involving thousands of dollars passed through
his hands without even a line to record them.
Young Humphreys was coming into his own
and everybody was glad, most of all his father
who looked to him now to bear the burden
and the heat of the day. It was fine; it was
splendid. The eleven years that elapsed
from the date of the partnership to 1887 saw
12

A PROPHET WITHOUT HONOR
the mercantile end of the business, the milling
and the lumber expanded to their fullest
capacity, including the addition of the buying
and selling of livestock. The importance of
the lumber business took precedence over
everything else. Young Humphreys, who
was then twenty-seven years old, had devel
oped into a successful speculator in timber
lands. He was handling the timber output
of the whole surrounding country. He had
his own lumber camps and at the same time
was acting as middleman for men who were
his competitors but who, knowing of his
unswerving fidelity to truth and principle,
preferred to put their deals through him even
though he was their competitor.
The Humphreys' rafts went down the
Kanawha, the Ohio, and the lower Ohio
rivers by the thousands and were sold to
sawmills scattered all the way from Catletts-
burg to Cincinnati and Louisville. Their
transactions ran into the hundreds of thou
sands of dollars for which the Humphreys
Company took in settlement the notes of the
milling companies with which they dealt.
And then one day, something happened; on
13

THE PIONEER
March 11, 1887, a large milling concern in
Cincinnati of whose paper the Humphreys
Company held a large amount, failed; the
failure brought about the failure of a similar
concern, both of which handled the great
majority of the Humphreys' business,
amounting to a total of $400,000. One of
these companies paid ten cents on the dollar,
the other paid nothing. The actual liabili
ties of the Humphreys Company to the
people for whom it was acting as middleman
amounted to $12,000. The crash wiped out
the Humphreys estate and left the young man
Albert in debt more than $200,000. Quite a
problem for a young man of twenty-seven,
particularly as he was not the kind of a man
to go through bankruptcy and proposed to
pay off every dollar with interest, which
he finally did, after working several years
for what is familiarly known as a "dead
horse." It is an iron law of the world's welfare that
only those ought to be saved who can
accomplish their own salvation. Educate
the people of all lands in sanitation, preven
tive medicine, and all phases of the healing art
14

A PROPHET WITHOUT HONOR
— and when they have so far progressed that
they understand these things, believe in them,
and practice them voluntarily, they will
have become fit for salvation from pestilence
and unsanitary lives — not before. The point
I wish to make is that Albert Humphreys,
under the impact of such a crushing blow —
and especially at that youthful period of
his life — could not possibly, then and there,
have heroically resolved to clear up his
debts. Such resolutions, made at such times,
are more apt to be hysterical than otherwise.
The only thing that saved him and his ideal
ism was the fact that he had never considered
such a possibility as susceptible to more than
one solution. To avail himself of the pro
tection that the law throws around a man
who fails honestly never entered his mind for
an instant. To fail to pay a dollar that he
owed was unthinkable on the face of it.
There was no possible excuse or reason that
would have satisfied a man built on his lines.
His whole upbringing as a lad and his experi
ence as a business man revolted at the very
thought of repudiating an obligation whether
or not he was morally responsible. He could
15

THE PIONEER
have contemplated suicide just as easily as
he could have considered an excuse for not
paying his debts. In other words, he met
that issue theoretically years before and had
planned his life upon it and the only thing for
him to do was to see it through, that's the
way he was constructed. Our American
youth may be thankful for such examples of
lofty idealism combined with innate integrity
— they are rare, very rare.
It is essential to any considerable satis
faction with life that a man should have some
spiritual impulse. There must burn or at
least smolder in him some spark of preference
for truth, some prejudice, unsuborned, in
favor of righteousness. It is impossible to
make life successful on a purely material
basis. The picture will bear another stroke
of the brush; can you, young man or oldster
before whose eye this page may pass, imagine
yourself "broke" at the age of twenty-seven
and in debt $200,000 at the same time, with
your mind fully settled upon paying the debt
as a matter of course and not even consider
ing the possibility of avoiding it, especially
as your own moral responsibiUty was not
16

THE OLD GRIST MILL AT SISSONVILLE

A PROPHET WITHOUT HONOR
involved? Don't all speak at once, the
Recording Angel is listening.
Here is a good place to bring in a bit of
reminiscence, expressed in Mr. Humphreys'
own words, covering this dark period of his
life and the bright ray of light shot into it
through the medium of that friendship and
confidence between man and man which is
one of the beautiful things of earth :
"I remember the morning after my fail
ure," said he, "when the world seemed the
darkest in history to me. I hardly knew
where to turn. I felt that the world was
against me, that every man would look on me
as a bankrupt, as a failure, — a man in whom
business men could place no confidence.
Frankly, I would just as soon have the word
Criminal branded on my back as the word
Bankrupt, without reference to the merits of
the case. But — as I argued with myself, the
only thing for me to do was to go to work and
get the money together to pay my debts.
One of the first men that I called upon was
C. C. Lewis, of Charleston, West Virginia.
He was a wholesale grocer — one of the firm
of P. H. Noyes & Company. I owed them
2 17

THE PIONEER
$1,367. I did not have a dollar, either in the
bank or in my pocket. I had stripped myself
completely and turned everything over to
my assignees. I told the two members of
the firm — Messrs. Lewis and Noyes — that I
did not want them to worry about what I was
owing them; being a young man with many
good working years ahead, I felt sure I would
pay every dollar I owed them.
"Mr. Lewis turned to me and said: 'Don't
worry about what you owe this firm. If we
have anything that you need in the way of
funds or friendly assistance in working out
your problem, or if we can help you in any
way to secure money to rebuild your busi
ness, remember that we are your real friends,
and all you have to do is to command us.'
"For nearly four years, I tried to 'beat
back' in my home country. I would secure
options at from $2 to $5 per acre, on land
upon which vast tracts of valuable virgin
timber stood and in which there were four or
five seams of bituminous coal from four to
seven feet in thickness, with oil and gas
possibilities, land that is to-day worth $150
to $200 per acre — and I tried to interest the
18

A PROPHET WITHOUT HONOR
leading business men of Charleston in the
future of the wonderful country in which
these properties were located, some of them
less than twenty-five miles from Charleston,
on the principal waterways flowing into the
Kanawha. "Their only reply to my appeal for help in
handling these wonderfully attractive prop
ositions was a skeptical smile and a little
fatherly advice to let such wild-cat specu
lations alone. It was then that I said to
myself: 'I'm a prophet without honor in my
own country. I can never pay my debts if I
remain in Kanawha.' Then I turned my
face to the great Northwest and moved to
Duluth, Minnesota." And it is worthy of
note that he did not go alone. That dark
year of 1887 was brightened by his wedding
with Miss Alice K. Boyd of Ripley, Ohio, on
November 3d. In all her husband's varying
fortunes, down to the present day, Mrs.
Humphreys has been a helpmeet in the
truest sense of the word, which her tempera
mental partner jovially attests in the lingo
of his profession: "Absolutely the richest
strike I ever made." She brought him two
19

THE PIONEER
stalwart sons: Ira Boyd, born February 18,
1890, and Albert E., junior, born October
18, 1893, both of whom are actively interested
in their father's business. A third son,
William, born in May, 1896, died in infancy.

20

CHAPTER III
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
"Hast thou forgot the open way,
The winding way, the wandering way,
With freedom of strong sun and rain
To clear the roving heart of pain?"
That is an eloquent story told of the
Mississippi River pilot who was asked by a
passenger if he knew all the shoals and sand
bars in the river. "Yes," he answered, "I
have been stuck on every one of 'em." What
more blessed teacher is there than Dame
Experience? Preachers come and preachers
go, our elders lay down the law before our
childlike and trusting natures; we listen and
we believe and — straightway we are off to do
a little experimenting "on our own," just as
our fathers did before us. And — when we
get our fingers burnt, the elders are prone to
look wise and forget that they did the self
same thing themselves in their salad days.
21

THE PIONEER
If they didn't, then they're not fit to be our
elders, that's all. We know only that por
tion of the world which we have traveled over;
and we are never a whit wiser than our own
experiences. And so it comes about that a
man measures everything by his own foot-
rule; that if he is ignoble, all the ignobleness
in the world looks out upon him and claims
kindred with him; if noble, all the nobleness
in the world does the like. Shakespeare is
always the same height with his reader.
In the minds of some men, youth is a crime,
mistakes are something never to be forgotten,
and "the law and the prophets" consists
principally in concealing one's weaknesses
from one's fellow men — just as if it could be
done for any great length of time. And so we
see that Charleston's business men could not
forget that Albert Humphreys had failed.
Praises be! we look at such failures as his a
little differently to-day. In this generation
we like to feel that a man to whom we entrust
our money has "been down the line," run
afoul of the sand bars, stubbed his toe, and
done his share of floundering around before
he found himself. In short, we'll take a
22

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
chance on a practical man who knows the
pitfalls of his business but heaven deliver us
from the theorist and the "sure-thing" man.
Indeed, it's not an uncommon thing to-day
to hear the question propounded in reference
to a man whose record is being investigated:
"Has he ever been through a failure?" In
other words — "can he stand the gaff?"
Unfortunately for themselves and the pro
gress of their own fair city, the Charleston
wiseacres, by reason of their narrow view and
unsympathetic attitude, forced a young man
of unsullied honor, indomitable energy and
pride, who had the greatest incentive in the
world to prove his real qualities right there in
his own town, to seek pastures new.
Albert Humphreys left Charleston and the
next place we find him in is the city of
Duluth, Minnesota. He went there, pri
marily, to look up an investment proposition
at the suggestion of a friend. While there
his attention was called to the possibilities of
the country immediately north of Duluth, at
that time commonly known as the Vermillion
and Mesaba Iron Ranges. Being a natural-
born pioneer he went up to "spy out the
23

THE PIONEER
land" and while spending the night in a
renovated bunk-house called, for the lack of
a better term, a hotel, he overheard a con
versation between three lumberjacks who
were playing penny ante beneath the smoky
rays of an old kerosene lamp, with white
beans for chips :
"I wish I had some money and knew John
McKinley," said one.
"Why?" said the other.
"Well," rejoined the first speaker, "I was
coining across country to-day, packing
through from the west of the Range, and I
noticed in the northwest quarter of Town
ship 58, Range 16, some mighty fine iron ore.
John McKinley is so busy cutting timber
that I guess he never stops to think of the
value of the ore on his property. I could
tell him something about it if I had any
money to back up my story" — and the Uttle
game went on while Humphreys lay there in
his bunk repeating over in his mind: "North
west quarter, Section 2, 58-16." The next
day found him back in Duluth, looking up
John McKinley. He located him in a brief
half-day and secured a thirty-day option on
24

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
twelve forty-acre tracts of land valued at
$60,000 for which he gavehis checkfor$l,000.
Inside of a couple of hours more he had
engaged a mining engineer and two men,
started them for the Range with the neces
sary equipment, tools, etc., to open a camp
and locate a pit near the spot described, and
report thirty days later to him in Duluth on
his return from Charleston. Then our enter
prising young friend caught the evening train
out of Duluth in order to beat the arrival of
his $1,000 check on a Charleston bank, if so
be he might be lucky enough to get the money
together to meet it, not to mention the $59,
000 due thirty days later. He managed to
raise $25,000 amongst some of his old
Charleston friends and in thirty days was
back in Duluth with enough money to com
promise with John McKinley on three forty-
acre tracts at $25,000 instead of twelve at
$60,000 and the lease was signed. During
the next few days a company was organized
with 125,000 shares of capital stock at $2.50
per share of which John McKinley bought
12,000 shares himself for which he paid $6,000
in cash and returned Mr. Humphreys' notes
25

THE PIONEER
for $24,000— a total transaction of $30,000,
which deal eventually made McKinley a
wealthy man. Meanwhile a large deposit of
that fine iron ore which has made the name
Mesaba famous the world over, had been
located by the Humphreys' engineering corps.
Within thirty days the stock was selling for
five dollars per share and the first boom the
great Mesaba Iron Range had ever known
was being flashed from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. The tide had turned for Humphreys.
Within ninety days after he landed in Duluth
on his first trip from Charleston, he had at his
disposal, any hour of the day, a special train
starting either from Minneapolis or Duluth
carrying parties of investors to the Mesaba
Range country, and — it may be said — quite
a number of them were from the vicinity of
Charleston, including some gentlemen who
"always knew Albert Humphreys would
make his mark in the world, yes siree." AU
of which calls to mind a sage observation of
that clever New York journalist Don Marquis :
"It is better to go swaggering through the
gates of Ufe loose-lipped and genial and
26

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
greedy, embracing pleasures and suffering
pains, than to find oneself in the midst of
caution, incontinently slain by chance and
eaten by worms."
Paraphrasing Emerson's famous epigram,
I wish to remark that all the world loves
a fighter. Albert Humphreys looks back on
the days of darkness in Sissonville in 1887
with a tolerant smile to-day. He can afford
to. He found out long ago that, as Herbert
Spencer has it: "The man of higher type
must be content with greatly moderated
expectations. He has to see how compara
tively little can be done and yet to find it
worth while to do that little well." Truly,
there is no millennium for minnows and he
is a fooUsh man who allows too much of his
thought to be taken up with those who find it
so easy to float downstream with the dead
ones. Only a live fish undertakes to work his
way upstream. These are the quahties of
the thoroughbred— the man who sticks to the
finish. Because we are men and not beasts of
the field we are all more or less inspired by the
daily thought that our lives should not be
lived in vain. To the extent that good breed-
27

THE PIONEER
ing or a kindly Providence brings it to our
minds, we occasionally ask ourselves how we
can make the most of this little span between
the daylight and the dark. One way that is
open to each and every one of us is to culti
vate some little germ of a vision. The old
prophet spoke much wiser than he knew
when he said: "Where there is no vision the
people perish." We can take the risk of
being considered good; we'll take a chance
on what our neighbor thinks; but we cannot
look ourselves in the face every morning when
we brush our hair without occasionally
wondering whether we are doing anything of
importance to anybody but ourselves. If
we are really going to accompUsh anything
worth while, we must make ourselves bigger
mentally and spiritually because Uttle men
do but little good. These are some of the
reasons why Humphreys has kept himself
close to the soil. He knows the inspiration
of close contact with old Mother Earth. He
might have been a successful manufacturer or
merchant, but — he chose that work that kept
him in harmony with a big and constantly
widening horizon, and thereby delivered him-
28

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
self from many of the carping littlenesses of
Ufe. He never forgot his "private dream,"
he never drew on his principal except when
he had compounded it with a vision that
merged his own spirit with that of his less
fortunate brother and thus brought him up to
a firmer footing instead of descending to his
less hopeful level. His vision has been an
infinitely more lofty and vigorous one on
that account — and his earnest desire to
make two blades of grass grow where but
one grew before has enabled others to see
that his was a creative vision, not a selfish
one, that it was no will o' the wisp but a
very real thing. Humphreys would have
preferred to remain in Charleston for no
other reason than that he loves the fight
ing Une. Nothing would have given him
greater pleasure than to prove to those who
had put him down for a failure that they
were wrong. But it was not until he came
back from the Mesaba country with a propo
sition so palpably good and worth while
that a child could grasp it that they were
ready to believe. Poor old human nature!
He is always looking for a "sign." There
29

THE PIONEER
must be a miracle performed. Some one
must rise from the dead. Doubting Thom
as must be convinced in his own peculiar
way.

30

CHAPTER IV
THE BUILDER AT WORK
"Yes, your 'Never-never country' — Yes, your 'edge of
cultivation'
And 'no sense in going further' — till I crossed the range
to see.
God forgive me! No 7 didn't. It's God's present to
our nation.
Anybody might have found it but — His Whisper came
to me." Kipling.
When that great empire-builder Cecil
Rhodes graduated from Oxford University
his old professor asked him what he was going
to do.
"I'm going down to South Africa to make
money," was the prompt reply.
"Is that all your university training means
to you, that it sends you out into the world
simply to make money?" queried his
instructor. "It's this way, Professor," rejoined the
31

THE PIONEER
young man: "I have some ideals in my mind
that I would like to see carried out before I
die — and it takes money to carry out ideals."
This is a true story and it illustrates the
constructive as well as the romantic character
of the pioneer wherever we find him. Some
times he does not recognize the latter trait
himself — but it's there just the same. And
quite as often, when he does recognize it he'll
keep it in the background, frequently to the
point of denying its existence.
During the five years which elapsed from
Humphreys' first trip to the Mesaba Iron
Range in the fall of 1891, he discovered mines
the ore of which is to-day worth more than one
hundred millions of dollars. In a compara
tively short time he cleaned up enough money
to pay off the two hundred thousand dollars
which remained from the Humphreys Lumber
Company failure in Sissonville in 1887. By
this time he had become an operator on a
large scale and was hailed by his former
critics in Charleston's business circles as a
good man to tie to. How easy it is for some
of us to make a virtue out of our former
detestation ! Yea, verily ! especially if there's
32

THE BUILDER AT WORK
any money to be made as a result thereof.
In June, 1892, Humphreys took a party of
Charleston men out into the Mesaba country
just to look around and see what they could
see. Among them was Colonel Robert Carr, a
lifelong friend with whom he had gone fishing
from boyhood days. While traveling through
the country with a pack train they came upon
a beautiful little lake which Humphreys had
often noted on the map. The beach was
composed of pure white sand and the water
clear as crystal. Turning to his old friend,
Humphreys said: "Uncle Bob, it looks like
there ought to be some fish in that lake."
Uncle Bob 'lowed that there might be.
It was the work of less than an hour to build a
raft sufficiently buoyant to hold the two men.
Fishing tackle was found in Humphreys'
"war sack" and the two buddies were soon
out in the middle of the lake hauling in some
of the finest pickerel that ever snapped at a
piece of fat pork. After they had "boiled
the kettle" and the fish were properly stowed
away where kindly Nature intended they
should be, Humphreys and Uncle Bob took a
little walk around the lake and ascended a hill

THE PIONEER
on the farther side, from which there was a
gorgeous view of the valley below.
"That looks to me like a mighty fine
town site, down there in the valley," said
Humphreys. "It sure does that," agreed
Uncle Bob. "I believe we could sell building
lots in a spot like that to a deaf, dumb, and
blind man," said Humphreys.
"Any one who couldn't see the value of
that sort of a town site ought to have his head
examined," asseverated Uncle Bob. "That
settles it," said Humphreys, "we'll just start
something as soon as we get back to Duluth
and we'll name the town after our native
State — Virginia . ' '
In less than a week Humphreys had his
engineers on the spot, surveyed it, cut streets
through the tamarack swamp where, not
withstanding summer weather, solid ice, three
feet in thickness, was found some three feet
below the debris which had doubtless been
frozen hundreds of years before. The town
was mapped and plotted without delay and in
six weeks sales of lots had taken place to the
value of $26,000. Before Christmas a rail
road was built into the town. To-day the
34

THE BUILDER AT WORK
city of Virginia, Minnesota, is the terminus of
five railroads, has a population of 25,000,
boasts one of the largest sawmills in the
world, some of the greatest iron mines, and is
one of the richest and most prosperous towns
in the State. The profane and uninitiate of
life see no romance in such an accomplish
ment. The pioneer knows better.
Somewhere in one of his essays that arch
pessimist Schopenhauer delivers himself of a
genial and comforting statement to the effect
that if a young man starting out on his career
could by some miraculous agency have the
Book of Life opened before him, he would
willingly lie down and die rather than pro
ceed in the face of the difficulties that he was
destined to encounter. It is a mere truism
to state that if Albert Humphreys could have
foreseen the panic of 1893 he would have
trimmed his sails to meet it. It is equally
true that if he had been a "sure thing" man
he would never have left Sissonville. His
splendid development work went straight
ahead and a number of additional mines were
opened in the Mesaba Range until the panic
"came down like a wolf on the fold" and
35

THE PIONEER
stopped, as by a blight, all development and
railroad building in that tremendous country.
At that time he owned and was developing
mining properties which are to-day worth
more than $100,000,000, the market value of
which dropped to a comparatively paltry
$1,000,000 almost over night.
It was about this period of time that large
combinations of capital were beginning to
make themselves felt in our industrial de
velopment, and the way they operated is a
very familiar story to most of us. This Uttle
narrative contemplates no disquisition on
economics. Human nature is much the same
the world over. Man in the aggregate is no
altruist and the creative faculty cuts mighty
little figure with the folk who are constantly
ringing the changes on that dry old saw:
"money talks." Albert Humphreys is an
individualist, pure and simple. He never
could subordinate his wondrous initiative to
working for a corporation unless the corpor
ation happened to be himself. And when a
man opens his books in the morning and
closes them at night as if the Almighty Him
self were standing at his elbow, he can afford
36

THE BUILDER AT WORK
to play a lone hand and expect the full and
complete confidence of his associates at the
same time. It doesn't necessarily follow,
however, that such a man should hold himself
both morally and financially responsible to
those who trust their money in his hands.
However, that is exactly the way Albert
Humphreys regarded the situation and that
is why, when he was caught in the panic of
1893 to the tune of $1,200,000, he assumed
the burden of making the loss good to his
friends and creditors with the same stead
fastness of purpose that he shouldered the
$200,000 failure of the Humphreys Lumber
Company in 1887.
How the tragic workings-out of some of
these great combinations have driven less
brave and determined spirits than Albert
Humphreys to ruin is a matter of contempo
raneous history. The railroads to the Mesaba
mines, the steamboat freight service on Lake
Superior, and most of the mines themselves
having been acquired by the Lake Superior
Consolidated Company (later a United States
Steel Corporation subsidiary) and controlled
by John D. Rockefeller and his associates, it
37

THE PIONEER
followed in a comparatively short time that
the "Consolidated" was delivering iron ore
in Cleveland, Ohio, at $1.90 per ton, or 50
cents less per ton than individual operators
like Humphreys could mine and deliver it
from their own properties. Long-time con
tracts were made at the $1.90 per ton rate
and just enough ore was sold to establish
that price — no considerable tonnage being
mined at the time. It inevitably followed
as a matter of course that the mainten
ance of that rate necessarily destroyed the
market value of mining properties of lesser
importance, and when the panic came it
compelled Humphreys to sell his choicest
properties, comprising thousands of acres
along the Mesaba Range, for a song, all of
which were bought in by the Rockefeller
interests. Two pieces of property in particu
lar which he sold for $200,000 and $400,000
respectively are to-day worth more than
$50,000,000. The details of some of these transactions
are so harrowing that no possible good could
be accomplished by setting them down here.
We all know that the doctrine of the survival
38

THE BUILDER AT WORK
of the fittest is one of the terrible commercial
accomplishments of our latter-day civilization.
Those powerful and unscrupulous men who
played it to the limit in those dark days, that
is to say, those who are left — have something
to think about in these more recent times
when the shoe is on the other foot and we are
all suffering as a result. It is worthy of
remark, however, that Albert Humphreys
never allowed his tragic and bitter experiences
to sour him. Furthermore, he believes in
letting the dead past bury its dead, other
wise this modest chronicle would stir up a
bunch of sleeping dogs that are better left to
their questionable memories. Before turn
ing our back upon the Mesaba Iron Range
entirely, however, a brief history of the
pioneers who discovered it and how they lost
control of it may be worth while.

39

CHAPTER V
the mesaba trail blazers
" Then welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit, nor stand, but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the throe ! ' '
The Mesaba Iron Range, extending from
seventy-five to one hundred miles north and
west of Duluth, is the most valuable and most
productive series of iron mines in the world
and produces over four-fifths of the iron ore
mined in the United States. The wonderful
discovery of these almost limitless deposits of
iron ore was made by the Merritt brothers of
Duluth in 1890. These Merritt brothers
were the finest type of our latter-day pioneer
— woodsmen with a fair amount of technical
knowledge who went into the wilderness for
the purpose of locating timber lands and iron
40

MINING IRON ORE IN THE MESABA

THE MESABA TRAIL BLAZERS
mines. Their parents settled in the little
town of Oneota, a few miles west of the
present city of Duluth, in the late forties,
although there was no such city in prospect
at the time. These four men — Alfred, Leoni-
das, A. R., and C. C, were blazers of trails.
They had great faith in that wondrous
country, which they manifested by taking up
vast tracts of land long before they had any
idea of its tremendous importance as an iron-
producing territory. Later, they located the
well known Biwabik, Mountain Iron, and
Mesaba Mountain mines. When these three
great mines were opened, the Merritt broth
ers cast about to raise money to build the
railroad referred to in the following chapter
for the purpose of opening up that vast
territory which lay about seventy-five miles
from Duluth. They finally interested Chase
Brothers and Daniel Grant of Faribault,
Minnesota, who built a road from Cloquet,
some miles west of Duluth, into the Mountain
Iron and Biwabik mines. Ore shipments were
being made by way of Superior, Wisconsin, at
which port an iron-ore dock had been built
during the construction of the railroad.
41

THE PIONEER
Enters now upon the scene an individual
by the name of Wetmore who came from the
East and was supposed to represent Rocke
feller interests. He seemed to be an able
citizen with plenty of money. He got in
good and strong with the Merritt brothers and
was generally looked upon as their financial
adviser. He induced them to organize the
Lake Superior Consolidated Company, with
a very large capital stock, and to transfer to
this Company all their holdings on the Mes
aba Iron Range, including their stock in the
newly built railroad. The organization of
this Company was made with a view to
extending the Mesaba Railroad by what was
to be known as the Cut-off, into the city of
Duluth, cutting out Cloquet and the outlet
by way of Superior, and to be followed by the
building of enormous ore docks within the
city limits of Duluth.
A bond issue of $250,000 by the County of
St. Louis and the City of Duluth was fathered
by the Merritt brothers and was voted almost
unanimously. The proceeds from the bond
issue were used largely in the construction of
the Cut-off and the iron ore docks. And, in
42

THE MESABA TRAIL BLAZERS
order to raise further funds to complete the
railroad and the ore docks, it was found
necessary by the Merritt brothers to borrow
large sums of money which were promptly
furnished by Mr. Wetmore, the Merritt
brothers, in turn, executing their obligations
in favor of his principals who were supposed
to be John D. Rockefeller and his associates.
At the time of the transfer of the Merritt
brothers' interests to the Consolidated Com
pany, there were included by the Rockefeller
interests certain Spanish- American and Goge
bic properties, which were represented as
dividend-paying and for which several mil
lions of dollars in bonds were issued. All of
these properties were found after a short time
to be worthless, as they were actually non-
dividend paying, and (like other properties
outside the combination already mentioned)
had been rendered practically bankrupt and
without market value by the discovery of the
Mesaba deposits which could be mined so
cheaply as to render foreign competition
impossible. The railroad was built and the docks com
pleted. And then — the African of High
43

THE PIONEER
Finance who had been hiding in the
traditional woodpile came out from under
and smilingly showed himself and this is
what was revealed: the ore, which had been
taken over by the Consolidated and by other
interests with which that company was
associated, was marketed at prices so low that
it ruined the market value of the Consoli
dated mine stock. And so — when the
obligations of the Merritt brothers matured,
the properties were earning nothing, the
stock non-dividend in character, and the
Merritts found themselves absolutely at the
mercy of the owners of their notes, payment
for which was demanded at maturity. The
old, old story! The labor of years gone for
naught. The survival of the fittest indeed!
With one exception this terrific blow
practically wiped out the Merritt family as
an industrial asset in the State of Minnesota.
C. C. Merritt went insane and died; A. R.
Merritt left Duluth and for years has been
working on a ranch in Idaho. Leonidas
Merritt holds a minor office in the employ
of the City of Duluth to-day. Of their
individual contemporaries engaged in the
44

THE MESABA TRAIL BLAZERS
same kind of developmental work in the
Mesaba country who were caught in the '93
panic, Col. E. C. Gridley died almost penni
less, Judge James T. Hale has long been an
employee of the State on a modest salary,
while A. J. Trimble and Capt. Frank Hibbing,
who had been operating on the Gogebic and
other ranges on the south shore of Lake
Superior, died practically "broke."
There were two survivors of this debacle
who never lost their nerve: Albert E. Hum
phreys and Alfred Merritt. The latter
brought suit against Mr. Rockefeller for
collusion, misrepresentation, etc., and finally
secured a judgment in the United States
District Court in Duluth for $940,000, which
was reversed by the United States Circuit
Court at St. Paul. Following this reversal,
payment of the notes was demanded by the
Rockefeller interests with the result that the
securities attached to the notes were sacri
ficed and the stock of the Consolidated Com
pany taken over at something less than
ten dollars per share. In passing, it is
worthy of comment that when, some six or
seven years later, the United States Steel
45

THE PIONEER
Corporation was organized, the stock of the
Consolidated Company was turned in on the
basis of $218 per share. A pretty bit of
financing, indeed. Of Messrs. Humphreys
and Merritt it might be said —
" Fate might cast them in the pit —
Fate could never make them quit."
Both of them, being of that rather unusual
tribe — good losers, took their losses stoically,
accepted the inevitable and put the whole mis
erable experience behind their backs. Merritt
started all over again and recouped his fortunes
by making new discoveries on the Mesaba
and the Vermillion ranges, while Humphreys
turned his face toward British Columbia.
During the trial of this celebrated case it
developed that one of the Merritt brothers,
L. J. Merritt by name, who was a local
banker, owned a large number of the Merritt
brothers' securities. L. J. was doing business
under the name of L. J. Merritt & Son,
Bankers. While the case was on trial and
before the compromise was reached, it
developed, much to the surprise of the resi
dents of Duluth, that the firm of L. J. Merritt
46

THE MESABA TRAIL BLAZERS
& Son, Bankers, figured that its interests
would be much better conserved on board
the Rockefeller dreadnaught than in the frail
shallop in which the fighting Merritt brothers
had embarked. At any rate, it was not long
before L. J. Merritt closed up his banking
business in Duluth and, accompanied by his
family, emigrated to Pasadena, California,
where he has been living for many years
in greater luxury than he ever displayed in
Duluth. But the people of Duluth will
never forget the presentment made by the
attorney for the Merritt brothers before the
jury that rendered the verdict in their favor.
The eloquent advocate drew a picture of an
adventurous ship loaded with treasure and
navigated by the very kind of men whose
pioneering fearlessness and initiative made
the United States what it is to-day, floating
peacefully on its way to a safe harbor when a
storm signal was given. The one man on the
vessel who had never had a hand in winning
the treasure with which the ship was loaded
but who had profited by the creative work of
its officers, was the first to slip over the side
into the Rockefeller yawl from which he was
47

THE PIONEER
hoisted to the decks of the good old ship
Safety First. Verily! Verily! "What is a
man profited, if he shall gain the whole world
and lose his own soul?"
In closing this chapter on the Mesaba, it is
not too much to say that had it not been for
the discovery of these wondrously productive
mines, together with the very railroads the
Merritt brothers built, we would, without
doubt, have lost the great World War. The
Mesaba Iron Range, during the years of the
war, produced and shipped to the lower
Lakes, from where it was distributed to the
various furnaces and steel plants of the
country, more than thirty-five million tons of
ore per year — or more than all the ore ranges
of the United States combined. The Mesaba
Iron Range constitutes the foundation of the
greatest corporation of all times: United
States Steel, whose holdings to-day on this
wonderful range alone, after having been
mined for twenty-five years, are worth more
than a billion of dollars — worth more than all
the preferred stock, common stock and the
bonded indebtedness combined, of the whole
corporation itself. 48

CHAPTER VI
under a new flag
" Change was his mistress. Chance his counselor.
Love could not keep him. Duty forged no chain.
The wide seas and the mountains called to him.
And gray dawns saw his campfires in the rain."
It's no small indictment of one's own
country to be compelled to leave it because of
the difficulty of getting a square deal. It
must be confessed, however, that is precisely
the reason why Albert Humphreys turned
his back upon the Mesaba country and went
up into that wonderful part of British Colum
bia traversed by that picturesque enlargement
of the Columbia River known as the Arrow
Lakes, which extend south from the main
line of the Canadian Pacific Railway at
Revelstoke into the Crow's Nest Pass coun
try. In that Nature's Wonderland the
mountains run up from the water side at such
an angle that the passing steamers have been
4 49

THE PIONEER
known to pick up a farmer who stubbed his
toe and fell off his farm into the lake, a little
drop of anywhere from five hundred to one
thousand feet: at least that is one of the
stories they tell the trustful traveler. And
it's worth being taken for an unsophisticated
"rube" to go up into those godlike mountains
and invite your soul.
Feeling that it was useless to try and
recoup his fortunes in the Mesaba, Hum
phreys went up into the Kootenay country
and bought some gold, silver, and lead mines
which he developed and sold to a syndicate
of Scotsmen from Edinburgh. He built the
first concentrating mill in the Slocan District
and was one of the pioneers in opening up
mining interests throughout that whole sec
tion. He found British Columbia to be one
of the safest places in the world in which
to do business. He found that the territorial
government was on the lookout for black
mailing lawyers and claim-jumpers. He
found an absolutely fair administration of the
laws and that the authorities welcomed
constructive and inventive genius and held
forth every inducement to the real pioneer,
50

UNDER A NEW FLAG
backed by the utmost protection of his
productive work and the money he invested.
He found the Gold Commissioner a bulwark
of defense against all the chicanery that had
made possible such a colossal injustice as
he and his fellow pioneers had suffered in the
Mesaba country. He found lawlessness
unknown and the same degree of protection
accorded to life and property in the wilder
ness as might be expected in the most popu
lous city. He spent two years developing
the property which he finally sold and then
the longings for home overcame him and he
decided not only to return to the States, but
to the scenes of his youth down in the old
State of Virginia. But, whoever heard of a
pioneer reaching his ultimate destination
except by a more or less circuitous route!
As Kipling expresses it in the greatest bit of
pioneer verse ever written, The Voortrekker:
"He shall come back on his own track, and by his scarce-
cooled camp
There shall he meet the roaring street, the derrick and
the stamp."
On his way out of the Kootenay country
in 1895, after he had closed up his mining
51

THE PIONEER
interests, intending to make his way into the
States via the Spokane Falls & Northern
Railway from Northport, Washington, the
boat on which he was traveling down the
Arrow Lakes stopped for the night at a little
landing known as Trail Creek, it being unsafe
for the lake steamers to undertake to navi
gate the swirling currents of the Columbia
River after nightfall. And here follows a
story which for real romance is unmatched by
anything I have ever read. Of course, it
goes without saying that Humphreys doesn't
see any romance in it — the real romancer
never does; he gets "so close to the trees that
he can't see the forest" and it is all so abso
lutely natural to him that he does as he does
as a matter of course. This particular nar
rative is so thoroughly representative of the
man that I am going to let him tell the
story in his own words, just as he told it to
me: "After the boat had been tied up to the
dock, which consisted of a few pine boards
nailed to a few piles, our party, consisting of
five men, including myself, took a walk on
shore before darkness came down. It looked
52

UNDER A NEW FLAG
like a mighty fine town site to me and an ideal
spot from which to build a very necessary
railroad into the town of Rossland, a mining
camp several miles away. On our return
from the walk, we stepped into the only
building there, which was used as a hotel by
men going to and from the mines at Rossland,
and I asked the proprietor (a Mr. Top
ping) who owned the land roundabout his
hotel, to which he replied promptly that
he did, that the land was his preemption,
whereupon the following conversation took
place": "'How many acres have you?'
" 'Some three or four hundred,' he said.
" 'Why don't you build a town here?'
"'Well,' he said, 'I surveyed it one time
and sold six lots at ten dollars apiece. They
never even paid the expenses of the survey.'
"Then I asked him: 'Why don't you give
some one half of it to build a smelter here and
a railroad up to Rossland?'
"'I have been looking for that man for
some time,' was his reply.
"'You see him now,' I said, 'looking right
at you.' 53

THE PIONEER
"'Do you mean it?' he asked.
"'Yes,' said I.
"'Then,' replied he, 'the job is yours. I
will give you half of my holdings here if you
will built a smelter and a railroad. After
supper we will draw up an agreement.'
"After supper the agreement was drawn
and signed and the next day we finished our
trip to Spokane.
"On my arrival in Spokane, in looking over
my mail, I found a telegram from Augustus
Heinze — in those days one of the biggest
copper men in the West — asking this ques
tion : ' Where can Jim Breen see you ! '
"I replied: 'You had better come, yourself.'
"Jim Breen was Heinze's engineer. He
was at Rossland looking for a smelter site on
the night that I was at Trail Creek. Heinze
had entered into a contract with one of the
largest mines in the Rossland Camp — the Le
Roy — to smelt 75,000 tons of ore at $8.50
per ton f.o.b. the mine. Appreciating the
fact that under ordinary circumstances he
would have been compelled to haul the ore
by wagon sixteen miles to Northport, thence
by rail to Butte, Montana (an impossible
54

UNDER A NEW FLAG
procedure at the rate quoted), he planned to
build a smelter near the mine itself.
"When Jim Breen made his trip from
Rossland down to Trail Creek the next morn
ing fully expecting to make a deal for the
only available smelter site in all that country
for this particular camp, he found that
Topping had delivered the town site to me.
"Heinze arrived in Spokane in two or
three days, and his first question was : 'Hum
phreys, what are you going to do with that
town site?'
"I replied: 'The Province of British
Columbia will issue a handsome subsidy at
the rate of $3500 in cash per mile and 12,000
acres of selected timberland to anyone
constructing railroads in the province. I
purpose having some of my friends help me
build that railroad and I'll take as my profit
a one-half interest in the town site, as well
as an interest in the railroad.'
"He replied: 'Give me an interest in the
town site, and I will build the smelter,
together with the railroad.'
"I asked: 'How much of an interest?'
"'Suppose we cut it into thirds,' said he,
55

THE PIONEER
'you taking a third, Topping a third, and
I will take a third.'
"I replied: 'We will send for Topping to
make the deal.'
"We telephoned Rossland, sent a mes
senger back to Trail Creek, had Topping
take the next boat coming to Northport, and
from there by rail to Spokane. On his arrival
we made the deal as outlined, and within four
months we had 400 men at work on a smelter
and the railroad and town lots were selUng at
from $200 to $600 each.
" One year after that time we had a meeting
in Trail Creek, the name of our new town.
In the interim we had sold a great number of
lots and on this trip we divided the remaining
unsold lots between us as follows: Heinze
would choose ten, Topping ten, and then I
would take ten, and then reverse — I taking
the first choice, Topping the second and
Heinze the third.
"We divided all the lots until some eighty-
seven remained. Heinze suggested that we
dump the eighty-seven into a 'Jack Pot' and
play 'Freeze-Out,' the winner taking all the
lots. We took matches for chips, two boxes
56

UNDER A NEW FLAG
each. Topping lasted one deal. I lasted
two. Heinze got the remaining lots !
"The next day, I met on the street a man
by the name of R. T. Daniels.
"He asked: 'Humphreys, what will you
take for your lots?'
"I named a price, spot cash.
"He replied, T will take them.'
"I made him a deed and he paid me the
money. "Several years after, I was walking the
streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I was
operating in oil, and, looking across the
street at a very handsome twelve-story build
ing, I saw the name 'R. T. Daniels.' It
carried me back to the good old days in
British Columbia, and I said to myself: 'That
must be my old friend,' and so it proved.
We had a joyful reunion. This man Daniels,
after leaving British Columbia, still on the
track of the fleeting dollar, went to Florida,
where he made a great deal of money, and
from there to Tulsa when it was a small
town. It is to-day one of the greatest oil
centers in the world. He invested largely in
real estate, has improved every piece of land
57

THE PIONEER
he purchased and to-day is worth millions of
dollars, notwithstanding which fact, he is the
same busy, hardworking trader that he was
when I first met him in British Columbia,
back in 1895."

58

CHAPTER VII
BACK TO THE SOUTHLAND
"And I long for the dear old river.
Where I dreamed my youth away;
For a dreamer lives forever.
And a toiler dies in a day."
If you would gather some fleeting
impression of the call of Home to the weary
pioneer, turn with me to the record of the
last trek into the wilderness of "the noblest
Roman of them all," he whose name will
echo like a clarion in the heart of our Ameri
can youth for generations to come: Colonel
Theodore Roosevelt. You will find it in that
tremendously interesting story of his canoe
trip down the River of Doubt as described in
his last book: Through the Brazilian Wilder
ness. Weakened by fever, crippled by an
abscess on his leg, practically down and out,
spending his days stretched on the boxes in
the bottom of a small open dugout, under the
59

THE PIONEER
well-nigh intolerable heat of the tropical sun,
varied by blinding, drenching downpours of
rain, his heart went back to his native land
and to his own hearthstone in the most
exquisite outburst of homesickness it has
ever been my good fortune to read.
Listen :
"In our home country spring had now
come, the wonderful northern spring of long
glorious days, of brooding twilights, of cool,
delightful nights. Robin and bluebird,
meadow-lark and song sparrow, were singing
in the mornings at home; the maple-buds
were red; wind-flowers and bloodroot were
blooming while the last patches of snow still
lingered; the rapture of the hermit-thrush in
Vermont, the serene, golden melody of the
wood-thrush on Long Island, would be heard
before we were there to listen. Each man to
his home, and to his true love! Each was
longing for the homely things that were so
dear to him, for the home people who were
dearer still, and for the one who was dearest
of all."
Humphreys had been away from his
beloved South for five years; he had passed
through the most trying experience of his
60

Hfe.- ON THE POCATALIGO RIVER

BACK TO THE SOUTHLAND
Ufe in the Mesaba country, had gotten on his
feet again in British Columbia and wanted to
go back home, yes, even to the local bankers
who would find it easier to say "I told you
so" in reference to the Mesaba, before they
even found out what he had accomplished in
the Kootenay country as a gold and silver
miner and as the practical builder of Trail
Creek and the railroad thence to Rossland.
*Twas ever thus ! The fall of 1897 found him
back in Charleston and looking around for
something to do. This time he didn't try to
interest old friends, local capitalists or any
one else. He took some of his own money
and purchased a large tract of coal land on
the Norfolk & Western Railroad, built a short
line of railroad into it, and then leased a large
section thereof to a Lynchburg syndicate.
After nineteen years of mining, they have
barely scratched the surface of the immense
coal deposits located in that tract.
Later on Humphreys' attention was called
to a vast tract of coal land on what is known
as Cabin Creek, on the Chesapeake and Ohio
Railroad, not far from Charleston, in which
two comparatively unimportant mines,
61

THE PIONEER
located a short distance from the mouth of
the Creek, had been for many years operated
by a Pennsylvania concern which had built a
short spur of railway track from the main
Une of the C. & 0. to their mines, thereby
bottling up all that tremendous acreage
which it was making no attempt to develop.
Furthermore — by virtue of their control of
this short line these " capitalists " quoted an
arbitrary freight rate of ten cents per ton over
and above the main line rate, to any persons
desirous of opening up the country beyond
their mines — a prohibitive proposition on the
face of it. For over fifteen years certain
Charleston business men had looked longing
ly at this luscious plum, realizing its limitless
possibiUties in coal but, for some reason or
other, had never been able to accomplish
anything with the owners of that little rail
road which blocked further exploitation of
the wonderful country beyond. It wasn't
long after Humphreys' return from British
Columbia, however, before he organized a
syndicate, purchased the little railroad and
presented it to the Chesapeake and Ohio
with the understanding that they would
62

BACK TO THE SOUTHLAND
extend it several miles further up the valley,
and accord a main line rate for hauling all the
coal mined. The result of this character
istically constructive move was to open up
250,000 acres of new coal lands with a capa
city of a billion tons of coal brought to the
very door of the C. & O. Railway. In less
than a year after the closing of this deal,
practically every section of land on that
great Cabin Creek tract was leased, a big
portion of which has been mined uninterrupt
edly ever since without any apparent diminu
tion of the supply. This is what is known
to-day as the famous Carbon Fuel Company,
one of the most successful bituminous coal
mining concerns in the South.
By this time Humphreys had gotten to be
a national figure in the bituminous coal min
ing field, and in the South he was recognized
as an authority. During that same eventful
year of 1901, he was approached by P. L.
Kimberly, the well-known Chicago Iron Ore
King, with a view to having him investigate
some presumably valuable coal lands on one
of the tributaries of the Big Sandy River in
Kentucky. This would have been Hum-
63

THE PIONEER
phreys' opportunity to go down into that
country and operate along the lines of Mr.
Wetmore who figured so actively with the
Merritt brothers in the Mesaba several years
previous, for there was a large number of
individual prospectors already on the job.
To the everlasting credit of Humphreys,
however, when these individual operators,
many of whom were men of small means,
saw him on his investigating tour, they knew
whatever happened, his work would be clean
and no man would be subjected to the usual
operation of the "steam-roller." As a result
of his survey he organized the Northern Coal
& Coke Company, with a capital stock of
$500,000. He assembled 100,000 acres of
land, bunched for the greater part, with the
expectation of building a railroad from
Pikeville up to the head of Elkhorn Creek
and to the north fork of the Kentucky River,
which would enable them to open at least
fifteen mines and make of it the greatest
soft coal property in the world. To this end,
the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad was to
extend their road to Pikeville where a
junction would be made with the Northern
64

BACK TO THE SOUTHLAND
Coal & Coke Company's railroad from
mines. Humphreys' plans went through with
Kimberly and his associates without a hitch
and it was specifically understood that no
more land should be bought beyond the
100,000 acres upon which the necessary
options had been secured, that being the
maximum amount of acreage they could
profitably handle with the $2,500,000 to
$3,000,000 they had agreed upon as a fixed
investment to buy and open up that great
tract of tremendously valuable coal land.
Up to this time neither Mr. Kimberly nor
his associates had visited this remarkable
country; everything had been left to Hum
phreys. When, however, Kimberly did go
down there with a few of his friends, — it
was the old, old story: they wanted every
thing in sight. Despite their very explicit
agreement with Humphreys, they turned
about twelve option-takers loose in the coun
try and by June, 1902, they had under option
360,000 acres of land scattered over half a
dozen counties. Humphreys called a meet
ing of the company in Chicago, accused Kim-
s 65

THE PIONEER
berly of violating his agreement, predicted
the failure of the venture under the new condi
tions, by reason of their having bought them
selves "land poor," prophesied they would
never open a mine, never build a railroad,
that their stockholders would quit them one
by one and that the day would come when a
few wise business men of wealth would cull
from the 360,000 acres with which they had
foolishly saddled themselves, the 100,000 he
had purchased and carry the company through
to a big success. Kimberly lost his temper
and offered to buy Humphreys' interest on the
spot, to which Humphreys agreed with alac
rity and returned to Charleston.
After several years' struggle to perfect
their titles and after selling off some of their
outlying holdings at cost (the very parcels to
the purchase of which Humphreys had so
earnestly objected) they finally allowed the
Consolidated Coal Company, of which the
Watsons of Virginia and ex-Governor Flem
ing are large holders, to select the one
hundred thousand acres which Humphreys
had optioned, for which they paid the North
ern Coal & Coke Company in common stock
66

BACK TO THE SOUTHLAND
of the Consolidated. Since that time the
Consolidated Coal Company has had two
railroads built into the property: the Balti
more & Ohio from the Chesapeake and Ohio
side, up the Big Sandy River; and the Louis
ville & Nashville from the North Fork of the
Kentucky River side, and to-day it is, with
out doubt, one of the greatest coal properties
in all the civilized world.
The story of the failure of this potentially
successful company, the Northern Coal &
Coke, would be incomplete without the
setting down of one of Humphreys' experi
ences with some of the peculiar back-country
folk or mountain men for which that part of
Kentucky is famous. On one of his first
trips into the country he drove with a party
of friends from the terminus of the Big Sandy
Branch of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad,
at a point called White House, to Pike
ville, some eighty miles distant, whence they
rode into the coal fields already mentioned.
They spent their first night at the home of
Ban Johnson, not far from Pikeville. A
short time before their arrival in the country,
a son-in-law of Johnson, Reynolds by name,
67

THE PIONEER
had killed a man and a reward had been
offered for his capture, by the Governor of
the State, all of which the Humphreys party
knew nothing. Johnson's home consisted of
an old-fashioned log house weather-boarded
on the outside and sealed within. Just as
the party was about to blow out the light
(there were six of them in one little room, two
to a bed) Ban Johnson stuck his head in at the
door- way and said laconically: "Boys, if you
hear any shooting during the night, just get
out of bed and lie down under the window-
sill — the logs are thicker." He afterwards
explained that his place was watched by
officers of the law who hoped to catch his
son-in-law Reynolds, and inasmuch as the
young man was likely to show up in the
middle of the night, in which event there
might be some shooting, he didn't wish his
guests to be taking any unnecessary chances.
The next morning Humphreys and his
party, piloted by John Venters, one of the
natives of the country and with whom they
were to spend the next night, took saddle
horses and rode up Shelby Creek to its head,
crossed over the mountain and rode down to
68

BACK TO THE SOUTHLAND
the North Fork of the Kentucky River. As
they were riding through the low gap between
the North Fork of the Kentucky and the head
of the Elkhorn, late in the afternoon, they
passed a lonely grave with two split rails
along each side and two dropped across the
ends. Venters, who was riding with Hum
phreys, said in an offhand manner: "That's
the grave of Talt Hall. He was hanged up at
the County Court House many years ago.
I buried him myself. I'll tell you the story
after supper." And it was a most extraor
dinary story indeed as will be seen from
the following chapter.
No one but a Southerner who has been
born and bred in that mystic mountain
country, who has lived amongst those primi
tive and superstitious back-country folk and
both understands and sympathizes with
their limited vision, could tell the story of
Talt Hall with such dramatic power and
fidelity to detail. And when we consider
that those peculiar people are a law unto
themselves and really do live up to their
lights, we can appreciate the tragic pathos
of the dialogue which took place between Hall
69

THE PIONEER
and his intimate friend John Venters to
whom he looked for deliverance up to the
last hour preceding his execution. Hum
phreys has a wonderful memory which he
uses to splendid effect in this very remarkable
story which I am going to let him relate
verbatim et literatim, precisely as John Venters
told it.

70

CHAPTER VIII
the story of talt hall
"And now he walks the world beyond
And drifts on hidden seas
Undesecrated by a chart —
Blithe derelict at ease."
"Talt Hall was a 'rebel,' you know,"
said Venters, as his guests filled their pipes
and sat around the log fire in the room that
served for kitchen, dining and living room in
his big log house. "Like most of us, he
fought against the North all through the war,
and when he returned home he found that
some of his family had been abused by
members of the Home Guard: men who had
remained home during the war. We figured
that the experience of some of his women
folks had sort of unbalanced his mind. It
was a pretty mean mess and none of us
blamed him when he started out to get even.
Anyhow, he killed first one of the Home
71

THE PIONEER
Guard and then another. He killed a num
ber of men across the line in the State of
Virginia, and on one of his trips over to
Wise Court House he was arrested, put in jail,
indicted, tried and sentenced to be hanged.
"A short time before hanging day, Hall
escaped, left the country and went West.
He was not out there very long until he killed
his man, and got out of the country. The
authorities in the West were not satisfied to
let him get away so easy, so they offered a
reward and put several detectives on his
track. He was finally located, working under
an assumed name, in charge of a section gang
on a part of the Louisville & Nashville Rail
road System — at that time the old Marietta
& North Georgia Railroad, running between
Marietta and Knoxville, Tennessee. One
day, two of these detectives, who had been
steered by one of Talt's men who was looking
for the reward, walked up to where Talt was
talking to some of his gang, drew their guns
and told Hall to consider himself under arrest.
'"What for?' Talt asked.
"They replied : 'We arrest you as Talt Hall,
and we have a requisition for you.'
72

THE STORY OF TALT HALL
"'You are mistaken,' said Talt, 'my name
is not Hall. You don't need any requisition
for me, however ; I'll go along with you. But
before I go, just let me go down to the office
and give these men their time.'
"Talt had his office in a box car beside the
track. As he sat down at his desk and
started to make out the men's time, he noted
the eyes of the two detectives roving around
the car looking at some small pictures he had
nailed up. Turning slightly to the left he
opened the top drawer of his desk, like he
was going to take out some papers, and quick
as a flash he picked up two 'six-shooters,'
swung back and killed both detectives and
broke the arm of the man who had informed
on him, and who finally got away.
"First thing I knew," continued Venters,
"Talt was back in Kentucky and came to
my place one night to get something to eat.
He was in hiding out in the hills, and twice
a week I'd carry food out and leave it under
a big rock not far from where he was con
cealed. On one of these trips, Talt told me
about having a girl down in Nashville and
said he was going down there to see her.
73

THE PIONEER
'"Now, Talt, don't do that,' said I. 'If
you go down there, they will catch you sure.'
"Talt said: 'No, John, they won't do it.
I could slip in there with a whole regiment
sticking around.'
'"Now, Talt,' said I, 'they will get you
sure if you go down there,' and I tried to
persuade him not to go. As I left that day,
the last word Talt said to me was : 'John, I'm
going.' "A short time after, when I carried out
some more provision^, the food I had left a
few days before under the rock was stiU
there. Only a few days later there appeared
in the Wise Court House paper an account of
the arrest of Talt Hall in Nashville. He had
gone there to see his girl, the house had been
watched and Talt was arrested. They
started to try him down in Nashville for the
killing of the two western detectives, but
the Governor of Virginia sent a requisition
down and brought Talt back to Wise Court
House, and the first thing he did was to
station a company of soldiers to guard the
town, the jail and the roads leading into and
out of Wise Court House. The old sentence
74

THE STORY OF TALT HALL
of hanging having expired, it was necessary
that he be re-sentenced; and then a fight
was started to have his sentence commuted
to imprisonment for life. Every possible
influence was brought to bear on the Gover
nor, but he was deaf to every plea.
"About five days before the day set for
his hanging, he sent for me. I hitched up
my team and drove over, some thirty miles,
to Wise Court House. It is a long, lonesome
ride — one of the longest and lonesomest, and
certainly the roughest, that I have ever seen.
"I put my team up and went down to the
little hotel for something to eat and then
went up to the jail, and after shaking hands
with Talt, he said:
" 'John, you are not going to let them hang
me, are you?'
"'Well, Talt,' I said, 'it looks like it's all
up with you.'
"He said to me: 'John Venters, do you
mean to tell me that you boys over there in
the mountains, hundreds strong, with your
Winchesters, are a-going to sleep over there
and let them hang me — Talt Hall?'
"My reply was: 'Talt, it's no use. We
75

THE PIONEER
couldn't get in here with a dozen regiments.
There are five companies of soldiers in this
town to-day and every crossroad is guarded
from here to the edge of the Kentucky River.
You haven't a chance.'
"After quieting down he said: 'Wait over,
John, something will surely happen; I'll get
out of this all right. The boys Will manage
to get in here some way; they won't see Talt
Hall strung up.'
"But on the morning of the last day, when
the crowd began to assemble for the public
hanging, Talt weakened and said to me: 'John,
it looks like they were a-goihg to hang me.
If they do, I want you to carry my body back
to the Elkhorn, open the coffin, so the boys
can look at it, then I want you to dig a Uttle
grave up there in the gap between the North
Fork of the Kentucky River and the head of
the Elkhorn, where for all time the water
will flow from the head of my grave down the
North Fork of the Kentucky River and from
the foot of my grave down the Elkhorn, to
the Big Sandy and on to the Ohio, and into
the Ocean.'
"At three- thirty, in the presence of a
76

THE STORY OF TALT HALL
tremendous crowd of people, he was hanged,
and a short time before dark his body was
cut down and placed in a coffin — a plain
poplar box — and lifted into my wagon, and I
started from the Wise Court House on my
trip home, about dusk. It is some thirty
miles across the mountains, and the road is
a long, rough, and lonesome one. You know,
boys, I was a 'rebel' soldier. I fought
through the whole war, and more than one
night I slept on the battlefield with a dead
man for a pillow and didn't think anything
about it. But that night, in coming over
that mountain road with old Talt's body in
my wagon, more than once I turned my head
slightly and looked over my shoulder, half
expecting to see old Talt standing up in the
wagon! "I arrived home about daylight, and two
of the boys came out and helped me take
him out of the wagon. We placed the coffin
on two benches that we got at the black
smith shop, and the body rested there until
about half-past eight in the morning, when
the men from the hills began to come in to
take their last look at old Talt.
77

THE PIONEER
"During the day we dug the grave up in
the low gap and just before sunset we took
his old rifle and put it in the coffin with him,
put in his clothes, closed it up, lifted him into
the wagon again and hauled him up to the
gap and buried him."
"Now comes a part of the story that
neither Talt Hall nor John Venters ever
dreamed would come true," said Humpreys
as he concluded:
"After the development of that tremend
ous coal field was brought about by the Con
solidated Coal Company, and the Louisville &
Nashville Railroad built an extension up the
North Fork and through the gap Venters spoke
of and on down the Elkhorn, a cut some thirty
or forty feet in depth was made through this
low gap, and when they dug into Talt's grave
all they found was a few boards, a few bones,
and his old rifle. These were carried away
and buried in one of the nearby country
graveyards."

78

CHAPTER IX
the call of the west
" Who's worn a bit of purple once
Can never, never lie
All smothered in a little box
When stars are in the sky."
Just as if Albert Humphreys who had
ridden the trails, searching out the hidden
places of the Mesaba Iron Range, built the
city of Virginia, prospected for gold and
silver in the Canadian Rockies, erected the
first concentrating mill in the Kootenay
country, founded the town of Trail Creek
and saw its railroad started, could remain
in the quiet, easy-going South! The opening
up of the famous Cabin Creek coal mines
and the organization of the Carbon Fuel
Company were mere incidents in the life of
a man in whom the wanderlust was instinct.
The call of the Southland which brought
him back to Charleston in 1895 found its full
79

THE PIONEER
fruition in three years. Success? Yes, he
had won that many times over if success is
to be figured in physical assets. But — "the
word came and out he went," following the
lure of unforgotten ways. True lover of
space and sky line, the whisper was ever in
his ear: "Arise, get thee hence, for this is not
thy rest," and 1898 found him on his way to
Denver, Colorado, wondering what was to
be seen over the crest of the Rockies just
beyond. No one ever felt the driving impulse
of that husky sentiment of Stevenson's: "It
is better to travel hopefully than to arrive,"
with any greater conviction than Humphreys.
No one ever looked upon material success in
a more impersonal way than he. Money has
never meant anything more to him than a
means to an end. And when he put his
house in order in Charleston and left his coal
business in the hands of trusted lieutenants,
he was like a boy just out of school and ready
for the next adventure, whatever it might be.
He had had considerable experience in drilling
for oil and gas in bis native state, in the
old fashioned "wild-cat" method, which,
according to the Pennsylvania and West
80

LOG-DRIVE ON THE POCATALIGO

THE CALL OF THE WEST
Virginia operator, was to assemble a big
acreage of land, pick out some place where it
was convenient to wood and water, then
build a derrick and drill a hole. After having
spent a goodly bunch of money, covering an
extensive period of time, in this more or less
primitive fashion in which, it must be said,
he had met with a fair degree of success, he
determined to change his methods and make
a scientific study of the "oil game," which
included the services of a geologist. And
the way his old-time disposition to "try
anything once" worked out was something to
see. Humphreys located in Denver in order to
be near the heart of things. The next
sixteen years were spent in the investigation
of every likely looking hole in the ground
that lay between the Rocky Mountains and
the Pacific Ocean on the west and the Gulf
of Mexico on the south. Gold and silver,
copper and lead, iron, oil, and gas — almost
everything, in fact, that could be wrested
from the bosom of Mother Earth by the use
of drill, dynamite, or pick received his
attention during that long period and —
6 81

THE PIONEER
incidentally, he developed a knowledge of the
whys and wherefores of oil producing that
stood him in mighty good stead when his
real opportunity came.
A persistent fallacy in the public mind is
that the Standard Oil Company controls,
directly or indirectly, the entire petroleum
industry and that the business no longer
offers much room for individual effort. As a
matter of fact, however, oil production offers
no greater obstacles than those which obtain
in any general line of commercial activity.
Some of the most successful and widely
known oil magnates in the country started on
"shoe strings." In other words — courage
and intelligence will overcome practically all
difficulties. Turning to the files of one of
the principal periodicals devoted to the oil
industry in the United States, I found the
following significant editorial comment upon
the entrance of Mr. Humphreys into the
field in which he was destined to achieve
such a spectacular success:
"In March, 1914, there arrived in Okla
homa a gentleman from Denver named
82

THE CALL OF THE WEST
Albert E. Humphreys, a man of considerable
means personally and with plenty of financial
allies but absolutely without anything but
the most general information as to the Mid-
Continent oil fields. Mr. Humphreys owned
interests in Colorado gold and silver mines,
West Virginia coal mines, and Minnesota
iron mines, but his experience in producing
petroleum had been confined to a small flyer
in West Virginia. After a few weeks' study
of the general situation, Mr. Humphreys
elected to play the role of 'wild-catter,' se
lected territory within the trend of petroleum
possibilities, but in districts generally con
demned by the oil fraternity or considered
to be too far off. The Denver capitalist
was an adherent of the geological theory of
oil accumulation and all of his acreage
was taken upon well defined geological
structures." In reply to a man who was counseling great
caution, I once heard Humphreys say: "I
believe in a man's exercising foresight. Too
much foresight, however, frequently acts
as an hindrance to enterprise. There are
certain things which are fundamentally true
in the experience of all men — so true, in fact,
that they are finally accepted as laws, — but

THE PIONEER
these should never stand in the way of a
man's taking a reasonable chance. A man is
not necessarily a gambler because he backs
his own judgment with his own money.
Precedent is the refuge of the man who is
unable to do his own thinking. Nothing
truer was ever said than that 'the man who
never makes any mistakes is the man who
never gets anywhere.' After all, Experience
is the great teacher and that man who can
keep his average on the plus side of the ledger
instead of the minus side is entitled to the
confidence of his friends."
When I heard that Humphreys was going
into the Oklahoma oil field in 1914, the pre
ceding remarks came to mind, notwithstand
ing they had been made many years previous.
I knew he would not follow the beaten path,
that, on the contrary, he would follow his
own judgment. And, here again, we find
the pioneer hewing to his own line rather
than that of his predecessors. There is no
romance in doing certain things a certain way
just because they have always been done in
that way. The trail-blazer looks a little far
ther ahead than any other kind of a man. He

THE CALL OF THE WEST
really believes that "there is a Divinity that
shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we
may." And — while our conclusions must con
form to the sum of human experience, no real
discoverer ever followed the line of precedent
without a comprehensive admixture of initi
ative. The proportions of this combination
are a matter for individual judgment — and
for judgment there is no substitute.
Humphreys' first venture in Oklahoma was
in what was known as the "Boynton" oil
field, in the southern end of the northwestern
part of the State, about twenty miles south
west of the city of Muskogee — a territory
which other producers had held in contempt
for five years. Here he organized the Merritt
Oil and Gas Company, in honor of those royal
old trail-blazers, Alfred and Leonidas Merritt,
whose fighting qualities and gorgeous back
bone had so challenged his admiration in the
old Mesaba Iron Range days back in the
early Nineties . B ef ore the drills had touched
the Boynton oil sands, however, Humphreys,
through other subsidiary companies, had
begun taking acreage in Kansas and at
Blaekwell, Oklahoma. Blaekwell then was
85

THE PIONEER
in sad disrepute as a result of one spectacular
plunging operator winding up his gigantic
wild-cat operations at a cost of $350,000,
with only one very doubtful and very deep
well to show for his troubles. The first test
in the Boynton field was successful.
Running true to form, however, and with all
the confidence in the world in the results of
his geological observations, Humphreys was
already looking for other fields. Meanwhile
he had organized the Humphreys Petroleum
and other companies with headquarters at
Tulsa, which successfully developed the
"Blaekwell" and the "Billings" fields. A
test was started upon a great "dome" in
New Mexico, others in Kentucky and Kansas
and two or three lesser tests in Muskogee and
Wagoner Counties, Oklahoma, coincidentally
with his leasing up a couple of big domes in
Noble County, covering seven thousand
acres, and the acquiring of a large acreage in
Wyoming, fifty miles from the nearest oil
pool. All of these explorations, it must be remem
bered, were remote from oil production. All
of the operations, however, were carried
86

THE CALL OF THE WEST
through in precisely the same definite, con
fident manner by Mr. Humphreys from his
temporary headquarters at Muskogee. It
must not be imagined for a moment that all
of these tests were successful — far from it.
That made no difference to Humphreys, how
ever. Never was the capacity of a man to
follow through tested any more thoroughly.
Courage and intelligence indeed! This was
no place for the shoestring operator. Out
of the seven different explorations started
during the sixteen months he was actively
engaged in the Mid-Continent field, three
were successful. The Merritt Oil & Gas
Company, after developing 1200 barrels
daily production at Boynton, was sold to the
Carter Oil Company for $480,000. Alto
gether more than $1,250,000 was taken out
of the Boynton district — that "contemptible
territory," which the wiseacres had waved
aside for over five years. The Duluth-Okla-
homa Oil Company, in which Humphreys
was interested, with eight thousand acres of
oil rights on the Blaekwell dome, drilled the
two biggest wells in the Blaekwell pool, one
of which was a gusher and sent a tremor
87

THE PIONEER
through the whole Mid-Continent crude oil
market. It started off at the rate of 185
barrels an hour and was making 75 barrels an
hour two weeks later. The first well started
off at 1600 barrels a day and, after producing
160,000 barrels during a period of six months,
was drilled deeper, increasing the production
to 60 barrels an hour.
These are interesting figures — not so much
from a material standpoint, however, as
indicating that godUke q'uality of the man
in staying by. When one figures that the
approximate cost of drilling an oil well "in
deep territory " is from twenty-five thousand
to one hundred thousand dollars, not to men
tion the cost of accumulating the land — one
hardly knows in which category to place the
nervy operator who wins three out of seven:
— a capitalist or a "wild-catter." And again
— when one considers that all these pros
pective wells were off the beaten track and
located in a sort of technical no-man's-land —
Humphreys' success brings to mind that
scriptural line: "The stone which the builders
rejected is become the head of the corner."
The history of this Oklahoma venture
88

THE CALL OF THE WEST
would be incomplete without the story of
what is known to this day in both the oil
and legal annals of the State as the Hum
phreys' Slater & Steiner deal. Like the poor,
the rascals who resort to fake lawsuits with a
view to robbing the pioneer of the results of
his hard-earned success, are always with us.
When Humphreys made his appearance in
the Boynton field, there were the usual hang
ers-on who had emigrated from all parts of
the country to pick up an honest living (?) in
the new oil country. It's hardly necessary to
say that " all's grist that comes to the mill "
with these gentlemen and that they are no
respecters of persons It must have been
Humphreys' frank, open countenance and
hearty, cordial manner of dealing with all
people that deceived Messrs. Slater & Steiner
into thinking that he was an easy mark, and
they went after him in the most approved
fashion, with the apparent conviction that all
there was to do was to start a lawsuit that
would make him "ante" in preference to
having the sale of his company indefinitely
delayed until the case should be decided by
the court. They didn't know their man : he
89

THE PIONEER
who regarded that time-honored motto:
Millions for defence but not one dollar for tri
bute as the "law and the prophets" for every
company he had ever formed. And the
thorough thrashing they got in the Oklahoma
courts stands to this day as the most interest
ing record of what this particular strain of
operators may expect when they tackle a real
fighter. One of the first acts of the newly organized
Merritt Oil & Gas Company was the purchase
of an old second-hand derrick from Mr.
Slater and a lease on a forty-acre tract of oil
land from Mr. Steiner. Stock in the new
company was issued to both of these men
at the rate of $50 per share, aggregating
$4,250 in payment for both of the items
mentioned, and which constituted mighty
good money at that — more, by a large margin,
than they would have gladly sold the same for
on a cash basis. After the property had
reached that point in its development when it
was a good "buy" in the open market, the
Carter Oil Company offered Humphreys
$480,000 for it and the deal was made accord
ingly. When Messrs. Slater and Steiner
90

THE CALL OF THE WEST
heard of it, they commenced suit to enjoin
the sale, asked for the appointment of a
Receiver, and judgment against the Merritt
Oil & Gas Company in the sum of $150,000
which was supposed to represent an equal
division of the value of their stock and the
damages (?) sustained. They charged every
thing on the calendar: fraud, misrepresen
tation, over-issue of stock, the drilling of
other oil wells with the funds of the Merritt
Company — in short, everything that an
unscrupulous outfit could think of to bolster
up their claims. The suit was filed and the
papers served and — if precedent meant any
thing — the plaintiffs felt fairly sure of
unearthing sufficient evidence to postpone
the sale until they "got theirs." But, they
reckoned without their host. They were
counting on Humphreys' organization of a
new oil company being enough like most of
those which had gone before to give color
to their claims. In other words, while they
had no basis for their suspicion, they took for
granted that Humphreys, like most of his
predecessors, would stand for a "shake
down" rather than face a trial with its pos-
91

THE PIONEER
sible disclosures of questionable management,
not to mention the delay in consummating
the sale with the chances of its falling through
altogether. But — as I have already said:
they didn't know their man, and what fol
lowed was absolutely characteristic of the
man, his methods, his attitude toward his
stockholders, and his unfailing fidelity to
principle, both in the matter of business and
the far more important question of self-
respect. Within three hours after the papers had
been served on him, Humphreys was waited
upon by one of Slater & Steiner's satellites
with a proposition to compromise the suit for
fifty thousand dollars. He was promptly
thrown out of the office. A prompt trial
followed during which it was shown that
every share of stock that had been issued had
been paid for in cash except those shares
which had been issued to the plaintiffs, that
the President (Mr. Humphreys), the Secre
tary and the Treasurer of the company had
served without salary, that every dollar
expended by the company was represented
by proper vouchers and that the company's
92

THE CALL OF THE WEST
record was absolutely clean and above sus
picion. Mr. Humphreys' attorney charged
Messrs. Slater & Steiner and their attorneys
with being plain blackmailers and asked the
Court to refuse the injunction against the sale
of the property, also to refuse the Receiver
ship and to issue an order restraining these
men or their representatives from interfering
with the sale. The presiding Justice, without
asking a single question or allowing their
attorney to say a word, granted the request
immediately. The sale of the Merritt Oil &
Gas Company took place at once and not long
afterward the Slater & Steiner suit was with
drawn. These estimable gentlemen, already
having sold 35 of their original allotment of
85 shares of stock for $100 per share, in the
open market, finally surrendered the remain
ing fifty shares of stock for a matter of exactly
$2.50 per share, thereby enabling Humphreys
to clean their names off the books of the
Merritt Oil & Gas Company for the modest
sum of $125 : quite a come-down from a suit
for $150,000. But that's Humphreys.

93

CHAPTER X
the romance of big muddy
"He either fears his fate too much.
Or his deserts are small.
Who dares not put it to the touch
And win — or lose it all."
There is a curious lack of directness in the
view which most men take of their own busi
ness problems. They find it difficult to
assume the attitude of a disinterested obser
ver. Great successes as well as great f aUures
are frequently predicated upon the point of
view. The great difficulty with most of us in
our various vocations is that we spend
entirely too much time on the inside, looking
out, instead of maintaining a clear per
spective from the outside, looking in. In a
previous chapter I have referred to that
unusual fairmindedness which enabled Albert
Humphreys to step into the shoes of the other
94

THE ROMANCE OF BIG MUDDY
man, so to speak, and render judgment
accordingly. This is not only one of the
inherent qualities of the man's moral aspects
but of his commercial sagacity as well.
Possessing a mentality almost lightning-like
in its processes, he has always created the
impression upon those less nimble in their
thinking, of acting without due deliberation.
As a matter of fact, however, I have never
known a man possessing a surer or more
keenly analytical judgment, either of men or
of measures, or one who could more quickly
scent the proximity of a mistake or who was
quicker to acknowledge one and to shoulder
the responsibility accordingly. It is a mere
truism to state that men of this stamp are
always on the lookout for the viewpoint and
the opinions of those with whom they are
associated. Humphreys has always been
distinguished by his willingness to listen to
the other man, no matter how humble his
station, believing that every worker in an
industry or a profession owes a certain
obligation to that industry or profession as a
whole. But he never deluded himself with
the idea that he had a monopoly of all the
95

THE PIONEER
knowledge and experience bearing thereon.
I have turned aside for a moment to paint
this little picture of the man in order to cast a
sidelight upon the most dramatic and the
most sensationally successful experience of his
whole business life. Oh yes — there were
those who shrugged their shoulders, com
mented oracularly on the usual parting of a
fool and his money. But — Humphreys had
long ago discovered a much greater fool in
the man who lacked the courage of his con
victions and who never knew the joy of
putting his hand to the plow and keeping it
there. During the year 1916 his attention was
called to a structure in the State of Wyoming,
known as the Big Muddy field, referred to in
the preceding chapter as being some fifty
miles from the nearest oil pool. Accompanied
by his geologist, he made a minute examin
ation of this particular territory and took up
a large acreage as a result. Next followed an
arrangement with Mr. R. B. Whiteside, a
wealthy Duluth lumberman, to drill a well in
return for a share in the acreage. Whiteside
made three unsuccessful attempts, that is to
96

THE ROMANCE OF BIG MUDDY
say he drilled and lost three wells, never
getting within 1500 feet of where the pay-
sand was to be found. Up to this time, no
oil well had been driven below 1800 feet in
depth in that structure. In other words, all
of the oil experts who had preceded Mr.
Humphreys in exploring that territory, con
sidered it sheer foolhardiness and a deliberate
waste of money to attempt to drive a well
beyond that depth. Humphreys finally
made up his mind that he would have to go
into the Big Muddy field personally and drill
his own well if he ever expected to get back a
dollar of bis money. Realizing what a husky
sum of money it would take to keep on going
down until he struck the pay-sand — in the
existence of which he was absolutely confident
— he made a proposition to the Midwest
Refining Company, offering them a lease on
six hundred acres if they would drill the well
at their own expense. Notwithstanding the
fact that their geologists who, with several
others, had been over this property a number
of times and had condemned it out of hand, the
Midwest people took a fortnight to make one
last searching investigation, which resulted
i 97

THE PIONEER
in their turning down Mr. Humphreys' pro
position for the following very interesting
reason, as they saw it:
An oil "dome" may be resembled to a
huge inverted basin in which the oil is held
owing to the geological formation of the
rock. The Midwest oil experts believed that
the northwest end of the dome or structure
was open and that, if there had ever been
any oil in that dome, it had escaped long ago.
Mr. Humphreys' geologist, after a third
examination, reached the conclusion that the
dome was closed tight at the supposedly open
end and that oil would be reached when they
drilled into what is commonly known as the
Wall Creek Sand, which is found at a depth of
about three thousand feet. It was simply a
difference of opinion between Mr. Hum
phreys' geologist and the Midwest geologists,
not to mention a goodly aggregation of other
geologists, all of whom believed that Hum
phreys was mistaken and would have his
labor for his pains. Humphreys started
building his derrick the first week in May,
1916, and, after six months' unceasing effort,
in the following November, at the astounding
98

THE ROMANCE OF BIG MUDDY
depth of 3151 feet, he struck the Wall Creek
Sand. Of course, everybody was suitably
amazed. Of course, it was a "pure matter of
luck," as the rest of the geologists all agreed.
And — of course, they all had their own
peculiar sensations when the Ohio Oil Com
pany bought a half-interest in the 500 acres
immediately surrounding the weU for
$500,000 cash. The remaining half, together
with the balance of the section and Mr.
Humphreys' holdings, was sold to the Mid
west Refining Company and a syndicate of
New York capitalists for the modest sum of
$1,000,000 cash and a third interest in the
stock of the Merritt Oil Corporation, which
was formed almost immediately to manage
the property — an added tribute to bis old
friends and trail-blazers, Alfred and Leonidas
Merritt of Mesaba fame.
The Merritt Oil Corporation was organized
with a capital stock of 600,000 shares at $10
per share, which were listed on the New York
"Curb" late in December, selUng at once
for $14, or $4 above par. The Merritt Oil
Corporation to-day has a production of
about 5000 barrels per day. It owns be-
99

THE PIONEER
tween 5000 and 6000 acres of the famous
Big Muddy dome, and is one of the most
prosperous oil companies west of the Mis
sissippi River.

100

CHAPTER XI
honor's debt paid in full
"Leave not, my soul, the unfoughten field —
Nor leave thy debts dishonored — nor thy place desert
without due service rendered.
For thy life, up, spirit, and defend thy fort of clay!"
Albert Humphreys was fifty-six years old
when he "cashed" on the Big Muddy strike.
His first move thereafter was to pay off the
remainder of that $1,200,000 debt of honor
which he had been carrying for twenty-three
years as a little memento of his experience
in the Mesaba Iron Range during the panic of
1893. In the spiritual world as well as the
physical, man develops best under responsi
bility and burden-bearing. He does better
work if he has a goal in sight. Paying off
the mortgage on a home built for wife and
children is one of the greatest incentives to
thrift that a young man can have. But —
what shall be said of a young man whose
101

THE PIONEER
all-absorbing inspiration at the age of thirty-
three is paying for a $1,200,000 "dead
horse?" As a matter of fact — there isn't
much to be said that would be at all germane
to the experience of the average man; that's
just the point — Humphreys isn't an average
man: "The sun set; but set not his hope:
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye:
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of time."
Someone has described a genius as a man
who can see just far enough ahead not to get
"cold feet." Someone else has characterized
a good fellow as one who boasts little, crows
gently when in luck, pays up, puts up, shuts
up when beaten and comes back for more.
Somewhere between these two extremes — and
partaking liberally of both — must be placed
the unusual personality of this man. Person
ally, I find it difficult to visualize a young
man looking forward with any degree of
idealism to the dedication of his life to paying
a debt for which no moral responsibility could
102

HONOR'S DEBT PAID IN FULL
be laid at his door. That Humphreys should
have chosen this course demonstrates as
nothing else could that the fundamental act
of Ufe is not judgment but choice. It is not
what people have decided but what people
want that is of original and divine importance.
In a previous chapter — speaking about his
experience at the time of the failure of the
Humphreys' Lumber Company when he was
a youngster of twenty-seven — Humphreys
very frankly states that he would just as soon
have had the word "Criminal" branded on
his back as "Bankrupt." And — while that
does not lessen the tragedy of dedicating half
a life time to the payment of a debt of honor,
it does, nevertheless, cast a very interesting
sidelight upon the character of a young man
who, commercially speaking, had not yet
found himself.
Life's rewards, materially speaking, fre
quently appear cheap as we come within
sight of them. Fortune loves to give slippers
to those who have wooden legs and gloves to
those without hands. The inheritance which
might have enabled us to live at our ease
usually comes to us on the day of our death.
103

THE PIONEER
I was with Albert Humphreys during the
early part of January, 1917, when he received
two checks aggregating $1,500,000 for his
interests in the Big Muddy structure. And
I know whereof I speak when I say that his
principal interest in that tidy sum of money
centered in the fact that it enabled him to
make the final payment on his illustrious
"dead horse," the more or less odoriferous
memory of which he had been carrying around
with him for over twenty years. And he
made it with as keen a joy of accompUshment
as any young householder ever felt in paying
off the mortgage.
During Humphreys' preliminary investi
gation of the Wyoming oil field, he learned
that one V. H. Barnett, in the employ
of the United States Geological Survey,
had examined the Big Muddy structure in
1914 and went on record with his opinion that
it was closed and that oil would be found
upon reaching the Wall Creek Sand at an
approximate depth of 2500 feet. Just as
a matter of sentiment, Humphreys started
to look the man up, only to learn that he
had been dead some time. He learned,
104

HONOR'S DEBT PAID IN FULL
however, that Barnett's widow was still alive
and — as luck would have it — employed as a
stenographer in a well-known oil firm in Tulsa,
Oklahoma. The next time he went to Tulsa
he sought out Mrs. Barnett — and — simply as
an expression of his own and his associates
appreciation of her husband's discoveries in
the Big Muddy field — presented to her a
check for ten thousand dollars. I could fill
the balance of this chapter with records of
similar instances of the man's big-hearted-
ness; instead of that, however, I am going to
content myself with a quotation from Emer
son: "When we see a soul whose acts are all
regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must
thank God that such things can be and are,
and not turn sourly on the angel and say:
'Crump is a better man with his grunting
resistance to all his native devils."
We are so saturated in what we consider
up-to-date methods that we are prone to
forget all about elementary morals. We
talk glibly about growth and development
but most of us really worship at the shrine of
the dollar mark. Pin us down, and we know
that big men and big business grow naturally
105

THE PIONEER
by virtue of service rendered — and the better
the service the more rapid the growth;
pygmy -like, however, we act most of the time
as if we believed the contrary. Humphreys'
dominating characteristic is personal honor.
For lack of a better term, I would call him a
Master workman. As has been shown all
through this biography, he possessed from
the very outset of his career a fundamental
appreciation of the spirituality of good work
and the vital importance to a man's mental
and moral development of rendering a fuU
measure of service in all his dealings with his
brother man. The one thing that stands
between most men and a well-rounded-out
success is that they are inclined to be business
men first and men afterward. Whereas, he
who hopes to become a worth-while citizen
in his community must see to it that he is a
man first and devoted to high standards of
practice. If we truly realized the possibilities of
growth, nothing would ever take the place
of the word service in our minds. Because —
service is an attribute of character; and —
when character is gone, there is nothing left.
106

HONOR'S DEBT PAID IN FULL
Humphreys realized very early in life that
all men in their respective vocations are
salesmen of their own personalities; that the
establishment of confidence is the one su
preme thing; that no man can hope to success
fully conduct any kind of a business or a
profession until he has thoroughly "sold"
himself and his character to his prospective
clients. It was that underlying conviction
that made him feel, in his young manhood,
that there was little difference between the
words "Criminal" and "Bankrupt" when
applied by the world at large to the individual.
He simply could not tolerate the idea of a
tarnished escutcheon. These peculiarly per
sonal and spiritual points were forced upon
his mind by reason of his recognition of the
fact that no man can live unto himself; that
he is a part of all that he has met; that he is
"selling" himself all the time, for good or
for ill, to every person with whom he comes
in contact; and that the operation of this
personal salesmanship is complete only when
accompanied by the rendering of real service.
The man who can see the end of loyal
service, heartily rendered, is genius enough to
107

THE PIONEER
see the uttermost end of the universe. He
only wins, however, who goes far enough,
who recognizes the divinity of service, who
experiences a real thrill of joy over work well
done, who is " on the square " with himself.
In a sense, this is religion, because it compels
man's recognition of a Power within himself
which makes for righteousness and enables
him to deliver that percentage of service
which sets him apart from his less spiritually-
minded brother. This is the kind of religion
that turns ideas into energy. This it was
that inspired Humphreys with that deter
mination which, despite the failure of others,
kept him on the job unceasingly, night and
day, for a period of six months until the Big
Muddy well was drilled into the Wall Creek
Sand and thus made possible the fulfilment
of his hopes. Not until duty looms larger in
a man's mind than his rights does he begin to
see clearly — and, when that time arrives, the
Humphreys type of man sees duty as a
privilege and not as compulsion. There
never entered into Humphreys' mind the
slightest question of his ultimate success;
he never learned how to "strike sail to a
108

HONOR'S DEBT PAID IN FULL
fear." He was his own severest critic. He
knew the driving power behind the word
must, and mstead of evading it he welcomed
it with open arms. And yet — there were
those around the Big Muddy field who
dubbed that 3151 foot well "Humphreys'
Folly" long before it attained that depth.
Truly, generalities are the refuge of feeble
minds; but, then — it takes an oyster knife
to open some men's eyes.

109

CHAPTER XII
the old brown suit
" Let those the gods have blinded
Hold their long feud with Fate —
And clutch at toys that never yet
Could make one mean man great.
Let those that Earth has bastarded
Fret and contrive and plan —
But I will enter like an heir
The old estate of man!"
Upstairs in a closet in the Humphreys'
home in Denver, there hangs an old brown
suit of clothes, bespattered with oil, for
which Albert Humphreys entertains a high
regard not to be commercially measured.
He wore it on the day that his first well came
through in the Boynton district down
Oklahoma way. When an oil well is "shot"
— that's no place for purple and fine linen.
When the Boynton well struck there was
quite a shower of the precious liquid which
sprinkled everybody and everything within
110

THE OLD BROWN SUIT
a radius of several hundred yards and which
also gave great promise of Humphreys'
subsequent sale of that particular property
for the tidy sum of $480,000. Humphreys
wore that old suit through all his activities
in the petroleum field. The only time he
was ever seen without it, during his various
trips to Tulsa, was coming and going to the
railway station. In fact — he became a sort
of public character and it was a very common
thing to hear the remark as he passed by,
either out in the oil fields or on the streets of
Tulsa: "There goes Humphreys in his old
brown suit." And — almost as frequently
something would be said in the same rela
tion about "the domes that begin with B,"
referring to the "Boynton," "Blaekwell"
and "Billings" fields where Humphreys dis
tinguished himself as a more or less scientific
"wild-catter." When he went up into the
Wyoming fields, the old brown suit went
along and another dome that began with
B was added to the list in the "Big Muddy"
structure. It is strange what deep impressions are
made by little things. With all his men-
Ill

THE PIONEER
tality, his wealth of experience, love of the
soil, and knowledge of the secrets which old
Mother Earth hides so closely in her bosom,
Humphreys' regard for that old brown suit
almost attained to a superstition. He
wouldn't any more go out into an oil field
otherwise clothed than he would have
thought of going without any clothing at all.
One would naturally say: "Of course not —
why would he take the chances of ruining a
perfectly good suit of clothes while he had an
old suit that was scarcely fit for any other
use?" But — every one of us into whose life
the romance of business has entered will
appreciate the attitude of the man. The old
brown suit cut no figure as a sentimental
reminder of his success. Rather was it a
suggestive memento of the transposition of
certain figures from the debit to the credit
side of the ledger. Yea, verily — the man
must be true to his dream though God
Himself should die! And to-day, I question
whether there is enough money lying around
in the State of Colorado to purchase that old
brown suit, notwithstanding the fact that
one of these days when he has "gone the long
112

THE OLD BROWN SUIT
trail" it will probably find its way into the
hands of the ragman.
In all we notice in the eyes of man, in the
way of desire, expression or reminiscence,
in all we read of his writings, and whatever we
hear in his outpourings of speech — there is
nothing to match his hunger for home.
While — "strong lust of gear shall drive him
forth," a man must come back weary with
labor if he is really to taste home — that is, the
real home; the place inside the mind. It was
to be expected, therefore, when Humphreys
left his West Virginia coal interests in the
hands of trusted lieutenants and turned his
face from Charleston toward the West, that
he would keep in touch with the old town
and its associations. From "a prophet
without honor," he has grown to be a
"favorite son" — if ever such a thing was
known outside of political terminology. And
— it may be said of Humphreys in Charleston,
as expressed in the epitaph of Sir Christopher
Wren, the famous architect of the Seven
teenth Century, who lies in the ancient
churchyard of St. Paul's, London: "Wouldst
thou see his monument — look around."
« 113

THE PIONEER
In Charleston there is a beautiful building
known as the Union Mission, containing a
chapel which seats six hundred people, a
Sunday school roster of three hundred chil
dren, which requires the services of eighteen
persons, involving a payroll approximating
thirty thousand dollars per year. This Mis
sion houses seventy-five homeless children
and a large number of men and women who
gravitate toward it from all parts of the
South and who are taken in hand by a corps
of consecreated, non-sectarian Christian
workers who regard it as their greatest
privilege to put unfortunate members of so
ciety upon their feet and give them a fresh
start in life. As one walks through this
splendid institution, it is difficult to imagine
that it had its beginning about ten years
ago in an old storeroom, furnished with a
few rough benches, and a drygoods box for an
altar, where the derelicts of the night were
welcomed to sleeping room on the floor, minus
blankets. To-day its ramifications extend, not
only throughout the State of West Virginia
but into adjoining States as well. It has been
the starting point of similar institutions
114

THE OLD BROWN SUIT
which have been established in the cities of
Evansville, Indiana; Akron and Canton, Ohio;
Petersburg, Va. ; Parkersburg and Wheeling,
West Virginia. It is a place where the latch
string is always out and where a welcome
hand is extended to every unfortunate who
enters its doors, and no questions asked
except those which are designed to be person
ally helpful. In the near future, a building
will be erected upon the Mission property
which will be devoted to a free clinic and a
women's and children's hospital.
Nearby may be found the Salvation Army
Citadel and the Humphreys and the Boyd
Memorial churches — the latter being in mem
ory of both Mr. and Mrs. Humphreys'
parents. Except the memorial churches,
which were built exclusively by Albert E.
Humphreys and his cousin, Albert J. Hum
phreys, the other institutions mentioned are
the outcome of the public-spiritedness of
some of West Virginia's best citizens who
were drawn together in a good cause as a
result of Albert Humphreys' leadership, and
who saw — first of all through his eyes — the
necessity for the helping hand from the out-
115

THE PIONEER
side in order to raise the standard of manhood
and womanhood in that city. It would be of
comparatively little interest to chronicle the
details of just how these splendid institutions
were started and it would not fit in with
Humphreys' ideas to do more than merely
mention that he had a part in a work of which
the whole city of Charleston is proud.
Out in Sissonville on the crest of a hill
locally known as "Mount Zion," is a little
wooden church, the cornerstone of which was
laid in 1870. In a small tin box deposited in
the center of that stone there is a ten-cent
piece, representing the first money ever
earned by the subject of my sketch, at the
age of ten years. This modest little edifice,
which took the place fifty years ago of a log
school house in which divine service was held
on Sundays, has never been closed during all
the years that have flown. And — sometime
in the near future, Humphreys is going back
there to the scenes of his boyhood to build
them a new church of brick and stone instead
of rough lumber. And — knowing my friend
as I do — I venture the statement that he will
get as much pleasure out of a glance at the
116

MOUNT ZION CHURCH AND THE HUMPHREYS BURIAL PLOT

THE OLD BROWN SUIT
little silver piece in the tin box as he will from
ministering to the comfort of those who have
grown up around that old house of prayer
since his departure many years ago.
At the outset of this life story of my friend
I referred to him as a lover of liberty and his
fellow man, who has kept his faith without
a stain amid a sordid world. A man's self-
sufficiency will carry him only so far; in the
presence of his moral responsibility to his
Maker and in his secret knowledge of the
merits or demerits of his own stewardship, it
drops from him like a discarded garment.
No one realizes more keenly than this same
Humphreys that the biggest fool of all is
the man who fools himself. Humphreys
has always lived close to old Mother Na
ture and, as Emerson most eloquently ex
presses it: "Nature, as we know her, is no
saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics,
Gentoos and corn-eaters, she does not dis
tinguish by any favor. She comes eating
and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the
great, the strong, the beautiful, are not
children of our law, do not come out of the
Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor
117

THE PIONEER
punctually keep the Commandments." One
would not do well to smite Humphreys on one
cheek with the expectation that he would
turn the other for a similar assault. But —
no appeal to his sense of fairness was ever
made in vain. With him public-spiritedness
is a form of reUgion — which is one way of
saying that, while he was systematicaUy set
ting aside, for a period of twenty years and
over, sufficient funds to cover the final inter
ment of his $1,200,000 "dead horse," he
didn't overlook his self-imposed duties as a
citizen of his old home town, notwithstanding
the fact he had transferred the far greater
part of his commercial activities to the West.
If there be any philosophy of History its
final word is Redemption. Constructive
helpfulness and not maudlin sympathy is
Humphreys' motif. He has no inclination to
lay down any rules of life for the other man to
follow. He realizes, however, that a church-
less country would mean a godless country
and he has no use for the slacker in either the
spiritual or material walks of life. I have
heard him say that " unmindf ulness of God,
who has always been so mindful of us, is
118

THE OLD BROWN SUIT
mean." And — while his anger burns like a
white-hot fire against the human parasite
wherever found — his thought is always for the
poor and the afflicted and his hand is ever in
his pocket. He plays a big game in a big way
and he gets a tremendous amount of pleasure
out of life. I think he would rather go fishing
than go to church. On the other hand, I
have known him, busy man that he is, to
travel a thousand miles to establish a non-
sectarian mission where local effort had
failed, and it's only fair to say that his money
always follows his arguments. A bit of
a Nature-worshiper he. I have seen his hat
come off in the presence of a glorious sunset
with much the same spirit of adoration that
he would bare his head before the American
flag. And — while he may never have read
the following lines by Neidhardt — I'll take a
chance on his standing for them :
"What! House me my God?
Take me in where no blossoms are blowing!
No riot of green and no sky,
And no bird song — no growing?
Parcel out what already is mine, like a vendor of staples?
See! Yonder my God burns revealed in the sap-drunken
maples.'' 119

THE PIONEER
A little romance in the heart, a little horse
sense in the head, a little iron in the purpose
— these three things will keep a man going in
the world as long as it's decent for him to
stay. If — "he has achieved success who has
lived well, laughed often, and loved much,
who has gained the respect of intelligent men
and the love of little children, who has filled
his niche and accomplished his task, who has
always looked for the best in others and given
the best he had," — then Humphreys has
been a very successful man and will leave the
world better than he found it. If there be
one text over and above another by which
Humphreys has ordered his daily life, it
might be expressed as follows: "Help your
neighbor but keep your nose out of his
affairs." If — as a result of having observed
his mental processes and his aggressive
methods over a term of years — I were asked
to formulate his creed, I should express it
somewhat as follows :
" Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
From none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws."
120

CHAPTER XIII
THE AWAKENING
"For God speaketh once,
Yea, twice, though man regardeth it not.
In a dream, in a vision of the night,
When deep sleep falleth upon men.
In slumberings upon the bed;
Then he openeth the ears of men
And sealeth their instruction.
"I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;
But now mine eye seeth Thee:
Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent
In dust and ashes." The Book op Job.
There was an interval of several weeks
between the writing of this chapter and those
which precede it, which allowed for the trip
to Charleston referred to herein, but for
which this chapter never would have been
written. No one appreciates more than I
that a biography from which the weaknesses
and the failings of the subject are excluded
121

THE PIONEER
cannot be fully representative. As a matter
of fact my friend Humphreys has so few faults
and they are, relatively, so unimportant
beside the big, salient points of his character
as to be unworthy of record; they simply
would have to be dragged in bodily, so to
speak, because they constitute no bearing
whatsoever on the man's make-up. The way
in which the writing of this last chapter
was brought about, however, illustrates a
definite phase of the man's latter-day devel
opment which was not fully apparent before
we went to Charleston together and which
clearly indicates that spiritual growth is not
necessarily a matter of years. The Hum
phreys with whom I spent a fortnight in
Charleston was a different man from the one
I had always known and the change was all
the more remarkable by reason of that
unbending pride which had dominated his life
for many years having been withdrawn from
the forefront and given its proper place in the
background of that intensely active mind.
It is quite fitting, therefore, that this chapter
should stand by itself as an afterthought
or — I might say — an afterglow of a remarka-
122

UNION MISSION CAMP IN THE HILLS

THE AWAKENING
ble experience. Shortly after bringing in the
"Big Muddy" well, Humphreys was stricken
by a serious illness, under the shadow of
which he lay for two years; it was a general
breakdown resulting from the unremitting
strain of nearly thirty years' work at a
tension to which no man should ever subject
himself if he has any idea of completing his
allotted span. There is no need to dwell
upon the agony of spirit of this man of
power, shorn of his wondrous dynamic
energy, thrown to one side like so much
flotsam washed up on the sea beach: a splen
did creation, a marvelous mechanism
"scrapped." They were two long, dark
years during which but few letters passed
between us — indeed, there was nothing to
say and little to think of but that terrific
text: "What is a man profited, if he shall
gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
My readers can imagine my feelings when
one bleak day in February, 1920, my tele
phone rang and I heard the familiar voice,
with its beloved intonations, clear, strong,
and vibrant with all its old-time energy,
calling my name from — it seemed to me —
123

THE PIONEER
across the void of years. Yes, he was here in
New York, he had come across the continent
without saying a word to me and sprung
his little surprise upon one whose prayers
had been uttered more than once on his
behalf. And as he told me the story — how
" God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform" —
his face shone with " the light that never was,
on sea or land" — and I saw it all and
marveled. As he put it, rather laconically, at the end
of one of the most tremendously interesting
stories I ever listened to in my life: "A man
who is shunted to one side for two years has a
lot of time to think — and I thought." The
net result of his thinking was as it always
is with men of his type: an immediate dif
ferentiation of the shadow and the sub
stance. He saw that practically everything
he had done during those three busy decades
had been accomplished in the spirit of per
sonal pride; that his uprightness of life, his
scrupulous regard for his word of honor, his
charities, etc., had all been more or less empty
124

THE AWAKENING
because of their selfish objectivity. He had
been successful — yes; he had been glad to
share a part of his success with others as a
matter of general decency, simply because he
was naturally keen to see others get a chance
for "theirs." He had whipped some of his
bitterest opponents thoroughly and pro
ceeded to forget them because he wasn't the
kind of a man to carry a grudge and — besides,
he didn't believe in any man playing a cheap
game, and he was too busy to spend any time
thinking about the men who tried to block his
projects, all of which were admittedly big,
broad, and constructively helpful as this
record shows. He had been self-sufficient.
yes — but not to an offensive extent. He had
been a fine citizen, a splendid husband and
father, a gorgeous friend and a generous
enemy and he loved his fellow man, or at
least he believed he did. What was it that
was lacking? He found what it was! He
had been working for himself and not for the
Divine Master. He saw it all; he got the
slant that every thinking man gets sooner or
later, especially if he be beaten to his knees —
that the basis of his whole scheme was a
125

THE PIONEER
species of selfishness, born out of a supreme
confidence in his own strength, and that
readjustment was inevitable if he were going
to live up to his light. And right there and
then he turned himself toward his Maker
in a humility of spirit that he had never felt
before and vowed that if he should recover his
health and strength he would devote his life
to His service. In his belief, his return to
health dates almost from that very hour, and
the good Lord knows I have no reason to
doubt it — and if I had, I'd try to believe it for
the sake of my own benighted spirit; because
Humphreys' spiritual rebirth is just as real
as his recovered sight was to blind Bartimeus
of Holy Writ.
In the following May he returned again to
New York and I accompanied him to Charles
ton whither he journeyed for the purpose of
fulfilling two especial desires which had
occupied his mind for a long time: to take
part in the dedication ceremonies of the
Union Mission which had been indefinitely
postponed for nearly two years because of
his illness, and also to complete the arrange
ments for another public benefaction — the
126

THE AWAKENING
construction of a summer camp up in the
hills not far from the city, to be conducted in
conjunction with the work of the Mission.
This camp was organized for the especial
benefit of Charleston's children of the poor —
Uttle folk of both sexes who are strangers
to babbling brooks, beautiful meadows, fields
of flowers, mountain air, and singing birds.
It includes a number of buildings and a
spacious assembly pavilion, not to mention
a wonderful swimming pool and a never
failing spring — all ensconced in an exquisite
vaUey far above the level of the city. It
has already become a veritable god-send to
the poor kiddies of the city, all of whom
will have a chance, every summer, for many
years to come, for a complete change of
environment. It was a week of rejoicing for those who
knew what the past two years had meant to
their dear friend whom they had despaired
ever seeing again. Part of the dedication
program was devoted to the unveiling of a
bronze tablet commemorating the services of
the Mission's distinguished patron. And it
was no little source of happiness to Hum-
127

THE PIONEER
phreys to have Rev. Francis Napoleon Lynch,
Pastor of the Marietta, Ohio, Methodist
Church, who was his boyhood friend and had
been converted in the old church on "Mount
Zion" at Sissonville, come to Charleston to
preach the dedicatory sermon. Verily, it was
a feast of good things, accompanied by a
spiritual uplifting which was felt throughout
the city.
During the week, Humphreys, accom
panied by his dear old friend Col. "Bob"
Carr, known throughout the length and
breadth of West Virginia, and who was with
him when the site of the city of Virginia,
Minnesota, was selected, back in the old
Mesaba days; Frank Cox, who has been
Humphreys' partner for over thirty years
and in charge of all his West Virginia inter
ests; Rev. Lynch and some intimate friends
identified with the Mission work, all — drove
out to Sissonville where he had not visited
for years, and spent the day walking through
the scenes of his childhood, not forgetting
the old mill which his father had built and
operated for so many years, now being carried
on by Humphreys' eldest brother, Adam C,
128

¦¦t ..-aff-lf
UNION MISSION CAMP SWIMMING HOLE

THE AWAKENING
known to the whole countryside as "Doc
Humphreys, the Honest Miller," by whom
and his good wife the party was entertained
at an old-fashioned country dinner, the
memory of which will be a sweet savour to
the writer of this biography for a long time to
come. "Doc " has never cared to stray from
the old hearthstone and would rather be
known as Sissonville's "Honest Miller" than
to have been the discoverer of the Mesaba.
In the afternoon, the whole party repaired
to the old church on "Mount Zion" and
Pastor Lynch preached a sermon that
brought those who were left of his boyhood
days "upstanding," and at which time
Humphreys promised to build them a new
church edifice of brick and stone — one that
would last as long as any of the present
village-folk of Sissonville would be apt to
worship there, and then some. And when
I saw my old friend standing in the pulpit of
that primitive house of worship and heard
him tell how different the world looked to
him since he had been rescued from both
physical and spiritual sickness, it made me
happier than these cold sentences can ever
9 129

THE PIONEER
indicate. His words will remain with me for
many a year to come: "When I get up in the
morning and look out on the world," said he,
"I feel as if I mounted to the seat of an
immense reaper and, taking the invisible
reins in my hands, guided the horses down
through vast fields of golden grain, returning
at night with a rich harvest for my Heavenly
Master. The sun, sky, streams, and trees,
yes — the whole world appears more wonder
ful to my newly-opened eyes than I ever
dreamed was possible. And it's aU because,
to-day — no matter what I do — I'm working
for Him." It was this experience that
determined me to add this final chapter, with
out altering in any way those that have
preceded it.
Ah! No one realizes more than this dear
friend of mine just what a man's reactions
are when he feels that he has been snatched
from the edge of the precipice by unseen
hands at the very moment he was slipping
over. How our eyes turn to the future in
such an hour! Just give us one more chance
and see what wonderful use we wiU make of
our time! Human life faces only one way.
130

THE AWAKENING
For all the past toward which we yearn or for
which we may feel sorry ; for all the love which
has Ughted up the days behind us or the
tragic mistakes which have darkened them —
there can be no stay of foot, and looking
backward can not change the front of our
forward march once we get into our stride.
Yes, indeed — to the very limit of life's onward
journey, to-morrow is more than yesterday.
We would rather lift the veil of any day to
come than to look upon the face of any day
that is gone or all the days that we remember.
Truly, when God lays His hand upon a man
for the purpose of turning him to Himself and
to His work, that, indeed, is one of the tides
in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood,
leads on to fortune — such fortune as the
purely material man can have no conception
of. If a man can only be turned! or, I might
say: if he is worth turning. Albert Hum
phreys had to be brought to death's door in
order that he might "find himself." He is
not the type of man who could ever remain
content in the shallows. Those splendid
faculties which have been so successfully
devoted to material things for so many years
131

THE PIONEER
will find their spiritual fruition as well. Sus
tained by the knowledge that he is doing his
Master's will, together with certain natural
tendencies which will assume their proper
position in the vision which guides his feet to
day, his future life is bound to be a series of
rich experiences in good works. "So mote
it be!" KING ALI'S QUEST
"There came a priest into the court one day.
And, standing by the throne with unbent knee,
He cried: 'Great Allah bade me come and say,
O King, thy brother hath sore need of thee.'
'"Our brother?' quoth the Monarch, wondering.
'Know we are AH, last of all our race.'
'Thy brother hath sore need of thee, O King,'
The priest replied, and vanished from the place.
"At night the great town slept beside the sea.
But on his pallet restless tossed the King,
And heard : 'Thy brother hath sore need of thee'
Through all the palace chambers echoing;
"Till, when gray morning through the window crept,
Forced by the summons pleading at his door,
AH went forth while all the sentries slept.
And took a way no king had gone before.
132

THE AWAKENING
"He went through fetid lane and alley dim.
He saw in prison foul the young child lie,
He heard by stake and cross the martyr's hymn.
He saw in lazar-hut the friendless die.
"In vain they called him to his crown and throne,
He laughed that such poor playthings yet should be,
And answered all : 'I find at last my own,
I know the brother that hath need of me.'
"If tomb King Ali had, it is unknown.
His palace columns razed by Time's rude hands,
For ages lost his scepter, and his throne.
His ashes mingled with the desert's sands —
' Yet down the chill wind of the Past is blown
Like breath of roses o'er a wintry sea,
These words of love: 'I find at last my own,
I know my brother that hath need of me. ' "

FINIS

133