The Square Pegs (13 page)

Tram’s record did not last two decades. In November 1889 the diminutive, intense sob-sister for the
New York World
, Nellie Ely, who had feigned insanity to expose conditions on Blackwell’s Island and had gone down in a diving bell and up in a balloon to obtain feature material, left New York on a 24,899-mile trip around the globe. Exactly seventy-two days, six hours, and eleven minutes later she reached New York on a special train from San Francisco, while ten guns saluted her from the Battery and her paper’s headline shrieked: “Father Time Outdone!” Race horses, babies, songs, and games were named after Nellie Ely, who remained a legendary figure until her death in 1922.

But all the vast publicity accorded her irked George Francis Train. An upstart of a girl in ghillie cap and plaid ulster had destroyed one of his few remaining claims to fame. He felt that he must preserve his reputation as a traveler. At once, he got in touch with the
New York World
and requested sponsorship of a new trip around the globe. The World was not interested in breaking its own record. Train then wired a friend in Washington, the editor of the
Tacoma Evening Ledger
, asking him to arrange $1,000 worth of lecture engagements. The editor of the Ledger, remembering that Train had selected the site on which Tacoma was built (“There is your terminus,” he had once told officers of the Northern Pacific) , and realizing the trip might put the community into print, arranged $4,200 worth of lectures.

Train was sixty-one years old when he left Tacoma by steamer for Vancouver. Over five hundred persons saw him off for Japan. The sixteen-day passage was rocky. Train was unaffected, but reported that a fellow passenger, Lafcadio Hearn, was seasick all the way. The trip was filled with small adventures. He was detained in Japan for lack of a passport. “At Nagasaki, the Consul told me that no foreigner could get a passport in less than three days. I said I’d get one in less than three seconds or see the Mikado or burst the empire. I went to Tokyo and got my passport in 30 minutes.” A cyclone cost him thirty hours en route to Singapore. At Calais he faced another obstacle. “I found that there was no boat I could catch. I telegraphed to Dover for a special boat and was told I could have one for forty pounds. All right. The boat came, but there were many people who desired to come, so they charged the others 17S. 6d. a head and charged me nothing; forty pounds saved.” In New York he was stalled thirty-six hours trying to obtain space on a train. At last he chartered a special Pullman for $1,500 and sped west. When he was delayed in Portland another five hours through mismanagement, he refused to attend a banquet in his honor. He went directly to Tacoma, returning to his starting point after sixty-seven days, twelve hours, and two minutes of travel. He had settled his score with Nellie Ely.

But still he was not through. Two years later, when he was offered an opportunity to improve upon his own record, he could not resist. A new community in Washington, Whatcom, located on Puget Sound, wanted to advertise itself and offered to finance Train around the world. He made the journey, without mishap or delay, in sixty days flat. It was his last adventure as Phileas Fogg.

During both of these trips, Train was, in the eyes of the law, a lunatic. The chain of events that led to this absurd designation began one day in November 1872. Train had been addressing a group in Wall Street on his candidacy for president when a friend handed him a newspaper that announced the arrest of Victoria Woodhull. It appeared that Mrs. Woodhull, the very same woman who was his rival for the presidency, and her attractive sister, Tennessee Claflin, had been jailed for obscenity (for their exposure of Henry Ward Beecher’s love life) at the instigation of the puritanical drygoods salesman, Anthony Comstock. At once Train determined to play Don Quixote “like a true errant knight, he flew to our side as a champion,” Mrs. Woodhull said and like Cervantes’s errant knight, Train emerged from the joust with the label of lunacy.

Train brought out a new edition of a paper he had once published in Omaha,
The Train Ligue
, and presented, under sensational headlines, three columns of quotations from the Holy Bible relating to sexual intercourse. “Every verse I used was worse than anything published by these women,” he stated. He was inviting arrest, and he did not have to wait long. New York detectives, spurred on by Comstock, found him in his apartment and hustled him off to the Tombs.

Train was deposited in a cubicle off the second tier, a section of the Tombs known as Murderers’ Row. Among his fellow inmates, he recorded later, was “the famous Sharkey, who might have got into worse trouble than any of us, but who escaped through the pluck and ingenuity of Maggie Jordan.” William J. Sharkey, who helped elect Train the president of Murderers’ Row, was indeed in worse trouble than the others. He was under sentence of hanging for having lulled a debtor named Dunn with a derringer. But fortunately for Sharkey, the Tombs was sloppily managed. Just as Train was permitted to wear a sealskin overcoat and receive reporters, so Sharkey was allowed to have daily visitors in his cell, which was furnished with walnut table, chaise longue, canary, and carpeting. His most regular visitor was his mistress, an accomplished pickpocket named Maggie Jordan. One day she brought Sharkey a green veil, woolen dress, black cloak, high-heeled shoes, and a pilfered visitor’s pass. He walked out in this disguise and retired to Cuba for the rest of his days.

Train needed no Maggie Jordan to assist his escape. The government realized it had a tiger by the tail. The obscenity charge was weak and the government was eager to forget it. Police were instructed to leave Train’s cell door open, lose him in the halls, make deals with him, anything to get rid of him. Train would not budge. He was in the Tombs, and there he would sit until he was properly tried.

After fourteen weeks, the government decided to try him on the grounds of insanity. Three doctors examined him. One declared him sane; the other two thought him obsessed on several subjects. All agreed that he was “of unsound mind, though harmless.” A jury concluded that he was quite sane. Finally, the government decided to try him on the charge of obscenity. But his lawyer, perhaps at the advice of Train’s family, pleaded insanity. Hastily, the judge instructed the jury to bring in the verdict “Not guilty on the ground of insanity.” Enraged, Train leaped to his feet and roared at the judge: “I protest against this whole proceeding. I have been four months in jail, and I have had no trial for the offense with which I am charged. Your Honor, I move your impeachment in the name of the people!” The judge threatened to pack him off to the State Lunatic Asylum in Utica, then thought better of it and released him as “a lunatic by judicial decree.”

Thereafter, he began to call himself The Great American Crank and played the role to the hilt. Years before, in Omaha, suffering some fancied insult from the manager of the Herndon House, he had marched out of a banquet vowing to get even. Within a few hours, he had purchased an empty lot across the street for $5,000, sketched the crude plan of a new and better hotel on the back of an envelope, and offered a contractor $1,000 a day if he would deliver the completed building in sixty days. When Train returned from a vacation sixty days later, the three-story, 120-room Cozzen’s Hotel, constructed at a cost of $60,000, was standing, ready for business.

Similar impulses had occurred to him from time to time in his early years. But in the last two decades of his life they took hold of him completely. When he heard that the mammoth Columbian Exposition of 1893 was doing poorly in Chicago, he rushed off to save it. The Midway, under Edison’s new electric bulbs, had its share of oddities. Swami Vivekananda, from India; Ida Lewis, a lighthouse keeper who had rescued twenty-two persons; Comanche, a horse that had been the only survivor of Custer’s Last Stand; Susan B. Anthony, Lillian Russell, and Snapper Garrison were all on display. But none created more of a stir than George Francis Train as he led a grand march up the Midway with a Dahomey belle from the African village on his arm.

Every unorthodoxy attracted Train. He became a vegetarian. After all, had not Plato, Shelley, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, and Thoreau been vegetarians? He dined on cereals, boiled rice, and fresh fruits, and believed that if he ate enough peanuts he would live to be 150. As he explained: “Having eaten no meat, eggs, fish, oysters, poultry, or animal food of any kind for many months, all the ancient argument, antagonism, ferocity of my nature has died out, and yet I am in savage health and terrible mental vigor.”

In public he would not shake hands with friends. Instead, he shook hands with himself, as he had once seen the Chinese do. Nor would he communicate with acquaintances except by writing on a pad. These were means, he said, of storing up his psychic force. He invented a new calendar, based on the date of his birth and his age, and he announced he was running for Dictator of the United States.

Toward the end he was alone and he was poor. His wife, supported by a trust fund he had left her, died in 1879. His villa was long gone. And he had lost his Omaha properties through foreclosure, though he maintained that they had been taken from him illegally and that he would still be worth $10,000,000 when he chose to become sane.

He supported himself by writing and speaking. His old friend Darius Ogden Mills had built the first of a chain of low-cost hostelries, the Mills Hotel No. 1, in New York City. Train rented a tiny room in the hotel, furnished with bed, chair, dresser, and several crates crammed with his papers. His room cost him twenty cents a night, his dinners fifteen cents each, and he claimed that he needed no more than three dollars a week to live. In this room he did his writing. He sold political articles, written in blue and red pencil, to newspapers. He published
Train’s Penny Magazine
, a weekly which sold for two cents, and in its pages inveighed against religion, mail-order houses, the Spanish-American War. And, at the request of D. Appleton and Company, he dictated, working an hour and a quarter a day for twenty-eight days, his autobiography,
My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands
. In this volume he laid claim to a prodigious inventiveness. He insisted that he had suggested, or conceived, the perforation of postage stamps, erasers on lead pencils, steps on carriages, and the canning of salmon. He tried, also, to explain his role as the original Phileas Fogg. “I have lived fast,” he wrote. “I have ever been an advocate of speed. I was born into a slow world, and I wished to oil the wheels and gear, so that the machine would spin faster and, withal, to better purposes.”

But to the very end his real livelihood came from addressing audiences in person rather than writing for them. Though his fee was reduced to $100 a performance, he appeared regularly in Boston, Omaha, Chicago, and San Francisco. He still made an impressive figure on the platform, with his receding white hair grown long, his flowing mustache, his handsome, dark face. Often he affected a curious costume for his lectures, wearing a military coat, a communist red sash, a string of Chinese coins, and carrying a green umbrella. In his lectures he continued to provoke his listeners. At the Boston Music Hall he called Boston “a backwoods town” and Harvard a school for incompetent football players. But more often he expounded his creed. “My religion is my conscience, my belief is the brotherhood of man. Everything is worth having, nothing is worth worrying over; that philosophy is a sure cure for all diseases.”

During his speaking tours Train met and conversed with all sorts of weird personalities, some of whose eccentricities made him seem staid by comparison. The most colorful of these cornered Train in his Occidental Hotel room, in San Francisco when he was lecturing on the
Alabama
controversy. England had built the cruiser
Alabama
for the Confederacy, and the
Alabama
had destroyed eighty Union merchantmen and one warship before it was finally sunk off Cherbourg. More than three years before, an international tribunal had met to find England guilty of a “breach of neutrality” in building, equipping, and permitting the escape of the
Alabama
. The tribunal had forced England to pay $15,500,000 in gold in damages for depredations committed by this vessel and two others against Union shipping. Instead of the fine, Train was demanding the invasion of Canada and the seizure of British Columbia as more fitting reparations.

He had finished just such a lecture in San Francisco when he was visited by Joshua Norton, self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. Norton I, attired in his blue military coat topped with gold epaulets, demanded that Train keep hands off British Columbia. Train would not listen. Then Norton changed his tactics. He said that if Train persisted with the invasion, he would guarantee to deliver peaceably Vancouver Island for $1,200.

It was an interview that might have been invented by Lewis Carroll. In the end, Train threw Norton out, and His Highness published a notice in the
San Francisco Herald
forever banning Train from his Empire.

As the lecture tours became more infrequent, Train spent most of his days on a bench in Madison Square, sunning himself, feeding squirrels and pigeons, and playing with the youngsters who romped on the grass. He loved children, told them stories, bought them sweets, and took them to circuses. He told them, as he had told his own offspring: ‘Treat all with respect, especially the poor. Be careful to injure no one’s feelings by unkind remarks. Never tell tales, make faces, call names, ridicule the lame, mimic the unfortunate, or be cruel to insects, birds, or animals.” And when his book was done, the year before his death, he dedicated it to the little people who were his last friends and who believed in him “To the children, and to the children’s children, in this and in all lands, who love and believe in me, because they know I love and believe in them.”

He was seventy-five years old when he died of Bright’s disease on the night of January 19, 1904, in New York City. For two days hundreds of people crowded into the funeral parlor for a last glimpse of him. Most of them were little people carrying flowers.