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YOAKUM THE EMPIRE BUILDER
Romantic Rise of a Chain-Bearer to Control of More Miles of Railroad than Anyone Else in the World – Head of Reclamation Plan for the Rio Grande Valley
(From the New York Herald)
From a rodman and chain bearer a few years ago, tolling laboriously for his day’s wage upon a primitive bit of steel track stretching between two pioneer Texas towns, to the management today of the greatest aggregate railroad mileage under any single control in the United States or any other country-such has been the phenomenal career of a man who now looms large upon the horizon of the great world of railroad and financial enterprise.
Quite unheralded this man has recently come to New York, where his name is modestly lettered in the corridor directory in the skyscraper at No. 71 Broadway-B.F. Yoakum.
It is a name not familiar to the newspaper reader of the East. Though he manages more railroad mileage than Mr. Hill, Mr. Harriman or Mr. Gould, his name thus far has been unheard of outside of his own vast domain, his very existence unguessed, save by that little coterie of wizards who sit within the holy of holies of Wall Street. The famous Harriman system, consisting of the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific, has 14,496 miles of trackage. The Rock Island-Frisco system and other lines under B.F. Yoakum consist of 17,500 miles.
In Wall Street, however, the name of B.F. Yoakum is one to conjure with. His stupendous projects are of absorbing concern, and if one crosses the Mississippi and journeys through Missouri, or Arkansas, or Colorado, or Texas, or the now State of Oklahoma, he will find that that name is an open sesame to the door of every farm house, of every rude settler’s log cabin or sod hut. He will find, too, to his great and ever increasing wonderment, that he can not traverse a square mile of this vast territory that he does not either see or hear or otherwise become impressed with the name and fame of Yoakum.
For B.F. Yoakum is the constructive and creative genius of the Southwest just as James J. Hill has been the corresponding genius of the Northwest. What Hill has done and is doing for the great wheat raising country traversed by the Great Northern railroad B.F. Yoakum has done, is doing, and going to do still further for that rich, virgin and almost illimitable territory webbed by the Rock Island-Frisco system. Like Hill, Yoakum did not wait for the settler to come to inhabit his railroads; he built and is still building them through a sparsely inhabited country and then inviting the settler to follow. Yoakum, not the settler, is the pioneer of the Southwest.
GREATER FUTURE PLANS
What Yoakum has accomplished against terrible odds in the way of pioneer railroad building is gigantic and will be briefly outlined further on, but what he is going to do in the comparatively near future is nothing short of titanic. Indeed, one may with propriety characterize his latest projects, which are now well under way, as truly Promethean. Prometheus it was who gave to man the gift of fire; Yoakum it is who is giving to the illimitable expanse of Western and Southwestern prairie not only a great transportation system, thus turning vast areas, heretofore commonplace in agricultural significance into territory as rich and fertile as that of the Nile. Prometheus with his hand turned the course of the mighty rivers and remodeled at will the seacoast of the earth. That is what Yoakum is doing with the gulf coast of Texas and with the rivers which flow above ground and with the caverns 600 feet beneath the earth’s surface.
To drop the terms of mythology, B.F. Yoakum has pinned his faith to two splendid dreams of engineering skill, which when completed and put in operation are bound to have an almost incalculable effect upon not only the development of the entire transmississippi country from Canada to Mexico and from the gulf to the Pacific, but upon the whole trade and commerce of the United States as well. One of these is a great ship channel from Galveston to Houston, which will make of the Texas metropolis, now many miles from the coast, a seaboard city and a port of entry for a large percentage of the immigrant laden ships that at present are landing their passengers at the port of New York. This great undertaking is now well under way and is being rapidly pushed to completion, and meanwhile Yoakum is working equally fast in the construction of the three railroads which he is building into Galveston and Houston so as to be able to carry his share of the alien pioneers who will soon begin to land at these ports far into the fertile plains and valleys of Texas that are now being prepared for them. The idea is to attract the industrious agricultural immigrant of South Europe-a type of immigrant ideally suited to the soil and the development of the natural resources of Texas-and to divert the st ream of immigration that is now pouring into the port of New York at the rate of more than a million a year.
Under the present conditions our immigration system is based on an economic waste. The immigrant who would take up agriculture-and the vast percentage comes to this country with that hope-finds himself landed in New York, with little or no money with which to take him out into the unsettled West. For the great majority there is nothing to do but stay here or drift to the equally crowded neighboring cities. Their landing direct at a gulf port in comparatively close proximity to lands which they can either homestead or buy very cheaply not only would be a great economic saving to the immigrants themselves, but it would go far toward solving what is more and more becoming a most serious social and economic problem. Incidentally, too, it is going to help sustain a Yoakum prophesy that ten million people will come to Texas within ten years and there secure a prosperity unobtainable anywhere else in the United States.
RECLAMATION PLAN
Of all Mr. Yoakum’s plans for the building up of the empire of the Southwest the one nearest his heart-the one which makes the greatest appeal to his imagination-is his proposed reclamation of the Valley of the Rio Grande by means of irrigation.
This territory, extending about 100 miles from the top end of Texas northward along the gulf coast, and about an equal distance along the Rio Grande, and now organized into the counties of Hidalgo and Cameron, was until a l short time ago the home of the cattle barons, who craftily spoke of it as fit only for cattle grazing. Notwithstanding the fact that the soil runs from forty to seventy feet deep and is as rich as that of the Nile, it had until a few years ago been impossible to utilize it for agricultural purposes, for the reason that is has been held in immense estates by a handful of cattle kings. One ranch alone had 1,300,000 acres.
Yoakum ran a railroad through this great land from Corpus Christi to Brownsville as a starter. He counseled and coaxed and demonstrated to the ranch holders that their possessions could be made far more profitable to them provided the country were divided up into ownership of forty and eighty-acre garden truck patches, with ample artesian and river water for irrigation. They believed him, and an era of great prosperity set in for a region which before had been given up wholly to thousands and thousands of head of cattle.
The fact that sugar cane raised in this wonderful coastal plain country took the first prize at the St. Louis exposition, excelling both in size and in the amount of saccharine matter the best product of Cuba and Louisiana, was a strong argument with Yoakum and his associates to populate and develop the territory for economic reasons as rapidly as possible.
The fact that the cane needed replanting only once in ten years, as against three in most other countries; that the yield was more than 6,000 pounds of milled sugar to the acre, without special cultivation or irrigation: that an onion crop would yield $600 an acre and carrots $450, and other remarkable figures for garden truck, warranted Mr. Yoakum in attempting the most stupendous piece of irrigation yet undertaken in the United States by private capital. He was to make Southwestern Texas the “sugar bowl” and the “vegetable garden” of the continent.
FROM THE RIO GRANDE.
The water which will irrigate the first 250,000 acres will be supplied by the Rio Grande itself and by it along. This Yoakum discovered could not be done with unique economy owing to the remarkable topography of the country to be irrigated, for the valley of the Rio Grande, unlike the valleys of all other great rivers, in its lower reaches drains away from and not toward the stream. Therefore, all that is necessary to carry t he abundant waters of this river into the thirsty valley is a single lift of from eight to thirty feet. That small application of energy on the part of the various pumping plans now being established is all that is necessary to place water at any and all points in the valley. Gravity does the rest. Pumping stations are now being rapidly installed at necessary points along the river and operated from a central power station which the irrigation company has not almost completed at Mercedes, the prospective metropolis of the young empire. From Mercedes will issue a network of canals, extending in every direction and me assuring more than 300 miles in aggregate length.
Work was begun on the project on May 1, 1906, and has been progressing steadily ever since. By next year thousands of acres will be irrigated. There are over a million acres which will ultimately be brought under irrigation in this section, and when the plan is fully developed it will stand as one of the greatest irrigation systems of theh world. As a project it far exceeds the Federal reclamation in the vicinity of Yuma, Ariz., where 30,000 acres are being placed under canal, with the Colorado river as the source of water supply.
It is into this Rio Grande valley particularly that Yoakum hopes to divert the sturdy South European immigrant, bred to generations of vine and olive and citrus fruit culture. For not only is the Rio Grande capable of producing fabulous returns in the way of sugar, but it offers even greater inducements to the raising of oranges, lemons, grapes, dates, figs, cotton, corn and truck crop, all of which are today being cultivated here in a limited way, with returns per acre running from $100 to $800, depending upon the nature of the crop and the amount and distribution of the rainfall. The inevitable uncertainty of raising crops when obliged to depend upon the rainfall will be entirely eliminated by irrigation, and in this subtropical climate there will never again be a question of obtaining maximum crops of whatever may be planted. The region is a thousand miles nearer the great Eastern markets than California. The climate is finer and the soil far more fertile. It has not the aridity of the fruit growing landsof Southern California.
HIMSELF A TEXAN
The man Yoakum, who conceived and is executing it all, is himself a Texan, and the fact that circumstances have at last obliged him to come to New York and identify himself with the coterie of railroad magnates, of which he has for years been one of the biggest, makes him none the less a Texan both in spirit and in appearance. He is a big man, standing six feet one, and is broad-shouldered proportionately. His eyes are blue-gray and eagle-like in their shrewdness. When on this side of the Mississippi river he wears a plain black Derby hat, but nobody on the other side ever saw him in aught but the great, broad brimmed, soft black felt of a Texas tradition. He was born near Tehunaca, in Limestone county, forty-eight years ago, the son of a country physician who was one of the pioneers of Texas. His uncle, Henderson Yoakum, a well known lawyer in those days, was the author of the first authentic history of the State of Texas. When Benjamin Franklin Yoakum was a small boy his father abandoned the practice of medicine to become president of the Cumberland Presbyterian college at Larissa, and it was the family hope that the boy should become a minister.
The boy, however, even at that time was dominated by a single idea. To be an engineer, a railroad man, was his ambition. It stood in his youthful mind for all that was great and manly. He began his earnest life as a rodman on a railroad surveying party. It was not long before he commanded that party, but he gained the position by earnest work.
His first job was on the international land Great Northern, which was just then building a line into Palentine, Texas.
He has been in the railroad business ever since. From a rodman he passed through the various stages of the construction department and gained in extensive expert state. Then he became a land boomer, or immigration agent, for the Gould lines. In that capacity he attracted the attention of Pacific and was employed by him as the immigration agent. He associated himself with Uriah Lott, and in 1884 he built his first railroad, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass, from Waco, in the center of the State, straight through to the Gulf of Mexico. When D.B. Robinson became president he made Yoakum his assistant. In this capacity he did so well that in 1893, when Robinson went to the Santa Fe, he took Yoakum with him and put him in charge of the Texas division of that road as general manager. In 1897 Robinson became president of the Frisco lines and took Yoakum with him as vice president and general manager. Two years later Mr. Robinson died and Yoakum succeeded him in the presidency.
At that time the Frisco system comprised only 1120 miles. It now has a mileage of 6016. Two years ago it allied itself with the Rock Island lines. Yoakum is chairman of the executive committee, which has control of more than 17,000 miles of railroad, making it the largest system that is or ever was under the personal influence of one man. These railroads and their tributaries are spoken of everywhere familiarly as the “Yoakum lines.”
HELPING COMPETITION
Mr. Yoakum is not buying up railroads and creating a trust; he is railroads. He is not seeking to establish a monopoly for any one line; he is, on the contrary, trying to make two or more railroads penetrate into territory where there is as yet but one or perhaps none at all.
It should be understood that day by day and week by week each and every one of the “Yoakum lines” is being extended and its mileage multiplied just as fast as the slight grading over the rich alluvium of this country can be accomplished and the steel rails laid.
During the last eight years Mr. Yoakum has planned and carried on the construction of 3,000 miles of railroad, at a cost, with equipment, of more than $40,000 per mile, which is more new miles of railroad that have been built by any other man in America. There is now under construction by him in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, more new construction than is being done by any other interest (the 800 miles of the Western Pacific, under construction by Mr. George Gould being the next largest new mileage now being built). All this construction has been through a section of country which has needed the new railroad to aid in its development, and has been accomplished by Mr. Yoakum in a quiet way and with little fuss.
To complete and round up the system of railroad building by which he hopes to attract millions of agricultural and industrial people to the West, and Southwest within the next decade, Mr. Yoakum has comprehensive plans. He expects to construct 4,000 miles of additional tracks. St. Paul, Minn., and Watertown, S.D. are now the terminiXX? Of the Rock Island-Frisco lines in the North; El Paso and Denver to the West, and New Orleans and Brownville, Texas, in the South. The Yoakum lines will give through tracks from St. Paul to New Orleans, to Brownsville and to El Paso, Texas. From Brownsville, the southernmost town in the United States, at the mouth of the Rio Grande, there is now completed a line along the Gulf coast, northward to Galveston, 214 miles.
This line, known as the Gulf Coast line, constitutes one of the most striking examples of Mr. Yoakum’s empire building and of his faith in the future of the Rio Grande valley, which it is the purpose to develop, now that it is possible to make it highly productive by irrigation.
It used to be a standing joke to say all that was needed to make Texas a pleasant place to live in was society and water. “If I owned hell and Texas, I’d rent Texas and live in hell”, “Phil” Sheridan is credited with saying.
“He would not say so today,” declared B. F. Yoakum. “Texas now has society aplenty, and it has water, too.” |
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