Duncan Hines (7 page)

Hines usually stationed himself at the counter of Albuquerque's Harvey House, but he made an occasional foray into the dining room when he could afford it. Unlike the larger room's menu, nothing at the counter cost more than 25 cents. This happy circumstance and the large portions that the Harvey House served, combined with his $40 monthly salary afforded him the pleasure of eating “like a king.” He was especially impressed with how immaculately clean the restaurant appeared; it reminded him of his grandmother's kitchen, and how she had repeatedly stressed to him the importance of “absolute cleanliness when handling food. She was almost a fanatic on the subject. She kept two buckets of water on her kitchen stove; one for cooking and one for rinsing her hands.” He “never saw her pick up a pot or utensil without first dipping her hands into the rinse water.” And while the Harvey Girls, the chain's waitresses, may not have had hands as clean as his grandmother's, he was highly impressed with their neat, pristine
appearance, noting their uniforms were “starched and spotless,” and their hair was “smoothly combed.” Small, seemingly insignificant things of this nature made a large difference with him. The attention given to these matters guaranteed his continued patronage. The restaurant chain's passion for excellence was unsurpassed, and it certainly shaped the expectations he demanded of restaurants in years to come. The Albuquerque Harvey House was also a popular place to congregate with the regulars who frequented it, and he soon became one of their number; it became for him a sort of substitute home when he was not working.
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While Hines was working for Wells-Fargo in New Mexico, he experienced a “wild west” adventure. One day he was riding in the railroad express car with a safe full of currency to be delivered to a bank. Along a remote stretch of track, the train suddenly came to a screeching halt. Figuring something was up, Hines hurriedly opened the safe, removed the money and hid it elsewhere in the car, then filled the money bags with paper. Sure enough, it was a holdup, an incident not uncommon in those days. The bandits entered the car and demanded at gunpoint that the safe be opened. They scooped up what they thought was the money and beat a fast retreat without ever opening one of the bags to check the contents.
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His quick action had saved the day, and to the end of his life he kept the medal he was awarded by the Wells-Fargo Company for his faithful service.

Employees who worked for Wells-Fargo knew that they would not remain stationed in one location for a protracted period, and this was certainly true in Hines's case. In early June 1899,
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just as he was becoming settled in Albuquerque, the company promoted him and assigned him to be the relief man in the company's Cheyenne, Wyoming office. In this position, Hines soon found himself engaged primarily in deskwork.
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Hines had not lived in town a month when he experienced another adventure, one which he never tired of telling. “I'll never forget it,” he would always begin. Hines, then nineteen, had left Denver on 1 July 1899, at about 1:30
P.M.
in a new Wells-Fargo express wagon. His instructions were to deliver the horse-drawn
vehicle to the company's Cheyenne office—a distance of about 90 miles.
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It was his first run through the unfenced country. “Only a few trails wound over the sagebrush hills,” he recalled.
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For the first few miles, Hines had no problems. He had instructions to sleep at an abandoned sheep camp, which was along the trail 14 miles from his point of origination, but he never arrived there. Hines had no idea what a deserted sheep camp looked like. He traveled all afternoon, ever hopeful that he would find what he was looking for. Eventually, as the sun began to set, he had to face the unpleasant truth: he had lost the trail. He had either passed his overnight lodging without realizing it, or he was nowhere near it. As the last glimmer of light faded over the horizon, he noticed a house not far from the trail. Confident that he would be spending the night there, he unhitched his horse and tied him behind the wagon. He walked to the house, expecting to get a bite to eat from its occupants, but he was in for a surprise. The house was deserted. He pounded on the door, but no one came. “The wind moaned around the corners of the bleak little shanty, the prairie grass rustled and whispered against the old gray boards, and suddenly the weather-beaten little cabin was the most cheerless place in Colorado,” Hines recalled. The sky was now pitch black. Hines, his spirit depressed, walked back to his wagon, preparing to spend the night in it. As he walked toward it, he noticed that it had started to snow. Although summer had commenced a few days before, snow in the mountains in summer was quite common. As he tramped back down the road toward his wagon, he suddenly realized he could find neither his horse nor his wagon. They had disappeared with the daylight. He tried to listen for them, but the howl of the wind masked any movement that may have been nearby. Faced with the horror of not only losing his company's goods and horse but also of starving and freezing to death, he began to walk to keep warm. He did not know where he was going, but it beat doing nothing. He thought that perhaps he would stumble across someone or something in the dark. “I was more scared than I had ever been before” he later recalled, “I thought of a thousand reasons why I should have stayed in Kentucky.” Then, as if he did
not have enough to worry about, along came a new problem: coyotes had picked up his trail. “I could hear them yapping in the darkness, a few yards away.” He knew they would not attack him, but he wondered if there was not always the first time for everything. Frightened, there was nothing for him to do but walk throughout the night, hoping he could survive his hunger, his ice-chapped fingers and ears, as well as his yapping companions. He walked constantly, never taking a moment to rest.

When the first outbreak of daylight made its way over the mountaintops, Hines looked behind him and squinted. There before him he could make out what looked like the silhouette of a low, rectangular house. Excited, he ran toward it, hoping to get shelter and food. But as he got closer to the structure, he noticed something about it that was strangely familiar. A realization suddenly washed over him, causing him to stop in his tracks. He had visited the same deserted house at dusk. He had walked in a big circle all night long. His horse and wagon were nearby, the animal waiting patiently for his discovery.

Thankful that he had once again regained his mode of transportation and his cargo, he remained befuddled as to where the trail to either Cheyenne or Denver lay. Besides, even if he and his horse were striding across the trail at its most visible point, there was no way to recognize it now; the snow of the previous night completely covered it. Because of the snow, he reasoned that if he tried to ride into Denver he could easily miss the city by 10 or 50 miles and never know it. Therefore, since it was closer, it only made good sense for him to attempt to find his way back to Cheyenne and deliver the wagon another day. He had one thing working in his favor: he had a general notion of which direction to travel. He knew to continue traveling uphill, because Cheyenne was situated at a higher elevation than that of Denver. Compounding his problem was his rumbling stomach, which had been without food since the previous morning.

Throughout his second day in the wilderness, he remained hopeful that he would run into some sign of life, but, alas, he did not. Therefore, he spent yet another fearful night without food, but
at least he spent it in the wagon, safe from the coyotes and the icy wind.

The next morning, feeling more hungry than alive, he once again set out across the mountains. Sometime that afternoon, on 3 July he met a new obstacle to overcome. As the wagon slowly inched up a steep incline, his horse “dropped his head and stopped, spraddle-legged, in his tracks. He was played out.” The animal simply could not pull the wagon another foot. Still determined to get to Cheyenne, Hines unhitched the beast, climbed on his back and poked a pin in its rear to get him to move. Despite this painful form of coaxing, the horse refused to take another step. Really desperate by this time, Hines continued his journey on foot, leading his horse behind him.

He had walked 2 miles when he came upon a house that had smoke curling from its chimney. Excited, he ran toward it. The hermit who answered the door let him in. To Hines's horror, however, his host's countenance was nothing to behold; his face displayed two large holes in both his cheeks; someone had fired a rifle at him, supposedly when he had his mouth wide open. Hines later recalled that “the thought of what must happen when he drank water aroused such interesting speculation that I almost forgot I was hungry.” Before retrieving Hines's wagon as well as watering and feeding his horse, the hermit fed Hines what few sparse scraps of food he could spare. The food, however, was not nearly enough to feed a man who had been without food for nearly sixty hours. In the conversation that followed between the two over the next few hours, Hines learned that he was only 14 miles from Cheyenne. He went outside the hermit's cabin to mount his horse, intending to ride into town and devour the wares of the first restaurant he spied. Unfortunately, his horse was still too weak to carry a saddle, let alone a human being. Unwilling to let this obstacle stop him, Hines headed for town on foot, walking through 5 inches of snow.

He arrived in the frontier metropolis some time the next morning on 4 July 1899. By now he was practically starving. The walk through the snow had consumed what little energy he had
acquired from the meager morsels the hermit had given him, and now he was intensely famished. Upon his arrival, he first hired a cowboy at the livery stable to retrieve his horse and wagon. With that settled, he tramped a few doors down the street to a restaurant—any restaurant. He saw a sign on one door that read: Harry Hynd's Restaurant. It was a frontier hash-house, “where the click of the roulette wheel in the back mingled with the clatter of dishes at the front counter.”
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Hines barged through the double doors.

“I want five dollars' worth of ham and eggs!” he told the counterman.

“Well, you won't get it,” his host scowled back. “Nobody can eat that much ham and eggs.”

Hines later conceded the counterman was right, but after four days with scarcely more than a few morsels of food, his demand seemed to him an entirely reasonable one. The ham and eggs were quickly set before him and he devoured them in no time. Many years later Hines wrote, “Nothing has since tasted as good as that platter of ham and eggs. I don't think that anything ever will.”
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Why did he order ham and eggs? Because to the Southern palate ham and eggs was considered not only a morning meal but a standard evening meal as well. In fact, it was a meal for all occasions. Even in his later years, Duncan Hines frequently ate ham and eggs for supper.
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Indeed, Hines always said that if a diner enters a restaurant and cannot decide what to order, the best strategy for him was to order ham and eggs, because no cook could disguise a bad egg nor spoil a slice of good ham.
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Nevertheless, the meal he consumed that day was not, as he claimed, the best meal he ever ate; it was, more likely, that after several days without a bite to eat he was just hungry.

Afterward, Hines often dined at Harry Hynd's Restaurant. One day, while in Harry Hynd's, someone pointed out to him that the man in the corner who was eating a T-bone steak with his hands was Tom Horn, a hired gun who reputedly received $500 from local cattlemen for every sheepherder he shot. Hines was terrified. When Horn rose from his table to leave he looked slowly, casually,
around the room at the other customers and, Hines said, “I tried to look as though I had never heard of a sheep.”
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Though only a relief man with Wells Fargo, Hines's gregarious personality enabled him to meet the “right” people in Cheyenne society. In 1902, Hines was invited by one of his friends, Bob Carey, son of the former U S Senator, to spend his vacation with him on his father's enormous cattle ranch.
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During his short stay, Hines and his young host got into all sorts of trouble. One day the two young men decided to follow on horseback a Native burial party across the Wyoming range, all the while “gathering up the cigarettes that the Indians had put along the funeral trail to pacify evil spirits.” The victims of their prank caught them in the act and angrily chased them all the way back to the Carey ranch. It took a while for the elder Carey to pacify their extreme anger. A few days later the two young men mischievously unlocked a bullpen, enabling four-hundred of the Senator's prized bulls to happily romp across the plains for the next several days, causing the Senator's busy ranch hands much unnecessary vexation as they drove them back into the gates. But it was only after the two killed nearly all the Senator's imported Austrian quails with a shotgun that Bob's father decided the young Kentuckian had become a bad influence on his son. When the Senator bluntly asked Hines, “Just when in hell are you going home?” Hines knew he had worn out
his welcome and left immediately.
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He quickly found other things with which to occupy his vacation time. Soon after this incident, he participated in a wild boar hunt in the area between Boise and Pocatello, Idaho.
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One day in Cheyenne in late 1900, Hines met a woman who charmed and mesmerized him.
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Florence Marie Chaffin was born on 10 September 1877, in the Cheyenne territory of Wyoming, thirteen years before it became a state. Her father, John Thomas Chaffin, a Virginian born in 1845, had served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. In early 1868, he married Mary Jennings Jeffres, a woman a full year older than he.
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They had a daughter, Eva, born in Virginia in April 1868. A few months after their daughter's birth, the Chaffins, who longed for a new life in a part of America not ravaged by war, packed their belongings into a wagon and headed for St. Louis, Missouri. After an arduous overland journey to that Midwestern crossroads, the Chaffins boarded a train on the Union Pacific and rode to the point where the railway ties ceased; in 1868 this spot was Cheyenne in Wyoming Territory.
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