Jay’s immediate plan was to undertake his own survey and map of Albany County. Just as he turned seventeen, he sent out letters to prominent men of that county soliciting their subscriptions and offering to include views of various towns and residences “whose proprietors offer a proper remuneration.”8 He then hired two assistants–Cousin Iram and another young man–whom he instructed in the rudiments of surveying. Over the coming weeks, in between supervising his assistants and doing some of the survey work himself, Jay, operating out of his uncle’s Albany home, personally went door to door in every township selling advance orders for the finished map. He also advertised in local newspapers to sell even more.
While all this went on, Jay began to plan a similar endeavor for Delaware County. He mailed out a prospectus to likely underwriters in August, just as fieldwork on the Albany map wrapped up. Once again, he proved himself an indefatigable publicist. After recruiting his Roxbury schoolmate John Champlin to help with the Delaware project, he solicited another contemporary–Simon D. Champion, publisher and editor of the local Bloomville Mirror–to help promote the map. A few months earlier, when Champion was seeking to broaden his subscriber base, Jay had sent him five dollars by way of contribution to the cause. “It is small indeed,” he admitted, “but I promise to do better in the future. By the way, I think the friends of our paper ought to do something to sustain the enlargement without an increase in price; you may put me down for five dollars annually and during the political campaign. I will send you a list of some of the poorer families to have the Mirror sent to.”9 Now Jay looked for his quid pro quo. “In Delaware County,” he wrote to Champion, “the Supervisors ought to encourage [the use of maps in schools] by buying maps for each of the School Districts. I want you to give me an editorial to this effect. . . . You must model the editorial over to suit yourself but it must be as strong as it can be made and come direct from you.”10
Jay’s move back to Roxbury in late summer, to more closely supervise the Delaware map, coincided with a fall taken by the drunken John Burr Gould that put him on crutches for several months. “Father grows old fast,” Polly wrote, “and I can see that both mind and body are failing.”11 Thus Jay found himself, as a sideline, running the family’s unprofitable tin shop. At the same time, other complications rose up one after another and were dealt with, the one constant annoyance being staff. In the end, Iram had to be fired from the Albany and Delaware County map projects over sloppy work and drunkenness. Other surveyors came and went. And Champlin, who wished to become a lawyer, eventually departed to return to school. Just as Champlin left the scene, Jay added to his own considerable workload when he secured part interest in a contract to help build the previously surveyed plank road between Albany and Shakersville.
Albany attorney and politico Hamilton Harris wrote years later about his first meeting with Jay Gould, whom he would represent in numerous court battles and lobbying efforts over the next forty years. Early in August 1853, Harris received a visit in his office from the directors of the Shakersville Road Corporation, these worthies being accompanied by “what appeared to me a small boy, dark eyed and dark haired.” Harris thought the lad was one of the directors’ sons. The question at hand involved opponents to a particular section of the road who were seeking to gain an injunction enjoining construction. Harris had barely started laying out his vision for an elaborate legal defense when the small boy piped up with a question. Was there anything, Jay asked, to stop the company from going ahead with construction before the enemies of the road obtained their injunction? When Harris answered there was not, the “little fellow” sat down and “commenced to figure at a table.” After calculating a bit, Gould looked up and asked Harris if, in the absence of an injunction, he could protect them from prosecution while they proceeded with the road. “I told him yes. I would protect them until an injunction was served.”12
As he would so many times later in life, Jay now used the letter of the law to his complete and utter advantage. That same day he hired every laborer and rented every dray he could find. The following morning he purchased and hauled vast supplies of lumber using the good credit of the Shakersville Road Corporation as his collateral. Then he put three teams to work on eight-hour shifts, day and night, the work of the night crew being lit by torches. By the morning of the day the road’s opponents obtained their injunction, the disputed section of highway stood finished.
Gould’s work increased through the winter and into the spring of 1854. While the Delaware map project still labored toward publication, the proprietors of the Newburgh and Syracuse Railroad commissioned Jay to survey the line’s course through Delaware County. Then Jay’s own Delaware County project led to something else altogether, when the New York State Agricultural Society–a group formed in 1832 to foster, promote, and improve New York’s food and agriculture industry–offered him a small commission to write a full-length history of his home county based on primary source documents and interviews with the area’s older inhabitants.
These combined projects added up to an enormous burden for someone just turning eighteen. “He worked himself too close,” Champion remembered decades later. “The load he was carrying was too heavy for him.” Finally, in June, after finishing several weeks of grueling fieldwork for the railroad map, Jay collapsed with typhoid fever in Roxbury, where he lay sick for nearly three weeks. Given the way Polly described his symptoms, one wonders whether Jay didn’t suffer a nervous breakdown at the same time. “His mind has been as weak as his body and he seems now more like a child than like Jay,” Polly wrote to James Oliver. “He has been very nervous, so much so that we have been very careful about doing anything or saying anything that would in the least excite him. It would make him tremble sometimes just having the Doctor come in unexpectedly.”13
Jay’s sickness delayed his sister Sarah’s wedding to George W. Northrop, a widower with five children who lived in Lackawack, Ulster County. Originally scheduled for 28 June, the nuptials did not finally occur until two weeks later, 13 July. During his sickness Jay partook only of buttermilk, trout soup, and barley coffee. Years later, relatives recalled the gaunt and pale Jay standing like a stick at Sarah’s wedding, an emaciated ghost of himself in a suit two sizes too large. His depleted stamina matched his depleted resources. In order to raise cash he shortly sold his rights in the Delaware map, which still remained his responsibility to finish. “He has sold his Delaware map,” wrote Polly at the time, “to Smith, his engraver, so as to clear about one thousand dollars free of all expenses. That we consider better than to trust to selling the map himself. . . . If he has only learned how to spend it aright! It is as much to know how to spend money as how to make it.”14
The prompt resumption of work after Sarah’s wedding–probably too much too fast, albeit with the help of two assistants–exhausted Jay once more. He came down with a major infection of the bowels on 31 July. The excruciating pain was relieved only slightly by large doses of morphine. Anna and Polly, the only sisters at home now that Sarah lived in Lackawack and Bettie was away teaching school in Margaretville, tended to him day and night. While Jay lay abed, Peter Van Amburgh–the hired man from the old farm–ran the store. For three days it appeared that the already skeletal Jay, now completely unable to take or retain food, might die. “You know this disease terminates one way or the other, soon,” Polly wrote Sarah, preparing her for the worst.15 But the worst was not to be. Jay’s crisis passed, and in ten days’ time he was walking tentatively about the shop, speaking of all the chores he had before him. “I shall be glad when [the map] is done,” Sarah wrote, “so that the child will have less to think about or I don’t know as he ever will get entirely well.”16 Jay’s doctors advised that he should lay down the burden of his projects temporarily. But as Polly reported to Sarah, “the idea of giving up all employment seemed to make him worse than ever.”17
Though still weak, Jay was recovered enough by September to attend the Delaware County Democratic Convention as a Roxbu
ry delegate. Simon Champion showed up in the same capacity, and both made the most of their opportunity to meet some of the region’s movers and shakers. Despite Jay’s successful navigation at the convention, his sisters remained fearful about his health. He had yet to gain back the weight he’d lost. The girls were also concerned about his incessant cough. “If his days on earth are to be short,” Polly wrote Sarah, putting off a trip to Lackawack, “I must spend those few with him, for than him I have on earth but one dearer friend.”18
Through October and November Jay remained close to home, dealing with the tin shop and working on his history of the county. Early in December, ignoring pleas from Anna and Polly that he not brave the winter weather, he left on a business trip meant to last just a few days: an errand to see to some last details of the Delaware map. Jay rode a horse over the mountain on a frigid day, stopped at the home of one of his doctors in Moresville, and there fell ill with pneumonia. Two weeks would pass before he was well enough to make the journey home; thus Anna traveled to Moresville, where she nursed Jay in the empty house of old Grandfather More, who’d passed away the previous March. Even after Jay finally made it back to Roxbury–just in time for Christmas–he remained confined to bed. Nevertheless he was cheerful enough to send a hearty note to Simon Champion:
ROXBURY, DEC. 28, 1854
S.B. CHAMPION ESQ.
Friend Champ:
How shall I commence a letter to you? Would you believe me were I to say I was puzzled whether to commence with a broad business letter caption “Mr,” etc., “Dear Sir,” etc. or whether to sit down and imagine an actual mouth to mouth chat proceeding? Well, you see that at the top of my letter is that cold, formal commencement, but just then the recollection of the pleasant times we have had together, and the time for which I hope is not altogether past, put every shadow aside, and I almost imagine myself in the Mirror office at this moment. It is a long time since I have heard from you, except by Mr. Peters a week since. But through the weekly invitation of the Mirror I commenced to write last week, but my hand shook so that I had to give it up. Now, Champ, you are a man of newspapers and advertisements and proprietor of the Mirror office. I want to study up something for me to do. The doctor stands over my shoulder and criticizes every movement as an alarming symptom. His orders are for the present “Live on soups made of shadows.” To say the word map requires a portion of castor oil, and the thought of transacting any kind of business is equal to jumping into a mill pond in winter time. But I have dismissed their sympathies and regulate my own diet. I find health and strength to improve in consequence. I have cutter and harness, and if you will only furnish sleighing I am at your service. Now, Champ, if you have time to answer this, tell me a good funny story. I have hardly raised a smile for five weeks.
Yours respectfully,
Jay Gould.19
Chapter 6
HIDDEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND DEATH
AFTER HIS PNEUMONIA, Jay spent a full eighteen months in and around Roxbury. By February he was recovered enough to take a part-time job working behind the counter in Edward Burhans’s general store, leaving what little work there was at the tin shop to Peter Van Amburgh. In his spare moments he focused on his growing history, a strenuous effort. He was barely on his feet again in March 1855 when he and the rest of the Goulds received yet another blow. Polly died suddenly from consumption (tuberculosis), a disease that, according to what John Burr Gould told his children, had stalked the Gould clan for generations. Polly’s tragic end left her betrothed, James Oliver, completely disconsolate. Jay as well felt as though “a dark pall” had been pulled over “everything, even the sunniest day.”1 Nothing, not even the April birth of Sarah’s son Howard Gould Northrop, could bring up Jay’s spirits.
Given his mood and his weakened state, it is no wonder that Jay now settled down, bided his time, and considered his options. He had some $2,000 in the bank, profits from his various map and contracting projects. But his plans were large and he felt the need for even more capital. Thus his employment with Burhans. Thus, as well, other employments together with the occasional speculation. Whatever he didn’t need he sought to turn into cash. John Burroughs, now a young schoolmaster in a distant village, bought two old books: a German grammar and a work on geology. Burroughs paid Gould eighty cents that, as he recalled years later, “Jay was very happy to get.”2
It was while working at the Burhans store that Jay encountered the Dartmouth-educated John William McLaury, destined to become the last of Gould’s great Roxbury friends.3 About Gould’s age, McLaury had recently come to town to take on duties as principal of the new Roxbury Academy, a boarding school financed by Edward Burhans. Not long after his arrival, McLaury stopped at the Burhans store to order textbooks. “I was pleasantly greeted by a handsome young gentleman who kindly offered to assist me in selecting the text books to be used,” McLaury remembered. “Taking a pen he began writing at my dictation, occasionally suggesting the books he considered best for particular studies.” Jay’s remarks and criticisms impressed McLaury. “I soon learned that his knowledge of books was not limited to mathematics and the physical sciences. . . . He was fond of literary and scientific studies and he must have spent much time with books for he had acquired an extensive knowledge of a wide range of subjects.” The two got on famously. Shortly, realizing Jay’s skill as a surveyor, McLaury offered him a small stipend to teach the subject at the academy.
Gould also became active in the Roxbury Academy’s literary club. Though composed mainly of students, the close-knit organization included several professional men of the community. At McLaury’s invitation, Jay began to show up for the weekly debates, at which he exhibited “not only extended knowledge but superior powers of reasoning and ability as an orator rarely attained by one so young.” McLaury recalled that Jay “had a happy faculty of expressing his ideas in clear and vigorous language that made his arguments very forcible.” He remembered Jay becoming especially passionate one night when the conversation of the club turned toward contemplation of the afterlife. There must, Gould insisted, be some “sublime point” to human existence; but that point would become clear only after one advanced “to the next plane, the second level, the higher consciousness otherwise known as Heaven.” A few days after that debate, Jay and McLaury “happened to meet at the home of a lady who was in trouble. She was mourning the recent loss of a child. Someone . . . talking to her concerning the condition of infants in the future world . . . had cruelly emphasized the possibility of their being forever lost. She asked our opinion.” This caused Jay, in his effort to comfort the woman, to consider out loud a host of creeds and faiths–not all of them Christian or even Judeo-Christian–with which McLaury was surprised to find him familiar. “Subsequently, when together, we enjoyed discussing theological themes.”
McLaury’s and Gould’s consideration of death continued in May when they undertook a starkly macabre bit of research. The two visited a small cabin on the outskirts of town and watched with clinical detachment as a young man of the village, Amos Gray, lay dying. Gray, as McLaury recalled, “was nearly all night long breathing out his soul, his poor old mother wringing her hands in great distress. While deeply sympathizing with her in her sorrow, yet we did not permit ourselves to yield to emotions of sentiment. Possibly we may have arrived at that age when young manhood thinks it unmanly to weep or be sentimental. However that may have been, I remember we viewed the dying process from a physical and psychic standpoint; we longed to fathom what we knew to be impossible–the hidden mysteries of life and death.”
Given that Gray suffered from the same sickness that had taken Polly, it seems astonishing that Jay could subject himself to such a scene or would want to. Yet he did. Still, the enlightenment he sought eluded him. Walking away from the house of death, after poor Gray had gone on to whatever awaited him, Jay commented sadly to McLaury that he guessed all their philosophical speculations were valuable only as “intellectual food,” thoughts for the brain to chew on, and �
�not of much importance in the material world.”4
Given his early losses as a child, his own close brushes with death, and Polly’s demise, Jay would always remain acutely aware of the brevity of one’s time on earth. “Time is flying fast, ” he’d written as a twelve-year-old helping out his classmate John Burroughs. But Gould’s whimsical poem was not, perhaps, entirely nonsense. As a niece who knew him well would one day suggest, those four words were “indicative of a feeling that seems to have been always in the mind of Jay Gould from his childhood on, a feeling which apparently, though perhaps unconsciously, spurred and drove him . . . seldom permitting him pleasure in leisure or relaxation. Again and again he came to speak of the shortness of life and the necessity of doing while there was yet time to do.”5
Through the balance of 1855 and into the first months of 1856, Jay continued to teach the art and science of the survey at Roxbury Academy, and to work on his history. While Gould labored away, local gossip, later recycled by more than one biographer, kept alive the rumor of his romantic involvement with Maria Burhans. This legend lingered for so long in Roxbury that some forty years later Hamilton Burhans still felt compelled to debunk it. “As gossip had it, he was to marry her,” Burhans wrote in 1896, “but it was never so; Jay Gould was too bashful; he never talked matrimony to anybody at that time; he never conceived any such idea.”6
Dark Genius of Wall Street Page 5
