Duncan Hines

by Louis Hatchett

  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.77 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 1899,78 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.79

  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.80 It was his first run through the unfenced country. “Only a few trails wound over the sagebrush hills,” he recalled.81

  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 th
e clatter of dishes at the front counter.”82 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.”83

  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.84 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.85 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.”86

  3

  FLORENCE

  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.87 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.88 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.89

  One day in Cheyenne in late 1900, Hines met a woman who charmed and mesmerized him.90 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.91 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.92

  The town later to become the capital of Wyoming was not quite a year old when the Chaffins arrived. In fact, there had been scarcely little civilization there only a few months earlier. Even so, by the time construction of the Union Pacific finally reached the city on November 13, 1867, approximately four thousand citizens had already established a town. Citizens might be a polite term. The town that greeted them was primarily filled with professional gunmen, soldiers, promoters, gamblers, and confidence men who enjoyed both quick money and cheap liquor, not necessarily in that order. Yet, within a short time the city matured and the rough elements went elsewhere. Within a few years, Cheyenne became the site of an expanded army post, Fort D. A. Russell. Originally built in 1867 to protect the Union Pacific workers from Indian attack, it became one of the country’s largest military outposts.93

  The Chaffin family quickly grew to become one of Cheyenne’s most respected families. Upon his arrival, John Chaffin first provided for his family as the cashier at Cheyenne’s Wilson bank.94 Later he was employed in several other positions including a stint as Wyoming’s territorial assessor. This occupation kept him preoccupied for over a decade while his wife, Mary, kept house and tended to the needs of their growing family.95 Indeed, the Chaffin family seemed to grow as fast as the town. In addition to Eva, there soon followed Fred (1870), Grace (1872), and Howard (1876). The couple’s last child was Florence.96 Sometime during the early-1880s John Chaffin left his position as the state’s property assessor and became the city’s major florist, an occupation he held until he died.97

  Before Hines ever met Florence Chaffin she had previously suffered through an unhappy marriage. The marriage took place, either soon before or after 1 January 1900, to an army officer stationed at Cheyenne’s Fort D. A. Russell. The marriage was mercifully brief and after their divorce, it was an unspoken rule that no member of the Chaffin family was to ever speak of the ill-fated union.

  What little evidence remains of Duncan and Florence’s courtship indicates that, after they met, the two began to see each other frequently. Florence, however, did not rush into his arms. Perhaps because of her previous marriage, she was a bit reticent about hurling herself into another potential disaster. But even if she had thrown herself at him, there remained one obstacle in their path to happiness: her mother. Like millions of young men before him, Duncan Hines, despite his best efforts, could not convince his potential future mother-in-law he was worthy of her daughter’s hand in marriage. Mary Chaffin did not think too much of the young man from Kentucky. She liked the idea that Hines’s family, like her own, had come from the South, and that his father had served with the Confederacy, but she was not convinced Duncan Hines was a good match for her youngest daughter. The two biggest strikes against him was that he was three years younger than Florence and his future looked as if it had no special prospects for a successful career—not, at any rate, as a relief man for the Wells-Fargo express office. Her parents pointed out that Florence’s sister, Grace, had married Richard H. Wilson, an army officer, and Mary Chaffin believed Florence could do just as well. It is not known if Florence temporarily acceded to her mother’s wishes and tried to get Duncan to forget about her, but if she did, her efforts failed. She simply could not keep her young suitor from pestering her with his attentions. Their romance remained in an awkward, frustrated state for quite some time.98

  Probably because of Mrs. Chaffin’s refusal to let him marry her daughter, late in 1902 Duncan Hines left Cheyenne and the Wells Fargo company. He had an image problem and he was determined to rectify it. He was making a passable living, but not a great one. Therefore, he left Cheyenne not to forget Florence, but to prove to her mother he was indeed a worthwhile suitor for her daughter’s hand.99

  He did not have to travel far to find work. He moved 9 miles across the state line into Colorado where he found a job with the Coal Fuel Oil Company that mined coke, which was then shipped to Mexico.100 Early in 1903, after a few months on the job, he was a
warded a vacation and chose to go to Mexico. To get there, he boarded a trainload of coke his company was hauling across the border. The train raced through the American Southwest before coming to a stop 45 miles past Nogales, Arizona, at a “dry, dusty, hot little town” named Cananea, Mexico. After dismounting from the locomotive, Hines hailed a carriage to take him into town. He sought out the town’s general store, went inside and bought some Mexican cigars. He was about to find a place to spend the night when a man approached him, asking him if he was interested in a job. He asked how much it paid. “Five hundred dollars a month—in gold.” This was approximately ten times the average wage, and Hines accepted on the spot. When he asked what he would be doing to deserve such a rich bounty, Hines was told he would be a “trouble shooter in the traffic department” for the Green Copper Company, which desperately needed someone to fill the job. “The vagaries of Mexican customs and the natural slowness of transportation…often resulted in delayed shipments of mining equipment and other supplies. Delays were costly, and the company was more than willing to pay a good salary to the man who could keep the supply lines open and functioning smoothly.” Within a few days he found himself a permanent resident of Cananea, working, eating and living with twenty-five other young Americans approximately his age, most of them mining engineers.101