This time, Captain Hazard chose to travel west over land. The family of eight crossed the Great Plains in two ox-drawn covered wagons he had built in the shape of boats so they could float across rivers. He even fashioned tent poles that were flat so they could double as oars. The journey took eighteen months, impeded by a cholera outbreak, herds of buffalo that stretched from horizon to horizon and held them up for weeks at a time, and several skirmishes with Indians. In one instance, a member of their wagon train was shot with an arrow an inch below his heart as he attempted to keep a band of Indians from stealing their supplies. “We ran to him and managed to get him in the wagon,” Mary wrote later. “He pulled the arrow out . . . and came very near dying and suffered for many days.” Her brother George recalled that the Indians “robbed us of most all we had to eat and wear. They left Mother and the girls with only what they had on their backs. We could see them going over the hills with Mother’s flour sacks, containing clothing and her paisley shawls, flung over their backs.”
In Council Bluffs, Iowa, the family watched as a town mob dragged a murder suspect to the spot where his alleged victim lay with his head split open in a pool of blood, and then they “hung him on one of the trees,” George wrote in his own journal. “About that time, the sky became overcast with intensely black clouds and those who thought him not guilty said it was because they had hung an innocent man . . . describing it as Black Friday.”
On a happier day, June 30, 1853, Eleanor Hazard, the Captain’s wife, gave birth to their seventh child, Eugene, in one of the wagons. The Hazard family bible notes that he was “born at the Platte River in the Sue [sic] Nation on Nebraska Terrian [sic].”
(Fifteen years later, Eugene was helping his older brother Daniel guide another wagon train west when he reached into a wagon to fetch a shotgun to shoot some quail and pulled it out muzzle first “with both barrels discharging into his intestines,” according to his brother George’s journal. “He died in Daniel’s arms. His last words were, ‘May God forgive Daniel.’” They buried him there, “under the tree where they had, moments before, just eaten their lunch, and built a rock border around his grave. Somewhere on a hilltop in Arizona.” As his sister Mary wrote in her journal, “He was born among the Indians and buried among the Indians.”)
The Hazard family arrived in El Monte, California, on Christmas Day 1853, planning to resupply nearby at what was then known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles (the Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels) before continuing on to gold country along El Camino Real. But according to Mary’s journal, they were “delighted with Los Angeles and gave up the idea of going north.” The Captain acquired thirty-five acres of land four miles outside the town, built a large adobe house, and settled into ranching and farming for the next ten years, during which time the Hazards crossed paths with Harley Taft.
* * *
The twenty-three-year-old farmer’s son had sailed around Cape Horn from Rhode Island in 1849, the same year as Captain Hazard. Census records indicate that he quickly found work in Los Angeles, first as a stable keeper and later as a teamster. According to family records and correspondence, one of the places he worked was the livery stable on the Hazard ranch, where he met and, in 1862, married Captain Hazard’s daughter Mary, who was fifteen years his junior.
Fate was not finished with the Hazards. In 1864, “our land was declared government land and we did not pre-empt, so we lost it all,” George wrote in his journal. They were forced to move into town, where Captain Hazard and his new son-in-law, Harley, began prospecting for land deals. They hit pay dirt on February 1, 1866, when they attended a public auction of tax-delinquent property and bid on an undeveloped five-acre parcel at the edge of Los Angeles. Located next to a large open pasture that arriving settlers had turned into a rowdy, disreputable camp, it was hardly prime real estate, but the price was right. Harley and the Captain bought the entire block between Fourth and Fifth Streets and Hill and Olive Streets for $9.90.
That piece of land became the cornerstone of the family’s prosperity as the town expanded into a city, encircling the block over the next three decades. Captain Hazard and Eleanor lived out their days on the Hazard-Taft homestead. Harley and Mary had six children in their house at 411 West Fifth Street. Their oldest son, Alfred, married and built his own house just around the corner from them at 457 South Hill Street. Three of their children did not survive early childhood, however: Walter died as an infant; Alice and Emily died at age two and three, respectively, in 1885.
Mary’s brother Henry, meanwhile, graduated from the University of Michigan law school on his way to becoming Los Angeles’s city attorney. He also developed the lot at the corner of Fifth and Olive into the city’s premier performance hall, Hazard’s Pavilion. Opened in 1887, it seated as many as four thousand people for sporting events, music concerts, business conventions, and religious revivals. The legendary prizefighter Jack Johnson won his first title there as “Colored Heavyweight Champion.” In 1889, Henry was elected mayor of Los Angeles.
The Hazard family’s remarkable American journey helps explain why Mary and Harley Taft might have seen potential in J. W. Earl. He may have been an uneducated lumberjack from the Michigan woods, but he was also smart, determined, and ambitious, a skilled craftsman who knew his way around horses and wheeled vehicles. Indeed, J.W. quickly rose from employee to partner in the carriage shop, and in 1889 bought out the other man and named the business Earl Carriage Works. All of which impressed the Tafts to the point that they allowed him to court their eighteen-year-old daughter, Abigail, who likely was impressed with his lanky good looks (he was six foot one) and pale blue eyes.
J.W. married Abbie Taft (whose childhood nickname was “Taffy” because her hair color matched that of the candy) on June 21, 1891. A year and a day later, she gave birth to their first child, Carl. A second son was born on November 22, 1893. They named him Harley, after his grandfather. A third son, Arthur, arrived two years later.
Earl Carriage Works expanded as rapidly as the Earl family, with J.W. relocating the business several times as his clientele increased, eventually taking over a large three-story brick building at 1320 South Main Street. Before long, he had several dozen men working for him, designing and building all manner of horse-drawn conveyance, from simple farm wagons to fancy carriages for the wealthy to sleek sulkies for the harness-racing crowd at the nearby Agricultural Park track. Given that Harley Taft listed his occupation as “capitalist” on his 1890 U.S. Census form, it seems likely that the family patriarch invested in his son-in-law’s growing business.
The city of Los Angeles was growing rapidly, too. Just across the street from the Taft and Hazard homes, the old settlers’ camp had been developed into a beautifully landscaped municipal park (now Pershing Square) with a bandstand for outdoor concerts that drew crowds of locals and tourists out for weekend buggy rides. The corner of Fifth and Hill had turned into one of the city’s most prestigious and busiest intersections, which increased the family’s property value, but at the expense of their peace and quiet.
So in 1893, three generations of Tafts—Harley and Mary, their twenty-seven-year-old son Alfred, and his wife, Blanche, and their three children—summoned up the family’s old pioneering spirit and migrated once again, albeit a much shorter distance than in the past. They bought twenty acres in the Cahuenga Valley, about six miles from Los Angeles near a dirt-street village called Hollywood, where they built a two-story Dutch colonial house in the middle of a lemon grove at what is now the corner of Taft Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. Their new community consisted of a small general store, a one-room schoolhouse, and a dozen or so Spanish-speaking families who tended the area’s strawberry and barley fields and nascent orange and lemon groves. Shortly after the move Blanche Taft gave birth to a fourth child, Sarah, who later would write that she was “the first Anglo-Saxon child born in Hollywood.”
The Earls eventually followed the Tafts into this new frontier. On July 4, 1900, J.W. mo
ved Abbie and the three boys into a large three-story house he had built on five acres that Mary Taft had deeded to Abbie just down the street from the Tafts’ place, at what is now the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Bronson Avenue. With a front gate made of stone and ironwork fashioned at his carriage works spelling out the Earl name, the new home was twelve miles from J.W.’s business—a ninety-minute buggy ride—and a world away from that log shanty in the pine forest.
At age thirty-four, J.W. was not about to settle into the life of a country squire, however. His business was growing, but he knew it faced a looming existential threat: the dawning of the new century was bringing an end to the era of horse-drawn vehicles. The Industrial Revolution had accelerated the pace of American life. Increasingly mechanized manufacturing and a doubling of the population were driving a growing demand for goods that needed to get from point A to point B more quickly, and all along the supply chain horses were holding up the process as coal- and steam-powered trains and ships waited for them to trudge to the loading dock. It seemed that horses no longer fit into the modern urban landscape.
Their slowness wasn’t the only problem. America’s cities were packed with more than 3 million of them—nearly 200,000 in New York, 80,000 in Philadelphia, 12,000 in Detroit. That many 1,200-pound animals produced an epic amount of manure. The city of New York calculated that between 3 and 4 million pounds of it a day had to be removed from its streets and stables, along with 41 dead horses (15,000 per year). The city of Rochester estimated that its population of 15,000 live horses dropped enough road apples annually to make a 175-foot-high mound of manure, which would cover an entire acre.
In addition to creating an ungodly stench and costing untold millions to clean up and cart away, the manure caused serious public health concerns. By one estimate, three billion flies hatched in urban horse droppings every day, at times resulting in veritable clouds of the pathogen-carrying insects. Between flies and windblown dung dust, horses were blamed for outbreaks of cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, and typhoid, feeding a growing consensus that the beasts should be banished from American cities.
“The vitiation of the air by the presence of so many animals is alone a sufficient reason for their removal,” the U.S. commissioner of labor wrote in Popular Science Monthly. An editorial in the magazine Scientific American stated that the banning of horses “would benefit the public health to an almost incalculable degree.”
Fortunately, one man’s pile of horse poop proved another man’s opportunity. For more than a decade, a generation of mechanically inclined young men had been working feverishly in garages, barns, and machine shops all across the United States and Western Europe, racing to create a self-propelled vehicle that would put the horse out to pasture as the world’s primary means of transportation and earn themselves a fortune in the process.
The Europeans jumped out in front in October 1885, when Karl Benz of Mannheim, Germany, conducted a successful test drive of the first gasoline-powered automobile, a three-wheeler he called the Benz Motorwagen. America’s car boys spun their wheels for a number of years turning out problematic steam-and electric-powered vehicles until Frank and Charles Duryea of Peoria, Illinois, finally gained traction with a gas-powered vehicle they’d built in a Massachusetts loft. On Thanksgiving Day 1895, the brothers entered their Duryea Motor Wagon in what was billed as “America’s first motor car race.” Sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald, with a two-thousand-dollar prize, the competition pitted the motor wagon against two American-built electric vehicles and three gas-powered imports built by Benz. The course covered fifty-four miles, from Chicago to Evanston, Illinois, and back, and the motor wagon crossed the finish line first.
The brothers quickly announced the formation of a company that would hand-build thirteen identical vehicles for sale to the public over the next year. Based in Springfield, Massachusetts, the Duryea Motor Wagon Company was the country’s first commercial auto-manufacturing operation. Widespread news coverage of the race and the new company seemed to speed up the development of gas-powered automobiles.
At 11:00 p.m. on March 6, 1896, Charles King drove the first gas-powered vehicle on the streets of Detroit, a wooden-wheeled, buckboard-style wagon he’d fitted with a four-cylinder engine. His 5 mph cruise down Woodward Avenue drew a crowd of several hundred cheering spectators, which nearly got him ticketed by a policeman for disturbing the peace and resulted in his being quoted in the Detroit Journal saying, “I am convinced that in time the horseless carriage will supersede the horse.”
Three months later, at four in the morning on June 4, Henry Ford took a somewhat quieter test drive around Detroit in an experimental gas-powered vehicle he’d built in a brick shed behind his home in Dearborn, Michigan. Ford’s “quadricycle” was a metal-frame buggy fitted with four bicycle wheels and propelled by a two-cylinder engine mounted under an upholstered bench seat. Lighter than King’s wooden wagon, it reached a speed of twenty miles per hour.
On August 11, two months after Ford’s debut, Ransom E. Olds invited a newspaper reporter along when he took his first gas-powered vehicle for a test drive on the streets of Lansing, Michigan. “It never kicks or bites, never tires on long runs, and never sweats in hot weather,” Olds famously boasted of his horseless carriage. “It does not require care in the stable and only eats while on the road.”
Out in California, J.W. followed the car boys’ exploits through newspaper reports, which he no doubt read with a mixture of excitement, concern, and envy. They were his contemporaries, after all, born in the same Civil War decade. With the exception of King, they’d all been raised on small family farms, an experience that left Ford and Olds with an abiding distaste for horses. Ford, too, had worked in a sawmill before seizing on his life’s work. Olds was the son of a blacksmith and had dropped out of high school to apprentice in his father’s machine shop. About the only significant difference between J.W. and these early automobile pioneers was his location far from the industrial center of the country.
Between 1895 and 1900, young men with similar backgrounds and skills formed nearly a hundred companies to build gas-powered automobiles, mostly in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions—in Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago, Toledo, and Buffalo; in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and York, Pennsylvania; in Hagerstown, Maryland, and Hartford, Connecticut; and in more than half a dozen cities in Indiana, where hardwood forests had long provided the sturdy but pliable oak, ash, and hickory that supported that state’s robust carriage-building industry. South Bend, Indiana, was home to the world’s largest maker of horse-drawn vehicles, the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company, which built a major portion of the covered wagons that had carried pioneers across the western plains.
Detroit didn’t have a resident automaker until 1900, when Ransom Olds moved his Olds Motor Works there from Lansing. But with initial funding from several lumber barons, Olds and his fellow Michigander Henry Ford quickly began laying the groundwork for what would become Motor City.
Olds’s new Detroit factory was the first ever designed specifically to manufacture automobiles. His plan was to build a vehicle that the average man could afford to buy and maintain, one that would weigh about 500 pounds and sell for approximately $500. “My whole idea was to have the operation so simple that anyone could run it, and the construction such that it could be repaired at any local shop,” he said. The result was a two-seat buggy with bicycle-style wheels, tiller steering, and a single-cylinder engine. Called the “curved-dash runabout” because of its rounded tobogganlike front end, it weighed in at 750 pounds with a price of $650.
Olds sold 425 of the runabouts the first year and 2,500 the second, with the sharp increase attributed to the vehicle’s performance in a highly publicized endurance run from Detroit to New York City for the 1901 National Automobile Show in Madison Square Garden. The Oldsmobile, as it came to be known, completed the 820-mile trek in seven and a half days, averaging 14 miles per hour and consuming 30 gallons of gas.
Olds took orders f
or more than 1,000 vehicles at the auto show, and thanks to a production process that was a forerunner to the moving assembly line Henry Ford would perfect a few years later, his factory was soon turning out 20 a day when other automakers were struggling to produce that many in a month, or a year. After a tour of the Olds plant, a reporter for the Detroit Free Press rhapsodized, “Rows upon rows of special machinery are humming and buzzing away, bewildering the onlooker with their number. Every step in the process of turning out the finished machinery of a modern car is carried out by a group of these beautiful machines. One little imagines, as he looks at the swiftly running car on the street, the immense amount of detail and careful manipulation that have been necessary on the hundreds of parts before they have all been brought together and adjusted to form this engine of commerce and pleasure.”
Olds’s simple little runabout became America’s first successful mass-produced gasoline-powered automobile, and the first to be immortalized in a popular song, titled “In My Merry Oldsmobile”: “Come away with me Lucille / in my Merry Oldsmobile / Down the road of life we will fly / automo-bubbling you and I.”
But Henry Ford was riding tight on Olds’s tail. He formed the Ford Motor Company in October 1903 and quickly began manufacturing his own runabout in a converted wagon factory on Detroit’s Mack Avenue. Like Olds, his plan was to “build a motorcar for the multitudes,” as he put it, one that “any person with a good salary will be able to own.” His Model A was a two-seater with a two-cylinder engine that propelled it to a top speed of 45 mph. Dubbed the “Fordmobile,” it caught on immediately, with more than 1,700 sold in the first fifteen months despite a higher price tag than the Oldsmobile—$750—which Ford planned to lower as soon as a more streamlined production process combined with increased sales to drive down his unit cost.
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