The Ridge(79)

“A suicide, you know.”

“I did not. I just saw that one day he was a prominent spokesman for the family and the company, and the next he was being, um, restored?”

Robin nodded. “Unsuccessfully. As I recall, he really came off the rails.”

“Can I read about this somewhere?”

“We have correspondence between the two brothers. That’s the closest you’ll get. The family didn’t disclose much about Frederick after his instability began. He was the dark secret then, I guess. Always in sanitariums of one sort or another, but rarely mentioned. I’ve had students pull the letters before for research work on the family, but I don’t recall anything else.” She led the way back into the family archives, used a big set of keys to open locked drawers at the far end of the room, and withdrew several binders.

“Those are photocopies of the family correspondence from the era you’re interested in. I can’t let you handle the originals, I’m afraid.”

“As long as they’re legible, they’ll do just fine.”

She nodded and left and then it was just him in the large, empty room with many generations of Whitmans gazing over his shoulder from sepia-tinted photographs. He opened the first binder and set to work.

There were letters from Frederick Sr. to his son during the Civil War. The Whitmans, originally of Boston, had sided with the North, and Frederick Jr. was a West Point graduate who’d left the war with the rank of lieutenant, then abandoned the army to take over his role as obvious successor to the Whitman Company’s throne. Always involved in land acquisition, going back as far as the fur-trading days in the upper Midwest, the company focused after the Civil War on timber and ore. Coal, specifically. The Whitmans saw the railroads for exactly what they were—the key to the industrial future of not just the nation but the world—and they wanted in early.

Roy scanned through one tedious letter after another detailing the prospects in the mountains that would soon be home to a town and a university bearing the family name, afraid to miss any reference to Blade Ridge. By the early 1880s, most of the letters preserved in the university’s collection were in the pen of Frederick Jr. and not his father, who was clearly in ill health. Some were from his mother, others from Roger, the younger brother, who was serving the company from its Boston headquarters, but the core of the family’s story in this time was told by Frederick Jr., who in 1882 had assumed the role of company president.

The first reference to the potential of the mines along the Marshall River appeared in 1887, and by a year later excitement over them was evident in Frederick’s letters. His exasperation at the success of rivals in West Virginia was clear, and he deemed the holdings along the Marshall to be capable of triple the yield of any competitors. “Blade Ridge, the locals call it,” wrote Frederick, “the name earned by the way the stone cliffs glimmer like a knife’s edge in the right moonlight.”

In the spring of 1888, he wrote to Roger demanding that he secure one Alfred H. Tremley for design and supervision of a railroad bridge that would allow coal to be removed from the hills by the beginning of the next year. Roger responded with good news—Tremley had agreed to their price and was headed west.

For a moment, Roy considered that Tremley might have been the source of Wyatt’s continuing search. But Tremley’s photograph had appeared in the newspapers, and Wyatt hadn’t selected it.

For several months, the exchanges between the Whitman brothers were buoyant, filled with predictions of great wealth. Then came November, and a letter from Frederick that was a good deal bleaker: “David Watson awoke in the night shivering and soaked in sweat, and by dawn he was unable to stand, lying huddled in blankets while the others left camp. Our physician warns of a possible contagion, which we cannot afford at our current pace. Hopefully, he is wrong.”

“He wasn’t wrong,” Roy muttered. “It was contagious, Frederick, old boy.”

Future letters confirmed the diagnosis. The illness was spreading, and with it dissatisfaction among the workers, whom Frederick feared would abandon the project entirely. His younger, brasher brother responded with firm words, suggesting that the crew be quarantined along the river and saying that work could not cease, as the company’s investors had been guaranteed functioning mines by the new year.

Correspondence quickly took on a grim tone—Watson had perished, and a second and third man succumbed soon after. The camp doctor told Frederick Whitman Jr. that he would have to hope the fever didn’t spread through the crew.

Hope, that winter, did not seem a powerful tool. By the first week of December, seven men were dead. Frederick Whitman Jr., while holding the men to quarantine at the work site, made his own camp across the river, telling his brother that he feared “sharing in the conditions of the men.”