Not long thereafter, Warren borrowed the requisite cash, bought his farm, sowed his corn and, with the arrival of the first shipment of steers, prepared for the profits to come rolling in. They didn’t. For in drawing up his scheme, Warren had forgotten one crucial variable: price. That year, prices for both corn and beef dropped to their lowest levels in memory, and before twelve months had passed, Warren was bankrupt. Forced to sell off the farm, he and Clara were left with only 19
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
their personal possessions and a mule team Warren had managed to keep out of his creditors’ hands.
But Warren wasn’t one to despair. From homesteaders heading south for the Oklahoma land rush, he learned that the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company was extending its lines westward into what was then still Indian Territory. A man with his own mule team could, he was told, almost surely find work grading track beds and hauling rails. Moreover, the pay was good: $2.75 per day.
W ith Clara; his firstborn son, Warren junior; his mule team and his trusty slide trombone, Bechtel set out for Indian Territory, spending more than a y ear grading track beds and living in a railroad-camp tent.
After a brief respite in Indiana, where, on September 14, 1900, a second son, Stephen Davison, was born, the Bechtels were on the move again, following the railroads to Iowa, Minnesota, Wyoming, Oregon and Nevada. It was a harsh, nomadic existence, and housekeeping was primitive; often the Bechtels had to make do living in a boxcar. But with Clara holding the family together, and Warren working sunrise to sunset scratching out track bed, the Bechtels endured, and in time, Warren had made enough to pay off his creditors back in Peabody.
His first real chance for advancement came during the winter of 1902-1903, when a contractor’s agent promised him a job on a construction site in the high desert country east of Reno. Eager for better pay, Warren arrived with Clara and the boys during an especially cold winter, only to discover that the agent had reneged on the job. Short of rrioney -Bechtel later told the company biographer, “I landed in Reno with a wife, two babies, a slide trombone and a ten-dollar bill”1-Warren wandered the area looking for work, and one day hitched a ride on a buckboard driven by a Southern Pacific supervising engineer named A. J. Barkley. Something about Bechtel-a spark, a willingness to learn and work hard-impressed Barkley, and by the time the ride was over, he had offered to help get him a job on the Southern Pacific.
Bechtel signed on for $55 a month. It was less than he had been making on his own; but the work was steady, and Barkley had promised that there would be a chance for advancement. After a series of increasingly responsible jobs that gave him a solid grounding in all phases of the construction business, he was promoted and dispatched to Wadsworth, Nevada, as an estimator, gauging costs and quantities of material needed to complete a project. From there he moved on to Lovelock, where, among other tasks, he supervised a large stone-quar-20
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rying operation, whose most notable feature was the employment of the recently introduced steam shovel. Many of the old-timers were reluctant to have anything to do with the big,
