And at the same time these young geologists learned real life; they had come to know intimately real men and women, all fired with the enthusiasm of a new venture, new opportunities, and a high ideal. With all this, Herbert Hoover learned, in particular, one additional very important thing. He learned that a certain unusual girl, beautiful, intelligent, and unspoiled, a lover of outdoors, and, as proof of her unusualness, a "major" student in geology, was the girl for him. Having learned this he decided to marry her. And later, she decided that he had decided right.
And so with all his experience at earning his living by organizing anything needing organizing, and with his stores of geological lore gained from lecture room and textbook and field work and close personal association with his able and friendly professors, and, finally, with the knowledge that he had already found exactly the right girl for him, Herbert Hoover went out from Stanford, in 1895, with his Pioneer Class, ready to open his oyster. But he had only himself to rely on in doing it.
Herbert Hoover began his mining career very simply and practically by taking his place as a real workman in a real mine, with no favors shown, following in this the emphatic advice given by Dr. Branner to every student graduating from his department. He went up into the mining region near Grass Valley in the Sierras where he had already studied with Waldemar Lindgren, and became a regular miner, a boy-man with pick and shovel working long hours underground or sometimes on the surface about the plant. But always he had his eyes wide open and always he was learning. He preferred the underground work because he wanted first to know more about the actual occurrence of the ore in the earth than about the mill processes of extracting the mineral from it.
Here he worked for several months, and gradually rose to the position of night shift-boss or gang foreman. But he began to realize that he was exhausting the learning opportunities of this particular place and kind of work, and so one night deep down in the mine, when for sudden lack of ore-cars or power or some other essential, work was held up for the last half hour of his shift, he went off into a warm corner, curled himself up in a nice clean wheelbarrow and slept away the last half hour of his pick and shovel experience.
He had decided to get into association, some way, with the best mining engineer on the Coast. There was no question about who this was at that time. It was Louis Janin in San Francisco. So he appeared at Mr. Janin's office as a candidate for a job, any job so that it was a job under Louis Janin.
But the famous engineer, well disposed as he was toward giving intelligent, earnest young men who wanted to become mining engineers, a chance, had to explain that not only was there no vacant place in his staff but that a long waiting list would have to be gone through before Hoover's turn could come. He added, as a joke, that he needed an additional typist in his office, but of course——. The candidate for a job interrupted. "All right, I'll take it. I can't come for a few days, but I'll come next Tuesday, say." Janin was a little breathless at the rapidity with which things seemed to get settled by this boyish, very boyish, young man, but as they were apparently really settled he could only say, "All right."
Now the reason that the new typewriter boy could not begin until next Tuesday—this was on a Friday—was that he had in the meantime to learn to write on a typewriter! Trivial matter, of course, in connection with becoming a mining engineer, but apparently necessary. So learning what make of machine he would have to use in the office, he stopped, on his way to his room, at a typewriter shop, rented a machine of proper make, and by Tuesday had learned to use it—after a fashion.
That kind of boy could not remain for long a typist in the office of a discerning man like Louis. Perhaps certain idiosyncrasies of spelling and a certain originality of execution on the machine helped bring about a change of duties. But chiefly it was because of a better reason. This reason was made especially clear by an incident connected with an important mining case in which Janin was serving as expert for the side represented by Judge Curtis Lindley, famous mining lawyer of San Francisco. The papers which indicated the line of argument which Judge Lindley and Mr. Janin were intending to follow came to Hoover's desk to be copied. As he wrote he read with interest. The mine was in the Grass Valley region that he knew so well. He not only copied but he remembered and thought. The result was that when the typewriter boy delivered the papers to the mining engineer they were accompanied by the casual statement that the great expert and the learned attorney were all wrong in the line of procedure they were preparing to take! And he proceeded to explain why, first to Mr. Janin's indignant surprise but next to his great interest, because the explanation involved the elucidation of certain geologic facts not yet published to the world, which the typewriter boy had himself helped to discover during his work in the Grass Valley region.
The outcome was that Janin and his new boy went around together to Judge Lindley's office where after due deliberation the line of argument was altered. The further result was that the boy parted from his typewriter, first to begin acting as assistant to various older staff men on trips to various parts of the Coast for mine examinations, then to make minor examinations alone, and finally to handle bigger ones. The letters from the young mining engineer to the girl of the geology department, still at Stanford, came now in swift succession from Nevada, Wyoming, and Idaho, and then very soon after from Arizona and New Mexico. Little mines did not require much time for examination and reports signed "Hoover" came into Janin's office with bewildering rapidity. Janin liked these reports; they not only showed geological and mining knowledge, but they showed a shrewd business sense. The reporter seemed never to lose the perspective of cost and organization possibilities in relation to the probable mineral richness of the prospects. And the reports said everything they had to say in very few and very clear words.
Herbert Hoover was not only moving fast; he was learning fast, and he was rising fast in Janin's estimation. He had a regular salary or guarantee now with a certain percentage of all the fees collected by Janin's office from the properties he examined. What he was earning now I do not know, but we may be sure it was considerably more than the forty-five dollars a month which he had begun with as typewriter boy, a few months before.
The work was not entirely limited to the examination of prospects and mines. In one case at least it included actual mine development and management. Mr. Janin had in some way taken over, temporarily—for such work was not much to his liking: he preferred to be an expert consultant rather than a mine manager—a small mine of much value but much complication near Carlisle, New Mexico. This he turned over to his enterprising assistant to look after.
It was Hoover's first experience of the kind, and it was made a rather hectic one by conditions not technically a regular part of mining. The town, or "camp," was a wild one with drunken Mexicans having shooting-bees every pay day and the local jail established at the bottom of an abandoned shaft, not too deep, into which the prisoners were let down by windlass and bucket. It was an operation fairly safe if the sheriff and his assistants were not too exhilarated to manage the windlass properly, or the malefactors, too drunk to hang on to the bucket. Otherwise, more or less regrettable incidents happened. Also, it led to a rather puzzling situation when the sheriff had to take care of his first woman prisoner, a negro lady of generous dimensions and much volubility.
But the mine was well managed and Hoover acquired more merit with his employer. And soon came the new chance which led to much bigger things. It was now the spring of 1897, two years after Hoover's graduation, and the time of the great West Australia mining boom. English companies were sending out many engineers, old and young, to investigate and handle mining properties in the new field, and were looking everywhere for competent men. Janin was asked by one of these London firms to recommend someone to them. He talked it over with Hoover, telling him that it might be a great opportunity. It might, of course, not be; it would depend on the prospect—and the man who handled it. Janin expressed his entire confidence in the young man before him, and his belief that the opportunity was greater than any the Pacific Coast then had to offer. He would be more than glad to keep Hoover with him, but he wanted to be fair to him and his future. The young man was all for giving hostages to fortune, and so the recommendation, the offer, and the acceptance flew by cable between San Francisco and London, and Hoover prepared to start at once to England for instructions, as had been stipulated in the offer.
Just before he started, however, Janin caused him some uneasiness by saying, "Now look here, Hoover, I have cabled London swearing to your full technical qualifications, and I am not afraid of your letting me down on that. But these conservative Londoners have stipulated that you should be thirty-five years old. I have wired that I was sorry to have to tell them that you are not quite thirty-three. Don't forget that my reputation depends on your looking thirty-three by the time you get to London!" And Hoover had not yet reached his twenty-third birthday, and looked at least two years younger even than that. He began growing a beard on his way across the continent.
The London firm had stipulated, too, that their new man should be unmarried. Hoover was still that, although he had begun to get impatient about what seemed to him an unnecessary delay in carrying out his decision already made in college. As a matter of fact, there was still no definite engagement between him and the girl of the geology department, but there was an informal understanding that some day there might be a formal one. So Hoover appeared before the head of the great London house—perhaps the greatest mining firm in the world at that time—without encumbering wife and with the highest of recommendations, but with a singularly youthful appearance for an experienced mining engineer of thirty-five. In fact, the great man after staring hard at his new acquisition burst out with English directness, "How remarkable you Americans are. You have not yet learned to grow old, either individually or as a nation. Now you, for example, do not look a day over twenty-five. How the devil do you do it?"
The days were days of wonder for the homegrown young Quaker engineer. Across America, across the ocean, then the stupendous metropolis of the world and the great business men of the "city," with week-ends under the wing of the big mining financier at beautiful English country houses with people whose names spelled history. And then the P. and O. boat to Marseilles, Naples, Port Said, Aden, and Colombo, and finally to be put ashore in a basket on a rope cable over a very rough sea at Albany in West Australia. There he was consigned, with the dozen other first-class passengers, mining adventurers like himself, to quarantine in a tent hospital on a sand spit out in the harbor with the thermometer never registering below three figures, even at night.
And then he came to the Australian mine fields themselves in a desert where the temperature can keep above one hundred degrees day and night for three weeks together. Also there is wind, scorching wind carrying scorching dust. And surface water discoverable only every fifty or sixty miles. Of course one expects a desert to be hot and dry—that's why it is a desert—but the West Australian desert rather overemphasizes the necessities of the case. It is a deadly monotonous country although not wholly bare; there is much low brush just high enough to hide you from others only half a mile away; a place easy to get lost in, and hard to get found in when once lost.
All of this desert was being prospected by thousands of men of a dozen nationalities, all seeking and suffering, for gold. The railroad had got in only as far as Coolgardie, but the prospectors were far beyond the rail head. They carried their water bags with enough in them to keep themselves and their horses alive between water holes. In the real "back blocks" they could not carry enough for horses, so they used camels with jangling bells and gaudy trappings of gay greens, orange, scarlet, and vivid blues, making strange contrasts with the blue-gray bush. Along the few main roads moved dusty stages, light, low, almost spring-less three-seated vehicles, with thin sun-tops overhead and boxes and bags in front, behind and underneath, and all swarmed about by pestilential flies, millions of flies, sprung from nowhere to harass the thirsty, weary travelers.
But only the agents and engineers rode in the stages; it cost too much for the little prospectors, the "dry-washers," who carried their few provisions and scanty outfit in packs on their backs, and tramped the trails, stopping here and there to toss the dry soil into the air and watch for the gold flakes to fall into the pan while the lighter earth blew off in the wind.
In the camp were gathered a motley crew, mostly hard, reckless men, who drank and bet their gold dust away as fast as they found it. But everywhere they were finding gold, and all the time came new reports and rumors of more farther on. The headquarters of Hoover's employers were in Coolgardie when he arrived, but were soon moved on to Kalgoorlie, following the railroad. The offices were in one of the three or four stone, two-story buildings, which lifted themselves proudly above the ruck of sweltering little toy-like houses of corrugated iron. Forty thousand people were supposed to be living in this "camp" at one time, buying water at two shillings six pence the gallon, which was cheap—they were paying seven shillings in some other camps. At first it was all brought by rail from the coastal plains four hundred miles away, but when the mines began to get down they struck water at a few hundred feet. But it was salt, and expensive condensing plants had to be set up, which kept the price still high. Coolgardie once boasted of having the "biggest condensing plant in the world," with rows on rows of enormous cylindrical corrugated iron tanks lying on their sides, over acres of ground, with all the pumps and boilers and steam pipes to keep these tanks supplied. Water was cheap there, only twelve or fifteen shillings the hundred gallons.
But out in the prospects and on the trails there was no such aqueous luxury. There was no water for washing and little to drink. And that little was mostly drunk as a terrible black tea, like lye, heated and re-heated, with now a little more water added, now another handful of leaves. I have a well-vouched-for story of an Australian girl who went into this gold-paradise with her husband who was manager, at a large salary, of one of the first mines. She used to take a cupful of water and carefully wash the baby and afterward the little girl, and then herself. After that it was saved for the husband to rinse the worst off when he came home from the mine. But he could have an additional half cup to finish with because he was so dirty. And they tried not to use soap with it so that finally, after letting it settle, it could be added to the horses' drinking water. It was not that the family could not afford to pay for water, but there was simply no water to buy.
Into this cheerful hell came the young Quaker engineer, from the heaven of California and the "city" offices of London where sat the big men who were intent on having their share of the big things in West Australia. He was to do his best for his particular big men, but how he was to do it was mostly for him to find out. His firm had already acquired interests in several promising properties. He was to help develop these mines and perhaps to find new ones to be taken on. A junior member of his firm was already on the ground when Hoover arrived, but he remained only a few months. It was a long way to London and Hoover could get few instructions. It was up to him. It was a hard life with many opportunities to go wrong in any of many ways. But he kept his brain clear, his body and soul clean, and just everlastingly worked.
There were all kinds of work to do, and all sorts of new things to learn about mines and mining. The ore occurred in the rock in a manner different from that in any other known gold field, so finding it and getting it out, and then getting the mineral out of the strange new kind of ore, required resourcefulness, "original research," as the scientists say, and constructive imagination. And the technical problems of discovering and manipulation once solved, there was still needed organization, system, and administration to make the mine a paying one.
But all these things were exactly the young engineer's specialties. He was from the beginning, as we already know, and conspicuously is today, resourceful, original, capable of prompt decision, an organizer and administrator. Although there were many trained engineers in West Australia, there was no one to equal him in these specialties of his. And very soon his firm's mines, which had so far had little benefit of executive ability coupled with technical knowledge and originality, began to pay and their stocks went up on the London market—which was the criterion of success in the eyes of the men in the "city." About the stock ratings Hoover knew little and perhaps cared less. He did care, however, about making good mines out of bad ones. And that was exactly what he was doing.
And very soon he did the other successful thing that the big men in London hoped for and that he kept always working for. He uncovered the big new mine. He had turned up several promising leads but their development proved disappointing. But the "Sons of Gwalia" realized his hopes from the beginning. It was out from Kalgoorlie four or five days hard riding, near a smaller camp called Leonora. He went out and took personal charge of the opening up and equipping of the whole mine and plant, living in a little "tin" house and gathering about him a staff of the best of the firm's assistants collected from all over the Colony. It was hot, although the climbing mercury usually stopped at about one hundred degrees. But that only further inflamed the enthusiasm of the group. They had the real thing, and they had a real leader—a very boyish looking boy of scant twenty-five. They forgot to watch the thermometer. They were more interested in water and transportation and labor and all the other things that are as necessary to a good mine as the gold in the ore-veins.
Occasionally, however, they had some relaxation. For one thing, they thought sometimes about food. One of the men had his wife with him, and she imported chickens and later even ducks which never, however, set web-foot in water. And they had a garden because they decided they were so in need of green vegetables. They turned a little priceless water from the condenser into the garden; but not enough for the vegetables and too much for the accountant's books. After estimating that the one undersized cabbage they raised cost them £65 worth of water, he discouraged further gardening.
They had also a pet emu. So did the wife of the manager of another mine near-by. They used to arrange to have the emus meet occasionally and there was always a glorious fight. Once when they had got the lady's emu over for a visit, one of the Australian boys thought it would look amusing in trousers. So he took off his overalls and after immense exertion got them on the legs of the creature, with the straps securely fastened over its neck and back. But the great bird became so enraged that the men could not safely get near enough to it to get off its clothing, and even its mistress feared ever to approach it again. There was also a pet goat named Sydney that ate several boxes of matches and had to have its internal fires extinguished by the only available liquid, which was the tinned butter that had yielded to the one hundred and ten degrees. Sydney lived through the experience but had always after that a delicate interior and was petted more than ever in consequence. And there was a tennis court occasionally wetted down with the beer that always went stale while they were saving it for state occasions. It was all a happy, glorious time—because they had discovered and were making one of the great mines of West Australia.
Hoover was now twenty-four, and a man of large reputation in mining circles in Australia and London, with a salary to correspond. He had spent about twenty-four months in West Australia, although they ran over all of one and parts of two other years, so that he is generally credited with having remained there three years. And he could have gone on among the Australian mines for as many years as he liked, for the big men in London now fully realized that they had in this young American engineer the unusual man, and that his only limit in Australia would be the limit of the possible. But the new opportunity and the new experience were calling.
Just about this time a young Chinaman of royal family in Peking had made a successful coup d'état and had formed a cabinet for the first time in the history of China, and this cabinet decided, naturally also for the first time in the history of China, to effect a coördinated control of all the mines of the Empire. There was, therefore, established a Department of Mines, with a wily old Chinaman, named Chang Yen Mow, at its head. He understood that Chinamen knew little about mining, and hence decided to find a foreigner to help him manage the mines of the Empire. He also thought that a foreigner, thus attached as an official to his department, could be of particular help to him in dealing with other foreigners inclined to exploit Chinese mines more for their own benefit than China's. This official was to be in a position much like that of an undersecretary in a cabinet department, and was to be given the title, in the Chinese equivalent, of "Director-General of Mines." He was to have a salary appropriate to such a large title. With all this decided, it only remained to find the proper foreigner, who should be a man who knew much about mines and was honest. There was, as we know, just such a man in Western Australia.
When Chang Yen Mow, the new head of the new Department of Mines of the new Chinese Government, began to look about for the foreigner who should know much about mines and be honest, and who would therefore be a fit man to occupy the new post of Director-General of Mines, he bethought himself of an English group of mining men with whom he had once had some business relations. The principal expert advisor of this group had been the man who was now the head of the great London mining firm for which Herbert Hoover was working, and working very successfully, in West Australia. Chang applied to this group for a recommendation of a suitable man for him. And this group in turn applied to the head of Hoover's firm. Or, perhaps, Chang applied directly to the great London mining man. The exact procedure, which is not very important, anyway, by which the head of Hoover's firm came to have the opportunity of making the recommendation, is a little obscure today. The important points in the whole matter, however, which are not at all uncertain, are that he did have it, and that he recommended Herbert Hoover, and that Chang Yen Mow, acting on the recommendation, offered the place, through him, to the youthful Quaker engineer, and, finally, that the competent and confident boy of twenty-four, always ready for the newer, bigger thing, promptly accepted it.
In two weeks after the cable offer and answer, a feverish fortnight devoted to a rapid clearing up of things in Australia, Hoover was on his way to London, to report personally to his employers about their own affairs as well as to get some information about the new undertaking. He wanted to find out before he got to China, if he could, something of what would be expected of a Director-General of Mines of the Chinese Empire. Perhaps he had in mind the possible necessity of "getting up" a little special knowledge about Chinese mines and mining ways before he tackled his new job, just as he had got up enough physiology in thirty-six hours to help get him into Stanford University, and enough typewriting in a week-end to fit him for entrance into Louis Janin's office in San Francisco.
However, after two weeks in the metropolis, eight or nine days on the Atlantic, two or three in New York, and five on the transcontinental trains, he found himself again in California and ready to make from there his second start to the far-away lands from which his loudest calls seemed to come—ready, that is, except for one thing. He was now, let us remember, at this beginning of the year 1899, not yet twenty-five years old, not that by half a year, indeed, and a half year could mean, as we have already seen, a great deal in his life. And he was a boy-man with a record already behind him of achievement and a position already in his hands of much responsibility and large salary. So he declared that the time had now come for the carrying out of the decision he had made in his college days of four years before. It was the little matter, you will promptly guess, and guess correctly, of marrying the girl of the geology department. He arrived in San Francisco the first of February, 1899. He spent the next few days in Monterey, "the old Pacific capital" of Stevenson's charming sketch, but of chief interest to Hoover as the place where Lou Henry—that was her name—lived. And here they were married at noon of Friday, February 10. At two o'clock they left for San Francisco, and at noon the next day sailed for the empire of China.
Into the sleepy, half Mexican, historic town on the curving sands of the shores of the blue Bay of Monterey this swift, breathlessly swift, boy engineer had come from distant Australia, by way of Marseilles and London, had clutched up the beautiful daughter of the respected town banker, and was now carrying her off to distant China, where she was to live in all the state becoming the wife of the Director-General of Mines of the Celestial Empire. It was a bit too much for the old Pacific capital, which did not know—for it was not told—that the sudden appearance of the meteor bridegroom had been preceded by many astronomical warnings in the way of electric messages that came to the prospective bride from Australia and London and New York. Anyway, it wasn't quite fair to the town, which tries to maintain old Mexican traditions, that go back to Spain, of a full assortment of festivities incident to any proper marrying. But Monterey has long been reconciled to this missed opportunity, and now reveals a just pride as the home town of the woman who has played such an active rôle in the career of her distinguished husband.
The hurrying couple, at least, had time for breath-taking—and honeymoon—when once on board ship. For it is a month's voyaging from San Francisco to China—or, at least, was then. They had for seat-mates at table Frederick Palmer, the war correspondent, and wife, which was the beginning of a friendship that still endures. And there were for other interesting companions a secretary of our legation at Peking and his wife, and a missionary pair who may or may not have survived the Boxer massacres.
The work in China was at first rather simple. Mines, of course, there were and had been for uncounted centuries. But what was needed by the new Department was some sort of survey of the mineral resources and mining possibilities of the Empire, and a tentative framing of a code of mining laws, so that the new development of the mines of the country which Chang hoped to initiate could be carried on to best advantage, and in such a way that private enterprise could participate in it. For centuries the mines had been Crown property and the ruler had simply let them out directly, or through the viceroys, for either a stipulated annual rental or for as much "squeeze" as could be wrung from the lessees in any of several various ways. And there had to be some rental or "squeeze" for each of the many officials that could get within arm's length of the mining business. The tenure of the use of the mines by the lessees was usually simply the period of the continued satisfaction of the lessor.
All this had not made for any extensive new opening up of the country's mineral resources, or for the scientific development of the mines already long known. One could not afford to put much capital into prospecting or into modernizing the mining methods when each improvement simply meant either more rent or "squeeze," or the giving up of the mine. So the ores were mined and the metals extracted from them by the miners according to the methods of their ancestors as far back as history or tradition went, and it was all done under a set of mining laws as primitive as the mining methods themselves. There were enormous possibilities of improvement. It would have been hard for any mining engineer to do anything at all to the situation without improving it. For Hoover, with his technical education in metallurgical processes, his experience in handling various and difficult mining situations, and his genius for organizing and systematizing, the opportunity was simply unique. He plunged into the work of examining and planning and codifying with the zest of a naturalist in an unexplored jungle. In the day time he made his examination; at nights he studied the mining laws of all time and all the world.
He built up a staff as rapidly as it could be put together and correlated with the tasks before it. He had sent in advance for two or three men he had worked with in America and for some of his most able and dependable associates in West Australia, including Agnew, a mill expert, and Newbery, a metallurgist, son of a famous geologist, both of them devoted to "the Chief." That was Hoover's sobriquet among his early mining associates; just as it was later among the members of his successive great war-time organizations. He has just naturally—not artificially—always been "the Chief" among his co-workers and associates.
His Caucasian staff of perhaps a dozen was greatly overshadowed in number by his Chinese staff, composed chiefly of semitechnical assistants, draftsmen, surveyors' assistants, interpreters, etc. A few of the Chinese helpers had had foreign training; there was one from Yale, for example, and another from Rose Polytechnic; the latter so devoted to American baseball that he was greatly disappointed in the new Director of Mines when he found he was not a baseball player. But he thought better of him when he learned that he had at least managed his college team. The staff had its headquarters in Tientsin, where were also the principal laboratories for the mineralogists, assayers, and chemists. Some of the men gave their time to the technical work, and others were engaged in collecting and correlating everything that had been published in the foreign languages about the geology and mines' of China, while Chinese scholars hunted down and translated into English all that had been printed in Chinese literature. But the Director and most of his immediate experienced assistants were chiefly occupied with the exploring expeditions into the interior and the examination of the old mines and new prospects. Especially did some immediate attention have to be given to the mines already being actually worked, for the Minister let it be known that he expected the new Director to pay the way of the Department as soon as possible from the increased proceeds of the mines which were to arise from the magic touch of the foreign experts.
These expeditions were elaborate affairs, contrasting strangely with Hoover's earlier experiences in America and Australia. The Chinese major-domo in charge insisted that the make-up and appearance of the outfit should reflect the high estate of the Director of Mines, so that every movement involved the organization of a veritable caravan of ponies, mules, carts, men on foot, and sedan chairs carried by coolies. These chairs were for the Director and his wife, who, however, would not use them, preferring saddle horses. But the proud manager of the expedition insisted that they be carried along, empty, to show the admiring populace that even if the strange foreign potentates amazingly preferred to ride in a rather common way on horseback they could at least afford to have sedan chairs. Imagine a prospecting outfit in the California Sierra or the West Australian bush with sedan chairs! And there were cooks and valets and cot beds and folding chairs and mosquito bed curtains and charcoal stoves and an array of pans and pots like Oscar's in the Waldorf kitchens, and often a cavalry guard of twenty-five or fifty men, superfluous but insistent and always hungry. Whether the expedition found any mines or not it was at least an impressive object lesson to the Celestial myriads that the new Imperial Department of Mines knew how to hunt for them in proper style. When Mrs. Hoover once remonstrated with one of the interpreters of the cavalcade about such an unnecessary outfit, the answer was: "Mr. Hoover is such expensive man to my country we cannot afford to let him die for want of small things."
A similar state had to be lived up to in the Director's home in Tientsin. The house was a large, four-square, wide-veranded affair, in which a dozen to fifteen servants, carefully distinguished as "No. 1 Boy," "No. 2 Boy" and so on down the line, waited, according to their own immemorial traditions, on the Director and his wife. These servants had curious ways, and a curious language in the odd pidgin English that enabled the door boy to announce that "the number one topside foreign devil joss man have makee come," when the English Bishop called, and the table boy to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee duck pups," or of chicken as "one piecee looster." The social scale among the few foreign residents was very precisely defined, and the social life of the foreign colony highly conventionalized, so that the unassuming, practical-minded young engineer of the high title and social position who was terribly bored—as he is today—by social rigmarole, and who was thought rather queer by the conventional-minded small diplomats and miscellaneous foreign residents because, as one of them put it, "he always seems to be thinking," was glad to be out of all this as much as possible and on the road, even if it had to be with the ludicrous caravan of state. Sometimes even all the attempted comfort and superfluous luxury of the caravan did not prevent the expedition from having serious hardships and running into real danger. An expedition across the great Gobi desert that lasted for thirty-nine days was successfully accomplished only after hard battling with heat, hunger and thirst, and even with hostile natives.
Some of the results expected from this imported miner were rather startling. For instance, age-long rumor had it that the Emperor's hunting park at Jehol overlay immensely valuable gold deposits. The Minister intimated to the Director that he would like to know the real facts about this as soon as possible. As the park lay in a little-explored region of southern Manchuria and was a place of much historical as well as geological interest, the Director decided to make a personal examination of it. After the expedition had been out several days, he was told that on the next they would come in sight of the Great Royal Park. Accordingly on the next day the guide of the caravan took him, with one or two of the Caucasian members of his staff and an interpreter, off from the road the grand retinue was following, and by winding paths up to a hill top which commanded a superb prospect.
"There," said the interpreter, with a wave of his hand toward the stretching prospect of beautiful valleys, low broad hills and mountain side, "there is the Hunting Park of Jehol." Then, turning complacently to the Director of Mines, he asked, simply: "Is there gold beneath it?" And interpreter and guide, and later, even more important officials, were stupefied to learn that the wonderful imported man who knew all about gold could not say offhand, from his vantage point, miles away, whether there was gold under the Park or not. And, more disturbing still, that he probably could not say anything about it at all without actually tramping over the sacred soil and perhaps sacrilegiously digging into it.
Such occasionally necessary confessions of incompetence made a little trouble, but only a little. However much the under men lacked knowledge about minerals and mines and how to find out about them, the head of the Department, Chang, knew enough to know that if his young Director confessed inability to meet certain demands it was because there was more wrong with the demands than with the engineer. But the real fly in the ointment soon began to make itself visible. It was not a disillusionment on the part of the Chinese officials in connection with their foreign expert, but a disillusionment on his part in regard to his real position and opportunities for accomplishing something for China. He began more and more clearly to realize that he could investigate and advise as much as he liked but that he could really do, in his understanding of doing, comparatively little. The modern West cannot make over the immemorial East in a day or even a year.
Gradually the young engineer came to realize that while his examinations and reports were all very welcome, and whatever he could suggest for improvement in technical detail, resulting in immediate greater output of the mines already working, was gladly accepted, there was no willingness to accept advice leading to changes in administrative and general organization matters. And to the modern engineer efficiency in these matters is as much a part of successful mining as skilled digging and good metallurgy. Suggestions looking toward getting more work out of the men, or cutting down the payrolls by removing the thirty per cent of the names on them that seemed to have no bodily attachments, were frowned on. These things interfered with "squeeze," and "squeeze" was a traditional part of Chinese mining. Foreign advisors and helpers were all very well when they found gold, but not so well when they found graft. A crisis was visible in the offing. But this particular crisis did not arrive, for another larger and more serious one came more swiftly on and arrived almost unheralded. It was the Boxer Uprising.
The outbreak found Hoover at Tientsin having but recently returned from Pekin with Mrs. Hoover, and both just recovering from severe attacks of influenza. If opportunity for thorough organizing of the mines of China had failed him he now had full scope for organizing a military defense of his home and wife and his many employees, foreign and native, for Tientsin, for a month, was the scene of hot fighting. It was a besieged household in a beleaguered city. Hoover could have gotten out with his wife and few Caucasian assistants at the beginning of the trouble, but he would not desert his few hundred Chinese helpers and their families—and his wife would not desert him. So they staid on together through all the rifle and shell fire and conflagrations of the Tientsin siege, building and defending barricades of rice and sugar sacks, organizing food and water supplies, and cheerfully "carrying on" in the face of certain death, and worse, if the outnumbering fanatic Boxers happened to win.
But there were occasional lighter incidents amid the many grave ones of the fighting weeks. Mrs. Hoover tells one, her favorite story of those days, in something like the following words. "We had a cow, famous and influential in the community, which cow was the mother of a promising calf. One day the cow was stolen and Mr. Hoover set out to find her. With three or four friends and half a dozen attendant Chinese boys he took out the tiny calf one night and by the light of a lantern led the little orphan, bleating for its mother, about the streets of the town. Finally, as they passed in front of the barracks of the German contingent of the international defending army, there came, from within, an answering moo, and Mr. Hoover, addressing the sentry, demanded his cow. The sentry made no move to comply, but, summoning all his Wörterbuch English, countered with the inquiry: 'Is that the calf of the cow inside?' Upon receiving an affirmative reply to his Ollendorff question, he calmly declared, 'Also, then, calf outside must join itself to cow inside.' And thereupon by aid of a suggestive manipulation of his bayonet, he confiscated the calf, and sent Mr. Hoover home empty-handed."
As one of the precursors of the Boxer affair Chang Yen Mow got into the bad graces of the government, gave up his position and was forced to flee from Pekin and take refuge in Tientsin. Even here he was dragged out of his palace and stood up before a firing squad, and escaped with his life only through vigorous interference by his Director of Mines. Because he thought that he might save from probable confiscation a valuable coal mining property at Tongshan about eighty miles from Tientsin, he desired to transfer this property outright to Hoover's name for the protection of the foreign title. Hoover refused this, but did undertake to go to Europe on a contract with Chang to enlist the aid of the Belgian and British bondholders of the Company to protect the property. These men rescued and reorganized the Company, dispatched their own financial agents to China, and appointed Hoover chief engineer to superintend the real development of the great property.
The wily old Celestial finding, after all, that China was not to be partitioned by the powers that had defended it against the Boxers, and that private property was not to be confiscated, now proposed to break his contract so eagerly made. And there seemed to be no hope that the curious course of Chinese law would ever compel him to recognize his previous agreements. But there was something in the persistent, indomitable pressure of the quiet but firm young Belgian agent, named de Wouters, who had come back with Hoover, and of the young American, which did finally compel the old Chinaman, after much trouble and delay, to live up to his contract.
Years later the situation, with kaleidoscopic picturesqueness, took on another hue, and Hoover found himself defending Chang's interests from the overzealous attempts of some of the foreign owners to get more out of the mines than was their fair share. In making the original contracts it had been agreed to have a Chinese board with a Chinese chairman, as well as a foreign board. This led to much difficulty and some of the Europeans declared that the young American had been much at fault in consenting to an arrangement which left so much share in the control to the Chinese, and they repudiated this arrangement. Hoover and de Wouters had a long hard struggle in getting justice for old Chang, but just as their persistence had earlier held Chang up to his agreements for the sake of the European owners of the undertaking, so now, directed in the opposite direction, it succeeded in getting justice for Chang and his Chinese group.
The affair brought him into business relations with another Belgian named Emile Francqui, of keen mind and great personal force, who, with de Wouters, were, strangely enough, later to be chief and first assistant executives, respectively, of the Great Belgian Comité National during the long hard days of the German Occupation. It was with these men among all the Belgians that Hoover was to have most to do in connection with his work as initiator and director of the Commission for Relief in Belgium.
But we are now, in the story of Herbert Hoover, only in the year 1900, and the Belgian Relief did not begin until 1914. And Hoover was still to have many experiences as engineer and man of affairs, before he was to meet his Belgian acquaintances again under the dramatic conditions produced by the World War.
He had now his opportunity really to do something in China in line with his own ideas of doing things in connection with mines, and not with those of Chinese mining tradition. As consulting engineer, and later general manager of the "Chinese Engineering and Mining Company" he attacked the job of making Chang's great Tongshan coal properties a going concern. This job involved building railways, handling a fleet of ocean-going steamers, developing large cement works, and superintending altogether the work of about 20,000 employees. A special one among the undertakings of the twelve months or more given to this enterprise was the building of Ching Wang Tow harbor to give his coal a proper sea outlet. Altogether it was a "mining" job of all the variety and hugeness of extent that the twenty-seven-year-old miner and organizer found most to his liking. And despite obstacles and complications due both to his Chinese and Caucasian company associates he did it successfully, enjoyed it immensely, and got from it much education and experience. But he was ready after about a year of it to turn his attention to the rest of the world.
In 1902, now twenty-eight years old, Herbert Hoover returned to London as a junior partner in the great English firm with which he had been earlier associated as its star field man in West Australia. But, though with an actual headquarters office in London, he was mostly anywhere else in the world but there. He was still the firm's chief engineer and principal field expert and upon him fell much of the responsibility of the firm's actual mining operations in the field as distinguished from its financial operations in the "city." He probably spent little more than a tenth of his time in London, and this was also true in his later career when he had given up his connection with the firm and was wholly "on his own" as independent consulting engineer and mine-organizer. And this explains what has often puzzled many of the people who came to know him and his household in London. He and it were so little "English." His home in London seemed always to be a bit of transplanted America, and, in particular, a bit of transplanted California. As a matter of fact, in all his years of London connections there was hardly one that did not see him and his family in America including an inevitable stay in California. He maintained offices in New York and San Francisco and had no slightest temptation, much less desire, ever to become an expatriate.
But this is getting ahead of the story. There is one outstanding happening in his London experience that insistently demands telling. It is the happening that meant for him the greatest setback in his otherwise almost monotonously successful career. And yet, although this happening meant temporary financial ruin for him, it was, in its way, only another success, a success of revealing significance to those who would like to know the real man that Herbert Hoover is.
After one of his returns to London, and in the absence of the head of the firm in China, he discovered a defalcation of staggering proportions. A man connected with the firm had lost in speculation over a million dollars obtained from friends and clients of the firm, by the issuance and sale of false stock. Technically the operations of the defaulter were of such a character that the firm could not be held legally liable. But the junior partner swept the technicalities aside with a single gesture. He announced that they would make good all of the obligations incurred by the defaulter. This meant the immediate loss of his own personal fortune, and it meant a serious difference of opinion with the absent head of the firm, whose frantic cables came, however, too late to overrule the decision of the junior partner.
There ensued a long bitter struggle, most of it falling on the junior partner with the Quaker conscience, to make good the losses without actually putting the firm out of business. For going on with the business was essential to the making good. It was a gruelling four years' struggle, but with success at the end of it. And then the American engineer, now grown forever out of youth to the man who had experienced the down as well as the up in life, gave up his connection with the firm and launched on that career of independent and self-responsible activity which has been his ever since. This was in 1908. Hoover was now thirty-four years old and probably the leading consulting mining engineer in the world.
His work soon took him back to Australia, the land of his first notable success, but this time into South Australia instead of West Australia. Here he took personal charge of a large constructive undertaking in connection with the rehabilitation of the famous Broken Hill Mines. These mines were in the inhospitable wastes of the Great Stony Desert, four or five hundred miles north of Adelaide, the port city. The living and working conditions in the desert were a little worse than awful, but by his technical and organizing ability he brought to life the two or three abandoned mines which constituted the Broken Hills properties, and, adding to them some adjoining lower grade mines, converted the whole group from a state of great but unrealized possibilities into one of highly profitable actualities. An important factor in this achievement was his origination and successful development of a process for extracting the zinc from ores that had already been treated for the other metals and then cast aside as worthless residues. There were fourteen million tons of these residues on the Broken Hills dumps and from them he derived large returns for the company that he had organized to purchase the property.
He also introduced new metallurgical processes for the profitable handling of the low-grade sulphide ores that constituted most of the mineral body of the mines. Indeed, this work in South Australia did much to help prove to him what has long been one of his cardinal beliefs, namely, that the safe backbone of mining lies in the handling of large bodies of low-grade ores. When such great ore-bodies are given the benefit of proper metallurgical processes and large organizing and intelligent building up of exterior plants, mining leaves the realms of speculation and becomes a certain and stable business operation.
All this successful work in South Australia occupied but seven months. Back in London again he gathered about him a remarkable staff of skilled young mining engineers, mostly Americans. There were thirty-five or forty of them, indeed, not on salary or fixed appointment, but men eager to attach themselves to him for the sake of working with him or for him in connection with the ever-increasing number of his large enterprises in the way of reorganization and rehabilitation of mines scattered all over the world. He became the managing director or chief consulting engineer of a score of mining companies, and the simple association of his name with a mining enterprise gave investors and other engineers a perfect confidence in its success and its honest handling.
Two of his largest undertakings were in Russia, one at Kyshtim, in the Urals, the other at Irtish on the Siberian plains near Manchuria. The Kyshtim property was a great but run-down historic establishment, on an estate of an area almost equal to that of all Belgium. One hundred and seventy thousand people lived on the estate, all dependent on the mining establishment for their support. The ores were of iron and copper, but the mines were so far from anywhere that not only did these ores have to be smelted at the mine mouths, but factories had to be erected to manufacture the metal into products capable of compact transportation. When Hoover took over the bankrupt properties he found himself not only with mining and manufacturing problems to solve, but with what was practically a relief problem to face. For the underpaid workmen and their unfortunate families were in a state of great misery. He succeeded not only in modernizing and rehabilitating the material part of the great establishment, but at the same time in rescuing and revivifying a suffering laboring population of helpless Russians.
The Irtish properties were near the Manchurian border, a thousand miles up the Irtish River from Omsk, a mere remote bleak spot on the wild, bare Siberian steppes. But at this spot lay extensive deposits of zinc, iron, lead, copper and coal, all together. He had first of all to build 350 miles of railroad to make the spot at all accessible. And the actual "mining" operations included everything from digging out and smelting the ores to manufacturing all sorts of things from metal door-knobs to steel rails and even steamboats to ply on the Irtish River. He put a large sum of English, Canadian and American money—including much of his own—into the work of building up a great establishment which was just on a paying basis when the war broke out. It is all now in the hands of the Bolsheviki, with a most dubious outlook for the recovery of any of the money put into it.
Other large operations under his direction were in Colorado, Mexico, Korea, the Malay Straits Settlement, South Africa, and India (Burma). The Burma undertaking has been, in its outcome at least, and, indeed, in many other respects, Hoover's greatest victory in mining engineering and organization. It is today the greatest silver-lead mine in the world, although it started from as near to nothing as a mine could be and yet be called a mine. It took him and his associates five years to transform some deserted works in the heart of a jungle into the foremost producer of its kind in all the world. This mine is far away in the north of Burma, almost on the Chinese border. They had first to build eighty miles of railroad through the jungle and over two ranges of mountains, a sufficient feat of engineering in itself, and then to create and organize at the end of this line everything pertaining to a great mining plant. Thirty thousand men were employed in establishing the mine.
Altogether Hoover and his associates had in their employment, in the various mining undertakings under way in 1914, about 175,000 men, and the annual mineral output of the mines being handled by them was worth as much as the total annual output of all the mines in California. And practically all of these successful mines had been made out of unsuccessful ones. For Hoover really developed a new profession in connection with mining; a profession of making good mines out of bad ones, of making bankrupt mining concerns solvent, not by manipulation on the stock exchange but by work in the earth, in the mills, in the mine offices. He works with materials, not pieces of paper. It takes him from three to five years to bring a dead mine to life; the mine must have mineral in it, to be sure, to start with, but he does all the rest. That little matter of having mineral in it is the whole thing, you may think. But if you do, you must think again. The history of mining is more a history of how mines with mineral in them have not succeeded in becoming mines where the mineral could be profitably got out of them, than of how such mines have succeeded. A successful mine is infinitely more than a hole in the ground with mineral at its bottom. It is railroads and steamers, mills, housing for men, men themselves, organization, system, skill, brains, all-around human capacity. Herbert Hoover is a great miner because he is—I say it bluntly and not from any blind hero-worship—a great man.
If he is, he can do more than mine greatly; he can do other things greatly. Well, he can, and he has done them. We come to that part of his story now, the part that begins when the World War began, when the world saw with amazement that grew into ever greater amazement an unknown miner, that is, unknown except to other miners, calmly do things that only great men can do. But we who know now the story of the boy and the man of the years before the war are not so much amazed. We know that he is the kind of man, who had had the kind of experience, the kind of world education, who with opportunity can do things the world calls great and be the great man. But just for a few minutes before we begin with August, 1914, the time when Herbert Hoover began a new chapter in his work because the world had begun a new epoch in its history, let us have a glimpse of this man outside of his mines and his offices. Let us see him in his home, with his family, with his books if he has any, and with his friends of whom he has many.
His two children, Herbert and Allan, were born in 1903 and 1907 respectively. Living first in apartments, the Hoovers felt that they and the boys and the dog Rags needed more room, or perhaps, better, different kind of room, room for an energetic family of Americans to grow up in Western American fashion, as far as this could be compassed in London. And so they found, farther west, in a short street just off Kensington High Street and close to Kensington Gardens, a roomy old house with a garden with real trees in it and some grass and flower-beds. It had been built long before by somebody who liked room, and then rebuilt, or at least made over and added to, by Montin Conway, the Alpinist and author. For generations it had been called "The Red House," a name that became in the succeeding years more and more widely known to Americans living in, coming to, or passing through London, for it became a well-known house of American foregathering.
I knew it first in 1912 when I was doing some work in the British Museum Library. The bedroom to which my wife and I were shown was inhabited already by a happy and very vocal family of little Javanese seed birds and green parrakeets, a part of the boys' menagerie which had to find refuge from the other animals already housed in their adjoining rooms. Out in the garden there were pigeons fluttering in and out of a cote, and hens solemnly inspecting the newly-seeded flower-beds. A big silver Persian cat, and a smaller yellow Siamese one regularly attended breakfasts, and Rags irregularly attended everything. The cats were Mr. Hoover's favorites. He liked to have one on his lap as he talked.
There were bookshelves in all of the rooms, and I noted that the owner, however many the guests had been, or long the evening, never went up to bed without a book in his hand. I came later to know how fixed this night-reading habit had become, for in the Belgian relief years when we had frequently to cross the perilous North Sea together on our way from Thames-mouth to Holland or back in one of the little Dutch boats which used to run across twice a week until most of the boats had been blown up by floating mines, Hoover used always to fix an electric pocket lamp or a stub of a candle to the edge of his bunk and read for a while after turning in. He has had little time for reading in daytime, but yet he has read enormously. It is this night-reading that explains it.
The shelves in "The Red House" contained many books about geology and mining and metallurgy. But they contained many others as well. Especially were they burdened with books on economics and political science. And they bore lighter loads of stories. Sherlock Holmes was there in extenso. The books on civics and economics and theories of finance were well thumbed and some of them margined with roughly penciled notes. I should say they had been studied. A frequent evening visitor, who came by preference when there had been no guests at dinner, was a well-known brilliant student of finance and economics, formerly editor of the best-known English financial weekly and now editor of a very liberal, not to say radical, weekly of his own. He and Hoover held long disquisition together, each having clear-cut ideas of his own and glad to try them out on the keen intelligence of the other. As a mere biologist, whose little knowledge was more of the domestic economy of the four and six-footed inhabitants of earth than of the social science and politics of the bipedal lords of creation, my rôle was chiefly that of fascinated listener.
Although he likes books and even likes writing, Hoover makes no claims to authorship himself. Nevertheless he has found time to put something of his knowledge, based on firsthand experience of the fundamentals and details of mining geology, and mining methods and organization, into a book which, under the title of Principles of Mining, has been a well-known text for students of mining engineering since its appearance in 1909. The book is a condensation of a course of lectures given by the author partly in Stanford and partly in Columbia University. Although it contains an unusual amount of original matter and old knowledge originally treated for the kind of book it professes to be, namely a compact manual of approved mining practice, the author's preface is a model of modest appraisement of his work. One of its paragraphs simply demands quotation: