More important in its permanent influence on student activities was his work in reorganizing the system of conducting general student body affairs, especially the financial side of these affairs. In his Senior year he had been made treasurer of the student body and on taking office found little treasure and much confusion. Each of the many student activities had its own separate being, its own officers and own funds--or debts--and a dangerous freedom from general student control.
Hoover worked out a system by which all control was vested in the officers of the general student body, and all funds pa.s.sed into and out of a general treasury. The Hoover system of student affairs management prevails, in its essential features, in the university today.
In later years, as trustee of the university, he was the initiating figure in reorganizing the handling of all the inst.i.tution"s many million dollars worth of properties, and so his organizing genius is evidenced today at Stanford both in the management of student activities and in the handling of the financial affairs of the whole university.
But the work that he did in his student days that paid him best, because it brought him more than money, was that which he did partly for, and partly at the recommendation of his "major" professor, Dr. John Casper Branner, a great geologist and remarkable developer of geological students.
Dr. Branner has been one of Stanford"s greatest a.s.sets from the day of its opening in all his successive capacities as professor, vice-president, and president, and he still wields a benign influence on the inst.i.tution as resident professor and president emeritus. It was the particular good fortune of young Hoover to find that his early decision to become a mining engineer, like the wonderful man who had visited him in Newberg, led him, when he came to the university, into the cla.s.s-rooms and laboratories of this kind and discerning scholar. Dr.
Branner quickly discovered "good material," something that he was always looking for, in this industrious, intelligent, and ambitious Quaker boy; and Herbert Hoover found in his major professor not only a teacher but a friend, who, in both relations, has had a great influence, all for the best, in his life. It is an interesting illumination of the democracy of American education to note that while the professor became the university"s president the student became one of its trustees.
The first money-earning work that student Hoover did for Dr. Branner, except for various little jobs about the laboratory or office, was a summer"s work on a large topographic model of Arkansas which that state was having prepared by Dr. Branner after a new method devised by him.
Part of this summer was spent in the field in Arkansas and the rest of it wrestling with the model in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the professor"s house.
Two summers were spent in work with the U. S. Geological Survey in the California Sierras around Lake Tahoe and the American River under Waldemar Lindgren, one of the greatest of American scientific mining engineers. This work was on the relations of the famous Sierra placer gold deposits to the original gold-bearing veins and lodes, and resulted in tracing those comparatively recent placers back to the old mountain slopes and valleys. It was a fascinating problem successfully carried through. The young geologist"s a.s.sociation with Lindgren, whose standards of personal character and regard for the dignity and ethics of his profession were of the highest, was a source of much valuable education.
All this summer activity was of value to young Hoover not only for the help it afforded him in his struggle for existence, and for the outdoor exercise it involved, but for the practical experience in geological work which it gave him to mix in with his lecture room and laboratory acquisitions and to test them by. He seemed to have no difficulty in getting all of this kind of work he had time to do. In fact, some of the other students used to speak a little enviously and suggestively about "Hoover"s luck" in this connection. Dr. Branner happened to overhear some remarks of this kind from a group around a laboratory table one day and promptly broke out on them in his forcible manner.
"What do you mean," he said, "by talking about Hoover"s luck? He has not had luck; he has had reward. If you would work half as hard and half as intelligently as he does you would have half his luck. If I tell any one of you to go and do a thing for me I have to come around in half an hour to see if you have done it. But I can tell Hoover to do a thing, and never think of it again. I know it will be done. And he doesn"t ask me how to do it, either. If I told him to start to Kamchatka tomorrow to bring me back a walrus tooth, I"d never hear of it again until he came back with the tooth. And then I"d ask him how he had done it."
Dr. Branner was as kind to his boys as he was stern when sternness was needed. Hoover came down with typhoid in his Junior year, just at a time when his finances could not afford such an expensive luxury. So Dr.
Branner sent him to a hospital and saw that he was cared for by the best of physicians and nurses and told him to forget about paying for it all until after he had graduated. And that probably meant that the good professor had to go for some time without buying books, which was what he usually did with his extra money.
Another unfortunate illness was announced to the busy student by an outbreak of little red spots on his body which were declared by the college physician to be the result of poison oak. But they were not; they meant measles, and measles needs prompt attention. Unfortunately young Hoover"s neglected case affected his eyes to such an extent that for several years afterward he had to wear gla.s.ses. And out of this grew the familiar Stanford tradition that Herbert Hoover ruined his eyes while in college by over-much night work on his studies!
As a matter of fact Hoover was no college grind. He studied hard enough at what he liked or thought important for his fitting to be a mining engineer, but he did not dodge getting a few credits from well-known "snap" courses, and he got through other required, but, to his mind, superfluous ones without doing much more work on them than necessary. He had a disconcerting habit of starting in on a course and then if he found it uninteresting or unpromising as a contributor to the special education he was interested in, of simply dropping out of the cla.s.s without consultation or permission. But he did dig hard into what he thought really counted; his record in the geology department was an unusually high one.
But with all his work and study he found time for some other kinds of activity. At least the two Irwin boys, Will and Wallace, who were Stanford"s most ingenious disturbers of the peace in pioneer days, claim that Hoover, in his quiet effective way, made a few contributions of his own to the troubles of the faculty. But such contributions from others were generally credited--or rather debited--to the more notorious offenders, so that they had to suffer not alone for their own brilliant inspirations but for those of other less conspicuous collaborators.
Wallace, for what seemed to the faculty sufficient reasons, was, as he has himself phrased it, "graduated by request," while Will had his Senior year encored by the faculty, so that it took him five years, instead of the more conventional four, to graduate. In fact, I remember that even as this fifth year was drawing near its close, the faculty committee of discipline, of which I was a reluctant member, seriously considered letting Will go in the same way that Wallace had gone. But some of us argued that if we should let Will graduate in the more usual way we should be rid of him soon anyway and without risking the bare possibilities of doing him an injustice. President Jordan always maintained that Will had good stuff in him, and he used his ameliorating influence with the faculty committee. So Will Irwin is today one of Stanford"s best-known alumni.
Herbert Hoover"s haunting trouble all through his college course was that unpa.s.sed entrance requirement in English composition. Indeed, he did not pa.s.s in it until about a week before he graduated, although he tried it regularly every semester all through his four years. How he finally got his pa.s.sing mark has been told me by Mrs. Hoover. She knows because she was there through most of the long agony.
After failing regularly at each semester"s trial princ.i.p.ally, he thinks (and Mrs. Hoover is inclined to agree), because he always had to take it under a particularly meticulous instructor, his predicament began to worry even his professors in the geology department. It looked as if their star student might not be allowed to graduate. Finally a date was set by the English department for a last trial before the end of his Senior year.
A day or two before this date the professor of paleontology, J. P.
Smith, famed not only for his erudition but for his especial kindness to all geology students--especially if they did well in paleontology--came to the worrying Senior with a paper that Hoover had written sometime before on a paleontological subject, and said to him: "Look here, you will never pa.s.s that examination in the state you are in. Take this paper; it"s fine. Copy it in your best hand; remember that handwriting goes a long way with professors of English; look up every word in the dictionary to be sure you have got the right one; then put in all the punctuation marks you ever saw, and bring it back to me." Hoover did it.
Then Professor Smith disappeared with the paper in his study, but soon came out with it, abundantly blue-penciled. "Now take it and re-copy it with all these indicated changes, and bring it back again." Again the interested Senior obeyed his mentor. Then the professor left the laboratory with the paper in his hand. Hoover awaited his return with ever-increasing interest. Pretty soon he came back with a cheerful smile, handed Hoover the paper, and said: "Well, you"ve pa.s.sed; although you probably don"t deserve it."
Professor Smith, it seems, had carried the paper, not to the fatal instructor, but to the head of the English department and had said to him: "See here; your instructor is holding up the best man we have from graduating. Now look at this paper of Hoover"s. Is there anything the matter with it? Doesn"t it make good sense? Isn"t it well written? Isn"t it well punctuated?"
The English head glanced over it impatiently--he was translating Dante, his dearest recreation, at the moment--and then roared out: "Well, it looks all right. I suppose Instructor X has to live up to the rules, but if the boy can do this well for you it"s good enough for us." And with his Dante pencil he wrote a large "Pa.s.sed" across the paper.
Someway all this does not sound like an account of life at the conventional university. Nor does Professor J. P. Smith, who used to interrupt his lecture to wake up a dozing student with a sharp but kindly "Here, Jack, wake up, this is an important point and I will surely ask about it in examination," seem to be of the conventional type of professor. And most Freshmen coming to Yale or Harvard would hesitate a little before taking the advice of some workman about the campus to go, with bag and trunk, in search of board and lodging to a house full of professors.
But as I said at the beginning, Stanford was different. It is precisely because it was, that Hoover"s particular college experiences and acquisitions were what I have tried to suggest, and not what you might think they would be from your knowledge of other universities. And while Stanford has converged somewhat with years toward the more usual university type--colleges get more alike as they get older--it has still an atmosphere peculiarly its own. But it was in the first days that this atmosphere was so very distinctive. Its president and faculty and students, all living closely together in the middle of a great ranch of seven thousand acres of grain fields, horse paddocks, and hills where jack rabbits roamed and coyotes howled, were thrown together into one great family, whose members depended almost entirely on one another for social life. And each department was a special smaller family within the great one. Life was simple and direct and democratic. Real things counted first and most; there was little sophistication. Work was the order of the day; recreations were wholesome.
The geology family was an especially close and happy one. Some of Dr.
Branner"s former a.s.sistants and students had followed him out to California. They were the older members of the family. Almost all of them are now well-known geologists and mining engineers. So also are many of his younger ones. The family went on long tramps and camps together. The region about Stanford is singularly interesting from a geologist"s point of view; and in those days it was a _terra_ more or less _incognita_. Everybody was discovering things. It was real live geology. Lectures and recitations were ill.u.s.trated, not by lantern slides, but by views out of the window and revelations in the field.
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 a.s.sociation 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 Cla.s.s, ready to open his oyster. But he had only himself to rely on in doing it.
CHAPTER IV
THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER
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 Gra.s.s 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 a.s.sociation, 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 Gra.s.s 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 Gra.s.s 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 a.s.sistant 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 a.s.sistant 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 windla.s.s and bucket. It was an operation fairly safe if the sheriff and his a.s.sistants were not too exhilarated to manage the windla.s.s 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 enc.u.mbering 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, Naples, Port Said, Aden, and Colombo, and finally to be put ash.o.r.e 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-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, 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 hara.s.s 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.