Some people ask "Who were the Couriers and why are you writing about them?" In order to answer that question, I have to go back to "Who was Fred Harvey?" The most complete answer to that question can be found in Stephen Fried's "Appetite for America : Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West -- One Meal at at Time." Fried also hosts the Fred Harvey History website and there's a Wikipedia article on Harvey as well, so I'm just going to give you the quick and dirty (well, not really dirty; that's just the way the idiom is phrased) version and you can check out those sites and others for more info. I highly recommend Fried's book, btw. It reads very well.
Fred Harvey was an English immigrant to the US in 1853 at age 17. His learned the restaurant trade from the bottom up, starting as a busboy in a New York City restaurant. Long story short, post-Civil War, the railroads were expanding across the continent and he saw an opportunity for providing quality food at a reasonable with excellent customer service. He contracted with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway to build and staff restaurants and hotels at all of their major stations from Chicago through to northern California and, not long after, convinced the Railway to give him the contract for the dining cars on the longer routes. Thus was born the Harvey House chain of restaurants and hotels, the very first such chain. It lasted until the 1960s. In 1968, it was bought by Amfac, which is now Xanterra, which operates (and often owns) all of the hotels and restaurants in the National Parks. Which is why the El Tovar in the Grand Canyon has a permanent exhibit on the Couriers, but that comes later.
At the time, trains stopped for about half an hour at isolated stations that might provide appallingly bad food at high prices in dirty conditions, if they provided any food at all. Passengers paid up front for a meal that they frequently were not given time to eat. The "restaurateurs" took as long as possible to bring the food out and sold the same plates of beans to different passengers all day long.
Well before Henry Ford, Harvey developed an efficient system that allowed food to be served as soon as the passenger stepped into the restaurant. Orders were taken on the train and wired ahead; ingredients were shipped via rail, so the restaurant always had adequate, fresh supplies; recipes were developed for their ease of preparation. There was something of an assembly-line about the way that passengers were moved through, but everyone who paid for food was able to eat that food.
And the food was served by a corps of Harvey Girls -- young, working-class women of high moral character who were thoroughly trained in efficient service with a smile. They wore ankle-length black dresses with long sleeves and high necklines -- Harvey did not want any hint that they were, ahem, "saloon girls" -- covered with a long, white bib apron. Their hair was pulled back into a bun and they wore a big, white bow at the back of their head.
(Three Harvey Girls in original uniform: Patti Dail, Oreva Kangun, and Edna Nation (NAU.PH.95.44.135.2).https://library.nau.edu/speccoll/exhibits/fredharvey/themes/harveygirls.html)
They were so famous that, in 1946, MGM made a musical, "Harvey Girls" starring Judy Garland, based on a 1942 novel of the same name by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Again, if you want more details, there are dozens of sites online, as well as Lesley Poling-Kempes' "The Harvey Girls: Women who Opened the West." What is particularly significant for us today is that being a Harvey Girl expanded the options of young, working-class women at a time when their choices were pretty much limited to service work such as a maid in a private home or possibly hotel, laundress, retail sales, or marriage. Harvey paid good wages and Harvey Girls were given a free ticket on the Santa Fe railroad every six months, so they got to travel -- and meet a wider range of young men than they would have at home, although they were contracted to work for a full year. So, no getting married until your year was up, because, of course, married women did not work outside the home.
When Fred died in 1901, his son Ford Harvey took over, but the company retained the name Fred Harvey, which is why "Fred Harvey" is often credited with activities that took place decades after he died.
The Corporation is credited with inventing cultural tourism, as well. At some point, someone (Ford? I can't remember) starting collecting Native American artifacts. The collection was ultimately housed in the Indian Building at the Alvarado in Albuquerque and the La Fonda in Santa Fe. After World War I, with the increase in disposable income leading to an increase in rail passenger tourism (people were no longer traveling on business or to relocate), passengers were often faced with layovers of several hours in New Mexico and Arizona. Around 1925, someone in the Corporation (yeah, I should remember, but I don't) got the bright idea to take advantage of the new automobile and sell short "detours" to scenic areas to these well-heeled tourists. They called them "Southwestern Indian Detours." And they hired middle-class college-educated young women to lead them. Rather than calling them "Tour Guides" they called them "Couriers," as in "diplomatic couriers." They were liaisons between "Americans" and "Indians."
The Detours were not cheap (in today's dollars, running around $200/day) and the Corporation wanted to make certain that Detourists (or Dudes) got their money's worth. The Couriers went through a six-week training program that crammed their heads full of geographical, historical, anthropological, and cultural information. Like Harvey Girls, they were trained in customer service and they wore a uniform that identified them as Harvey employees (no, it was not an ankle-length black dress and apron!). Unlike the Harvey Girls, it was unusual but not unheard of for a Courier to get married and keep her job.
As with the Harvey Girls, there is quite a bit of information available online, although some of it is inaccurate. There is only one book written on the Couriers and it's really more about the Detours themselves, Diane H. Thomas' "The Southwestern Indian Detours: The Story of the Fred Harvey/Santa Fe Railway Experiment in "Detourism."" And, as with the Harvey Girls, this expanded the career options for college-educated young women beyond teaching, nursing, and librarianship. They were the experts and the authorities on the people and places the Detours visited. They and the driver were responsible for the safety of the Detourists, as well as their education and entertainment and even feeding. Every car carried lunch boxes with food, beverages and ice. It has been suggested that they were the model for airline stewardesses (and yes, the gender-specific term is appropriate and relevant).
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