Now that you have an idea of who Fred Harvey was and why he was important, we can move on to who the Couriers were. Strangely (or maybe not), they get far less press than the Harvey Girls. There are several websites that provide much the same basic information within the context of the Southwestern Indian Detours -- Dudes, Detourists, and Broken Axles, Splendor & Spectacle, Harvey Car Courier Corps -- and with the same inaccuracies. They are mentioned in Fried's book and referred to in articles and museum exhibits, but there's no single book that focuses just on them. D.H. Thomas' The Southwestern Indian Detours (out of print) includes the most information about them, but it also treats them as adjuncts to the more important Detours.
My guess is that it's because there were fewer of them than Harvey Girls and only those with the financial wherewithal to afford one of the Southwestern Indian Detours had any personal interactions with them. Also, the Detours were restricted to New Mexico and Arizona, and were in business, as it were, only from 1926 to about 1940 -- between the Wars, in other words. And Judy Garland never played a Courier on the big screen.
The Indian Detours had their beginning in 1892 with stagecoach trips from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon. By 1915, a spur line from Williams had been built and trains ran twice a day from the Fray Marcos Harvey House Hotel to the recently completed El Tovar, a Fred Harvey Hotel. The stagecoach and later train trips were so successful that the Fred Harvey Company soon began offering similar trips elsewhere, beginning with Santa Fe, via that new invention, the motor car. Tourists were given an illustrated brochure with a suggested walking tour, including architectural and historical information. Otherwise, they were left to their own devices.
Over the next few years, additional one-hour tours were added, designed for the train passengers on layovers. Then, World War I intervened and there was a gap until Major R. Hunter Clarkson, formerly of the Royal Flying Corps joined the Fred Harvey Company as head of transportation at the Grand Canyon. He envisioned large touring cars, full of sightseers, visiting all of the points of historical, cultural, and geological significance throughout Arizona and New Mexico. At least as importantly, he sold Ford Harvey on the idea. The sightseers would arrive on the ATSF, for which Harvey had the dining car contract. They would stay at Harvey Houses in Las Vegas, Albuquerque and Santa Fe (originally -- soon this expanded to include Williams and the Grand Canyon) and they would pay for the privilege of being driven around.
In order to justify the high prices, they decided to employ tour guides, but not just any tour guides. The Harvey Girls were already renowned for their training and customer service skills. Why not hire and train "girl guides" for the Detours (as they were now called)? They hired Erna Fegusson, whose highly successful Koshare Tours had done just that. She was given total control over the hiring and training process. Candidates had to be college graduates. They had to be at least 25 years old -- but not much older. They had to be single (that kind of went without saying). They had to learn basic conversational Spanish. Another non-English language, such as French, German, or Italian, was a plus. And they had to be willing to go through a six-week training course in every subject under the sun.
Ultimately, they also had to assist the driver with changing tires, pushing cars that were stuck, providing meals and snacks to passengers, as well as first aid. It's suggested that they were the model for later airplane stewardesses (yes, it was gendered).
The tours were all expenses-paid -- and the Couriers were responsible for booking the hotel rooms and paying the hotel and restaurant bills, which, btw, included their own expenses. They wore a uniform that identified them as Couriers -- a long-sleeved velvet blouse, similar to that worn by Navajo women, a skirt with a kick pleat or trousers for climbing the ladders at pueblo ruins, walking shoes or boots, and a soft-brimmed cloche with the Thunderbird logo pinned on it. They were expected to buy and wear a silver concho belt and squash blossom necklace, at the very least.
The training was far from cursory. The teaching staff included Dr. Edgar Lee Hewett, director of the School of American Research, Dr. Alfred V. Kidder, Andover Academy, Dr. Sylvanus Morley, Carnegie Institute, Frederick Webb Hodge, American Museum of the American Indian in New York, Charles Fletcher Lummis, journalist, historian, and founder of the Southwest Museum in L.A., and Paul A. F. Walter, New Mexican Historical Society. It will not escape your notice that these are all men -- white men -- mostly old.
The requirements that they be college graduates meant that all of the women were middle-class, the daughters of professional men. Those who had any work experience at all were primarily teachers, although many of the women had no work experience at all.
Personally, I want to know more about these women, who they were, and why they decided to become Couriers. I want to know more than their names (Thomas gives quite a few names, but no other information) and who their father was. I also want to know what they did afterward.
I want to know more about what they were taught as Couriers, given that the classes were constructed and taught by old, white American men. I'm making a trip to the University of Arizona in Tucson later this year to work with the Farona Wendling Konopak papers, which consist primarily of her Courier training materials.
And once I've done that, I'll start on volume three of the Couriers series -- or maybe volume four. 😉
