Sea Girt: A place to rest after adventures in the Wild West

Walter Hinchman summered at the Northeastern foot of Philadelphia Blvd and the Beachfront at the cottage of his brother Charles every summer in the early 1900s. Walter was retired and living in Manhattan, but he relished the respite of Sea Girt each summer, where he sketched the wildlife and wrote poetry. Charles, a PRR Railroad executive and his wife Lydia (Mitchell) Hinchman welcomed him.

Walter’s sketch of a heron in Wreck Pond in 1914

Walter, born in 1845 in Ohio had rugged adventures in the Wild West and the lifelong bachelor had great stories to tell to his nieces and nephews. As a tapeman, draftsman and sketch artist, Walter helped General William Palmer map possible train routes in hostile Indian territory in 1867 & 1868, and again in 1872 in Minnesota. His first trip was as a member of the Union Pacific Railway Excursion.

Walter walked with a party of fifty engineers and surveyors from Kansas south through New Mexico, Arizona to California and north to San Francisco where they sailed home to Philadelphia. They were targets of some of the last Native American bands fighting to stop the progress of European Americans across their remaining lands.

William Bell Photo from Chocolate Butte Az.

Once the Civil War ended, The US Cavalry had the resources to protect settlers and railroad builders. The railroad kings were anxious to complete faster routes to the growing West Coast cities. They showed little respect for previous treaties moving Indians to the west. Historically warring tribes dropped their disputes with each other to make a last stand.

After riding trains to the frontier, he wrote to Charles as he departed Salina Kansas in June 1867

“Dear Brother,

The excursion party arrived at this point yesterday and I was glad to find Gen. Wright still here. I am now fairly installed as one of the company.” He complained that there was little discipline and some of the men were “jackasses”, who because they were “…some Senator’s son, that they are a little above the ordinary folks.” He was worried that they never learned “…the soldier’s first duty, to obey”.

“Instead of the ride over the plains which I had been promising myself, we are to walk all the way and I will probably be out two years. I think I shall like it; have been congratulated by Capt. Blair our Quarter Master who says he knew thee, and on having good ‘polish’, for which I have to thank my dear brother. We are heading up to start tomorrow morning and I write in great haste to send to Mr. Browne who leaves tonight.

With love, I am as ever

Thy bro.,

W.H.

After leaving the last town in Kansas, the company entered the still-wild plains. William Bell, the excursion’s photographer wrote,

“ We had no sooner found ourselves in the land of the antelope and the buffalo, beyond the little ‘cities’ and out of hearing of the locomotive, than Indian troubles began to cast their shadows around us, deeper and deeper as we moved forward.”

“Never before had hostility to the pale-face raged so fiercely in the hearts of the Indians of the plains, and never had so large a combination of tribes, usually at war with each other, been formed to stop the advance of the road-makers. From Dakota to the borders of Texas, every tribe, save the Utes, had put on war paint and had mounted their war steeds. Reports came from the north that the Crows and the Blackfeet had made friends with the Sioux, and from the south the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the Kiowas and Comanches, had been seen in large bodies crossing the Arkansas and moving northward. The horrors of last summer were fresh in the minds the frontiersmen, who remembered many a comrade scalped by the red-skins.”

He noted that the Bozeman trail to the north, near Fort Kearny Nebraska (present day Wyoming) was now protected by a large force of the US Army. The westward pioneer trail cut right through prime buffalo territory ceded to the Lakota Sioux in a treaty in 1851.

In 1866 Crazy Horse with 1,000 mounted warriors drew out a cocky Capt. William Fetterman and a force of 80 men against orders, and all 81 were quickly massacred. The increased Army presence after the battle drove the bands southward into the railroad expedition’s path.

Harper’s 1867 image of Fetterman’s failed attack and Crazy Horse’s victory outside Fort Kearny. It had to be imagined because no soldier returned alive.

Hinchman was on the trail just a few days when seven men were killed and five injured in an assault by the Cheyenne on horseback. The Cavalrymen of the expedition were no match for the skilled charging and whooping riders.

Fortunately for the railwaymen, a Corporal killed their leader who was well known, by the pejorative, “Chief Roman Nose”. As the chief was driving a spear through a fallen soldier, the Corporal knocked the chief out of the saddle with a slash and he was impaled on the Corproal’s saber. The remaining warriors scattered with a volley from the dismounted cavalry.

They later found a naked Sgt. Williams on the plains with various mutilating cuts on his body as a sign, indicating that members of the Cheyenne, Sioux, and the Arapahoe had all been present during the attack. Walter was asked to draw an image of Williams and his wounds with five arrows still in him for the record.

Walter wrote to his brother, fearing additional attacks, noting that since they were surveyors scattered in small parties, they really could not be well protected.

Later on the trip in Sycamore Canyon Arizona, the railway survey party was ambushed by the Apache raining rocks 2,000 feet down the steep canyon walls. The Indians, shooting from three sides and whooping war cries thought they had trapped the survey party, driving them deeper into the narrow pass. Palmer, a seasoned commander with more accurate weapons, ordered the cavalrymen in his party to scale the canyon walls, chasing the Apache.

He then marched the rest of the crew straight up, over the top of the canyon wall, losing only one man, a servant who fell to his death. The Apache were run off, but Hinchman’s party got separated from the rest of Palmer's men in the dark. For four days, despite lighting bonfires, Hinchman was nowhere to be found. A relieved Palmer finally wrote Charles Hinchman from Fort Mojave on New Year's Day 1868:

“Your brother is well and with me. He got separated for four days over beyond San Francisco Mountain and hadn't had anything to eat along. I believe he was somewhat hungry when he reached supplies. He looked a little pale for about a week thereafter. I was quite uneasy for a while, fearing the Apaches would run into his little squad, as I met numerous wigwams, immediately abandoned just after parting with him at Sunset Gap, but he turned up alright. So that instead of writing you a sad letter of condolence, that at one time I expected would be requisite, I am enabled to record his little adventure merely with its harmless finale”.

Walter captured the scene in a sketch of the canyon fight with high canyon walls and rocks careening down on the explorers. Palmer later had the sketch made into a painting for display in his home in Colorado Springs. Palmer founded the city at the foot of Pike’s Peak in 1871. During the commission of the painting, Palmer wrote to Walter asking him if he remembered the colors from top to bottom of the stratification of the canyon walls.

The Sycamore Canyon ambush 1867, by Walter Hinchman

After seeing the Pacific before he had seen the Atlantic, Walter returned from San Francisco over the Panama peninsula escorting the General’s horse, and he sailed to Philadelphia.

Sycamore Canyon today National Forest Service photo Kalab National Forest, Wikipedia Commons

After two years working in DC for the General and then for the PA Steel Company as a draftsman, Walter returned to the trail again, this time to the Minnesota woods as part of Jay Cooke’s Northern RR project. Attending the trip this time was coal magnate Stephen L. Thurlow, an investor in the railway who had just purchased the Sea Girt resort from a dying Commodore Stockton.

While tracking to Duluth Minnesota, Thurlow was miserable, but Hinchman seemed in his element, sketching the more peaceful Minnesota tribes, and the forests.

1871 drawing of Minnesota Indian by Walter Hinchman

You couldn’t blame Thurlow for investing with Cooke. Jay was perhaps the most respected financier in America. Cooke, with a commission incentive on every bond, sold a staggering $511 million dollars worth of 20-year bonds to support the Union in the Civil War.

Cooke had correctly predicted that Chicago would be the largest city in the Midwest over St. Louis. He hoped that Duluth, a small trading outpost of a few shacks on the western edge of Lake Superior would become another large city between Chicago and the West Coast and a major depot on his rail route.

In 1869 his survey crew had reported the best of all possible conditions along the proposed route. Even more enthusiastic was their gushing of untold riches in timber, “200-foot firs growing so thickly together to turn daylight to dusk”, grazing land, “for hundreds of thousands of cattle”, salmon, “Salmon are not caught here, they are pitchforked out of the streams”...

”Jay, we have got here the biggest thing on earth.”

Unfortunately, the mud from thawing soil in the north caused delays, worrying investors. But perhaps the biggest source of bad press came from the exploits of a Lakota Indian named Tatanka Yotanka, commonly known as “Sitting Bull”.

The holy man and warrior leader was feared for cutting down survey crews as they entered Sioux territories, and the progress of the road stalled when it entered the Badlands. Jay needed to raise one million per month, and when the investors fell short, there was a run on the Jay Cooke brokerage.

There was shock. “Like a thunderclap from the clear sky” said the Philadelphia Press. They followed with, “An hour before its doors were closed, the Bank of England was not more trusted.”

The New York Tribune screamed “A Financial Thunderbolt”, and the Philadelphia Inquirer stated, “They would not be more surprised if snow had fallen in July.”

Jay Cooke, the king of bond sales could not sell his way out of problems. Panic spread.

The New York Stock Exchange closed for the first time to restore order and remained closed for seven and a half days. Ninety percent of railroad companies with unfinished roads failed, including the Northern Pacific and with it Thurlow’s investment.

Hinchman did not forget. When coal prices fell and Thurlow was forced to sell his Sea Girt farm and the old Stockton oceanfront mansion, Walter had his brother Charles make a significant investment in the Sea Girt Land Improvement Company, providing Walter a place to spend his summers in retirement, before he died there in 1920.