Joseph Lincoln Steffens

“ Fortunately Heney's friends appealed to his fears as well as their own, so he paid no attention to them. He opened his speech with an answer to all those who had argued that "a young man starting out in life as I am, ruins his future, ruins his prospects of advancement in his profession and of preferment in his party by having the courage and manhood to stand forth against corruption in public affairs, after a man has been nominated by his party. ”

“ Enemies of his admit readily that Frank Heney has courage. In parts of the West and in days when, according to tenderfoot fiction, all men were brave, he achieved a reputation for bravery. And this fame was his before he "killed his man." So there is no doubt about the physical courage of our hero. But there is little doubt about the physical courage of most Americans. It is moral courage that is rare among us, as rare, apparently, as physical cowardice. Heney is distinguished in the West, as he would be in the East, for the quality of his "nerve." ”

“ To get away from this, he applied for a school at Silver City, Idaho. It was a mining town in full blast and not every man could teach its school. The last teacher wasn't big enough, and Silver City sized up the new teacher, as most men would, for less than he was.
Heney does not look his part. He is five feet eight and a half inches in height, but slender; strong, but rather with nervous than muscular force. His head is round and his face is rosy, with a good deal of Irish in it, blond, amiable Irish. A firm chin, thin, close-set lips and a steady gaze out of the eyes—these show the man. ”

“ Burns perceived at a glance that Hyde and Benson were merely brokers through whom big operators got hold of lands meant for small settlers. Who the big operators were was well known in the Land Office, and the mere fact that they were getting lands wholesale was of itself an evidence of fraud and corruption. ”

“ Geronimo had his Apaches gut on the warpath and the frequent alarms brought the cattle men frequently together. They liked Heney and his education helped while away many an hour for the idlers. But they hazed the sunny "tenderfoot." They gave him bad bronchos to ride. Again and again he was thrown, but, as with the boys "south of Market," so with these horses, he always came back; up and into the saddle, "taking his medicine" even though the blood spurted from his nose and mouth. For months he submitted with unfailing good nature to all this cowboy "fun." ”

“ But Burns did not think there was anything impossible for Richards. He followed the clerk out and he took from him the rest of the story. The time came when the Secretary had to let Richards resign, but that was years later. He couldn't believe then any evil of the Commissioner who had exposed Binger Hermann, and it was always hard for him to change his mind about a man he once had trusted. But this fixity of mind was a comfort as well as an exasperation to Burns and afterward to Heney. For Mr. Hitchcock was as stanch with honest men as he was with "crooks." ”

“ Thus the land frauds were not only violations of the land laws; they were a general violation of the policy of the government; and they were bringing about a condition in which, as in the old countries, a comparatively small number of large land-owners would own the land in the United States. Burns saw that this process of appropriation was carried on by several methods, and he studied them all, but he worked out most carefully the schoolland, lieu-scrip frauds, since they were the specialty of Hyde and Benson, his first case. ”

“ When Bums went on to say that certain officials, whom he named,—men high up in the Department; veterans in the service; gentlemen in deportment; members of good families; friends of great men—when Bums said they were "crooks," the Secretary demanded to know how the detective knew. And when the detective said the fraud simply could not go on without their knowledge and connivance, the Secretary asked for evidence.
"I have no evidence yet," Burns had to admit; "that's only my theory." ”

“ And all men want to make them do right is the inspiration of a good leader ahead and—unfailing justice behind." Every chapter of Heney's life begins and ends with a fight, and the "dude" teacher's term in Silver City ended in "trouble." But not with the boys. It was a man's fight with a man, and it grew out of the dissipations of a mining town; for Heney did not stop drinking and gambling and fighting, as he had hoped, in his new environment. ”

“ We should soon have looked into taxes, and when I had seen what the railroads and mines didn't pay, I think I'd have understood—even if I had never gone to Oregon or come back here to California. For—territories, states and cities, they're all alike.
"No, it's not a mere matter of good men and bad men. I suppose I seem always to be trying to put crooks in jail, and I am, but I know that that won't straighten the crookedness. ”

“ Burns headed straight for San Francisco, and there he began his field work as he did his investigation in the Department at Washington, by studying out the system. At the bottom of the Land Office corruption were the big business men, Hyde and Benson; and they were, indeed, big. If Burns had been a novice he admits that he would have been staggered by the position, wealth and influence of these men. But the detective had detected business back of crime before. The counterfeiters of Philadelphia had brought out against him the influence of men prominent in business, law and in politics ”

“ All through the Handy episode Heney was carrying on his political war with the gang that ran his party and it was guerrilla warfare. Indeed that was the trouble with Heney's politics. He was constant, but irregular; bold, but personal. He opposed bad men, not the system that produced them, and though he often won these individual fights, his victories did very little good.
He saw the saloon men and gamblers in the county ring, and he understood why they were willing to let Al Bernard be county treasurer: they represented their business. ”

“ But you can't play politics with only your friends behind you—not, at least, in a government by the people. And the people in Pima and the other counties round about Tucson belonged to the parties which belonged to the bosses who traded them off between themselves. Heney proposed now to appeal to the people. He challenged Barnes to come to an open meeting at the Opera House on the night of May 6, 1891, and there listen to and—if he could—make answer to certain charges which he, Heney, would bring against him, with the proofs. ”

“ Look at the men; they may be ill-matched externally. Listen longer, and you will learn that one lives, for the present, at Seattle, the other at Tonopah, but they know the same people, the same stories, dovetailing chapters of the same history. I once heard two of them laugh joyously at the discovery that they had met before—on opposite sides of a general gun fight in Texas. These men are Westerners. ”

“ To an uncommercialized mind, even good business seems to be less important than good government. And if there is something about these businesses which makes it necessary for the managers of them to degrade themselves, debase their neighbors, and debauch their cities, their states, and the United States, why, then, it would seem that we are to conclude, not that our institutions are to go, but that all such businesses must be either taken away from private owners or put under public control.
Oregon Corrupt Like California
But that's theory, and theory is offensive to practical people. ”

“ First let us watch the development of a fighting American citizen out of a Westerner of the best fighting type.
A Fighting Boyhood
Frank Heney began fighting when he was a little shaver. His range then was "south of Market Street," which meant to a San Francisco boy about what the Ninth Ward meant in the boyhood of many a New Yorker. It meant fight. There were gangs, and these gangs were all at war; you had to fight your way home from school in a body, or, if you "got kept in" and your gang wouldn't wait, you had to fight alone against heavy odds or sneak around the block. ”

“ By following his story from the beginning, therefore, we may see what he has seen of the life and political condition,9! the West, We shall catch glimpses in Arizona of the primitive stealings of a territory; we can study in Oregon the improved corruption of a young state and get leads into the ancient, magnificent grafts of the Federal government; and finally, we shall realize, as Heney has, in San Francisco, California, the whole American system of political, industrial and financial misrepresentation. ”

“ Letting everything else go he pledged everybody to his slate for committeemen, and by threatening, if he was beaten, to go out and beat Barnes's ticket, he forced the boss's own candidates to help him hold the delegates in line. His committee was elected and he made himself chairman. Thus Frank Heney put himself in the place of the boss of Pima County.
Many Americans think that all they have to do to get good government is to elect good men to office. This had been Heney's theory and his power as boss gave him the opportunity to put his theory to the test. ”

“ Schneider's letters said that the settlers were dummies, and that with their applications for school lands went also a deed of relinquishment to Hyde, but even if Schneider had not written this letter, the constant recurrence in so many papers of "F. A. Hyde," the name of one man should have aroused suspicion in an honest official's mind; and since everybody knew that Hyde was one of the brokers through whom big operators were getting too much land, the Land Office should have investigated. ”

“ Here we have business men helping to preserve the forests, apparently; really, however, the reserves they marked out were not always forests; sometimes they were treeless wastes.
"Schneider alleges," says Holsinger, "that to successfully carry out their schemes, it was decided that not only should some of the government agents in the field be fixed, but to send one Henry Dimond, an employee of Hyde's, to Washington to interest some department clerk so that they would know every move made in the Department of the Interior. ”

“ I know what you are doing. I know the whole rotten situation here." And he described it. "Now I want you to understand that I won't be bluffed. I am making an investigation and I'm going to prove the crime on every last one of you. And you're first. That's all." ”

“ But how is a weak man like Hughes to be blamed when a banker beside him and a lot of best citizens behind and all around him were tempting him to eat an apple so that they could get whole orchards. I can see it now. Didn't they try me. Herrin (General Counsel for the Southern Pacific) didn't want me for an attorney when I was fighting for right things, but when I became Attorney General of the territory he offered me a railroad retainer. I didn't know why then, but I'd have found out. We were for economy. ”

“ Cowboys "don't mean nothin'," when they pester the life out of you and risk your bones. They sat silent, studying Frank while he raged, and when he rode off home, Roberson and Turner rounded up his cattle and, after the rodeo, drove them over to his ranch. There they blew him up for "gettin' mad," but from that time on they let him alone. That is to say, they ceased to "josh" him, and when there were Mexican horse thieves to go out and kill, or Indians to follow, Roberson and Turner, the leaders, each tried always to get Heney in "his bunch." ”

“ Bums "knew" that not only Forest Superintendent Allen and Special Agent Prior at Los Angeles were corrupt, but that Grant Taggart, the forest supervisor at San Francisco and H. H. Jones, his chief and Allen's, at Washington were corrupt; and that Major Harlan, the chief of the special agents, and J. J. Barnes, the expert of the school-lands division,—all of these and many others had to be corrupt. The Land Office, inside and out, at Washington and in the field, must be corrupt from the rim to the core.
And so Burns told the Secretary, and the Secretary went "right up in the air." ”

“ But the men I mean are of no one town, state or territory. They know the United States, and thus broadly are Americans, but of no distinct breed. They are rangers, and their own, particular range is the whole of the great, far West, which they are making, and which is making them.
Francis Joseph Heney is such a Westerner. His father immigrated from Ireland, his mother from Germany. He was born, March 17, 1859, at Lima, New York, but the family moved to San Francisco in 1863, and Frank, brought up there, calls himself a San Francisco Californian. ”

“ Some people say Burns bluffs; they are wrong. Burns knows; he is sure; his mind's eye sees as surely as his physical eye; and his assurance counts. He confronted Barnes with a complete and graphic account of the manipulations of the land frauds. Barnes paled, and Bums, seeing he was right, accused him of accepting bribes. Barnes broke down and confessed.
Barnes turned out to be the clerk "B.," whom Schneider said Dimond had hired to keep Hyde and Benson posted. But Schneider didn't know it all. Barnes said it wasn't Dimond, but Hyde himself that had ruined him. ”

“ Learning What Fear Is
Mrs. Handy needed counsel, and Heney made up his mind not to fight till her case was ended.
The strain was terrific. Ben Heney, who knew all about it, urged his brother to shoot. Frank had his gun ready; he had filed off the trigger to enable him to draw it quickly, and he kept in practice, but Ben feared that Handy might catch his brother off his guard and shoot him like a dog. And Frank says himself that he was afraid of this. "I learned to know what fear was," he says. Often at night he would give up. "If he calls me that to-morrow, I'll shoot," he would decide. ”

“ The Secretary mailed the telegram to Burns, and the detective found written across the face of it an indorsement to the effect that: "You are evidently a very bad man." Burns felt then that he had the faith which Mr. Hitchcock, "stiff-necked and obstinate," as I have called him, could give to a man when he believed in him—^a faith which "makes a man make good."
Burns obtained from Hyde and Benson's employees and clients further light on their business methods. ”

“ When Heney joined the other young Democrats at Washington he found that Hughes had from Don Dickinson a promise of the governorship, and that if he didn't take it, Mark Smith and his territorial com- mittee would be allowed to fill all the offices. "It was to beat Smith that we took Hughes," Heney says; " but we boimd him in advance to make no appointments with- out the approval of a majority of four of us: Meade, C. M. Bruce, L. H. Manning and myself." The history of American politics is full of governors and mayors who, to get the "honor," have surrendered all the powers of their office. ”