While the Enterprise Canal was still an ongoing but faltering project, Andrew contracted to build five miles of railroad bed (miles four to eight) near Morenci for the Morenci Southern Railroad, owned by the Detroit Copper Company.368 He saw it as an opportunity for him and other men in the Gila Valley to earn cash. While he and Ed Phillips, his partner in the farm implement business, had signed the contract, Andrew considered it a project of the Church in the valley, not unlike the Enterprise Canal, except that workers here were paid cash rather than given credit toward shares in the canal.
Andrew signed the contract on March 4, 1900, and work commenced on the 15th, when his journal reads, “Was very anxious, the responsibility was considerable, the uncertainty considerable.” Almost immediately Phillips panicked. Andrew recorded, “Never saw a man so discouraged.” At Phillips’s pleading, Andrew persuaded contractors Streeter and Lusk to release Phillips from responsibility on the contract. Frank S. Lusk praised Andrew’s determination to carry out the contract alone and repeatedly promised Andrew that he would not lose.
One of the participants, Orville Allen, wrote:
I drove my own team and stayed till he finished up on the grade for the railroad from the siding below Clifton on up to Morenci. I hauled the powder and the provisions up to the commissary located about halfway between Clifton and Morenci. The road is still there. It was a narrow gauge. The mining company at that time seemed to favor Andrew Kimball and our people and whenever they wanted good men he would recommend them and the Company would accept his recommendations without reservations . . . men never
missed a shift if they had a recommend from Andrew Kimball. I took a whole load of men and boys up to Morenci from all the towns in the valley and I know that Andrew Kimball accepted this contract to get employment for his people from which they could derive cash to help them along. . . . On the Enterprise Canal, he (Andrew Kimball) took me to the head and showed me all about it and said if the people would stay with him on this job they would make a winning. I brought the scrapers down from the Morenci job to do the work on the canal. . . . Landed men did not support the canal. They thought they had enough land and water and feared it would mean further sharing. But it would have established the water right for the valley if they had supported him and stayed with him.369
Phillips’s misgivings proved amply justified. Andrew had thought the project a job for teams with scrapers,370 but the construction required much more blasting than expected, and workers kept quitting. Wages were only $4 per nine-hour day for man and team.371 Some suggested Andrew renege on the contract, but he persisted because he valued his good name.
Since he had walked the whole five miles and had had ample time to think through the project before signing the contract, it is not clear why Andrew was so badly mistaken, or whether someone had misled him about the amount of blasting required or that he simply lacked experience. But it soon became apparent that Andrew was foundering. He sought help from the copper company.372 He also appealed for help from the Mormons in the St. Johns area. Stake president David K. Udall responded that personally he could not come; he would urge other men and teams to come, but he did not expect much response. Andrew got more advice than help. In May he wrote a distressed letter from the railroad camp to be read in stake priesthood meeting:
I can not see my way clear to leave my post of duty. I have written to the Presidency to temporally excuse me from local duties, setting forth the obligation I am under here, the heavy losses I have sustained and the necessity of the strictest attention to my duty to save me from being ruined. . . . I [would] certainly like to be with you [but] I am at present a prisoner as far as my liberty is concerned and can only get my hands untied by the faithful performance of this my first duty at the present.373
In spite of the desperate tone of this letter, in June Andrew wrote overoptimistically to the General Authorities that while some of his brethren had left him in the lurch, he felt confident of being able to fill the contract without loss.374
By July 4, Andrew wrote in his journal, “Still behind but gaining some. If we got better classification [that is, adjustment for unanticipated difficulties and changes required by the project engineers] it will come out OK.”
The next day he penned: “[Mr. Lusk] was very fair. . . . released me from mile 7. . . . Mr. Lusk promised faithful he would not touch me if I failed, but would help me all he could to come out ahead.” Some of the load lifted the next month when Lusk wrote to Andrew: “Dear Sir: We hereby release you from the work on sections 7 and 8.”375 That made it possible for Andrew to escape the unrealistic contract by completing only the first three miles.
Responses from Salt Lake had offered him little solace. Joseph F. Smith wrote:
[It appears that] while you were authorized to take a contract for one mile in the interests of the community, you, it appears, entered into an agreement to do five miles of grading in the name of Phillips & Kimball, and not in the name of the people at all. This seems to be where the brethren [Heber J. Grant and Moses Taylor, recent stake conference visitors, reporting to the First Presidency,] think you made a mistake. . . . corporations have no souls. . . . for goodness sake do not allow them to compel you to do hard pan, gravel, cement and rock work for earth. They will make you do it if they can.376
J. Golden Kimball advised, “In your troubles and heart aches do not censure your people, but carry the load alone and find fault with yourself. Once lose the hearts of your people and your case is up.”
Andrew was told that Heber J. Grant, who had visited the stake in June,
concludes that you received the consent of your Councilors, and the High Council to take a contract on the Rail Road, but in doing this they were not a party to the contract. Neither were the people a party to the contract further than to work if it was profitable to them. The facts were that you were falling behind in work each month, and owing to having to buy water, paying a high price for hay &, they saw only failure and quit. Bro. Grant [in a mining scheme] made a fool of himself, and of course, you had done the same, and should shoulder the difficulty and make the best of it.377
Kimball Camp consisted of tents for sleeping and eating, corrals and haystacks for the horses and mules, and scrapers and tools scattered everywhere. Andrew hired mostly local Mormon boys to give them income, but he also hired career railroad construction workers. Unfamiliar with prayers, one of them noted, “Kimball always says something just before the meal which gives every workman an equal chance at the food.”378
While workers sweltered under the Arizona sun, Andrew’s son Gordon, age ten, and a local boy named Charlie Smithson, age eight, carried water to the men at work.379
John Stock was driving a team and scraper on grade filling when a man suffered an injury. John stopped to see if he could help. The hard-boiled professional-grade boss threatened him with the loss of his job if he did that again, because he had held up a whole line of scrapers. John told Andrew he wanted to quit before he was fired, but Andrew transferred him to the commissary, where he had easier work and better pay.380
On November 1, 1900, the three miles was officially completed, and Andrew felt a wave of relief. The next day he wrote in his journal, “I was very pleased to get released from so hard and long imprisonment so to speak. Was very tired, so long and hard a strain.”
A friend wrote: “You were blessed exceedingly to get out of it with your boots. You certainly had good grit to stick to it as you did. It is very difficult to find people upon whom you can depend, when it comes to money matters.”381
The ill-fated contract not only cost Andrew income, it cost him something in the regard of his fellows. Early, when things had looked most bleak, Andrew’s letter from the railroad camp that was read in priesthood meeting seemed to some a criticism of the people. Andrew had thought the project would be a boon to members of his stake, but some believed he was using his office to recruit workers for his private profit. Bishop I. E. D. Zundel described the situation as he saw it in June:
The people all have the impression that it was Phillips & Kimball’s Contract and not the contract of the people. . . . I have made unsuccessful efforts to pursuade brethren to go up and give you a helping hand and it seems like all my labors in that direction are fruitless. There was a few of the brethren preparing to go up and assist you, but on hearing your letter read they expressed themselves unwilling to go. . . . I must say I admire you for the integrity you exhibit.382
At year’s end Andrew summarized, “[I] spent 7½ months as a Rail Road Contractor under a heavy strain and loss.”383
He got some relief by being excused from full performance of his contract, but he ended up being uncompensated for the extra work on the three miles he did complete. For more than a year he tried in vain to get additional payment. Mr. Lusk wrote, “Wambaugh has proved himself as thorough a scoundrel as we have thot him and the Co. seems to uphold him. We shall ask you for no money. If we can get it from the Co. we will, otherwise it is our loss. You have done your best and we appreciate it and are sorry we cant all get fair treatment.”384
