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Freezing civilities: ice and the building of the American West, 1850−1950

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Freezing civilities: ice and the building of the American West, 1850−1950

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Freezing Civilities: Ice and the Building of the American West, 1850-1950
by

Jordan M. Keagle

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
HISTORY

August 2021

Copyright 2021 Jordan M. Keagle

ii

The cotton-bale, the stevedore's hook, the saw and buck of the
sawyer, the mould of the moulder, the working-knife of
the butcher, the ice-saw, and all the work with ice…
— Walt Whitman, “A Song for Occupations”

iii

For my parents, Sally and Mark.

iv
Acknowledgements

Out of everything that has gone into this dissertation, this is the section for which I wish I had
kept better notes. To those whom I will inevitably miss and those whose names I cannot recall, I
apologize.

First, I thank the members of my committee. My advisor and chair, Bill Deverell, has been
unfailingly supportive. His comments have guided every portion of this document. He believed
in its value and my capability before I ever did. Peter Mancall is not content with unreasoned
answers or sloppy writing and he has made me a better historian for it. Tim Gustafson graciously
joined my qualifying exams committee and has stayed on since. He once told me he sits on
history committees for fun. I hope he’s enjoyed himself on this one.

I would like to thank the friendly and helpful archivists and staff members of archives across the
West: the Truckee-Donner Historical Society, the California State Railroad Museum, the
California State Library, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the
California Historical Society, the History Colorado Center, the Denver Public Library, the
American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, and the Huntington Library.

I am additionally grateful for research funding from the Bancroft Library and the American
Heritage Center.

At various times, Ed Austin, Phil Nickel, and Paul Otto have all been mentors to me in the field
of history. I would not have made it to USC without each of them.

The list of friends and colleagues who have contributed to this dissertation is long:

- Skyler Reidy and Willie Cowan have heard me talk about this project more than probably
anyone else. I am so glad to have had them as fellow scholars of the West in my USC cohort.

- Jenna Ross has edited an uncountable number of drafts, but more importantly, she has been a
dear friend and confidant.

- I am grateful for the constant encouragement of my colleagues on “Magic Island”: Jillaine
Cook, Laura Dominguez, Stan Fonseca, Yesenia Hunter, Gary Stein, and Dan Wallace. Our
twice-weekly Zoom sessions have been landmarks in the otherwise unsteady timescape of
COVID-19.

- Annica Gage stepped in to read the almost-final draft at the eleventh hour and it is all the better
for her keen eye.

Finally, I need to thank my parents, Sally and Mark Keagle. Without them, I would not have
been able to complete this dissertation. They have believed in me from the beginning, even when
they were not quite sure what I was actually doing. Their support—emotional, spiritual, and
financial—pushed me through to the finish. This is for them.

v
Table of Contents

Epigraph ii

Dedication iii

Acknowledgements iv

List of Figures vi

Abstract vii

Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Cold Cargo: The Natural Ice Trade in the Pacific West 10
Chapter 2: “The Paradise of the Ice Men”: Harvesting Winter in Truckee 53
Chapter 3: Creating an Urban Coldscape 96
Chapter 4: Produce and Preservation 136
Chapter 5: Icemen and Icewomen 173
Epilogue: Ice Without an Iceman 204
Bibliography 213

vi
List of Figures
Figure 1. Oakland Iron Works ice machine diagram, 1893 104
Figure 2. Table comparing profitability of natural and artificial ice, 1871 108
Figure 3. Yakima Artificial Ice and Cold Storage Company, 1908 151
Figure 4. Ice blocks exhibited at the Washington State Fair, 1904 154
Figure 5. Montgomery Ward Windsor Model C18005 refrigerator, 1901 177
Figure 6. Montgomery Ward Windsor “Polar Bear” refrigerator, 1910 179
Figure 7. Pasadena Ice Company coupon booklet, circa 1930s 186
Figure 8. Detail of 25-pound coupon from Pasadena Ice Company booklet 187
Figure 9. Iceman in Houston, Texas, circa 1930 197
Figure 10. Union Ice Company advertisement urging “automatic” delivery, 1933 201
Figure 11. “Ethel Buying Ice” 206

vii
Abstract
This project examines how, across the century from 1850-1950, people in the American
West—laborers, merchants, manufacturers, politicians, and consumers—transformed ice from an
ephemeral feature of the natural landscape, to a purchasable product, to a foundational piece of
“modern” life. In contrast to conventional understandings of the “civilized East” versus the “wild
West,” the people of the West were no less seekers of luxury and comfort than their Eastern
cousins. But at the same time, ice was far from a frivolous indulgence for the wealthy. People
across the social spectrum came to not just rely on it, but to expect it, even in far-flung locations.
Even before electric refrigeration, consumers succeeded in satisfying their desires for cold drinks
and fresh produce, albeit through means that seem very foreign in the twenty-first century. For
the people of the American West, ice was not a product of modernity. Instead, the West became
modern, in part, through ice and the control over the natural world it made possible.

1
Introduction
In 1914, “Mrs. J. R.” of Toronto, Ontario wrote to Sunset: The Pacific Monthly with
questions about living in Southern California. How much would it cost to build a suitable home?
What were the temperatures like in the summer months? She had escaped the Canadian snows by
spending a previous winter in Los Angeles, but had yet to experience a California summer.
Editor Walter V. Woehlke answered her query, writing that the temperature in Los Angeles
reached 95° only a handful of times each year and “these hot spells last only two or three days at
a time [and] are accompanied by cool nights… June invariably is cool, almost chilly.” So mild
and pleasant was the climate of Los Angeles, Woehlke assured his Canadian correspondent, that
“an ice-cooled refrigerator is a luxury, not a necessity, on the entire Californian coast.”
1
This was
a lie.
Woehlke would have been hard pressed to find fellow Californians who agreed a
refrigerator was anything less than a staple of everyday life in the Golden State. For more than
sixty years, since before California’s admittance to the Union, ice had been an object of desire
and a powerful tool in the West. It offered comfort, bolstered industry, and even helped to create
a sense of identity in growing Western communities. In 1914, ice was cheap and ubiquitous in
California and across the Western United States, available at all times of year in even the
smallest towns. But that ease of access, stretching across both geography and economic class,
was hard won. Westerners devoted blood, sweat, and countless dollars of investment to taking
control of the cold and building a refrigerated society on the Pacific Coast.
This project examines how, across the century from 1850-1950, people in the American
West—laborers, merchants, manufacturers, politicians, and consumers—transformed ice from an

1
Walter V. Woehlke, “Sunset Service Bureau,” Sunset: The Pacific Monthly, October 1914, 780–82.

2
ephemeral feature of the natural landscape, to a purchasable product, to a foundational piece of
“modern” life. In contrast to conventional understandings of the “civilized East” versus the “wild
West,” the people of the West were no less seekers of luxury and comfort than their Eastern
cousins. But at the same time, ice was far from a frivolous indulgence for the wealthy. People
across the social spectrum came to not just rely on it, but to expect it, even in far-flung locations.
Even before electric refrigeration, consumers succeeded in satisfying their desires for cold drinks
and fresh produce, albeit through means that seem very foreign in the twenty-first century. For
the people of the American West, ice was not a product of modernity. Instead, the West became
modern, in part, through ice and the control over the natural world it made possible.
Historical studies regarding ice in the United States are limited both in number and in
scale. Few monographs exist that specifically address ice and refrigeration, but among those that
do, two primary themes dominate: technological advancement and the flourishing of American
business. Richard O. Cummings’s The American Ice Harvests: A Historical Study in Technology
(1949) was the first full-length historical study of the American ice industry, setting the tone
followed by later works and remaining a touchstone in the field even to the present.
2
It is, in
large part, a survey of the changes in ice harvesting technology circa 1800-1920 and a chronicle
of the men who made their fortunes in this business. According to Cummings’s preface, study of
the subject illuminates "American industrial growth and the development of domestic and
foreign commerce" and the place of "individual enterprise and ingenuity" in the ice and
refrigeration businesses. Indeed, Cummings’s esteem for Frederic Tudor, the nineteenth century

2
Cummings has proved very influential in this narrow field and is cited on numerous occasions by certain other
books relevant to the project, especially Oscar E. Anderson, Refrigeration in America: A History of a New
Technology and Its Impact (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, The
Ice King: Frederic Tudor and His Circle, ed. Alan Seaburg (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003); and
Gavin Weightman, The Frozen-Water Trade: A True Story (New York: Hyperion, 2003). Rees, Refrigeration
Nation, leans heavily on Seaburg and Weightman, who, in turn, cite Cummings. In that way, the most recent book
on ice sales in the United States is heavily indebted to the first.

3
“Ice King” of Boston, is evident. He depicts Tudor and his off-and-on partner Nathaniel Wyeth
as visionaries: Tudor the businessman and Wyeth the inventor. While Cummings pays the most
attention to New England ice—and understandably so, given that Boston and its environs were
the center of the industry—he also addresses Midwestern and even California ice harvesting,
albeit only briefly.
3
Cummings understands the ice industry as one of "continuous extension of
services" and impressive technological innovation that came to a crashing halt with the rise of
artificial ice plants. While Cummings does not fall entirely into romanticization, he clearly
considers natural ice harvesting a quaint memory from a foregone era and its impacts definitively
ended. Overall, American Ice Harvests is a foundational work, both for Cummings’s detailed
descriptions as well as his introduction of the idea that a special relationship existed between ice
and refrigeration and American prosperity.
What Cummings only gestured at in his work, historian Oscar E. Anderson made explicit
in Refrigeration in America: A History of a New Technology and Its Impact (1953). Although
Refrigeration in America was not written to be the counterpart of American Ice Harvests, the two
books pair very well. Another primarily technological history, Refrigeration in America delves
deeply into the (literal) nuts and bolts of mechanical refrigeration as well as into the details of
refrigeration as a business. However, Anderson does this in service of an argument for American
exceptionalism. “Refrigeration for domestic purposes,” he argues, “was and has continued to be
an American institution. For various reasons, including climate, diet, custom, and average level
of living, the United States remains the only country where domestic refrigeration is extensively
used” [emphasis mine].
4
He goes on to tout American leadership in the international trade,

3
See especially Richard O. Cummings, The American Ice Harvests: A Historical Study in Technology, 1800-1918
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 55–58, 73–75, 89.
4
Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 3.

4
dubbing Frederic Tudor’s business shipping ice to India “a triumph of Yankee enterprise.”
5

According to Anderson, advancing refrigeration technologies served to bolster the national
development of the United States, particularly its urban centers, writing, “By the middle of the
twentieth century a new and infinitely complex society had emerged in the United States. To this
society the techniques of refrigeration were vital.”
6
For Anderson, temperature control
technologies were the enablers of American growth, helping to conquer the logistical challenges
of an expanding nation.
Taken together, Cummings and Anderson illustrate the development of cooling
technologies in the United States across nearly 150 years, with one clear picture emerging:
control over cold on an industrial scale was vital to the economic development of the United
States both at home and abroad. This idea, stripped of its mid-century jingoism, is one worthy of
further exploration. Anderson’s argument is compelling and reflects the way Americans
experiencing the nation’s rapid modernization understood that process. But refrigeration did not
make America modern—not alone.
7
Nor was mechanized refrigeration an absolute good, without
consequences that affected other areas of American life. A contemporary study of the subject
needs to grapple with the potential ramifications of an expanding new technology both on the
environment as well as on various segments of an unequal society. Were these innovations
experienced differently by the rich and the poor? The urban and the rural? By whites and by

5
Anderson, 3.
6
Anderson, 320.
7
“How X made Y modern” is a popular formula in recent historiography across specializations. Even limiting to
Western and environmental history, potential explanations for the transition into modernity abound. For a small
sampling, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1991); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of
Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012); Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the
Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Kendra Smith-Howard, Pure and
Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

5
people of color? Scholars like Cummings and Anderson give illustrations of technological and
economic change without showing the ways these changes affected the populace beyond
businessmen and engineers. Their attention is on production and management at the expense of
the consumer. This project reverses this focus in order to gain a better understanding of
commodified cold’s influence on the level of the household and the individual.
Furthermore, ice sits at the confluence of two scholarly narratives of the West: the
“conquering” of the Western environment and the rise of capitalism. Building on previous
commodity studies by environmental historians, my work argues that ice was itself a critical raw
material in the building of the West’s industries and cities—a resource that has been so far
overlooked in favor of, for instance, ice’s other elemental expression, water. It was at once a
product of nature and the hard-won result of human labor and scientific expertise. For well over
fifty years, so called “natural ice”—ice cut from frozen ponds—competed in Western
marketplaces with artificial manufactured ice. In contrast to previous scholarship, this
dissertation treats both halves of the ice industry as an interconnected whole and complicates the
distinction between ice as a “natural” versus an “artificial” product. In total, thousands of tons of
ice were used each year across the West by the booming produce, meat, and brewing industries.
A vast network of ice cutting, manufacturing, storing, and shipping undergirded the food systems
of nineteenth and early twentieth century America. By enabling long-distance transportation of
perishable goods, ice bridged the urban and the rural West, as well as connecting the West with
the East. Additionally, even more ice was used by domestic consumers in household iceboxes,
offering control over the environment at a personal scale as well as an industrial one. To adapt

6
Richard White’s statement of purpose from the introduction of The Organic Machine, this
project attempts to find the natural in the refrigerator and the unnatural in the ice.
8

In his book Refrigeration Nation, Jonathan Rees, one of the few twenty-first century
historians of ice and refrigeration, applies the modern refrigeration industry concept of the “cold
chain” to the study of the cold-control technologies of the past.
9
Cold chains, according to Rees,
“consist of the linked refrigeration technologies needed to preserve and transport perishable food
from its point of production to its point of consumption.”
10
For instance, a possible cold chain
circa 1850 could connect a frozen Boston pond, the nearby icehouse, the hold of a ship packed
with sawdust, a dockside icehouse in San Francisco, and finally the ice box of a San Francisco
ice cream saloon. Like a chain of custody in a criminal investigation, successful maintenance of
a cold chain requires dedicated observation and care as an object passes through many hands and
across long spans of time or distance. Severing the chain at any point will degrade or destroy the
perishable products. Handlers all along the chain must act with the future in mind, even when the
next steps might be uncertain or unknown. It is important to note that the cold chain as used by
Rees is not concerned with energy transfer, but rather with infrastructure. Unlike Elliott West or
Richard White’s writing on energy systems, the cold chain concept does not include discussions
of the energy or the labor—human, mechanical, or animal—involved in producing and
maintaining cold.
11

As with any concept read backwards onto the past, the cold chain has both benefits and
pitfalls for historical analysis. On the positive side, the cold chain is an approachable framework

8
Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), xi.
9
Rees, Refrigeration Nation. See especially the introduction and chapters 1 and 8.
10
Rees, 3.
11
See Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1998); White, The Organic Machine.

7
for tracing the typically convoluted journeys of individual items on their way to the consumer. It
emphasizes continuity across space and time. Steps along the chain are concrete and can each be
examined in turn. On the negative side, however, the cold chain can misrepresent goods as
moving along fixed, narrow paths, with one point leading uniformly into the next. Although
potentially composed of many links, a chain shows only one possible route of many.
Rees refers to cold chains as “a kind of food chain,” and this comparison offers a solution
to the problem.
12
Just as food chains when linked together form a food web, showing the many
potential ways energy might flow through an ecological system, I propose taking a step back to
see cold chains as constituent parts of a larger “cold web.” Instead of a cold chain showing the
specific path of a single item, a cold web illustrates the branching, breaking, and reconnecting
paths that refrigerated goods and ice itself follow. Where a cold chain prioritizes continuity, the
cold web traces contingencies. Seeing where cakes of ice, cartons of ice cream, or frozen sides of
beef could have gone is as illuminating as following where they did. To revisit the previous
example of a cold chain, every point, from the frozen pond to the California saloon, is an anchor
for possible alternative chains. Multiple companies serving various markets harvested ice from
the same New England ponds, meaning one block of ice might travel to California while another
went to New Orleans or even to India. Similarly, ice that arrived in San Francisco Bay might
have been unloaded to supply the city or may have continued up to Sacramento and further
inland from there. By weaving cold chains into cold webs, the environmental and commercial
ties between Boston, India, and the boomtowns of the California gold fields come into focus.

12
Rees, Refrigeration Nation, 3.

8
Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1 begins, as many stories of early Anglo-American California do, in Boston.
From its origins in the early nineteenth century, the natural ice industry of New England had
grown to a global trade under the leadership of Frederic Tudor, but the great “Ice King” never
attempted to expand his domain to the Pacific Coast. When other merchants shipped ice from
Massachusetts for sale in California in 1850, they found an eager and bottomless market, despite
the high prices they charged. Soon, the oceanic trade routes through which ice traveled stretched
not just between Boston and California, but to Russian Alaska as Californians sought a closer,
cheaper source of “congealed cold.” Chapter 1 argues that the cold drinks and ice cream that the
ice trade made possible became cultural signifiers in the rapidly-growing cities of California. Ice
cream saloons in particular served as markers of refinement and spaces where women could
comfortably socialize—proof of “civilization” amid the heavily male boom towns.
Chapter 2 focuses on the development of California’s homegrown ice trade, circa 1867-
1886. The construction of the transcontinental railroad over the Sierra Nevada made the ponds
and lakes of the bitterly cold summit accessible by rail for the first time. This region, centered on
the logging town of Truckee, became the home of the first commercial ice harvesting operation
on the West Coast. This chapter takes a detailed look at natural ice harvesting as an industry and
explores the intertwining of environment, labor, and race in the Sierra Nevada. It argues that the
commodification of the landscape and the expulsion of Chinese laborers from the Truckee Basin
in 1885-1886 were two components of a larger project to remake California into a space suitable
for white, capitalist modernity.
Chapter 3 returns to the cities to tell multiple interconnected stories illustrating the
establishment of “refrigerated spaces”—spaces purpose-built to remain cold for long periods of

9
time—throughout the urban West. Urban cold control relied heavily on the adoption and
refinement of artificial ice machines which, although initially extremely expensive, allowed city-
dwellers to produce ice at their places of business rather than moving it long distances from the
mountains. Chapter 3 argues that the new wider availability of ice helped to change it from a
commodity to a utility—something that was both expected as a part of everyday life and could
then be applied in innovative new ways.
Chapter 4 extends the cold web beyond cities into the Western hinterlands to see how
growers, vendors, and shippers created a continent-spanning system of refrigerated spaces in
order to bring the West’s produce to distant Eastern markets. Through two case studies—the
establishment of an ice factory and cold storage facility in Yakima, Washington and the founding
of the Pacific Fruit Express—chapter 4 argues that advances in refrigeration during the first third
of the twentieth century constituted the first major step in creating a single American market
unbounded by season or geography.
Chapter 5 considers ice and refrigeration on a much more intimate scale than previous
chapters, focusing on home ice delivery and family refrigerators. This chapter reconstructs the
lost figure of the iceman, once the subject of jokes, songs, and films, but now a blank space in
American cultural memory. It argues that the kitchen icebox was a site of tension and anxiety
because it was the place where two opposing spheres of gendered labor overlapped: the rough,
physical, and masculine iceman and the nurturing, protective, and feminine homemaker.
Finally, the Epilogue describes the rise of electric refrigeration in the 1930s and 1940s
and the end of the “ice age.” It argues that examination of the Western ice industry should
prompt the imagining of a new “refrigerated West.”

10
Chapter 1
Cold Cargo: The Natural Ice Trade in the Pacific West

Migration from the United States and abroad brought a frenzy of growth and
development to Gold Rush-era California. Existing towns blossomed into cities and new
settlements sprang up by the dozens. By 1850, the population of San Francisco had reached
25,000 souls and the city was beginning to look more like the Eastern cities most of its residents
had left behind. Brian Roberts argues in American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and
Middle-Class Culture that Forty-Niners, many of them from white-collar backgrounds, did not
shed their middle-class ideals and upbringings when they traded pens and ledgers for shovels and
pans. Those who did rebel once they set foot in rough-hewn California did so only temporarily
before returning to the standards of respectability they had known back home.
13
While Roberts is
primarily concerned with the ideologies and behaviors of the nineteenth-century middle class as
seen in California, I argue that the Anglo-Americans who swarmed California in the late 1840s
and 1850s demonstrated their allegiance to the middle-class lifestyle through their consumer
desires and habits as well. In particular, they embraced ice as a symbol of middle-class
refinement and the marker of a settlement on the rise. If any Western outpost was to be counted
among the great cities of the nation, these boosters thought, it would first have to secure a supply
of ice, regardless of the difficulty and expense. The population boom, however, strained
California’s markets across the board. Increasing demand often far exceeded the supply even for
common goods, much less expensive imports like ice, transforming daily necessities into
luxuries as vendors struggled to keep up. Many products had to be shipped from Oregon farms or
eastern factories and these journeys slowed supply lines and increased prices. Gold-seekers may

13
Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000), 15.

11
have come to California hoping to strike it rich, but they quickly found that maintaining an
Eastern standard of living in the newly minted state was going to be an expensive challenge.
In March 1850, the Daily Alta California lauded the arrival of two hallmarks of urban
living: mailboxes and the milkman.
14
Daily mail and milk delivery were, according to this
journalist, positive steps in the march of improvement, but there was more work to be done. With
these necessities secured, the column continued, what the growing city needed next was ice.
Despite the obvious utility of ice in the dairy business and the columnist’s excitement over the
prospect of fresh milk in the city, he never addressed the connection between the two products.
Instead, the author highlighted the various frozen concoctions San Franciscans could mix up with
a supply of ice: “sherry cobblers, mint juleps, [and] fruit ices,” treats that he hoped would delight
the local ladies. A cold refreshment, he figured, would be sure to make a suitor stand out in a
town as starved for women as San Francisco. The women of the city, however, had other ideas
and looked forward to the opening of ice cream saloons where they could socialize with one
another—outside the company of men. These varied imaginings across gender lines, in addition
to being amusing and informative in their own right, demonstrate just how influential was the
very prospect of ice in the West: even before ice arrived in California, residents imagined how it
would reshape social relationships.
As spring turned to summer and the weather warmed, the desire for ice grew, particularly
in the inland cities that did not enjoy San Francisco’s cooler—and sometimes downright chilly—
weather.
15
Easterners, particularly those from New England, were accustomed to easy access to
ice even during the summer months, and the lack of ice in California’s cities was sorely felt.

14
“The New Milky Way,” Daily Alta California, March 2, 1850.
15
San Francisco’s location on the Pacific creates one of the most mild and stable microclimates in the United States.
Average summer high temperatures reach only about 70°F, compared to average highs over 90°F in Sacramento.
Despite the relatively small distance between them, the two cities were and are climatologically worlds apart.

12
Some Sacramento entrepreneurs experimented with hauling wagonloads of snow down to the
city from the Sierra Nevada. While the sight of fresh snow in the middle of July was certainly
exciting, the product had its drawbacks as well. By the time snow-ice, as it was called, made it to
market—a journey of a few days—it was no longer white and fluffy, but hard and hail-like, the
result of melting and refreezing. Although this snow-ice did not keep for very long, it worked
well enough for drinks like juleps and punches, and thus became a valuable commodity for
saloons and hotels. One hotel proprietor, a Mister Keith of the Empire in San Francisco,
purchased two thousand pounds of the “inestimable luxury” for the lofty sum of a dollar per
pound—roughly equivalent to a $60,000 investment today.
16
Undoubtedly, Keith and others like
him passed the expense on to their customers, but that did not lower demand. The limited
amounts of snow-ice that made its way to California’s cities consistently sold out in the summer
of 1850. The pleasure of a cold drink and the social capital that accompanied being seen
enjoying one was evidently worth the price. Small mining towns nearer the mountains enjoyed a
more reliable supply of Sierra Nevada snow, and their citizens reaped the rewards. According to
the Sonora Herald, residents of Sonora, a foothill settlement in modern Tuolumne County,
enjoyed “a new article of luxury”—ice cream manufactured by Mexican migrants and sold on
street corners.
17
So jealous were the editors of the Daily Alta California, that they reprinted this
news under the headline “Please Stop,” writing, “We shall go out of town if the outsiders do not
let us alone with their marvelous stories.”
18

Although the citizens of California were quick to purchase mountain “snow-ice,” its
limitations and high cost meant it could only serve as a stopgap until something better arrived,

16
“Sacramento Intelligence – More Ice,” Daily Alta California, July 17, 1850.
17
“Please Stop,” Daily Alta California,” July 20, 1850.
18
“Please Stop,” Daily Alta California,” July 20, 1850.

13
and these consumers had something very specific in mind. In Sacramento, hotel owner John S.
Fowler hosted a grand ball to celebrate the opening of the city’s new theater, a triumph of culture
in “the wilds of California.”
19
Even before the party was held, the Sacramento Transcript assured
readers the fare was to be “as sumptuous as the ample resources of our country will permit” and
the ball would “compare favorably with any east of the Mountains.” The event, the paper
continued, would fall short of eastern fetes in only one respect, namely that “no ice has yet been
shipped from Wenham Lake and Fresh Pond to Sacramento City,” meaning that the party’s
tables would lack the elaborate ices and jellies that “always [seem] such a pity to cut into with a
spoon.”
20
Wenham Lake and Fresh Pond are small bodies of water outside Boston, some four
thousand miles away from Sacramento, yet the newspaper article treated them as if they were
household names, despite no ice—from Massachusetts or otherwise—yet coming to California’s
markets. In fact, by 1850 “Wenham Lake” and “Fresh Pond” had become synonymous with
“ice” around the world thanks to the shipments made to British India by Frederic Tudor, the Ice
King of Boston. Tudor himself had no interest in California. Not a single block of his ice
departed Boston for the Pacific Coast. But Tudor only held rights to portions of Wenham Lake
and Fresh Pond. His competitors in the ice trade had as much claim to the names as he did, and
they readily took advantage of the brand recognition Tudor had risked so much to create.
Outside the Ice King’s domain, the Western market stood open for the taking. Even as urban
Californians spent the summer of 1850 lamenting the lack of quality ice, the genuine article was
on its way.
Two ships, the Merchantman and the Zingari, departed Boston harbor in winter, each
carrying over a hundred tons of ice cut from exactly the ponds lauded in the California papers.

19
“Grand Soiree,” Sacramento Transcript, April 23, 1850.
20
“Grand Soiree,” Sacramento Transcript, April 23, 1850.

14
Despite the long head start, neither ship arrived in California until the late summer.
Merchantman appeared first on July 25, ending a two-hundred-day voyage.
21
While passengers
and most cargo could be unloaded and moved across the isthmus of Panama to meet a second
ship waiting in the Pacific, carting blocks of ice through the rainforest was not an attractive or
cost-effective option. Therefore, the Merchantman and the ice ships that followed had to make
the full circuit around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. This voyage varied in length based
on the time of year and the weather, but generally took between four and six months. By the time
the vessel reached San Francisco, perhaps as much as a third of its cargo had melted away.
Rather than stay in San Francisco and unload its cargo, however, the Merchantman continued up
the Sacramento River, to the predictable annoyance of San Franciscans who were forced to wait
another two weeks for their shipment to arrive.
Sacramento may not have had to wait any longer for ice, but it was faced with its own
problem. As Tudor discovered in the Caribbean, selling ice successfully required planning and
the creation of infrastructure. But Florence Mahony, the merchant to whom the Merchantman’s
cargo was consigned, was no iceman. He imported various commodities from the States and ice
was only one of his speculations. In fact, it was not even the only cargo aboard the ship as it
approached Sacramento that summer, sharing space in the hold with large quantities of lumber
and coal.
22
Mahony had either not anticipated the need for an icehouse or was unwilling to make
the investment on what might be a single, unprofitable shipment. In any case, the Merchantman,
laden with 177 tons of Wenham Lake ice, could not unload its cargo for sale without an icehouse
to store it in, and Sacramento had none. Frantic, Mahony made an appeal to the local leadership,
hoping to find a solution in time. Fortunately, he found a spokesman on the city council.

21
“Shipping Intelligence,” Daily Alta California, July 25, 1850.
22
“Importations,” Daily Alta California, July 25, 1850.

15
Alderman Tweed brought the issue before the body, explaining that the awaited cargo of ice
would run afoul of a city ordinance requiring ships to unload their goods within three days of
arrival. This, argued Tweed, would be an outright disaster because the ice “had wasted away
greatly already” and, if unloaded as required with no icehouse to receive it, “would be a total
loss.” A journey of many months and thousands of miles would end in failure on Sacramento’s
docks. He encouraged his fellow councilmen to suspend the ordinance in this case.
23

This launched a round of debate between the council’s aldermen. Alderman Pettit
inquired whether the ship could simply sit as a floating icehouse. Tweed answered that it could,
if moved to the proper mooring, but pointed out that then Mahony would be barred from selling
the ice from aboard his ship. Tweed then proposed that at the council’s next meeting, they draft
“an ordinance to meet the case,” fearing that “the owner of the ice might perhaps be ruined if the
[existing] ordinance were enforced.”
24
At this suggestion, Alderman McKenzie objected. There
was no time to waste, he asserted. The Merchantman was due imminently and, more importantly,
additional vessels laden with ice would follow. These ships, McKenzie feared, would avoid
Sacramento and discharge their goods in San Francisco if they were not allowed to sell. If
Sacramento wanted any ice that summer, or indeed ever, the council would have to come to a
solution and quickly. For McKenzie, ice was not only an enjoyable luxury. Ice was both pleasant
and cooling, but also “conducive to health” amid the heat of the California summer.
Furthermore, McKenzie cited the words of a local physician who had claimed snow ice from the
Sierra Nevada “would bring with it more disease than our city had ever previously known.”
Passing a revised city ordinance to allow the sale of imported lake ice was therefore an urgent

23
“Meeting of the City Council,” Sacramento Transcript, July 29, 1850.
24
“Meeting of the City Council,” Sacramento Transcript, July 29, 1850.

16
matter of public health as well as civic pride.
25
Why should Sacramentans suffer in the heat
unnecessarily? Why should San Francisco have what they did not?
Swayed by McKenzie, the council appointed Tweed to draft new regulations and adopted
them within two days, shortly following the Merchantman’s arrival.
26
The long-awaited
appearance of true lake ice in Sacramento was a matter of some excitement. The price of the
remaining snow ice plummeted from a dollar per pound to only twelve-and-a-half cents, not
nearly enough to remain a viable product.
27
With ice now in hand, wrote one resident,
Sacramento was quickly catching up with “New Orleans and New York and the other small
cities.”
28

The Sacramento Transcript’s report gives examples of two noteworthy aspects of the
early ice trade in the West: the emphasis on ice quality and regional market rivalries. According
to the Transcript, the ship, “so long expected by our citizens and such an object of ardent interest
to our councilmen” came loaded with “genuine cakes of ice, in fine condition, fresh from
Wenham Lake.”
29
No sooner had the Merchantman docked than a block of ice was on its way to
the newspaper office, presumably a gift of Mr. Mahony to encourage positive press. If this was
the case, then Mahony’s bribe was well-made. The article announcing his shipment proclaimed
the ice to be “cool, dripping, square, and clear as crystal.”
30
While this description may read as
unremarkable, each quality listed contrasts Mahoney’s Massachusetts lake ice with the Sierra

25
McKenzie neglects to give the physician’s name, only mentioning that he recently heard him speak, but fears
specifically regarding the safety of Sierra snow ice are not attested elsewhere. In fact, during the early ice fervor in
California, explicit discussions of ice purity were uncommon. As future chapters will discuss, concerns over the
healthfulness of ice became quite common in the following years, particularly as the market for ice grew more
competitive.
26
“Proceedings of the City Council,” Sacramento Transcript, July 31, 1850.
27
“Trading in Snow,” Sacramento Transcript, September 12, 1850.
28
“I Scream Every Evening,” Sacramento Transcript, July 23, 1850. The “I scream”/“ice cream” pun is an enduring
one.
29
“Arrival of Ice,” Sacramento Transcript, July 30, 1850.
30
“Arrival of Ice,” Sacramento Transcript, July 30, 1850.

17
Nevada snow ice seen in California’s markets so far that summer. Both types of ice were
necessarily cold, but solid lake ice was the more effective of the two as a chilling agent.
Lake ice was hard and dense, meaning it dripped slowly rather than simply melting away.
Shape was another marker of quality. Smooth faces without breakage or uneven cuts indicated
the care taken in cutting and throughout the long shipping process. Finally, clarity was perhaps
the most important aspect to potential buyers. The clarity of a piece of ice is affected by
numerous factors, including the speed at which the ice freezes and cycles of melting and
refreezing, but prior to methods of identifying contaminants invisible to the naked eye, clarity
was thought synonymous with purity. By all these metrics, the ice sitting aboard the
Merchantman was considered a treasure.
The appearance of ice in the city caused a commotion not just in Sacramento but in
nearby towns as well. Sacramento’s monopoly on ice, while brief, sparked envy among its
neighbors, a sentiment that the citizens of Sacramento, relishing in their prize, only stoked. The
editors of the Transcript, in the same article that described the high quality of the ice that had
arrived aboard the Merchantman, took a playful shot at the people of San Francisco, writing, “if
our San Franciscan friends wish to have something else than glass to rattle in their tumblers at
dinner, they had better give us a call.”
31
San Francisco’s Daily Alta California in turn, wrote that,
should you engage an inhabitant of Sacramento in conversation, they will inevitably disparage
San Francisco before praising their own city, citing its climate and beauty as well as its “iced
cobblers, juleps, ice creams, and so on, and then ask triumphantly – What do you live in such a
hole as San Francisco for when you can come here?”
32
“As for your sparkling, icy compounds,”
continued the article by way of rebuttal, “why the ‘imbibing’ of these too freely would take away

31
“Arrival of Ice,” Sacramento Transcript, July 30, 1850.
32
“Sacramento Gossip,” Daily Alta California, July 30, 1850.

18
our sense, which we an’t anxious to lose—besides, who wants ice where the fremometer [sic]
stands at 50. Go away with your juleps—don’t bother us.”
33

This show of disinterest and appeal to temperance proved to be only an act, however. The
arrival of ice aboard the Zingari two weeks later set off a frenzy in San Francisco, despite that
city’s milder climate. The Alta California of August 11 describes the scene: “Yesterday morning,
upon looking from our windows, we saw a nice, white covered wagon passing, upon the sides of
which were painted, in large block letters, those old familiar household words, ‘Boston Ice
Company.’ The cart passed in front of several of the public houses and was immediately
surrounded by a crowd of persons looking at and tasting of the melting crystal. A smile of
pleasure was upon every countenance, for the congealed compound seemed to bring back scenes
far away. The amount of cobblers [mixed drinks composed of wine, citrus juices, and sugar] and
juleps which would probably be consumed during the day at once became a subject of
algebraical importance.”
34
With ice finally available for purchase, one would have been hard
pressed to find someone in San Francisco who would dare to say, “Go away with your juleps.”
As the summer dragged on, other less fortunate cities made their displeasure known.
Under the headline “Sour Grapes,” the Transcript reprinted the complaint of the Stockton
Journal, which read, “Our contemporaries of the quiet little village of Sacramento City are
making a perfect humbug of themselves about the arrival of a schooner, from some out-of-the-
way place, with a cargo of this article [i.e. ice] on board. Keep ‘cool’ gentlemen, it’s only an
isolated luxury.”
35
For their part, the editors extended an invitation to visit and accompany them
for some refreshment but did not offer to send any of the prized commodity down to Stockton.

33
“Sacramento Gossip,” Daily Alta California, July 30, 1850.
34
“Ice! Ice!,” Daily Alta California, August 11, 1850.
35
“Sour Grapes,” Sacramento Transcript, August 12, 1850.

19
San Diego, too, felt left out of California’s next big thing. A correspondent for the Transcript
there attested that just the thought of ice was too tantalizing to ignore even among other luxuries,
writing, “Since the last steamer from ‘Friskey,’ we have been unable to enjoy ourselves in any
other way than by taking up the Transcript and reading of juleps, punches, and cobblers, made
cool by fresh arrivals of ice at your highly favored city… I am in vigorous health and the
enjoyment of such other temporal blessings—ice excepted—as are calculated to make one desire
a protracted residence on this interesting planet.”
36

The jabs exchanged between California’s newspapermen in the summer of 1850 are
clearly intended to be comedic, but they echo the very serious rivalries between the young state’s
growing population centers. The US-Mexico War and the ongoing Gold Rush had upset the
status quo in California and the steady stream of immigrants could boost a settlement to
prominence nearly overnight. At the same time, however, it was unclear which towns would
maintain their importance—or indeed, survive at all—when the tumult finally died down. In
order to preserve their relevance and regional power, California’s cities had to appeal to
newcomers not only as places to get rich, but as places to live and spend their earnings—
communities that could offer the higher standard of living that gold seekers envisioned for
themselves. This was something of a challenge in towns that had grown up quickly and
haphazardly and where life was decidedly rough. San Francisco, which had already endured
three major fires before its first shipment of ice made landfall, was, as J. S. Holliday described it,
“a place without homes,” devoted equally to business and to vice.
37
However, the saloons of San
Francisco, whatever their reputations, leapt at the opportunity to offer their customers iced

36
“From our Regular Correspondent at the South,” Sacramento Transcript, August 27, 1850.
37
J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed in: The California Gold Rush Experience, Red River Books ed. (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 301, 411.

20
drinks. Vice and refinement, it seems, were not contradictory terms in California. Consumers in
these cities saw ice not only as a metric of comparison between Western and Eastern life, but as
a mark of distinction for a Californian town that could set it apart from its neighbors. Ice could
not, on its own, suddenly make California’s cities respectable, but it was, at least so long as the
supply held out, an accessible luxury that reflected the society California could become.
The availability of ice changed the consumer landscape in Californian cities and it did so
drastically. As a commodity, ice did not exist in isolation. It was only of real use in conjunction
with other goods. To begin with, ice required a variety of equipment to be used effectively. The
250-pound blocks sent from Boston were far too large and unwieldy to be used by businesses or
in private homes. Ice tools like tongs, picks, and shavers were necessary purchases in order to
transform raw ice into a practical product, particularly for culinary applications. Accordingly, an
array of these items accompanied the ice packed aboard the Merchantman.
38
Even more
important than the ability to cut and shape ice, though, was a place to store the ice both prior to
and following the sale, as the Merchantman’s consigner Florence Mahony had learned. Unlike
Mahony, fortunately, Flint, Peabody, and Company—the San Francisco agents who arranged for
the Zingari delivery—anticipated this need. For their own use, they quickly set about
constructing a dockside icehouse. For their customers, along with the ice itself came 50
refrigerators, “single and double, of different sizes, and of the latest Boston manufacture.”
39

38
“Importations,” Daily Alta California, July 25, 1850.
39
Advertisement for Flint, Peabody, & Co., Daily Alta California, August 11, 1850. The term “refrigerator” may
seem anachronistic, but it has a longer history than is widely assumed. Those sold in the mid-nineteenth century
were, at their simplest, wooden boxes that could be filled with ice—either a small chunk cut from a larger block or
crushed ice—and perishable goods. Also known as iceboxes, these varied in size and construction. Over the second
half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, refrigerators became progressively more elaborate,
incorporating better insulation, metal or porcelain interiors, and spouts for drainage. Alongside the technical
improvements, refrigerators also underwent aesthetic changes, all of which will be considered in later chapters. As
terms, “icebox” and “refrigerator” coexisted for almost a century as names for these unpowered, ice-reliant cooling
chests. It was not until well into the reign of the electric refrigerator in the twentieth century that the distinction

21
Fully half of the original ad announcing the arrival of ice in the city was devoted to the virtues of
refrigerators, promising they would be “invaluable” not only for keeping ice, but for “meats,
vegetables, milk, butter, etc. in hot climates.”
40

This made for a key selling point even in the relatively mild climate of San Francisco
because these products were themselves extremely expensive in the 1850s. New arrivals to
California regularly complained about the high prices of basic foodstuffs and would often
provide lists in their letters as evidence to their families at home. Mary Jane Megquier, who had
accompanied her husband to San Francisco from their home in Maine, gave this report to her
daughter in June 1849: “Some kinds of provision are cheap as in the states such as beef pork
flour, but vegetables are enormously high, onions seven cents apiece pine apples sold for eight
dollars apiece, potatoes shilling per pound, butter dollar and a quarter per pound.”
41
According to
the letters of saloon and hotel owner M. D. S. Hyde, the situation had not improved even three
years later in the summer of 1852. There were still “but a very few grocery stores in the city” and
butter and fresh vegetables remained particularly expensive. If he’d possessed a thousand extra
dollars, Hyde wrote, he would invest it in potatoes.
42
Even if ice itself was not immediately
affordable for everyone, it could be used to help alleviate rising food expenses by reducing
waste, and the benefit would only grow as ice became less costly. This is the earliest occurrence
in the West of what became a recurring argument from ice purveyors over the following century:
ice saves more than it costs.

between an “icebox” as an unpowered piece of furniture and a “refrigerator” as its electric counterpart solidified. In
short, iceboxes were refrigerators before refrigerators were refrigerators.
40
Advertisement for Flint, Peabody, & Co., Daily Alta California, August 11, 1850.
41
Polly Welts Kaufman, ed., Apron Full of Gold: The Letters of Mary Jane Megquier from San Francisco, 1849-
1856, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 35.
42
M. D. S. Hyde letters to his brothers, 1852, July-November, BANC MSS 78/71 c, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley.

22
From a business perspective, ice and refrigerators were symbiotic products. If a consumer
wanted his or her ice to last more than a few hours, it was inevitable that they would purchase a
refrigerator as well. But the association also worked in reverse. Unlike contemporary
refrigerators that run indefinitely—presuming power is not interrupted—nineteenth-century
“icebox” refrigerators required a consistent supply of ice to continue functioning. Every
refrigerator sold, therefore, was the promise of reliable business for the ice dealer. That ongoing
market relationship, however, assumes a reliable supply of ice to sell, which was far from a
guarantee in 1850 and 1851. In any case, ice dealers sold not only ice to their customers, but also
the tools needed to handle and use it, while cultivating potentially long-term business
associations.
As ice and its related accoutrements made possible the transport and sale of products
previously rare or entirely unavailable in California, new businesses sprang up to supply the
public. Newspaper advertisements following the first importations of ice give a day-by-day
account of the new luxuries available for purchase. Although alcoholic drinks like punches and
juleps were the most common application for ice in Gold Rush California, the most exciting and
desirable was ice cream. While not unknown in California prior to the arrival of Boston ice, the
new supply made ice cream readily available in the cities, even to those who had not struck it
rich in the diggings. According to the Sacramento Transcript, vendors in that city sold ice cream
early in the summer for one dollar and fifty cents per glass, but by September the same serving
garnered only twenty-five cents.
43
The ice cream boom began as soon as the requisite ice arrived
to market. On the same day the Alta reported the Zingari and its cargo of ice had docked in the
harbor, a new ice cream saloon announced its opening.
44
According to proprietors Dart and Gale,

43
“Fruit,” Sacramento Transcript, September 16, 1850.
44
“Ice Creams and Cobblers,” Daily Alta California, August 11, 1850.

23
their establishment was to be a “polished and luxurious retreat from the dusty streets and din of
business,” serving “the genuine article—none of your snow crust preparations—none of your
milky, melting, questionable creams.”
45
As in the case of the description of Mahony’s cargo of
Boston ice some weeks earlier, the ice cream shop owners stressed the difference in quality
between their ice cream, made with freshly-arrived lake ice, and the slushy, sub-par desserts
made previously with the snow ice that had been the city’s only option earlier in the summer.
The implicit argument is simple: better quality ice begets better quality ice cream.
Like the ice with which it was made, ice cream held symbolic importance in the early
years of American rule in California. Where iced drinks were thought of as a sign of refinement,
ice cream was all the more luxurious, owing to its sweet richness and the labor involved in
creating it.
46
Additionally, some considered ice cream to have medicinal purposes. Nineteenth-
century Americans were largely skeptical of drinking ice-cold water, but other iced drinks or
frozen foods were thought healthful, particularly in warm climates. During one particularly warm
spell, Mr. Dart’s ice cream saloons in San Francisco and Sacramento were “sharply beset for the
article,” which “is said to be a sure cure for the rheumatism, cholic, and hydrophobia, and is not
bad to take.”
47

45
“Ice Creams and Cobblers,” Daily Alta California, August 11, 1850.
46
So-called “Philadelphia-style” ice cream, popularized by the Parkinson family confectionary shop in that city, set
the standard for ice cream in the nineteenth century United States and appears as a descriptor in advertisements even
as far away as California. True Philadelphia ice cream, as opposed to other recipes and styles, contained only cream,
sugar, and flavorings, eschewing milk, oil, eggs, and thickeners like gelatin. These additives covered deficiencies in
taste and texture. To leave them out indicated pride and confidence in the product. Making ice cream required a
great deal of time and labor. Crushing a block of ice into small pieces in which to nestle the ice cream pot was itself
an arduous task. After the confectioner had pulverized the ice and prepared the ice cream base, the technique varied
depending on the technology available. In the simplest version, the ice cream pot was left to sit in a mixture of ice
and salt. Its contents would be stirred occasionally and returned to the icy slurry to continue to harden. Alternatively,
the mid-nineteenth century saw the invention of a number of crank-driven ice cream freezers, which accelerated the
freezing process at the cost of more intensive labor. Both techniques introduce air into the ice cream base and
distribute ice crystals throughout, without letting them grow too large. See Jeri Quinzio, Of Sugar and Snow: A
History of Ice Cream Making.
47
“Clear Skies and Warm,” Daily Alta California, September 18, 1850; “Cool,” Sacramento Transcript, September
21, 1850.

24
Ice cream represented the maturation of California’s markets. Merely six months since
the article in the Alta celebrating the inauguration of local milk delivery and dreaming of the
importation of ice, both San Francisco and Sacramento had ample supplies of the fresh milk,
cream, eggs, and ice needed to make ice cream. Flavorings could come from as close as
California’s growing farms or from distant ports. One Sacramento pharmacist advertised in the
Sacramento Daily Union, “Fresh Vanilla Beans, for Ice Cream, continually on hand,” most likely
sourced from Mexico.
48
Only a cosmopolitan city with resources to spare could offer its citizens
ice cream on a daily basis. As Wendy Woloson describes it in Refined Tastes: Sugar,
Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America, consistent manufacturing
methods and falling prices “democratized” ice cream in the 1840s.
49
But this was in the
urbanized Atlantic states. In California, ice cream regained some of its lost allure amid
inconsistent supply and inflated frontier prices. What was available for everyone to enjoy in the
East was, at least for the 1850s, restricted to a slightly higher class in the West.
Indeed, such was ice cream’s popularity that multiple ice cream “saloons” opened in each
of the major cities. By the summer of 1851, three such establishments—the Fountain of Roses,
Mrs. Josephine’s, and Miss Griffith’s—were serving ice cream on the same street in
Sacramento.
50
The Union’s description of the Fountain of Roses encapsulates well the allure of
the ice cream saloon in Gold Rush California. “Among the many improvements that bespeak the
rapid advancement of our city,” it begins, “may be most justly regarded the magnificent Ice
Cream Saloon of Messrs. Little & Naegle.”
51
In this case, the “advancement of our city” was

48
Advertisement for J. L. Polhemus, Sacramento Daily Union, April 2, 1851.
49
Wendy A. Woloson, Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 71.
50
“Ice Cream Saloons,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 24, 1851.
51
“Ice Cream Saloon,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 11, 1851.

25
measured in comparison to the “Atlantic cities,” in which few establishments surpass the
Sacramento eatery in “elegance of furniture and variety of delicacies.” The piece goes on to
praise the Fountain’s décor and offerings and marvels that such a place “can be got up in a two
year old city.” In other words, the ice cream saloon appeared incongruous with its surroundings,
more like what might be found in an established Eastern city than a young town on the California
frontier.
Was this breathless description a marketer’s exaggeration? Almost certainly. One can
safely assume that the ice cream parlors of the East did not serve so rough a clientele, nor did
they accept raw gold dust as payment for their desserts. But regardless of any embellishment,
this account illustrates what Californians wanted from their communities: elegance and luxury
that could compete with, and perhaps even surpass, the urban centers “back in the States.” For
Sacramento to boast of such an establishment after only two years spoke of the city’s great
promise. As Barbara Berglund argues in Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in
the Urban West, 1846-1906, spaces like these could serve as symbols of either “urbane
civilization or frontier barbarism,” and therefore were taken as barometers for the advancement
of the city as a whole.
52
Ice cream saloons, with their elevated décor, luxurious offerings, and
generally more subdued and refined atmosphere, contributed to a city’s perception of civility.
Drinking halls were undoubtedly more numerous, but ice cream saloons stood out to both
visitors and residents alike as evidence of a rapidly maturing California.
The opening of new ice cream saloons was especially anticipated among Californian
women, who were barred from participating in the masculine social life centered around the
state’s many drinking establishments. The extreme gender imbalance between men and women,

52
Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 2.

26
over ten to one according to the state census of 1850, was felt even more keenly in shared
cultural spaces like saloons.
53
Those arriving from the East worried women would be “polluted
by the pervasive atmosphere of sin and maleness” exemplified by the saloons and gambling dens
that dominated California’s streets.
54
The men of the young state knew that no respectable—that
is, white and middle class—woman would spend her time in a saloon, so where were they to
conduct their wooing when the long-awaited ladies appeared? Ice cream provided an answer and
an opportunity.
55
In addition to promoting their businesses as luxurious and pleasant for all
guests, owners of ice cream saloons took pains to communicate the suitability of their facilities
for female customers. Dart, Gale, & Co., while advertising their move to a new location on San
Francisco’s Commercial Street, pronounced that their saloon was “fitted up for ladies as well as
gentlemen, with a suite of rooms on the second floor and an entrance separate from the main
saloon.”
56
Beyond luxury and comfort, the saloon offered female patrons a measure of privacy,
spaces where they could talk and enjoy a dessert outside the company of men, coming and going
as they wished. Saloons, as safe spaces for women to socialize, became much-desired markers of
civility for California residents. Ice made possible the creation of environments considered
appropriate for women within male-dominated California.
But this is not to say that ice cream saloons were always strictly segregated by gender.
They could also serve as socially acceptable locations for men and women to mingle, as opposed
to seedy bars and taverns. Megquier found the nearby ice cream saloon enchanting, if the
company less so. In an April 1853 letter to her children, she wrote, “We have near us a splendid

53
Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000), 226.
54
Roberts, 227.
55
Elisabeth Margo, Taming the Forty-Niner (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1955), 162.
56
Dart, Gale & Co. advertisement, Daily Alta California, November 4, 1850.

27
ice cream saloon which surpasses any thing I have seen in the states, very large windows with
magnificent buff silk damask curtains… two large rooms are connected by an arch hung with the
same material, marble tables, floors and counters and as light as day at all hours of the night. The
homeliest man in the city treated me to an ice cream there a few nights since at one dollar a
glass.”
57

San Francisco confectioner M. L. Winn, more than any of his contemporaries, committed
to marketing his shops as welcoming to women and, secondarily, their male companions. Winn
operated both the original “Fountain Head” Saloon in San Francisco as well as a branch location.
In the Nevada Journal, Winn advertised his business as “Winn’s Branch Confectionery Ice
Cream and Ladies Refreshments Saloons.”
58
Like other business owners, Winn touted the luxury
to be had in his store, calling it “the only fashionable resort for Ladies and Gentlemen in the
State,” but he also distinguished his restaurant by tying it directly to the cause of temperance.
Winn recognized the increasingly common view among nineteenth-century American women
that drinking and the culture that accompanied it were not only boorish, but a moral rot. Winn’s
advertisement continued, “Hundreds of Ladies, we are happy to say, are among the number [of
the saloon’s patrons]; and if they—'the Ladies’—will hereafter patronize no house where
intoxicating drinks are sold, a social reform will be brought about in this State, in five years, that
will be felt throughout the heathen as well as the civilized world.”
59
In only a few column inches,
Winn crafted a multifaceted argument in favor of his business. Winn offered refreshing treats, a
refined, women-friendly environment in which to enjoy them, and a steppingstone to a better
California not through luxury, but through social reform. In closing, Winn pledged to continue

57
Kaufman, Apron Full of Gold, 121.
58
Winn’s Confectionery advertisement, Nevada Journal, September 30, 1853.
59
Winn’s Confectionery advertisement, Nevada Journal, September 30, 1853.

28
speaking out for the cause, holding high “the Flag of Temperance,” and striving to “rescue all
that have fallen from the platform of rectitude.”
60
At M. L. Winn’s Fountain Head, ice cream
represented a different kind of advancement for California, less from deprivation to luxury—
although the restaurant was luxurious—but from frontier vice to civilized virtue.
What’s more, Winn’s commitments to service and morality paid off. The Annals of San
Francisco, published 1855, describes the Fountain Head as “celebrated for its gentility and
cleanliness.”
61
Customers flocked to both locations, where Winn served up to 1500 glasses of ice
cream per day. In order to create and store that much ice cream, the restaurant’s ice bill regularly
ran up to $2000 per month.
62
Winn’s business is evidence that refinement and moral restraint
could prove financially successful, even on the rough streets of California. Ice cream was as
much an incentive to gather as alcohol, but with very different connotations. The Sacramento
Daily Union summed up the mood of the summer this way, announcing the grand Fourth of July
celebration: “Ice Cream and Picnics under the Sierra Nevada! Who would have believed, three
years since, that California cream and mountain ice would ever come in contact; or that the
sturdy backwoodsman of Maine and the planter of Mississippi would ever sit down together
under the same grove of oaks, in the wilds of the Pacific woods, surrounded by all the comforts
and luxuries of an Eastern home?”
63
Ice cream was a delicious manifestation of American luxury
and California’s advancement, the perfect treat to celebrate the Fourth on the Pacific Coast. A
steady and affordable supply of ice helped legitimize California urban centers as American cities
worthy of consideration by their eastern peers.

60
Winn’s Confectionery advertisement, Nevada Journal, September 30, 1853.
61
Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (New York: D. Appleton & Co.,
1855), 642.
62
Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, 643–44.
63
“From Nevada City,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 13, 1851.

29
During the first two summers of ice in California, the popularity of “congealed cold” in the
state was clear, but its future was not. Was ice to be a seasonal enjoyment, imported from the
East only in the hot summer months, or a common staple of Western life? The language
Californians used to describe their desires for ice and its related products demonstrate conflicted
feelings and changing expectations. Both individuals’ lifestyles and the marketplace adapted
quickly to the introduction of ice, so the periods when it vanished took their toll. Of all of the
words used to describe ice in the California papers of the 1850s, the most common was “luxury,”
but “necessity” was close behind. These two characterizations of ice as a product seem
contradictory. A “necessary luxury” is an oxymoron. But the phrase encapsulates the noteworthy
status ice was already beginning to occupy in the minds of Western consumers.
One episode recounted in the Daily Alta California from June 1851 is illustrative. The author
begins by stating plainly the importance of ice in the city of San Francisco, writing, “We have
been chuckling for the past year over the possession of this great luxury and have become so
accustomed to using it as to regard it as a necessary article of consumption. It is not all pleasant
then to know that the supply has given out, or rather been diverted from this market.”
64
In an
echo of the first ice shipment the year prior, San Francisco’s supply of ice had been “diverted”
up the river to Sacramento, where it would presumably, as the Alta author speculates, fetch a
higher price. This, he admits is “fair business transaction” but “a very great inconvenience” to
the people of San Francisco who would be left wanting until the next shipment arrived days, or
possibly weeks, later.
The accusation that San Francisco had been purposefully deprived of ice in order to make a
greater profit did not sit well with Flint, Peabody & Co., the dealers supplying the city. They

64
“Ice,” Daily Alta California, June 11, 1851.

30
dashed off a response to the Alta California which appeared in print on June 13. “We were
pleased to notice in your paper of yesterday,” write the merchants, “that the article of ice has
become an indispensable luxury here. One year since when we first introduced it here, we were
condemned instead of blessed; we are glad to see that it is now better appreciated.”
65
This latter
comment rings slightly odd, given the excitement and swift business that surrounded the
importation of ice the previous year. If anything, the firm’s investors, rather than Californian
consumers, were the ones who may have balked at shipping ice to California, but the reception
was swift and the gamble quickly paid off. Perhaps these merchants were merely playing up their
victimhood in the matter. In any case, they continue with a rebuttal: “Before our barque left here
for Sacramento city, we supplied the consumers of ice with what they judged enough to last them
till the barque arrived up and commenced sending down the regular supply for this city. There
was no lack of ice here yesterday and will not be in future. Please accept the renewal of your
daily supply and be kind enough to recall the reproof contained in yesterday’s paper.”
With that, the matter disappeared from the newspaper pages. But who was in the wrong? Did
the writer for the Daily Alta California, anxious to secure some of the “necessary article” for
himself, simply speak too soon when he pronounced that “not a pound of ice” could be found in
the city?
66
Or did the dealers of Flint, Peabody & Co. actually send San Francisco’s share of the
ice up the river only to backpedal when confronted about their business practices? While they
were not the only ice dealers in San Francisco, Flint, Peabody & Co. were among the most
established, having sold the first cargo of ice to the city in August 1850. Due to the
unpredictability of shipments, it is entirely possible that the firm actually did control all of the ice
in the city at a given time and were in the midst of some market manipulation through contrived

65
“Cooling Announcement,” Daily Alta California, June 13, 1851.
66
“Ice,” Daily Alta California, June 11, 1851.

31
scarcity; cut off San Francisco’s supply of ice, then take advantage of the increased demand.
What exactly happened is impossible to say, but the emotions surrounding the incident speak for
themselves. Ice was something to get worked up about.
In the following month of July 1851, the paper spoke even more strongly about the
importance of ice in the city. For the citizens of California, “to be suddenly deprived of the
compound is as disagreeable and vexatious as it is for an infant to be deprived of the
nourishment of its mother’s breast.”
67
California consumers were not quite so helpless as
newborns, but with rising temperatures, rising ice prices, and diminishing supply, one can
understand why they may have felt that way. Once more, ice—or rather its absence—invited
hyperbole. Meanwhile, if the lack of ice was “vexatious” in mild San Francisco, it was
exasperating in the much warmer Sacramento, where mid-summer temperatures topped 100°.
The same week, the Sacramento Daily Union declared the lack of ice there “a public calamity.”
68

Both the San Francisco and Sacramento papers cited medical reasons for the great necessity of
ice in the California climate—ironically a point of agreement between two squabbling cities with
very different climates. In the words of the San Francisco journalist, “In this very highly
seasoned weather it is not at all to be wondered at that the blood gets heated, and excitement of
some sort or other prevails. Ice, ice is the great antidote, and ice the people must have.”
69
The
Sacramento correspondent concurred, pleading the case of the “invalid who is restlessly tossing
upon his couch,” but also widened the scope of his complaint. It was not only the ill who would
suffer without a ready supply of ice during the summer. “The devotees at the shrine of Bacchus”
and “the housekeeper who is dependent upon the waters of the American” will likewise “lament

67
“Ice,” Daily Alta California, July 31, 1851.
68
“A Public Calamity,” Sacramento Daily Union, July 25, 1851.
69
“Ice,” Daily Alta California, July 31, 1851.

32
the loss of that luxury which has now become necessary to a summer’s existence.”
70
The
desire—or rather, need—for ice, according to this writer, cut across the full spectrum of
California society. If the reader could not muster any sympathy for the cooling needs of the
recreational drinker, the author brought forth the more pitiable cases of the ill and the women
struggling to “civilize” California. Ice brought relief, enjoyment, and increasingly, a sense of
refinement to California consumers. What had been a curiosity and a treat had, in less than a
year, become an absolute necessity. Its enthusiastic reception alleviated any concerns over
whether importing ice to California was a worthwhile endeavor, but the hemisphere-spanning
supply chain had yet to catch up. At least in the short term, ice remained a fickle luxury.
With such high demand for ice in Californian cities, interruptions in supply were both
unpopular and common. By examining advertisements for ice, ice-related products, and shipping
reports, we can come to a rough idea of when ice was and was not available. Ice sold well in San
Francisco following the first importation, lasting through August into September 1850, but
follow-up shipments were slow to come. The initial shipment was a gamble, so the venture’s
success needed to be conveyed to Boston and a new ship dispatched, all of which took time.
Shipments increased in frequency through 1851, but as described above, interruptions and
shortages still occurred. Late in the summer of 1851, as the temperature topped 102° in the city
of Sacramento, saloons “were besieged by crowds until the last pound had disappeared. The run
was greater than any made upon a doubtful banking establishment in the Eastern States.”
71

In these uncertain times, and in contrast to later years, ice merchants’ advertisements often
focused on questions of supply rather than quality. Dealers bragged about the amount of ice
newly arrived or stored in their houses and promised a single price throughout the year or the

70
“A Public Calamity,” Sacramento Daily Union, July 25, 1851.
71
“The Weather,” Sacramento Daily Union, August 1, 1851.

33
season. Some merchants even came to port armed with tall tales to further increase their
notoriety. Mahoney, the businessman responsible for Sacramento’s first cargo of ice, built on his
success in the ice business, growing to serve both Sacramento and San Francisco. A year after
his initial gamble, Mahoney did business under two new titles, styling himself “Colonel Florence
Mahoney, Ice King of California,” a transparent allusion to Frederic Tudor, who was still alive
and active in the ice industry.
72
(Fortunately for Mahoney, their two kingdoms did not overlap.
Tudor, as ever, remained focused on the East.) In September 1851, Mahoney also expanded a
routine advertisement announcing the arrival of a new ice shipment with a story of danger on the
high seas. The Barrington, nearly at the end of its six-month journey from Boston, had been
caught in a “severe gale of wind,” forcing the captain to dispose of some cargo in order to right
the ship. Rather than cast overboard any of the precious ice, however, the captain opted to
release “5000 feet of lumber.”
73
He safely piloted the ship and its 237 tons of ice into port.
74

When Mahoney graced the staff of the Daily Alta California with a “monster cake of ice,” the
newspaper men wrote, “We scarcely know how to feel grateful for such freezing civilities. The
Colonel is thanked.”
75
In a state where a shortage of ice could provoke hostilities, consumers
lauded the men who provided it as heroes.
As California’s appetite for ice grew, dealers struggled to keep up, especially in the busy
summer months. The frozen ponds of Massachusetts held more than enough ice to satisfy
Western customers, but the distance vessels had to travel to carry both ice and messages made
coordinating shipments difficult. Californian ports might go weeks without a delivery or have

72
“Important to Ice Consumers,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 26, 1851.
73
“Important to Ice Consumers,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 26, 1851.
74
“Importations,” Daily Alta California, September 25, 1851.
75
“Mountain of Ice,” Daily Alta California, September 29, 1851. The newspaper staff also compared the gift of ice
favorably with the Koh-i-Noor, at the time the world’s largest diamond, which was on display that year at the
Crystal Palace Exhibition in London.

34
multiple ice ships arrive at once. Additionally, although icemen had refined the techniques of
packing ice to resist melting over long journeys since Tudor’s earliest forays into the Caribbean,
ships nonetheless arrived on the Pacific Coast with far less ice than they had held when departing
New England. The detrimental effects of a six-month voyage could not be so easily overcome,
but what if the trip were shorter—months shorter?
Enter Doctor Samuel Merritt, formerly of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and therefore familiar
with the ice industry. Unconsciously following in the footsteps of Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth two
decades prior, Merritt was the first Californian businessman to look to the North Pacific for a
source of ice. In the winter of 1850, having seen the ice craze of that summer, Merritt hired a
ship and a crew, dispatching them to Puget Sound to load as much ice as possible and return.
After four months of sailing and scouting, the ship returned to port in San Francisco without a
single block of ice in its hold.
76
Merritt’s logic—and Wyeth’s for that matter—was solid, but his
calculations were off. Puget Sound and its adjacent waters did not get cold enough to reliably
freeze, even in the depths of winter. Subsequent ice-hunting expeditions would need to venture
farther north, beyond the borders of the Oregon Territory. Merritt’s endeavor was not totally in
vain, however. His crew had busied themselves cutting trees rather than ice. Merritt soon made
his fortune providing California with lumber from the Pacific Northwest and coal from Australia
and did not concern himself with the ice business again.
77

Fortunately for California consumers, others stepped in to resume the search for a sustainable
Pacific ice supply. The solution lay past both the Oregon Territory and even the British holdings
in the Northwest, along the frozen shores of what is today Alaska, but was in the 1850s Russian

76
Lewis Publishing Company, The Bay of San Francisco: The Metropolis of the Pacific Coast and Its Suburban
Cities: A History (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1892), 379–80.
77
Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1921), 337.

35
America. With the 1841 sale of Fort Ross in California, Russian America was the Russian
Empire’s last foothold on the continent. Its capital, called alternately Sitka or New Archangel,
was a frontier settlement in every sense. It lay far removed from both the imperial capital of
Saint Petersburg and the British and American outposts on the Pacific. The town’s economy
revolved around fish and furs, both harvested by Native Alaskan workers. The California Gold
Rush had already proved a boon for the Russians, providing a new trade partner—with a
seemingly infinite appetite for goods—on the eastern rim of the Pacific. Therefore, when San
Francisco capitalists interested in purchasing ice made contact with Captain Nikolay Rosenburg,
Chief Manager of the Russian-American Company and de facto Governor of Russian America,
they encountered no hostilities. Ice was, after all, both worthless and abundant in the Russian
colony, and increased traffic between Sitka and the United States only stood to benefit
Rosenburg and Russia.
78

Despite the friendly reception from the Russians, however, the Sitka ice trade got off to a
shaky and even deadly start. On August 2, 1851, the schooner Exact, under the command of
Captain Isaiah Folger, departed San Francisco bound for Oregon—or at least that’s what the
Daily Alta California reported.
79
In actuality, Captain Folger proceeded to Sitka, where he met
with Governor Rosenburg about establishing an ice company. Following that meeting,
unsatisfied with the opportunities available at Sitka, Folger announced he would “proceed to the
Northwest as far as Cross Straits [Cross Sound], and thence through the Russian Archipelago

78
Bancroft, History of Alaska, 587; E. L. Keithahn, “Alaska Ice, Inc.,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 36, no. 2
(April 1945): 121; Ted C. Hinckley, “Ice from ‘Seward’s Icebox,’” The Pacific Historian 11, no. 3 (Summer 1967):
30. Only a handful of historians have examined the ice trade between Sitka and San Francisco since Bancroft
included the topic in his 1886 book. Keithahn relies heavily on Bancroft and Hinckley, in turn, leans on both of his
predecessors. All three contextualize the Pacific ice trade within Alaskan history with an eye toward its eventual
1867 purchase by the United States. In this section, I endeavor to sketch a more robust picture of how the Alaska ice
industry functioned and its place in the Pacific World.
79
“Shipping Intelligence,” Daily Alta California, August 3, 1851.

36
[Alexander Archipelago]” in search of “a more convenient place for the shipping of ice,”
planning to return to Sitka after a month or so of exploring.
80
Rosenburg warned him against the
trip, particularly as the ship was unarmed, but Folger went on regardless. The Exact and all of
her crew were never seen again. San Francisco only learned what had happened when,
coincidentally, another Captain Folger—William, no relation mentioned—arrived in Sitka
months later on a similar scouting mission. Of the fate of the Exact, said Rosenburg, “there was
not the least doubt that she had been taken by Indians, or lost, or she would most certainly have
returned to Sitka.”
81
Isaiah Folger and his crew were the first men to lose their lives in the Pacific
ice trade but would not be the last.
The first successful shipment of ice from Sitka to San Francisco came courtesy of the
Pacific Ice Company in April 1852. Two-hundred and fifty tons of ice, as well as 800 pounds of
fresh halibut, arrived aboard the Backus after a return trip of only sixteen days.
82
This short
transit time—lightning fast compared to the usual six month voyage from Boston—is what made
the Alaska ice trade not only feasible, but revolutionary. Ships bound for Sitka could make a
round trip in a month and remained in the cool waters of the northern Pacific the entire time, as
opposed to the ships on the Boston route which spent months in the tropics. These better
shipping conditions meant less waste and better prices as well as increased market flexibility. For
the first time, California ice dealers could reasonably plan ahead for the needs of the coming
season or even adapt to changing demand within a relatively short window, particularly by the
standards of nineteenth-century maritime trade.

80
“Probable Loss of the Schooner Exact and Crew,” Daily Alta California, March 19, 1852.
81
“Probable Loss of the Schooner Exact and Crew,” Daily Alta California, March 19, 1852.
82
“Ice from the Russian Settlements,” Daily Alta California, April 12, 1852.

37
The Pacific Ice Company’s inaugural advertisement, credited to company president J. F.
Hutton, situated the new product, dubbed “Crystal Lake Ice,” within the California ice market,
which to that point had featured little competition. Hutton made two arguments in order to win
over existing Boston ice customers. First, like other ice dealers before him, he touted the ice’s
quality, encouraging community members to test it for themselves, as it was “[the company’s]
opinion it will be found equal if not superior to any from the States.”
83
(It is valuable here to
remember that “Alaska” was an unknown quantity to the average American of the 1850s. The
“Russian Settlements” from which this ice came were both foreign and distant. The “Crystal
Lake” branding helps to strip away this foreign quality by giving the product a name befitting a
Northeastern ice company.)
84
Second, Hutton made a populist appeal to California consumers.
According to the advertisement, because the company “[desires] to place this luxury within the
power of all to use it, the price will be considerably reduced.”
85
This was new ground in the
conversation about ice in California. As previously discussed, advertisements and editorials had
for two years stressed the value of ice, its importance across the population, and the frustration of
not being able to obtain it when desired, but had not yet directly addressed a class divide in who
had access to the “necessary luxury.” Partially, this is a result of available sources. The literate
and connected, especially those with a voice in the papers, held a great enthusiasm for ice and
appear to have indulged in it with little concern over cost. But, of course, only a fraction of those
who came to California in the Gold Rush years struck it rich. Hutton here, for the first time,
acknowledges that ice may have previously been out of reach for a certain segment of the

83
Pacific Ice Company advertisement, Daily Alta California, April 14, 1852.
84
In fact, the use of the word “Crystal” in ice company names was so common that there was almost certainly a
“Crystal Lake Ice Company” operating somewhere on the East Coast. But familiarity and comfort more than distinct
brand recognition were the object here.
85
Pacific Ice Company advertisement, Daily Alta California, April 14, 1852.

38
population and pledged to bring it within their grasp. Assuming all went according to plan, the
new source of ice would mean lower prices and an expanded market, a victory for the Pacific Ice
Company and for consumers.
Unfortunately for Hutton, his victory appears to have been short-lived. The shipping records
published in the California papers record only one shipment to the company from Sitka. Hutton’s
agents sold ice in both San Francisco and Sacramento, but the company stopped running
advertisements in the Daily Alta California and Sacramento Daily Union in May 1852. No
further reference to the company is found in either paper. Norman E. Saul, in his 1972 article
addressing the Sitka ice trade, describes this venture simply as “not financially successful,”
presumably because in seeking to make ice available to all, J. F. Hutton sold his product at an
unsustainably low price.
86

The Russians remained enthusiastic about the ice industry regardless of these setbacks,
however. Governor Rosenburg dispatched his agent, Peter Kostrominitov, to seek out a new set
of California investors who might consider picking up the trade. The men Kostominitov found
were a cross-section of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens, headed by Beverley C.
Sanders, banker and Collector of the Port of San Francisco.
87
The investors contracted with the
Russians for 250 tons of ice, purchased at $75 per ton, with the price dropping to $35 per ton and
the volume increasing fourfold by the end of 1852.
88
The new business, established under the

86
Norman E. Saul, “Beverley C. Sanders and the Expansion of American Trade with Russia, 1853-1855,” Maryland
Historical Magazine 67, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 157.
87
Howard I. Kushner, “‘Seward’s Folly’?: American Commerce in Russian America and the Alaska Purchase,”
California Historical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 7; Saul, “Beverley C. Sanders and the Expansion of
American Trade with Russia, 1853-1855,” 157–58. See Kushner for a detailed list of the stockholders.
88
Bancroft, History of Alaska, 587. Beginning with Bancroft and continuing through the twentieth-century literature
is a persistent confusion about the exact origins of the American Russian Commercial Company. Bancroft seems to
conflate the ARCC with the earlier Pacific Ice Company, headed by J. F. Hutton. On one hand, the name of the
business appears to have been rather fluid in the first years of operation, appearing as the ARCC, the “Russian and
North American Ice Company,” and, at least colloquially, the “Sitka Ice Company.” Some confusion is therefore

39
name “American Russian Commercial Company” had ample capital and its shareholders held
interest in various industries around California and beyond. The ARCC, in contrast to its
predecessors, was situated for success.
Russian America provided two invaluable resources for the ice industry—cold weather and
fresh water—but the land itself did not directly provide the ice the ARCC sought to export.
Rather, the company’s two harvesting sites at Sitka and Woody Island, near Kodiak,
demonstrated clearly the human intervention required to make use of this “natural” resource. To
begin, the company hired workers, primarily Native Alaskans, to dam streams and create ice
ponds.
89
Artificial ponds held key advantages over natural ones. If made carefully, artificial or
modified existing ponds could be shaped to aid later cutting. Most importantly, they were
positioned to minimize the distance ice needed to be hauled from the pond to the icehouse to the
docks.
90

Instead of a passive process in which nature transformed the pond on its own, winter kicked
off a season of careful management. Work began with the first big freeze. As soon as the ice
could hold a man’s weight, workmen made a daily ritual of sweeping the surface clean of snow.
If left in place, snow would freeze into an uneven crust that would need to be shaved off later.
Worse, as an effective insulator, a blanket of snow would help to hold in heat, slowing the

understandable. However, Bancroft, Kushner and Saul all include lists of the ARCC’s stockholders and officers, and
J. F. Hutton appears on none of them. Likewise, none of the men associated with the ARCC surface in the
documentation of the Pacific Ice Company. Therefore, I have elected to deal with the two as separate commercial
entities rather than different incarnations of a singular business. Various reports indicate that, at least prior to the
success of the ARCC, Governor Rosenburg negotiated with multiple parties regarding ice exports, potentially even
more than are documented. Given the available evidence, I conclude that the ARCC began business relations with
the Russians in mid-1852, with incorporation and full-steam operations beginning in 1853. From this point, the
ARCC appears to have an exclusive contract with the Russian government.
89
“The Acquisition of Alaska,” Daily Alta California, November 20, 1867.
90
“The Sitka Ice Trade,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 11, 1854. This article gives the distance as less than 500
yards from the banks of the pond to the ocean but does not specify which pond at which of the two locations.
Modern satellite imagery of Sitka and Woody Island shows the still extant ponds as very near to the shore.

40
growth of the ice below and delaying the eventual harvest. In snowy years, this could be the most
laborious part of the process, as it had to be performed by hand by a team of men after each
snowfall. Actual cutting could not begin until the ice reached at least a foot thick, but a depth of
sixteen or more inches was preferred. Larger operations required dozens of men and some crews
would work night and day if the weather seemed poised to change. When the ice was finally
thick enough, cutting commenced using the Boston method described previously: crosshatching
the ice through a combination of man- and horsepower, then breaking the blocks apart and
moving them into nearby icehouses.
The artificial ice ponds were only the first modification the ARCC made to the Alaskan
landscape. What the Russian settlements lacked in infrastructure, they made up for in space. The
ARCC had essentially total freedom to build. The company soon erected multiple icehouses at
both locations and laid short rail lines that ran from the icehouses to the docks. According to
Bancroft, these were the first rails in all of Alaska.
91
Farm plots, worker housing, horse stables,
and sawmills rounded out the ARCC’s ice camps.
92
The mills served a dual purpose. First, they
converted Alaska’s natural timber reserves into lumber that could be used for further
construction. But even more trees, however, were shredded until sawdust was all that remained.
Sawdust made for a fine insulation for ice both in the icehouse and aboard ship. Ice stored in
sawdust needed only to be rinsed before it could be used and, best of all, sawdust cost nothing.
The lack of proper facilities for storing ice had proved disastrous for many of the American
Russian Commercial Company’s predecessors, but the ARCC’s directors appear to have done
their research and made icehouses a priority at both ends of the supply chain. They built three
icehouses at Sitka and two more on Woody Island, all of enormous size, for a total capacity of

91
Bancroft, History of Alaska, 538.
92
“The Sitka Ice Trade,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 11, 1854.

41
12,000 tons.
93
In California, the company built with an eye toward broad distribution,
constructing brick icehouses in San Francisco, Sacramento, Stockton, and Marysville.
94

Consistent with their strong understanding of the market, Beverley Sanders and his associates
recognized that consistent demand for ice existed in California’s smaller towns as well as in its
largest cities. They made preparations to fulfill this demand rather than stoke the ongoing
regional rivalries. There was ice enough for all and all could buy from the American Russian
Commercial Company. This approach makes sense in the context of the other endeavors of the
ARCC’s leading partners. Sanders, along with J. Mora Moss, also ran the Mountain Lake Water
Company and the San Francisco Gas Company. Instead of thinking of ice as a commodity, we
might instead, even at this early stage, think of it as a utility like water, gas, and electricity. Moss
in particular was understandably proud of the role his businesses played in elevating life in San
Francisco. He held a grand gala to celebrate the lighting of the first gas lamps in the city, beacons
of light that “seemed as sort of a guiding star through the mud.”
95
This was the paradox of San
Francisco in the mid-1850s: a rapidly-advancing city flush with new wealth was sitting on a
foundation of mud and vice. But to men like Moss and his partners, all that mattered was how
they might wed civic and commercial advancement. Guests in attendance toasted the Gas
Company, the “capitalists [who] furnished the means,” the Mountain Lake Water Company, and
finally, the “Zitka Ice Company” [sic].
96
In 1854, one could not live a “modern” life in San
Francisco without doing business with J. Mora Moss.
The brief operation of the Pacific Ice Company foreshadowed major changes to the ice
business in California, but it was the American Russian Commercial Company that made them

93
Bancroft, History of Alaska, 587.
94
“The Sitka Ice Trade,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 11, 1854.
95
“San Francisco by Gas-Light,” Daily Alta California, February 12, 1854.
96
“San Francisco by Gas-Light,” Daily Alta California, February 12, 1854.

42
reality. In contrast to the Pacific Ice Company’s single successful shipment, the ARCC’s supply
line ran like clockwork, taking full advantage of the short two-week travel time between
California and Sitka. This consistency was framed as a key selling point to consumers
accustomed to unpredictable shortages from the Boston-based merchants. In March 1853, with
harvests and importations fully underway, the managers of the ARCC introduced their firm to
San Franciscans with the following advertisement in the Daily Alta California:
Having made such arrangements as will secure a constant supply of ice, we are now prepared
to deliver it to Saloons, Hotels, Steamers, private families and others, at greatly reduced
rates. The public are assured that there will be no failure in supplying this delightful luxury
the year round, complete arrangements having been made to have frequent arrivals of cargoes
from Sitka, where capacious ice houses have been erected and will be kept filled by our
resident agent.
97

Compared to the three prior years of ice advertisements in California, this is a clear departure.
Unlike others previously discussed, it makes no mention of the quality of the ice for sale—its
purity or coldness—or any sensory description of the product whatsoever. It asserts the value of
ice, calling it “this delightful luxury,” but does not attempt to convince the reader of why ice is
luxurious or what one can do with it. Instead, the advertisement makes a practical appeal to
existing consumers who need no further enticement to purchase ice but are frustrated with the
difficulties in obtaining it. While not explicitly referencing the shortcomings of their rivals in the
marketplace, the ARCC firmly asserts that their customers can rely on “a constant supply of ice”
made possible by “frequent arrivals of cargoes from Sitka,” as opposed to the fluctuating supply
and inconsistent shipments offered by Boston merchants.
98

Boston vendors also did their best to overcome the persistent issues they faced. Flint,
Peabody, & Co. constructed icehouses and purchased their own fleet of ships, assuring customers

97
American Russian Commercial Company advertisement, Daily Alta California, March 15, 1853. Emphasis mine.
98
American Russian Commercial Company advertisement, Daily Alta California, March 15, 1853.

43
that, “with their arrangements now fully perfected, there is no doubt but that they will hereafter
furnish a full and constant supply of this article, so necessary to comfort in warm weather.”
99

Certainly, by the summer of 1853, the supply of ice in California had never been more
reliable. But at the same time, demand had never been greater. There was room for multiple ice
businesses to operate successfully in the state, but that was of no consequence to the men of the
“frozen water trade.” The first western Ice War was on. Boston merchants had experience on
their side. Over three years, they had refined their procedures for shipping and storage and made
the necessary investments to improve yields. The American Russian Commercial Company was
new, but headed by experienced businessmen with money to spare and a positive relationship
with their partners in the Russian colonial government. The facts of geography, however, neither
side could change. A round trip from San Francisco to Sitka and back took just over a month,
including time for loading the ship with fresh ice. The same trip to Boston took the better part of
a year. Longer travel times meant more expense and fewer completed trips. While both the
ARCC and its competitors dealt in huge volumes of ice, only Sitka ice benefitted from
economies of scale. An advertisement appearing in the Sacramento Daily Union in June 1853
touted the “great quantities of this Arctic sea crop” arriving in the city, a large enough supply
that despite a price increase due to “extremely hot weather,” Sitka ice sold for only twenty-five
cents per pound.
100
By the end of the year, one newspaper correspondent surmised that Sitka ice
would soon edge Boston ice out of the market entirely, as the California shipments were only a
small—and not especially profitable—part of New England’s exports.
101

99
“Ice Trade,” Daily Alta California, February 23, 1853.
100
“Sitka Ice,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 18, 1853.
101
“The Ice Trade,” Sacramento Daily Union, December 6, 1853. This article gives the total ice exports of Boston
for January through October 1853 as 71,219 tons, of which only 1,692 went to the Pacific—less than 2.5%. Boston
ice may have been vital to California, but California was hardly vital to Boston’s ice merchants.

44
Throughout 1853 and 1854, the American Russian Commercial Company flourished, but
in the heat of late summer, events on the other side of the world stopped it in its tracks. A good
relationship with Russia was a necessary condition for business, but the dissolution of their
contract was never a legitimate fear. In fact, company president Beverley Sanders spent eight
months in Russia conducting mutually beneficial—if slow—negotiations with his Russian
counterparts.
102
Meanwhile, however, Russia had gone to war with seemingly all of Western
Europe over the Crimean Peninsula. Despite Sitka’s location at the farthest extent of the Russian
Empire, the drumbeats of war still sounded.
No Americans fought in the Crimean War, but the conflict nonetheless threatened to hit
Californians where it hurt: their ice cream bowls and julep cups. An August 1854 article reported
an agreement between the English, French, and Russian governments not to attack territorial
holdings on the Pacific Coast, therefore restricting any conflict between belligerent nations to the
open ocean. The piece framed this as good news for “the luxurious and epicurean portion of the
San Francisco community” who were distressed even to consider “the bare idea of being obliged
to sip their modicum of claret without ice; the most distant prospect of any incident happening to
cut off the usual supply of Sitka ice caused the perspiration to ooze from their plethoric
countenances.”
103
Here, the author makes a dig at the kind of elites who, when watching a war
unfold, concern themselves only with their own comfort. The idea was purposefully absurd. Why
would a conflict in Eastern Europe spread to the Pacific? The ice trade, though thriving, was
hardly lucrative enough to purposefully interrupt. The American Russian Commercial
Company’s only involvement in the Crimean War in 1854 was to fire a twenty-one-gun salute in

102
Saul, “Beverley C. Sanders and the Expansion of American Trade with Russia, 1853-1855,” 159–65.
103
Untitled report, Daily Alta California, August 26, 1854.

45
celebration of the successful defense of Sebastopol. In both cases, celebration would prove
premature.
104

Regardless of the war in the Europe, business continued apace for the American Russian
Commercial Company. The ARCC had substantially expanded its share of the market, eventually
squeezing out the Bostonians entirely. The company’s ships completed their scheduled deliveries
into 1855 but stopped without warning in July. The Daily Alta California reported on the 21st:
“The stock [of ice] in town is fast becoming exhausted. Some Sitka traders are now several days
overdue.”
105
Two days later, ships not from the American Russian Commercial Company but
from the French fleet appeared in San Francisco Bay, bringing news from Russian America.
Sitka, according to the French sailors, “was in the virtual possession of the American Ice
Company.”
106
The Russians evidently retreated into the Alaskan interior when they learned that
British and French vessels were on their way, despite the agreement signed the previous year.
Far from relishing their new role as the masters of Sitka, the Americans were “in a starving
condition,” waiting on a long-overdue ship of supplies dispatched from San Francisco.
107

Meanwhile, the whereabouts of the ice ship Zenobia was likewise unknown. The author of the
article concluded that, given the current uncertainty of shipping in both directions, the citizens of
California ought to brace for an ice shortage similar to that of July 1852—the period after the
Pacific Ice Company folded, but before the ARCC’s first importations. “This,” he writes, “will
be serious news for the liquor saloons about town.”
108

104
“Salute on Board the Zenobia,” Daily Alta California, November 23, 1854.
105
“Ice,” Daily Alta California, July 21, 1855.
106
“Arrival of the French Fleet,” Daily Alta California, July 23, 1855.
107
“Arrival of the French Fleet,” Daily Alta California, July 23, 1855.
108
“Arrival of the French Fleet,” Daily Alta California, July 23, 1855.

46
The temporary absence of Sitka ice encouraged some enterprising Californians to look closer
to home for a solution. Over the previous few years, a number of merchants attempted to revive
the Sierra snow and ice trade. Roads to and through the mountains had improved since 1850,
making transporting ice down from alpine lakes and into the cities easier, but it remained
difficult, slow, and expensive. The total lack of Alaskan ice at the peak of the summer was
exactly the window of opportunity these merchants had been waiting for. On the same day the
Daily Alta California announced the bad news from Sitka, the Sacramento Daily Union
proclaimed that relief had come at last from California’s own mountains. “This market is now
abundantly supplied with ice and snow, from the exhaustless store houses in the Sierras,” the
piece reads. “Grass Valley, in Sierra County, furnishes a quality of ice as solid and clear as the
finest Sitka. There is little danger of the town being deprived of this indispensable luxury, so
long as the snowy peaks skirt our eastern horizon.”
109
(Of note is the implication that in the
ARCC’s few years of operation, Sitka ice had supplanted Boston ice as the gold standard of
quality.)
If the Sierra Nevada could provide “exhaustless” ice on par with Sitka, what was to keep the
Alaskan trade from being supplanted entirely, just as the Boston trade had been? The great
restriction on the success of California-based ice companies was the detail the Union failed to
include: the price. An article in the Alta the following day fills in the gaps. Ice imported from
Sitka reliably sold for five cents per pound that summer, but the shortage caused the price to
skyrocket. The limited quantity of ice available in San Francisco reportedly sold for forty cents
per pound.
110
This price may have been acceptable to the public in the short-term and the heat of
July, but could it be feasible in the long run? A delivery from Sitka could arrive any day and

109
“Ice,” Sacramento Daily Union, July 23, 1855.
110
“Sierra Nevada Ice,” Daily Alta California, July 26, 1855.

47
flood the market with cheap ice again. As soon as shipping in the Pacific returned to normal,
California ice dealers would likely be shut out.
Indeed, traffic from Sitka resumed more quickly than anticipated, and Alaskan ice filled the
ARCC’s icehouses again by the beginning of August 1855. Company agents claimed the
exorbitant prices seen in San Francisco over the previous weeks—up to 42 cents per pound—
were the responsibility not of the ARCC, but of speculators, who purchased the “very needful
luxury” from the company and resold it at an obscene markup.
111
The “uniform price” of six
cents per pound had been and would remain firm, “so long as a block of the frozen element
remains in the storehouse of the company.” Regardless of the truthfulness of this claim, if any ill
will toward the ARCC existed, it quickly evaporated. The heat of the California summer left no
room for quarrels with the ice company or principled abstention from its product.
The ARCC’s new California-based rivals did not fold as soon as Sitka ice reached the docks,
but with prices returning to normal, they needed other ways to compete in order to survive. First,
while the ARCC provided ice to all of the major towns, California icemen opted to focus on
selling to inland cities like Sacramento. As previously discussed, minimizing the time, labor, and
expense of transporting ice was key to a business’s success. The ARCC had a distinct advantage
transporting their product by water from Alaska, but their circumstances changed at the water’s
edge. Ships could travel up the American River to Sacramento, but moving farther inland
required slow, expensive, and wasteful overland travel. Ice that sold for six cents in San
Francisco would cost more in towns like Placerville. Ice from the Sierra Nevada, in contrast,
could economically serve the foothill mining communities and make a strong play for
Sacramento’s business even if it could not compete in the Bay. These small mountain towns

111
“Ice,” Daily Alta California, August 7, 1855.

48
benefitted the most from the new source of ice. A visitor from San Francisco to Sonora, east of
Stockton in Tuolumne County, reported to the readers of the Daily Alta California that although
the town was both isolated and “uncomfortably hot,” its citizens were not only supplied with ice,
but “much more lavish of it than is the case in San Francisco.”
112
The “fainting San Franciscan”
who deigns to visit the dusty mining town would, against all odds, find him or herself “in the
midst of frozen plenty, and a land literally overflowing with milk punch and ice water.”
113
With
the establishment of ice companies in the Sierra Nevada, small gold country settlements could at
last make their own claims to the refinement that inspired so much pride in the citizens of San
Francisco and Sacramento.
Mountain ice companies easily established themselves in the inland communities unserved
by the American Russian Commercial Company but faced aggressive competition in
Sacramento. Undercutting the ARCC’s prices could potentially leave just enough room for
profit, but only if ice could be brought down from the mountains and sold in sufficient quantities.
Additionally, with the ARCC promoting fixed prices for the season, established customers of
that company would need a compelling reason to switch. In order to drum up business, the new
California merchants raised two issues with the people of Sacramento: opposition to monopoly
and the virtues of “home production.” The American Russian Commercial Company had
enjoyed a monopoly on the ice market since mid-1853 when shipments from Sitka fell into a
reliable rhythm and Boston shipments dried up. By the following year, the former Boston ice
depot in San Francisco was converted to a grist mill.
114
Lower prices and full icehouses made the
ARCC’s domination palatable to California consumers, at least for about two years. The

112
“Notes of Travel Through the Southern Mines,” Daily Alta California, June 18, 1858.
113
“Notes of Travel Through the Southern Mines,” Daily Alta California, June 18, 1858.
114
“Ice,” Sacramento Daily Union, November 7, 1854.

49
interruption of business in July 1855, however, transformed the downsides of monopoly from
theoretical economic principles to tangible—and uncomfortable—effects on buyers’ lives. The
steadiness of the ARCC’s prices and supply lines were revealed to be more tenuous than they
had previously appeared. While the company blamed the colossal price hikes on third-party
speculators, without competition in the market, nothing but promises stood in the way of similar
increases in other crises, or even permanently. Fears of market manipulation, even more than the
short window of opportunity that summer, proved to be the entry point California ice companies
needed.
By late 1855, both cooler weather and many tons of Sitka ice had arrived in Sacramento.
The fervor of the summer was long gone, but the would-be ice kings of California were not
content to wait out the off-season. Instead, they set about cutting and storing ice for the following
year and pleading their case to the public with the aid of the local press. Over the winter of 1855-
56, the Sacramento Daily Union published a handful of pieces assessing the ice industry and the
multiple outfits at work in the mountains. The first of these cited an inn owner named Brockliss
who, “in company with a few others,” began putting up ice on the South Fork of the American
River.
115
The article frames Brockliss and his unnamed colleagues as inadvertent participants in
the ice trade, having been forced into action by “the effects of [the ARCC] monopoly” that had
been “so seriously felt last season.” Ice, the author concluded, “is regarded not only as a luxury,
but indispensably necessary to the comfort of the citizens, [and] it is hoped that all enterprises
which promise to furnish it abundantly and cheaply will be generously sustained.”
116
In short,
any efforts to break through the monopoly and provide inland California with a new, affordable
source of ice would be laudable. Later, Benjamin Tallman, one of Brockliss’s competitors,

115
“California Ice Trade,” Sacramento Daily Union, November 3, 1855.
116
“California Ice Trade,” Sacramento Daily Union, November 3, 1855.

50
received an even more celebratory treatment. The paper dubbed him representative of the sort of
men “who ‘constitute a State’ and who are so much needed in California.”
117
The description of
his business that followed took on the flavor of a folk tale. To hear the Sacramento Daily Union
tell it, it was Tallman, not Brockliss or any of his associates, who “conceived the notion that the
people in the mountains were paying too dear for their ice” and set about on his own to remedy
the problem. As his business prospered, in the article’s words, Tallman did not just expand but
“pushed the good work into the valley,” building an icehouse in Sacramento from which he
“throttles the Sitka monopoly in one of its strongholds.”
118
Although the piece is titled “A
Business Man in the Mountains,” Tallman’s success is not contextualized as purely or even
primarily financial. Instead, he is painted as a hero: the model of a new California man, fighting
against the exploitation of his neighbors. The visceral language of “throttling” conjures imagery
of the Sitka ice monopoly as an organism, not unlike the later personification of the railroad
monopoly as a grasping octopus. In men like Tallman, the ARCC seemed to have finally met its
match.
Woven throughout the articles celebrating California’s new crop of icemen is a repeated
refrain praising the state itself. The Alta directly compares the supply of ice in the Sierra Nevada
to California’s most famous natural resource, writing that the natural icehouses of the mountains
prove “that the broad expanse of the interior of California yields other precious articles besides
gold for the enrichment of her emporium.”
119
Here ice, in keeping with its common classification
as a “luxury,” is afforded the same status as gold: both are precious resources that enrich

117
“A Business Man in the Mountains,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 29, 1856. The article is marked as a reprint
from the Empire County Argus of Coloma, but the Union runs the piece in its entirety, which I interpret as an
endorsement.
118
“A Business Man in the Mountains,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 29, 1856.
119
“Sierra Nevada Ice,” Daily Alta California, July 26, 1855.

51
California. Even if California’s gold were to run out—not an unreasonable fear by the mid
1850s—the state had much more to provide its citizens. The Sacramento Daily Union speaks
with pride of both the state and its people, writing, “We have strong faith that California will
soon supply her own citizens with this indispensable cooling agent,” the supply of which “may
be extended to an indefinite extent.”
120
California’s ice supply is painted as nothing less than
providential. Ice is “emphatically a necessity” to comfortable living in the state, but in return the
state provides ice in “indefinite” amounts.
121
Additionally, this author stresses the economic
benefits of an internal ice trade. “Let Californians be furnished their own ice by the enterprise
and industry of her own citizens,” he writes, “and the home ice business will cause thousands of
dollars, now sent out of the State to buy ice, to remain in the hands of the people.”
122
Once again,
the intertwining of natural resources, development, and democratization is evident in this
language. The natural bounty of California makes luxury more accessible to its citizens, spurring
economic growth. Every need has been provided for within the state’s own borders and
prosperity was the certain result.
If one is committed to seeing a divine hand in the creation of California’s climate and the
placement of its natural resources, as so many in the nineteenth century were, then it must be
considered a cruel joke of the Almighty that the state’s reserves of ice were hidden away on
mountaintops. As a key ingredient in the state’s cultural maturation, ice was necessary both to
Californians’ comfort and to their identity as citizens of the young state and of the West as a
whole. When the ice supply ran out, as it often did, it revealed the precariousness of the state’s
newfound “civilization.” To the dismay of California’s would-be ice kings, providence did not

120
“Ice,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 3, 1856.
121
“Ice,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 3, 1856.
122
“Ice,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 3, 1856.

52
provide a quick or effective way to move ice down from the high mountain ponds to the state’s
growing cities. Every day ice spent in transit not only added to the company’s expenses, but
further degraded the product, leaving less and less to sell. Until the mountains could be
overcome, consumers had to make do with the affordable but inconsistent wares of the American
Russian Commercial Company. Unlimited ice, without interruption, was required to keep
California moving forward toward its obvious—to Californians—destiny on the world stage. To
go without was simply unthinkable.

53
Chapter 2
“The Paradise of the Ice Men”: Harvesting Winter in Truckee

“Truckee is happy. They make ice there and make plenty of sawdust to pack the ice in.
It is a beautiful illustration of the fitness of things.” - Grass Valley Morning Union, Jan. 29, 1874.

In the moments before dawn on December 7, 1867, a crowd gathered at the Sacramento
railroad depot. Before them, waiting, stood a fine locomotive trailed by thirteen passenger cars.
Altogether, the train stretched a full two city blocks along the waterfront. Sacramento was awake
despite the early hour. The legislature had commenced its session earlier that week, flooding the
capital city with California’s eminent men, many of whom had been invited that morning.
Politicians and city dignitaries, some accompanied by their wives and children, made their way
through the growing throng and climbed into the train cars. The crowd murmured and gawked.
The state’s elites had dressed not for the crisp morning, but for the depths of winter. At the stroke
of seven o’clock, with some eight hundred travelers aboard, the train departed for a destination
not listed on any railroad timetable. By the invitation of Leland Stanford and the Central Pacific
Railroad, the assembled guests were to become the first passengers to ascend to the summit of
the Sierra Nevada, seven thousand feet above the city of Sacramento.
Stanford and his partners had wasted no time before showing off their achievement.
Workers drove the final spikes at the summit only seven days prior to the excursion and, while
the rails had carried supplies and workmen up the steep inclines, this was to be the first test of
the route with a fully appointed passenger train, complete with two refreshment cars. As
insurance against any difficulties, the train took on a second locomotive at Colfax, about one-
third of the way through the climb, after which the grades became progressively steeper. The
light rain that fell as the train left Sacramento turned to sleet, and sleet became snow as the train
continued to ascend, slowly but deliberately. Sounds of exertion came from the twin locomotives

54
as if they were living beasts of burden. According to the newspaper correspondent representing
the Grass Valley Morning Union, the engines “puffed and wheezed as if they really understood
the hardness of their task.”
123

Inside the cars, by contrast, a party atmosphere helped to speed the hours-long journey.
Passengers dined, drank, and hobnobbed through the morning and into the afternoon. Finally,
just after two o’clock, the mouth of the Summit Tunnel came into view. As the train steamed
forward, out of the snowstorm and into the mountain, loud cheers broke out, undoubtedly
amplified by a full day of anticipation and the refreshment car’s open bar. But the Summit
Tunnel, at nearly 1700 feet long, outlasted the initial enthusiasm and replaced that excitement
with a sense of unease. For a few moments, perfect darkness enveloped the train and its
passengers. Another reporter, this one from the Alta California, compared the darkness within
the tunnel to the supernatural darkness that blanketed Egypt in the Book of Exodus. “It was so
intensely dark as to be absolutely painful,” he wrote. “In vain the eye was strained to catch a
glimpse of some object to relieve the hideous blackness.”
124
On exiting the tunnel, a second cry
rang out, not just of excitement but of relief, the crushing darkness replaced by glistening snow.
When the train came to a stop at Summit Station, it was technically on the eastern slope
of the Sierra Nevada, the actual summit having been crossed under while in the depths of the
tunnel. The fact that the tracks down the other side had yet to be laid was inconsequential—the
mountains had been conquered. Quickly, the shock of the darkness faded, and the celebratory air
returned. Any sense of decorum among the legislators and business leaders dissolved as dozens
of men piled out of the train cars and took to “snow-balling” with such intensity that they broke a
number of the train car windows. The ladies in the party opted to remain inside and out of the

123
“Editorial Correspondence,” Grass Valley Morning Union, December 10, 1867.
124
“Letters from the Capital,” Daily Alta California, December 10, 1867.

55
cold, entertaining themselves with cards and conversation. Occupants of one car gathered around
to listen as one of their fellow travelers recounted the harrowing story of the Donner Party. The
storyteller, identified as Mrs. Jones, claimed to have been among the doomed pioneers and
recalled “the drawing of lots among the Donner sufferers” to decide who among the party would
die to sustain the living.
125
From within the train car, the listeners could look out through the
blowing snow at an icy blue body of water in the distance—Donner Lake, the very spot where
the grisly events being narrated played out.
Were the passengers unnerved by the story? Did they secretly breathe a sigh of relief
when the time came to begin the descent toward Sacramento? The tourists, unlike the Donners
and their companions, faced no dreadful trials on their way down the mountain. By ten o’clock,
the excursionists had returned to the depot in the capital city without incident. The fifteen-hour
round trip to the summit had been a resounding success, proof not only that the mountains could
be conquered, but that they could be transcended with comfort and ease.
The day trip to the summit of the Sierra Nevada in December 1867 capped a year in
which Californians’ attention fell time and again on the mountains. The Central Pacific
Railroad’s race to the top that year was not only closely documented and heavily publicized, but
it also coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the Donner Party disaster. Perilous, tragic, and
larger than life, the Donner story had taken on new meaning two decades later as a founding
myth of California. Books, lectures, and reminiscences about the migrant party and its trials kept

125
“Editorial Correspondence,” Grass Valley Morning Union, December 10, 1867. The veracity of this part of the
story is questionable. No Joneses accompanied the Donner Party on the journey westward. Many of the survivors
were young women or girls in 1847, but none of these are recorded as having married and taken the name Jones
either. Furthermore, the detail of casting lots is a recurring theme in retellings of the Donner myth, but its
provenance is shaky. The idea of picking victims by chance seems to have been suggested, but never acted upon.
See George R. Stewart, Ordeal by Hunger and Michael Wallis, The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in
the Age of Manifest Destiny. Early Donner historian and Truckee resident C. F. McGlashan claimed lots were drawn
by those at the “Camp of Death,” but none of the men had the will to follow through.

56
the events of 1846-47 fresh in mind alongside the daily updates of the railroad’s progress. One
such public address, delivered in the foothill town of Grass Valley by attorney E. W. Roberts,
cited the Donner incident as representative of California’s “primitive past,” contrasted with the
“advanced condition of civilization” to be found in the state by 1867.
126
The gulf described by
Roberts between the California of 1867 and the California of 1847 is far larger than a mere
twenty years might imply. In that time, California saw not just the transition to statehood, but the
upheavals of the Gold Rush and the Civil War as well. The California that the Donners and their
companions sought to reach was long gone, made unrecognizable by waves of immense change.
Hardly any Californians of 1867 had even been living in the state when the Donner Party
attempted the mountain crossing, contributing to the sense of the Donner narrative as legend
rather than lived experience.
127
With this in mind, some sought to restore the state’s memory of
its early years. A. D. Rock, a longtime California surveyor and businessman, placed an
advertisement in various newspapers in the autumn of 1866 requesting that anyone with
knowledge of the Donner Party contact him and assist him in writing the first complete history
on the topic. Such a volume was needed, wrote Rock, because the story of the Donner pioneers
“is connected with the settlement of the State, and more especially so, since the Central Pacific
Railroad will soon be completed and the cars running in sight of the old camps—the historic
spot.”
128

Roberts and Rock both recognized, even with admittedly incomplete knowledge, how
California’s past and future convened on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, at a place named for its

126
“Local Intelligence – The Lecture,” Grass Valley Morning Union, February 8, 1867.
127
“The Donner Party Calamity,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 8, 1866. As reported in this piece, a
correspondent for the paper visited the Donner Lake area and found that nobody living there could provide much
information regarding the Donner story. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the survivors chose not to settle near the site of
their deadly ordeal, meaning that the memory and the place had separated in the intervening years.
128
“A Matter of Public Interest,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 5, 1866.

57
most infamous travelers: Donner Pass. The Central Pacific’s crossing of the mountains and
eventual linkage with the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah stood to transform California once
again, that much was clear. What remained hazy in the late 1860s was precisely what the railroad
would do in the lives of Californians and the citizens of the wider West. Predictions were as
varied as the people who called California home. One laudatory article, published when the
railroad reached the summit, elevated the feat of engineering to the status of a world wonder,
comparing it favorably to the Colossus of Rhodes and Hanging Gardens of Babylon—high praise
for a railroad route that was not yet complete.
129
Others pointed to the undertaking as the solution
to the country’s sectional strife: the iron road would stitch the fractious North, South, and West
back together by giving the whole nation a new source of pride and economic growth. Henry
George, writing for Overland Monthly as the route neared completion in 1868, offered a vision
that was at once thrilling and concerning. George foresaw the railroad catapulting San Francisco
into a place of economic and cultural prominence, the jewel of the nation, the continent, and the
Pacific. With the railroad would come spectacular wealth, but that prosperity “will not be a
benefit to all of us, but only to a portion.”
130
The Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads
bore out George’s worries. Millions of dollars in government bonds, creative bookkeeping, and
the sweat and blood of thousands of Chinese immigrants made the Associates of the Central
Pacific wealthy men simply by completing construction of the railroad.
131
But would the railroad
bring prosperity for anyone but the corporate elite and their cronies?

129
“The Triumph of Skill and Enterprise Complete!,” Trinity Journal, December 7, 1867.
130
William Francis Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994), 21.
131
White, Railroaded, 35–36. Precise numbers are fuzzy due to the aforementioned financial gymnastics, but it is
safe to say the Big Four cleared over $10 million in profits, possibly much more.

58
The practical importance of the immense project was unclear throughout the years of
construction. Simply put, the tycoons built their railroads far ahead of demand, and no amount of
symbolism could make a continent-spanning public works project viable.
132
Between Omaha and
Sacramento lay some of the most rugged, least populous country in the nation. No one was
clamoring in the 1860s for a railroad through vast stretches of desert, scrubland, and towering
mountains. California, though growing, was nowhere near the booming economy it would
become in the twentieth century. A reliable overland route to California was theoretically useful,
but the task fell to Californians and other citizens of the West to find ways to derive value from
it.
No great cities existed on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada as the railroad snaked its way
up and over the summit, but the Central Pacific opened up the previously inaccessible summit
region to extractive industries and settlement followed. In 1867, Placer County lumberman E. J.
Brickell relocated his business from the western to the eastern side of the mountains in order to
sate the railroad’s seemingly infinite appetite for wood. Brickell established the Truckee Lumber
Company at Coburn’s Station, a tiny outpost on the banks of the Truckee River just past the
summit.
133
During the final push to complete the summit crossing before winter set in, thousands
of railroad workers—some white engineers and many more Chinese laborers—populated a tent
city near the lumber mill. Most of these men moved on with the railroad, following construction
into Nevada and beyond, but others remained to form the core of a permanent settlement. Only a
few months later, in the summer of 1868, Coburn’s Station was unrecognizable. With startling

132
White, xxvii.
133
Truckee Donner Historical Society, ed., Fire & Ice: A Portrait of Truckee, Second Edition (Truckee, CA:
Truckee Donner Historical Society, 1994), 11.

59
speed, the new residents erected hundreds of homes, five stores, three hotels, and two theaters.
134

The rapid growth was made possible, both economically and materially, by the fourteen lumber
mills in the immediate vicinity, which hummed day and night. “The sawmills are making lumber
of the forests of timber daily,” read one early newspaper account, “and the market is open for it
as fast as it is sawed.”
135
The settlement also took on a new name to befit its status as a true
mountain boomtown: Truckee, after the river that powered the town’s mills.
136

Timber was the first natural resource to be exploited by the new Sierra Nevada
community, but it would not be the only one. Over a decade before the founding of Truckee, in
1855, a correspondent for the Empire County Argus in the gold country town of Coloma cited a
shortage of ice in the Bay at the peak of the summer. Neither Boston nor Sitka ice were to be
found anywhere in San Francisco, and the people of that city were “no doubt much annoyed.”
137

As explored previously, such complaints about ice shortages were—and would remain—
common refrains in California papers. This author, however, went beyond complaining to
envision a forward-thinking solution: “When the great road over the mountains via Georgetown
and Lake Bigler [Lake Tahoe] is constructed, thousands of tons of the best ice in the world can
be furnished at lower rates than the Sitka Ice Company can lay it down in San Francisco, thereby
furnishing an unfailing supply, and at the same time retaining a large amount of money in
circulation among our own citizens.”
138
In the context of 1855, years before the first tracks
across the Sierra Nevada were laid, this prediction may have read as a fanciful vision of the
future like so many others offered by California boosters following statehood. However realistic

134
Joanne Meschery, Truckee: An Illustrated History of the Town and Its Surroundings (Truckee, CA: Rocking
Stone Press, 1978), 44.
135
Truckee Donner Historical Society, Fire & Ice, 12.
136
“Coburn’s Station Blotted Out,” Daily Alta California, April 12, 1868.
137
“Ice,” Empire County Argus, July 28, 1855.
138
“Ice,” Empire County Argus, July 28, 1855.

60
the idea, other newspapermen likewise realized that all that stood between Californians and the
ice they so fervently desired were the “exorbitant freights and unreliable means of
transportation” involved in bringing ice down from the mountains.
139
Building a railroad to the
top of the mountains strictly to facilitate the harvesting of ice was obviously a laughable
proposition, but the federally funded transcontinental railroad was just what the potential
California ice industry needed to start work. The leaders of the American Russian Commercial
Company, frequently decried as a monopoly by the press, understood this too. J. Mora Moss
deemed the threat to his business credible enough to oppose the transcontinental railroad being
built at all.
140
But regardless of the strong opposition by businessmen and nature alike, the “great
road over the mountains” was at last finished. With the greatest obstacle out of the way,
entrepreneurs could begin supplying California with ice from the state’s own icebox—but would
it be as successful as the papers had imagined?
The first two ice operations established in the Sierra Nevada following the coming of the
railroad had an improvisational quality and therefore got off to a shaky start. The Nevada Ice
Company, confusingly headquartered in Nevada City, California, began cutting ice from the
nearby mining camp of Blue Tent in February 1867, well ahead of the railroad’s progress.
141

Nevada City and Grass Valley appreciated this industriousness, but as the railroad crept up the
mountain, Nevada City was bypassed entirely. The nearest stop was more than ten miles away
over rugged and steep terrain. The railroad, so long awaited, was of no use. The company could
continue supplying the nearest towns, but exporting its ice over long distances remained
unfeasibly expensive and laborious.

139
“California Ice Trade,” Sacramento Daily Union, November 3, 1855
140
Eugene M. Itogawa, “The Natural Ice Industry in California” (Master’s thesis, Sacramento, California State
University, 1974), 24.
141
“Cutting Ice,” Sacramento Daily Union, February 15, 1867.

61
The Summit Ice Company also struggled to establish itself, but for different reasons.
Joseph Graham, a Central Pacific engineer, masterminded the construction of ice ponds near the
summit west of Truckee in 1868, but despite the proximity to the railroad line, the position
proved to be disadvantageous.
142
The problem in this case was not human-made, but an
environmental fact of the High Sierra region. The peaks of the Sierra Nevada create a
pronounced rain shadow. Moist air precipitates on the western slopes before crossing over the
summit to the much drier eastern side. The ice ponds laid out by Graham for the Summit Ice
Company sat directly in the path of some of the most severe precipitation. As discussed in the
previous chapter, snow is one of the iceman’s greatest foes, perhaps even more than
unseasonably warm weather. The iceman is powerless against an early thaw, but a blanket of
snow falling on the ice necessitated grueling work where time was of the essence. If not dealt
with, snow could severely slow the formation of ice or prevent it entirely. Every winter, clouds
dump an average of 400 inches of snow on Donner Pass.
143
The investors in the Summit Ice
Company spent $50,000 erecting buildings and making improvements to the land in order to
begin harvesting ice, then a further $30,000 to rebuild and reinforce their buildings after heavy
snowfall repeatedly crushed them.
144
Constant refurbishment and the high labor costs incurred in
keeping the ice ponds clear, combined with the small overall yield of usable ice drastically cut
into the company’s profits. In 1873, the Summit Ice Company relocated, abandoning the summit
for which it was named in favor of a location on Prosser Creek east of Truckee. Although only
about twenty miles distant from the company’s original facilities, Prosser Creek receives

142
Itogawa, “The Natural Ice Industry in California,” 26.
143
Randall Osterhuber, “Climate Summary of Donner Summit, California 1870-2001,” Journal of the Sierra
College Natural History Museum 2, no. 1 (Winter 2009),
https://www.sierracollege.edu/ejournals/jscnhm/v2n1/climatesummary.html.
144
Harry L. Wells, History of Nevada County (Oakland, CA: Thompson & West, 1880), 166.

62
approximately a quarter of the snowfall recorded at the summit and reaches consistently colder
temperatures throughout the winter. It was, as Harry L. Wells put it in his History of Nevada
County, “the paradise of the ice men.”
145

The Truckee Basin may have been an iceman’s paradise, but it was hardly a secret. Just
as lumber mills had proliferated along the Truckee River, so too did ice harvesting operations in
the late 1860s and into the 1870s. When Summit Ice relocated to Prosser Creek, it joined the
Nevada Ice Company, which had made a similar move in 1870, and the Boca Mill and Ice
Company, established in 1868.
146
The People’s Ice Company began work a stone’s throw away
at Martis Valley in 1874. The following years brought even more competition. Tracing the
precise history of these companies is a challenge due to similar names, repeated mergers and
closures, and, as the Summit and Nevada Ice Companies demonstrate, a tendency for ice outfits
to move away from the locations for which they had been named. Eugene Itogawa, whose
master’s thesis, “The Natural Ice Industry in California,” is the most comprehensive study
currently available, gives this summary:
In addition to the Boca, Summit, Nevada, and People’s Ice Companies, the Truckee
Basin supported numerous other ice companies, including the following: Boca Brewing
Company at Boca; Crystal Ice Company at Verdi; Mountain Ice Company at Essex;
Bronco Ice Company at Bronco; Tahoe Ice Company at Truckee; Rocky Run Ice
Company at Bronco; Floriston Ice Company at Floriston; Essex Ice Company at Essex;
Truckee Ice Company at Truckee; Donner Ice Company at Donner; and the National Ice
Company at Iceland and Polaris.
147

Paradise, then, was a crowded place. It may be tempting, especially given the short tenures and
spotty records of some of these businesses, to consider them as interchangeable or as a single
conglomerate. Consumers outside of the Truckee Basin certainly did this, labeling all ice from

145
Wells, 166.
146
Wells, 166.
147
Itogawa, “The Natural Ice Industry in California,” 32.

63
the region as “mountain,” “Sierra,” or “Truckee” ice and caring little whether the ice actually
came from Boca, Verdi, or Polaris. Treating these companies with specificity, however, allows
for the reconstruction of more complicated stories about commerce, labor, and the environment
in the Sierra Nevada.
Despite their reliance upon them, ice ponds in New England and Alaska were distant
curiosities to California consumers. Blocks of ice appeared in town as if by magic, but the actual
mechanics of its production were unclear to most of those who purchased and used it. With the
Sierra ice industry boom in the 1870s, ice harvesting was for the first time integrated into
Western communities, both in terms of geographic proximity and cross-class participation.
Previously, the state’s ice men were typically those importing and reselling ice to consumers. But
with the expansion of California-based ice companies came employment for thousands of lower-
class laborers and middle-class managers. Suddenly, ice could be—if not a town’s sole
industry—a cornerstone of its economy and culture. Additionally, in contrast to the titles used
within other iconic Western industries that bore allusions to social and economic hierarchies, the
terminology applied to the men working in the ice industry was surprisingly flexible. In the
lumber industry, the man in the woods with a saw was a “lumberjack” or “logger” and the man
overseeing the company was a “lumber baron.” Likewise, the “cowboy” drove the herds to
market, but the “cattlemen” owned the ranches. Ice industry nomenclature flattened these
distinctions of power and class. With the exception of the rare “ice king,” every man involved in
the industry, from the ones working on the pond, to the delivery men, to the corporate investors,
could simply be called an “ice man.”
Ice company agents took pride in their operations and regularly offered tours and
demonstrations to members of the public in order to instill that same pride in their neighbors.

64
Just before Christmas in 1874, J. B. Brogan of the Summit Ice Company invited journalist,
historian, and leading citizen of Truckee C. F. McGlashan, along with the staff of his newspaper
the Truckee Republican, to survey the company’s facilities on Prosser Creek.
148
The account of
the visit published in the paper is detailed and evocative, clearly meant to illustrate the facilities
and the ice harvesting process to unfamiliar readers. The many ice companies of the region
utilized much the same model as one another, so let us join McGlashan and his staff on the tour
to see the workings of a Sierra ice pond up close.
Unlike the functional, but rudimentary construction at the Sitka ice ponds, the ice
companies of the Truckee Basin invested in worksites built for efficiency and longevity. The
Summit Ice Company in particular, following its disastrous few years at the summit, needed a
base of operations that could produce a great deal of ice year after year with little fuss or added
expense. The company’s new location on Prosser Creek provided all the elements required for
successful ice harvesting: an amenable climate, ample clean water, proximity to the railroad, and
room to build. In addition to the storehouse adjacent to the pond, the grounds sported a
boardinghouse, stables, a blacksmith’s shop, and a tool shop.
149
Following a twenty-minute train
ride from Truckee, Brogan welcomed McGlashan and company into the boardinghouse for
breakfast before braving the early morning cold to see the men at work. Company engineers had
created the ice pond by damming Prosser Creek a quarter mile upstream from where it met the
Truckee River, creating a broad surface from which to cut ice. Work on the pond began shortly
before the first freeze in the autumn. A crew of around fifteen men were tasked with “booming
out” the pond. The workers dragged a float across the surface of the water, gathering the

148
“The Ice Harvest – Work at Prosser Creek,” Truckee Republican, December 23, 1874.
149
“The Ice Harvest – Work at Prosser Creek,” Truckee Republican, December 23, 1874. In this regard, the Summit
Ice Company was one of the smaller operations in the Truckee Basin. Other company complexes included multiple
boardinghouses, sawmills, and, in the case of the facility at Boca, a full brewery.

65
accumulated leaves and other debris which they could then fish out. The process closely
resembled that of cleaning a modern swimming pool, but without the benefit of filters or chlorine
and on a much larger scale—to thoroughly clean the pond in preparation for freezing regularly
took a full week.
With freezing weather came a period of careful, even tense, watchfulness. Workmen
rushed to remove any fallen snow from the surface of the ice as quickly as possible, but whether
snow was thought a blessing or a curse depended on whom you asked. For owners and overseers,
snow was undoubtedly a curse. Ice forms from the water’s surface downward as the water is
chilled by cold air. A blanket of snow slows the growth of the ice beneath it by insulating the
water from the air, delaying the harvest. A successful winter might see a company cut two or
even three crops of ice from the same pond. Heavy snows reduced the possibility of multiple
harvests. Furthermore, paying laborers to clear away snow added considerably to the overall cost
of storing ice, increasing the total to as much as twelve to fifteen dollars per ton.
150
For the men
working the ice, however, a snowstorm was an opportunity. The work was grueling, scraping or
shoveling snow by hand, often into the dead of night, but it was absolutely necessary and
therefore it paid well. As will be discussed later in this chapter, most icemen were seasonal
laborers, moving between jobs as they became available. In the harsh Sierra winter, few other
jobs were to be had. Poor weather on the ice ponds may have spelled a headache for the ice
company superintendent, but for his men it meant additional days or even weeks of housing,

150
“The Ice Harvest – Work at Prosser Creek,” Truckee Republican, December 23, 1874. It is worth expanding on
this figure somewhat to give a clear idea of the true cost. The Summit Ice Company in 1874 had a storehouse with a
capacity of around 10,000 tons of ice and the company later expanded to multiple buildings with a 22,000-ton
capacity. A particularly snowy winter would have an overall poor yield, say, 7,500 tons, leaving the original
icehouse only three-quarters full. At twelve dollars per ton, this comes to $90,000 (or approximately $2.1 million in
2019 dollars), the vast majority of which would go to paychecks.

66
food, and pay. Weather divided the interests of workers and bosses, but both groups were equally
powerless to control what nature would bring them.
Booming and scraping, however, were only the beginning of the work. After time and
labor had transformed the ice pond into a smooth “ice field” and the ice had grown to a foot in
thickness, the harvest could start. First, the ice field—1,600 feet by 160 feet, or almost six acres
in the case of the Summit Ice Company—had to be marked out into squares. Using the same ice
plow technology developed by Nathaniel Jarvis, teams of two men and one horse turned the
glassy surface of the ice into an immense checkerboard of twenty-two inch squares. A team of
icemen would then cut a channel some four or five feet wide from the area of the field to be
harvested down toward the dam. With all of the preparations complete, the pond took on the
appearance of a factory line. One man, armed with a large, heavy chisel, “plunges with great
force and dexterity into the furrow made by the plow,” breaking cakes of ice away from the rest
of the field.
151
Two squares by six, these cakes weighed over a ton each. Other workmen,
stationed at intervals along the channel, used long-handled forks and chisels both to push the
floating cakes along and to break them along the scored lines into individual blocks.
This work, too, was undertaken with the utmost haste to avoid nature spoiling the reaping
in progress. Snow remained a threat: a heavy coating of snow would need to be scraped away
before work could resume, and an especially dense snowfall could sink floating cakes beneath
the pond’s surface. Freezing rain could also fill in the lines cut into the ice, which would then
need to be redone. With this in mind, crews worked day and night and even on Sundays,
continuing to cut ice by lamplight. Company managers also supplemented their teams with
additional workers during the harvest. The week after McGlashan and his writers visited the

151
“The Ice Harvest – Work at Prosser Creek,” Truckee Republican, December 23, 1874.

67
Summit Ice Company, the firm posted an urgent ad in the Truckee Republican which read, “Mr.
J. B. Brogan wants fifty more men to work at storing ice at once. Good wages will be paid and
good board furnished.”
152
Until every block sat in the icehouse, the crop—and therefore the
company’s investment—was in danger.
The icehouse, then, was the company’s most valuable asset. If it was not in order, the
whole operation would be in vain. The Summit Ice Company’s storehouse sat along a bend in the
creek, two hundred feet below the edge of the dam. Four hundred and fifty feet long, fifty feet
wide, and twenty-four feet high, the icehouse could hold ten thousand tons of ice. A good harvest
could fill it from bottom to top. For insulation, the walls were built a full foot thick and packed
with sawdust. Packed fully and carefully, the house could preserve ice until the following year’s
harvest, provided any remained after the high demand of the summer months. Filling the
icehouse relied in equal parts on skilled icemen and the power of gravity.
153
After cleaving cakes
of ice into separate blocks, icemen wielding long poles tipped with iron hooks maneuvered the
ice into a chute, which carried it down to the icehouse “with the speed of a wild engine.” As
block after block slid into the storehouse, other men “dexterously change their direction sending
them to different parts of the great building, where they are packed away and remain in frigid
security until needed.”
154
In total, the ice companies of the Truckee Basin could store fifty
thousand tons of ice, enough to supply the rest of the state and beyond.

152
“The Ice Again,” Truckee Republican, January 2, 1875.
153
At ice ponds not constructed around a natural grade, blocks were instead guided onto a chain-driven conveyor
belt called an “ice elevator.” The ice traveled up from the water level and into a second- or third floor opening in the
icehouse. From there, workers could take advantage of gravity to slide blocks into place.
154
“The Ice Harvest – Work at Prosser Creek,” Truckee Republican, December 23, 1874.

68
The men whose labor drove the Truckee ice industry lived and worked in seasonal cycles,
always in motion. Only a fraction of the men found on the ice ponds lived in the Sierra Nevada
year-round. Those who did largely spent spring and summer as loggers or operating any of the
many local sawmills. The ice companies required a few hands in the warmer months to work in
the icehouses and load railcars, but most were out of a job and headed into the woods for work.
When the snow fell and the ponds froze, loggers became icemen again. The two professions
called for many of the same traits and skills: strength, dexterity, teamwork, proficient use of
axes, saws, and picks. By moving between industries, an able worker could turn the off-season
into another few months of paying work. Some companies made the same seasonal transition
along with their workers. The Boca Mill and Ice Company sawed ten million board feet of
lumber in 1872. When the mill pond froze over, its workers proceeded to put up eight thousand
tons of ice.
155
To fill the slow summer months, the Nevada Ice Company, likewise, expanded
into shingle manufacturing.
156

But lumber and ice also posed overlapping challenges and dangers for their workers.
Employees spent their days exposed to the elements. The tools of the trade, meant to cut ice and
wood, could mangle flesh with ease. Rivers and ponds—both frozen and thawed—claimed their
share of lives. Even the product itself could be a hazard to the unaware workman. For example,
blocks of the size prescribed by the Summit Ice Company would have weighed between two
hundred and two hundred-fifty pounds. A piece of ice, moving, as McGlashan described it, “with
the speed of a wild engine” down the chute had the potential to break a leg or crush a foot.
157

155
“Boca, Lumber and Lager Beer,” Grass Valley Morning Union, October 30, 1873.
156
“Shingle Making,” Grass Valley Morning Union, January 18, 1874.
157
“The Ice Harvest – Work at Prosser Creek,” Truckee Republican, December 23, 1874.

69
Regardless of these dangers, the promise of a warm meal and a good paycheck kept the company
bunkhouses full and the wheels of industry turning in the Truckee Basin.
Eventually, the consistent expansion of Truckee’s ice industry pushed the small town’s
labor supply to its limits, even after bosses recalled lumbermen from the woods for the season. A
big harvest, particularly in years in which all of the ice companies could harvest at once, would
leave the streets looking barren. The Truckee Republican of December 15, 1883 captured the
mood, writing, “The town is very quite [sic]. Nearly all the men are at work on the ice ponds
down the river.”
158
Another column that day reassured business owners that while Truckee may
have been “dull” at the moment, it was productivity that kept the men away from the local stores
and saloons. “Every industry in the mountains [had] thrived” that year, leaving no time for rest—
or spending—between the lumber and ice seasons.
159
But as soon as the work on the ice ponds
was completed, that success would spell “good, lively holidays” as the men returned to town
with their earnings.
As Truckee and its local extractive industries grew year over year, the seasonal flow of
labor and laborers shifted. Initially, the ice industry offered jobs for only a portion of the
lumbermen unable to find work during the winter. The remainder left for temporary jobs in
warmer climes and returned in the spring. By the mid-1880s, this seasonal exodus stopped and
even reversed. In 1885, the Republican described the changes to the rhythms of labor in the
Sierra Nevada. As expected, the ice ponds would require many hands that winter. But breaking
with tradition, high demand for lumber meant some mills would continue work through the
colder months, stretching the labor pool thin. Therefore, the paper predicted that many men who

158
“Local Lines,” Truckee Republican, December 15, 1883.
159
“Hard Times,” Truckee Republican, December 15, 1883.

70
would otherwise leave Truckee and “go below,” that is, descend from the mountains into the
Central Valley for winter work, would remain at work in town.
160

The ice company foremen also began to search further afield for hired hands. After
Truckee’s men had all been accounted for, bosses looked to Reno, the next large town along the
railroad line. But the mining towns of western Nevada, too, could not muster the men required.
Companies therefore placed newspaper advertisements in more distant cities: Sacramento, San
Francisco, and beyond. The Truckee Basin became a magnet for itinerant laborers from across
the West by offering good-paying winter work that came complete with room and board—a rare
opportunity. But the chance to work on the ice ponds came with a catch: the ice season was short
and its timing unpredictable. A dry, cold year might see a harvest before Christmas, but a wet,
warm one could push the season back until February. The emphasis placed on speed and
efficiency meant that crews consisted of whichever men were in the area and ready for work
when the order came. Furthermore, each company in the region worked on its own calendar
based on hyperlocal weather conditions. All of the ponds might be ready to cut at once, or the ice
season could stretch out for weeks. For out-of-town laborers, positions were not guaranteed.
Arriving in Truckee too late could leave a man without a job and with no way to recoup the
expenses he incurred on his way to the little mountain town.
Jobseekers soon realized there was a simple solution to this problem, albeit one that did
not make them friends among the year-round residents: arrive early and bide your time until the
ice harvest began. From their point of view, this only made sense. Having no other work to do in
the winter, why not spend the uncertain waiting period in Truckee? But from the town’s
perspective, those “jobseekers” or “itinerant laborers” looked a lot like vagrants, and they arrived

160
“Outlook for Work,” Truckee Republican, October 24, 1885.

71
each winter by the hundreds. Rough, rootless, and often penniless, these men threatened to
undermine two decades of work by Truckee’s businessmen and homemakers to transform the
town. Truckee was no San Francisco, to be sure, and the gender balance among its permanent
residents harkened back to the overwhelmingly male mining settlements of the Gold Rush years,
but at the same time it was far more than the tent city and handful of sawmills it had once been.
The influx of temporary workers seemed a step backwards, even if their presence was a key
component to Truckee’s growth and prosperity.
Others treated the men with more sympathy. On one frigid morning in January 1886, a
crowd of 108 men appeared on the doorstep of James McDonald, superintendent of the Summit
Ice Company at Prosser Creek, looking for work. McDonald himself was an Irish immigrant who
came to the Truckee Basin as a teamster before taking command of the ice ponds at Prosser. His
neighbors in Truckee spoke of him fondly. Reports of his visits to town in the Truckee
Republican teased him for completing his errands with such efficiency that he never had time to
socialize.
161
McDonald’s reputation as a genial man and a fair boss likely helped to drive so
many desperate men to Prosser Creek that morning. He did not hire all of them, instead hand-
picking a crew of the most skilled and experienced men from among the throng, but he treated all
present to a hot breakfast prior to dismissing them.
162
The men still without jobs were left to try
their luck again at another company or move on. The ice industry exacted a toll from its workers
even before it hired them.
But what of the town to which these wandering men came? Drawing a clear picture of
Truckee’s population in the late nineteenth century is a challenging task. To start, nearly all data
from the 1890 census no longer exists. All records collected from the state of California are

161
“Local Lines,” Truckee Republican, April 16, 1884.
162
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, January 9, 1886; “The Ice Harvest,” Truckee Republican, January 9, 1886.

72
gone. Data from other years for Truckee and its neighboring communities is accessible but
comes with its own shortcomings. Chief among these is in that era, the census was taken in June
and counted citizens based on their place of residence at the beginning of that month. Counting
only residents present in the summer creates a misleading image of towns like those in the
Truckee Basin that experienced seasonal changes in their population and workforce. Therefore,
precise demographics of the area during the ice season in any given year are out of reach.
Additionally, the question of occupation also referred to the time at which the census was taken.
The most common job listed in the area is “laborer.” How many of these laborers followed the
yearly labor cycle from the woods to the ice ponds and back is unknown. Only James McDonald
at Prosser Creek and his counterpart A. B. Clark at Cuba with their year-round positions as
superintendents are listed as ice company employees—foremen without subordinates.
Despite these problems, the extant census data provides a broad sense of the local
population that can be expanded upon with descriptive information from other sources. As was
typical for remote California towns in the late nineteenth century, Truckee and its neighbors
skewed male—overwhelmingly so in the smaller settlements. Additionally, to call a place like
Prosser Creek a “company town” overstates how much of a town actually existed. It might be
better described as a permanent company camp. The summertime population of Prosser Creek in
1880 consisted of thirteen men, six women, and eleven children.
163
Only four families, including
James McDonald’s, called Prosser home. The remainder of the men lived alone as bachelors or
in company housing. And that was only the skeleton crew employed over the summer. Boca,
home to the Boca Mill and Ice Company and the Boca Brewing Company, was similarly
populated by single working men. Truckee too, despite being far larger and more developed

163
1880 United States Census, Prosser Creek, Nevada County, California, digital image, familysearch.org.

73
than the surrounding outposts, retained a distinct quality of frontier roughness and masculinity.
Even without the influx of winter jobseekers, it was a rugged, workingman’s town.
This is not, however, to say that the Truckee Basin and its people were homogenous.
Racial and ethnic diversity suffused the logging camps and boardinghouses. The magnetic power
of California had hardly dimmed in the years following the Gold Rush and many who came
seeking gold had, after failing to strike it rich, dispersed to other corners of the state to find work.
On the ice ponds and in the sawmills, amid the din of labor, could be heard a wide variety of
tongues. Irishman James McDonald had no trouble finding his countrymen in the High Sierra
and employed a number of them on the ponds at Prosser Creek. The lager beer produced at the
Boca brewery came courtesy of brewers hailing from across the German Empire: Baden, Hesse,
Prussia, and Bavaria. A large portion of the labor force came to California from Canada, often
with French or Scottish roots. Yet more came from England, Wales, Denmark, and all corners of
the United States.
A San Francisco journalist, in a January 1886 profile of the “Sierra icemen,” dubbed the
men he met at one of the ice companies a “motley gathering” and described them thus:
At one of the ice camps that I visited, where about thirty men are employed, I found that
of four men, sitting side by side at the dinner table, one had spent the summer in Kansas,
another in the Black Hills, the third at Walla Walla, W.T., and the fourth among the
mines in the Calico district. A Maine lumberman had for his vis-à-vis a burly son of Erin,
who was fresh from experiences in India and New Zealand; while the “French” cook was
offset by a couple of Germans, who were going back to the “Vaterland” as soon as
possible. Few, if any, of the men have met before, and in ten days, when the ice is
harvested and housed, they will separate. Some of them may meet in the wheat-fields of
Tehama County, some in the copper mines of Sonora, some on the sand-lots, and
possibly, some in a London lodging-house. But when the hour of departure comes they
will go as suddenly as they came.
164

164
“The Sierra Icemen,” Truckee Republican, January 16, 1886.

74
In other words, a shared burden of work and a common adversary in the weather united these
men of disparate origins, but only temporarily and superficially. Cultural and linguistic
differences, combined with the short work season and stiff competition for jobs, ensured that
affinity only went so far. Icemen found the ability to cooperate on the ponds and cohabitate in
the bunkhouses, but their solidarity only rarely extended to any kind of collective action against
their employers. A disgruntled crew of icemen might, in theory, try to use the limited timeframe
of the ice harvest as leverage against their boss, but in so doing, they ran the risk of losing their
meals, their accommodations, and their pay all at once and at the coldest part of the year.
Potential replacement workers abounded, alleviating the pressure of timing. Besides, what good
would it do to agitate for better wages or conditions when one’s employment might last, at the
longest, two weeks? For their part, ice company bosses did try to make appealing offers to
potential employees, touting comfortable lodging and good pay—occasionally even with the
promise of overtime pay for additional hours worked.
165
At the same time, however, employers
knew any real grievances could be solved by bringing in a new crew or would simply disappear
when the season ended. Any men who arrived looking for work the following year would either
not know about the disputes of the previous season or needed the job enough to take what was
offered.
Additionally, the international coalition at work in the Truckee Basin through the winter
had its limits, and the lines of racial demarcation were sharply drawn. Euro-American workers
consistently excluded two racialized groups from membership in their laboring fraternity: the
indigenous Washoe people and Truckee’s sizable population of Chinese immigrants. The Wašiw,

165
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, November 26, 1881. In this case, for instance, the going rate was $2 per day,
plus board, with double pay for overtime, although the advertisement did not specify the number of hours after
which overtime applied.

75
or “Washoe,” have lived in the region surrounding Lake Tahoe, straddling the border of modern
California and Nevada, for at least six thousand years. The roughness of the lands they called
home sheltered the Washoe from outside interference until the mid-nineteenth century, but the
influx of colonizers during the Gold Rush proved devastating. Genocidal campaigns of anti-
Indigenous violence combined with the environmental degradation of mining and logging
shattered the Washoe way of life. Poverty among the Washoe and their generational experience
of living and working in the cold of the Sierra Nevada could have made them ideal candidates
for working on the ice ponds, but local whites considered their Native neighbors untrustworthy at
best and dangerous at worst. Washoe men, the ice bosses feared, would take their wages to buy
alcohol and wreak havoc in town, a prediction that unfortunately came true on the few occasions
Native laborers were employed.
166
But fears of drunken misbehavior never prevented the ice
companies from hiring white workers, who engaged in such behavior without fail every season,
with occasionally deadly results.
167
Prejudice and double standards therefore kept Indigenous
workers off of the ice ponds, even when they might have been valuable contributors.
Chinese labor, in contrast, was ubiquitous in Truckee. The tent city left from the
construction of the railroad in the 1860s evolved into a semi-permanent Chinatown, which
moved from block to block following pressures from white residents and a series of fires, both
accidental and malicious. No one in the mountain towns of the Sierra Nevada quite knew how
many Chinese lived among them. Certainly hundreds, maybe as many as two thousand in total.
Regardless of the actual number, the common opinion was “too many.” In November 1878, a

166
“They Get Fire Water,” Truckee Republican, January 15, 1902; “They Get the Fire Water,” Truckee Republican,
January 25, 1902; “Drunken Indians Parade the Streets,” Truckee Republican, December 21, 1911. Note that all
three incidents come from the early twentieth century, when additional job opportunities made securing winter
laborers more difficult, hence hiring the normally passed-over Washoe.
167
“A Temperance Lecture,” Truckee Republican, January 19, 1884; “Too Much Bug Juice,” Truckee Republican,
January 18, 1902.

76
mob of five hundred white citizens, headed by the so-called “Caucasian League,” looted and
burned Truckee’s Chinatown.
168
Racist rioters threatened not just the Chinese, but their white
employers as well, both directly with violence and indirectly by eliminating the supply of
inexpensive Chinese labor. To put an end to the cycles of violence, a group of these employers
purchased a tract of land on the south side of the Truckee River, facing the town proper, but
outside the legal city limits.
169
There, they said, the Chinese community would be safe.
So long as the fragile peace held, white business owners could continue to profit off of
their Chinese employees. As in many other Western towns, Chinese labor helped to patch over
the gender imbalance in the community. Many Chinese men took on jobs that would be
“properly” filled by white women in more developed, urban spaces. Chinese cooks worked in
hotels and restaurants across Truckee. Between cooks, servers, and grocers, many a meal in
Truckee had at some point passed through Chinese hands. Many other immigrants found
employment as woodcutters, chopping and splitting the smaller or undesirable trees left behind
by timber loggers for use as firewood.
170
Proponents of white labor maligned these workers as
lethargic opium addicts capable of doing only a third the work of an “industrious white man.”
171

But for local companies, the price was right. A few Chinatown residents went into business for
themselves, catering both to white customers and their fellow Chinese. A series of prominent
Chinese-owned laundry services operated in town, including the Truckee Laundry and the
Pacific Laundry, under proprietors Wau Lee and Hong Woh.
172
White men largely dismissed
laundry as a quintessentially female task but thought it an appropriate job for the “effeminate”

168
Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (New York: Random House, 2007),
167.
169
Truckee Donner Historical Society, Fire & Ice, 72.
170
“Tahoe and Donner,” Truckee Republican, November 19, 1881.
171
“Chinese Wood-choppers,” Truckee Republican, October 29, 1881.
172
Advertisement for Truckee Laundry, Truckee Republican, September 11, 1875; Advertisement for Pacific
Laundry, Truckee Republican, August 27, 1881.

77
Chinese. Chinese launderers, who cared little for Anglo-American ideas about gendered labor,
found an opportunity for financial independence within the field of “feminized” work.
Businesses like Lee’s and Woh’s thrived.
Of all Truckee’s workplaces, the ice ponds employed the fewest Chinese immigrants.
Over the years, a few Chinese worked for the ice companies in auxiliary roles, particularly as
cooks, but Chinese are absent from the written and photographic records of the men who cut the
ice itself. The reason for this absence is not so clear as in the case of Washoe icemen, however.
Racism was undoubtedly a prime factor. Ice company foremen likely viewed Chinese laborers as
deficient in the strength and endurance required of icemen. Language barriers, too, could have
been a concern. On the ice pond, miscommunication could be deadly. Poor English skills would
have been a plausible reason to pass over Chinese workers, even if the same issue was ignored
when hiring European immigrants. Additionally, since employees lived in bunkhouses on site,
American and European icemen may have balked at sharing space with Chinese cohorts.
To ascribe the lack of Chinese icemen entirely to racism, though, deprives the Chinese of
agency. True, Chinese workers across the American West took more dangerous positions and
worked for lower pay than their white counterparts. But as the Chinese laundrymen demonstrate,
Chinese immigrants were also savvy operators within an economy stacked against them. Chinese
laborers in Truckee had a distinct advantage over the seasonal migrant workers in that they had
permanent homes in the area and could therefore be choosier about their work without the risk of
being unhoused in the middle of a Sierra winter. Jobs filled by Chinese paid less than working on
the ice, but provided greater flexibility, better working conditions, or both. Positions as cooks or
launderers continued year-round and kept workers warm and dry. Woodchoppers worked
through the winter as well, but had to face the elements, although not to the same extremes as

78
icemen, for whom temperatures below zero were considered prime weather. Furthermore, the
pay schedules differed between the two industries. Icemen were paid by the day but only
received their wages when the work was complete, as much as two weeks later. Laborers hired to
chop firewood were instead paid by the cord. Firms like Truckee’s Sisson, Wallace, & Co., one
of the largest employers of Chinese in the region, bid on contracts to deliver a certain amount of
wood, then hired Chinese laborers to fill them. In November 1881, as the weather turned colder
but before winter had truly set in, hundreds of Chinese men cut wood along the shores of Donner
Lake for a paycheck of $1.35 per cord.
173
Cutting and splitting a cord of wood could take an
efficient worker a full day, so the woodchoppers’ pay lagged well behind that of the icemen
making two or three dollars daily. What the Chinese woodcutters gained in this arrangement was
independence. They could work as much or as little as they pleased in a day and continue their
work throughout the winter season, as opposed to the rigid constraints set on icemen by company
foremen and the weather. Chinese workers, despite being looked down on by white labor, often
had something the itinerant jobseekers who manned the ice ponds lacked: options. Although their
place in the community was never secure, the Chinese of the Truckee Basin drew upon their
persistence and flexibility to make a living in the midst of a hostile environment.

“The Great Work”: Icemen and Chinese Expulsion in Truckee
The winter of 1885-1886 stands out in the history of Truckee’s ice industry as one in
which tensions lying beneath the region’s growth and prosperity came to a head. The year is
indicative without being representative: no other ice season was quite like it, but it brings the
intertwined conflicts of labor, race, and environment into focus. It was easily the most eventful

173
“Tahoe and Donner,” Truckee Republican, November 19, 1881.

79
winter since the Central Pacific reached the summit in 1867 and a turning point in the history of
the community. Existing histories fail to connect the state of the ice industry that winter to the
upheaval in Truckee. Bad weather did not create a racist purge in the Sierra Nevada, but the
stresses of unemployment, mounting delays, and falling profits helped to fuel the anti-Chinese
movement. An acute employment crisis, combined with simmering racial resentment, ignited in
one of the West’s largest anti-Chinese actions.
In 1885, a successful summer had emptied the local ice houses.
174
Strong sales meant
higher profits, but also left the ice companies without a reserve of ice to fall back on should the
winter harvest be less than ideal. The pressure was on to replenish the supply, particularly at the
Summit Ice Company at Prosser Creek and the Mountain Ice Company at Cuba where
superintendents James McDonald and John Nagle had allocated the summer’s income for
expansion and improvement to ponds and storehouses. Prosser Creek alone boasted three
immense ice houses with a combined capacity of 22,000 tons.
175
Both companies needed to see
fruitful seasons to justify their investment. By November, the ice enterprises throughout the
Truckee Basin were united in impatience and expectation. Temporary workers began to trickle
into town as local icemen completed their pre-season tasks. Early indications seemed promising.
The Republican reported “heavy frosts, icicles, and thin sheets of ice” already forming and
speculated that the first week of December would see four hundred men at work on the ice.
176
All
that remained was to wait and watch the skies.
Within days of the Republican’s prediction, however, the weather delivered a stern
rebuttal to the notion of an early and productive start to the ice season. The first real storm of the

174
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, November 14, 1885.
175
“Improvements at Camp 20,” Truckee Republican, September 23, 1885; “At Prosser Creek,” Truckee
Republican, October 14, 1885.
176
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, November 14, 1885; “The Ice Crop,” Truckee Republican, November 14, 1885.

80
winter dropped six inches of snow on the region, sinking the growing ice—still too thin to hold a
man’s weight—beneath the surface of the water and ruining it.
177
The remainder of the month
was a cycle of clear, cold days that raised the icemen’s hopes and wet, stormy ones that dashed
them again. James McDonald summarized the protracted battle: “Ice formed to a depth of two
inches prior to the first fall of snow. The pond was promptly cleared, and when the ice was an
inch thick, another storm buried it and rendered it worthless. Again, the ice formed, and again the
snow came. At present there is about half an inch of good ice on the pond, and unless the storm
continues, the ice harvest will commence with the first days of December.”
178
Since the ice was
spoiled before it could be walked on, rather than clearing the snow from the surface, icemen
instead had to sluice out the existing ice and slush. A small section of irregular ice would disrupt
the formation of the ice sheet and the resulting ice would not be clear or solid, with unpredictable
pockets and weak spots. The entire pond, then, needed to be clear before refreezing. By the first
of December, ice crews had been at work and drawing salaries for weeks, but the companies had
no ice in their houses to show for it. Instead of having an efficient season, they were already
behind.
Meanwhile, frustrations mounted in town as well. The rebuilding of Chinatown on the far
side of the river in 1878 had cooled but not extinguished the racial strife in Truckee. Over the
following years, hostilities built up again, bolstered by the growing anti-Chinese movement
across California. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, ostensibly a solution to the
“Chinese Question,” further exacerbated the problem. Californians did not just want a ban on
further Chinese immigrants entering the country, they wanted the Chinese already in their midst
driven out. One of the most fervent anti-Chinese crusaders in the Sierra Nevada also happened to

177
“The Snow,” Truckee Republican, November 18, 1885.
178
“The Ice Crop,” Truckee Republican, November 28, 1885.

81
have one of the largest platforms from which to make his appeals: Charles F. McGlashan,
lawyer, leading citizen of Truckee, and publisher of its only newspaper, the Truckee Republican.
Anti-Chinese screeds appeared constantly in the Republican, frequently paired with
exhortations to attend community meetings and coordinate local efforts. One article, published in
mid-November as heavy snows once again delayed the ice harvest, spelled out the perceived
connection between Chinese employment and white poverty: “There are more Chinamen at work
in this region at present than at any time since the completion of the railroad. About one
thousand will find steady employment during this entire winter in the Truckee basin. Several
hundred white men will be idle in consequence, and their wives and children will have scant
food and clothing. This used to be a white man’s country, but it is fast becoming the property of
the Chinaman.”
179
The jobs held by Chinese laborers, as discussed above, were largely chopping
firewood or performing domestic tasks—jobs that the white men of Truckee, both migrant and
resident, felt to be below them. These positions paid poverty wages, half that of a job with the ice
companies, and not nearly enough for a man to support a family on. But the reality of the
situation could not compare to the imagery: Chinese men at work while white men idled, locked
out of well-paying “white man’s work” by capricious storms. This enraged McGlashan and he
used the pages of his paper to stir up the same feeling in his neighbors. “The Chinese should be
made to know,” he wrote, “that this State of California is not sufficiently large to accommodate
them.”
180

But if the solution to Truckee’s woes—expelling the Chinese—was clear to McGlashan
and his compatriots, the methods by which to achieve victory were not. A campaign of murder
was out of the question, but only because “it would embarrass the average Californian to have to

179
“The Expulsion of the Chinese,” Truckee Republican, November 18, 1885.
180
“The Expulsion of the Chinese,” Truckee Republican, November 18, 1885.

82
murder any considerable number of Chinamen” and “the blood of a Chinaman would stain one’s
hands just like the blood of a more human being.”
181
On the evening of December 5, 1885,
McGlashan organized the largest anti-Chinese meeting yet seen in Truckee with the purpose of
drafting a plan for the entire town to follow. The day had been a cold one, cold enough to hearten
the icemen and disperse some of the “tramps” who loitered around town waiting for work.
182
The
large crowd assembled in the hall that night included men from across the social classes of
Truckee. By McGlashan’s side as organizers were prominent citizens of the town: dry goods
merchant J. L. Lewison, grocer Hamlet Davis, teacher and school principal S. A. Bulfinch, and
county supervisor H. L. Day. But packed inside to listen were also dozens of men who were out
of a job and increasingly desperate. The difficulty of obtaining a job in the area dominated the
discussion and was leveled as the primary charge against the Chinese population. Those in
attendance told stories of applying for jobs at companies that employed Chinese labor, “offering
to take the place of any of the numerous Chinamen employed, do as much work as the
Chinaman, and more, if possible, and to accept the wages which the Chinaman received” only to
be refused.
183
Only a half dozen men profited from the presence of Chinese workers in the town,
they argued, and “temperate,” “industrious,” and “deserving” workingmen would suffer until the
last of them was removed.
184
To this end, the members of the meeting passed a resolution by
popular acclamation:
Resolved, That it is the sense of this meeting that not only the interests of the laboring
men, but those of the entire community, demand that all individuals, companies or
corporations should discharge any and all Chinamen in their employ by January 1
st
, 1886,
and refuse thereafter to give them work of any kind.
185

181
“If the Chinese Don’t Go,” Truckee Republican, November 21, 1885.
182
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, December 5, 1885.
183
“The Mass Meeting,” Truckee Republican, December 5, 1885.
184
“The Mass Meeting,” Truckee Republican, December 5, 1885.
185
“The Anti-Chinese Meeting,” Truckee Republican, December 9, 1885.

83
Certain leaders of the movement feared that, despite the high-minded discrimination
professed at the meeting, some in their midst might employ more violent methods. J. L. Lewison
argued that it was the duty of the “better class of citizens”—of which he was one—to set an
example by taking an interest in the cause and firing the Chinese workers they employed.
McGlashan concurred. “Driving [the Chinese out],” he said, “does not necessarily imply
violence.”
186
By freezing the Chinese out of employment, boycotting the businesses that refused
to discharge their Chinese workers, and immediately enforcing all debts owed by Chinese
residents, the town could secure a bloodless victory over what they considered an occupying
force.
Midway through the meeting, a German man unknown to any native Truckee citizens
took to the podium at the urging of those in the crowd around him. He began by apologizing for
his poor English, but his energy and humor captivated the audience. He voiced his firm support
for the proposed plan and descended from the stage to applause. The warm reception afforded to
this man, evidently an immigrant and a stranger to the community, illustrates the degree to which
the anti-Chinese movement in Truckee was a matter of racial animosity. No one in the assembly
blamed him for taking a job from a native-born American, nor did they deride him for his shaky
grasp of English or use it as evidence of an inability to assimilate. By virtue of his whiteness, the
German was accepted as one of the “temperate” and “deserving” workingmen, the “bone and
sinew of Truckee,” as one speaker put it, despite his outsider status.
187
The tenuous ties of
fraternity between the diverse laboring men of Truckee, previously never quite strong enough to
promote collective action, finally solidified around the goal of ethnic cleansing.

186
“The Anti-Chinese Meeting,” Truckee Republican, December 9, 1885.
187
“The Anti-Chinese Meeting,” Truckee Republican, December 9, 1885.

84
The citizens of Truckee entered their meeting on the night of December 5, 1885 sure of
their aim, but unsure of their methods. They left the meeting with a plan and a deadline. By
January 1, less than a month’s time, all those still employing Chinese labor were to discharge
them and the Chinese, having no other option, would leave town. “If the Chinamen cannot get
work and earn wages,” read one post-meeting report, “they will speedily shake the snows of
Truckee from their feet and seek new pastures.”
188
The “or else” was only implied, but the tone
and fervor of the meeting made it clear enough, despite McGlashan and his fellow “better class”
of Truckeeites claiming they wanted to avoid violence.
In the final weeks of 1885, amid holiday festivities, the members of the anti-Chinese
movement—growing every day—acted with new purpose. Delegations met with business
owners to request that they sever ties with Chinese workers and replace them with whites. Those
who refused swiftly found themselves called out in the press and dogged by the newly minted
activists. If peaceful negotiations did not suffice, McGlashan warned in the Republican, then the
laboring men who languished without jobs would demand “more violent and less lawful
remedies.”
189
Whether this was a grim prediction or an active threat against the more reluctant
businessmen is unclear, but this type of rhetoric worked. One committee paid visits to each of the
town’s hotels to ask the proprietors if they would join the cause and release their Chinese
workers and reported their answers in the paper:
T. B. Whitney of the American House, answered promptly, “Yes; I will discharge them
tomorrow, if you say so.” James Sherritt of the Sherritt House, replied: “I sent below for
white cooks last night.” Stewart McKay answered: “Of course I will. I will let them out
sooner, if I can get white men to take their places.” W. H. Hurd was interviewed, and
said: “I made up my mind, at the meeting last night, to let my Chinamen go. They will be
out within three days.”
190

188
“An Appeal to Neighbors,” Truckee Republican, December 9, 1885.
189
“An Appeal to Neighbors,” Truckee Republican, December 9, 1885.
190
“They Are Going,” Truckee Republican, December 12, 1885.

85
Their efforts met with similar success all over Truckee. Between cooks, laundrymen,
woodcutters, and other positions, Truckee business owners pledged to discharge a total of forty-
five Chinese laborers. Some even offered to pay new white employees more than they had been
paying the Chinese. It was a strong showing for only a week of concerted activism, but it wasn’t
enough. A group tasked with gathering the names and trades of Truckee’s unemployed
workingmen had found eighty-three in that time and their census was not yet complete. A mass
exodus of Chinese would ease but not solve the problem of unemployment. The promise that
Truckee would become a utopia for white labor as soon as the Chinese had been expelled had
made many converts to the cause, but the cracks were starting to show.
The beginning of the ice harvesting season could have provided a safety valve, offering
good pay to hundreds of workers while keeping increasingly restless men off the streets of
Truckee, if only the weather had cooperated. Superintendent John Nagle from the Mountain Ice
Company at Cuba reported eight inches of ice on his ponds on December 16.
191
The weather had
been cold enough to freeze the water to that extent, but the temperature had trended upward over
the previous nights. At eight inches, the ice was thick enough for cutting, but it would be a sorry
crop. Thinner blocks melted more quickly, leading to more loss during storage and shipping. The
ice company bosses had to decide: should they keep the icehouses empty a bit longer and hope
for the best or fill them with a lower quality product? With most of the winter still ahead, this
was a compromise Nagle and his peers across the Truckee Basin were unwilling to make.
Instead, they would hold out at least another week to allow the ice sheets time to thicken. At
Prosser Creek, James McDonald was as optimistic as ever. Chances of a good harvest remained
“excellent,” he said, providing no more storms rolled in.
192
In the meantime, McDonald had

191
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, December 16, 1885.
192
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, December 16, 1885.

86
joined the anti-Chinese cause and pledged to release the Chinese working in support roles at the
ice works. When the time finally came to cut ice, the job would be done by a team of all white
labor from top to bottom.
Back in Truckee, activism and agitation continued, but despite the rapid progress being
made, the mood around town had begun to sour. The anti-Chinese forces looked on their
opposition—both the Chinese themselves and the white “Chinese lovers”—with increasing
suspicion. All around them, they began to see evidence of conspiracies. Two cases of Winchester
rifles had appeared in Chinatown, some whispered, but whether they were for defense or a
preemptive strike—or indeed existed at all—no one could say.
193
The Chinese stoked the fires of
mistrust by claiming to have detectives across the river in town and promised that should there
be any outbreak of violence, troops would be dispatched to Truckee to keep the peace.
194
From
the earliest days of the movement, McGlashan made it clear that if the movement descended into
riots, arson, and murder, then intervention by federal forces would not be far behind.
195
The
federal government, in his opinion, was too sympathetic to the resident Chinese and would put a
stop to the crusade. The prospect that troops might descend on the small mountain town of
Truckee to keep the peace and defend Chinese immigrants is slightly farfetched and the notion
that it would be the Chinese themselves who called in the occupying force is even more so.
Regardless, McGlashan and his fellow organizers took the threat seriously enough to stress a
perfect adherence to law and order among their subordinates, writing, “there need be no
bloodshed or violence in clearing the vermin out of the Truckee Basin.”
196
As the January 1

193
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, December 16, 1885.
194
“The Anti-Chinese Agitation,” Truckee Republican, December 16, 1885.
195
“If the Chinese Don’t Go,” Truckee Republican, November 21, 1885. Reprisal from the government of California
(e.g., the dispatching of the state militia) seems not to have been a concern, likely given wide acceptance of the anti-
Chinese movement across the state.
196
“Lawful Means,” Truckee Republican, December 19, 1885.

87
deadline grew nearer, the members of the movement took on the mantle of the law themselves. A
newly appointed safety committee pledged vigilant enforcement of laws pertaining to gambling
and opium smoking.
197
Constant patrols against vice in Chinatown amounted to legally
sanctioned harassment of Truckee’s Chinese population with the explicit admission that the
increased scrutiny was intended to drive them out. “More Chinamen will be driven from town in
a single week by the enforcement of the law than other means would drive away in a month,”
read the article announcing the committee’s formation.
198
While maintaining the cover of “law
and order,” pretenses of secrecy or subtlety were abandoned. Open surveillance and targeted
persecution of the Chinese community were to be the final push that would ensure all Chinese
departed by the new year.
The end of 1885 and the beginning of 1886 inspired little hope in Truckee. Christmas had
come to the Sierra Nevada unseasonably warm, melting the small amount of ice already
formed.
199
With no ice left on the ponds or sitting in the icehouses, the new year found the
icemen back at square one, waiting and watching the skies. Men hoping for work continued to
skulk around town with little to do until the ice companies put out the call. Across the river,
Chinatown ought to have been abandoned in concordance with the January 1 evacuation
deadline, but some Chinese laborers still remained. The mercantile business recently reorganized
as Sisson, Crocker, & Co. had so far refused to cancel its contracts with Chinese woodcutters
who continued to live and work in Truckee. These developments caused some dismay and
frustration among the anti-Chinese contingent, but the real excitement began when the morning

197
“Gambling and Opium,” Truckee Republican, December 30, 1885.
198
“Gambling and Opium,” Truckee Republican, December 30, 1885.
199
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, December 30, 1885.

88
express train dropped off two large crates addressed to a Chinese resident named Tuck Chung.
Packed inside were Winchester rifles.
200

What had been only a rumor previously had just appeared in the train depot for all to see.
The Chinese remnant was armed, that much was clear. But the confirmation of weapons among
the Chinese raised further questions: How many guns did they have? How willing were they to
resort to violence? And, most importantly to the anti-Chinese faction, were whites helping to arm
the Chinese? Business owners who employed Chinese laborers had both the funds and the
motive to help funnel guns to Chinatown. They needed the Chinese workforce to remain and
guns would better enable the Chinese to resist expulsion from Truckee. But arming the Chinese
risked sparking a firestorm. The anti-Chinese party had, at McGlashan’s urging, remained non-
violent so far, but if shooting began, all hell was sure to break loose.
The first weeks of January 1886 brought a reversal of that winter’s status quo. For the
first time, the ice industry made headway while the anti-Chinese movement stalled. Clear days
and cold nights at last allowed the ice sheets to grow half an inch or more each night.
201
The ice
at Prosser Creek reached fourteen inches, more than enough for harvesting. Superintendent
McDonald put out the call for workers in Truckee, which was answered with gusto. It was during
this week that McDonald provided breakfast for over one hundred men who came to Prosser
looking for work. Those whom he did not hire would have to wait a bit longer as the other ice
companies were not quite ready to begin cutting. Even so, John Nagle could not resist singing the
praises of his growing crop at Cuba, professing it to be “so clear that the stones can be counted
on the bottom of the pond, or a newspaper can be read through a block of ice.”
202
Nagle,

200
“Chinese Winchesters,” Truckee Republican, January 2, 1886.
201
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, January 6, 1886.
202
“Ice at Cuba,” Truckee Republican, January 6, 1886.

89
McDonald, and especially the migrant laborers who had congregated in Truckee since November
had reason to be glad. At long last, wrote the Republican, “there will be plenty of work and good
wages during the next two weeks.”
203
Within days, over three hundred men—nearly all of the
previously unemployed—could be found on ice ponds all along the Truckee River.
204
Their
window of opportunity had finally opened. They were not going to waste it.
With so many men out of town and at work on the ice, the streets of Truckee were far
quieter than they had been. While the laboring men worked, the local elites who had spearheaded
the anti-Chinese agitation directed their efforts toward their most intractable opposition. Only
two major businesses still refused to fire their Chinese employees. Sisson, Crocker, & Co. had
been in the movement’s sights from the beginning but remained committed to fulfilling their
firewood contracts with Chinese labor. The Truckee Sawmill also still retained its Chinese
workers, but owner Elle Ellen lay confined to his bed with pneumonia and could not be
negotiated with. In response, the committee, under McGlashan’s leadership of course, instituted
a new tactic in the war against immigrant labor. He called for “all who sympathize with the anti-
Chinese movement, whithersoever dispersed” to boycott not only both firms, but any businesses
whose owners did not themselves join the boycott.
205
McGlashan, who knew firsthand the power
of the press, telegraphed the declaration of the boycott to newspapers across the Pacific Coast.
206

Since so much of the wood cut by these companies was exported for sale elsewhere in the West,
the boycott needed widespread support. The final battle in his anti-Chinese crusade would be
fought as much in Los Angeles and San Francisco as in Truckee. Regardless, McGlashan was
confident the end was in view. He proposed a “grand celebration and torchlight procession” to

203
“The Ice Crop,” Truckee Republican, January 6, 1886.
204
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, January 9, 1886; “Brevities,” Truckee Republican, January 13, 1886.
205
“Boycott Them,” Truckee Republican, January 20, 1886.
206
“How It Was Done,” Truckee Republican, January 30, 1886.

90
commemorate the “grand victories which the citizens have achieved in the anti-Chinese cause by
the use of lawful means,” declaring victory even before announcing the boycott that was to win
the war.
207
The vision of Truckee as a white labor utopia seemed to be within reach—certainly
the hundreds of men on the ice ponds seemed like evidence of prosperity to come. But, for one
final time, the Sierra winter roared in to quash premature celebrations.
In Truckee, summer fortunes and summer comfort depended on winter work. Work was
steady bordering on frantic when the ice companies finally commenced harvesting in mid-
January. In a better year, the January crop would have joined a previous one already stored away
in the icehouses, but the winter of 1885-1886 had been “phenominal” (sic), even in the judgment
of Truckee’s most experienced icemen.
208
A second cutting in February or even March would
normally be an option, but any confidence in what the weather would bring in the coming
months had evaporated. Therefore, the companies’ hopes for the coming year rested on the
harvest in progress. If that crop fell short, California might enter an “ice famine,” in which “ice
will be comparatively scarce and very high [in price] during the summer of 1886.”
209
To run out
of ice in the middle of summer would be an unmitigated disaster for the ice companies, an
expensive inconvenience to consumers, and a prime opportunity for new artificial ice plants to
expand their market share. Whether for good or for ill, the summer’s outcome would be decided
in January.
Halfway through the long-awaited harvest, beginning on January 16, the biggest storm in
years brought four days of unrelenting snow, which amounted to over three full feet.
210

McGlashan had to postpone his torchlight jubilee, but he took the change in stride, remarking

207
“The Good Work,” Truckee Republican, January 13, 1886.
208
“The Sierra Icemen,” Truckee Republican, January 16, 1886.
209
“The Sierra Icemen,” Truckee Republican, January 16, 1886.
210
“The Storm,” Truckee Republican, January 20, 1886.

91
that a delay of a week or two would “witness the final exclusion of the Chinese” and make the
celebration all the more joyous.
211
The icemen found the storm far more threatening. Clearing
snow off of an uncut pond required many hands and round-the-clock work, but the burden could
be eased somewhat with mechanical scrapers and horses to pull them with. A pond in the process
of being harvested, especially when faced with that much snow in so little time, was a very
different situation. Free-floating pieces of ice were much more difficult to scrape snow from and
likely to sink beneath the water’s surface if the snow grew too heavy, clogging the channels
through which cakes of ice were floated. The urgency of the fight is reflected in the Republican’s
reporting. In a brief piece titled, “Fighting Snow,” the paper praises the icemen’s “heroic”
efforts. A second paragraph is appended to the column as it appears in print, reading, “Later:
Since the above was in type, the ice has sunk at Prosser Creek, and work has ceased at Martis
Creek. A rainstorm set in this afternoon, and the creeks will probably rise and ruin the ice at most
of the ponds.”
212
All was not yet lost, but the seeds of a summer ice famine were sown.
At the height of the efforts to fight back against the blizzard, the icemen employed by the
People’s Ice Company at Cuba banded together and made an unprecedented stand. They laid
down their shovels and went on strike when their labor was needed the most. The People’s Ice
Company, alone among ice companies by late January, still employed a Chinese cook and the
twenty-six men battling the snow would not abide it any longer. They did not demand better pay
or more favorable hours, despite their numb hands and aching bodies. The immediate firing of
the Chinese cook was their only aim. The strikers picked their moment well. Workers could be
replaced, but new ones would have to be recruited in Truckee and brought to Cuba by train, with
snow falling all the while. A day-long delay could doom the ice crop. Superintendent Hale was

211
“Probable Postponement,” Truckee Republican, January 20, 1886.
212
“Fighting Snow,” Truckee Republican, January 20, 1886.

92
forced to acquiesce to his workers’ demand. Within half an hour, the cook had been fired, a
replacement appointed, and the men took their places on the pond once more.
213

Tireless work and a long overdue shift in the weather saved the ice crop. Labor costs,
after factoring in the false starts and near-disasters would be higher than usual, but at least there
would be ice in the houses to ship out that summer. Finally, Truckee and the ice industry fell into
the familiar winter rhythm. Merchants and saloon keepers, perhaps not used to seeing abandoned
streets after so long, complained that business was “very dull” with so many men at work, but
knew that as they returned, their pockets full, Truckee would assume “her proverbial prosperity
again.”
214
A small delegation of icemen went up to Truckee for the Saturday night anti-Chinese
meeting to lend their voices in support on behalf of their fellow workers and to request that the
torchlight procession be delayed just a bit longer. The icemen, they said, were anxious to join the
celebration and add their numbers to the growing ranks.
215
McGlashan and the committee readily
agreed to the change. The icemen were exactly the kind of worker the anti-Chinese movement
purported to be fighting for and episodes like the People’s Ice Company strike had made their
commitment to the struggle clear. They had more than earned their place in the jubilee. The date
was set for February 13 and the Republican urged its readers: “Get your torches ready and train
up your lungs to shout hosannas, that Truckee is rid of the damnable pagan.”
216

An early spring came to the Sierra Nevada the week of the torchlight procession. With
the ice crop already cut and stored away, the people of Truckee were free to revel in the “warm
and balmy” weather.
217
To those in the anti-Chinese movement, it must have seemed as if the

213
“Strike at Cuba,” Truckee Republican, January 23, 1886.
214
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, January 30, 1886.
215
“The Torchlight,” Truckee Republican, January 30, 1886.
216
“The Torchlight Procession,” Truckee Republican, February 3, 1886.
217
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, February 10, 1886.

93
earth itself was joining them in celebration. Icemen returning to town after their work was
concluded set about looking for new jobs. Many of them stepped into the void left by Chinese
woodcutters as Sisson, Crocker, & Co. finally relented to public demand and sent away their
workers.
218
Few residents still remained in Chinatown. Those who could afford train tickets
packed their things and left by the dozens. Those without funds came to the anti-Chinese
committee with a bargain. They would leave Truckee and never return in exchange for train
passes and fifty dollars each. The idea that the Chinese were in any position to barter evoked
only derision in the committee members. “The Chinamen shall not receive a dollar’s wages from
any white man,” they concluded, “and those who are too poor to ride out of town can walk.”
219

Although the committee was unwilling to fund the Chinese laborers’ departure, the appeal
represented a final capitulation. The stragglers would leave town as they were able—or as
hunger and fear dictated. White labor had won. The “Great Work,” as McGlashan often called it,
was over. All that remained was to celebrate.
On the night of February 13, Truckee was awash in firelight, flickering off the dwindling
snowbanks. The whole region had come. James McDonald led the delegation from Prosser Creek
and the denizens of Boca chartered a special train so that their whole families could attend.
220

Bonfires burned in the town square and from the mountaintops while lamps and candles shone
from windows. At 8 o’clock, over four hundred men, torches aloft, began their procession
through the streets, “all enthusiastic, all eager to do something to relieve the exuberance of their
joy at the promise of the speedy expulsion of the remaining Chinese… It was a season of

218
“Brevities,” Truckee Republican, February 10, 1886; “Boycott Raised,” Truckee Republican, February 13, 1886.
219
“Impoverished Chinamen,” Truckee Republican, February 13, 1886.
220
“They Are Coming,” Truckee Republican, February 10, 1886. “Brevities,” Truckee Republican, February 13,
1886.

94
rejoicing.”
221
The fire wagon rolled along with them, draped in a banner that read, “Organized to
Protect White Men’s Property.” Other standards proclaimed, “Our Next Governor, C. F.
McGlashan, White Labor’s Champion” and “A Peaceful Victory; Veni, Vidi, Vici.”
222
The
jubilant citizens of Truckee shouted themselves hoarse and reveled deep into the night. When the
fires finally burned low, they staggered home and “slept sounder and sweeter for the labor of
rejoicing, for the harmonious conduct of the evening, and the general gratification felt at the
close. The end came at last.”
223

The grand jubilee that illuminated the mountains that night was ostensibly a celebration
of victory against the Chinese in the Truckee Basin, but truly stands for a wider achievement: the
victory of capitalist control over the Chinese and the environment alike. The mountains had been
conquered and the natural resources of the Sierra Nevada converted into exportable goods. The
railroad and the industries that made Truckee only existed through the labor of the Chinese, but
that labor and those laborers were erased that night. The torchlight celebration wrote a new
history of Truckee and the Sierra Nevada—one in which the mountains never posed a deadly
threat, where the railroad always made travel and trade possible, and where white men faced no
challenge to their control. The new Truckee was to be a place where white Americans could find
good paying jobs without immigrant competition and city dwellers could find rest and relaxation
among mountain vistas. The region’s Native peoples, its Chinese population, and even the
pioneers of the Donner Party had no place in the new vision of the Sierra Nevada. The story that
had been so important in the narrative of California’s history when the railroad first ascended the
mountains, so much so that the people of Truckee repeatedly petitioned to have their county

221
“The Illumination,” Truckee Republican, February 17, 1886.
222
“The Illumination,” Truckee Republican, February 17, 1886.
223
“The Illumination,” Truckee Republican, February 17, 1886.

95
renamed from “Nevada” to “Donner,” had slipped into irrelevancy. The very site of the tragedy
on Donner Lake went unacknowledged until a massive memorial cross was erected by the new
landowners—the Donner Ice Company.
224
The bitter cold that had destroyed the Donners was
now being packed and shipped for export across California. Capitalist modernity had taken root
in the mountains and even the winter was for sale.

224
“Donner Ice Co. Erected New Cross,” Truckee Republican, July 28, 1906.

96
Chapter 3
Creating an Urban Coldscape

Thomas Guinean, proprietor of the Arcade Hotel in Sacramento, fancied himself an
inventor as well as a hotelier. Not content to win accolades for his hospitality alone, he brought
his latest creation to the 1879 California State Fair for judgment by the public. Built of varnished
redwood, “Guinean’s Universal Refrigerator” was no mere kitchen ice box—it stood eight feet
high, eight feet wide, and six feet deep. Lined with metal, the inside was divided into two
sections, “the bottom one being intended for the preservation of articles by cold air without ice,
while in the upper chamber an ice box will contain about 500 pounds of the cooling material.”
225

The refrigerator’s size was novel, but Guinean’s true innovation was hidden within the cabinet’s
walls. In addition to packing the space between the wood exterior and the metal interior with
insulating charcoal, Guinean had installed “air chambers in the top, bottom, back, front, and
sides, all arranged ingeniously and with taps to carry off gases that may accumulate.”
226
It looked
impressive, both in scale and in craftsmanship. But how well would it function?
Guinean believed his refrigerator was the finest ever created and sought to prove it with a
bold public experiment. “I claim,” he wrote in the pages of the Sacramento Daily Union, “that
meats, fish or any perishable article placed in it can be kept for an unlimited period. The
refrigerator is constantly filled with cold air, and I can warrant that any meats, vegetables, or
fruits placed in my refrigerator will keep in a perfectly fresh state even if transported a distance
of ten thousand miles.”
227
After the opening of the fair, Guinean invited attendees to bring any
perishables they desired to place into his creation, removing the possibility of any deception or
contrivance. Under the close supervision of H. M. LaRue, president of the State Board of

225
“A New Refrigerator,” Sacramento Daily Union, August 30, 1879.
226
“A New Refrigerator,” Sacramento Daily Union, August 30, 1879.
227
“Guinean’s Universal Refrigerator,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 2, 1879.

97
Agriculture, members of the crowd stocked the refrigerator’s shelves with a variety of foodstuffs
while Guinean loaded the upper chamber with ice and sealed the cabinet tightly. Through a full
week of late summer heat, crowds of fairgoers stopped to gawk at “the sealed room,” as the
Sacramento papers dubbed it.
228
The exterior of the refrigerator gave little hint as to what was
going on inside. The doorframe, lined with rubber, allowed no cold air to escape. One small
drainpipe gently dripping water was the only indication of any change underway within the
chamber.
Finally, on the evening of September 13, the closing day of the fair, a large and excited
crowd gathered around the refrigerator awaiting the grand reveal.
229
Mister LaRue was again on
hand to do the honors of unsealing the door, but all those present were cast as judges, given “full
opportunity to examine the fresh vegetables, meats, and fruits” locked within the week prior.
230

If Guinean’s refrigerator had failed, no close examination would be necessary. The smell of
decay from the chamber would make everyone in the pavilion all too aware of the state of the
food inside. A correspondent of the Daily Union narrated the moment of truth:
When the doors were thrown open the beef and the mutton were brought out, and found
to be perfectly sweet and good, and just as fit for the table as when put in. The same was
true of the undrawn fowls. The peaches were as plump and sweet and fresh as when first
deposited in the refrigerator; so, too, of the vegetables… The ice chest had been packed
with 500 pounds of ice, of which only 250 pounds had melted… This is a perfectly fair
statement of the test of the great refrigerator and proves it to be a complete success and
squarely up to the mark in all things claimed for it.
231

Of all the refrigerator’s contents, only a bottle of milk had spoiled. The chamber had not been
properly prepared to accommodate milk, explained Guinean, but he insisted that milk could stay

228
“The Sealed Room,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 10, 1879.
229
“The Demonstration,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 15, 1879.
230
“The Proof of the Pudding,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 13, 1879.
231
“The Demonstration,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 15, 1879.

98
fresh in his invention if packed correctly. Notwithstanding that one bottle of sour milk, the
demonstration had been a success.
Guinean immediately accepted a contract with one of California’s richest men,
millionaire investor E. J. “Lucky” Baldwin, to install a refrigerator inside Baldwin’s luxury hotel
in San Francisco.
232
The Baldwin Hotel refrigerator was to be even larger than the one Guinean
showed at the fair, measuring twenty-four feet long, twelve feet high, and ten feet wide—seven
times the volume of the original.
233
The cost to construct the refrigerator and then keep it stocked
with ice would be enormous, but to Baldwin, money was no object. His palatial hotel deserved
an equally impressive refrigerator, certain to be the largest and most advanced on the West
Coast. For his part, Guinean stood to profit not only from the installation itself, but from the
association with Baldwin. His more modest Arcade Hotel could advertise that it had a
refrigerator on the same model as the elite Baldwin Hotel. By the beginning of 1880, the
Arcade’s refrigerator and the culinary wonders it made possible featured prominently in
advertisements for the hotel.
234
Through the lavish banquets and elegant parties he hosted,
Guinean made it clear to his guests that mastery of the cold was not an optional enhancement to a
hotel’s hospitality, but a necessary component of refinement and modernity.
Hoteliers like Guinean and Baldwin were among the many business owners who sought
to create refrigerated spaces—fixed locations, purpose-built for keeping things cold for long
periods—within Western cities. Only a few years prior, designing a commercial refrigerator that
required hundreds or thousands of pounds of ice to operate would have been pointless. Sourcing

232
“The Universal Refrigerator,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 16, 1879.
233
“Guinean’s Celebrated Refrigerator,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 2, 1879. The size of the ice hopper for
the Baldwin Hotel model is unknown, but it probably had a capacity over 2000 pounds (one ton) and likely much
more.
234
“The Arcade Hotel,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 1, 1880.

99
enough ice to consistently cool even a small household ice box could be challenging. When ice
was available, it was generally plentiful, but moments of abundance alternated with shortages
that could last weeks. With the arrival of the transcontinental railroad over the Sierra Nevada and
the development of a homegrown ice industry, however, interruptions in the supply of ice
became far less common. The 1870s saw rapid growth and increasingly advanced infrastructure
among the ice companies of the Truckee Basin, ensuring near-constant availability of ice. At the
same time, entrepreneurs began importing machines for making ice artificially, allowing those
with enough capital and technical know-how to disentangle their businesses from the natural ice
industry entirely. With the supply of ice not just secured but growing, urban dwellers in
California and the wider West could begin using ice in new ways. The introduction and
proliferation of these spaces transformed urban living as much as the arrival of ice itself.
This chapter reconstructs the landscape of cold that connected points within, between,
and beyond the rapidly growing cities of the American West in the late nineteenth century. To do
so, we must understand refrigerated spaces as more than abstract points on the cold web, but as
tangible, mappable sites. Where in cities did refrigerated spaces exist? With which industries or
businesses were they associated? From where did the supply of ice come? What refrigerated
spaces could be found beyond the boundaries of, but nonetheless tied to, cities? Additionally, the
size, shape, and construction of these spaces mattered just as much as location. The physical
attributes of a refrigerated space determined its utility as a site for business, for leisure, for
storage, and whether the space would even remain cold in the first place. As can be seen in the
first category of refrigerated spaces, careful compromise between cost, location, and construction
had a clear effect on the urban coldscape.

100
The earliest refrigerated spaces in cities were the storehouses of the ice companies
themselves. Any company attempting to sell ice without the proper infrastructure in place would
find profits and product rapidly disappearing. As with the waterside ice houses found along the
Truckee River, the walls of urban ice houses were built thick. Walls could be stuffed with
insulating material such as straw, charcoal, or cork, or simpler brick walls could be constructed
as part of a double-wall exterior, with an enclosed chamber of air serving as insulation. Unlike
on the ice ponds, the surrounding geography could not so easily be used in the icemen’s favor.
The most fortuitously placed icehouses sat near the edge of the water and downhill from the
harvesting area. Icemen on the ponds used the forces of water and gravity to efficiently
maneuver blocks into the house.
Their counterparts in the city were not so fortunate. If the icehouse did not sit adjacent to
the railroad tracks, the ice had to be hauled through the city streets before being stored. These
journeys incurred labor costs for men, wagons, and horses. They exposed the ice blocks to
greater risks of melting, breakage, and contamination. Stacking and moving cakes of ice inside
the icehouse also required significant labor. Careful arrangement of the ice blocks reduced
melting and damage to the product while maximizing its cooling potential. A haphazardly filled
icehouse would warm more quickly and its product melt away faster than a neatly stacked one.
Size played a role as well. A concentrated cache of ice would hold temperature more effectively
than a small supply. Therefore, it benefitted ice companies to construct large storage facilities
adjacent to railroad lines, minimizing the time and labor spent unloading and storing ice.
Convenience at one stage, however, meant additional hassle at the next. Serving
customers directly from the railroad depot was not always feasible, especially as cities expanded
in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Railroads stoked urban growth, but few people

101
wanted rattling, sparking, smoke-belching trains for neighbors. Construction of railroad
infrastructure and residential or commercial spaces often took place at opposite ends of town.
Visiting the icehouse to pick up the day’s supply of ice would not have been a trivial task for the
average household consumer. Meanwhile, the two-hundred-plus-pound cakes of ice were far too
large and unwieldy for personal use, even if a customer had the horse and cart required to bring
one home.
235

Ice companies had to bridge the gap between the industrial scale of their storehouses and
the domestic scale of their buyers. They accomplished this in two ways. First, companies
implemented home delivery of their product, which had already been cut into ice box-friendly
sizes of ten or twenty-five pounds. Although seemingly simple and practical, this process was a
source of consistent aggravation and lurid moral panics. The economically and sexually fraught
world of home ice delivery is fully discussed in chapter five. Alternatively, ice companies
partnered with other local businesses to act as resellers, who provided ice to their neighborhoods
out of their own refrigerated spaces. This benefited all three parties: ice companies could make
far fewer deliveries, saving labor as well as the expense of hiring teams and drivers; business
owners could utilize the cooling power of the ice they stored to preserve their own goods prior to
sale; and consumers could affordably purchase pieces of ice, sized for home use, from nearby
vendors with whom they were likely already doing business. These collaborations, although
intended to remedy the inaccessibility of ice company storage facilities, helped refrigerated
spaces to proliferate across urban areas.

235
Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008), 44, 170, 176. Greene points out that any railroad journey in nineteenth century America,
whether undertaken by people or by goods, was just as much a journey made possible by horses. Horses filled gaps
in the urban transportation infrastructure as the primary conveyance to and from the railroad depot. Almost every
item for sale in American cities had, at some point, been moved by horses.

102
City grocers and butchers found partnerships with ice dealers were particularly
convenient. As ice became more readily available, many shopkeepers installed large, refrigerated
chambers much like the one exhibited by Thomas Guinean. Owners often made their
refrigerators centerpieces of their marketing campaigns, arguing that their particular models
preserved food better than their competitors. In 1882, Mohr and York, wholesale meat merchants
in Sacramento, cited their “fine refrigerator apartments by which meats are kept fresh in the
hottest weather.”
236
Likewise, R. A. Chamberlin, the proprietor of the Empire Market in Chico,
headlined his advertisement with bold letters reading, “FRESH MEAT FROM THE
REFRIGERATOR!”
237
Chamberlin invited the public to examine the new refrigerator he had
installed in his shop “for the accommodation of my patrons, at an expense of over $400.” Based
upon “thorough scientific principles,” Chamberlin’s refrigerator, identified as “Robert’s Peerless
Refrigerator,” circulated cold air, “driving out the animal heat from newly-killed meat” and
guaranteeing a higher quality product than any other butcher in California—or so he claimed. In
his advertisement, Chamberlin presented his business investment as philanthropy for the
betterment of his community. “Believing it would prove a blessing to the people of this valley
during this season,” he wrote, “I have incurred the expense of constructing it, and am thoroughly
satisfied with the investment, and know that all those who wish pure, sweet, fresh meats, free
from fly-blow or taint, will need but to see it to appreciate it.”
238

Even as they became common fixtures of urban commerce, the installation and operation
of these refrigerators—like Chamberlin’s $400 model—remained expensive. Acting as resellers

236
“Business Review,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 2, 1882. “Refrigerator apartments” is an uncommon
phrasing referring to subdivided chambers within the refrigerator to reduce the transference of tastes and odors
between goods.
237
Empire Market advertisement, Weekly Butte Record, July 23, 1881.
238
Empire Market advertisement, Weekly Butte Record, July 23, 1881.

103
of ice could help defray these costs while making good use of the ice itself. In San Rafael,
grocers McDonald and Pascoe used their position as ice merchants to emphasize the quality of
the other goods they had for sale. “Being agents for the National Ice Co. we can guarantee our
oysters being always frozen,” they boasted. Along with oysters, their refrigerator held fish
packed in ice as well as fresh eggs and fruit. As ice sellers, it was to be understood that their
refrigerators would always be fully stocked, never left to grow warm as the ice ran out.

Manufactured Ice
Just as ice from the Sierra Nevada began to arrive in quantity in Western cities, the ice
market underwent another fundamental shift with the introduction of artificial ice machines. All
refrigeration systems from the nineteenth century to the present work in essentially the same
way. Scientifically speaking, cold does not exist; it is simply the absence of heat. “Producing”
cold, therefore, is the process of removing heat from a space or a substance. Refrigeration
machines rely on chemicals known as “refrigerants.” These substances are selected for their high
specific latent heat, that is, they can absorb a large amount of heat prior to reaching their boiling
point and becoming vapor.
239
Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, inventors in the United States
and Europe worked in parallel on their ice machines, making incremental changes to the same
basic design. Refrigerants would be contained within a series of metal coils situated inside a
large tank. The tank was filled with a saltwater solution that could be chilled below 32 degrees
Fahrenheit without freezing. Finally, metal cans filled with fresh water would be placed inside
the tank, surrounded by the coils and brine. As the refrigerant ran through the coils, it absorbed
heat from the brine. The cold brine, in turn, froze the ice in the cans. Frozen cans could then be

239
Rees, Refrigeration Nation, 36.

104
lifted out of the tank, the fresh blocks of ice removed, and the cans refilled and replaced to start
the cycle over.
240
The size and number of ice canisters multiplied by the amount of time required
to freeze them solid resulted in the machine’s yield capacity, which could reach thousands of
pounds per day if operating optimally. Early ice machines served their purpose but tended to be
expensive to build, difficult to maintain, and unnervingly prone to exploding. In a nation as ice-
rich as the United States, with a decades-long tradition of cutting and shipping natural ice,
manufacturing ice via machine seemed technically impressive, but practically fruitless.
241

Figure 1. This diagram, from a catalog published by the Oakland Iron Works of Oakland, California comes from slightly later but
follows the same design principles as the machines described. Note the spaces on the right side labeled “ice cans.” Oakland Iron
Works sold freezing cans in varying sizes that could produce ice blocks as large as 300 pounds. Source: Oakland Iron Works
Descriptive Catalog of Refrigerating and Ice Machinery, 1893, Commercial Catalogs Collection, California Historical Society,
San Francisco.

240
Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 87–88.
241
For a more detailed technical discussion of ice-making machinery, see Rees, Refrigeration Nation, particularly
chapter 2, “The Long Wait for Mechanical Refrigeration.”

105
A window of opportunity for the artificial ice machine in the United States first opened in
the midst of the Civil War. The hostilities between North and South prevented Southern cities
like Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans from receiving regular shipments of ice from the
ponds of Massachusetts and Maine. Ice was just one of the many products the Confederacy had
earlier been importing from the North and going without it until the war’s end was not a
welcome proposition. Unlike California, the hot and humid South held no secret reserve of
“congealed cold” to be accessed in time of need. Some in the South harvested small amounts of
ice in winter. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson recorded using both paid and enslaved
laborers to cut ice near their Virginia estates.
242
But the South had nothing on the scale of New
England or California’s ice ponds. Desperate for a solution to the problem of obtaining a wartime
julep, Southerners turned to the work of engineer Ferdinand Carré in France. Refrigeration
engineers largely agreed on the science behind their work and on the design of the mechanism,
but spent considerable time and effort experimenting with potential refrigerants to find the most
efficient option. Carré pioneered the use of aqua ammonia—ammonia gas in solution with
water—as the refrigerant inside the coils of his machine. Aqua ammonia held certain key
advantages over other popular substances. It could absorb far more heat than either water or air
and lacked the catastrophic flammability of ether and gaseous (or anhydrous) ammonia. Carré’s
machine set a new standard for efficiency in refrigeration and wealthy Southerners were willing
to pay. European ships able to slip through the Union naval blockade delivered a small number
of refrigerating machines to Southern ports. For the first time, Dixieland could make its own ice.

242
Garden Book, 1766-1824, page 30, by Thomas Jefferson [electronic edition]. Thomas Jefferson Papers: An
Electronic Archive. Boston, Mass.: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003. http://www.thomasjeffersonpapers.org/

106
Even after the war’s end, the South lead the nation in use of ice machines.
243

Artificial Ice Comes to California
The establishment of successful artificial ice plants in Southern states caught the attention
of Western entrepreneurs. Natural ice harvesting, regardless of its success in places like the
Truckee Basin, still relied on cooperative weather and availability of railroad transportation.
Manufacturing ice within the city where it was to be sold would mitigate these problems, to the
benefit of both the manufacturer and the consumer. The financial barrier to start an artificial ice
company, however, was considerable. In 1871, Juan Robinson of San Francisco published a
detailed prospectus meant to attract potential investors in the California Ice Manufacturing
Company. Born John A. Robinson in New York, “Don Juan” spent most of his life in Sonora,
Mexico as a merchant, diplomat, and agent for American mining interests before retiring to San
Francisco.
244
Robinson’s time in Mexico likely attuned him to the power of ice as a commodity
in markets where it was not naturally found. He began his proposal by describing ice as “one of
the necessaries of life in these regions,” used by “all who can afford to pay”—and presumably
coveted by those unable to do so.
245
Robinson estimated Californians consumed an average of
twenty tons of ice per day across “Hotels, Restaurants, Ice Cream and Drinking Saloons, by
Steamers leaving for Southern Ports, and plying on the Bay and Rivers, by Private Families
&c.,” but felt that amount would skyrocket “could this luxury be afforded at a price which would
place it within the reach of all classes of society, say one cent per pound.”
246

243
Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 86.
244
Miguel Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border during the
Porfiriato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 24–25.
245
Juan A. Robinson, California Ice Manufacturing Company (Limited) (San Francisco: Cuddy & Hughes, 1871), 3.
246
Robinson, 3.

107
The figure of one cent per pound was purposefully provocative, a full fifty percent
reduction from the going price in the city. The previous summer, the American-Russian
Commercial Company, still operating out of Sitka following the 1867 purchase of Alaska from
Russia, sold ice to household consumers at two cents per pound.
247
Large orders of over one
hundred pounds and picked up by the purchaser from the ice house were discounted slightly to
one and a half cents per pound. Robinson’s proposed price would undercut all his competitors by
a significant margin, but he assured readers that the artificial ice plant could be profitable despite
the low prices and the initial investment. From his calculations, Robinson produced the table
seen in Figure 2:

247
American-Russian Commercial Company advertisement, Daily Alta California, June 16, 1870.

108
Figure 2. Table displaying the expected profitability of natural and artificial ice at given prices per pound. Robinson calculated
that manufactured ice remained profitable even at ½ cent per pound while any price less than 1 cent meant a loss for a natural ice
company. Source: Juan A. Robinson, California Ice Manufacturing Company (Limited) (San Francisco: Cuddy & Hughes, 1871),
1.

109
At one cent per pound, manufactured ice would produce a profit of $15 per ton, while
natural ice at the same price would only net $3 per ton. If the price were reduced even further,
Robinson calculated that his manufactured ice could still turn a profit while the natural ice
companies would lose progressively more money.
248
In the future, improvements could be made
to machinery to cut operating costs or increase yield, further bolstering the profitability of
artificially created ice. The natural ice companies, whether based in Alaska or in the mountains
of California, would have little leeway to adapt their operations to survive in a marketplace
where the going rate for ice had suddenly been reduced by half. So long as manufactured ice
could truly be profitable at this price, as Robinson asserted, then the venture’s success was
assured.
In order to actually manufacture ice, Don Juan Robinson had arranged the purchase of
two of “Carré’s No. 1 Industrial or Continuous Ice Machines,” made in Philadelphia according to
the Frenchman’s patent. At $25,000 each, the machines did not come cheap, but they were
reputed to be the best in the world. The No. 1 model was the largest available machine made to
the French design. Carré’s American agent M. J. Bujac guaranteed that each could produce at
least 20,000 pounds of ice every twenty-four hours, more if running at peak efficiency.
249
For an
additional $50,000, Robinson also purchased the exclusive right to own and operate any such
machines within California, creating an instant monopoly that could potentially lead to
expansion and franchising across the state.
Robinson’s vision was ambitious, but the cost of seeing it through was larger still. All
told, the estimated investment required to establish the ice plant and begin manufacturing came

248
Robinson, California Ice Manufacturing Co., 1.
249
Robinson, 4–5.

110
to $118,750—over $2.6 million today.
250
Securing the support of outside investors was vital, but
Robinson had nothing to show them. No machines. No ice. Instead, he relied on testimonials
from other ice company owners and his own business partners regarding machines already
operating elsewhere. Observers consistently marveled at the coldness of the ice and the speed
with which it could be produced. Banker Thomas Warren, an associate of Robinson’s, saw first-
hand at an exhibition in New York how the machine worked and “was perfectly delighted with
it; the Ice produced was clear as crystal and solid and compact as marble, and the attention
required to carry on the process marvelously small, and it really appeared to work itself.”
251

Reports of successful ice businesses employing Carré’s machine in New Orleans particularly
impressed Warren. “Now it strikes me,” he wrote to Robinson in a letter reproduced in the
company prospectus, “that this thing having been a practical success in New Orleans, where the
temperature of the water in summertime is never less than 90°, and the air even higher on an
average… that there can be no doubt about its doing all that it claims to perform… and if they
would pay here, how much more ought it to pay where ice has to be brought from Sitka and the
Mountains.”
252

The hot and humid climate of New Orleans posed a challenge to any ice business, natural
or artificial, but by all accounts, the Louisiana Ice Manufacturing Company appeared to be
thriving. Owner Camile Girardey attested to Robinson that his company made a steady profit at
the price of one cent per pound, largely by avoiding the wastefulness of importing ice from the
North. Furthermore, even with six machines turning out a total of seventy-five tons of ice per
day, the company sold all the ice it could produce.
253
The Louisiana Ice Manufacturing Company

250
Robinson, 10.
251
Robinson, 14.
252
Robinson, 15.
253
Robinson, 23.

111
had driven out all of its competitors and boasted a net profit of nearly eighty thousand dollars for
the year 1870.
254
“This invention,” wrote Girardey in summary, “is not only a mechanical
triumph but a commercial success.”
255
If the conditions in subtropical New Orleans did not
impede ice manufacturing, then San Francisco, where the temperatures were much milder in
comparison, ought to pose no problem at all.
When the California Ice Manufacturing Company incorporated in April 1871, artificial
ice was a novel industry in the West, but even then, Robinson’s company was not alone. He had
purchased exclusive rights to Carré’s ice machine in the state of California, but entrepreneurs
using machinery designed by other inventors were free to operate. Robinson had not been the
only one to think that the success of artificial ice in the South could be replicated on the Pacific
Coast. As engineers from across the country and the world competed to build more efficient
freezing systems, efficiency rose, while prices fell. After a period of early skepticism, artificial
ice machines became everyday sights in urban centers across the American West.

Ice and Brewing on the Pacific Coast
This new accessibility of ice-making equipment empowered business owners to take
unprecedented control of the refrigerated spaces they needed in order to create, store, and sell
products. Of these businesses, breweries made especially good use of ice machines in order to
carve out a foothold in a crowded market. German-speaking immigrants that arrived in the
United States in the middle of the nineteenth century brought with them generations of beer-
brewing expertise. These newcomers established breweries across the country, introducing their
neighbors to styles of beer previously unknown in North America. One style in particular, the

254
“Ice Manufacture,” Daily Alta California, March 20, 1871.
255
Robinson, California Ice Manufacturing Co., 23.

112
lager, quickly became extremely popular with American consumers.
256
Many varieties of lager
exist, but all lagers are left to mature in cold cellars for a period of months before they are ready
to drink. This made lager production dependent on the local environment in a way other types of
beer were not.
257
The problem was solved relatively simply in the cities of the Midwest where
many German immigrants settled. Cooler average temperatures and readily available natural ice
made lager brewing a natural fit. This trend begat the American beer brands of Schlitz, Miller,
and Pabst, among many others.
In other parts of the country, however, situations and solutions were not so simple.
Californians wanted lager, too, despite the warmer climate. Rather than try to bring ice to the
brewery, some brewers opted to bring their brewery to the ice. The Boca Brewing Company,
which began producing beer in 1876, stood adjacent to the Boca ice ponds outside of Truckee so
that freshly cut ice could be placed directly into the brewery’s storehouse.
258
Fresh water was
likewise in good supply and the railroad passed right through Boca, making the Truckee Basin a
prime location for a large brewing operation. L. E. Doan, also the owner of the Boca Mill and Ice
Company, established the brewery with a specific goal in mind: “to reduce the price of lager beer
from the regular price of one bit per glass to the more reasonable rate of five cents.”
259
In no
small part due to the heavily subsidized ice, the brewery succeeded beyond Doan’s ambitions.
Within months of opening, Boca beer had brand recognition across California, from nearby
Grass Valley, to distant Eureka and Los Angeles.
260
At saloons near and far, Boca beer sold, just

256
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew: A History of American Beer, Revised ed. (Ames, IA: Blue Willow Books,
2019), 22–24.
257
Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 28–29.
258
Wells, History of Nevada County, 78.
259
“Corpulency Encouraged,” Truckee Republican, July 31, 1875. The article, as indicated by the title, implies that a
having a local brewery will fatten up certain residents of Nevada County.
260
“Boca Beer,” Grass Valley Union, May 26, 1876; “Boca Beer,” Los Angeles Herald, June 24, 1876;
Advertisement for the Fashion Saloon, Humboldt Times, September 14, 1876.

113
as Doan had wanted, for five cents a glass, “the best and at the same time cheapest lager beer on
the Pacific Coast.”
261
Mastery of the ice supply in the mountains enabled the Boca Brewing
Company to dominate the California market with a high-quality product at a stunningly low
price.
Shipping barrels of beer down from the Sierra Nevada via the Central Pacific Railroad
was convenient given that the railroad came almost to the brewery’s doorstep, but it was not
inexpensive. Freight rates for large, heavy items—like beer barrels and blocks of ice packed in
alongside them—tended to be high and shifted constantly. The mathematics of shipping became
even more complicated the farther a product was to travel. Every railroad company set its own
rates using sliding scales and arcane calculations, creating a “kaleidoscopic” landscape where
shipping to a faraway city was often simpler, cheaper, and faster than shipping to a nearby
one.
262
Additionally, storing and handling the beer was delicate enough of a task, requiring yet
more ice, that Boca Brewing deputized only one vendor in each town to carry it.
263
In
Sacramento, this honor fell to Jacob Hoehn, agent of the Summit Ice Company. As an ice dealer,
Hoehn already had access to the refrigerated storeroom needed to keep beer on hand. He
guaranteed to his customers that his beer was “kept at a temperature not above 60 deg.
Fahrenheit, cooled by large quantities of ice.”
264
His business was effectively subsidized by the
ice company.
For those dealers not lucky enough to partner with an ice company, the expense involved
in carefully shipping and storing Boca beer threatened to overtake the money saved by brewing it
next to the ice ponds. Alexander Muller, saloon owner and representative for Boca Brewing in

261
Boca Brewing Company advertisement, Daily Alta California, August 16, 1877.
262
White, Railroaded, xxix, 162–63.
263
Advertisement for Alexander Muller’s saloon, San Jose Mercury, August 21, 1881.
264
“Boca Beer!,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 30, 1876.

114
San Jose, claimed to be sacrificing his profits by selling Boca Beer “at 5 cents a decent, big
glass.”
265
The farther from Boca the beer had to travel and the warmer the climate at the
destination, the slimmer the profit margin for barkeepers. The beer’s popularity, however, kept
the money flowing. When L. E. Doan died in 1881, the Boca Brewery had more than achieved
his objectives, shipping beer not only across the state but to Australia, Hawaii, and Peru, as
well.
266
But at the same time, it had been cornered by its own success. Its location made
expansion challenging and the railroad remained the only way to get beer down from the
mountains and into the cities. The Boca Brewery had brought cheap lager to California, but the
stage was set for competition.
Much like Juan Robinson with his artificial ice plant, would-be brewers in California
needed to overcome steep opposition. While not quite a monopoly, the Boca Brewing Company
had brand recognition and a strong hold on the market. But what Boca lacked was adaptability.
Artificial ice machines turned the Western brewing industry on its head by adding innumerable
new points on the cold web and enabling the decentralization of brewing. Suddenly, brewers
could make and store beer in the cities where it was to be consumed. Neither beer nor ice would
need to be shipped in from elsewhere, saving time and expense. Without the need to situate a
brewery near a source of cheap natural ice, entrepreneurs could target specific local markets and
cater specifically to those markets’ needs while maintaining the low prices that Boca had
established as the standard.
Equipped with their own ice machines, breweries served as multipurpose refrigerated
spaces. Ice production, beer production, and cold storage of both commodities could occur in one
location. Although growing progressively more affordable, ice machines remained a sizeable

265
Advertisement for Alexander Muller’s saloon, San Jose Mercury, August 10, 1879.
266
“Truckee Items,” Grass Valley Union, September 8, 1878; “Deceased,” Grass Valley Union, February 16, 1881.

115
investment. But the flexibility they offered brewers was priceless. In 1881, Louis Krumb, already
a successful brewer in San Jose, overhauled his entire business, building a brand-new brewery
outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment. Krumb’s description of his new facility makes clear
both his interest in modern technology as well as his intention to challenge the domination of
Boca Brewing specifically. Standing three stories high, the new brewery would have “all the
modern improvements for making genuine Eastern lager beer,” making it the only such brewery
outside of Boca.
267
Krumb, an immigrant from the German state of Hesse, repeatedly
emphasized that his company would make “genuine” lager, implying that the lager currently
available in California was subpar. His dissatisfaction with “the beer being made on this coast at
present”—that is, by the Boca Brewing Company—was that it was not aged properly. What was
sold as lager was, by Krumb’s estimation, actually poor quality “young beer.”
268
Krumb’s beer
was going to be different and the refrigeration in his brewery would be the key.
Krumb argued that “the reason the grade of beer to be brewed [in his brewery] has not
been manufactured on this coast is because of the enormous price of ice heretofore prevalent.”
But ice would not be a problem for Krumb, who had partnered with a manufacturer in Oakland
to deliver as much ice as he needed every day. His cold storage room, where the beer would be
kept to age, had a capacity of 350,000 pounds of ice and featured two advances in refrigeration
engineering. First, ventilators in the walls allowed for the circulation of air and “[kept] the
atmosphere in a continual state of purity.”
269
Second, a panel in the wall dividing the beer cellar
from the ice storage chamber could be moved in order to allow more or less airflow between the

267
“Krumb’s New Brewery,” San Jose Herald, April 12, 1881.
268
“Krumb’s New Brewery,” San Jose Herald, April 12, 1881.
269
“Krumb’s New Brewery,” San Jose Herald, April 12, 1881.

116
two sections, thereby controlling the temperature. Krumb claimed that his storeroom could reach
temperatures as cold as 40° Fahrenheit, a marvel in the era of ice-based refrigeration.
270

Krumb was not content to compete only with the Boca Brewing Company, however. He
also set his sights on the San Jose ice market. The San Jose Herald had recently written that an
ice factory was one of the city’s greatest needs; Krumb was prepared to step into that gap.
271
In
an advertisement headed “ICE! ICE! ICE! Never Less than 300,000 Pounds on Hand,” he
announced his intention to overturn the domination of the existing ice companies and
significantly lower prices in the city. “Ice has heretofore been considered a luxury, and only
within the reach of the rich,” the ad read, “but by the enterprise of the undersigned, it has now
ceased to be so, and parties which have represented monopolies and charged you every season
from $50 to $60 per ton can do so no longer.”
272
Within this brief advertisement, Krumb
promoted his new ice business on three factors: value, transparency, and availability. He set his
rates far below the going rate of 2½ to 3 cents per pound, charging only 1½ cents per pound for
amounts less than 100 pounds, 1 ¼ cents for quantities between 100 and 2,000 pounds and only 1
cent per pound when purchased by the ton—a rate equivalent to $20 per ton. Furthermore,
Krumb promised to abide by the published prices and not raise them for the remainder of the
year, rejecting a favorite tactic of the other ice companies to increase profits during the hot
summer months.

270
A space refrigerated by ice could not be cooled any lower than 32° Fahrenheit, the temperature of the ice itself.
More often, air temperatures inside an ice box or larger refrigerated space hovered between 45° and 50°.
Conceptions of “safe” temperatures for cold storage, that is, temperatures at which food can be stored without
danger of illness, varied greatly through this period and well into the twentieth century, moving with advances in
refrigeration technology and microbiology. As ice melted, temperatures inside an ice box could shift rapidly. The
smaller the space, the larger the difference in temperature could be over course of a day or a week. A 1917 United
States Department of Agriculture pamphlet “Care of Food in the Home,” for instance, advises that an ice box
registering even 60° is viable for keeping food fresh for a few days. Currently, the USDA defines the “temperature
danger zone” as 40-140° F.
271
“The Need of an Ice Factory,” San Jose Herald, April 14, 1881.
272
Krumb ice advertisement, San Jose Herald, April 20, 1881.

117
But with these guarantees in place, how did Krumb plan to make any money from his ice
business? His comment regarding perpetual availability gives a strong clue. Krumb assured
potential customers that he would never run out of ice and, in fact, never held less than 300,000
pounds at a time, more than enough to serve the needs of the city. Coincidentally, the ice
reservoir for his cold storage room held up to 350,000 pounds but would function most
effectively if full or nearly full. Therefore, it becomes clear that the ice Krumb used to “power”
his refrigerated storeroom was also the ice he sold to customers. As with grocers like McDonald
and Pascoe who sold ice on behalf of the ice companies, Krumb took advantage of the cooling
power of the ice he stored for eventual sale. It is no wonder that Krumb was unconcerned with
the cost of the ice needed to brew and store “genuine” lager beer; it was subsidized by being
resold to local consumers.
Does this mean Krumb was selling “used” ice, then? Yes and no. Certainly, it had been
put to use for its cooling effect prior to being sold, but short of directly wrapping the blocks in
some insulating material, the process by which the ice absorbed heat from the surrounding air
(and thereafter begin to melt) could not be stopped. Proper handling and the large amounts of ice
in the brewery’s cold storage would have slowed melting, but not prevented it. Rather than allow
this natural loss, however small, to go to waste, Krumb had designed an efficient solution. From
the consumer’s perspective, none of this was cause for concern. Ice, after all, could not be
“turned off.” If anything, the fact that Krumb sold the same ice used in his brewery would be a
mark in its favor, an indication that the ice was first-rate, both cold and pure, suitable for use by a
craftsman who took his work very seriously. Indeed, Krumb made a potential skeptic into a

118
happy customer: Alexander Muller, Boca Brewing’s agent in San Jose, soon announced with
pride that his ice box was kept cold by a thousand pounds per week of Louis Krumb’s ice.
273

Purity, Health, and Marketing
Only rarely did natural or artificial ice dealers have complete control over a local market.
Even in the smallest towns there was room for competition, but the fiercest battles took place in
cities where demand for ice was highest. Full-blown “ice wars,” as the papers dubbed them,
broke out often, typically just as the weather began to warm. In the heated inland climate of
Sacramento, ice wars could come early, as in 1880 when March brought the first predictions of
the fight to come.
274
Within a month, the Coles brothers, owners and operators of the Sacramento
Ice Company fired the first volley. J. L. and D. H. Coles faced two disadvantages to breaking
into the ice market in the capital city. First, they were new in town, only having arrived from the
East the previous summer, so their personal and professional connections were limited.
275

Second, their business was to be the first to sell manufactured ice in Sacramento, a city well-
supplied by the natural ice of the Sierra Nevada. The brothers had to make the case both for
patronizing their company and for buying manufactured ice in general. They needed to make a
splash.
Whether they knew it or not, the Coles’ marketing strategy utilized a tactic as old as the
ice industry in California. One morning in mid-April, the two delivered samples of their ice,
unsolicited and free of charge, to the staff of the Sacramento Daily Union, just like the editors of
the Daily Alta California had received three decades before when the first cargo of ice arrived in

273
Advertisement for Alexander Muller’s saloon, San Jose Mercury, August 17, 1881.
274
“Late News Paragraphs,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 18, 1880.
275
“Passengers Passing Carlin for California,” Sacramento Daily Union, July 28, 1879.

119
San Francisco Bay. As in the earlier case, the visit to the newspaper office paid off, earning the
Sacramento Ice Company its first positive review, which read, in part, “[The ice] is more solid
than ice frozen by natural means, equally pure, and is molded into blocks convenient for the
general purchaser.”
276
A full advertisement for the new company also appeared in the paper that
day, promising “perfectly pure” ice at “prices that defy any legitimate competition.”
277

That competition came in the form of Thomas Finley, agent for the Mountain Ice
Company, who correctly took the Coles brothers’ announcement as a declaration of war. Finley
already had a year of experience selling natural ice in Sacramento, emphasizing the
independence of his company in contrast to the growing threat of monopoly in the mountains.
278

Opposition at home, however, forced Finley to reevaluate his strategy. Where the Mountain Ice
Company’s advertisements had previously read, “The Only Mountain Ice Outside of the
Monopoly,” following the positive press for the Sacramento Ice Company, Finley changed his
advertisement to take a swipe at his artificial competitors. References to the ice monopoly and
even to specific prices disappeared. Instead, the updated text played on consumers’ fears and
apprehensions about the new technology. Few customers would have seen an ice plant in
operation or known how one worked and the chemicals involved—“sulphurous oxide” in this
case—certainly sounded threatening.
279
Finley meant to take advantage of this ignorance,
touting, “PURE MOUNTAIN SPRING ICE, the only natural and healthful ice offered for

276
“Artificial Ice,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 14, 1880.
277
Sacramento Ice Company advertisement, Sacramento Daily Union, April 14, 1880.
278
Edward Hopkins, an executive of the Central Pacific Railroad and nephew of “Big Four” member Mark Hopkins,
spent the late 1870s purchasing and consolidating ice harvesting operations in the Sierra Nevada. An ice monopoly
intimately tied to the railroad posed a huge threat to independent vendors, as Finley rightly realized. In 1882,
Hopkins officially incorporated his holdings as the Union Ice Company. See Cummings, The American Ice
Harvests, 89.
279
“Ice Making,” Sacramento Daily Union, August 14, 1879. “Sulphurous oxide” is presently known as “sulfur
dioxide” is a toxic gas with a pungent smell. It was not commonly used as a refrigerant. The Coles brothers’
machine, based on a Swiss design, was likely one of very few in the United States to use sulfur dioxide instead of
anhydrous ammonia.

120
sale.”
280
All other ice dealers, therefore, were implied to be peddling an unnatural and
unhealthful product. From this perspective, artificial ice was not a technological feat, but a
danger.
The Coles brothers drafted a rebuttal, and their new advertisement ran the gamut of ice
industry talking points. The brothers referred to the “permanency” of their company—important
in convincing customers to take out subscriptions—and its role in taking down “monopoly and
extortionate prices.” Their ice, they claimed, was far purer than that “obtained from stagnant
pools, filled with decayed vegetable matter” and had been “demonstrated to outlast the best
natural ice.”
281
At only a single cent per pound, their ice was a bargain and sure to be irresistible
to value-conscious consumers. Yet even so, compounding losses forced the Sacramento Ice
Company to dissolve in late June, the time of year when it ought to have found the most
success.
282
According to the proprietors, their small ice machine could not produce enough to be
profitable at one cent per pound and expanding capacity required money they did not have. The
brothers packed up the machine and shipped it back East before departing to try their luck in the
mines of Tuolumne County.
283
How Thomas Finley felt about his apparent victory is unknown,
but in response to the Sacramento Ice Company’s closure, the Summit Ice Company—one arm
of the dreaded monopoly—raised its price to two cents per pound.
284

The war of words between the Sacramento and Mountain Ice Companies in 1880,
although short-lived, is representative of the kind of barbs traded between purveyors of natural
and manufactured ice across the West. For decades, both sides of the industry attempted to

280
Mountain Ice Company advertisement, Sacramento Daily Union, April 28, 1880.
281
Sacramento Ice Company advertisement, Sacramento Daily Union, May 24, 1880.
282
“Gone Out of Business,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 26, 1880.
283
“Brief Notes,” Sacramento Daily Union, December 9, 1880.
284
“Gone Out of Business,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 26, 1880.

121
convince customers that only their ice was fit for human consumption, but no clear winner
emerged, and the rhetoric remained largely consistent. Natural ice companies regularly raised the
alarm about the exposure of machine-made ice to the hazardous chemicals used as refrigerants.
“Nature does her work well,” read an advertisement from a natural ice dealer in Healdsburg,
California. “Her pipes don’t get out of fix and leave ammonia in your ice.”
285

Determining whether ice was truly safe, however, was not so easy. In lieu of more
scientific means of determining purity, both vendors and consumers judged ice by factors visible
to the naked eye, particularly the clarity of the ice. Since the earliest days of the American ice
trade, buyers had coveted crystal-clear ice and for good reason. It sparkled in a glass and its
translucency held connotations of perfect purity. In reality, the transparency or opacity of ice has
less to do with its contents than how it is formed. Cloudiness in ice results from air trapped
within the water as it freezes. Slow, even freezing drives out the most air and results in the
clearest ice. By this measure, natural ice held a distinct advantage. Many early ice machines
froze the ice too quickly, yielding blocks with clear exteriors but cloudy cores. In this case,
artificial ice sellers had to reassure consumers of the quality of their ice and would occasionally
market a particularly opaque batch at a discount. The Consumers’ Ice Company of San Francisco
advertised “first run, slightly white, but perfectly CLEAN and PURE ICE” at the reduced rate of
five dollars per ton.
286
The difference was purely aesthetic, but the advertisement nonetheless
specified it was “good for refrigerating.” An ice plant in Hood River, Oregon took a more poetic
route, offering two grades of ice: the first-class “Crystal” ice and the lesser “London Smoke” ice,
which was “not quite so clear” as the former grade, but “just as good” when put to use.
287
Over

285
Natural Ice Company advertisement, Healdsburg Tribune, June 2, 1898.
286
Consumers’ Ice Company advertisement, Daily Alta California, July 3, 1890.
287
Hood River Apple Growers Union advertisement, Hood River Glacier, June 24, 1909.

122
time, ice manufacturers developed methods for producing perfectly clear ice, but doing so
required additional time and steps, notably steam-distilling the water before freezing, which had
the additional benefit of removing impurities.
288

As a remedy to skepticism about the safety of manufactured ice, ice plants, particularly
newly opened ones, often held open houses during which members of the community could tour
the facilities and see for themselves how the process worked. In 1884, the Southern Ice and Cold
Storage Company in Los Angeles extended an open invitation: “The new works are open for the
inspection of all those who are desirous to prove the assertion made that there are no chemicals
used in contact with the ice made by this company and the perfectly pure water from which the
ice is frozen.”
289
Shortly thereafter, the company hosted a class of future teachers from the
California State Normal School—now the University of California, Los Angeles—who
witnessed the “magical” process by which cold “can be harnessed and made obedient to the
wants of mankind.”
290
By opening their doors to the public, artificial ice manufacturers could
take advantage of a key difference between themselves and their natural ice competitors:
proximity to their customers. While many consumers had initial misgivings about the quality and
safety of artificial ice, these fears could be alleviated by ice companies pulling back the curtain
and demonstrating the manufacturing process. In doing so, they could convince customers of the
healthfulness of their product while emphasizing their place within the local community.

288
With limited ability to see what was in ice before consuming it, customers judged ice’s purity by what was left
behind after it melted. All but the purest natural ice typically had some degree of dirt or sediment. See Jonathan
Rees, “What’s Left in the Bottom of the Glass: The Quest for Purity and the Development of the American Ice
Industry” in Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart, edited by Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
289
“The March of Improvement,” Los Angeles Herald, March 23, 1884.
290
“How Ice is Made,” Los Angeles Herald, April 20, 1884.

123
Frozen Leisure
Occasionally, the developing technology of mechanical refrigeration would be applied to
entirely different ends, unrelated to the practical applications of preserving food or cooling
beverages. One such instance demonstrated the possibilities for leisure within the urban
coldscape. Beginning in February 1894, the Mechanics’ Pavilion in San Francisco’s Civic Center
hosted an ice-skating rink. At 9,600 square feet, the rink could accommodate as many as five
hundred skaters at a time, but its opening day drew four thousand.
291
It soon became a prime
attraction in the city as, “to native sons and daughters [of California] who have never
experienced the rigors of an Eastern winter, it is a thrilling novelty.”
292
Beneath the air of
frivolity, however, lay substantial technical achievement. W. W. Donaldson, the rink’s general
manager and operator of the rink, applied his ten years’ worth of cold storage expertise to its
design. It was only the fourth such skating rink ever successfully constructed and the first of its
kind in the United States. Running pipes filled with refrigerant beneath the skating surface would
have been courting disaster—Donaldson already had to cancel plans for a similar rink after a
catastrophic fire destroyed the cold storage exhibit hall at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892—so
instead, Donaldson used anhydrous ammonia to cool a brine solution to approximately 10°
Fahrenheit, then sent it coursing through 40,000 feet worth of pipes below the water’s surface.
293

This way, the water froze quickly into a surface “as smooth and glassy as the Knickerbockers
enjoy in Central Park,” but skaters did not risk coming in contact with anything more dangerous
than saltwater.
294

291
“Like to Winter,” San Francisco Call, February 4, 1894.
292
“Outwits Nature,” San Francisco Call, February 25, 1894.
293
“Outwits Nature,” San Francisco Call, February 25, 1894.
294
“Like to Winter,” San Francisco Call, February 4, 1894.

124
When placed in the context of the late nineteenth century ice industry, the Mechanics’
Pavilion ice rink is awash in contradiction. To start, it was invariably referred to in the press as a
“natural ice rink.” The company that operated it was even called the “Natural Ice Skating
Company,” even though the rink was clearly the product of careful engineering. In an article
titled “Outwits Nature – How Ice Is Made at the Big Rink,” Donaldson detailed precisely how he
accomplished the feat, beginning his explanation with the line, “How is this natural ice
produced? There is no secret about it.”
295
Why then, did so many accept the ice rink as “natural,”
even while manufactured ice still garnered suspicion? Perhaps the fact that this ice was not
meant for human consumption meant it drew less scrutiny. Furthermore, the visitors to the rink
experienced the same physical interactions with it as they would with a frozen pond: their skates
cut grooves into the surface and it was both cold and solid to the touch. It was not a deceptive
substitute for ice, a smooth floor meant to mimic the real thing, but it was by no means natural.
Similarly, the skating rink exemplifies the contradictory place of ice as both a luxury
product and a democratized good. San Franciscans could not quite decide whether the rink was
opulent and highbrow, or something meant for the masses. The rink was a technological wonder,
the only one of its kind in the United States, and not inexpensive to build. It presented a rare
opportunity for city dwellers, but yet one open to all.
296
Donaldson himself seems to have been
confused about exactly who the rink was for and busied himself dreaming up promotions to
attract every segment of the Bay Area populace. Within one week in late February, he brought in
local teams to play “Baseball on Ice,” held a “potato match,” and hosted an invitation-only party
for “the society people of San Francisco.”
297

295
“Outwits Nature,” San Francisco Call, February 25, 1894.
296
Admission to the rink initially cost 25 cents, but was later lowered to only 10 cents per person. “Like to Winter,”
San Francisco Call, February 4, 1894; “Polo To-Night,” San Francisco Call, April 18, 1894.
297
“Baseball on Ice,” San Francisco Call, February 23, 1894.

125
In theory, the rink was for everyone. Donaldson went out of his way to make the rink
accessible to women and children by banning alcohol, prohibiting smoking (while ladies were on
the ice), and employing instructors to help the many Californians who lacked ability on the ice.

298
The egalitarian nature of the ice rink did not last, though. High society events proved popular
enough that Donaldson booked progressively more. Seeing and being seen on the only artificial
ice rink in the country became the new pastime of the San Francisco elites. Unfortunately, this
alienated the less wealthy customers who unsurprisingly resented the rink turning into a private
club on multiple nights each week. When, inevitably, skating fell out of vogue a few months
later, middle- and lower-class visitors had little interest in returning to a venue they felt had
driven them out.
299

So what of the rink itself? From a certain perspective, the power, machinery, ammonia,
and fresh water required to construct and operate it were a waste that could have been used for a
more practical purpose. The equipment, rearranged into a more traditional configuration, could
have produced millions of pounds of ice during the time the skating rink was open. Yet, by 1894,
icemaking had advanced far enough that practicality no longer mattered nearly so much. Ice had
become commonplace, a base expectation of urban life, not a rare treat—even for the poorer
classes. Ironically, its ubiquity made it all the more valuable, as the proliferation of ice and ice-
making machinery allowed for new innovation. The San Francisco ice rink is indicative of the
evolution of ice from a luxury, to a commodity, to a utility. By the final decade of the nineteenth
century, ice was a power to be wielded as much, if not more so, than a product to be purchased.

298
“Outwits Nature,” San Francisco Call, February 25, 1894.
299
“A Society Tragedy,” San Francisco Call, November 24, 1896.

126
The Carceral Coldscape
In late August 1894, delegates assembled at Lucky Baldwin’s grand hotel in San
Francisco for the California State Democratic Convention. Two vital tasks lay before them:
selection of a candidate for governor and the drafting of a party platform. Regardless of where in
the state they were from, all present agreed on the importance of their work. Republicans had
occupied the governor’s mansion for the past two terms. Returning the state to Democratic hands
would require “a document that should prove a tower of strength,” lest the party go down in
defeat once again.
300
Over the course of four long days of deliberation, the convention at last
produced a platform. The final draft reflected the diversity of the state and of the voters to whom
it was meant to appeal. The platform denounced the gold standard, Chinese immigration, and
even oleomargarine, which it claimed threatened California’s dairymen with “unfair and ruinous
competition.”
301
Immediately after the anti-margarine provision came another policy plank that
concerned both the dining tables and the pocketbooks of Californians: “We favor legislation
authorizing the manufacture of ice at the branch prison at Folsom, for sale to fruit-shippers and
other consumers at the cost of production.”
302
If the Democrats proved successful in the
November election, the state of California itself would go into the ice business.
On January 11, when newly sworn-in Governor James H. Budd, a Democrat, took the
podium to give his inaugural address, he had nothing to say about margarine but had evidently
not forgotten about the proposal to manufacture ice at the state prison, calling it “one of the most
important industries” that might be established there. He then laid out his argument:
The cost would be surprisingly small, and the value to all classes, especially to butchers,
fruit raisers and handlers of perishable products in general, would be very great. Ice can
be profitably manufactured at Folsom and sold to our people at a very small fraction of

300
“Hard at Work,” San Francisco Call, August 23, 1894.
301
“Down to Work,” San Francisco Call, August 24, 1894.
302
“Down to Work,” San Francisco Call, August 24, 1894.

127
the usual rate for natural ice. The free labor which the establishment of such a plant at the
state prison would displace would be comparatively insignificant, for about the only
employment furnished by the natural ice companies that would be affected is in the
harvesting and storing a gratuitous product of nature for a short time in the winter.
303

The prospect of operating ice machines at Folsom State Prison seems on first glance like
an inconsequential topic to warrant being included in a speech as important as the governor’s
inaugural address. Indeed, the San Francisco Call, which opted to abridge the Governor’s
remarks rather than print them in their entirety, omitted this paragraph altogether.
304
But the
proposal served a specific purpose in the context of the speech as a whole. Budd’s remarks
focused almost exclusively on the state’s finances. Large expenses incurred by the state prisons
and asylums especially concerned him. He felt these expenditures were out of step with the size
and needs of the state, particularly compared with the amounts spent by states with much larger
populations. California’s spending on the administration of state prisons was exceeded only by
that of New York, with a population four times as large.
305
Putting the “idle” men incarcerated in
California’s state prisons to work manufacturing some useful product would defray these costs.
In this, Budd had the both state and federal law on his side. He directly referenced the
Constitution of the State of California Article X, Section 6, which, “requires in definite terms
that convicts shall be forced to labor for the benefit of the State.”
306
Despite the associations of
prison labor with the post-Civil War South, jails and prisons served as “crucibles of unfree labor”
across the country. Treating the incarcerated as “slaves of the state” had been explicitly upheld

303
“Governor James H. Budd’s Inaugural Message,” Los Angeles Herald, January 12, 1895.
304
“Budd is Governor,” San Francisco Call, January 12, 1895.
305
“The Governor’s Inaugural,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 12, 1895.
306
“Governor James H. Budd’s Inaugural Message,” Los Angeles Herald, January 12, 1895. The text referenced by
Budd no longer exists in California’s constitution, having been repealed in 1976. In 1895, it read as follows:
“SEC. 6. After the first day of January, eighteen hundred and eighty-two, the labor of convicts shall not be let out by
contract to any person, copartnership, company, or corporation, and the Legislature shall, by law, provide for the
working of convicts for the benefit of the state.”

128
by the Supreme Court and doing so would put California’s prison system in good company with
those of the Eastern states.
307

In this context, establishing some kind of manufacturing at Folsom State Prison made
economic sense. But why ice specifically? The remarks made by Governor Budd and the
arguments put forth after the introduction in the California State Assembly and Senate of bills to
enact the plan give an indication of the way California’s political elites prioritized the state’s
various industries. In his inaugural, Budd made no explicit mention of selling prison-made ice to
individual household consumers. He claimed that the ice factory would benefit “all classes,” but
highlighted its value for “butchers, fruit raisers, and handlers of perishable products.”
308
It is
clear that California’s agricultural sector was the intended beneficiary. Ice manufactured with
incarcerated labor and sold well below market prices would, in effect, subsidize the industries
that relied upon ice the most: butchers and meatpackers, produce growers, and dairy farmers. In
supporting these industries, however, prison ice would undermine the natural ice industry, an
outcome Budd and his partners in the legislature evidently found acceptable. The governor
downplayed the impact of the new ice factory on employment in the Truckee Basin, citing both
the relatively small number of workers and the short season during which ice was harvested. Ice
harvesting was a hyper regional, rural industry. Cheaply manufactured ice, subsidized by the
state, would have wide-ranging benefits to urban commerce. Losing a few jobs cutting ice in the
winter seemed to be more than a fair trade in exchange for bolstering the farms and merchants
that employed more people and produced more capital.

307
Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles,
1771-1965 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 58.
308
“Governor James H. Budd’s Inaugural Message,” Los Angeles Herald, January 12, 1895.

129
However, Budd’s characterization of ice as “a gratuitous product of nature” betrays his
misunderstanding of the industry. As we have already seen in chapter two, natural ice was
painstakingly cultivated, not left to form independent of human intervention. Despite being made
through natural processes, ice was not free to produce. Every stage, from cleaning the unfrozen
pond to delivering ice cakes to customers, required both labor and expense. Urban consumers of
natural ice knew that the product came from lakes in the High Sierra, but the majority of steps
between the lake and their iceboxes were a mystery. From this perspective, the comparatively
higher prices of natural ice versus artificial ice must have appeared to be greed rather than the
result of a long and complex supply chain. This unfamiliarity also made invisible the number of
skilled laborers employed in the ice industry. The “comparatively insignificant” job losses cited
by Budd likely followed the narrowest definition of an ice industry worker: the couple hundred
men who cut ice from the ponds for a few weeks in the winter. An apt comparison would be to
define farmworkers as active in the fields or orchards at harvest time, while ignoring the labor
that preceded and followed the harvest. No wonder, then, that Budd and the California
Democrats thought they had a winning plan, one that would benefit many and hurt few. Budd’s
choice to feature the proposal prominently in his inaugural address hints that he expected
Californians to embrace the idea of manufacturing ice with incarcerated labor. In practice,
however, the response was much more mixed.
After the introduction of the ice factory bills in Sacramento, the San Francisco Call
solicited opinions from the Bay Area public on the matter. John Lubben, a liquor merchant in
San Francisco, welcomed the establishment of an ice factory at Folsom. “I use a great quantity of
ice in my business and it is a big item in my expenditure,” he told a reporter. “I am taxed to keep
up the state prisons and if I can get any return for the money I have to pay, it is so much the

130
better for me.”
309
As a taxpayer, Lubben reasoned, buying ice from the state would make him his
own customer. Lubben’s enthusiasm was not universal in the city, however. Frank Wieland, also
a liquor dealer, strenuously disagreed with Lubben and the plan to manufacture ice, deeming it
an immoral assault on working people. “I wouldn’t use their ice if they gave it to me for
nothing,” he asserted. “Let the state make up its deficit in some other way than by attempting to
take the bread and butter out of the mouths of hundreds of women and children.”
310
The
strongest condemnation among San Franciscans came from Joseph Martin, secretary of the
Floriston Ice Company, who declared it “an iniquitous measure [that] puts convict and free labor
in competition.”
311
Martin obviously had a personal stake in the question, but the strong feelings
of men like Wieland who might easily profit from the introduction of cheap prison ice attest to
the high political stakes.
Nowhere were those stakes higher, however, than in Nevada County, the home of
Truckee, Boca, and California’s only ice ponds. Budd’s proposal and the subsequent introduction
of bills to enact it infuriated the citizens of the Truckee Basin, who took pride in their hometown
industry. Ironically, the debate over the prison ice bill took place during the height of ice
harvesting in January and early February, allowing advocates to highlight the work being done
while warning of the dire repercussions if the prison ice factory were to be constructed. One
glowing report from an excursion to observe the harvest emphasized the speed and efficiency of
the two hundred icemen employed at the pond of John F. Moody outside of Truckee. The piece
presents them as highly skilled and valued workers harvesting a product of unparalleled quality
and purity. Their rapid, assembly line process was an “object of admiration” as twenty tons of ice

309
“Convicts to Make Ice,” San Francisco Call, January 31, 1895.
310
“Convicts to Make Ice,” San Francisco Call, January 31, 1895.
311
“Convicts to Make Ice,” San Francisco Call, January 31, 1895.

131
floated into the icehouse every minute.
312
“If our legislature could see this work going on,” it
continues, “we think they would blush with shame to think they would allow a bill to come
before them, the passage of which would be certain death to this industry.”
313

Fortunately, ice harvesters and their families had an advocate in state government.
Richard Thomas, a Republican, represented Nevada County in the State Assembly and presented
multiple petitions against the bill signed by thousands of his constituents.
314
The petitions
acknowledged the need for prisons to be self-sufficient but urged lawmakers to consider another
approach. Instead of mass-producing ice, the men incarcerated at Folsom could instead work to
produce many different items required for prison life in only the amounts needed.
315
Diversifying
production would minimize the impact on any one industry, the petition argued, while giving
prisoners more options for employment upon release. This idea had some merit, as multiple other
proposals for manufacturing at the state prison were under discussion in Sacramento, including
making rope, crushing stone for paving roads, and building furniture.
316
But the task of
equipping and training inmates to make everything needed within the prison walls—to turn the
prison into a closed system—would be enormous. Manufacturing one product on a mass scale
was simply more economical.
As for the question of reducing the effect on free labor, Budd and other supporters of the
plan believed they had already done so by selecting ice as the product to be manufactured. In

312
“Moody’s Ice Works,” Grass Valley Union, February 15, 1895. This figure is slightly suspect as the article
describes packing “about two hundred” blocks of “nearly three hundred pounds” per minute. Regardless, for a
process driven by water and human muscle, the speed of the ice harvest would have been an impressive sight.
313
“Moody’s Ice Works,” Grass Valley Union, February 15, 1895.
314
“California Legislature,” Sacramento Daily Union, February 8, 1895; California State Assembly, The Journal of
the Assembly during the Thirty-First Session of the Legislature of the State of California (Sacramento: State
Publishing Office, 1895), 290, 347.
315
“Ice Men Object,” Grass Valley Union, January 27, 1895.
316
“California Legislature,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 30, 1895; “Cheap Rock for Roads,” San Francisco
Call, February 11, 1895; “Bills in the Assembly,” San Francisco Call, February 14, 1895. The furniture bill was
introduced by Assemblyman Thomas as a direct replacement to the ice bill. It did not advance.

132
response, the citizens of Nevada County stressed the importance of ice industry jobs to their
community. “There is no industry in the state that has more claims to recognition than that of
putting up natural ice,” read one article printed in the Truckee Republican and subsequently
republished to a much larger readership in the San Francisco Call.
317
The ice industry was
worthy of special consideration, the piece argued, given that it employed hundreds of men at
“good living wages” during a time when work was otherwise scarce. Competition from
incarcerated labor would necessitate that ice companies lower the pay for their men such that
they would no longer be able to support their families or lay them off entirely. In either case,
former icemen would “probably have to tramp all over the State in search of something else to
do,” an especially difficult task in the middle of winter.
318

This line of argument was likely to strike a chord with even the most hard-hearted
members of the California Assembly. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing into the early
twentieth century, California’s legal system expended an enormous amount of effort in a war
against vagrancy.
319
In 1891, Budd’s predecessor, Governor Henry Markham, had signed into
law a revision of the 1872 California Anti-Vagrancy Act. The new law made vagrancy
punishable by six months in jail instead of by a fine as before and expanded the legal definition
of a “vagrant” considerably.
320
Following its implementation, reports of vagrants, drunkards, and
those merely suspected of public idleness being arrested filled the pages of newspapers across
the state. Matters worsened considerably in winter, when seasonal industries dismissed as many
as 100,000 itinerant laborers until the next spring.
321
The number of men employed by the ice

317
“Convict Ice,” San Francisco Call, February 3, 1895.
318
“Convict Ice,” San Francisco Call, February 3, 1895.
319
See Hernández, City of Inmates, particularly chapter 2, “Hobos in Heaven.”
320
“The New Vagrant Law,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 24, 1891.
321
Hernández, City of Inmates, 47.

133
companies may have been small in comparison—a thousand at the most—but every job provided
during the harsh winter months was a “tramp” off the streets of cities like Sacramento and Los
Angeles. From this perspective, lawmakers might not have been so keen to endanger jobs in the
ice industry.
Exactly how many jobs might have been lost is a moot point as the bill did not actually
pass. As luck would have it, Assemblyman Thomas of Nevada County sat on the Committee on
State Prisons and Reformatory Institutions, to which the prison ice bill was referred after its
introduction.
322
As a member of this committee, Thomas argued strenuously against the bill and
in favor of his home county, which he and his constituents believed had “suffered enough”
without one of its key industries being undermined by state-funded competition.
323
The bill’s
sponsor, Assemblyman Laugenour of Yolo County, sat on the committee as well, but Thomas
succeeded in convincing the body to rule against passing it.
324
With that vote, the plan to produce
cheap ice at Folsom State Prison was dead. The prison’s administrators eventually installed
icemaking machinery but manufactured only enough for internal use. The failure of California
Democrats to establish a state-run ice factory as they had promised probably did not
meaningfully contribute to their rejection by the state’s voters, but nevertheless, Governor James
Budd was the last Democrat of his generation to reach that office. The governorship did not
return to Democratic hands until 1939.
Had he been more knowledgeable about the ice industry, Budd could have made other
arguments in his plan’s favor and pushed it through despite the objections. The dependence of
natural ice on the weather was a legitimate weakness, as was the remote location of the ice ponds

322
California State Assembly, Journal of the California State Assembly, 97, 152.
323
“At the State Capitol,” Grass Valley Union, February 10, 1895.
324
“At the State Capitol,” Grass Valley Union, February 17, 1895.

134
in the Sierra Nevada. Folsom, on the other hand, sits only about twenty miles from Sacramento.
From this central location, the proposed ice factory could have served the needs of both the
capital city and the many trains that passed through it. The specifics of the ice industry and of
cold-control technologies were never a priority for the governor or his associates, however.
While Budd saw it primarily through the lens of reducing state expenses, the Folsom ice plant is
an example of the (attempted) use of state power to reorient the cold web. In this case, the effort
did not succeed, but if it had, California would have utilized forced labor from incarcerated
citizens to strengthen the urban coldscape at the expense of the rural economy of the Truckee
Basin. Folsom, not Truckee, would have sat at the center of the web. Increased production and
lower prices for ice could have allowed for the creation of more refrigerated spaces, large and
small, particularly within the cities of the Bay Area and the Sacramento Valley.
Although Budd knew little about how ice was made, he seems to have recognized the
changing role of ice in the lives of his constituents at the end of the nineteenth century. Ice had
long since ceased to be a luxury. Californians did not simply want ice, they required it—for
comfort, for business, for health, and for leisure. The governor saw how ice undergirded the
prosperity of his agriculturally rich state and how less expensive, more abundant ice would
benefit California’s farmers and ranchers. Budd’s ice factory, run with incarcerated labor, would
have elevated ice to the status of a government service, perhaps paving the way for other
politicians to standardize ice as a state-managed utility. Many consumers likely would have
welcomed an alternative to the growing threat of monopoly from the Union Ice Company. But
Budd’s plan failed, and although businesses across the state bore names like “Consumers’ Ice
Company” and “Peoples’ Ice Company,” there was no true public option. Without the boost the
state could have provided to artificial ice production, natural ice—and the near monopoly that

135
sold it—remained competitive in California into the twentieth century. Soon, growing demand
from growers and shippers in the booming agricultural sector would push Western ice
companies, natural and artificial alike, to their limits.

136
Chapter 4
Produce and Preservation

In the wake of the Civil War, a New York butcher-turned-historian named Thomas F. De
Voe toured the marketplaces of four of the North’s largest cities—New York City, Brooklyn,
Boston, and Philadelphia—with the aim of answering for the good of the public a deceptively
simple question: “What is there in our Markets fit to eat?”
325
De Voe, a recognized genius in the
field of butchery, proved to be no less adept at research. From his voluminous notes, which
contained information gleaned from interviews with salesmen, newspaper articles, and historical
manuscripts, he published The Market Assistant: Containing a Brief Description of Every Article
of Human Food Sold in the Public Markets of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
Brooklyn; Including the Various Domestic and Wild Animals, Poultry, Game, Fish, Vegetables,
Fruits, &c., &c. with Many Curious Incidents and Anecdotes in 1867. As the title indicates, De
Voe intended his work to be a comprehensive record, not just of the markets themselves, but of
the origins, cultivation, and uses of all that was available within them. This task required over
four hundred pages, but the book’s review in the New York Times pronounced that De Voe had
“[carried] out to the letter the promise of the title.”
326

By conducting his investigations in the mid-1860s, De Voe captured these urban
marketplaces just before a major turning point in the history of American eating: the completion
of the transcontinental railroad. His exhaustive attention to detail makes clear the wide array of
goods which made their way to Northeastern markets, while also revealing the items that
remained difficult to find. De Voe writes of railroads and steamboats bringing fresh produce up

325
Thomas Farrington De Voe, The Market Assistant, Containing a Brief Description of Every Article of Human
Food Sold in the Public Markets of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn (New York: Hurd
and Houghton, 1867), 6.
326
“New Publications,” New York Times, March 17, 1867.

137
from the Southern states in early spring, “thus inducing, as it were, in these latitudes, artificial
seasons.”
327
As spring gave way to summer, vegetables from all points “are daily gathered in
vast quantities; then dispatched by the numerous railroads, steamboats, sloops, and vehicles of all
sorts to their destinations, and we find them in the various public markets the next morning fresh
and good.”
328
Even so, certain items remained expensive and limited in both quantity and
quality. Fruit especially posed a challenge to the urban consumers of the North. “Fruits are not
sufficiently plentiful to supply the wants of all,” wrote De Voe, and this lack was evident in the
marketplace, where even poor-quality fruit was often hard to come by.
329
Citrus fruit in particular
stand out as underrepresented. The best (and most expensive) oranges available in New York
came from St. Augustine, Florida, but after the small domestic supply ran out, fruit shipped in
from the Caribbean and the Mediterranean took its place.
330
Lemons came exclusively from
overseas, while limes and grapefruit De Voe included in his text only for the sake of
completeness as they were “seldom to be found.”
331
Even temperate fruits like apples and pears
came to market only in brief windows as various growing regions packed and shipped local
produce. Despite the growing power of “artificial means [of preservation] and the swift steam-
engine,” the vast majority of American foodstuffs remained locked away by season and
terrain.
332

In his writing, De Voe delves deeply into the histories of American shopping and eating
but resists speculation on their futures. Whether or not he had his own private notions of what the
future may bring, even such an astute observer as De Voe could not have predicted the sweeping

327
De Voe, The Market Assistant, 321.
328
De Voe, 322.
329
De Voe, 367–68.
330
De Voe, 383.
331
De Voe, 378–79.
332
De Voe, 20.

138
changes that were to come even in the remainder of his own lifetime. The Market Assistant
addresses the West only in the broadest strokes as the source of “wild-fowl, venison, poultry,
[and] butter,” and De Voe’s descriptions of Western spaces indicate that his West stretched only
to the prairies of Indiana and Illinois.
333
The Pacific Coast lies beyond the edge of possibility as
viewed from New York City in 1867. Yet within a generation, the agricultural riches of Western
landscapes would become everyday sights in the markets De Voe so carefully examined.
This chapter extends the cold web beyond cities into the Western hinterlands and,
eventually, to the cities of the East. Successfully shipping perishable goods across the United
States required greatly expanding the physical infrastructure of the cold web. Rural communities
and farming cooperatives erected cold storage warehouses in which produce could be held and
prepared for shipping. Railroad companies established icing stations at calculated intervals
across the West, islands of cold from which railroad cars would be refreshed with new ice,
thousands of pounds at a time. Refrigerated boxcars, or “reefers” as railmen nicknamed them,
were themselves refrigerated spaces, albeit ones that traded precise temperature control for
mobility. The geographic scope of the cross-country cold web required cooperation and
interdependence between many actors at distant locations. Failure at one point could cascade
throughout the system as separate cold chains crossed and merged, leaving trains stranded as
their contents warmed, melted, and soured. These interruptions, however, paled in comparison to
the millions of pounds of food that arrived in the East not salted, dried, or rotten, but almost
supernaturally fresh. Refrigerated rail transport, to borrow from Wolfgang Schivelbusch,

333
De Voe, 20.

139
conquered time, space, and nature to bring Western ranches, farms, and orchards to the Eastern
consumer’s doorstep.
334

As we have seen, advances in artificial ice machines allowed any business owner with
sufficient space and capital to establish his own refrigerated spaces, ranging from small
chambers to cavernous cold storage rooms. For dealers handling products like meat or beer, the
still sizeable investment required to install and operate ice machinery was money well spent.
Uninterrupted refrigeration was a requirement, not a luxury, and manufacturing one’s own ice
meant a warm spell in Truckee or a strike among city ice deliverymen would not, for instance,
wipe out a butcher’s stock. Yet many other merchants dealt in a mixture of dry and refrigerated
goods or sold products that would benefit from climate-controlled storage but did not necessarily
need it. For these businesses, the upfront costs of ice machines and insulated rooms outstripped
the potential benefits. Meanwhile, artificial ice companies found it most economical to keep their
machines running day and night. On all but the hottest of summer days, ice sales fell short of
daily production, resulting in a growing surplus of ice sitting in storerooms in the middle of
Western cities. It did not take long for enterprising icemen to turn excess ice—an idea scarcely
imaginable in the urban West a few decades earlier— into a valuable service in and of itself.
Joint ice and cold storage companies provided the same “product”—cold—in two ways.
Either customers could buy blocks of ice and take them for use in their own homes or businesses,
or they could rent space and make use of the ice’s cooling power at a central warehouse. Many
factors might affect a consumer’s choice to use one service or the other, including the amount of
goods to be stored, the temperature at which they needed to be preserved, and the length of time

334
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth
Century: With a New Preface (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014). See especially chapter 3,
“Railroad Space and Railroad Time.” See also William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, to which this dissertation is
deeply indebted.

140
they were to spend in storage. Purpose-built cold storage excelled at keeping large volumes of
perishables cold for months and even years. The fuller the storage rooms, the better—just like a
household refrigerator, cold storage chambers maintained a steady temperature more effectively
when more densely packed with ice or other goods. When properly packed, these rooms reached
a lower temperature than household or even commercial iceboxes, which were smaller and more
frequently opened. Certain larger cold storage businesses even installed refrigerant coils into the
walls or floors of their buildings, but this required a massive investment of capital.
335

Cold storage facilities served distinct but complementary purposes within the cold web
depending on their location. Urban cold storage typically catered to the needs of vendors
managing their imported goods, items brought into the city from the hinterlands. The largest
cities grew into centers of wholesale trade, taking in goods from the surrounding region and
redistributing them back to the smaller towns in the countryside.
336
Even as cold storage
operators tried to create and maintain artificial climates, their temperature-controlled spaces were
unavoidably tied to the environments surrounding them. Advertisements for the Los Angeles
Cold Storage Company in 1888 boldly declared, “There is no city in the world where cold
storage is needed so much for almost everything we produce and eat.”
337

In another column, the company specifically addressed its intended customers: “Grocers
and storekeepers now have a cold storage warehouse where they can send any material they
desire to have preserved for sale. It sometimes happens that the demand for an article is not great
and unless the sale is brisk, some portion of the receipts is likely to be left on hand. There is a
means provided now whereby this portion can now be saved in a fresh condition for sale another

335
Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 127.
336
Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 281.
337
Los Angeles Cold Storage Company advertisement, Los Angeles Herald, August 11, 1888.

141
day.”
338
This description implies that within urban spaces the cold storage warehouse could be
treated as an extension of the city’s shops, a centralized equivalent of a back storeroom or cellar.
Accessibility would be key to the success of this relationship. Shopkeepers required the
flexibility to respond to changing demands from the public, depositing or withdrawing items
from cold storage as the need arose. A vendor could not sell what he could not easily retrieve
from his rented storage. Likewise, proper organization was vital. Cold storage managers had to
ensure that each customer’s goods remained separate from the next and that every item stored
could be traced to the proper owner. Haphazard storage could result in foods attracting off
flavors or being damaged by indelicate handling. In cases like these, it was not uncommon for
unhappy customers to sue storage operators to recoup their losses.
339
Some sympathy, perhaps,
should be offered to cold storage managers given the difficulty of their task. Constant changes in
a cold storage room’s contents made maintaining a consistent temperature and humidity
formidable challenges. Urban cold storage warehouses were active spaces, not static museums
of chilly commodities. They served as places of commerce, with items changing hands while
staying safely refrigerated, and of production, as in the case of one Los Angeles restaurateur who
was able to sell the cheapest ice cream in the city by virtue of manufacturing it in the refrigerated
space provided by the Los Angeles Ice Company.
340
Within the cold web, cold storage facilities
were not dead ends or final destinations, but hubs through which goods flowed.
Rural cold storage locations operated on the same principles but in pursuit of different
goals. In contrast to urban cold storage, which dealt largely with goods brought into the city from

338
“Ice. Ice. Ice.,” Los Angeles Herald, August 11, 1888.
339
“Damaged Eggs,” San Francisco Call, February 26, 1891; “He Says His Apples Were Frozen,” Seattle Post-
Intelligencer, April 20, 1894; “Egg Has Banana Flavor,” Seattle Star, September 29, 1915.
340
Occidental Restaurant advertisement, Los Angeles Herald, May 27, 1881. Similarly, the Los Angeles Cold
Storage Company rented out space in its building to manufacturers requiring a temperature-controlled environment.

142
elsewhere, cold storage in small agricultural communities primarily preserved locally produced
commodities prior to shipping and sale. While seemingly a straightforward advancement,
accessible rural cold storage profoundly reshaped the relationship of farmers, orchardists, and
ranchers to regional and national markets, giving them a level of control over their products and
their businesses that they never had before. Prior to the introduction of large-scale cold storage to
agricultural areas, growers of perishable crops such as fruits and vegetables had only a narrow
window of time in which to sell their produce. Racing to sell their goods before they spoiled,
farmers often had to accept lower prices, particularly when multiple growing regions harvested at
once, flooding the market. The change cold storage brought to American agriculture was not
simply that food could be shipped farther than before. It fundamentally altered the way both
producers and consumers understood seasonality.
In the twenty-first century United States, industrial agriculture and globalized distribution
systems have resulted in the uniform availability of nearly all food products throughout the year.
Quality of certain foods may be higher during specific seasons, but they are nonetheless always
purchasable. This is a development of the modern cold chain and dates back only a few decades.
For growers and merchants at the turn of the twentieth century, wide availability was a goal, but
not yet a reality. Indeed, some foods considered “seasonless” staples today—eggs are a prime
example—were marketed as a seasonal commodity.
341
Cold storage removed most, but not all, of
the risk involved in saving agricultural products to sell weeks or even months later. For the first
time, growers could play the market and decide for themselves whether to sell close to the

341
“Native Hens Cackling,” San Francisco Call, February 24, 1895. Eggs rarely disappeared from the market
completely, but both price and quality were far more influenced by the season than today. In some instances, these
price hikes were significant enough to make shipping Western eggs cross-country a viable proposition. Dealers
during the winter of 1895 purchased California eggs at 16½ cents per dozen and sold them at 28 cents per dozen in
Chicago.

143
harvest at lower prices or wait until supply dwindled and prices rose. From the perspective of the
consumer, this flexibility expanded availability greatly as different producers chose to bring their
crops to market at different times. Preserving produce for later sale, even if it were only to spend
a few weeks in cold storage, was therefore a critical early step toward the uniform, yearlong
market of today.

“A Great Boom [sic] for the People of this Valley”: Cold Storage and Capital in Yakima
As an example of the transformative power of cold storage in an agricultural community,
let us examine the case of Yakima, Washington.
342
Located on the eastern side of the Cascade
Mountains in south-central Washington State, the Yakima River Valley boasts rich volcanic soil
and warm summers. The forced removal of the Yakama people by the United States government
to only a small slice of their ancestral homelands in the 1850s opened thousands of acres to white
settlement, but the region’s aridity severely restricted agricultural development. An influx of
funds both from the federal government and from the Northern Pacific Railway, which arrived in
Yakima in 1885, jumpstarted the construction of irrigation infrastructure in the Yakima
Valley.
343
As a result, orchards multiplied in central Washington through the turn of the century.
Twenty-five thousand apple trees of fruit bearing age in 1890 became 346,000 by 1900, and
almost a million by 1910.
344
With production increasing year over year, ample supply was all but
assured while challenges of distribution and sale remained to be conquered. Communities that

342
A preemptive disclaimer: the city, county, and river are all spelled “Yakima.” The Indigenous Nation and the
present-day reservation are both spelled “Yakama.” For further reading on (dis)possession, agriculture, and settler-
colonialism on Yakama lands, see the work of Yesenia N. Hunter.
343
Amanda L. Van Lanen, “‘We Have Grown Fine Fruit Whether We Would or No’: The History of the
Washington State Apple Industry, 1880-1930” (Doctoral thesis, Washington State University, 2009), 48–58.
344
Van Lanen, 83.

144
had already invested in new ways to grow fruit had to seek out innovative ways to store and
transport it.
Winters in the region east of the Cascades get cold enough to permit the formation and
harvesting of ice, but as we have seen, the process is not so simple in practice. Like the ice
harvesting region of the Sierra Nevada, the Yakima Valley sits in a rain shadow; the towering
Cascade Range prevents the moisture of the Pacific from crossing into the greater Columbia
Basin. Precipitation, particularly snow, is one of the iceman’s greatest foes, so this was a point in
Yakima’s favor, but Yakima winters only rarely featured the deep, consistent cold required to
freeze bodies of water to a depth suitable for cutting. This forced Washington ice companies to
compromise and store ice that any of their Truckee Basin counterparts would scoff at—only six
to eight inches thick rather than twelve to fourteen.
345
Thinner cakes of ice melted more quickly,
both in storage and in use, and meant that a much smaller volume of ice was put away at all. This
was a surmountable problem when Yakima was a small town, but as the population increased
and industrial agriculture took root in the valley, the difficulties grew apace.
In 1900, Yakima experienced a brief “ice famine” during which no “congealed coldness”
could be found. Ironically, given the drama of the phrase, ice famines occurred regularly in
Yakima and across the West and rarely represented an ice supply interruption of more than a
week. In this case, Yakima only went without ice for three days. The incident is remarkable,
however, for its timing. Ice famines were a summer phenomenon. This one came in mid-
December. For ice to run out in the middle of winter, when demand was lowest, indicated serious

345
“Snap Shots at Yakima,” Yakima Herald, December 3, 1896; “The Local Round-Up,” Yakima Herald, February
22, 1900; “Pen Sketches of the Week,” Yakima Herald, January 24, 1901; “Reportorial Shortstops,” Yakima Herald,
February 7, 1901. Yakima icemen occasionally cut thicker ice, but these years were few and far between. Leading
local iceman Frank Sinclair harvested ice between ten and twelve inches thick in December 1896, but this was in
conjunction with record-breaking cold weather.

145
instability in the cold web of central Washington. If the market could not support small-scale ice
consumption in the coldest part of the year, then applying ice to any industrial purpose was out
of the question. The citizens of Yakima recognized this, and a full evaluation of the issue
appeared in the Yakima Herald a few weeks later. “The ice problem is getting to be a serious
matter in Yakima owing to the mild winters,” it began.
346
After the small supply left from the
previous winter ran out, customers “were compelled to pay $20 per ton for manufactured ice
shipped from the Sound.” Ordering ice from Seattle or Olympia was far from a sustainable
solution as the cost advantages of machine-made ice were quickly outpaced by the cost of
transportation. As the article went to print, the ice on local ponds measured only three inches.
Something else would have to be done. Wasting no time, Yakima iceman Frank Sinclair traveled
to Seattle to see the city’s ice factories and determine if Yakima could follow in its footsteps. He
returned discouraged, however. The expenses of establishing and operating an ice plant in a town
the size of Yakima were “too heavy a tariff” to be feasible.
347
He would cut and store whatever
ice he could and hope it lasted.
The solution to Yakima’s ice problem came unexpectedly in the summer of 1903 when a
man named John Lewis Hughes arrived in town from Atwell, Illinois. He came to Yakima with a
mission: he wanted to start an ice factory and cold storage warehouse. Back home, Hughes had
been a teacher and a school superintendent. He had no family in Washington; his roots were
across the Atlantic in Wales. He had never even been out West before. In an interview with the
Yakima Herald, Hughes stated simply that he had “heard of this city as a good location for an ice
factory and cold storage plant” and so he hopped a train to investigate.
348
So far, he had judged

346
“The Ice Problem,” Yakima Herald, January 3, 1901.
347
“City News in Brief,” Yakima Herald, January 24, 1901.
348
“Yakima May Have an Ice Plant,” Yakima Herald, August 26, 1903.

146
the people of Yakima “to be of a good business caliber” and was content to move forward. The
feeling was evidently mutual, as the article called Hughes “every inch a gentleman” and
mentioned that he “impresses one as thoroughly business.” Between the time of the interview
and when the Herald went to press, Hughes dropped by the newspaper office to announce that he
had purchased property in the city and the plan was “a sure go.”
349

John Hughes was not the first to announce construction of an ice factory in Yakima. For a
moment in 1902, it seemed that the town might gain two such institutions practically
overnight.
350
For various reasons, most of them undoubtedly financial, none materialized. With
no previous experience in ice and refrigeration and no ties to the community, Hughes must have
attracted the skepticism of some in Yakima, but he was no con man come to defraud an isolated
farming town. He and his business partner swiftly moved their families to Yakima and set to
work on the plant, which was to cost at least $30,000.
351
The question remains, however, of how
he came to the idea in the first place.
352
Accompanying their investments in infrastructure in
central Washington, the Northern Pacific Railway and associated land companies blanketed the
East and Midwest in advertising. These pamphlets dazzled readers with the beauty of the
Northwest and argued that anyone, with or without prior expertise, could start a thriving farm or
orchard there.
353
Hughes likely learned about Yakima from one of these publications, but he

349
“Yakima May Have an Ice Plant,” Yakima Herald, August 26, 1903.
350
“Another Ice Plant,” Yakima Herald, February 4, 1902.
351
The partner, J. A. Hawks, only remained involved for a short time. His share was bought out by R. DeKay in
August 1904. “City News in Brief,” Yakima Herald, September 2, 1903; “To Enlarge Ice Plant,” Yakima Herald,
August 10, 1904.
352
An article in the trade journal Cold Storage alleged that Hughes acted on behalf of unnamed “capitalists,” but
sources disagree on who exactly was involved. The Yakima Herald only mentions Hawks. A piece from the Yakima
Democrat first listed his partners as J. A. Hawks and Fred Helton, but a subsequent article claimed, “A number of
wealthy men of Atwood, Ill. are interested with him in the enterprise.” This seems the most likely given the amount
of capital required to build the ice plant. Hughes was definitively the face of the project, however. “News from the
Pacific Coast,” Cold Storage 10, no. 3, (Sept. 1903): 117; “Ice Plant Assured,” Yakima Democrat, August 29, 1903;
“Ice Plant and Cold Storage,” Yakima Democrat, September 5, 1903.
353
Van Lanen, “We Have Grown Fine Fruit,” 63–71.

147
rightly ascertained that the region needed an ice plant more than it needed another farmer. For
their part, the people of Yakima must have been accustomed to outside investment in their
community, as the railroad and irrigation systems that spurred the town’s growth had come about
similarly. In any case, the locals were not about to spurn needed improvements just because the
capital required came from elsewhere.
Construction on the ice plant and cold storage warehouse proceeded rapidly and
anticipation around Yakima grew alongside it. Hughes continued to give interviews with the
Herald, laying out his plans for the new facility. He noted that his new neighbors expressed
particular excitement about the cold storage side of the business, and he pledged to pay special
attention to meeting their needs in that regard. Large producers and shippers would benefit from
the ability to store carloads of fruit, but Hughes was attentive to individual customers as well.
One room in the cold storage warehouse was to be outfitted with small compartments, which
could be rented out “and each patron may have his own particular box the same as in a safety
deposit vault.”
354
Hughes emphasized that these lockers would rent for only “a small sum,” thus
making reliable cold storage accessible to all and ensuring “nothing that is produced need go to
waste.” The new cold storage plant had the potential to change how Yakima handled perishable
goods on both small and large scales. The Herald reporter summed up its inestimable value this
way: “With an up-to-date cold storage plant the hundreds of tons of fruit annually wasted in this
valley may be preserved until such time as there is a market for it. All hail the cold storage and
ice plant.”
355

By early February, less than six months after Hughes had first set foot in Yakima, the ice
plant was operating at full capacity. In conjunction with the plant’s completion, the Herald ran a

354
“The Cold Storage and Ice Plant,” Yakima Herald, September 2, 1903.
355
“The Cold Storage and Ice Plant,” Yakima Herald, September 2, 1903.

148
congratulatory piece with a detailed description of the building’s layout. It is worth including
here as representative of a fully appointed rural cold storage facility at the turn of the twentieth
century:
There are five cold storage rooms, in which are a perfect network of pipes for the
conveyance of cold air from the large ice-storage room. These rooms are designated the
egg room, the butter room, the fruit room and two general storage rooms, which will
accommodate an almost unlimited quantity of various produce. The machinery
throughout is thoroughly modern and up-to-date, the entire cost of the plant being put at
$50,000. The capacity of the plant is estimated at 50 tons per day, and the process of
manufacture absolutely insures [sic] a pure quality of ice. This is undoubtedly one of the
greatest enterprises yet inaugurated in this section.
356

If Hughes truly was a novice in the field of cold storage, he had done his due diligence in
research and planning. Separation of eggs and butter from aromatic fruit helped guard against
off-flavors. Using pipes to divert cool air into the storage rooms rather than pack them with ice
directly reduced moisture and therefore mildewing. This system also allowed operators to adjust
the temperature of individual chambers for optimal preservation of different products.
357

Like his urban counterparts, Hughes threw open the doors of his building and invited the public
to observe the machinery at work within. Even though Yakima residents had called for an ice
plant and cold storage facility for some time, the inner workings of one remained obscure to
most. Hughes showed his roots as a teacher and “took especial pains to explain everything to the
visitors, which included a large delegation from the public schools.”
358
He did not expect the
people of Yakima to entrust their valuable produce to him without first investigating the
premises. Fortunately, the new business met with resounding approval. The time had come to see
whether it had been worth the investment.

356
“Ready for Business,” Yakima Herald, January 20, 1904.
357
“To the Public,” Yakima Herald, February 17, 1904.
358
“Condensed City News,” Yakima Herald, February 10, 1904.

149
The Yakima Artificial Ice and Cold Storage Company began selling ice and accepting
goods to be stored immediately, but its true test came that summer. The challenge to Hughes and
his business partner, J. A. Hawks, was twofold: provide enough ice to meet public demand
through the hot summer months and enable Yakima’s orchardists to make a fine showing at the
upcoming state fair. Determining demand—and therefore the proper rate of production—was its
own puzzle. Prior to the establishment of the ice plant, Yakima did not have enough ice to go
around, that much was clear. But, given the chance to buy ice at home for a reasonable rate, how
much would the people of Yakima consume? The company’s machinery, running at all hours of
the day and night, could produce a three-hundred-pound block of ice every ten minutes, or a
yield of just over twenty tons every twenty-four hours.
359
And as had happened in other Western
communities, the demand for ice in Yakima swiftly and soundly rose to meet the expanded
supply.
This was a surprise to Hughes: at the start of the enterprise, he believed twenty tons
would more than serve Yakima, and he would have to market the ice to nearby towns as well.
360

This proved to be not only unnecessary, but unfeasible given the small quantity of ice left
unsold—and created for Hughes an unanticipated dilemma when he was approached by another
city in the Pacific Northwest.
361
In April, only two months into operation, citizens of Spokane,
230 miles away via the Northern Pacific, contacted the Yakima Artificial Ice Company offering
to buy the factory’s entire output.
362
The mild winters that held back Yakima’s natural ice

359
The cooling tank contained 143 rectangular freezing cans, each one measuring 36 by 22 by 11 inches. The
machine did not freeze these large blocks in only ten minutes, rather, the cans were staggered so that each began
freezing at ten-minute intervals. This allowed the blocks to freeze slowly, over the course of twenty-four hours, and
meant that ice factory workers only had to remove and refill one can every ten minutes. “The Ice Factory,” Yakima
Democrat, February 13, 1904.
360
“May Put in Ice Plant,” Yakima Democrat, August 22, 1903.
361
“To Enlarge Ice Plant,” Yakima Herald, August 10, 1904.
362
“Want All the Ice,” Yakima Herald, April 6, 1904.

150
industry had done the same in eastern Washington and western Montana, and Spokane was
facing an early spring ice famine. Spokane’s own artificial ice plant was underway, but not
scheduled to begin producing until June.
363
Frustrations mounted as the local icemen announced
that the price for the remnants of that winter’s meager harvest would more than double, from
forty cents per hundred pounds to one dollar.
364
The freight charges alone on carloads of ice from
Yakima would normally be prohibitive, but the Spokane dealers offered to pay above the going
rate for ice if the Yakima icemen would turn over their supply. Overpaying, even grossly
overpaying, was preferable to going without ice.
Despite the promise of a better price, Hawks and Hughes publicly rejected the proposal,
stating that they came to Yakima “to sell to the home people and will first supply them, even at a
lower figure, before shipping the product.”
365
By promising to put Yakima first, they affirmed
their loyalty to their new hometown over potential profit. In this context, ice was not a
commodity, but a community good. The benefits it brought accrued to the whole town and
Hughes considered himself a public servant. By summer, plans were underway to expand
capacity.
366
Spokane had to find its ice elsewhere.

363
“No Ice Cut,” Spokane Press, February 25, 1904.
364
“Another Fool’s Day Joke,” Spokane Press, April 1, 1904.
365
“Want All the Ice,” Yakima Herald, April 6, 1904.
366
“To Enlarge Ice Plant,” Yakima Herald, August 10, 1904.

151

Figure 3. The Yakima Artificial Ice and Cold Storage Company as it appeared after expansion in 1908. The original caption of
the image as it appeared in Better Fruit, the publication of the Northwest Fruit Growers Association, noted that at the time of the
photograph, the company was storing forty carloads of apples. Source: “Orchard Development in the Yakima Valley,” Better
Fruit 2, no. 8, (Feb. 1908): 11.
If the Spokane ice famine tested the priorities of the ice plant owners, the 1904
Washington State Fair was the test of their cold storage facilities. The farmers and orchardists of
Yakima treated the agricultural displays at the fair with the utmost seriousness. The boosterism
that came out in magazine articles and advertisements about Yakima—such as the one placed by
the Yakima County Horticultural Union that proclaimed that the Yakima Valley’s “climate rivals
California” and its “fertility rivals the Nile”—applied to the fair’s contests as well.
367

Competition with other counties was fierce, both for local bragging rights as well as the free
marketing in fair travelogues published in papers across the West.
As the host of the fair, Yakima County was expected to perform well and local growers
intended to exceed expectations. In an article titled, “Yakima County Must Win the First Prize,”
the members of the Horticultural Union outlined their plans. The exhibit for the 1904 fair would
be different than in years past. Previously, the county produce display had been disorganized, the

367
Yakima County Horticultural Union advertisement, Better Fruit 2, no. 8, (Feb. 1908): 3.

152
work of individuals without coordination. Instead, Yakima’s horticulturalists would pool their
knowledge and resources to select the best produce in each category. They would then make use
of their key new advantage; the finest fruits would be deposited in the cold storage warehouse for
safekeeping.
368
Already, crates of strawberries and cherries picked in July sat within, awaiting
their day in the spotlight.
369

Preparations for the fair made for a straightforward test of the cold storage plant’s
efficacy and its managers’ skill. In theory, this was to be a relatively simple task for the new
facility. The amount of fruit to be stored was small and most would only need to remain
refrigerated for a few months, until late September. Using temperature and humidity controls,
conditions in the storage room could be adjusted as needed for each variety of produce.
Micromanagement on Hughes’s part could pay off handsomely. Without previous experience
refrigerating produce for later sale, locals needed proof that the system worked. If the fruit
emerged from cold storage in poor condition, one could hardly expect Yakima growers to entrust
any more of their goods to the company. But if the produce instead came out looking as pristine
as it went in, then the Yakima County exhibit would be as much an advertisement for the cold
storage company as it was the county, just in time for the harvest. As successful showing would
cement cold storage as a necessary and valuable part of the fruit growing industry.
At long last, the time came to open the fair. Visitors flowed in from across the Northwest,
and exhibitors hurriedly assembled their displays. When the Horticultural Union members began
to retrieve the produce left with Hughes, they found the oldest fruits, apples placed in cold
storage when the facility opened seven months prior, “looked as fresh and tasted as crisp as when

368
“Yakima County Must Win the First Prize,” Yakima Herald, July 27, 1904.
369
“Special Premiums for the State Fair,” Yakima Herald, July 13, 1904.

153
put in.”
370
Hughes, showing his business savvy, took out an advertisement the very same day,
listing the cold storage rates for the coming season.
371
The apples, along with the rest of the
Yakima Valley produce, impressed guests and judges alike throughout the week of the fair. “The
products of Yakima County alone, particularly the fruit, commanded the wonder and amazement
of the most credulous,” reported the Yakima Democrat.
372
Through careful attention to the
judging rules as much as green thumbs and careful refrigeration, Yakima County won both the
first and second place prizes for agricultural exhibits, to the delight of the growers who had set
their minds so firmly on victory.
373

Despite the integral role the cold storage warehouse played in the county’s triumph, the
normally gregarious Hughes did not publish any statements taking credit. Instead, he took a
different approach to make sure that his contribution could not be ignored. Alongside the tables
of produce, the Yakima Artificial Ice and Cold Storage Company made its own small exhibit of
glass-like blocks of ice, standing on end. Inside the blocks, suspended in ice, were “frozen fruit-
laden limbs of apple, cherry, and other trees and bouquets of flowers.” Another block, shown in
the accompanying photograph, contained fish and shellfish looking as fresh as when they were
pulled from the water.

370
“Apples Kept Good,” Yakima Democrat, September 29, 1904.
371
Yakima Artificial Ice Company advertisement, Yakima Democrat, September 29, 1904.
372
“Last Day of the Fair,” Yakima Democrat, October 1, 1904.
373
“Annual State Fair is on in Full Blast,” Yakima Herald, September 28, 1904. Sunnyside, a town in the southern
part of Yakima County, entered the competition on its own, most likely as a stunt from local boosters. The gamble
paid off and Sunnyside’s growers walked away with second place, making Yakima the best county twice over, at
least in the minds of its own citizens.

154

Figure 4. Ice blocks created by the Yakima Artificial Ice Company and exhibited at the 1904 Washington State Fair. Frozen in
the blocks are an apple branch, complete with fruit and leaves (left) and two salmon and an assortment of shellfish (right). Note
the apples stacked behind the blocks. Source: Yakima Valley Museum.
This was a bit of showmanship on the part of the icemen. Translucent blocks required
time and skill to create, but had everything to do with aesthetics, not quality. Furthermore,
neither fruit nor fish, not to mention flowers, could be effectively preserved this way. It was,
however, a striking image that communicated to the average fairgoer two important messages.
First, that ice could stop nature’s clock and keep products in a state of perfect preservation; and
second, that the Yakima Artificial Ice Company made the highest quality ice available.
Everything a potential customer needed to know was communicated at a glance. If that were not
enough, the company also “provided comfort to the visitors to the pavilion” in the form of a huge
tank of ice water, free for all to enjoy. A visit to the Washington State Fair made clear that ice
was a requirement of a healthful, prosperous life on the Northwest’s fruited plains.

155
Fruit on the Move
As fruit culture flourished across the irrigated West, cold storage warehouses allowed
growers to handle progressively larger harvests while only a small fraction of the total yield went
to waste, at least in the short term. Refrigeration gave growers and merchants more time to
dispose of their fruit, but it did not shorten the journey between the productive regions of the
West and the nation’s population centers beyond the Mississippi. As historian Steven Stoll put it,
“The land was advantageous, but its location was not.”
374
In the first decade of the twentieth
century, this resulted in consistent frustration among orchardists as they grew ever more and
finer fruit only to have their produce sabotaged by slow shipping and shoddy handling. Existing
systems were simply not up to the task of quickly moving thousands of carloads of perishable
goods across the country. Until the railroads—particularly the Southern Pacific and the Atchison,
Topeka, & Santa Fe serving California—caught up, growers had to get creative to succeed.
On the morning of March 22, 1901, San Francisco’s Broadway Wharf was awash in the
smell of oranges. For five hours, a crew of two hundred stevedores scrambled to move almost
nine thousand boxes of oranges between the steamships Santa Rosa and Umatilla, “each box
being carried or passed from man to man in its progress from vessel to vessel.”
375
The fruit, the
product of Southern California orchards, was on its way to be sold in the East, but by a peculiar
and thus far untested route. Thousands of tons of fruit were stranded in California without a car
to be seen from either the Southern Pacific or the Santa Fe and, despite the best efforts of cold
storage operators, as much as a third of the crop threatened to go bad before the required number
of railcars could be found.
376
Seeing this dysfunction as an opportunity for his own company,

374
Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 63.
375
“Orange Crop is Going East via Great Northern Route,” San Francisco Call, March 23, 1901.
376
“Orange Crop is Going East via Great Northern Route,” San Francisco Call, March 23, 1901.

156
James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway, contacted the Californians with a
proposal. He pledged that by shipping the oranges via the Pacific Coast Steamship Company to
Seattle, then moving them overland on the Great Northern, the fruit could arrive in Chicago in
only ten days in peak condition.
377
The southerly routes regularly took fifteen to twenty days
making the eastward journey—if cars could be found at all. Even in March, fruit shipments
needed to be iced to survive a lengthy trip through the Southwest, which added time and cost.
378

The combined sea-land route via the Great Northern, argued Hill, would be faster and cheaper.
Besides, the only alternative was to continue waiting in the hopes the Southern Pacific or the
Santa Fe would deign to send a few cars.
With little to lose, the growers determined the experiment was worth trying and sent
twenty-four carloads of oranges to be picked up by the Santa Rosa at three different Southern
California ports before being transferred at San Francisco for the second oceanic leg of the trip.
Three days later, the Umatilla arrived in Puget Sound to find a string of refrigerator cars and a
Great Northern locomotive waiting. Following another frenzied transfer, the freight was on its
way toward Minnesota.
379
The seventy-one-hour transit between Seattle and St. Paul shattered
previous speed records for freight along the Great Northern route, beating the previous fastest
time, a “furious run” from St. Paul to Seattle with a cargo of live reindeer, by thirteen hours.
380

At St. Paul, railroad officials pronounced the oranges to be in “excellent condition” and sent
them on to Chicago for sale, more than meeting Hill’s promise of a ten-day trip from San
Francisco.
381

377
P. L. Axling, “The Great Northwest,” The Ranch, April 4, 1901.
378
“California’s Fruits at Home and Abroad,” Los Angeles Herald, March 29, 1901.
379
“Shipment by Northern Route,” Seattle Star, March 26, 1901.
380
“Great Northern’s Fast Trip with Southern Oranges,” Los Angeles Herald, March 30, 1901.
381
P. L. Axling, “The Great Northwest,” The Ranch, April 4, 1901.

157
Against all odds, the test journey succeeded. The California growers and shippers were
pleased. The Great Northern officials were joyous and quickly scheduled additional runs.
Edward S. Blair, general agent for the Great Northern, traveled to Los Angeles to meet with fruit
industry representatives and personally shepherd the second shipment on its way to Seattle.
According to Blair, the new combined sea and land route was, in fact, the better option, not just a
temporary solution. He touted the shorter transit time and the climatic benefits of transporting the
fruit over the ocean and through the Northwest. “Although the fruit is shipped from Seattle east
in refrigerator cars,” he said, “not a pound of ice is used. The temperature of the last train ranged
from 44 to 48 [degrees Fahrenheit]. It went no higher and all icing charges were avoided.”
Furthermore, while aboard the steamships, “every box is subjected to a current of cool sea
air.”
382
The natural refrigeration provided by the Great Northern route eliminated the hassle and
expense of icing cars, an absolute requirement at all times of year for cars that traveled through
the Southwestern deserts. Blair made every assurance that his company intended to be a serious
contender in the shipping of fruit from California. Every orange ship appearing in the Puget
Sound “will find the Great Northern ready with as many cars and engines as may be required.”
383

Not everyone, even in California, was so enthusiastic. A reporter for the Los Angeles
Herald assessed the situation with skepticism. The Herald correspondent quoted a “guileless”
fellow reporter from the Chicago Record-Herald who declared that “the achievement not only
saves a good portion of the California orange crop” but would teach the other railroads a
valuable lesson in customer service.
384
It was “ludicrous” rebutted the Californian, to say that the
shipment had saved “a good portion of the crop” when the total output of California’s orange

382
“Will Ship by Northern Road,” Los Angeles Herald, April 2, 1901.
383
“Will Ship by Northern Road,” Los Angeles Herald, April 2, 1901.
384
“Moving the Orange Crop,” Los Angeles Herald, April 6, 1901.

158
groves was estimated to reach between twenty-two and twenty-five thousand carloads.
385
The
first Great Northern shipment consisted of only two dozen cars and second just fifteen. As an
experiment, the trip had been successful. But it was a novelty, not a solution.
Railroad insiders questioned whether the breakneck pace of the shipments could be
maintained and whether privileging fruit cars over other rail traffic to keep transit times short
would produce any profit for the Great Northern. On both counts, the margin for error was slim.
Company officials at the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe, furious at the idea that business they
had taken for granted could be so easily stolen away, set out to make sure that the Great
Northern’s new project came to an unceremonious end.
386
Following the second round of orange
shipments, the Southern Pacific recalculated its freight charges. Instead of paying the small fees
for shipping from Southern California growing regions to nearby ports, shippers would instead
be charged for the full distance, i.e., rather than charging the $5.40 local rate to transport oranges
from Pomona to the port of Los Angeles, the railroad would charge the $10.05 per ton rate to
Seattle, even though the freight made most of the journey by ship.
387
It was an underhanded
move, but Southern Pacific freight agent George Luce argued it was actually his company being
defrauded and the higher chargers were simply righting a wrong. Regardless, the complexities of
freight charges meant the Southern Pacific could apply almost any surcharges it liked with little
recourse.
Great Northern representatives pledged to absorb the additional costs and continue
shipping oranges, but the expenses quickly proved too much to bear. Meanwhile, forced into
action by the unexpected competition, the southern routes began sending refrigerator cars to the

385
“Moving the Orange Crop,” Los Angeles Herald, April 6, 1901.
386
“More Oranges to be Shipped,” Seattle Star, March 29, 1901.
387
“End of Shipments via Great Northern,” Los Angeles Herald, April 6, 1901.

159
fruit depots as quickly as possible. The reallocated cars were still not enough to meet demand,
but with one hundred and fifty cars departing California per day, the Southern Pacific and Santa
Fe could carry ten times as much as the Great Northern.
388
On April 23, 1901, only a month after
the first cargo of oranges left San Francisco en route to Seattle, the Great Northern issued a
statement reading, in part: “We do not want the shipments and the fruit traffic rightfully belongs
to the southern roads.”
389
The Great Northern’s short foray into citriculture was over.
Shipping California oranges to Chicago via Seattle and St. Paul was not sustainable, but
the arguments James Hill and Edward Blair made in support of the Great Northern’s project, as
well as the failures they identified in the services provided by their competitors, foreshadowed
the ways that fruit shipping would be forced to evolve over the following decades. Success or
failure carrying perishable produce depended on two main factors: efficiently moving train
cars—whether empty or filled—to where they needed to be and maintaining cold temperatures
within the cars through strategic icing. In 1901, both of these proved difficult for the Southern
Pacific and the Santa Fe. Poor management combined with a shortage of rolling stock meant cars
were never at the right place at the right time. Passengers and manufactured goods largely
traveled to the West, while bulky agricultural commodities went east. Therefore, railroad agents
had to send empty cars westward, wasting a trip. Trains pulling empty cars could move quickly
on the westbound journey, which was of occasional benefit, but they inched along on the
eastward trip, making frequent (but varying) stops when time was of the essence.
390

Unpredictable timing also made properly cooling cars nigh impossible. Cold storage
effectively stopped nature’s clock, but as soon as fruit left the climate-controlled warehouse the

388
“Fruit Exchanges Will Ask Damages,” Los Angeles Herald, April 13, 1901.
389
“Does Not Want the Orange Shipments,” Los Angeles Herald, April 23, 1901.
390
Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage, 66–67.

160
march of time resumed. Refrigerator cars attempted to replicate these conditions with
inconsistent results. Typically, a car would be loaded with ice at the same time as the produce,
but the cooling power of that ice was limited. Just as the train had to take on more water and coal
at planned intervals, the refrigerator cars needed periodic refreshing with new ice. Natural
melting combined with fluctuating outside temperatures, elevations, and weather conditions as
the cars traveled across the West led to constantly changing temperatures within the cars and
faster degradation of fruit. Blair was correct in recognizing the expense and difficulty in icing
fruit cars for travel across the Southwest, but he was wrong in thinking the Great Northern
immune to the same problems. Consistency in timing, in temperature, and in service was crucial
to moving produce across the country, regardless of the route it traveled. Achieving this
consistency required investment and optimization—total commitment from the railroad company
at every stage. The incursion of the Great Northern into the citrus industry laid bare the
inadequacies of the Southern Pacific’s and Santa Fe’s fruit shipping departments. With
California producing more fruit year over year, the system needed a complete overhaul lest the
growers and the railroads lose out on millions.

The Refrigerated Empire of the Pacific Fruit Express
In the spring of 1901, just as California oranges were traveling the Pacific toward Puget
Sound, E. H. Harriman’s Union Pacific took over the Southern Pacific, which had been left
rudderless following the death of rail tycoon Collis P. Huntington the year before. The new
combination, dubbed the “Harriman Lines,” brought the vast resources of both companies under
unified control, which Harriman utilized to drive modernization and yet more growth.
391

391
Richard J. Orsi, Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West,
1850-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 33–34.

161
Harriman’s largest project, begun in 1906, was the establishment of the Pacific Fruit Express, a
jointly owned subsidiary of both the Union and the Southern Pacific, to provide refrigerator car
service across both railroads’ operating areas. As a veteran of the railroad industry, Harriman
recognized that the problems of refrigerated shipping could only be solved by controlling every
step of the process, and so he embarked on a campaign of investment and integration.
Harriman moved quickly and decisively. Months before officially incorporating the new
company, he ordered the purchase of 6600 new refrigerated cars, bringing the total number
available to the company to over eight thousand. Only the Armour Refrigerator Line, the largest
provider of refrigerated transport outside of the railroads and the Pacific Fruit Express’s chief
competition, had more rolling stock.
392
With Armour’s resources focused on meat packing and
its base of operations in Chicago, Harriman hoped to edge them out of the Western fruit market.
At $1700 each, the car purchase accounted for over $11 million of the company’s $12 million in
authorized capital, figures that Harriman shared with his board of directors only after the order
had already been placed.
393
With nearly all the company’s funds invested, the new fleet—or at
least a portion of it—needed to be ready for service by the first summer harvest of 1907 to begin
recouping costs. Builders in Detroit and Chicago succeeded in delivering more than half of the
cars by June and the remainder by September, allowing the company to begin service for the
1907 season.
Turn-of-the-century refrigerated railcars, even the comparatively advanced models
employed by the Pacific Fruit Express, were not as technologically advanced as the name
implies. Rather than being mechanically cooled through the same means that might be employed

392
Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 248; Anthony W. Thompson, Robert J. Church, and Bruce H. Jones, Pacific Fruit
Express, Second ed. (Berkeley, CA: Signature Press, 2000), 70.
393
Thompson, Church, and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 9. Thompson, et al., speculate that the order of 6600 cars
represents the largest single expenditure in a refrigerator fleet in United States history.

162
in a cold storage warehouse—e.g., piping coolant through the car’s walls—“reefers” were, in
essence, ice boxes on wheels. “Refrigerated” in this case differentiates cars equipped to hold ice
from ventilated boxcars, which lacked receptacles for ice but had small adjustable doors to
permit varying degrees of air circulation.
394
Each car in the PFE’s original fleet measured 41 feet
long, with bodies constructed of Oregon fir and two layers of felted insulation, each half an inch
thick. The insulation, sold for housing construction under the brand name “Linofelt,” was made
of flax fibers and replaced less sanitary insulators like sawdust, charcoal, and felted cattle hair
mats.
395
At both ends of the car were “ice bunkers,” large metal chambers that each held 5500
pounds of ice. Perforations in the ice bunkers allowed warm air to flow from the center of the
car, over the ice, and back toward the produce packed inside, cooling it. A fully loaded car
carried a payload of thirty tons: twenty-five tons of freight and five tons of ice.
396
Painted a
distinct, cheery yellow, a Pacific Fruit Express car was unmistakable and by the end of 1907,
thousands of them regularly crisscrossed the American West.
Refrigerated transport required much more than just cars, or even locomotives to pull
them, however. In order to support the reefer fleet, the Pacific Fruit Express began constructing
an ever-expanding network of ice facilities, ranging from natural ice ponds and artificial ice
plants to huge icing depots. Naturally, this necessitated even more investment, but Harriman did
not hesitate. In October 1907, as the first few hundred cars began transporting produce, Harriman
pledged to spend a further $1 million constructing ice plants to serve California fruit traffic,
beginning with an immense factory and railyard outside Sacramento. The investment, according
to Pacific Fruit Express general manager C. M. Secrist, was evidence of Harriman’s commitment

394
Thompson, Church, and Jones, 58. The value of ventilation would be hotly debated among fruit shippers, but it
was generally agreed that it was far less effective than icing for most types of produce.
395
Thompson, Church, and Jones, 64, 71.
396
Thompson, Church, and Jones, 73.

163
to the new business and his grand vision for reshaping the Western fruit industry.
397
Local fruit
growers, who as a trade journal described, “never get through complaining of the railroads and
their service no matter what happens,” welcomed the construction in the hopes it would improve
on the existing system, not that it could get much worse.
398
With nearly $13 million already spent
and only a few cars carrying fruit eastward, the Pacific Fruit Express needed to devise an
efficient, sustainable strategy for cooling and moving fruit as soon as possible.
Although Harriman, a New Yorker, probably did not know it, his plans for an icing
station near Sacramento reflected Governor James Budd’s abandoned idea of an ice plant at
Folsom State Prison from a decade before. Both men recognized the need to place such a
resource close to the railway hub in the capital city. In fact, the location selected for the Pacific
Fruit Express facility in Roseville lay only a few miles away from the prison. Unfortunately for
Harriman, his ice plant would not be subsidized by the state government of California, but, in
theory, the time and expense saved through efficiency would more than make up for the initial
outlay. The Pacific Fruit Express could have sourced its ice for Sacramento Valley stations from
the Truckee Basin, but the company opted to install its own artificial ice machines instead. Even
though the trip was short and the natural ice cut in Truckee was cheap, retrieving ice from the
mountains in the amounts required would tie up too many cars and personnel when they were
needed to haul fruit.
399
Initial construction called for three ice machines capable of producing
fifty tons per day a piece, but this was expanded to five machines and two hundred and fifty total
tons per day by the time the plant began operations in 1908. The Roseville plant’s capacity

397
“To Build Ice Plants in the Fruit Sections,” San Francisco Call, October 3, 1907.
398
“California’s Complaint Against Railroads and Others,” Fruit Trade Journal and Produce Record, March 14,
1903.
399
“Ice-Making Plant,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 6, 1907.

164
continued to increase over the following years up to a maximum of 1300 daily tons, making it
the largest single ice plant in the world by a considerable margin.
400

Roseville sat at the center of the Pacific Fruit Express’s empire, the first and finest of its
locations across the West. But although Roseville was the largest and busiest of the PFE icing
stations, it was only one small piece of the company’s operation. The successful delivery of
perishable goods depended upon an entire network composed of dozens of outposts, an intricate
cold web stretching across the United States. Each of these stations had distinct purposes on the
local, regional, and national scales. Interruptions or delays of service at one location could
radiate throughout the system, impacting customers thousands of miles away. In 1915, a fire and
subsequent tunnel collapse in the Tehachapi Mountains blocked traffic headed toward Roseville
from Southern California for almost a month. Hundreds of fruit cars that would have been iced at
Roseville and continued toward Nevada instead had to be redirected toward El Paso.
401
In order
to function smoothly, the Pacific Fruit Express needed infrastructure that was both efficient and
equipped with enough redundancies to account for the unexpected.
The category of “icing station” encompassed a wide range of sites with a variety of
layouts, equipment, and ice production mechanisms. Some, like Roseville, the Pacific Fruit
Express constructed from the ground up to serve its specific needs. The immense volume of ice
required at Roseville and its status as a busy hub made onsite ice manufacturing the clear choice.
Other locations were purchased from other companies and adapted over time as fruit traffic
increased. The second and third new facilities of the three announced in October 1907, following
Roseville, were located at Colton, California, just outside of San Bernardino, and Las Vegas,

400
Thompson, Church, and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 311.
401
“Tehachapi Bore Burned Out, Collapses” Grass Valley Union, May 15, 1915; “Roseville Station Closed,”
Truckee Republican, May 27, 1915.

165
Nevada. Both had previously been operated by Armour, although the rival company handed
them over to the PFE in vastly different states. The Colton site included buildings and tracks, but
not on the scale required. Most importantly, the Armour property had no ice machines. All the
ice formerly used to supply cars in Colton had to be shipped in from Los Angeles manufacturers,
leading to a great deal of expense and waste. Pacific Fruit brought in equipment capable of
producing 225 tons of ice per day. By the end of 1909, company icemen were working day and
night to fill the new icehouse, which had room for 27,000 tons, or enough to fill over 5,000 cars
of Inland Empire oranges.
402

Las Vegas, in contrast, was already an established icing station, but the ice plant burned
to the ground along with “seven hundred tons of precious ice” in July 1907, shortly before the
Pacific Fruit Express took possession from Armour.
403
The loss was catastrophic, both to the
small community and to the railroad traffic passing through it. As the only ice stop between San
Bernardino and Salt Lake City, the Las Vegas plant had the responsibility of refreshing the ice in
all cars making their way across the Mojave Desert. The standard five-ton ice bunkers used in
Pacific Fruit Express cars could not hold enough to keep fruit cold all the way from Southern
California to Utah. Until the plant could be rebuilt, perishable shipping along that line ground to
a halt. Southern Pacific engineers soon set to work on a new plant with double the capacity,
enough to serve both the trains and the town.
404

Most of the Pacific Fruit Express’s outposts manufactured their own ice in amounts that
varied from 50 tons at San Jose to 1,300 tons at Roseville. It was simply more cost effective in
the majority of cases to manufacture ice where it was needed rather than move it. At the scale on

402
“Icing Plant at the Gate City,” San Bernardino Sun, December 12, 1909.
403
“Ice Plant Burns,” Las Vegas Age, July 13, 1907. Ice plants burned regularly, although complete destruction, as
in this case, was uncommon.
404
“Soon to Build Big Ice Plant,” Las Vegas Age, October 19, 1907.

166
which the Pacific Fruit Express operated, even small expenditures of money and time quickly
added up. Smaller or less used sites often had only an icehouse and adjacent loading platform.
These locations used ice either delivered from neighboring stations with large enough machines
to produce a surplus or purchased from local ice companies. Rarer still were the stations where
the PFE harvested its own natural ice. The largest of these were at Carlin, Nevada, Laramie,
Wyoming, and Donner Lake, California. Carlin alone used between 50,000 and 55,000 tons to
ice approximately 60,000 cars per year. Company employees with the specialized training to cut
ice moved between stations as needed, splitting the winter between multiple locations. Ice pond
superintendent W. O. Blinn and his fifteen-man crew, for instance, spent the ice season of 1911-
12 at Donner Lake, Carlin, and North Powder, Oregon.
405
The process looked much like that
seen decades earlier in the Truckee Basin, with one important advancement. Beginning in 1919,
icemen no longer had to rely on human and equine muscle to do the cutting. Large, gasoline-
powered saws comprised of a four-cylinder engine and a circular sawblade meant for
lumbermills made quick work of frozen ponds.
406

Regardless of from where the ice came, each satellite icing station operated similarly.
The icing platform, which resembled a long wooden deck, paralleled the tracks. Depending on
the amount of traffic through that station, platforms could be single-sided or double-sided
“island” platforms that could service two trains at once. Platform lengths varied as well, from
only a few cars long to the massive 3520-foot platform at Carlin, with room for eighty cars at
once.
407
All platforms, independent of length, stood fourteen feet tall, high enough that the cars
could be re-iced from above through the hatch at either end. As with winter ice harvesting, icing

405
“Improvements at Donner,” Truckee Republican, February 29, 1912.
406
Thompson, Church, and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 279.
407
Pacific Fruit Express Co. description of facilities, Carlin NIP, p. 4. MS 49 Series 10 Box 2-1. California State
Railroad Museum, Sacramento.

167
cars was demanding, physical, and highly seasonal work that attracted all kinds of temporary and
transient laborers. Some worked only for a season, like the group of athletes from the University
of Southern California who used their summer vacation to “store up money and muscle” working
the icing platform in the Imperial Valley during the 1920s.
408
Like the men on the ice ponds,
railroad icers used gravity to their advantage to speed their work. Every minute that elapsed with
the train still at the station was refrigerating power wasted. This “pit crew” mentality, racing to
complete the necessary tasks as quickly as possible to get the cars moving again, prioritized
speed even at the expense of safety. Crushed and melting ice created slick surfaces on the
platform. A worker who lost his balance manipulating the heavy blocks could easily fall to the
ground fourteen feet below. In May 1912, Vincenzo Morretti, an eighteen-year-old Italian
immigrant, fell from the top of a railcar while icing trains at the small Truckee station. He hit his
head on the next car as he fell and died from his injuries a few hours later.
409
Fellow workers and
the ice blocks themselves were also hazards. Many workers had hands or feet crushed by errant
cakes of ice, sometimes to the degree that amputation was called for.
410
A sign found at many
Pacific Fruit Express stations read, “That block of ice is bigger and tougher than you. Watch it.
Safety First.”
411

The Cantaloupe Deal
Turn of the century boosters bragged that “all the fruit that grows under the sun in any
region of the world” could be grown in California, and settlers drawn to the Golden State sought

408
Orsi, Sunset Limited, 319.
409
“Accidentally Killed,” Truckee Republican, May 30, 1912.
410
“Asks $40,000 for Loss of Leg Hurt by Falling Ice,” Los Angeles Herald, October 26, 1917.
411
Thompson, Church, and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 293.

168
to prove them right.
412
Although oranges loom largest in the imagery of twentieth-century
California, gracing hundreds of postcards and travel brochures, the cantaloupe crop of the
Imperial Valley offers the clearest picture of the operations and impact of the Pacific Fruit
Express. The small towns of the Imperial Valley along the Mexican border in southeastern
California—Brawley, Imperial, and El Centro—existed thanks to the Southern Pacific Railroad.
An immense feat of hydraulic engineering, funded in large part by the railroad, had transformed
the desert into “one of the most wonderful garden spots in America.”
413
In 1905, Imperial Valley
farmers began growing cantaloupes, which thrived in the hot and dry climate. The melons were
practically foolproof, said growers. They ripened weeks earlier in the Imperial Valley than they
did in any other region and held the highest potential return on investment of any California
crop.
414

Growing cantaloupes, however, proved to be far easier than shipping and selling them.
Despite the tough appearance of their outer rind, cantaloupes are surprisingly delicate. They
bruise easily, especially when warm, and mold quickly when exposed to humidity. Compared to
firmer fruits, like apples, or more acidic ones, like citrus, cantaloupes have much smaller
windows of viability. An unripe cantaloupe becomes ripe, then rotten, in a matter of days rather
than weeks. The burning sun of the Colorado Desert that helped the melons to grow so rapidly
also hastened their deterioration. Cantaloupes held without refrigeration for only eight hours
before being loaded and shipped in iced railcars degraded at an astonishing rate; over forty
percent were found unsuitable to be eaten by the time they arrived at their destination.
415
For best

412
“Gigantic Industry,” Los Angeles Herald, May 17, 1908.
413
“What Imperial County Offers,” Calexico Chronicle, Second Annual Magazine Edition, May 1909, 38.
414
E. R. Elliott, “Cantaloupes About Calexico,” Calexico Chronicle, Second Annual Magazine Edition, May 1909,
48.
415
A. W. McKay, G. L. Fischer, and A. E. Nelson, The Handling and Transportation of Cantaloupes, Farmers’
Bulletin 1145 (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture, 1921), 7.

169
results, cantaloupes needed to be cooled and packed immediately after picking, a tall order for
the tiny desert towns. Valley farmers needed help if they were going to get their fruit to market
in good condition.
The Pacific Fruit Express came to the Imperial Valley only to find a cruel mathematical
puzzle: a single ice factory with a limited output, daytime temperatures surpassing 100°, and
seemingly infinite fields of cantaloupes needing to be packed and shipped. The Imperial Valley’s
one ice factory was located at El Centro and could produce fifty tons a day—only ten cars’
worth. Cantaloupe shipping in 1908 consumed the entire daily output of the El Centro plant, all
the ice held in reserve there, and a further ten thousand tons shipped into the valley from Los
Angeles and Colton.
416
The Pacific Fruit Express carried a total of 1,804 carloads of cantaloupes
out of the Imperial Valley that year, all in the space of six weeks. Yet that was only the
beginning. Yields increased every year and by 1927, that figure reached 16,848 cars.
417

Strangely, the Pacific Fruit Express never constructed its own ice factory in the Imperial Valley,
despite the incredible volume. All ice used at its three cantaloupe stations came from local
companies or, in times of great need, was shipped in from further afield.
To compensate for this, the “cantaloupe deal,” as the annual bonanza came to be known,
became the very picture of efficiency, implementing new techniques and operating unlike any of
the other harvests serviced by the Pacific Fruit Express. Melons and laborers alike suffered under
the desert sun, so harvesting took place first from dawn to mid-morning, and later through the
night under floodlights. As the fruit was being harvested, the cars were prepared for packing. The
greatest innovation since the refrigerator car itself was pre-cooling, which could be applied either
to railcars or to the fruit that was to fill them. For the cantaloupe crop, cars were pre-loaded with

416
Holton Power Company advertisement, Calexico Chronicle, Second Annual Magazine Edition, May 1909, 130.
417
Thompson, Church, and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 360.

170
ice before taking on fruit, lowering the ambient temperature inside. After the fruit had been
loaded, the ice bunkers were topped off and the cars were dispatched.
Pre-cooling of fruit simply required holding fruit in cold storage until it reached a
specified temperature—but the specifics of what temperature was best for which type of fruit and
how best to cool it were subjects of intense debates. Freshly picked fruit is generally warm,
between 70° and 80°. Reducing the temperature of fruit is a slow process, taking a few days, but
a reefer packed with cold fruit does not consume ice as quickly as one packed with warm fruit,
leading to better results overall for many types of produce, particularly citrus and grapes.
418

Imperial Valley cantaloupes, however, were poor candidates for pre-cooling. Owing to the hot
climate, cantaloupes could be closer to 90° if picked during the heat of the day. Even those
harvested in the nighttime hours would be slow to cool given their large size and density.
419
One
unorthodox and expensive, but efficient, method for cooling cantaloupes quickly involved
packing the melons into crates, then using a conveyor belt to drag them through an ice-cold brine
before being placed in the car.
420
Regardless of the method however, the very limited ice
manufacturing in the Imperial Valley would only have been able to accommodate a small
fraction of the harvest, making pre-cooling a rarity for the melon crop. As such, the cantaloupe
cars required an incredible amount of ice. Topping off the ice bunkers in a car filled with hot
cantaloupes could take as much as 8,000 pounds on top of the 10,500 already loaded.
421
Imperial

418
“Pre-Cooling of Fruit to be Given a Test,” San Francisco Call, August 8, 1907.
419
One study conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture determined that warm melons placed in a
pre-cooled refrigerator car did not reach 40° until three days into the journey, by which time the ice bunkers would
have been refilled on multiple occasions.
420
Interview with A. V. “Pete” Holst, p. 10. MS 49 PFE Series 13 Box 1-1. California State Railroad Museum,
Sacramento.
421
Interview with A. V. “Pete” Holst, p. 7. MS 49 PFE Series 13 Box 1-1. California State Railroad Museum,
Sacramento.

171
Valley cantaloupes were the most ice-intensive of any commodity the Pacific Fruit Express
carried.
The Cantaloupe Deal was a point of pride for both the citizens of the Imperial Valley and
the employees of the Pacific Fruit Express. The Southern Pacific Bulletin, the official publication
of one of the PFE’s parent companies, regularly celebrated the processing of the cantaloupe crop
as indicative of the company’s superiority and the possibilities for technology to conquer nature.
A 1921 article written by George R. McIntosh, General Agent for the Pacific Fruit Express,
revels in the statistics related to that year’s harvest. 10,678 carloads multiplied by 320 crates
each and 45 melons per crate yields a figure of 153,763,200 cantaloupes, “sufficient to furnish
each man, woman, and child in the United States one melon and a half.”
422
The total ice
consumed at Imperial Valley shipping points that year McIntosh stated to be 156,298,000
pounds, which allows for the calculation of the one figure he seems to have omitted: The Pacific
Fruit Express consumed more than a pound of ice for each cantaloupe before they even left the
station. Altogether, concludes McIntosh, the handling of the Imperial melon crop must be
acknowledged as “one of the greatest transportation accomplishments in the United States.”
423

The Pacific Fruit Express exemplifies the status of ice as a resource in the twentieth-
century American West. Large-scale ice manufacturing transformed ice from a product into a
utility that could “power” refrigerated spaces and permit the explosive growth of the Western
produce industry. From his vantage point in Reconstruction-era Manhattan, Thomas De Voe
could never have anticipated the mass movement of produce across the country, much less that it
would arrive in East Coast cities in near-perfect condition. The barriers of season and geography

422
George R. McIntosh, “How Imperial’s Cantaloupe Crop Is Handled,” Southern Pacific Bulletin, October 1921,
21.
423
McIntosh, 22.

172
that had so long defined the American market were swiftly dissolving. But while refrigerated
transportation more easily connected American consumers to their food, it also helped divorce
them from it. The “alchemy” of the refrigerated car, as William Cronon dubbed it, turned the
production of commodities into an abstraction.
424
For the shopper in New York or Baltimore, the
cantaloupe field in Brawley, California did not really exist, nor did the fruits’ long trip across the
continent. Even as a new and developing technology, refrigeration was already becoming
expected and invisible in the eyes of the public. The agricultural supply chains and consumer
imagination had been profoundly transformed; the next step was to bring that transformative
power into their homes.

424
Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 264.

173
Chapter Five
Icemen and Icewomen

The summer of 1916 came to Helena, Montana “hotter than cotton” and tensions rose
along with the temperature. By the end of July, rumors circulated throughout town that the
teamsters were debating whether to strike. A local division of the large and formidable labor
union of the mid-twentieth century, these were teamsters in the original sense: men who
transported goods across the city in horse-drawn wagons. Helena’s teamsters, who serviced a
variety of businesses in the city, complained of low pay and long hours. They particularly
resented the many last minute, same-day deliveries demanded by customers who phoned in
orders without a care for the labor it took to fulfill them. One driver attested that he had recently
been called to make four separate deliveries to one home in the course of a single day, all from
the same store.
425
These discussions concerned owners and customers alike. A strike—even a
short one—would bring business in Helena to a standstill. On August 1, union leaders reached a
decision to strike. The order came for all union members to stop work, leaving their wagons and
cargo where they sat.
Nothing could have been a less welcome sight to Marguerite Greenfield, owner of
Helena’s Independent Ice Company, than the union delegate who arrived with news of the strike.
In the weeks prior, Greenfield had been certain that a strike would not interrupt her business as
she already paid her men fifteen dollars per month above the going rate and cut off deliveries at
five o’clock each day.
426
Regardless of her business practices, the union representative did not

425
“Helena Teamsters Out,” Helena Independent, August 2, 1916.
426
Greenfield ice diary, July 20, 1916. Greenfield Family Papers. MC 166. Box 5, folder 14. Montana Historical
Society Research Center Archives, Helena, Montana. Greenfield’s diary is somewhat challenging for the historian to
use given her tendency to assign nicknames, particularly to people or organizations with whom she did not get
along. Additionally, Greenfield did not always record the exact date for each entry, sometimes giving the month or
even just the season, e.g. “Fall 1921.”

174
waver, declaring, “Young lady, no man will deliver any ice for you.” Greenfield, thirty-three
years old, was unfazed and shot back, “Humpf, I’ll deliver it myself. I can sit on an ice wagon
and drive a whole lot better than some of the men I can find.”
427
Starting the next morning, that
is exactly what she did. For ten days, Greenfield harnessed the horses, loaded the wagon, and
brought ice to the citizens of Helena. Helpers came and went—first her sister, then the ice cream
shop manager, then the dog catcher—but Greenfield made most of the deliveries on her own, six
thousand pounds per day.
428

This determined, even defiant, attitude was typical of Marguerite Greenfield, who had
never balked at entering the thoroughly masculine ice industry. In her diary, kept during two
decades in business, Greenfield discussed the Independent Ice Company as an extension of
herself. Its successes were her successes, and the acts of her competitors—whether slashed prices
or poached workmen—were personal slights. Indeed, in both her personal and professional lives,
Greenfield and the company were one. She was singularly focused on her business and had few
close ties, never marrying or having children. Yet she refused to see herself as something special.
Whether or not she had intended her company to make a statement, it inarguably did. Her work
as Montana’s only “icewoman” was unconventional enough to draw national press. “People are
still watching me as if I were some sort of strange freak,” she told a reporter for The American
Magazine in 1921, “and now and then at the icehouse somebody comes peeking around to get a
look at the woman iceman, but I’m in the business to stay. I like it.”
429

427
Greenfield diary, August 1, 1916.
428
Greenfield diary, August 4, 1916.
429
Betty Dishon, “A Woman in the Ice Business,” The American Magazine, May 1921, 54.

175
Greenfield’s nonchalance contrasts with the widely held opinion, both in her hometown
of Helena and across the country, that her chosen career was deeply transgressive.
430
Most
Americans in the early twentieth century would have seen a woman in the ice industry as
somewhere between impractical and improper. Ice, from cutting to delivery, was a man’s field,
too rough, too physical, and, at times, too seedy for a woman to concern herself with. Even while
profiling her because of her unusual job, reporter Betty Dishon took pains to point out
Greenfield’s appropriate feminine attributes. “One would expect her to be a large, florid woman,
with hands like a man, and a voice like a foghorn,” wrote Dishon. But in reality, she assured
readers, Greenfield stood “just five feet tall, never weighs more than one hundred twenty pounds,
[and] has small hands.”
431
The “icewoman” was still a woman after all.
Marguerite Greenfield embodied the gendered tension at the heart of the early twentieth
century ice industry. The kitchen icebox was a constant site of conflict and negotiation because it
was a place where masculine and feminine spheres overlapped. At the icebox, the masculine-
coded world of ice manufacturing, shipping, and delivery collided with the feminine-coded
world of cooking, cleaning, and nurturing. The scenes that played out in front of family iceboxes
varied from mundane and businesslike to intimate and even dangerous. The thought of a woman
alone in her home with a strange man, particularly one from the working class, held unlimited
sordid possibilities in the twentieth-century American imagination, some of which came to be
reality. This chapter sketches two parallel worlds of gendered labor—that of the male ice
deliveryman and that of the female homemaker—and considers the encounters that took place

430
Some, particularly other ice company owners, found this admirable and even attractive, but pushing the
boundaries of propriety nonetheless. See letters from Herbert A. Doyle of Taunton, MA dated May 23, 1921, and
Charles Kerlin of Franklin, Indiana dated June 5, 1921. Greenfield Family Papers. MC 166. Box 5, folders 7 and 10.
Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Helena, Montana.
431
Dishon, “A Woman in the Ice Business,” 54.

176
when these worlds intersected in Western kitchens.

A Family Necessity
Many families bought their first refrigerators at the turn of the twentieth century as the
variety of available sizes and styles multiplied.
432
Montgomery Ward, for instance, offered more
than thirty different models of “Windsor Dry Cold Air Refrigerators” in its 1901 mail order
catalog, which varied in construction, size, and price.
433
Every option in the line boasted
hardwood construction and carved ornamentation, styling the refrigerator as decorative rather
than utilitarian, even though they would rarely be seen by guests to the home. The smallest and
cheapest of that year’s designs sold for $8.70 and sported an ice chamber holding thirty-five
pounds of ice and internal storage measuring 3,162 cubic inches, or 1.83 cubic feet.
434
In this
case, the ice would be loaded into the chamber through a door on top of the icebox, while other
models, particularly larger ones that accommodated more ice, iced from the front. All of
Montgomery Ward’s designs placed the ice chamber on top and the storage chamber below in
order to capitalize on the natural phenomenon wherein hot air rises and cold air sinks.
More expensive models also included additional features to meet specific needs. One
contained a built-in water cooler, with a porcelain-lined tank and an external faucet. The tank
was entirely closed off from the ice chamber and the catalog explicitly warned against filling the
reservoir with melted ice, “as it is frequently impure and always has condensed on its surface the

432
“Icebox” and “refrigerator” still coexisted as terms without clearly defined differences in the early twentieth
century. Many manufacturers chose to call their designs “refrigerators” and less advanced models, whether in style
or construction, “iceboxes.” This likely facilitated the transition to calling the electric appliances “refrigerators” and
the unpowered devices “iceboxes” beginning in the 1930s and 40s.
433
Montgomery Ward 1901 catalog, Box 66, Folder 2, Montgomery Ward records, 1849-1989, Collection No.
08088, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
434
In 1901, refrigerator manufacturers had not yet started using cubic feet as the default measurement of storage
space, but I have made the conversion here to allow for easier comparison.

177
smells from the food below.”
435
Another model elevated the icebox to a true piece of furniture,
adding a tabletop, shelf, and mirror to create a sideboard refrigerator. A refrigerator like this
might be kept in the dining room rather than the kitchen, a piece to be seen and not hidden. The
most expensive models came lined with white porcelain instead of with zinc, which gave the
refrigerator’s interior a crisp appearance and made cleaning easier. The largest cost $26.12, held
one hundred and twenty pounds of ice, and contained 9.33 cubic feet of food storage space.
Whichever model a family chose, it could be shipped to their home anywhere in the country.

Figure 5. Windsor Model C18005 refrigerator as depicted in the 1901 Montgomery Ward catalog. This model contained a built-in
water cooler. Note top-loading ice chamber and the faucet above main chamber door. Image courtesy of the American Heritage
Center, University of Wyoming.
A decade later, Montgomery Ward’s offerings remained much the same, but the way in
which they were presented to the catalog reader had changed. Porcelain-lined refrigerators had
become the default, with zinc-lined equivalents relegated to the second page of items. The
porcelain lining, according to the ad copy, “will never wear off and is as easily cleaned as a china

435
Montgomery Ward 1901 catalog, Box 66, Folder 2, Montgomery Ward records, 1849-1989, Collection No.
08088, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

178
plate.”
436
Furthermore, it is “made without seams [and] has no sharp corners in which dirt and
microbes can lodge.” Making the more expensive porcelain models the centerpiece of
Montgomery Ward’s product line made cleanliness rather than capacity the key factor by which
customers were to be convinced of the refrigerators’ value and quality. This is not to say,
however, that sanitation was the only way the catalog listings appealed to customers. The
Windsor line of refrigerators now carried model names instead of just item numbers. Company
copywriters intended these names to evoke ideas of cold, reinforcing the perceived effectiveness
of the iceboxes. In order from smallest to largest, Montgomery Ward sold the “Frigid,” the
“Zero,” the “Greenland,” and the “Polar Bear” in its porcelain-lined series and the “North Pole,”
the “Arctic,” and the “Iceberg” in the zinc-lined series. Although the designs had changed little
in the course of ten years, the 1910 models were larger across the board: the smallest held fifty-
five pounds of ice while the largest took two hundred and ninety five.

436
Montgomery Ward 1910 catalog, Box 72, Folder 1, Montgomery Ward records, 1849-1989, Collection No.
08088, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

179

Figure 6. Windsor “Polar Bear” model refrigerator as depicted in the 1910 Montgomery Ward catalog. Image courtesy of the
American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

While refrigerators served a vital purpose in the home and were regularly touted as labor-
saving devices, they nonetheless required a great deal of management from whomever oversaw
the kitchen—typically a housewife or paid domestic laborer. The best refrigerators were
engineered so that the ice within melted slowly, but not too slowly, providing a steady and
predictable cooling effect. In practice, the amount of ice a household refrigerator would consume
over the course of a day or a week varied based on a variety of factors: the amount and
arrangement of food in the refrigerator, the temperature of the food placed inside, the
temperature outside the refrigerator, and the amount of time the refrigerator doors stood open.

180
Manufacturers could estimate a particular model’s weekly ice usage, but the actual amount
needed was up to the consumer to discern. An attentive housekeeper would check the ice
chamber before the iceman arrived so that she knew how much ice she required. As tempting as
it may have been to request the bare minimum, refilling the ice chamber fully was the safer—
albeit more expensive—choice. An underfilled icebox might run out of ice at an inopportune
time, endangering all the food within. An emergency house call from the ice company could
often be arranged, but the delivery fee was sure to be exorbitant. Unlike an electric refrigerator,
an ice refrigerator was not a singular purchase. Keeping a refrigerator “running” in this period
required an ongoing financial interaction between housekeeper and iceman and a continual line
in the family budget.
One common practice, popular among penny-pinchers, involved wrapping the ice in
some insulating material—blankets, newspaper, etc.—to slow the melting process and reduce the
weekly ice bill. While this did make the ice last longer, it did not help to preserve the food inside
the refrigerator. Wrapped ice melted more slowly because it had less exposure to air, but the
warmer air needed to come in contact with the ice for the refrigerator to function. Melting ice
was “working” ice. The 1915 homemaking guide The Housekeeper’s Handbook of Cleaning by
Sarah J. MacLeod, which features a full chapter on the care and cleaning of refrigerators, advises
against this custom specifically. The housekeeper who wraps her ice, wrote MacLeod, “literally
does not get her money’s worth from the ice. What she saves on the ice bill she often loses
several times over on the food bill.”
437
Unfortunately, the appeal of making one’s ice last a few
days longer meant the mistaken practice proved hard to eliminate. Almost fifteen years later, in
1929, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Home Economics produced an

437
Sarah J. MacLeod, The Housekeeper’s Handbook of Cleaning (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915), 97.

181
instructional poster with the bold headline, “SAVE FOOD – NOT ICE.” Like MacLeod, the
poster advised homemakers to allow their ice to melt, thereby lowering the temperature inside
the refrigerator and better preserving the food. The cost of ice, although usually higher than
consumers would have liked, was, with proper refrigerator maintenance, recouped by keeping
food fresher longer.
As indicated by the descriptions in the Montgomery Ward catalogs, keeping the
refrigerator clean was another daily concern. The same innovation that kept foods sweet and
saved money might, if left unchecked, transform into a breeding ground for sickness. Women
served as the guardians of family health with the responsibility to keep the refrigerator clean and
safe. In 1907, Good Housekeeping published “A Refrigerator Alphabet,” a series of twenty-six
tips for refrigerator maintenance in the home. The entry for ‘O’ makes the stakes clear: “Only
eternal vigilance will keep the most expensive variety in sanitary condition and with such care
the cheapest grade may be satisfactory from the standpoint of health.” The Progressive mania for
cleanliness and food purity made the family refrigerator a battlefield in the war against filth and
disease. Shortcuts made while cleaning could allegedly kill. One 1909 newspaper column
warned that connecting the refrigerator’s drainpipe directly to the drain saved labor, but risked
health. “Rather empty the waste pan a dozen times a day,” it read, “than subject your food to the
sewer gases that are bound to find their way from a drain into the icebox.”
438
Another from the
same year upped the ante, claiming, “the average uncleanly icebox is a charnel house which not
only holds death, but spreads it.”
439
Refrigerator manufacturers and furniture dealers
wholeheartedly encouraged this kind of panic with attention-grabbing headings like “The ‘Piece
of Furniture’ on which Hangs the Life of the Child,” which appeared in an advertisement for the

438
“Watch Refrigerators,” Spokane Press, April 24, 1909.
439
“Neglected Refrigerators,” Los Angeles Herald, September 10, 1909.

182
Bohn Syphon Refrigerator in 1912. A Bohn refrigerator, argued the advertisement, “arrests germ
multiplication” in milk, making it “the kind of refrigerator that saves lives—the kind you ought
to have for your children’s sake.” Rival company Monroe dubbed its refrigerators “The Home of
Wholesome Food.” In practice, the work put into cleaning and maintaining a refrigerator likely
mattered much more than its specific make and model, but every brand touted its healthfulness
and ease of use.

“How’d You Like to be the Iceman?”
In May 1899, vaudevillian Will F. Denny visited the studio of the Columbia Phonograph
Company—the predecessor of Columbia Records—to freeze his high tenor voice in wax. Denny
was no stranger to Columbia or the young recording industry, having already recorded songs
with the company as well as with its rivals, but the song that day was new. “How’d You Like to
be the Iceman?,” a comedic ditty by J. Fred Helf and Eddie Moran, had already traveled the
vaudeville circuit and Columbia wanted to release it on wax cylinder for listening on home
phonographs and in jukeboxes.
440
For both the company and the artist, the song was just one of
many quickly produced to meet growing demand for recorded music.
441
It was likely a surprise,
therefore, when “How’d You Like to be the Iceman?” became one of the most popular songs not
just of the year, but of the era, with a legacy in American slang that outlasted the singer and the
medium on which it had been recorded.

440
A variety of artists performed the piece live in theaters across the country. The published sheet music for “How’d
You Like to be the Iceman?” had the heading, “Press Eldridge’s Big Hit!” Eldridge, a vaudeville and blackface
performer, appears not to have recorded his own version of the song.
441
Tim Brooks, “Columbia Records in the 1890’s: Founding the Record Industry,” ARSC Journal 10, no. 1 (1978):
5; Tim Brooks, “A Directory to Columbia Recording Artists of the 1890’s,” ARSC Journal 11, no. 2–3 (1979): 109.
A 1901 article refers to this song specifically in reference to “nickel-in-the-slot” machines that “grind out” music.
“License the Slot Machines,” Marin Journal, January 17, 1901.

183
“How’d You Like to be the Iceman?” depicts the daily rounds of an iceman and the
customers he encounters along the way. Details of the setting are minimal—the town in which
the iceman works could be any town, even the listener’s—but the song sketches the character of
the iceman quite clearly. The first verse comes from an outsider’s perspective: the singer
describes coming upon a fine brownstone mansion, one so lovely that he assumes it is the home
of a millionaire. When a servant emerges, the singer asks “if Mister Vanderbilt was in” only to
be told that the home belongs to the iceman. After the titular refrain of “how’d you like to be the
iceman?” the perspective shifts to follow the iceman himself. In the second verse, the iceman
begins his deliveries. He visits a café and complains of the heat while dropping off “enormous
cakes.” The owner asks him what he would like and the iceman replies, “a tin roof cocktail”—
that is to say, one that is “on the house.” The iceman next attends to the grocer, refilling his
refrigerator before picking out some items for himself. He selects ten pounds each of coffee,
butter, sugar, and tea and announces, “Here’s forty pounds of ice. That makes us square.”
Finally, the iceman calls upon a “big fat cook” knowing that he will be invited to stay for dinner.
He ends his day with an empty ice wagon and a full stomach.
“How’d You Like to be the Iceman?” preserves a cultural touchstone from the turn of the
twentieth century that has otherwise faded from American memory. Much like the used car
salesman of the mid-twentieth century, the stereotypical iceman was a cheat and a hustler.
Whether he was malicious or merely comical depended on the telling, but he was never quite
honest. The iceman of the song is at once fabulously wealthy but also stingy and conniving. His
mansion rivals the homes of the richest Americans, yet he tries to wheedle a free drink out of the
restaurant owner. His trade with the grocer is far from fair; even in the most desperate of summer
circumstances, forty pounds of ice would barely cost a dollar.

184
The song resonated with the American public because the iceman was such a common
feature of daily life. The increase in refrigerator ownership spurred a proportionate increase in
home ice delivery service. As previously addressed, ice companies—whether they dealt in
natural or artificial ice—worked on an industrial rather than a domestic scale. A three hundred
pound cake of ice straight from the pond or the factory would not fit in even the largest
household refrigerators. Companies bridged the gap between producer and consumer in large
part through home delivery. Costs for delivery services, including labor, equipment, and other
overhead, were high, even compared to other commodities. Ice Delivery, a 1922 handbook for
ice company operators written by Walter R. Sanders, an editor of the trade journal Ice and
Refrigeration, estimated that in one extreme case, expenses for home delivery service were
twelve times as high as for commercial ice sales; the so-called “family trade” amounted to only
about a quarter of the company’s total business but required three times as many laborers,
wagons, and horses.
442
“How’d You Like to be the Iceman?” invites listeners to consider just
how rich the local iceman might be getting at their expense, but the consumer’s perception of the
ice business as lucrative was generally mistaken. The men who delivered the ice were hourly
laborers, typically making around three dollars per day circa 1920.
443
A busy ice route was no
guarantee of success to the owner of the company either. Home ice delivery could easily cost
more money than it brought in, leaving a deficit to be recouped by other company services like
wholesaling or cold storage.
Often, the margin between profit and loss was quite small and could be shifted by
relatively minor changes. Therefore, companies strove for the utmost efficiency in deliveries, to
mixed results. When, the Stockton Ice Company stopped making deliveries for less than five

442
Walter R. Sanders, Ice Delivery (Chicago: Nickerson & Collins Co., n.d.), 126–27.
443
Greenfield diary, July 20, 1916; Sanders, 123, 132. Greenfield notes that she paid her drivers above scale.

185
cents worth of ice during the summer of 1902, the local paper lamented that “Nickles [sic] are no
longer legal tender with the iceman” and blamed the era’s ever-present bogeyman, the ice trust,
for trying to increase revenues by selling customers more than they wanted.
444
The Helena Ice
Company, rival of Marguerite Greenfield’s Independent Ice Company, charged varying rates
depending on which floor of a hotel or boarding house a customer occupied. Ground floor
deliveries cost sixty-five cents per hundred pounds, while buyers on the second floor paid
seventy-five cents.
445
Both of these changes, although deemed deeply unfair by customers, were
logically tied to the reduction of labor costs. As Sanders explains in Ice Delivery, the cost of a
single delivery remains the same whether the block ordered weighs twenty-five pounds or a
hundred, the only difference being that smaller deliveries cost more in labor than they make in
revenue. Likewise, a delivery to the second floor takes more of the iceman’s time and effort than
a ground floor drop-off and should therefore cost more. Customers rarely saw it this way,
however. Unlike the hidden costs of production and delivery, these alterations to prices and to
the icemen’s routines were very visible to customers and drew regular complaints—although
rarely enough anger for consumers to stop taking ice altogether.
Many companies eventually made a larger, systemic change, adopting the use of coupon
books to speed domestic ice sales. The customer could purchase a booklet containing tear-away
tickets marked with various amounts of ice—twenty-five or fifty pound denominations were
common, but some books might contain tickets as small as five pounds each. When the iceman
made his daily rounds, the customer would pay him with these coupons in lieu of cash. This
system advantaged the ice company in several ways. First, the customer was obliged to pay for

444
“Cold Deal,” Stockton Record, June 6, 1902.
445
Helena Ice Company advertisement, Helena Independent, May 2, 1917. The ad also specified that customers
buying a coupon book would save five cents on every hundred pounds delivered.

186
many days’ worth of ice upfront, albeit with a small discount.
446
Not only did this put weeks’
worth of revenue into the company’s coffers at once, it also helped to retain customers. Coupon
books, like the one pictured from the Pasadena Ice Company in Pasadena, California, typically
bore a bold disclaimer: “The coupons in this book are not transferable and are payable only in
ice.” Very rarely did ice companies allow consumers to trade in unused tickets for cash. If prices
dropped, customers could not expect to be reimbursed. Even if a rival company were to lower
prices, customers who had purchased coupon books were obliged to stay with their original
provider or lose the money already invested.

Figure 7. Coupon book issued by the Pasadena Ice Company, Pasadena, California circa 1930. Author’s collection.

446
The Imperial Ice and Development Company in Calexico, California, for example, offered ten cents off per
hundred pounds of ice purchased this way. Imperial Ice and Development Company advertisement, Calexico
Chronicle, May 25, 1917.

187

Figure 8. Detail of 25 pound coupon from Pasadena Ice Company booklet. Author’s collection.
Additionally, the coupon system sped transactions and increased transparency. When the
Los Angeles Ice and Cold Storage company introduced coupon books in 1910, it presented the
change as a “progressive step” toward improved ice service. “Our customers no longer have to
‘hunt up change’ when the ice man comes. We sell no ice for cash,” an advertisement explained.
“Neither are they obliged to check up monthly ice bills, with all their liability to error or
misunderstanding… When our drivers leave your ice they simply take a coupon for it—that ends
the transaction.”
447
In theory, coupons would allow icemen to make their deliveries more quickly
by eliminating the need to deal in small change at every stop. Detached coupons made adding the
day’s receipts easy and held no monetary value, lessening—but not eliminating—opportunities
for theft. In practice, certain customers resisted the change, preferring to purchase their ice a day
at a time rather than take on the larger expense. On routes with a no-cash policy, this allowed an
unscrupulous iceman to conduct transactions off the record, pocketing the money for himself.
448

Even with guiding procedures in place, the iceman’s honesty was not guaranteed.

447
“The Handy Ice Coupon Book,” Los Angeles Herald, April 17, 1910.
448
“Tricks of the Ice Man,” San Pedro Daily News, September 18, 1907.

188
Compared to other laborers who visited homes as part of their jobs, icemen stood out for
the way they performed their task. The milkman and the paperboy left their wares on the
doorstep. The man from the coal company filled the coal bunker from outside. The mailman
slipped letters through the slot or placed them into the mailbox. Only the iceman needed to enter
a home to do his job. This had both practical and personal ramifications. For one, an iceman
could not complete a delivery if nobody was home. Homeowners needing their iceboxes filled
could not leave their houses lest they miss the iceman. On hot days when every house on the
block hung out their card to indicate they wanted ice, the iceman’s progress through the
neighborhood might be slowed to a crawl, throwing off the rhythms of work and play as
customers waited impatiently for their deliveries. A heatwave in July 1910 in Portland, Oregon
pushed the city’s artificial ice plants to their limits and kept icemen busy on their routes until 9
and 10 o’clock at night.
449
In the leadup to Independence Day 1919, the Imperial Ice and
Development Company, which supplied ice to the scorching desert town of Calexico, California,
implored customers to consider their ice needs ahead of time and order extra ice on July 3. Those
who needed fresh ice on the Fourth would be attended to but should “have the ice box ready and
your coupons handy, so the man may deliver and get away quickly. The ice man is human and
would like his holiday.”
450
Even on lighter days, the extra time and attention required to properly
fill an icebox meant that the iceman could cover less ground than others who worked door-to-
door. On average, an iceman spent as much time unpacking iceboxes as he did filling them up.
Despite every advertisement and salesman advising them not to, consumers invariably filled the
ice compartments of their refrigerators with other goods—“milk bottles, ginger ale, lettuce,

449
“Portland Fans; Iceman Laughs,” The Morning Oregonian, July 12, 1910.
450
“Help Ice Man Get His Holiday July 4
th
is Requested,” Calexico Chronicle, July 1, 1919.

189
berries, watermelons, and cucumbers”—hoping to keep them colder.
451
In actuality, this made
the icebox as a whole work less efficiently and slowed the iceman’s work considerably. A
“humanely-inclined, tender-hearted” customer, suggested one column of household hints, would
ensure that the ice chamber was already empty by the time the iceman came to the door.
452
Doing
so yielded quicker service, a happier iceman, and a smaller puddle on the kitchen floor.

Tipping the Scales
American popular culture did not think highly of icemen in the early twentieth century,
despite their importance to household health and comfort. But what had they done to deserve
such a poor reputation? Many icemen, it should be said, were good neighbors and hard workers.
Jim Grant delivered “congealed cold” to the people of Stockton, California in the first decade of
the twentieth century. The local children knew he was always good for a small chunk of ice on a
hot day and adored him for it. Grant, seeing the dirty faces of Stockton’s young people,
embarked on a crusade “for the purpose of converting grimy faced urchins into clean
countenanced boys and girls.”
453
He refused to give out ice to any child smudged with dirt,
telling them to run home and clean up before they got their relief from the heat. A 1902 Los
Angeles Herald piece celebrated iceman William Paul, a twelve-year veteran of the Los Angeles
Ice and Cold Storage company, as an exemplar of a “typical wage earner” in that city. For
iceman like Paul, it read, “worth is not measured by his ability to handle ice but by the skill and
tact by which he wins and retains the good will of the customer.”
454

451
“The Ice Man,” Chico Record, July 16, 1922.
452
“Kindness to Ice Man,” Calexico Chronicle, August 9, 1924.
453
“Jim Grant, Reformer,” Stockton Record, August 17, 1904.
454
“Typical Wage Earners of Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Herald, November 23, 1902.

190
While the profile of Paul spoke of him positively, the piece ends on a sour note: “No
consumer has yet been found who will admit that he ever got his money’s worth from the
iceman.” The scourge of “short weight,” more than any other issue, made the imagined iceman
into a crook. For decades, urban dwellers across the West fought largely futile battles against
icemen who consistently delivered less ice than they had paid for. Some of these men were
careless or rushing to get through their deliveries while others purposefully defrauded
customers—not that the customers cared much about whether the shortage was due to negligence
or malice. The peculiarities of the iceman’s scales were fodder for jokes for decades. One
popular bit, reprinted with slight variations in newspapers across the country, described the
proud father of a newborn having the iceman check how much his child weighed, only to be told
the bundle of joy clocked in at a full forty pounds.
455
Another zinger cut straight to the point:
“What a change it must be for the iceman when he dies”—implying that the man who deals
unfairly in crystalline cold will inevitably meet with a fiery end.
456

In the world of the living, both companies and individual drivers could be held liable for
giving short-weight ice. Many icemen incurred fees for doing so, but first they had to be caught.
Few homemakers owned the kind of scale needed to weigh a piece of ice and the idea of
handling the heavy, slippery block was not particularly appealing to most consumers.
457
To
combat this difficulty, an Oregon man named Lew Wallace Going designed a handheld paper
“calculator” to determine the weight of an ice cake based on its dimensions with no arithmetic
required.
458
The Madera Mercury of Madera, California offered a less technical solution by

455
“Baby Up to Now, Morning Astorian, May 1, 1907; “A Forty-Pound Baby,” East Oregonian, November 12,
1907; Oregon Daily Journal, December 24, 1911. The version in the Morning Astorian takes the form of a poem.
456
Stockton Independent, October 11, 1907.
457
Mary Lee, “Kitchen Scales,” Oregon Daily Journal, May 2, 1914.
458
“Portland Man Invents Ice Gauge and Weight Computer,” The Oregonian, August 4, 1918.

191
simply printing a list of sizes and their corresponding weights for customers to cut out and use as
a reference.
459
One article on the subject, which described a “shrewd lawyer” realizing that the
iceman had been cheating them without his wife noticing, concluded, “Not every woman can lift
fifty pounds of ice upon a set of scales, but almost any woman can measure the length and
breadth and thickness of the block left in her refrigerator.”
460
Verifying the weight of ice was
therefore another duty imposed upon housewives, even if they were not thought clever enough to
come up with the solution or do the math on their own.
The ephemeral nature of ice and the power of the ice companies combined to make
pursuing short-weight icemen challenging, but those who succeeded in taking down swindlers
could use it to boost their own careers. Los Angeles County employed a woman named Laura
Hampton as an investigator in sting operations to catch icemen, gas station attendants, and other
vendors who did not deal fairly. The county hired Hampton when agents found that merchants
were more likely to shortchange female customers and became overly defensive when
questioned by men.
461
In 1920, San Diego County Judge J. Edward Keating’s fight against
icemen giving short weight took center stage in his reelection campaign. “More power to Judge
Keating, more ice to the housewives of San Diego,” wrote one supporter to the San Diego
Union.
462
Another letter, credited only to a “Woman Resident,” went further in its vehement
support for Keating: “Had I 20 votes they would all go to the man who was not afraid to throttle
at its birth the malformed ice menace. I do not know Judge Keating, not even to see him, but
upon his record in the ice short-weight cases, if in nothing else, the housewives of San Diego
should stand behind him.”

459
“How to Measure Your Ice,” Madera Mercury, May 21, 1920.
460
“Dishonest Ice Man Trapped by Shrewd Lawyer,” The Oregonian, July 28, 1918.
461
“Woman Traps Short Weight Vendors,” Los Angeles Herald, July 9, 1921.
462
“Attack on Keating Resented by Writer,” San Diego Union, August 30, 1920.

192
On other occasions, dishonest icemen outed themselves inadvertently. In 1915, a
Sacramento iceman “made the mistake of his life” when he dropped off twenty-four and one half
pounds of ice instead of thirty to the home of Charles Johnson, California State Sealer of
Weights and Measures.
463
No stranger to scales, Johnson determined that the shortfall exactly
matched the weight of the iceman’s metal tongs; the iceman had evidently weighed both together
on his wagon before making the delivery. Shortly thereafter, Johnson made a statewide
announcement insisting that icemen weigh their ice properly rather than guessing the size of the
block and to leave the tongs off the scales when they did so.
Icemen regularly pushed back on these complaints, offering the industry’s side of the
story. A. L. Wulff, secretary for the Sacramento area icemen’s union, argued in 1907 that any
short weight given to customers was the fault of the company, not the drivers. Artificial ice
cakes, Wulff claimed, were supposed to weigh three hundred pounds but were only counted out
to drivers, not actually weighed upon leaving the factory. “Every pound of ice is charged to the
driver and he has to account for it,” said Wulff. Any loss, whether through melting, waste, or
short-weight cakes to begin with, would be deducted from the iceman’s pay.
464
Someone had to
make up the difference, and the icemen preferred that it be the customer who took the loss. When
approached for comment about this practice, I. J. Trainor, owner of the Kane & Trainor Ice
Company, refused to be interviewed.
465

In Los Angeles, ice company representatives worked to disabuse the public of the idea
that “selling frozen water by the pound” was pure profit. S. A. Bulfinch, agent for the Union Ice
Company in Los Angeles, spoke for his company and his competitors, arguing that the ice

463
“How’d You Like to Be the Iceman and Weigh Your Tongs With Ice?,” Sacramento Daily Union, August 21,
1915.
464
“Why the Iceman is Forced to Sell at Short Weight,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 21, 1907.
465
“Would Not Be Interviewed,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 22, 1907

193
manufacturers serving that city rarely, if ever, turned a profit. His own Union Ice Company,
although successful elsewhere, could not stay in business based only on its sales in Los
Angeles.
466
W. G. Eisenmayer of the Los Angeles Ice and Cold Storage Company emphasized
the high costs of delivery as the primary impediment to low prices in Southern California. While
ice could be affordably manufactured at two dollars per ton, delivering it regularly cost four
dollars per ton. If customers wanted ice delivered to their doors, lower prices were simply not
possible.
467

Other responses from icemen were more practical than theoretical. If a customer proved
too intent on getting their full money’s worth, the ice wagon might pass them by entirely, as
happened to one Los Angeles woman who had filed a complaint of short weight.
468
In scorching
Needles, California, consumers complained to the San Bernardino County Weights and
Measures Department that they had repeatedly paid for more ice than had been received. The
issue made it to the county court, where the judge tasked officials of the Needles Ice Company
with ensuring all the ice their men delivered registered at full weight—or else. The company
retaliated by raising prices from one cent per pound to one and a half cents, arguing that the extra
work of weighing each delivery required more labor and thus increased labor costs.
469

Los Angeles also hosted a number of ice-related melees in which icemen and customers
turned belligerent. In 1909, a pair of icemen assaulted a Black customer named Ulysses Lee
Pettus over a delivery dispute. L. W. McArthur, one of the icemen, pleaded guilty to battery and
paid a ten dollar fine. His partner, Samuel Reed, who had stabbed Pettus in the abdomen with an

466
“The Ice Business,” Los Angeles Herald, May 4, 1912.
467
“Cost of Manufacturing and Delivering Ice,” Los Angeles Herald, May 31, 1912.
468
“Accuses Ice Men of Discriminating,” Los Angeles Herald, July 3, 1907.
469
“Horrors! Price of Ice Jumps 50 Percent,” Needles Nugget, August 24, 1917.

194
ice pick, was charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
470
Pettus survived the attack after
spending two weeks in the hospital. Reed was found guilty and sentenced to two years in Folsom
State Prison.
471
In another instance, the buyer was the aggressor. Long Beach restaurant owner
John Vashilk was dissatisfied with the size of the piece of ice delivered to him by iceman Phillip
Lyon. Vashilk first threatened Lyon with a revolver but when it was taken from him, he took up
Lyon’s own ice pick and stabbed the iceman instead.
472
Vashilk was sentenced to five months in
the county jail, but was instead moved to a mental hospital after killing another inmate while in
custody.
473
Both of these incidents, it should be noted, took place in summer, when tempers flare
hottest and ice is most needed.

Adultery on Ice
“How’d You Like to be the Iceman?” only alludes to one of the other common traits of
the imagined iceman: his flirtatious demeanor. This stereotype, too, had some grounding in
reality. Marguerite Greenfield had little patience for such distractions with her employees. While
making the normal delivery rounds one day in June 1916, Greenfield watched as the trainee
iceman accompanying her disappeared around the back of a house with a block of ice. He ought
to have reappeared and rejoined Greenfield in only a few moments, but the minutes ticked by
with “no sign of men or tongs.”
474
Her patience having run out, Greenfield hopped down from
the wagon and followed her new employee toward the back of the house only to find him turning
the ice cream churn for a customer “who was looking pleased as punch. No wonder.” On the

470
“Ice Man Pleads Guilty,” Los Angeles Herald, September 1, 1909.
471
“Gets Two Years for Assault,” Los Angeles Herald, November 20, 1909.
472
“Dispute Over Ice Ends in an Assault Charge,” Los Angeles Herald, June 12, 1912.
473
“One Dead, 2 Stabbed By Prisoner at Jail,” Los Angeles Herald, August 1, 1912.
474
Greenfield diary, June 1916.

195
previous day, the same recruit had filled a woman’s icebox, then helped her to carry it down into
her cellar, leaving his ice melting in the wagon all the while. Greenfield was not pleased with his
dawdling. When the iceman protested to his employer that he was only providing good customer
service, Greenfield told him to restrict his helpfulness to his off time. He was paid to deliver ice,
not to do odd jobs for every housewife in Helena. However much their bosses might complain,
though, showing favoritism to certain customers paid off for icemen, who often found a warm
welcome and a homemade treat waiting for them. Greenfield found the whole situation puzzling,
writing, “Another queer feature of this business is that so many of the women are so good to the
drivers. They give them pie and cake. I never get a handout no matter how starved I may be.”
475

At the best of times, male laborers entering homes to serve female customers strained
propriety. At worst, the threat posed by icemen engendered a full moral panic. Once again, the
culture of jokes surrounding the iceman as a character fanned the flames, but sexual violence on
the part of icemen was rarely the subject. Instead, these jokes and even another popular song
stressed the attractiveness of the iceman to the women he visited. In a spiritual sequel to “How’d
You Like to be the Iceman?” called “All I Get from the Iceman is Ice,” a female singer laments
that the iceman continues to brush off her advances. “The iceman is a nice man, but just one
thing is sure: there is something in his business that affects his temperature,” she sings. Rather
than returning her affections, the iceman gives her only ice, both literal and figurative. Popular
columns thought young women, daughters and maids especially, were particularly drawn to the
iceman. A 1900 joke, for instance, suggested that homeowners may want to keep an eye on the
hired help when the iceman was around:
“We’ll either have to get a new girl or a new iceman, George.”
“Let it be a new iceman, then. What’s the trouble?
“This iceman is so good looking that he makes Maggie nervous. Yesterday morning she

475
Greenfield diary, June 1916.

196
got so mixed up that she tried to get him to put the ice in the oven.”
476

A 1914 piece in the Los Angeles Herald commented on both gender and the generation gap:
“The old-fashioned woman who wore a skirt and two petticoats around the kitchen now has a
daughter who greets the iceman in a diaphanous rag that resembles a nightgown.”
477

The following image of a Houston iceman circa 1930 epitomizes one version of the
imagined iceman. Standing with his hip out, he holds the chunk of ice in his tongs with only two
fingers. His hat, perfectly askew, has matches stuck in the band. A pipe dangles from his mouth.
His clothes are rumpled and his overalls are undone on one side. Wet patches on his shoulders
show where he has braced blocks of ice while making deliveries. His eyes, shaded by the brim of
his hat, look directly into the camera. This young man, clearly posing for the photographer, is far
from representative of all American icemen, but his is the face husbands dreaded coming to their
back door while they were away at work. Icemen ran the gamut from young to old, but any good
iceman needed to be fit and strong to efficiently handle his product. In the busy summer months,
the ice company’s employee rolls might take a more youthful turn as young men home from
college enlisted for the season. In July 1915, the San Bernardino Sun advised readers not to be
alarmed if at their door appeared “a silver-tongued Apollo, deftly poising a hundred-pound
crystal on his broad shoulder,” citing a statement from the National Association of Ice Industries
that thousands of college students would perform seasonal work as icemen that summer. It was
icemen like these—young, strong, and attentive—that solidified the iceman as the handsome
stranger and prompted disillusioned newlyweds to “happen to notice that the iceman is rather a
good-looking chap,” at which point the honeymoon was truly over.
478

476
“Badly Mixed,” Rogue River Courier, November 22, 1900.
477
“Luke McLuke Says,” Los Angeles Herald, October 20, 1914.
478
“Luke McLuke Says,” Los Angeles Herald, July 6, 1915.

197

Figure 9. Iceman in Houston, Texas, circa 1930. The subject and photographer are unknown. The negative, which had been
bound for destruction to extract the silver, was saved and now resides in the Sloane Gallery in Houston.
In all of the humor derived from the character of the alluring iceman, who appeared in
jokes, songs, vaudeville skits, and silent films, there was a kernel of truth. Dalliances between
married women and the iceman did happen, as one Portland, Oregon man found out the hard
way. In October 1906, clothing store owner Lewis Moyer filed for divorce from his wife of eight
years Ella, citing “desertion and too intimate relations between the defendant and Henry
Schroeder.”
479
When a judge granted the divorce two months later, the sordid tale was laid bare
in the pages of the Oregonian for all of Portland to read:

479
“Court Notes,” The Oregonian, October 28, 1906.

198
Moyer keeps a little store in Albina and once the hardest man in the world to find was the
iceman. Then things changed and Moyer could go home at any hour of the day and note
the ice wagon standing in front of his home. Once his curiosity grew apace and he peeped
in the window. He observed that his wife, while discussing the price of ice or some
domestic subject of the sort had inadvertently seated herself on the iceman’s knees.
He learned that the iceman’s name was Henry Schroeder and then accused his wife of
harboring an affection for the fellow. Mrs. Moyer admitted the gentle impeachment, took
$500 from the family treasury and eloped to Denver with the iceman.
480

Ella Moyer, having run away with her new beau, was not present at the hearing. Her daughter—
Lewis Moyer’s stepdaughter—however, was. Alta Moyer, seventeen, testified against her
mother. Lewis, evidently, had been the only one unaware.
Written between the lines of a seemingly open and shut case of infidelity is a story that
intertwines love, labor, and race in the Pacific Northwest. The news of a married woman eloping
with the iceman is the sort of thing that the papers, hungry for scandal and primed by a decade of
songs and jokes, ought to have made quite a commotion over. Yet the paramour’s profession did
not make the headline of the Oregonian’s account. Instead, the paper’s editors centered Lewis
Moyer with the title, “Americanized Chinese is Given Divorce.” Moyer’s racialized status as
Chinese-American lends a different perspective to the story. Western icemen were not just
symbols of (slightly dangerous) masculinity, but of white masculinity specifically. From the ice
ponds of Truckee to the ice wagons of Portland, the ice industry was thoroughly white. Even as
icemen entered women’s homes unchaperoned, their race lent a degree of respectability. Henry
Schroeder, a white man in a blue collar job that prized strength and endurance, represented a
very different sort of masculinity than Lewis Moyer, an Asian American shopkeeper. The
newspaper accounts do not explicitly justify Ella Moyer’s infidelity, but neither do they ask why
she made the choices that she did. To some degree, given the strong cultural conceptions of the
iceman as the rough but desirable outsider, her decision to run away from her marriage with a

480
“Americanized Chinese is Given Divorce,” The Oregonian, December 29, 1906.

199
different kind of man, a more quintessentially American man, did not have to be explained.

Remaking the Iceman
The iceman of the popular imagination was a complicated, even contradictory figure. He
was unpolished but dashing, helpful but liable to be dishonest. In the 1920s, the Union Ice
Company, which by then operated in dozens of California cities, attempted to escape the
iceman’s unsavory image. Through a blitz of new advertisements, Union Ice worked to
recontextualize their icemen as professionals—experts in the field of refrigeration, not just
manual laborers who hauled ice of questionable cleanliness. Each advertisement showed Union
Ice deliverymen in crisp, clean uniforms and matching hats. Gone were the overalls and unkempt
mustaches of earlier depictions. One such advertisement showed the clean-shaven, somber face
of an iceman alongside the heading, “A Springtime Guardian of Your Health, Your Food, Your
Purse.” “Have your ice man call oftener,” the accompanying text read, “and you’ll need fewer
calls from the doctor.”
481
Drawing on the homemaker’s desires for health and thrift, this
advertisement positions the iceman as a trusted ally, someone with her best interests at heart. At
the same time, it encouraged consumers to purchase more ice, even in mild weather when many
households chose to forego the expense. Another, featuring a smiling iceman with a cake of ice
on his shoulder, was captioned, “I’m a pretty good doctor, myself!”
482
While no consumer would
seriously accept the iceman’s word as equal to that of a medical professional, the advertisement
aimed to present the Union Ice Company’s employees as at least morally equivalent to
physicians. The doctor could be relied upon to look out for your health, and so too could the
iceman—so long as you allowed him to keep your refrigerator filled, that is.

481
Union Ice Company advertisement, Santa Cruz Evening News, March 25, 1924.
482
Union Ice Company advertisement, San Pedro News-Pilot, March 9, 1923.

200
The Union Ice Company’s rehabilitation of the iceman culminated in a 1933 advertising
campaign encouraging housewives to “Make Your Ice Refrigerator Automatic!” Using a card in
the window to flag down the iceman was as old-fashioned as a horse-drawn ice wagon, argued
the ad. With the help of the Union Ice Company, any homemaker could bring her refrigerator up
to date, removing the hassle of monitoring the icebox. The conversion was simple: “Just give
your Union Ice Man a key to your back door. He’ll keep your refrigerator iced scientifically at all
times… And at the end of the month, you’ll be surprised to find that your ice bill is smaller than
it was under the old haphazard methods of delivery.”
483
The adjacent photograph shows a
uniformed iceman, block of ice slung over his shoulder, smiling down at a cat while he unlocks a
door using one of dozens of keys on a ring.

483
Union Ice Company advertisement, San Pedro News-Pilot, April 20, 1933. Emphasis original.

201

Figure 10. Union Ice Company advertisement urging customers to sign up for “automatic” ice delivery. Source: San Pedro News
Pilot, April 20, 1933.
The proposal to entrust the iceman not only with management of the refrigerator,
traditionally the domain of the woman of the house, but with unsupervised access to the home
itself is a complete reversal of the traditional relationship between iceman and consumer. An ice
customer in 1900 or 1910 would have blanched to even consider such an invasion. For decades,
the presence of the buyer in the home when the iceman came to call was a necessary, if
inconvenient, safeguard for the members of the family and for the family purse. That the Union
Ice Company would offer such a service reflects a radically altered vision of the American

202
iceman and the changing needs of the household consumer. The advertisement does not
reference electric refrigerators, but their growing prevalence and availability is a clear factor in
the effort to make iced refrigerators “automatic.” Electric refrigerators required no tending, no
guessing, and no iceman. Turning the iceman into an unseen automaton who fills the icebox
while the owners are away was the closest an ice company could come to the automation offered
by electric appliances. That this idea would be palatable to customers reflects Union Ice’s
success in redeeming the iceman, but the company had successfully remade him just in time for
electric refrigeration to begin driving him out of business.
The heyday of the American iceman lasted only about thirty years, from the wide
introduction of affordable and effective “icebox” refrigerators near the turn of the twentieth
century to rise of electric refrigerators in the 1930s. Throughout that time, the iceman was a
cultural figure as much as he was a practical fixture of daily life, but what precisely he
represented is difficult to define. At various times the iceman was a threat or a cheat, but at
others the iceman’s wagon was the most welcome sight in the world. With startling quickness,
the iceman could turn from hero to villain, particularly when a hot day’s delivery did not quite
measure up. As the human face of an industry and of a technology, the iceman bore the brunt of
Westerners’ changing feelings about ice as it transformed from a wonder to a necessity to a
chore. Frustrations with the limitations of the early twentieth century cold web came to rest on
the shoulders of icemen, although consumers regularly blurred the lines between working class
deliverymen and upper class ice industrialists, placing blame where none was warranted. And
yet, for all of the emotions around ice and icemen, the industry now exists as a void in American
cultural memory, thoroughly obliterated by rapid technological change. In his 1949 study, The
American Ice Harvests, historian Richard Cummings remarked that the ice industry had

203
experienced “a rate of obsolescence perhaps unequaled in any other large-scale American
industry.”
484
What existed for Cummings in living memory is now the stuff of an unremembered
past. The iceman is dead. Long live the iceman.

484
Cummings, The American Ice Harvests, 111.

204
Epilogue
Ice Without an Iceman

In May 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, a resident of San Pedro, California
wrote to the local paper, the News-Pilot, irate about the increasing price of ice in the city:
To the Editor: I read in your newspaper every day about trading at home and am doing
that right along, but what I want to know is why we should pay 30 cents for 50 pounds of
ice when in Los Angeles it is delivered for half that.
Everything we use has come down except ice and our wages with it… No wonder people
are buying Frigidaires and if the ice company gets in bad they have no one to blame but
themselves.
Let the people who use ice get busy and make their demands. – A Citizen.
485

Two days later, the newspaper printed a second letter, a rebuttal to the first. Unlike the other
letter, this one was proudly signed by its author, Mrs. Marjorie Spaan, the wife of a San Pedro
iceman. It reads:

To the Editor: I am writing this so the writer of “Price of Ice” will know that it is what it
is. I don’t believe that the writer even stopped to find out why the price of ice in Los
Angeles is so cheap. The price of ice in Los Angeles is so cheap because of the ice war to
make these electric slot machines go out of business.
In Los Angeles, there are slot machines where you put in 10 cents and you get a 15-cent
piece of ice all wrapped up. And it is those electric machines that put my husband out of
work. We have no such machines here and so our price remains the same.
It is just such people as you that keep an honest working man from making a living… Do
you know that the iceman in San Pedro must buy his own truck, route and ice and that
they work on commission, except Union Ice Company, and the little he makes in summer
must hold him over the winter?
I don’t see how you had the nerve to call yourself a citizen as I don’t call you a very good
citizen of San Pedro. I am just the wife of a Standard Ice Man. – Mrs. Marjorie Spaan.
486

This pair of letters from Depression-era Southern California illustrate the transformation
at work in the ice industry of the 1930s. Ice remained, as ever, a necessity of life in the West,
particularly in the summer, but the ways consumers got their ice were changing rapidly. The so-

485
“Saying it in the News-Pilot,” San Pedro News-Pilot, May 1, 1933.
486
“Saying it in the News-Pilot,” San Pedro News-Pilot, May 3, 1933.

205
called “slot machines” referenced by Mrs. Spaan were common sights around Los Angeles in the
era. As discussed in the previous chapter, manufacturing ice was typically an urban artificial ice
company’s smallest expense. Delivery costs, in contrast, seemed to increase constantly and ice
companies passed that cost on to their customers. The Central Ice and Cold Storage Company in
Los Angeles worked to eliminate this problem by developing ice vending machines, which it
introduced to Angelenos in 1931. The machines, which dwarfed the average customer at twelve
feet tall and eight feet on each side, sat outside on city streets, accessible to all. Instead of
delivering ice directly to homes, the company needed only to stock the machines, a task taking
just a few minutes. This streamlined procedure allowed the ice inside to be sold at extremely low
prices. Despite their size, the machines dispensed domestic-sized blocks of ice, easy to carry and
ready to use at home. The model depicted below sold twenty-five-pound blocks, wrapped in wax
paper to prevent dripping, for only fifteen cents each. This was a price with which ice delivery
could not compete. Los Angeles icemen, desperate to regain their lost share of the market, were
locked into a race to the bottom, slashing prices more and more. But even a necessity, if sold at
bargain prices, could not provide enough revenue on which to make a living, as Mrs. Spaan
could attest.

206

Figure 11. “Ethel Buying Ice,” Herman Schultheis Collection, Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection.

Even more dangerous to icemen than ice vending machines, however, was the growth of
the electric refrigeration industry. The Great Depression prompted American consumers to
decide what expenses were necessities and which were not. While most deemed ice and
refrigeration essential, many came to consider the iceman himself as unnecessary overhead. The
price of ice fluctuated year by year and season by season, but an electric refrigerator promised to
grant a family independence from the iceman once and for all. Promises, however, often fell
short of reality. The earliest electric home refrigerators were anything but a sure bet. Consumers
wanted refrigerators that could fit in their kitchens, maintain a consistent temperature, and
function properly twenty-four hours a day, all for an affordable price. Industrial refrigerating

207
plants used dangerous chemicals and required skilled overseers to operate—home models needed
to do without either.
487
Electric refrigeration, therefore, came to American homes in stages.
Released in the 1920s, the original Frigidaire was not a complete refrigerator, but a refrigerating
system that could be installed in a customer’s existing icebox refrigerator. The apparatus
consisted of a large motor-driven condenser to be placed in the customer’s basement which was
connected via pipes to the freezing device inside the refrigerator. “Good riddance to all the muss
and nuisance of ice,” read a 1923 Frigidaire advertisement.
488
A Frigidaire cooling system
“generally costs less to operate than what you pay for ice,” as the advertisement touted, but the
initial investment was high—between $500 and $600.
489

A similar promotion for Kelvinator in 1927 told readers of The Ladies’ Home Journal
that in a few hours’ time and for a low down payment, they could have “the cold maker from the
light socket” installed in their existing refrigerators and “never need to worry about your
refrigerator again.”
490
This model, unlike the early Frigidaires, was self-contained; the freezing
unit fit snugly into the refrigerator’s existing ice chamber. This made the machine less expensive
and less of a procedure to install, but the “plug-in” design of these units came with its own
issues. Refrigerators came in myriad sizes and layouts. A Frigidaire or Kelvinator unit that
worked well in one configuration might struggle to keep another suitably cool. The ability to
upgrade any existing refrigerator was a cornerstone of the advertising campaigns for both
companies, but it was very difficult to achieve in practice. Manufacturers of home refrigeration
systems quickly learned what industrial refrigeration designers already knew: adapting a system

487
Rees, Refrigeration Nation, 143.
488
Frigidaire advertisement, Orchard and Farm, August 5, 1923, 7.
489
Rees, Refrigeration Nation, 148.
490
Kelvinator advertisement, The Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1927.

208
built for ice for use with electric cold control would not work. The cooling machinery and the
enclosure that housed it needed to be perfectly matched.
The expense and compromised performance of the installable refrigeration units kept
them from achieving wide adoption in the 1920s, but advances in home refrigerator technology
greatly expanded the industry in the 1930s. Chemists hired by General Motors, the parent
company of Frigidaire, developed Freon, a nonflammable, nontoxic artificial refrigerant that
traded the drawbacks of ammonia for increased efficiency.
491
Freon allowed companies to build
smaller, lighter, less expensive cooling units to power their refrigerators. These new machines
were then placed into custom-built steel cabinets to create completely integrated refrigerators,
sold as a single appliance. Despite the privation of the Great Depression, refrigerator purchases
soared throughout the 1930s—across all brands, American consumers purchased approximately
820,000 refrigerators in 1932 and sales rose each year, peaking in 1937 at over two million units
sold.
492
Average prices fell drastically over the same period, reaching approximately $150 by the
end of the decade.
493
As the first, anonymous, San Pedro letter writer noted, “No wonder people
are buying Frigidaires.”
Symbolically, both ice vending machines and electric refrigerators helped divorce the
concept of cold control from the person of the iceman. Unless a customer arrived at the vending
machine at the exact right time, she would never see the ice company employee reload it with
packaged ice. The new owner of an electric home refrigerator might have it installed by a
professional and could call for a repairman when—not if—the appliance experienced problems,

491
Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 191–92, 197. While not directly harmful to humans or deleterious to food,
Freon and other chlorofluorocarbons were found to be incredibly detrimental to the ozone layer and heavily
restricted beginning in the 1980s.
492
“The Market for Domestic Refrigerators,” Box 217, Folder 25, Montgomery Ward records, 1849-1989,
Collection No. 08088, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
493
Rees, Refrigeration Nation, 148.

209
but a modern refrigerator largely ran by itself, without intervention. The function once fulfilled
by an iceman and an icebox working in tandem could now be accomplished by machine alone.
Furthermore, modern refrigerators did not just make visits from the iceman unnecessary,
they replaced him entirely, doing his job and more. Freon-cooled electric refrigerators could,
unlike icebox refrigerators, create their own ice right inside the home. Earlier models reached
low enough temperatures to freeze an ice cube tray if placed on top of the cooling unit, but more
powerful configurations through the 1930s and into the early 1940s had ever-increasing ice
producing capabilities. Sales representatives highlighted the amount of ice each model could
produce as a yardstick for comparing across models and brands. A 1932 Frigidaire advertisement
made ice making, not food preservation, its key selling point. In the ad, a huge bucket of ice
cubes looms over a woman and her new Frigidaire. Even a medium-sized Frigidaire, it claimed,
had the ability to freeze more than 16,000 pounds of ice cubes in the course of a year—a
staggering 44 pounds per day.
494
Needless to say, the scenario described probably never played
out in any American kitchen, but the takeaway was clear to any homemaker who picked up The
Ladies’ Home Journal that month: buy a Frigidaire and the ice problem is solved forever.
Frigidaire competitor Montgomery Ward, which offered its own line of electric
refrigerators, advised its salesmen to take a more scientific, less hyperbolic approach. A 1939
internal training manual taught employees to tell the “Economy Story,” walking a potential
customer through the many ways a Montgomery Ward refrigerator could save her money. Rather
than emphasize the volume of ice produced, the script focused on the refrigerator’s efficiency in
maintaining temperature in the food compartment while simultaneously making ice. A mid-sized
model drew only 1¼ cents worth of electricity to make an eight-pound batch of ice, for an

494
Frigidaire advertisement, The Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1932.

210
equivalent price of 15 cents per hundred pounds, a bargain in any American city. What’s more, it
did this while holding a full chamber of food at a steady 48°. The document sums up the value to
the customer this way: “If she bought 8 lbs. of ice and put it into the ice box, it would have to
melt to chill the food—but with an M/W, the food is chilled, and she gets 8 lbs. of ice, too—all
for 1¼¢!”
495

As soon as home refrigerators could produce ice more cheaply than it could be purchased
from the iceman while at the same time preserving food, the end of the ice industry as it had
existed for nearly a century was at hand. Artificial ice companies remained in business to provide
ice for industrial use, but the domestic market only continued to shrink. By the end of World
War II, over half of American households owned an electric refrigerator and the following years
of postwar abundance put refrigerators in the remainder of homes in short order.
496
A large, full
refrigerator became a defining symbol of American prosperity—the marriage of advanced
technology and agricultural plenty in the modern era. Electric refrigeration, argued Oscar
Anderson in 1953, was indispensable to the “new and infinitely complex society” then emerging
in the United States.
497

Anderson, writing in the early 1950s, could sense the gravity of the changes taking place
around him, but his assessment undersells the complexities of the previous century. The new
society Anderson saw came not just out of the Second World War, but from the transformation
of the American landscape over the preceding decades by imperialism, technology, and capital.
The ice industry of the American West exemplifies this transformation. What began as an

495
“1939 Electric Refrigerator Product and Sales Manual,” Box 158, Folder 10, Montgomery Ward records, 1849-
1989, Collection No. 08088, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
496
Rees, Refrigeration Nation, 164.
497
Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 320. See also, for instance, Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife’s
Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century.

211
extravagance, an indulgence in “civility” in the midst of an “uncivilized” territory, quickly
became an engine for turning water and weather into capital. When nature proved unable to meet
the rising demands placed upon it for cool preservation and refreshment, Western entrepreneurs
supplemented—and later supplanted—it through mechanical means. Ice-powered refrigerated
storage and transport helped to knit together East and West by creating a single, nationwide
market for produce. The interconnected, technological society of the mid-twentieth century was
built upon the structures laid down in the nineteenth.
Electric refrigeration is now so ubiquitous that it strains the imagination to consider how
earlier generations achieved the same ends. Effective creation of refrigerated spaces seems like
something that could not have predated our present technological era, and yet it did. The speed
and thoroughness with which electric refrigeration replaced ice-based cold control has warped
our cultural memory of the American “ice age,” particularly as it applies to the American West.
The West of popular culture is hot and dusty, rough and untamed. The only sources of
refreshment in the imagined West are bubbling springs and, at best, a sarsaparilla. In reality, ice
was ubiquitous in the West. Those made to go without it resented its absence and even those who
had it complained of the cost. How does the West change when we learn that Forty-Niners
enjoyed ice cream or that Tombstone, Arizona’s Arctic Ice Company provided “congealed cold”
only blocks away from the legendary gunfight? Reimagining a “refrigerated West” brings to
light new connections: between East and West, between urban and rural, and between ice and the
many other Western industries that have received much more scholarly attention in the last
generation. Westerners from California to Montana and from the Gold Rush to World War II
emphasized time and again the importance of ice to their businesses, their comfort, and their

212
senses of identity. It is well past time that this far-reaching and foundational industry be
recognized.

213
Bibliography
Archival Materials

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley:

M. D. S. Hyde letters to his brothers, 1852, July-November, BANC MSS 78/71 c.

Juan A. Robinson, Prospectus for California Ice Manufacturing Company (Microfilm)

California State Railroad Museum Archives, Sacramento:

Pacific Fruit Express Company Collection, MS 49.

California Historical Society, San Francisco:

Commercial Catalogs Collection

Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Helena:

Greenfield Family Papers, MC 166.

American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming:

Montgomery Ward Records, 1849-1989, Collection No. 08088.

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Dissertations and Theses
Itogawa, Eugene M. “The Natural Ice Industry in California.” Master’s thesis, California State
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217

Articles
Brooks, Tim. “A Directory to Columbia Recording Artists of the 1890’s.” ARSC Journal 11, no.
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———. “Columbia Records in the 1890’s: Founding the Record Industry.” ARSC Journal 10,
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Rees, Jonathan. “What’s Left in the Bottom of the Glass: The Quest for Purity and the
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Newspapers and Periodicals
Better Fruit
Calexico Chronicle
Chico Record
Cold Storage
Daily Alta California
East Oregonian
Empire County Argus
Fruit Trade Journal and Produce Record
Good Housekeeping
Grass Valley Morning Union
Healdsburg Tribune

218
Helena Independent
Hood River Glacier
Humboldt Times
Ice and Refrigeration
Ladies’ Home Journal
Las Vegas Age
Los Angeles Herald
Madera Mercury
Marin Journal
Morning Astorian
Needles Nugget
Nevada Journal
New York Times
Orchard and Farm
Oregon Daily Journal
Overland Monthly
Rogue River Courier
Sacramento Daily Union
Sacramento Transcript
San Bernardino Sun
San Diego Union
San Francisco Call
San Jose Herald
San Jose Mercury
San Pedro Daily News
San Pedro News-Pilot
Santa Cruz Evening News
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Seattle Star
Southern Pacific Bulletin
Spokane Press
Stockton Independent
Stockton Record
Sunset: The Pacific Monthly
The American Magazine
The Oregonian
The Ranch
Trinity Journal
Truckee Republican
Weekly Butte Record
Yakima Democrat
Yakima Herald

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This project examines how, across the century from 1850−1950, people in the American Westㅡlaborers, merchants, manufacturers, politicians, and consumersㅡtransformed ice from an ephemeral feature of the natural landscape, to a purchasable product, to a foundational piece of “modern” life. In contrast to conventional understandings of the “civilized East” versus the “wild West,” the people of the West were no less seekers of luxury and comfort than their Eastern cousins. But at the same time, ice was far from a frivolous indulgence for the wealthy. People across the social spectrum came to not just rely on it, but to expect it, even in far-flung locations. Even before electric refrigeration, consumers succeeded in satisfying their desires for cold drinks and fresh produce, albeit through means that seem very foreign in the twenty-first century. For the people of the American West, ice was not a product of modernity. Instead, the West became modern, in part, through ice and the control over the natural world it made possible.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Keagle, Jordan Mark (author)

Core Title Freezing civilities: ice and the building of the American West, 1850−1950

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 07/07/2021

Defense Date 06/15/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American West,California history,Consumerism,Cultural history,environmental history,History,Ice,OAI-PMH Harvest,Railroads,United States history,US West

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Deverell, William Francis (committee chair), Gustafson, Thomas (committee member), Mancall, Peter Cooper (committee member)

Creator Email jordan.keagle@gmail.com,keagle@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15276669

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Legacy Identifier etd-KeagleJord-9708

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