The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-01-07
FULL OF FACTS.
Col. P. Donan Presents a Picture of Rufus Hatch-- Railroad Schemes
 Gould's Future Plans.
NEW YORK, Jan. 4, 1888.

NEW ONN, pUli. ICCcs To the Editor Of The Arkansao0 7rareter:
 One of the most interesting charac- ters in New York to me is the Wall street veteran, Rufus Hatch. He is as much an institution of New York as the Brooklyn bridge and Central park. He is known throughout the country as "Uncle Rufus" and his ut terances in regard to finance, com merce. railroads, stocks and almost everything else are quoted far and wide. l heard of him long before l ever met him, and pictured him to myself as a tall, broad browed man, with long flowing whiskers and an air of ponderous and naughty dignity. No ideal could have been further from the real. Uncle Rufus is short, stout, bald-headed and as genial and jolly q man as one ever meets He has often been taken for Ben Butler, put is rather better looking than Bcniumin He has had career full of adventure and vicissitude, seasoned with much usefulness and good deal of fun. He was born in York county, Maine, in 1882. In his boyhood he worked on farm, and was for time employed in a country store. He went west in 1851, when he was nineteen years old, and landed in Illinois when Chicago had but 28,000 people and when all the railroad in the state was forty-one miles between Chicago and Elgin. The track was of strap rails, laid like street railway on timbers placed lengthwise. Young Hatch drove the first stake ever driven on railroad in Wisconsin. It was on the survey of the Beloit & Madison branch of the Galena railroad, TOW q part of the great Chicago X Northwestern system. The engineers name was Bushnell, and Hatch and man named Goodwin went 10 sawmill about mile and half from Beloit and split slabs for stakes. He was paid $125 day and had to board himself. The wife of Engineer Bushnell sang in the choir of a Congregational church at Rockford, and young Hatch was the organist. He once palmed off the "Marseillaise" on the congregation for a voluntary. In Rockford, in 1858, he married his first wife, the pastor of the church in which he played the organ perform ing the ceremony. Hatch paid the parson ten dollars, and fifteen years later, when he had made a fortune, presented the church with an organ that cost $4 ,250 as a testimonial of his pleasant remembrance of early days. Two of the finest locomotives ever built for the Chicago X Northwestern railway up to 1868 were named "Henry Keep" and "Rufus Hatch," and they are still running in good or der. Superintendent George l.. Dun- lap had them built.
 He became interested in locomotive building, and was the first man to em- ploy steel in their construction. In 1854 he went into the grain business ill Chicago, and soon after began the issuing of crop prognostications, his first article of this sort appearing in the Chicago Tribune about the time of the consolidation with the Demo- crat in 1856. The sudden close of the Crimean war and the tumble in the prices of grain broke the firm of which he was a member, but he assumed in- dividually all the liabilities and few years later paid the last dollar with interest in full, amounting to Sl60,- 900.
 In 1862 he came to New York and at once plunged into the settlements of Wall street. Since then his name has been part of the history of the new world business and enterprise. He was for years vice. president and managing director of the Pacific mail. He was the originator and builder of the famous iron steamboat line from New York city to Coney Island and other suburban resorts, and he has made and lost several fortunes. He is ono of the men whom nothing can down. Like truth, though crushed to earth, he is dead sure to rise again. His energy and indomitable recupera- tive power cannot be permanently re- pressed. He has always been . long horned bull in regard to every thing west and northwest. To him, more perhaps than to any other one man, ii the great northwest indebted for the mighty boonswhinh .1ew years age gave It such m impetus of growth h popnktion md wealth. For two sue cessive years he took large and in-