My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth YearTrain, George Francis
History
My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth Year
Train, George Francis
Train, George Francis, 1829-1904
By the end of the week, I began to grow a little suspicious, and sent my
clerk to the office of Mr. Boyd early on Monday morning. The office was
closed, and there was no Mr. Boyd there. He had gone to Sydney, and that
was the last seen of Boyd in Australia. He had "buncoed" us and
Denniston & Co. in the easiest sort of way. I really felt cheated, it
was done so smoothly. I had not got the worth of my money, as I should
have done had I been harder to deceive. There had been no sport in that.
I next heard of Boyd at Singapore; but I was to run up against him
later. In '61, when I was giving a junketing trip to some people on the
Union Pacific road, and a party of us were on the steamboat St. Joseph
going to Omaha, a man came up to me and claimed an acquaintance.
Although more than twelve years had passed, I recognized him at once as
the John Boyd who had got the better of me in that little trade in
Melbourne. I pretended not to know him. I suppose he assumed that the
matter had passed out of my mind and that his face was no longer
familiar to me. He coolly gave me his address on a card, and when I
looked at it I saw "Noble & Co., Bankers, Des Moines, Iowa." I knew him
by his broken nose, that would have betrayed him at the ends of the
earth.
Perhaps the thing I enjoyed most in Australia was the introduction of
American articles--"Yankee notions," the people there called them--into
Australia, even against the prejudice of the colonists. They would fight
hard against everything that was new or American, but I took a delight
in overcoming their bias, and forcing them to accept our ideas. I made a
calculation once of the things that I had introduced into Australia, and
they amounted to something like fifty. Among these were such common
things as the light wagon, the buggy, shovels, and hoes, and--wonderful
to think of when one hears and reads so much in these days of the "tins"
that the British army consumes--tinned, or canned, goods. These had not
been heard of, and I saw at once that there was a fine chance for some
profitable business. English packers could not begin to compete with us.
On one cargo that I brought in from New London, Conn., we made a profit
of 200 per cent. And now "Tommy Atkins" lives on the "tins" that we
introduced as a method of carrying provisions from one end of the world
to the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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