By Phil Roberts (1986)
*A version of this article first appeared as “Duncan Hines’ Best Meal,” True West, March 1987, pp. 36-40. Printed online for first time.
“The best meal I ever ate was an order of ham and eggs in a frontier café where the click of the roulette wheel in the back mingled with the clatter of dishes at the front counter.” So begins the autobiography of well-known restaurant critic Duncan Hines. The café was in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the year was 1899. Thirty-five years and thousands of meals later, Hines issued his first restaurant guidebooks.[i]
Born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1880, Hines attended Bowling Green College for a term.[ii] The president of Wells Fargo at the time was a Bowling Green graduate, and Hines was hired by the firm. First, he was sent to Albuquerque, N. M., where he spent six months learning the telegraph business. In June, the company brought him to Denver, where he was told he would be working in Cheyenne. Rather than traveling by train or coach from Denver, Hines was to do double duty for the company by delivering a new express wagon to Cheyenne.
No modern roads tied the two cities together, so the Kentucky tenderfoot set off from Denver on a sunny July afternoon, jauntily following what appeared to be the main trail. The company officials expected him to make the easy fourteen miles to an inn where he would be lodged that first night out. “It wasn’t until it began to grow dark that I realized I had either missed my overnight lodging entirely or had passed it without knowing it for what it was,” Hines wrote many years later.
Consequently, he drove the wagon until he somehow lost the main trail. Hours later, he came upon a cabin far from any town. There, he expected frontier hospitality to compensate for his error in missing the expected stop. To his dismay, the cabin was abandoned.
Even though it was July, the temperature dropped near the freezing mark in the mountain country at nights. Hines not only found himself poorly clad for the climate, but he became disoriented and lost the horse-drawn express wagon in the darkness. Until dawn, he wandered, hoping if he didn’t find the wagon, he would at least come upon a homesteader’s shack where he could be fed. When he left Denver he had not thought to take food along, assuming there would be roadside stops on the way.
But food was not to be had. Dawn came and a shivering, hungry, 19-year-old Hines at last spotted his horse and wagon, silhouetted in the morning sky about a mile away. Only then did he realize he had walked a great circle completely around it throughout the night.
The next day the weather remained cold. Hines tried to find the main trail north without success. “Cheyenne remained beyond the horizon; indeed, not one dwelling or sign of a human being did I see on that second day,” Hines wrote.
The third day out, Hines finally found the main trail. Still, there were no roadside stops. He was 15 miles from Cheyenne when his horse stubbornly refused to continue. After several unsuccessful attempts to make the animal move, Hines set out for Cheyenne on foot. Two miles down the trail, he came upon a homesteader who offered to help. “Apparently, his experience with Western horse-flesh lent his efforts a persuasion that mine had lacked,” Hines noted. Soon, he was on his way.
Cheyenne was still a frontier town despite the fact that it was graced by huge homes built for cattle barons and wealthy businessmen. The thriving business district was in the shadow of the massive stone Union Pacific Depot. Up Capitol Avenue, a dozen blocks from the depot, stood the decade-old stone state capitol.
Despite those civilizing touches, cowboys from the surrounding ranches whooped it up in the numerous saloons. Only seven years earlier, the town hosted the “invaders,” the ranchers and hired gunmen who precipitated the so-called “Johnson County War/Invasion.” When Hines arrived, Cheyenne was still so much a part of the disappearing frontier that its now-world famous Frontier Days celebration had originated only two years before and Tom Horn, the notorious hired gun, was “on assignment against rustlers” in the surrounding ranch country.
For Duncan Hines, sightseeing would have to wait. His first priority in town was food. Up the street from the livery stable where he parked the equally hungry and exhausted horse and the express wagon, he spotted a big sign advertising “Harry Hynds’ Restaurant.”
The café owner, unknown to Hines until later, was the colorful former blacksmith who operated the café as a sidelight to his thriving saloon and gambling hall.[iii]Harry Hynds had some local notoriety but it was not based on the quality of his menu. It stemmed from the shooting death of his wife and her lover in Salt Lake City, an act for which he was tried but exonerated with the help of lawyers furnished by Wyoming friends. In the 1920s, Hynds would gain wealth in oil investments and fame through his management of the Plains Hotel, for many years the social center of Cheyenne, and the 40-day home each biennium for Wyoming’s legislators.
But on that particular July Fourth, just before the 20th century, young Duncan Hines told the counterman, “I want five dollars worth of ham and eggs.”
“Well, you won’t get it,” the man answered. ”Nobody can eat that much ham and eggs. I’ll give you an order and if you want more when you’ve finished that, we’ll give ‘em to you.”
Hines concluded the man was right. “Hungry as I was after more than two days without food, I was amply filled by one of Harry’s orders.” The date was July 4, 1899.
In a few days Duncan Hines was moved into his new quarters, a comfortable upstairs apartment in the Davis Block, a brick structure occupied on the ground floor by retail stores.[iv] Even though he lacked the wealth or social status of many of the young business and professional people of the city, he soon became friends with a number of them.[v]
In those days, the Cheyenne social scene was closely connected to “the post,” nearby Fort D. A. Russell. It was common practice for army officers to court and marry eligible young women from the wealthy cattle baron families or daughters of businessmen.[vi]
One of the most popular young women in “Cheyenne society” at the time was Florence Chaffin, the daughter of J. T. Chaffin, county assessor and former bank officer. Florence’s parents were natives of Richmond, Virginia, and her mother was known in Cheyenne for raising beautiful flowers.[vii]
The oldest of the Chaffin daughters, Eva, “Married into the army.” The second daughter, Grace, was renowned as a skilled painter of China plates.[viii] Mrs. Chaffin apparently believed her youngest daughter, Florence, should marry an officer at the post just as Eva had done. She was disappointed to learn that Florence had met and fallen In love with a young Wells Fargo employee, Duncan Hines. She was horrified to hear that they planned to marry.[ix]
According to some accounts, Mrs. Chaffin objected so strenuously to the proposed marriage that Florence finally relented and broke off with the young express company clerk. It is said that her mother and sisters introduced her to army officers and she dated several of them from time to time. After a few months, Florence announced her engagement to a young army lieutenant at Fort Russell, Lt. Robert E. Frith. The marriage ceremony was held at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Cheyenne, where the eldest sister had wed her officer-husband.[x]
But Florence’s marriage was short-lived. Local gossip had it that the lieutenant was extremely cruel to Florence. He supposedly gave her no money for food, struck her, and accused her of “loving another man,” a fact which at that point she apparently did not deny.[xi]
In the meantime, Duncan Hines accepted a higher-paying position with a Colorado-based fuel company. The company shipped coal and coke to Mexico, and on a combination inspection tour and vacation there, Hines met a man who offered him a job in Cananea, Mexico, 45 miles from Nogales, for the “unheard of salary of $500 per month–in gold.” It turned out that the man represented Wells Fargo, so Hines was back working for the company he had quit in Cheyenne some months earlier.
During the next several years, he corresponded with Florence Chaffin, back living in Cheyenne following her divorce from Lieutenant Frith. After a year or so, Florence accompanied her parents when they moved to a new home in New Rochelle, N. Y.
While his adventures in Mexico were eventful, Hines thought he should be moving on. He bought a ticket for New York in September 1905, and upon his arrival in New Rochelle, he and Florence married.[xii]
They moved to Chicago where Hines took a job as a salesman for a printing company.[xiii] For the next 26 years, he traveled thousands of miles nationwide. During his trips, he kept notes of good restaurants and comfortable hotels. It was this sidelight that was to bring him fame and wealth.
In 1935 Florence suggested that in lieu of Christmas cards, they send friends a booklet listing 168 good eating-houses in 30 states and the District of Columbia. Curiously, that first listing contained no entries for any of the three states where Hines once lived–New Mexico, Colorado or Wyoming–and there is no mention of Harry Hynds’ Plains Hotel, by then regionally famed.
That first “Adventures in Good Eating” was no more than a legal-sized sheet of blue paper folded in quarters, but the response to it was resounding. Soon the Hines’ were deluged with requests for copies. There years later, they had sold so many copies of the booklet that Hines decided to retire from the printing sales position to run his publishing venture full-time. He was 56 years old.
Hines’ ratings of restaurants soon became so influential that a positive recommendation could “make” a good place and negative comment could break a poor one. Tourists and businessmen sought out places which had passed his strict tests for quality and comfort.
After Florence’s death in 1939, Hines left Chicago. He returned to his native Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he later remarried.[xiv] In 1949, the inventor of the first packaged dry cake mix purchased the use of Hines’ name for his soon-to-be-released new product. The firm making “Duncan Hines Cake Mixes” was sold to Proctor and Gamble in 1956. Hines continued to review restaurants and write books until his death in Bowling Green in 1959 at the age of 79.[xv] The guidebooks were ended in 1962.
According to his niece, Hines rarely spoke of his “western adventures” in his later years.[xvi] Just a few years before his death, he wrote, “No gustatory experience that I have had since that time has dislodged that platter of ham and eggs [at Harry Hynds’ in Cheyenne] from its secure position as my best remembered meal…. I have eaten many exotic foods in many expensive restaurants since that day in Cheyenne, but nothing has tasted as good as that platter of ham and eggs.”
[i] Duncan Hines, Food Odyssey. New York: Crowell, 1956, Chap. 1: “That Never-to-be-Forgotten Platter,” 1.
[ii] Duncan Hines obituary, New York Times, March 16, 1959, 31. Obituary identified it as “Bowling Green Business College” and stated that he left after two years without a diploma.
[iii] Shirley E. Flynn, “Cheyenne’s Harry P. Hynds: Blacksmith, Saloon Keeper, Promoter, Philanthropist,” Annals of Wyoming 73 (2001), 2-11
[iv] Cheyenne City Directory, 1900.
[v] For instance, see the report on the golf tournament between Laramie and Cheyenne golfers, “Golf Championship,” Laramie Boomerang, May 26, 1901, 5. Hines golfed for the Cheyenne team; one of the golfers on the Laramie team was Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard.
[vi] Some cite as a noteworthy example the marriage of Capt. John J. Pershing to Frances Warren, the daughter of Wyoming U. S. Senator Francis E. Warren on Jan. 26, 1905. Pershing was never stationed in Cheyenne; the two met in Virginia when Capt. Pershing was serving with the army’s general staff in Washington, D. C. “”Pershing’s Wyoming Connection,” Buffalo Bones: Stories from Wyoming’s Past II (Cheyenne: Wyoming State Archives and Historical Dept., 1981), 34-35.
[vii] J. T. Chaffin’s biography appeared in the unpublished “Wilkerson biographies,” Feb. 23, 1898, held in the collections of the Wyoming State Archives, Parks and Cultural Resources Department, Cheyenne. Chaffin came to Cheyenne from St. Louis to take a job as a bookkeeper at “Wilson’s bank.” After three years at the bank, he was elected county assessor. “Mrs. Chaffin has been successfully engaged in floriculture… Her extensive greenhouses afford a display unsurpassed in variety….” The couple had five children: Eva, Fred, Grace, Howard and Florence.
[viii] Paul Frison, “Duncan Hines and Cheyenne, Wyoming.” Unpublished manuscript in the collections of the Wyoming State Archives, State Parks and Cultural Resources Division, Cheyenne, n. d. Wilkerson biographies.
[ix] Frison.
[x] “Social Life in Cheyenne,” Cheyenne Daily Leader, Feb. 15, 1902, 3.
[xi] Frison.
[xii] “Dan Cupid Wins Out Busy Little God Interests Himself Second Time in Cheyenne Young Lady,” Laramie Republican, Oct. 17, 1905, 3.
[xiii] Their long-time Chicago home was at 5494 Cornell Avenue. Wyoming State Tribune, March 12, 1922, p. 9, includes a listing for Florence in a list of former Cheyenne residents “now living elsewhere.”
[xiv] He built a combination home and office near Bowling Green in 1940 and married Clara Wright Nahm, March 22, 1946. She died Aug. 8, 1983. Who Was Who in America. Recent research indicates that the Hines-built home/office building still stands, but has been converted to a funeral home.
[xv] Obituary, New York Times, March 16, 1959, 31.
[xvi] Correspondence, Jean Hines Morningstar and author, 1985-86.