Sickly Cobb Took Reins In Early Business Success Story
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday July 17, 2007
Two Americans played very different parts in bringing an Australian outback institution to life, writes Steve Meacham.
He was an American adventurer whose name has become part of Australia's folk mythology, an entrepreneur who created an outback institution. Yet Freeman Cobb - the 22-year-old who founded Cobb & Co, the legendary stagecoach company - spent barely three years in this country before returning to California as a rich man in search of new adventures. Sam Everingham, the author of a new book that claims to be the first detailed history of the men who created one of Australia's great business empires, says Freeman Cobb was an unlikely hero. "He was always sickly," Everingham says. "Small and pallid, with a heavy, dark moustache and a pronounced limp." But he had two great advantages: the confidence of youth and "the ability to see opportunity amid the chaos" of the gold-rich Melbourne of 1853. Cobb was sent to Melbourne, with an older colleague, by the Adams Express freight company, which had made a fortune out of the California gold rush and wanted to cash in on the new discoveries in Victoria. But the older partner took one look at the appalling state of the Victorian roads and decided to take the next ship back to San Francisco. "But Cobb said 'Bugger it!' " Everingham says. He knew Adams Express was sending its coaches and drivers. So he took a gamble, raised the finance, bought the coaches and persuaded the three drivers to join him. On January 30, 1854, the first advertisement for Cobb & Co's passenger coach to the goldfields appeared in Melbourne's Argus. "In the gold rush era there was a lot of money to be made because people were so greedy," says Everingham, who discovered previously unread letters and manuscripts during his research for Wild Ride: The Rise and Fall of Cobb&Co. "People would pay huge prices to get to the goldfields quickly." Cobb was able to provide the speediest service because he had invested in US-built coaches made of hickory and ash, which were much lighter than traditional English coaches built for well-cobbled roads and shorter distances. He also changed his horses every 16 kilometres, meaning they could travel much quicker. By May 1856, Cobb and his partners were able to sell their thriving business for a reputed #16,000. Cobb returned to his native Massachusetts and became a senator, but died in 1878, aged 48, trying to run another coach company in South Africa. But it was another American, the much more ruthless James Rutherford, who masterminded Cobb & Co's aggressive drive north to NSW and Queensland with his partner, Frank Whitney. By 1883 Cobb & Co routes in NSW and Queensland alone covered more than 9600 kilometres. The company also owned 11,000 square kilometres of pastoral land - nine stations in NSW and Queensland that sprawled over an area three-quarters the size of Northern Ireland. But other coaching firms had existed since the early 1800s. What made Cobb & Co part of folk mythology? "Rutherford and Whitney were very expansionist," Everingham says. "They had a much bigger vision than their competitors and they were very aggressive about buying rival routes." They also followed some basic business rules, most of them laid down by Freeman Cobb. Their coaches stuck to a timetable, unlike competitors who would wait to fill the coach before setting off. Their routes were designed to complement, not compete with, the ever-expanding railway network. And their drivers - based on the Wells Fargo model - were polite, chivalrous and invariably great storytellers. "The drivers were like the talk show hosts of today," Everingham says. "They had to get on with everyone on board. But they also had to be able to handle bushfires, floods and bushrangers. "They became legendary because often the Cobb & Co coach would be the first commercial vehicle into any new town. For early settlers, seeing a Cobb & Co coach arrive with the mail and supplies meant survival."
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald
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