Fred Harvey Co. introduced Americans to indigenous peoples’ art.

Although fewer people know his name, Fred Harvey had far more impact on the American West than Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickcock.

It was Harvey, a transplanted Englishman, who made travel through the Southwest more pleasure than ordeal. And in the process, Harvey created a market for Native American crafts that dominated many tribal economies until the recent introduction of gambling on Indian lands.

Harvey is the presiding spirit of a fascinating new show at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage. Called “Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art,” the exhibit traces the many ways in which the company Harvey founded shaped our notions of the Southwest and her peoples. Above all, it illustrates how that most American of activities--marketing--creates its own reality.

Harvey was only 15 when, in 1850, he sailed to the United States. Finding work as a dishwasher in a posh New York restaurant, Harvey fell in love with fine dining. Like all successful entrepreneurs, Harvey had a good idea that filled an unmet need. He knew that the food slopped up in the derelict cafes alongside the nation’s railroads was lousy at best, and often downright dangerous.

By 1876, Harvey had cut a deal with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway to establish a series of first-rate restaurants along its Southwestern routes.

Harvey would have earned his footnote in history if he had done nothing more than create the country’s first chain of restaurants and railroad hotels. But as Michael Duchemin, curator of history at the Autry, points out, Harvey did much more. He convinced the nation that the Southwest was an exotic but safe destination, as worthy of the tourist’s time and money as Paris or Venice.

“When Harvey first started, the Indian wars were still relatively fresh in people’s minds,” Duchemin observes. “His way of travel offered safety and reassurance. People could have adventure and romance without suffering inconvenience or discomfort.”

When a person debarked at a Harvey House, as his establishments were called, they found freshly brewed coffee, fresh squeezed orange juice, Irish linens, genuine crystal, generous portions, reasonable prices and impeccable service.

The last was the province of the famed Harvey Girls, bright, attractive, unmarried waitresses who projected a combination of competence and glamour, not unlike that later associated with airline stewardesses.

The subject of a 1945 movie starring Judy Garland, the Harvey Girls were a working-girl elite, who were encouraged to change their distinctive black-and-white uniforms at the first smudge and who never, never chewed gum.

The Harvey Co. used advertising as skillfully as any organization in America, promoting its product--the American Southwest and its indigenous people--on everything from posters to playing cards. Harvey and his descendants, who inherited the business on his death in 1901, had an almost Disneyesque sense of how all parts of the company could bolster each other.

For example, they built a full-fledged ethnological museum as part of their Albuquerque operation, the Alvarado Hotel. The museum, which guests had to pass on their way into the hotel proper, featured fine examples of traditional Indian crafts, including pottery, weaving and basketry. The museum piqued the American appetite for all things Indian, and some of the most dramatic baskets, pots and textiles are in the current show.

At the Alvarado, as at the Harvey properties at the Grand Canyon, Native American artists were hired to produce their wares under the very noses of the tourists. Such demonstrations, as well as performances by Indian dancers and others, were also a feature of the wildly popular world’s fairs of the period. Among the distinguished artists employed by the Harvey Co. were Maria and Julian Martinez, who created the famous black pottery identified with San Ildefonso Pueblo.

From the start, the Harvey Co. associated itself with the relatively new science of anthropology, hiring academics for their expertise as well as to enhance the company’s reputation for quality.

The company was not so pure that it didn’t doctor the occasional photograph, replacing the figures of railway employees in one ad with the more marketable likenesses of Native Americans, for instance.

But the firm did have a genuine high regard for Native Americans and their crafts. The Harvey Co. became a major supplier of Indian artifacts to museums, including the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Ariz., where this show was originally mounted in 1996. The company did not lose money in the process.

Perhaps Harvey’s greatest impact, for better or for worse, was on the Native Americans whose lives he both romanticized and changed forever. Harvey was instrumental in bringing a cash economy to the Indian Southwest--so profoundly that Edmund Ladd of the Zuni Pueblo recently lamented, “We’ve gone from ritual to retail.”

BE THERE

“Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art,” through April 19, Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 4700 Western Heritage Way, in Griffith Park, across from the Los Angeles Zoo. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, except Monday. $7.50, $5 for seniors and students with valid I.D., $3 for children 2 through 12. (213) 667-2000.