USA > California > California; an intimate history > Part 19
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in effigy in front of his own church and frequently threat- ened by mobs. Finally his friends took him in hand. A steamer was sailing on a certain Sunday. Passage was secured for Dr. Scott by several of his parishioners, al- though he was not taken into their confidence. Morning service was held as usual, and in spite of warnings from friends as well as enemies he once more denounced the government and pleaded the holy cause of a new flag and a new people. Meanwhile a mob had gathered in front of the church, and roared its threats. It was patent that this time he was not to be permitted to leave sanc- tuary without a dangerous mauling. But Mrs. Thomas H. Selby had her carriage waiting in the rear. Finally Dr. Scott was persuaded out of the pulpit by his anxious friends and into the carriage. The coach- man whipped up his horses and raced the mob to the docks; Dr. Scott, fuming, was safely stowed away. He remained in the South until the war was over, then returned to San Francisco and resumed his pastoral duties.
My grandfather, Stephen Franklin, was a member of this church, having been a friend of Dr. Scott's in New Orleans. He came to California first in 1851, then went to Central America and returned to California several years later with his family. Although he took no part in politics, he was opposed to the Vigilance Committee on principle, being a firm believer in the written law. For- merly a cotton-planter in Louisiana himself, he voted with the Chivalry Democrats; and, a man of rigid principles, both religious and political, it was not in him to compro- mise either then or later with the great organization that reformed San Francisco (although devoted personally to William T. Coleman), or with the men that elevated the
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flag above the "beloved South." When the news flashed across the wires of the assassination of Lincoln the excite- ment in San Francisco exceeded anything that had con- vulsed it before. Word ran round the city that every house and building of any sort must drape itself in mourning or prepare for attack. No one disobeyed this unwritten order but a church, several newspaper officers, and my grandfather. He was the reverse of a violent or even a bitter man, but he did not approve of Lincoln, and that was the end of it. He would not put his house in mourning for him. The mob wrecked the church and the newspaper offices and then started for my grandfather's house. As it appeared at the head of Stockton Street, the next-door neighbors tore up a black gown, rushed in, and hung it from the upper windows. My father, Thomas L. Horn, one of the young merchants of the city, had been a member of the Vigilance Committee, and was an ardent Union man. I merely relate this bit of family history as an instance of the intensity of feeling so far from the seat of war, and as proof that I am able to be an impartial historian! I was brought up by my grandfather, and during that time and for years after I was an ardent Southerner, but I have got over it.
The following would be incredible if it were not true, and illustrates the raging patriotism of the women of the South compared to which that of the men was quite commonplace. A certain eminent judge had a family of women, pre-eminent socially, and by this time not on speaking terms with any one upholding the flag. The judge heard the news of Lincoln's assassination down- town, and, jumping into his buggy, drove furiously for home. There were no telephones in those days, but he
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feared his women might hear the news and disgrace him in the street. When he reached home he coaxed his wife and other female relatives up the stairs and into a room at the back of the house. There he locked the door, put the key in his pocket, and told them that Lincoln had been assassinated. His wife (who upon ordinary occasions boasted all the hauteur, repose, and suave manners of an F. F. V.) shrieked like an Indian and, picking up her skirts, executed a war-dance. (She was very short and very fat.) The other women were hysterical in their delight, screaming, laughing, and clapping. The judge was shut up with them for nearly two hours. Then he let them out only when each gave him her solemn word of honor that she would not run up and down the street shouting her satisfaction. But by this time they were exhausted and ready to behave themselves.
California contributed three distinguished men to the Union army-Sherman, Halleck, and Baker. In 1861 she sent two full regiments of cavalry, eight full regiments of infantry, besides eight companies that enlisted in the First Regiment of Washington Infantry Volunteers: sixteen thousand in all. In 1863 seven more companies of cavalry were raised, six companies constituting the First Battalion of California Mountaineers; and in the next two years two other regiments.
California was equally liberal with her gold, although she refused to submit to the imposition of greenbacks; and she became the chief supporter of the famous Sani- tary Commission organized in behalf of the sick and wounded. Thomas Starr King, a Unitarian clergyman, whose fame survived him locally many years, a tomb being erected to him in the yard of his church, which
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stood in the heart of the city, took charge of the branch organization in San Francisco, and with his energy and eloquence raised six thousand dollars at the first meeting. That was a good deal of money for those days, particu- larly in war-time; but ten days later a further sum of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars in gold was sub- scribed and sent to headquarters in New York. In October another hundred thousand dollars were sent on, and before the end of 1862 still another hundred thousand. Being in gold coin, this contribution represented a half a million in legal-tender notes.
In 1863 California responded to another appeal and announced her intention of subscribing twenty-five thousand dollars a month as long as the war lasted. At the close of the war the report of the central commission showed that out of four million eight hundred thousand dollars contributed to the sanitary fund California had supplied nearly a million and a quarter, and Oregon and Nevada nearly a quarter of a million, the three together contributing a third of the whole amount.
The war proved to be of enormous benefit to Califor- nia. The telegraph line across the continent was com- pleted in October, 1861, putting her in direct communi- cation with New York. In 1862 Congress granted her petition for the long-denied railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, the withdrawal of Southern members from both houses making this concession pos- sible at last. And her population received an immediate stimulus. Hundreds of families, believing that the war would last for many years, emigrated to California, where they would be spared the immediate suffering, the ter- rible strain and anxieties of those living too close to the
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path of war. Within a year a thousand new houses were contracted for in San Francisco; and the Russ House, the Lick House, and the Occidental Hotel, superfine hostel- ries for their day, went up, the last two retaining some- thing of their old prestige until burned in 1906. Street- railroads were built, and business of all sorts, which had been depressed before the outbreak of the war, was, from many sources, stimulated. The Republican party, of course, claimed all the credit, and, it must be admitted, ruled the state without too many iniquities for several years.
In 1867 the United States government purchased what is now know as the territory of Alaska from the Russian government, an enormous tract of land of over five hun- dred and eighty thousand square miles, thus shifting California almost to the center of the United States. But the most exciting event for Californians after the close of the war was the completion of the railroad in 1869. Theodore D. Judah, a native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who had already demonstrated his ability in railroad- building locally, interested four Sacramento merchants in the scheme of an immediate railroad across the conti- nent, now that the hostile influence in Congress was re- moved. It was owing to the far-sightedness of these four men-Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stan- ford, and Collis P. Huntington-as well as to the brilliant young engineer, that California got her railroad in the six- ties. They organized the Central Pacific Railroad Com- pany, notwithstanding ridicule and opposition, incorporated it in California, raised money, obtained the consent and aid of Congress in spite of the war; and on January 8, 1863, Stanford broke the first ground in Sacramento at
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the corner of Front and K streets, not far from the fort where Sutter used to watch the train of emigrant wagons crawl down the slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This railroad, one of the most difficult of all engineering feats owing to the intervening chains of mountains, is a monument to the young engineer who conceived it, Theodore D. Judah, and to the four men who won as much contumely as gratitude for pushing it through and connecting the two oceans. No longer did Californians have to travel East by mail-coach, hanging first out of one side and then the other, their eyes raking the horizon for scalping Indians. No longer were they forced to take the alternative to this grizzling experience and lose a precious month at sea, and possibly their lives crossing "the Isthmus." Indeed, the greater number of Cali- fornia immigrants, important and insignificant, when they sent for their families, had resigned themselves never to see their native states again. But as soon as the rail- road was built they became the restless travelers they have remained ever since.
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XIX
THE TERRIBLE SEVENTIES
SPECULATION is a permanent microbe in the blood of Californians, and they are never really happy save when they have turned it loose to multiply and run riot; in other words, when they have food for excitement. After the great gold-rush, although they speculated in whatever came to hand-city varas, water-lots, stocks and bonds, new placers-they had no really terrific excitement financially until the seventies. Then it was so mad and so prolonged that it might have glutted even a San Franciscan.
In 1872 began the sensational history of the great silver- mines of Nevada, and witnessed the coruscations of a new galaxy of millionaires: Mackay, Fair, Flood, O'Brien, Ralston, Sutro, Sharon, Haggin1, Tevis, D. O. Mills, "Jim" Keene, and too many others to mention here.
Of these by far the greatest personality was William C. Ralston. Born in Ohio in 1825, educated at the public schools, leaving abruptly to try his hand at ship-building, he finally started for California in 1850. At Panama, however, he was offered the position of agent of a line of steamships plying between New York and San Francisco, and accepted it. In 1853 he was sent to represent the same firm in San Francisco. Shortly afterward, his em- ployers opened a bank, and, recognizing his great abilities, took him into partnership. The firm was called Garrison,
1James Ben Ali Haggin was a pioneer, and also a man of wealth long before this; but his family did not begin to play a leading part until the seventies.
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Morgan, Fretz & Ralston. Later it became Fretz & Ral- ston, the more brilliant and adventurous member of the firm carrying it safely over the shoals of 1855. After another change Ralston in 1864 induced D. O. Mills and several other men who already were on the broad way to fortune to join in founding the Bank of California, still, in spite of all vicissitudes and changes, the great bank of the Pacific coast, and known all over the world. Mills was the first president, Ralston the cashier, but succeeding soon afterward to the presidency. William Sharon was the confidential agent in Virginia City, Nevada. All distinguished foreigners in those days brought letters of introduction to the Bank of California, and many to Mr. Ralston personally. He entertained them at his magnifi- cent and picturesque country house at Belmont, about thirty miles from San Francisco. It was an immense white, rambling, French-looking structure, situated in a wild and windy cañon. One of the sights of those days was Ralston's four-horse char-à-banc crowded with guests (generally breathless) dashing along the old Mission road, himself at the wheel. It might be daylight or black midnight, it was all one to Ralston; he never slack- ened his pace. He generally managed to arrive with his guests, however, just after dark, when the immense house against the black background of the cañon was a blaze of light. There a banquet was always spread, the ball- room always open, and the hundred bedrooms ready. Innumerable Chinese servants in white were at the ser- vice of the guests. At the top of the staircase was a large room built like an opera-box, where it amused Ral- ston to sit with a few of his chosen friends and watch his company disport itself below.
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When Anson Burlingame passed through California on his way to the Orient to conclude the treaty which bears his name, Ralston drove him down to Belmont at his usual furious rate. Shortly before dinner was announced he had him escorted to the library. This was a room rather small, handsomely finished with laurel, and, as I remem- bered it, never a book. There Mr. Burlingame found the large company gathered in his honor, and was asked to sit down. All the guests faced one way. A few moments passed. All knew that some sort of a surprise was in store, and felt that Ralston's originality could be relied upon. Suddenly the opposite wall gave a sort of shiver, then rose slowly like the curtain of a theater, revealing an immense banqueting-hall laden with the most splen- did plate, china, and glass that had been brought to Cali- fornia at that period, and an almost limitless variety of flowers and fruits. As motionless as an army about to salute were the pigtailed Chinese.
The next morning the ambassador at Mr. Ralston's request picked out the site for a future town the magnate had in mind, and it was promptly named in his honor. Ralston did not live to build it, but to-day Burlingame is a fashionable little community representing many millions. One of its members, by the way, is a daughter of James King of Wm., and another a son of William T. Coleman.
For five or six years Ralston enjoyed a world-wide reputation as a host and a new-world Monte Cristo. He would take fifty or sixty guests at a time to Yosemite and the Big Trees, or entertain them at the Cliff House and other road-houses, hiring special trains and entire livery- stables. Meanwhile, the stock excitement was rising daily.
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WILLIAM C. RALSTON [INSERT], WHO FREQUENTLY TOOK HIS GUESTS TO YOSEMITE AND BIG TREES, WAS THE FIRST TO DRIVE A FOUR-IN-HAND THROUGH "WAWONA"
THE TERRIBLE SEVENTIES
There was some interest in the Virginia City silver- mines as early as 1863, when Ophir, Savage, Hale and Norcross, and Gould and Curry were opened, and they were regularly bought and sold on the Stock Exchange; but it was not until the exploitation of the Comstock Lode, with its fabulous and apparently inexhaustible riches, that California, and San Francisco in particular, suddenly broke out with the most virulent form of specu- lation fever; soon beyond all human power to check.
The great silver-mines of the Comstock Lode were the California, Consolidated Virginia, Crown Point, Belcher, and Raymond and Ely. Consolidated Virginia was the most popular, made a few great fortunes and bankrupted half the coast. It was controlled by four men, Mackay and Fair, practical miners, and Flood and O'Brien, who for many years had kept a saloon in San Francisco; being men of uncommon shrewdness, they extracted the salt from the oceans of mining talk always flowing over their bar.
These five mines were called the Bonanzas, and prac- tically the whole state invested in them. Women sold their jewels, and every clerk and servant hoped to make his or her "pile." The old Stock Exchange was no longer able to accommodate the increasing number of brokers, and in January, 1872, the California Stock Exchange Board was organized. Daily and hourly, until men fell in their tracks from exhaustion, it was a scene of such frenzied excitement that the old stampeding days to the diggings were relegated to the storehouse of insignificant memories. That any one survived those years, par- ticularly 1875, is a phenomenon that must be explained by the climate. Thousands did not. They either com-
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mitted suicide or crawled away to hide themselves for the rest of their shattered lives. Only a few tremendous fortunes were made. Several millionaires, their reason burnt up with the speculation microbe, were ruined, and more of the merely well-to-do; but the greater number of people with "money behind them" managed either to come out even or save enough to begin life over; the vast num- ber that lost all were those that had nothing to lose.
In 1872 the market value of the Nevada stocks shot up from seventeen millions to eighty-four millions of dollars, and the sales numbered many millions. Business was neglected. Even the gambling-tables languished. People invested all they had, all they could borrow, beg, pawn, or steal, in stocks. No one talked of anything else; and many women, known as Mudhens, sold stocks on the curb. Everybody assumed that one spot of earth at least had enough for all, and that this day one year he would be handling money by the bushel and proclaiming that never in this life would he do another stroke of work. Husbands must have been quite unmanageable in those days, and repellant to all but wives that were equally reckless and irresponsible.
All this went to Ralston's head, but in a totally different fashion from its devastations in the average cranium. Ralston, like Broderick, or, to soar higher, like Cecil Rhodes or Napoleon, was a law unto himself, and, as his brothers have done, discovered that sooner or later Law manages to hold its own like the wind and the waves. Nevertheless, if the crash had not come when it did Ralston's commanding genius for finance and his mag- nificent civic patriotism never would have been called into question; now he must be regarded as a great man
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gone wrong. He just missed having hideous statues erected to his memory all over the state of California. What he needed was a whole mine of his own.
Between the insupportable excitement of those years and the fact that he was regarded as the uncrowned king of California he lost all sense of proportion, all power of foresight. Born one of the clearest of thinkers, and famous in the financial world for taking precisely one minute to make up his mind on questions involving millions, it would seem that his brain, being the biggest in the state, could accommodate the greatest number of microbes. His passion was San Francisco, his ambition, to make her one of the greatest cities in the Union, the rival of the proudest in the older East. With the silver floods rolling down from Nevada it seemed to him that now was the time to do it-take the tide at its flood. In rapid succession his fertile brain projected and his superhuman energy put through the Mission Woolen Mills, the Kimball Carriage Factory, the Cornell Watch Fac- tory, the West Coast Furniture Factory, the San Fran- cisco Sugar Refinery, the Grand Hotel, the Palace Hotel, the Dry Dock at Hunter's Point, the Reclamation Work at Sherman Island, the Irrigating Works of the San Joaquin Valley, the Rincon Hill Cut, the extension of Montgomery Street, and the California Theater. Ralston possessed one of the greatest civic imaginations the world has produced, and if he only could have found that mine he would rank with such city-makers and castle-builders as Ludwig I. and Ludwig II. of Bavaria, both of whom, by the way, nearly bankrupted their state.
One can only admire the ruthlessness of these great imaginations that elevate the beauty and prosperity of
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their chosen territory above the commonplace needs of the " plain people," or their own safety, and wish they could discover the mines that are wasted on the sordid or the unworthy. To my mind Ralston is far more entitled to admiration and real fame than any of the thousand and one smug millionaires that live smugly, take no risks save for themselves, and leave no impress on the world. Ludwig I. found Munich a medieval stronghold and converted it into a great Renaissance city (with corners of other periods), to which all the world goes and leaves many millions of marks a year. Moreover, it is a city without a slum. The beautiful and unique castles upon which Ludwig II. spent the revenues of his state until the government, fearing bankruptcy, deposed and imprisoned him, are one of the greatest sources of revenue in Bavaria to-day. As for Ralston, practically all of the businesses he founded, as well as his other investments, survived him- self, flourished, and added to the wealth and importance of his city. The Palace Hotel, finished by Mr. Sharon, became one of the famous hotels of the world.
But he did not live to see the fruition of any of his great schemes, nor the growth of the city that until the fire of 1906 owed more to him, to the tremendous impetus he gave it, than to all other San Franciscans of his era put together; for he was the first to rouse civic pride in a very selfish and self-centered community. But almost imperceptibly the mines began to show signs of exhaus- tion, to say nothing of unconquerable underground floods. And Ralston had been improving San Francisco with the capital of the Bank of California.
Of course, he had borrowed of other banks. It suited one of these banks, intensely jealous of the man as well
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as of the Bank of California, to watch for the weak mo- ment and then turn on the screws; in other words, call in its loans. On August 27, 1875, California rocked with the news-and vibrations of this earthquake were felt all over the world, for Ralston's famous institution was the agent of the Rothschilds-that the Bank of California, which had been regarded as Gibraltar's twin, had closed its doors.
Behind those doors the excitement was none the less intense for being suppressed-by men that had no time for emotions. William Sharon and others agreed to set the bank on its feet again out of their personal fortunes, but Ralston was requested to resign. The man that had made the bank one of the greatest institutions in the world, and given California a position financially she never had enjoyed before, was treated without mercy. But he must have picked up his hat and left that council chamber of the just with the hope that he never would lay eyes on one of those men again.
He was in the habit of taking a daily swim from North Beach. He drove from the bank to his usual bath-house, swam out and went down. The next excitement in San Francisco was "Ralston's suicide." That night Mr. Sharon said to my grandfather, "Best thing he could have done." But my grandfather, who was perhaps the most intimate friend Mr. Ralston had, never for a mo- ment believed in that immediately adopted theory of suicide, a theory that gained swift credence not only because Ralston was ruined and had wrecked the bank, but because he was a man of intense pride. Some years afterward Dr. John Pitman, who was Ralston's doctor, made, at the request of one of the great Californian's
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daughters, a written statement which should dispose once for all of the popular theory.
FORT WAYNE, INDIANA, January 5, 1903.
DEAR MADAM,-I have to-day received a letter from Mr. Charles E. Dark, of Indianapolis, telling me of your serious desire to have a statement from me regarding the death of your father, Mr. W. C. Ralston, whom it was my pleasure and honor to know.
If I remember correctly it was August, 1875. He was President of the California Woolen Mills, California Furniture Company, and the Bank of California. He had for some time been almost pursued by Senator Sharon, whose manipulations caused the suspension of the Bank of California, which was totally unnecessary, as the bank was solvent; but Sharon played his cards causing the suspension. The day of Mr. Ralston's death was a blazing hot day, the city was a furnace of heat. I met him as he was coming out of the bank and shook hands with him. He told me he had just shifted a load of care from his shoulders by resigning the presidency of the bank, and, to use his own words, "felt like a school-boy off for his holidays." It had been a custom of his to go in swimming at North Beach, and he told me he was off for a swim, and he wanted me to go with him. I warned him that he was overheated, that the water of the Pacific was dangerously cold, and begged him to forego his bath; but he insisted. I was un- able to go with him at the time, but promised if he would wait an hour I would go with him to North Beach. We then separated. I fully expected to find him waiting for me at the bath-house, but I was de- layed, and the first thing I heard was the newsboys calling an extra with a statement of his suicide. The Call and the Bulletin had both been opponents of his, and were only too glad to do their dirty work. Mr. Ralston was a grand man, a noble man; he had no idea of suicide, and I so stated over my signature in the Chronicle. He was a coura- geous man, not a coward, was ready to meet all emergencies, and never discouraged. He was a friend of the poor man and the rich; he knew men, and his judgment never was at fault. His death was a great loss to the Pacific coast, and Senator Sharon and the Call and the Bulletin were guilty of the foulest lie when they accused him of suicide. His death was due to cramp produced by his heated condition and very cold water.
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