California Gold (112 page)
III.21
The Los Angeles typographers’ strike actually took place in 1890. In 1888, however, Harrison Gray Otis was already campaigning against the open shop.
IV.27
Johnson’s oil burner was actually invented by Lyman Stewart of Hardison & Stewart, the forerunner of Union Oil (now Unocal). The present-day corporation cannot turn up a detailed description or picture of the burner. If there are any oil historians out there who can, I would be grateful to know; this remains one of a few loose ends of historical research that I could not tie up to my satisfaction.
IV.31
Some details of the railway accident are taken from the January 1883 wreck of the Overland Express at Tehachapi Summit. It was a famous tragedy of the period; fifteen people died.
V.34 and
ff
. Chinese laborers were driven from the orange groves when the panic of ’93 sent thousands of unemployed whites onto the roads of California seeking work. There is a great dark vein of bigotry running through California history. Driving around Riverside on March 15, 1988,I saw the following spray-painted on a large water tank:
ALL NIPS MUST DIE. CALIFORNIA NATIVES RULE
.
V.41
The lovely phrase “spellbound in darkness” is the title of a work on silent pictures by the late George Pratt, a distinguished film historian.
VI.44
An immigrant from Britain, W. K. L. Dickson, invented the Kinetograph at the Edison laboratory in 1888. Later, Edison lent his name to the Vitascope projection system of Thomas and J. Hunter Arant of East Orange, New Jersey, because it was superior to the projection system he was developing. As stated in Part IX, Edison was not always enthusiastic about moving pictures, but he was a keen promoter, and took more credit for creating the movies than he deserves.
VI.49
I have advanced the date of Barney Oldfield’s driving exhibition in Riverside by some months. The speed record was actually set in December 1902, and it was broken six months later, again by Oldfield.
VII.56
Abe Ruef drove through San Francisco with $50,000 in shirt boxes one month after the earthquake, not before.
VII.56 and
ff
. I arbitrarily advanced the commercial introduction of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost by one year because I wanted Mack to drive one of these great cars.
VII.61
Despite the devastation and tragedy, there are occasional flashes of humor in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. While the story may be apocryphal, Caruso is said to have been awakened when part of the ceiling of his room in the Palace Hotel fell on him; he reportedly dashed into the street in his nightshirt, clutching a towel and an autographed photo of President Roosevelt and exclaiming, “ ’ell of a place. Give me Vesuvius!” From the same fount of legends comes the story of a young actor on tour, John Barrymore, who, in characteristic fashion, was too busy to get up when the commotion started; he was in bed at the St. Francis with someone else’s fiancée.
VIII.62
Like Jim Chance, and at roughly the same age, Jack London was a hobo on the road. Later in life, in very euphemistic and unrevealing language, he wrote about his experiences with “jockers”—older tramps who kept young road boys as “slaveys”; the inference is that while many of the men used their young companions sexually, London escaped this fate.
VIII.62
Nellie’s outdoor café—and the slogan on it, deriding Oakland, are taken from a postquake photo showing those very things. Jokes about Oakland were common even then.
VIII.66
On November 13, 1908, the rejected juror Morris Haas shot Francis J. Heney, as described. Of course he did not shoot any fictional characters.
IX.73
Young Charlie Chaplin filmed four short comedies at the Essanay studio out in Niles. However, he found the facilities too primitive and, with Anderson’s consent, moved on to Los Angeles.
IX.76
The bombing of the
Los Angeles Times
ultimately dealt a severe blow to organized labor. In April 1911, after a sensational nationwide manhunt, detective William J. Burns (of the San Francisco graft investigation) arrested one Ortie Mc-Manigal, characterized as a “professional dynamiter.” McManigal in turn implicated John McNamara, secretary of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, and his brother Jim. Labor leaders staged parades and gave speeches protesting a “frame-up,” and Clarence Darrow was retained to defend the trio. Then McManigal struck a deal to become a state’s witness. In the face of conclusive testimony, the McNamaras stunned their fellow trade unionists by confessing that they had indeed planned the crime. Darrow counseled them to plead guilty to avoid execution, which they did. The muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, a Californian from Sacramento, helped arrange the plea bargain; General Otis was understandably the hardest to persuade.
X.81
The “Committee of Conscientious Citizens” did exist for a short time in rural, largely Protestant Hollywood. The committee circulated petitions urging that movie actors be kept out of the community at all costs.
X.82 and
ff.
Indian migrant workers began coming down from Canada in the first decade of this century, bringing to the fields a high level of agricultural skill, like the Japanese and Chinese before them. The landmark book on this subject,
Factories in the Field
by Carey McWilliams (1939), estimates that by 1915, the peak year, there were ten thousand Indians at work in the state. Two of them wrote fascinating personal memoirs of their experiences.
Coda
The Emigrant’s Guide
by T. Fowler Haines is an invention of the author, but is based on many other Gold Rush guidebooks compiled by eastern journalists who never set foot in the West. Among the most famous are those of Joseph Ware (a best-seller), Henry Simpson, and J. Tyrwhitt Brooks (real name: Vizitelly).
Finally, here are a few brief notes on people and stories touched on in the novel.
William Randolph Hearst lived until 1951; the publishing empire he founded of course exists to this day. Hearst’s long and flamboyant career included attempts to be elected mayor of New York and governor of the state, and heavy-handed efforts to influence America’s public policy (he was notably successful at whipping up fervor for the Spanish-American War). Hearst had a mistress for many years, the former Ziegfeld Follies girl Marion Davies, whose fílm career he promoted and financed. For the two of them, he constructed his fabulous coastal retreat in Big Sur, San Simeon, a tourist landmark. Late in his life he used the full power of his empire to condemn and try to suppress Orson Welles’s classic
Citizen Kane
, whose central character is clearly Hearst.
James J. Corbett lived until 1933, and earned money on the stage in a play specially written for him. According to the record, he was a creditable actor.
Jack London died young, at age forty, in 1916. He was world famous, but had been broken physically by alcohol and diseases contracted in his travels.
John Muir’s remarkable life ended in 1914. To the last, he crusaded against damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley, but it was a losing fight, and the struggle weakened and saddened him. President Wilson and his secretary of the interior eventually cleared the way for the project, and the dam was completed in 1923. (It’s difficult to know whether the 1988 Reagan-administration proposal to destroy the dam, drain the valley, and create a second tourist destination like Yosemite was a serious idea or just more bureaucratic maundering.) Regarding Muir, the great naturalist and conservationist, James D. Hart closes the Muir entry in
A Companion to California
with these words: “More sites in California have been named for him than for any other person.” Dr. Hart’s volume is available, and indispensable to any serious student of California history.
In 1914, Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce went to Mexico on a journalistic expedition in search of the guerrilla Pancho Villa. He disappeared and is presumed to have been killed, though no one knows the circumstances.
As noted above, Lyman Stewart’s little oil company was the forerunner of one of the world’s largest, Union Oil. Ed Doheny’s street well in Los Angeles was the foundation of a dynasty of California oil and money. Doheny was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal during the administration of Warren Harding.
Abraham Ruef was paroled from prison in August 1915, and received a pardon in 1920. He dealt in real estate until the end of his life in 1936, and died bankrupt.
History has a way of turning bandits into benefactors. Henry (Ed) Huntington, one of the heirs of the rapacious Big Four, was a passionate book collector whose agents sought out and bought whole libraries around the world. He created the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, one of the great historical repositories of this or any other continent. Some of the important research material used in this novel came from the Huntington.
Quite a few people have contributed time and knowledge to this novel. I want to thank them publicly. Whatever the contribution—a letter, a bibliographic reference, the vetting of some copy, just general support and encouragement—it must be made clear that none of them should be held responsible for errors of fact or judgment in the text. The sole responsibility is mine.
During my research, I collected a great many books on California, among them some handsome first editions. To gather them, I had the help of three California bookmen: Jim Chapman of Barry Cassidy Rare Books, Sacramento; Michael Dawson of Dawson’s, Los Angeles; and Richard Hilkert of Richard Hilkert, Bookseller, San Francisco. Many thanks, gentlemen.
The following people also deserve special appreciation: John and Val Curry of Hilton Head Island (John’s grandparents founded Camp Curry at Yosemite, and for some years John himself managed the Ahwahnee Hotel); Merry Franzen, docent of Heritage Square, Los Angeles; Ed Hardy, president of Yosemite Park and Curry Company; Dr. Gerald Haslam; Michael T. Hogelund of Unocal Corporation; Andrew Jameson, librarian-historiographer of the Bohemian Club, San Francisco; Rainer Heumann; Beverly Rae Kimes; Peter LaMotte, M.D.; Harry Lawton of the University of California at Riverside; Kim Miller, librarian of the Antique Automobile Club of America; Vince Moses, curator of history at the Riverside Municipal Museum; my friend Jay Mundhenk, an expert historian as well as veteran of the California food-and-wine business (and also a descendant of the Berryessa family); Elizabeth Young Newsom, curator of the Waring Historical Library, Medical University of South Carolina; Andrew Nurnberg; Bill Roe, an expert polo player and friend (who promised to keep his weight down so he could play the villainous Billy Rodeen in any film version of this book), and Bill’s good wife, Nancy, who raises horses and is encyclopedic about polo in her own right; Dick Schaap; Charles Silver of the Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Monsignor Francis J. Weber, archivist of the Diocese of Los Angeles; and Jim Young, assistant sports-information director of the University of California at Berkeley.
In preparation for writing, I read literally hundreds of articles, monographs, diaries, news clippings, statistical studies, and books—mountains of books. Almost all were useful, and a great many were memorable. Two, however, deserve special mention because of the intellectual debt I owe to them.
Americans and the California Dream, 1850 -1915
and
Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era,
both by Dr. Kevin Starr, are seminal works. Starr chronicles and explains the great political and social themes and movements of California history. Scholarly, yet written with felicitous style, these are challenging books packed with detail. They richly reward the patient and inquiring reader.
I have saved the best, and most important, for last.
I traveled extensively in California before I sat down to plan and write the book. But my two home bases are on the East Coast, so I decided, for the first time, that I needed an on-site representative. I was miraculously blessed with a recommendation that I contact Melissa Totten of Los Angeles.
For over a year, Melissa served as my research associate in California. She found invaluable documents in all the great libraries, checked obscure points, provided me with the addresses of experts, and generally performed herculean labors of scholarship with unfailing accuracy and good humor.
I am, quite literally, old enough to be Melissa’s father, and whenever I grow despondent about some of the sluggards who pass for young people these days—sluggards who think success ought to come without effort; who consider that a half-baked job is good enough because who really cares anyway?—I have only to think of Melissa, and be encouraged by the realization that there must be others like her (but not many!). She was a good right hand in the West, and a good companion on field trips. I thank her heartily. Like me, I think she will be a graduate student all her life—no matter what her “real” profession. She also knows the single most important thing about using California’s great scholarly libraries: how to find a parking place.
This novel marks the start of what I trust will be a long and happy relationship with my new publisher, Random House. I am particularly pleased to be with Random House because they publish two of the absolute giants among historical novelists, James Michener and Gore Vidal. It’s appropriate, then, that I acknowledge the ongoing support and encouragement of four Random House people: Bob Bernstein, Joni Evans, Susan Petersen, and Bob Wyatt. I also send thanks to Howard Kaminsky, who was with Random House when I came aboard.
I am grateful to Amy Edelman for her intelligent and skilled copy editing (and for pointing out several blunders by our forgetful author—the kind of blunders that are perhaps inevitable in a twelve-hundred-page manuscript but that nevertheless cause red faces if they see print). My editor, too, aided the project all along the way with his invaluable thoughts, expertise, and general good cheer. He won’t be named here; he knows who he is.
My good friend and counselor, attorney Frank Curtis, has guided this work from its inception. My debt to him is much too large ever to be repaid.
