by Edward Ball
“There are all the positions that a galloping horse will assume in making a complete stride, Governor,” Muybridge said. “And I suppose you will recognize your horse, Hawthorn, galloping at a one-minute-forty-two gait.”
Muybridge meant that Hawthorn was covering a mile in one minute, forty-two seconds. The photographer might have been jumpy and disheveled, but he knew to flatter the man with the money.
Stanford looked at the screen from his chair. “Well, Mr. Muybridge,” he said, “you have a galloping horse there, but it is not Hawthorn. It’s Florence Anderson.” (The name of another horse.)
“No, it is Hawthorn,” Muybridge said. “The trainer sent the horse out to me, and my notes have it that way.”
It was a peculiar exchange—strange that in the birth hour of a media-made world, the two partners most involved with bringing the thing alive should be disputing the names of horses.
Stanford looked again at the flying pictures. “I think you must be mistaken in the name of the animal, Mr. Muybridge. That is certainly not the gait of Hawthorn, but of Anderson.”
The identity of the horse interested Stanford more than seeing the animal run across the room. And who was right?
At the Palo Alto Stock Farm, Muybridge’s equipment had filled a barn, and he had photographed five or six animals a day, taking notes on the fillies and mares and stallions. They were his study subjects, and Muybridge’s relationship to them was not that of a horse connoisseur. He did not know the animals as Stanford did, and so Muybridge relied on a written schedule. Stanford was right. On the day Muybridge made the pictures that he now projected on the screen, the horse called Hawthorn had been scheduled for the photographer’s cameras, and he had marked the name in his notebook. But that morning Stanford’s trainer had substituted a different horse, Florence Anderson, which Muybridge did not know at the time.
Three months after “the Stanford entertainment,” Muybridge repeated his show. The parlor banter was behind him, and he wanted press. On May 4, 1880, he hired a room at the San Francisco Art Association, a members’ society and art gallery, at 313 Pine Street, next door to the Bohemian Club, and advertised his appearances, his show. This time he charged for seats: fifty cents for a ticket. An audience came, and so did reporters, because Muybridge made good copy. The picture machine transfixed the newsmen, and next day came the stories in the city press. An item in the San Francisco Daily Call singled out the feeling of fascination, the instant when the people in their chairs had become spectators, frozen and mesmerized.
“The moment that attracted the most attention,” a reporter wrote, “which in fact aroused a pronounced flutter of enthusiasm from the audience, was the representation … of horses in motion. It placed upon the screen, apparently, the living, moving horse.”
Muybridge, self-portrait, ca. 1879 (Illustration Credit 1.6)
Whoever he was (there was no byline), the reporter also talked about what we might call the “reality effect” of the media. “Nothing was wanting but the clatter of the hooves upon the turf and an occasional breath of steam from the nostrils to make the spectator believe that he had before him genuine flesh-and-blood steeds,” said the paper.
And the writer made a forecast that in retrospect seems perfectly uncanny.
“Mr. Muybridge has laid the foundation of a new method of entertaining the people, and we predict that his instantaneous, photographic magic-lantern zoetrope will make the rounds of the civilized world.” This journalist thought he had glimpsed the beginnings of a new way of seeing.
The “screening” in May 1880 was the public curtain raiser, if you like, of visual media. If we live in a sensory world where images orbit and engulf us, Muybridge opened the door to it. He handed us our distractions as a magician gives out illusions. And this conjurer of horses that ran across the screen was a wizardlike, prematurely aged, disheveled, and murderous man.
At the end of the night, Edward Muybridge removed the glass disk from his projecting device and packed up his kit for the next show.1
* * *
a Muybridge gave his machine the lovingly recondite name the “zoogyroscope.” A year later he was calling it the zoopraxiscope, the name that stuck, after the tabletop toy (the zoetrope) and a projector popular in France (the praxinoscope). Once, when a census clerk asked his job, Muybridge said he was a “zoopraxographer,” probably the only person of that profession in the country.
THE YELLOW JACKET MURDER
Six years earlier…
OCTOBER 17, 1874, SAN FRANCISCO
It was a Saturday, and Edward Muybridge walked home at about noon, crossing Market Street and making his way in somewhat of a delirium to his house at the corner of Howard and Third Streets. He had spent the morning talking to a woman named Susan Smith in her rooms on Telegraph Hill, and their conversation had disturbed him. No, it had stunned him, reduced him to animal shaking. Susan Smith was paid help, a midwife and nurse who a year earlier had worked for Muybridge and his wife, the former Flora Downs. Smith had helped Flora give birth to her son, the Muybridge couple’s only child, and Smith had also taken care of the baby. She had done so in part because Edward and Flora were badly matched in their marriage (although neither would have said so). Edward could live on rice and wear a few things out of a suitcase, Flora liked clothes and luxury. Edward wanted to travel for work and stay home when he was in town, Flora liked the theater and friends and going out. What is more, Edward was forty-four, and Flora was twenty-three.
On this day Muybridge had come home to an empty house. Flora had been away with their baby for several months, leaving the photographer alone, which at any rate he preferred. After visiting Smith, Muybridge retreated for an hour to decide what to do about Smith’s stories, and among the things he had to decide was whether to take out his gun.
To own a gun in California was more common than owning a horse. It was cheaper, to start, thanks to the efficient gun makers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, whose factories sent a stream of drop-forged, reliable, and not badly priced shooting gear out to the western states. California and the rest of the West, especially the glorious and strange and violent frontier parts, the underpopulated and contentious sprawl of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Oregon, gave the gun makers their most reliable customers. These parts of America were home to the most steadfast buyers of guns, at least since the conclusion of the Civil War had taken away that previous heavy consumer of personal firearms, the government of the United States, which had bought up a million Winchesters and Colts to settle its disagreement with the southern states.
After their marriage in 1871, Muybridge and his wife, Flora, lived in a townhouse in the South Park section of San Francisco, a development that simulated a square in London. (Illustration Credit 2.1)
Edward Muybridge’s gun was the most ordinary of revolvers, a Smith & Wesson #2. The #2, from the Smith & Wesson Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, had turned into the most popular revolver to accompany the national push into the West, which was now in full flood, with tens of thousands picking up their lives in the eastern states and carrying them across the Mississippi every year. The #2 was an instrument favored by lawmen and casual shooters, the gun of the boomtowns and the homesteaders and the traveling salesmen. It was a single-action six-shooter—you had to cock the hammer each time—and it took the medium bullets, .32-caliber ammunition. Just as the men in California’s mining camps kept guns in their tents and cabins, Muybridge kept a pistol at home in the biggest city in the West, San Francisco, a would-be cosmopolitan capital that had not succeeded in restricting its ritual and frequent revenge killings, its I-am-a-man bloodiness, despite almost seasonal attempts to do so.
Smith & Wesson #2 revolver, ca. 1866 (Illustration Credit 2.2)
Edward Muybridge earned good money as a photographer, and he and Flora lived high. They had settled for two years at 3 South Park, which a reporter called their “fascinating address,” one way of expressing envy at their stylish house. (It was no rival to the homes
of Muybridge’s friend, Leland Stanford, but no one could compete with the Stanfords.) In South Park, twenty-odd townhouses faced each other around an oval garden—to walk through it, you would think that San Francisco, the instant city of shacks and rooming houses and brothels, stood far away. You would think you were not in the West at all, but in a corner of London, maybe Grosvenor Square. Since then Muybridge and his wife had moved a few blocks north, and perhaps down a step on the social ladder, to a rented place where the Third Street trolley ran right past their window. (There again was Stanford, whose company, the Central Pacific Railroad, operated the streetcar.)
Arriving at home, Muybridge spent the hour dwelling on his choices before coming to a decision. It might have taken a few minutes to find the Smith & Wesson, which he did not use very much. Muybridge later told the papers that he had not fired his six-shooter in four months, although he did not say what he had previously shot at.
The photographer was in plain dress but high color—he wore his usual tattered gray jacket and wide-brimmed hat, a corncob pipe in his pocket. He had no reason to change clothes, and in his state of mind no ability to do so. When he let his mind go to the subject preoccupying him, he broke down weeping, until after two or three minutes he could again force composure on himself.
From his townhouse Muybridge walked across Market Street and made his way for fifteen minutes along Montgomery Street, three-quarters of a mile, arriving at number 429—the address of Bradley & Rulofson, a photography studio that was his art dealer. Bradley & Rulofson was one of a handful of decent art galleries in San Francisco, and Muybridge had the distinction of being the gallery’s most prominent artist. The gallery’s managing partner, a portrait photographer called William Rulofson, was a slight, good-looking man with a full head of light hair and mutton chops. Rulofson, age forty-eight, said to be keen and volatile by people who observed these things, showed Muybridge’s photographs in the gallery, sold them to collectors, and found clients for the artist, taking a commission on all of this from Muybridge’s sales, which were constant and considerable. Rulofson later said that when Muybridge came into the gallery during the early afternoon that Saturday, his state of mind was “the most intense and agonizing I have ever seen.” It was about 2:00 p.m. when the Smith & Wesson #2 and its owner reached Bradley & Rulofson’s, and they stayed for ninety minutes.
Muybridge appeared to his friend and dealer to be something more than manic but something less than deranged. The two men spent much of this visit in Rulofson’s third-floor office, where Muybridge talked and then yelled, moaned, wept, and occasionally got out a sentence or two about what he was going to do. At some point Muybridge brought out a piece of paper on which he had written some instructions. He gave the piece of paper to Rulofson and told his friend to put its contents into action if circumstances made it necessary. By “if” and “necessary,” conditional words, he intended to suggest that he might not survive the events of the day, that the photographer, who had made a good deal of money for the gallery, might have to have his affairs settled by his business manager, Rulofson, in probate.
The western slope of Mount St. Helena, in central California, looks from a distance like a rippling curtain of brown dirt. Here and there oak trees and conifers make islands of shadows. I drove seventy-five miles northeast of San Francisco to look for the cottage where Edward Muybridge had come only once, at night, on a Saturday in the fall of 1874. It was a place difficult for him to find, and it remained well hidden. Following a winding mile of road over scalps of bald foothills, I arrived at a gate, a house—and there was the man who owned the land. He said that he had retired to it from a career in oil in Texas. He asked if I knew the story about the photographer, and he said the wasps had gone for the season. He said that the little frame house—clapboard on the outside, five rooms within, propped off the ground on corner piers—had burned a few years before, and so we walked down the hill to look at the foundation, which did not tell much. The retired oilman said in addition that in those days, the days of that photographer, the place used to be known as the Yellow Jacket Mine. I noticed that the twenty-some acres of rolling brown fields and evergreens possessed exceptional light, light that a photographer might admire. It was a place known for nothing much before Edward Muybridge showed up there, and nothing much after. The story did not seem to age, and the man said that one or two people had come up the road to ask about it, but that was ten years before.
The twenty-five-mile-long gulley called Napa Valley runs south to north between two courses of the Sierra Nevada range. A railroad track goes up the middle most of the way, leaving off in the town of Calistoga, and the valley ends a bit further, at the barricade of Mount St. Helena. It was here that a speculator chose to try for mercury, in the 1870s.
The Yellow Jacket Mine sounded like a tunnel into earth, but it was not that, or not yet. The miners were looking for minerals and had not found them, and the Yellow Jacket was chiefly the cottage where the miners ate and slept and drank when they were not gouging randomly at a hollow of St. Helena called Pine Flat. The little house at the Yellow Jacket attached itself about halfway up the two-thousand-foot rise of the mountain. It had one decent room to sit in, and on Saturday night, October 17, 1874, four or five miners and two or three others, women from nearby Calistoga, smoked and played cards and talked.
There were miners at Yellow Jacket because a year before somebody in San Francisco with money had thought to send men over the ridge to dig for “quicksilver,” as the element mercury was called. Mercury was one of the metals that California offered from its bosom to determined pickaxes, along with gold, silver, and copper, any of which would pay happy sums of money if you could get them out of the ground.
Prior to the quicksilver experiment, the Yellow Jacket Mine had been known, with some irony, as the Yellow Jacket Ranch. The name was a bit of a joke for the reason that far more than cattle or sheep, the most numerous animal on the ranch was a stinging variety of wasp—yellow jackets. The yellow jackets swarmed for two months every autumn. Now and then they killed a dog during that season, and one year they had killed an unlucky and drunken ranch hand who happened to fall on a horde’s nest, but mainly they kept people indoors.
It was mid-October, the swarms were gone. At about 11:00 p.m. the men were playing cards and drinking; the women sat across the room and swatted at the men’s chatter. (These glimpses of the scene, as well as the dialogue and choreography, are distilled from a thick folder of newspaper accounts.) The women did not live in the cottage, and although none of the news stories remarks on this, it would not have been unusual had the men paid the women to come see them that night. Outside the door were a thin moon, a road, pines, and outspreading oaks. Light from the oil lamps flickered at the windows.
One man in the group did not play cards much. His name was Harry Larkyns, the best-looking man, probably, and in the eyes of many observers the most charming and vain of the group. He sat with the women and was entertaining them. There are no photographs that might show us one way or the other how handsome he was; nevertheless, reporters went on about him. A news writer described Harry Larkyns as “a young man, not over thirty, with a quiet aristocratic air that rather impresses one.” Larkyns was in fact forty years old, tall and graceful and lithe in form, with dirty blond hair. His diction pointed to his birthplace, which was Scotland. His manners and use of similes and artful talk reflected long schooling. Like most Californians, Harry Larkyns was new to California. He had arrived in San Francisco two years earlier, in November 1872, and within a few months, he had surfaced in the news, unpleasantly. The San Francisco Chronicle told the story of a monthlong transaction he had undertaken that had ended with Larkyns’s arrest for “obtaining money on false pretenses.” A confidence act, most likely.1 In two days the accused was out of jail, however, having promised to repay money to the accuser, a young Englishman who had given Larkyns a long credit line.
Harry Larkyns’s introduction to the West had the region’s habi
tual stamp of invention and bluff. He told everyone he was rich, and so it was initially accepted—until his arrest. After he escaped prosecution, the well-schooled Larkyns found a job in the office of a publisher, Bancroft & Co., as a translator of French. Quitting that job, he moved on to journalism. Larkyns claimed to anyone who would listen that he was at home in theaters and around the stage, and so it came about that one of the city papers, the Daily Evening Post, hired him to write theater criticism. After a year, however, he had lost that job for handing in copy someone else had written. Next Larkyns worked as a booking agent for Wilson’s Circus, a ten-year-old caravanserai in San Francisco, boosting the show and trying to find road dates for its epauletted ringmaster and leaping acrobats. Larkyns in other words did what was necessary—he improvised, he sculpted himself, in the Western style. He was full of big stories and bon mots, a handsome swain on the stinking streets.
At present Larkyns was in the pay of the speculators who were trying to turn the Yellow Jacket into a quicksilver strike. Their names have been forgotten, but these investors, or gamblers, had hired Larkyns to make a map of the mercury fields and to describe their prospects. (That a confidence man would have such a job speaks to the mental resources of California at this point in time.) Larkyns had been walking around St. Helena and its lower slopes for three months, writing up his impressions of the suitability of different sites for the placement of pickaxes. Although little prior experience qualified him to make such judgments, he allowed himself to imagine the money to be made and to publish his thoughts in a mining bulletin called the Weekly Stock Report. His last dispatch, published in August 1874, said the quicksilver fields north of Napa Valley promised to be one of the next windfalls of California mining for those fortunate enough to recognize the opportunity.