by Edward Ball
Edward Muybridge left Bradley & Rulofson’s at 3:56 p.m., as William Rulofson remembered it. From 429 Montgomery, at the corner of Sacramento Street, Muybridge ran eight blocks north and east, sprinting to reach a certain wharf on the waterfront. He arrived at the ferry dock and jumped on the 4:00 p.m. steamboat as it fired up its boilers and paddled out, aiming for Vallejo, a town at the north end of San Francisco Bay. At 6:00 p.m., he got off the boat and boarded a train headed north. During the journey an interesting fact might have crossed his inflamed mind, namely, that the train, like everything else, it seemed, belonged to his friend Leland Stanford’s company, the Central Pacific. No matter. Muybridge made his way up the channel of the valley and after an uncomfortably slow four-hour ride (railroads were supposed to be about speed, but not the local trains) stepped down at the town of Calistoga, population five hundred, the last stop. It was 10:00 p.m. He looked for a buggy to take him the rest of the way around the thighs of Mount St. Helena. The driver of the hack on the late shift that night was an eighteen-year-old named George Wolf. Wolf remembered later that Muybridge got on the buggy and told him to drive north for ten miles. Wolf also remembered that the road that night was dark under the narrow moon, and that on the way, as the buggy’s oil lamp threw a faint light, Muybridge asked whether there might be a danger of robbers. A fair question—the area had a reputation for bandits. Muybridge asked if he could fire his pistol as a warning shot, to frighten off any rough men who might be lying in wait in the gullies. The driver trotted the horse along in the near black, and Muybridge shot into the evergreens with his gun, because he had not used it in four months.
In the sitting room at the Yellow Jacket, Harry Larkyns offered a stream of stories to the women. People who knew him said Larkyns beguiled women, he had the charm of talk and powers of arousal. Larkyns told the women that while living in London he had been an impresario, a theatrical producer in the West End. He said, in fact, that it was the theater, or rather an error of judgment in the theater business, that had compelled him to come to the United States from England. Larkyns told whoever would listen that as a young man, he had invested some of his family’s plentiful money in the theater, over the protest of his grandmother. His parents were dead, he said, which is why his grandmother had become his benefactor. In London, when his new and expensive and most favorite production failed to make money—as splendid as the company had been, as smart the staging—he had lost an irreplaceable sum of the family money. The mistake had thrown him into disgrace with his more conservative relations, grandmother included, and he had been forced to emigrate, he said, to escape the general humiliation. Larkyns held the women’s open-eyed attention with this variety of story.
It was about midnight. The card game went along across the room, with no sign of folding. A knock came at the door, and one of the miners, Benjamin Pricket, got up from the table to answer. Pricket came back to say that someone wanted to speak with Harry Larkyns.
“I will see who this mysterious visitor is,” Larkyns said.
Larkyns went to the door, which stood open, and looked into the black.
“I can’t see you,” he said. “Step into the light.”
Edward Muybridge stood outside. In an interview with the San Francisco Examiner two months later, Muybridge remembered the night and described a precise little scene to the reporter.
“I said, ‘My name is Muybridge, and I have received a message from my wife,’ ” he told the papers. “But before I could say more, Larkyns started to retreat into the house. I had made no attempt against him. I saw that he would be gone in a moment and that I must act on the instant, or he would escape.”
Muybridge raised the Smith & Wesson #2 and shot Larkyns in the chest. Someone who saw the effect said the bullet went into his body “an inch above the left nipple.” Harry Larkyns turned into the room, put his hand on his chest, and shouted, “Let me out! Let me out!” He ran away from Muybridge, through the cottage, and out the back door.
Muybridge walked into the house with the gun in his hand. One witness said that he turned to the women who had been talking with Larkyns and spoke to them. “I’m sorry for the disturbance,” he said.
One of the men at the card table, a miner named James McArthur, stepped into a bedroom and came out with his own gun. Muybridge had started to follow Larkyns out the back door. “And as he passed the bedroom door I covered him with a pistol and made him surrender,” McArthur remembered. Muybridge put up no resistance and handed over his revolver.
At 11:00 p.m. on October 17, 1874, Muybridge knocked at this house—a cottage at the former Yellow Jacket Mine in northern California, near the town of Calistoga—asked for one of the men inside, Harry Larkyns, and shot him with a Smith & Wesson #2 revolver. (Illustration Credit 2.3)
One of the miners went out to Larkyns behind the house. There was a large oak tree near the door, which is where Larkyns fell dead. A physician who looked at him gave the opinion that he had lived “no more than twenty seconds” after the shot. The miner returned to the room to say that Larkyns was dead. Hearing this, Muybridge announced to the group, seven or eight people now on their feet, that this was a good outcome, and that he was glad for it.
Harry Larkyns’s body was carried into the cottage and laid on a sofa, and somebody went on a horse to bring back a doctor. The nearest settlement was Calistoga, ten miles away, and at about 1:00 a.m. a Dr. Reed arrived. Reed examined the body and said that Larkyns was dead, which was known to everyone.
California had a reputation as the national center of gunplay, a place where shootings happened with the rhythm of the sunset. The Muybridge crime was a killing among miners out in the wilderness, which meant it was an event so ordinary as to seem commonplace. Notwithstanding its plainness, and far out of proportion to its remoteness, the murder of Harry Larkyns swelled into a national story. The shooting was reported in newspapers in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. It appeared in the press in Indiana, Nebraska, Idaho, Arizona, and in all likelihood in many other places whose newspapers did not survive to be taken care of, microfilmed, and scanned 150 years later by libraries.
The shooting created a brief national sensation. Most of the papers, west to east, had previously followed the doings of Edward Muybridge. They had run stories on his photographs of Yosemite Valley, some of the most beautiful images to come out of California. They had run stories the first time that he used his camera to stop the motion of a running horse. But Muybridge the killer was something different. Muybridge was not just an artist who happened to have shot a man. He was known to be the personal cameraman of Leland Stanford, the best-known and richest man west of the Mississippi—Stanford, who was something like the paterfamilias of California. That connection made the story especially newsworthy.
In San Francisco, people from all walks of life talked about Muybridge and the killing. They parsed it, defended it, took it apart, and ran through its inflections. It was interesting, wasn’t it, that Muybridge had committed an instantaneous murder. The crime was precise and ecstatic, and therefore a shooting suited to the shooter. It was not unlike a running horse, a quick frame of an act like the impossible pictures the photographer had made. It was interesting, wasn’t it, that there was a cognate in the crime.
In the Yellow Jacket cottage, the miners talked about what to do with the photographer. Muybridge said later that he thought he might be lynched. Gang rule did not lie far beneath the surface in California. Three years earlier, in 1871, a mob of five hundred had rioted and lynched some twenty Chinese immigrants, for the reason that immigrants did not belong in the state because they took away work from whites. Lynching was a familiar part of the miner’s life in the mountains, far from a courthouse, and Harry Larkyns had made friends with this particular group of miners. The lynching idea in fact did come up for discussion, witnesses later said. Talk of killing Muybridge went around the room, but the man who had taken the photographer’s gun, James McArthur (who now guarded the s
cene with his own revolver), persuaded the other men that bringing out the noose was a bad idea this time. If the men did it, it would not reflect well on them, and furthermore none of them was particularly close to Harry Larkyns, who had airs. McArthur persuaded the others that the best thing to do would be to hand the shooter over to the law, down the valley in the county seat, the town of Napa.
Muybridge at the base of the tree named U. S. Grant in the Mariposa Grove of sequoias, Yosemite Valley, 1872 (Illustration Credit 2.4)
The killing was done, and Muybridge was left in a clearer mind. He had survived and surrendered, surprising himself on both counts. Witnesses described a calm that came over him, which lasted for hours.
James McArthur used a rope to tie the photographer’s ankles, and Muybridge was put into the back of a four-seat open buggy. McArthur sat next to him, and along with two other men they rode down the mountain toward Calistoga. The plan was to take Muybridge to the sheriff. However, it was the middle of the night, the road skirted the mountain, with drop-offs into brush, and the lamp was weak. Somewhere on the way down, the carriage dropped a wheel off the edge of a little bridge and slipped. Muybridge and McArthur were thrown into the ditch beside the road. The prisoner was all right, but McArthur, badly hurt, couldn’t move. Muybridge might have thought, This would be the right time to try to get away, but he climbed out of the ditch and plopped back into the carriage.2
GOD OF THE SUN
Eight years before…
1866, MONTGOMERY STREET, SAN FRANCISCO
He called himself a “photographic artist,” although he had not yet sold any pictures. “Artist” was his new identity, the camera his new instrument. The last time he lived here he made a living as a bookseller. The last time he lived here he also had a different name—E. J. Muygridge. He arrived back in San Francisco sometime in 1866, no longer Muygridge the book dealer, but the photographer known as Helios. A new living required a new identity. He thought highly enough of his new self to use a single name, borrowed from the Greek god of the sun. At age thirty-seven, a time when most people surrender to whatever circumstances trap them, Muygridge had discarded his previous life as a businessman and nominated himself an artist. Helios. He had a stage name, like that of a diva.
It was not at all uncommon, in the brand-new West, that while inventing a future a person might make up a past or use a new name. The emblem of California was the miner with a sieve and a knapsack, the man who came from nowhere and claimed to be whoever, his truth accepted as soon as he could trade a bag of ore for specie. Everyone in California came from somewhere else (except the Miwok, Hupa, Modoc, and ten other tribes, who did not come from somewhere else). More than a few blurred and touched up the past. But because personal history referred to a life back east, or in Europe, or for that matter China, it could not be said to be of importance.
San Francisco was Helios’s adopted city, and he knew his way around. There was the little art district along Montgomery near California Street, with the photography and art galleries. Three blocks away lay Chinatown, with its joss houses and their shrines, and smells of opium. There were the wharfs east of Montgomery, where every other clipper seemed to come from Hong Kong with another three hundred men on their way to swing sledgehammers for the railroad. (That was new, they weren’t laying tracks over the Sierras when he left.) And there also at the dock rode the steamers, in from Panama, full of the Irish from New York who had crossed the isthmus. That wasn’t new. Last time he was here, the Irish were already going to Nevada to dig for silver in Virginia City. Helios knew the rhythms of the place because he had lived in San Francisco during the 1850s, but then he had gone home to England. Nothing unusual there—people came and went in California, to and from the frontier, trying to cash in, going away, coming back, trying again. In those days, when he was E. J. Muygridge and he sold books, he lived on Montgomery Street in a pair of rooms on the second floor. He sold dictionaries then, and science books, and illustrated encyclopedias, and also some art. Mainly lithographs, pictures of things far from the West, like Roman cities, good things for people to hang above the fireplace. The book business had not been a crashing success. Dignified books for libraries, Muygridge’s specialty, did not much interest Californians. These were people who wanted a stake in a mine or land, or had an appetite for anything having to do with money, but who did not particularly want literature. Discovering this fact took a long time, five years start to finish, but once he did, the artist formerly known as E. J. Muygridge had closed up shop and left for London, in 1860.
A “bird’s-eye view” drawing of San Francisco, ca. 1864 (Illustration Credit 3.1)
He had stayed away for six years. Those particular six years happened to have been exactly enough time for the United States to go to pieces and bleed itself out in the Civil War, and then come back together again. (Although he did not plan it this way, Helios was careful to stay away until the war was over.) Six years was an eternity in the far West, on the edge of America, where things changed annually. Montgomery Street might look familiar, but the photographer did not recognize many people. In six years, San Francisco had doubled in size, from 60,000 up to 120,000. Rents had gone up, the sound of construction was never-ending. There were more women on the street, but the ratio still ran low, about one woman for every two men. The numbers were so lopsided that women appeared to be foreigners invited from abroad.
While away in England, Helios had burned through two or three more lives and tossed them on the trash heap, on top of the bookseller. In London he had changed the spelling of his name again, becoming “E. J. Muybridge,” and in that iteration he had tried his hand as an inventor and taken out a pair of patents. (As Muybridge, he designed a hand-crank washing machine, and he tried to perfect a method of printing illustrations—neither patent went anywhere.) After that, he had worked for three years in finance, wearing the spats and high collars of the London banking tribe. That was his worst memory, because he had failed miserably. But fortunately, during a stay in Paris, E. J. Muybridge had found his way into a photography studio, and that accident had given him a new pattern to follow—something he could try out in California, a place where you might keep trying on masks even after you reached middle age.
The evidence about the way Helios became a photographer is circumstantial but persuasive. It was at a photo studio called Maison Hélios, in Paris, that the businessman E. J. Muybridge remade himself into an artist, picking up another name, borrowing it like a piece of equipment, before heading to America for the second time.1 Maison Hélios, at number 9 rue Cadet, in the 9th arrondissement, belonged to three brothers named Berthaud—Michel, Jean, and “G.” Berthaud. During a long visit to Paris in the fall of 1862, Muybridge, who was trying unsuccessfully to sell a patent for his printing process in the French market, used the Berthaud brothers’ studio as his own address. Maison Hélios was booming. The Berthaud brothers would eventually have branch photography operations in eight cities in France, and with their expansion they had reason to take on an apprentice, in this case, an English inventor who used to sell books.
It seems the frères Berthaud and Maison Hélios not only gave the wayward E. J. Muybridge, a man dangling between one thing and another, a technical education in cameras, photo chemicals, and lenses; they also showed him how to sell himself in the business. The Berthaud brothers used as a trademark an emblem stamped with the word “Hélios,” with rays of light emanating from the center. When E. J. Muybridge set himself up in San Francisco as the photographer called Helios, he designed a logo—a camera, the word “Helios,” and emanating rays of light. The businessman knew to copy a successful formula.
Photographs of Helios himself from his first years as an artist show a man in hobnail boots and ragged jackets. He wears rumpled pants and floppy hats against the sun as he skitters through the streets decked in his anonymous, run-down drag. As a London businessman, he once tricked himself out in formal woolens and buttoned up in choking collars, but as an artist he dressed l
ike a man who lived outdoors.
The clothes had changed during his time away; so had the manner. Friends who had known him before he left said something had shifted in the man. For most of his working life, E. J. Muybridge had been careful about presenting himself, keeping up a bland front, tiptoeing through business in a polite dance of sales calls and follow-up letters. Now, returning, he took no interest in his grooming. He was “very eccentric,” said an old friend, “and so unlike his way before going, the change in his appearance was such that I could scarcely recognize him.” Another who had known Helios in a previous incarnation said, “He was much less irritable before his return, and much more careless in dress when he came back—not the same man in any respect.” An art dealer he knew said the photographer had become disorderly and often changed his mind. “He would take violent dislikes of people, utterly causeless,” said the man. A news reporter added that Helios “was not a man of strong, or even of average social leanings.” The photographer had a new profession and an altered personality. He raced toward things, surprising people with his intensity.2
Helios logo, ca. 1872. A camera with wings, aloft under the sun—the logo used in California by the artist formerly known as E. J. Muygridge (Illustration Credit 3.2)
Muybridge, self-portrait, San Francisco’s North Point Dock, ca. 1868 (Illustration Credit 3.3)
From his viewpoint, Helios was just adopting the Western mode. Wasn’t the West, for everyone, mainly a chase after something? Much of the West used to be Mexico anyway, before the American pursuit and takeover. Mexico occupied nearly half of the continent—if you drew a line from Texas to Oregon, Mexico was everything to the west and south. In those days, the western vastness meant mission outposts and a thin ribbon of haciendas, but the majority population was indigenous—the Apache, Arapaho, Cayuse, Cheyenne, Comanche, Hopi, Modoc, Mohave, Nez Perce, Navajo, Paiute, Shoshone, Sioux, Ute, Yakima, and Yuma tribes, among others. Maybe two million Indians lived between the Mississippi River and the Pacific. The invasion by U.S. infantry cut Mexico in half, and California and the Southwest came to Washington as spoils. The West, to Helios, with the clearer sight of an immigrant, was just the newest piece of land-grab America.