by Edward Ball
After eighteen years of marriage, she was childless. She may have miscarried once, or several times—impossible to say. Few women of her era wrote down their menstrual cycles and lost pregnancies and then left such a diary to posterity. In August 1867, Jenny turned thirty-nine. Her hair was still dark, but she was past the expected age for mothering. And so it probably came as a surprise to her when in October of that year she realized she was pregnant. She had a physician to talk to, a Dr. H. K. Harkness, and Leland Stanford’s wife was his most prominent patient. Harkness prescribed bed rest for Jenny’s middle-aged pregnancy, but she would not be confined. In the spring she gave a tea party to celebrate her imminent motherhood. She was full and round—the party came sometime during her third trimester—as she welcomed the other rich couples of Sacramento to her house, the grandest in town. Amid canapés and tea and little speeches about being a mother, Jenny Stanford slipped off the front porch and fell into the flowerbed. Her husband froze in his chair in fear, and others jumped to pull her up. Despite the embarrassment, she was all right, as was the baby. In May 1868, Dr. Harkness delivered the Stanfords’ healthy boy, their first child.
A few weeks later the new parents celebrated in the way their copious money allowed, hosting an elaborate dinner. They now had a cook and several servants, who produced everything in exaggerated style, using large pieces of silver the Stanfords had bought. Jenny Stanford had a secretary who described a little dinner performance with the baby.
“When the guests were seated the waiter brought in a large silver platter with a cover and placed it in the center of the table,” Jenny’s assistant, Bertha Berner, remembered. Leland Stanford acknowledged the new dish and dismissed the waiter, then stood up and said that he wanted to introduce a new guest who had arrived late. The cover of the silver dish was lifted, and there was the new baby, Leland Stanford Jr., a tiny thing lying on a bed of flowers. He was carried around the table on the platter and shown to each guest. It was said the baby was smiling and went through his introductions well.3
Flora Downs was born in March 1851—in Ohio, according to one witness, in Alabama, according to another, or, by a third account, in Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. Her mother had died young, it was said. Her father remarried, and Flora was delivered into the hands of a stepmother, who raised her for a while and then decided not to. Her father and stepmother did not want her, and so at age twelve the motherless Flora went to the care of her mother’s sister in Kentucky, Flora Downs Stump, the woman for whom she had been named. This aunt was married to a riverboat captain, Thomas Stump, and the couple had two children of their own. When in short order the family decided to go to California, about 1863, they took young Flora with them.
At a certain point the group came to the town of Marysville, one of the biggest mining settlements in California, in the north Central Valley, where they deposited young Flora with another of her mother’s sisters, Sarah Downs Shallcross. Leaving Flora Downs behind with this aunt and her husband, William Shallcross, the Stump couple, who had brought Flora to California, moved five hundred miles north, to Portland, Oregon, where Thomas Stump proceeded to run steamboats on the Columbia River.
Muybridge, View of Mills Seminary (now Mills College), Oakland, California, 1873 (Illustration Credit 6.2)
Growing up motherless, Flora, now twice abandoned, was uprooted, fourteen years old, and two thousand miles from home. One witness states that a year later Flora Downs moved again, this time to Mills Seminary, a school for girls on the east side of San Francisco Bay, in Oakland. Mills Seminary wanted to be a finishing school for California’s comfortable daughters, girls with money and a good family, yet for Flora, who had known only caregivers who passed her along the chain, it cannot be taken for granted that a boarding school supplied much comfort. Flora had no family in California beyond her aunt and uncle, and no one knew Flora well enough to speak of the vortex of her life with anything like empathy, or even curiosity. She was a California artifact, washed up in the West, like thousands of others.
While still in school Flora, age sixteen, met a twenty-four-year-old named Lucius Stone. In frontier terms, Stone, the son of a family of saddle-makers, was something of a merchant prince. His parents owned the biggest saddlery in San Francisco, Stone & Hayden, a maker of reins and bridles, stirrups and saddles. The Stone family was rich—a census assigns them $110,000 in property, fifty times that of other families in their neighborhood. The horse leather business threw off money in part because Stone & Hayden had a factory at San Quentin Prison and employed convicts on the production line, 150 felons who did not receive wages. The company paid the prison forty cents a day for each man, and the warden pocketed the token salaries. From such dubious business arrangements Lucius Stone was heir to easy money. Flora Downs dropped out of school, married him, and moved in with her husband at his parents’ big house.4
Flora lived “very unhappily” during the marriage, she said during the divorce trial, calling her mother-in-law, Sophie Stone, “cruel” and “tyrannical.” Perhaps Sophie Stone, age sixty-two, thought the teenage Flora was digging at the family riches, or perhaps Lucius Stone had abused her. (Flora made another observation: her husband, in his early twenties, was “too old.”) For various reasons, Flora moved out, apparently with an inducement of money, rented a room in a boardinghouse, and hoped her divorce would be easy. She was eighteen.
Flora Downs had not had much of a childhood. She had a little education and a good face, and when she looked for work she found a clerk’s job at a shop called Kearney’s Dollar Store. From there she seems to have walked into the Nahl brothers’ gallery, detouring into the world of artists and art. The Nahls hired her to retouch photographs.
Muybridge, Convicts Quitting Work, State Prison, San Quentin, ca. 1870 (Illustration Credit 6.3)
Sometime in 1869, Flora looked up from her retouching table and saw Edward Muybridge, the photographer the Nahls had just taken on as a client. He was thirty-nine, with a gray beard and brown and gray hair. He looked at what she was doing, and although he did not like to use his camera with people, he asked her if she would let him photograph her.
A jeweler in San Francisco, Schulz & Fischer, had finished engraving the golden spikes.5 The invoice went to the Central Pacific Railroad—$25.24 to etch 381 letters onto two five-pound souvenir rail spikes made of eighteen-carat gold, alloyed with copper. On one of them, a homily: “May God continue the unity of our country, as this railroad unites the two great oceans of the world.” And in a larger font, the name LELAND STANFORD.
Stanford was the man picked from the lot (or he picked himself) to tap a final spike into a final railroad tie. He had an appetite for publicity, and he accepted the role of showman on behalf of his comrades, the other associates. To see his own name jostle down into the wood must have given Stanford a vain pleasure. The golden spike would be pulled up after the ceremony, replaced with the usual iron, and the spike, along with other shiny souvenirs, like a silver shovel, would be sent home with the governor.
It was May 10, 1868, a Monday morning, and cloudy. The completion ceremony had been arranged at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, a non-place in dry flatland seventy miles northwest of Salt Lake City. The Central Pacific was joining its track with that of its partner and rival, the Union Pacific Railroad, which had built the eastern half of the line. The Union Pacific had been laying rail for seven years, starting in Omaha, Nebraska, and going west, throwing down 1,032 miles of track across the plains to the Rocky Mountains. Meanwhile the Central Pacific had built eastward, laying 742 miles of rail through California, over the Sierras, across Nevada, into Utah, to the edge of the Rockies. The locomotives surfaced on the horizon in the dust and dirt. Stanford arrived with other top hats from California in a two-car train pulled by Central Pacific’s locomotive 60, an engine the company called the Jupiter. (The railroads meant something like the destruction of time and space, and the names of planets fit the scale of their ambition.) Thomas Clark Durant, who
ran the Union Pacific, came on the track from the east, his car pulled by the Union’s locomotive 119. (The Union Pacific people did not name their machines, preferring numbers.) The companies’ two locomotives came face to face, cowcatcher to cowcatcher. From photographs it appears that about three hundred people (all men except for three or four women) stood around the locomotives and on top of them, to shout down the future.6
The Reverend Dr. Todd, from Massachusetts, offered a prayer. “And now we ask thee that this great work, so auspiciously begun and so magnificently completed, may remain a monument to our faith and good works,” he said. “We here consecrate this great highway for the good of thy people. O God, we implore thy blessings upon it and upon those that may direct its operations. Through Jesus, the Redeemed, Amen.”
Stanford, holding a hammer made of silver—workers knew it as a “maul”—stepped onto the rails to give a speech. “I’m here to express the hope that the great importance which you are pleased to attach to our undertaking may be in all respects fully realized,” he said. The ponderousness of his style kept his sentences from spilling at a normal pace. Stanford said nothing about the Chinese Americans who had built the rail and nothing about those who would profit from it (himself and his partners), but he said a considerable amount about freight rates. “We will transport coarse, heavy, and cheap products over all distances at living rates to the trade,” he told the crowd, half or more of whom had been drinking. “We will render practicable the transportation of freights for a much less rate than is possible under any system which has thus far anywhere been adopted,” he added woodenly. And with the hammer he tapped, but did not slam, the spike, which was gold after all.
Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869. Leland Stanford, center stage, a hammer in his right hand and hat in his left, just before he drove the gold spike into the last railroad tie. Holding a hammer in his left hand is Union Pacific Railroad vice president Thomas Durant. (Illustration Credit 6.4)
The spike had been wired to a telegraph line, and the hammer blow sent an instantaneous buzz around the country to depots of the Western Union Company, signaling the crescendo of east–west unity with a telegraphed message. Stanford had composed the three-word telegram to send with the deed—LAST SPIKE DRIVEN. Laconic, like the man himself. A telegraph operator tapped the words over the network, from an outpost in the desert to cities on both coasts.
In California, the celebrations and drinking had already run for two days. The ceremony, because of bad weather, had been postponed from an initial date of Saturday, May 8, to the following Monday. No matter to the waiting masses. Newspapers reported that by Saturday night, carousers drank their way through the streets of Oakland, San Francisco, and Sacramento. In Chicago came a big parade, in New York a hundred-gun salute at City Hall, and in Philadelphia the pealing of bells at Independence Hall.
In Sacramento, a crowd gathered outside the California State Assembly building to hear music and speeches. From the rostrum, one politician compared the finishing of the railroad to the battle at Waterloo in 1815 as well as the invention of the printing press during the fifteenth century. Judge Edwin Crocker, one of the associates, stepped to the podium. Crocker was a heavy man who wore a long white beard with no mustache. In his speech, rather unexpectedly, he praised the Chinese men who had sweated and groaned to lay the track.
“I wish to call to your minds that the early completion of this railroad we have built has been in a great measure due to the poor, despised class of laborers called the Chinese,” said Crocker, “and to the fidelity and industry they have shown.” It was a surprise tribute, although Crocker did not bother to recall the scene two years before when two thousand Chinese linemen went on strike for better pay and found their camps surrounded by armed militia. (The strike ended in a week, with no pay raise.)
Stanford, speaking to a reporter years later, said his cross-country railroad had changed the country. “It was the commercial opening of practically a new world,” he told the San Francisco Examiner. “The hardships of the pioneer settlers were ended and a stop was put to the Indian wars.” All of this by the railroad. The track, as Stanford saw it, was the suture that laced a nation of parts into a whole. (A different version of the story would be that the train squeezed out the last resistance of the native people and tightened America into a commercial empire.)
Sometime after the completion of the rail line, the California artist Thomas Hill began painting a canvas he called The Last Spike. The giant picture, eight feet by twelve, took the Thomas Hart photo as a model—a railroad track in the plain, a locomotive, a mass of people, and at the center, holding a hammer, Leland Stanford, flanked by executives and politicians in grim hurrah. Stanford commissioned the painting after seeing some of Thomas Hill’s landscapes (and buying one of them, a picture of Yosemite Valley). As Hill developed The Last Spike—it was the size of a small room, and so it took time—Stanford would pay occasional visits to his studio. He was not interested in a documentary account; the photograph existed, but it need not be consulted. Instead, the picture was to represent Stanford’s friends and business partners, many of whom had not been present at the scene, and according to their degree of importance. Stanford told Hill who would appear and where they might be placed—seventy-one people altogether, and they had to be recognizable. Stanford told Hill that only he could hold a hammer in the picture, despite others having also driven several spikes. Hill finished a version of the painting, after which Stanford ordered the artist to behead a number of figures and repaint them with different faces, giving the artist a new list of names. Hill later wrote of these events, “I swallowed my bile at this, for what was I but a slave, needing friends, not enemies.” Having taken out some and painted over others, Hill was left with several headless silhouettes. For one of them he substituted a sad-looking figure, a symbolic and plausible Indian, standing feather-dressed and withdrawn. The picture was done, but unfortunately, Hill had placed Stanford’s partner, Charles Crocker, too far from the center of the scene. The contractor who had built the train saw the painting and was enraged. Stanford, embarrassed, refused to take delivery of the picture, and the sale was off. He never paid Hill’s fee, a year’s income. The painting hangs in the California State Railroad Museum, in Sacramento.7
Thomas Hill, The Last Spike, 1881. Oil on canvas, 96 × 144 inches. Leland Stanford (center) commissioned a painting of his moment of apotheosis involving the train and insisted that no one in the crowd of heroes hold a hammer but him. (Illustration Credit 6.5)
Stanford wanted to edit the present for the benefit of the future. Or, maybe he needed to benefit his own present. Photography and its realism could not do that job. It was a paradoxical view for a man who would soon be intent on cameras, but that was just for his horses.
Sometime in 1869 Edward Muybridge and Flora Downs took a trip out of San Francisco and into Sonoma County, seventy-five miles north. They boarded the ferry across the bay to Vallejo, and then rode a train up Napa Valley as far as the town of Calistoga. Muybridge would repeat this itinerary in a few years, on the night of the murder. The ostensible reason for this trip, however, was so Muybridge could photograph two strange ecosystems—a petrified forest, on the one hand, and on the other, a place known as the Geysers, where freshets of steam spewed from rocky ground around the Russian River. Another reason was so he and Flora could be alone out of town.
The petrified forest, a scattering of trees that had turned to stone after ten thousand years, stood on a ranch near Calistoga, and the Geysers lay twenty miles away. A tour guide named Clark Foss ran a stagecoach excursion that carried day-trippers out from the train to both sites.8
Several of Muybridge’s photographs from the junket show Flora in the middle of things, looking with boredom at the natural curiosities. She wears a parachute-like white dress and high hat, a glimpse of city femininity teetering amid the rocks, the steam gathering around her. The couple is not alone: other tourists linger in the dead forest with its stone trunks,
in street clothes. Muybridge was used to camping out, but with Flora he had taken the cushioned path, with nicely dressed sightseers and a tour guide.
Back in San Francisco, continuing their courtship, and the seduction, the couple went to an amusement park called Woodward’s Gardens. Robert Woodward, a hotel owner and impresario, had turned the grounds of his mansion on Market Street into a pleasure park. (It appears to have been the very first of California’s fantasy settings, its first theme park, admission price thirty-five cents.) Woodward’s Gardens had a zoo with motley animals and a village with human attractions—acrobats from Japan, Hawaiians, Native Americans. A Chinese giant named Chang Woo Gow, eight feet, three inches tall, walked around the grounds wearing silk brocade. There were four museums, a boat for children that churned around a circular moat, and taxidermied animals strewn around the grass.9 Muybridge and Flora did not go to Woodward’s Gardens strictly for entertainment. About this time Muybridge opened a retail stand near the front gate of the amusement park, where he or a counter clerk sold his prints to the streams of tourists.
Muybridge photographed Flora Downs (left) at a petrified forest near the town of Calistoga, California. (Illustration Credit 6.6)
On a visit Muybridge photographed himself in one of the art galleries, or rather, he photographed his back. In the picture, he is an art lover at the end of the room, facing away from the camera, staring at a painting two feet from his nose.