by Edward Ball
Harry Larkyns told the jailhouse interviewer that as a young man in England he found himself thrown out on the street by his rich, proper family. His parents were dead, his grandmother replacing them. She and other relatives had shunned him, he said, for having stooped to invest some of his inheritance in the theater, in London. His attempts to establish himself as an impresario went awry, he lost money, and he fled England in disgrace for France. This much formed the beginning of his story.
Larkyns filled the ears of many listeners with his grandiose biography. Here are some other parts of it. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, he had joined the French ranks as an aide to General Charles Bourbaki, whose efforts to repel German armies from southern France had won glory. Larkyns said that under Bourbaki, he had risen to the rank of major, and as a result he wished to be referred to—here in California—as “Major Larkyns.” He said the French government had awarded him the cross of the Legion of Honor. He said when the war ended, with the unfortunate surrender of France, he had decamped to Paris to take in the city’s pleasures.
Major Larkyns, one writer said, “spoke French with the true Parisian accent, Spanish with the sweetness of a muleteer, and German with the resonance of a bullfrog.”
While in Paris, Larkyns had met and befriended one Arthur Neil, another young English traveler who possessed both cash and a sense of adventure. Here Larkyns’s story gets easier to nail down, because Neil, filing a complaint with the San Francisco police, corroborates some of it. With Arthur Neil, Larkyns “danced at the Mabille, rode on the Boulevards, and strolled on the Bois.” After some weeks at this, said Larkyns, he and Arthur Neil parted company.
Harry Larkyns and Arthur Neil had both come to America, although separately, and upon arriving both had gone west. In Salt Lake City, Utah, where each went to take an interest in the mines, they bumped into each other again. Once the high greetings and reunion toasts were behind them, Larkyns, who was out of money, noticed that Neil was still possessed of a good store of cash. Larkyns informed Neil, whom he had impressed before, that he was en route to Yokohama, and that his bags, including credit instruments, had been sent ahead. He added that his grandmother in London was good for his expenses. Neil sympathized, loaned him clothes and money, and began writing checks. The pair decided to come together to San Francisco, with Neil paying all the bills.
The two arrived in San Francisco in November 1872 and checked into one of the city’s stylish transit points, the Occidental Hotel, where Larkyns soon indulged “a riotous, extravagant course,” giving champagne dinners, to which he invited a dozen new friends, including Arthur Neil, who was asked to pay for everything. Larkyns hired “a notorious lady in this city named Fanny ——” and spent heavily with her—flowers, opera tickets, carriages, and special meetings. Arthur Neil, reality now dawning on him, decided to escape his friend and told Larkyns that he was obliged to leave for Honolulu, in the Sandwich Islands—known as Hawaii after 1895. Larkyns informed Neil that he would accompany him, especially since his own money was imminent. Neil seemed dubious but remained enamored, and they sailed. In Honolulu, Neil rented a house and hired servants and a cook, and Larkyns resumed his spending on dinners and entertainment. A week passed, and Neil finally saw he was being taken, so he threw Larkyns out.
Larkyns sailed back to California in January 1873, on the SS Nevada. In San Francisco, said the paper, he once again “cut a terrible dash, ran up bills everywhere, and managed to have himself considered, for a time, a gentleman. All the young men about town knew him, and many believed him.” When Arthur Neil arrived in the city on the next steamship, he was presented with a stack of invoices. Neil filed a complaint accusing Larkyns of obtaining money on false pretenses—$3,000 was the figure he gave. A warrant was issued, and Larkyns was jailed.
The man in the nobby suit, on the day after he spoke to the papers, promised to pay back some of the money and somehow talked his way out of jail. Arthur Neil left San Francisco and did not return. Larkyns was free to make his way, and to bank on his seductive powers.
In spring 1872 Muybridge went to Sacramento, leaving Flora behind in San Francisco. He left to photograph the Stanford house in April, and then, for the first time, Stanford’s horses, including Occident, in May.
About this time Muybridge’s dealers, the Nahl brothers, decided to sell their gallery and get out of retail art. When the Nahl gallery closed, Muybridge lost a distributor, and Flora was put out of her job as a photo retoucher. The married couple went as a pair over to another art dealer, a bigger operation called Bradley & Rulofson.
Bradley & Rulofson comprised two photographers—Henry Bradley, from Virginia, and William Rulofson, of New Brunswick, Canada. Rulofson made all the decisions, and like everyone in the art world, he and his partner did business on Montgomery Street. William Rulofson had come to California during the Gold Rush, and twenty-five years later, his gallery had thirty-four employees (six of them Chinese American) and occupied twenty-nine rooms on three floors of a building at 429 Montgomery, on the corner of Sacramento. Bradley & Rulofson advertised itself as the biggest art dealer in San Francisco, and the most progressive. As proof, the gallery boasted of a strange new machine it had installed, an elevator. (The elevator, another nod to speed, was water-powered. A pump attached to the city’s water main filled a tank that acted as a counterweight to raise and lower the cage.) When he made arrangements to sell his photographs through Rulofson, Muybridge made sure his new dealers gave his wife, Flora, a part-time job retouching pictures, as she had done at the Nahl gallery. Despite his own attachment to velocity, Muybridge disliked the elevator and always took the stairs, a fact that came out at the murder trial.
William Rulofson and his family at their San Francisco home, ca. 1880 (Illustration Credit 8.1)
To mark the acquisition—a new artist! the famous Helios!—Bradley & Rulofson printed a catalog of Muybridge’s work, describing all his photographs for customers to buy. It ran to fifty pages and listed more than a thousand images.3
Back in San Francisco after a stint with the Stanfords, Muybridge packed for another trip that would take him away from his wife, Flora. In June he went to Yosemite. He had first made his reputation as a photographer, five years earlier, with turbulent pictures of Yosemite Valley, the state’s natural spectacle. Most of those had been stereo cards, not much bigger than the human hand. This time he would make big pictures, seventeen by twenty-two inches—the scale of a small table—known as “mammoth plates.” The operation required a big camera, the size of an oven. Before the invention of the enlarger, a darkroom device that could stretch a negative up to any scale, the photographic print was the same size as its glass negative: to make a big photograph you needed a big camera.
As he had done before, Muybridge spent five months at Yosemite. The writer Helen Hunt Jackson, a fan of the photographer, described running into him on a narrow path.
“As we slowly climbed the trail, a long line of pack-mules met us. We drew aside to let them pass. They were loaded with a photographer’s apparatus, lenses, plates, camera, carefully packed boxes of chemicals. Their owner, Mr. Muybridge, has just established himself in the valley for the purpose of taking a series of views, larger and more perfect than any heretofore attempted.”4
Between June and November Muybridge made his mammoth plates. According to one paper, to take his pictures, Muybridge “cut down trees by the score that interfered with the cameras from the best point of sight; he had himself lowered by ropes down precipices to establish his instruments in places where the full beauty of the object to be photographed could be transferred to the negative, and he went to points where his packers refused to follow.” Muybridge was good at publicity—there might have been 50 percent truth in that.5
Muybridge, in a publicity photo for the Bradley & Rulofson Gallery in San Francisco, 1872 (Illustration Credit 8.2)
The logistical problem of transporting the negatives—large rectangles of glass—two hundred miles along rattling roa
ds back to San Francisco must have been daunting, but Muybridge preferred this to the alternative, which was to photograph people in their nicest clothes and tightest expressions, like every other cameraman in the Bradley & Rulofson studio.
Muybridge, Leland Stanford, 1872. Stereograph (Illustration Credit 8.3)
On this trip he did not overlook his new patrons, the Stanfords, and went out of his way to flatter them. Muybridge made a point of going to the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias, where many trees had stood for a thousand years. The trees had Indian names, but Californians had discarded these, and this time the photographer accepted the change. He photographed the tree known as “Jane L. Stanford” (244 feet high and sixty-five feet in circumference), as well as the “Leland Stanford” (248 feet high, eighty-two feet around). He gave the pictures to his new clients, making sure they would see that their names had inflated, along with their money, to the scale of natural monuments.
Released from jail, Harry Larkyns published a letter in a newspaper, the Daily Register, hoping to deflect some of the gossip about him that ricocheted through town. He said that his incarceration, his first California experience, had humiliated him. He said that people who did not know him had maligned his character and that he would remain in the state until he had vindicated himself. For a couple of months Larkyns worked as a stevedore, loading ships on the wharfs. When the book publisher Hubert Bancroft met him and took pity, he hired Larkyns as a translator of some French text his company planned to bring out. In summer 1873, Larkyns, the man the Chronicle had called “the prince of confidence men,” joined the San Francisco Evening Post as an art and theater critic. That a duke of deception like Harry Larkyns would be a judge of anyone’s artwork suggests something, though it’s not clear what, about the state of culture commentary in the West.
After the artistic drought of the frontier decades, San Francisco now possessed a number of theaters, which put on stage shows that rolled into California from the eastern states by train. The perquisites of Larkyns’s job took him frequently to see farces, melodramas, and opera. (The burlesque shows that put women on stage in bloomers, and also minstrel acts in which white men wearing blackface sang “Negro music,” did not warrant coverage by the papers, though they sold twice the tickets of the legitimate theaters.) To file copy for the Post, Larkyns made his way every week to Maguire’s Opera House, a three-story theater on Washington Street, west of Montgomery; the Metropolitan Theatre, on Montgomery between Washington and Jackson; the New Alhambra, on Bush Street near Kearny; the California Theatre, also on Bush; and the Amphitheatre, at the corner of Post and Stockton Streets.
Larkyns mingled with the best of the city’s art world, including its photographers. When a production came to town it was expected that its actresses and singers would sit for photographs, and Bradley & Rulofson had a strong position in that trade. William Rulofson made portraits of romantic leads, famous faces of the day, from Edwin Booth to Sarah Bernhardt, who trod the boards of the theater district, and sold these pictures as “cabinet cards,” the equivalent of celebrity head shots. For his part, Larkyns had reason to drop in on occasion at Rulofson’s to pick up a picture of an actress and to talk to the performers themselves.
Flora Muybridge was now on the staff at Bradley & Rulofson. It might have happened that Harry Larkyns met Flora on one of these drop-ins; they would have come face-to-face without going out of their way to do so. Edward Muybridge, at any rate, remembered it that way. “In early 1873, Harry Larkyns came up to the gallery,” he told a writer. “My wife was present, and she introduced him to me. I had frequently heard her speak of Major Larkyns before, but did not know that she was much acquainted with him.” By the summer, Larkyns was coming around the gallery a lot, Muybridge said, “and I often gave him points in regard to art matters, which he was then writing about.”6
A writer who knew him described Larkyns as a man whose “fascinating manners and pleasing address made him a great favorite among the female sex,” which is perhaps a nineteenth-century way of saying that he seduced whoever came within range.
Muybridge went along obliviously as Flora became fascinated by Larkyns. “He was always trying to get me to take passes to the theater,” Muybridge remembered, “but I seldom went to the theater and did not fancy the Major’s style of man.” Even the photographer called Larkyns “the Major.”
One day Muybridge accepted the offer of theater tickets and went with Flora and Larkyns to the California Theatre. The three had drinks after the show, or probably, the men had whiskey as Flora looked on. In a few days Larkyns came to Muybridge’s house “on some matter of business,” and for the photographer that marked the end of his desire to indulge a friendship with the theater critic. Afterwards, Muybridge stopped answering Larkyns’s supplications.
A day came when a popular English actress named Adelaide Neilson arrived from the East Coast for a monthlong booking. William Rulofson photographed Neilson, then his gallery printed an advertising card with a picture of the actress and, next to it, a Muybridge photograph from Yosemite. Adelaide Neilson was on stage at the California Theatre in Romeo and Juliet. (At age twenty-six, a somewhat old Juliet, but the role had made her famous.) Muybridge remembered that when he came home one night Flora was out, and she did not come in until late. He asked her where she had been. “To the theater with Major Larkyns,” she said. Larkyns, a fascinating dilettante, was also a fine physical specimen and an athlete. A brief touch between Larkyns and Flora at Romeo and Juliet would not have attracted notice.7
The California Theatre, a haunt of Harry Larkyns and the place where Flora Muybridge and Larkyns began their affair, in a signed photograph by Helios (Muybridge), ca. 1870 (Illustration Credit 8.4)
For her part, Flora Muybridge had an effect on men, including her employer, William Rulofson, who asked her to sit for his portrait camera. Rulofson sent one picture of Flora out to the Philadelphia Photographer, which had previously flattered Muybridge for his landscapes. The journal inserted the portrait in its pages and praised Rulofson for it.
The picture of Flora, framed from her waist at the bottom to just above her pile of hair woven with flowers at the top, shows her in a white dress, which is squared around the neck with lace. (She wears enormous white outfits in nearly all of her pictures.) Her waist is cinched to a wasp circumference by a corset. A stack of light-brown hair weighs on her head, braided into a turban shape, while a crucifix hangs from a heavy necklace, and earrings dangle low. She stares to her right, making her profile into the subject. As in other pictures of her, it is the eyes that pull the attention: they look away from the camera, half-lidded, almost weary. Flora’s eyes seem to make her unreachable.
Flora Muybridge, whom Larkyns called “Flo,” saw much of her lover. Larkyns rented a room on Montgomery Street, and it became their rendezvous point. A second trysting place seems to have been the Cliff House, a hotel on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Muybridge had once photographed it.
The Cliff House Hotel, San Francisco, a trysting place for Harry Larkyns and his lover, Flora, photographed by Muybridge (Illustration Credit 8.5)
When they had been married for two years, in spring 1873, Muybridge went away again to do a new kind of journalism: he photographed a war. The occupation of war cameraman had little precedent. Only since the Englishman Roger Fenton photographed the Crimean War, fifteen years before, had anyone brought a camera to a shooting field. In America during the Civil War, photographers Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and George Barnard had deprived the theater of war of its perennial romance by taking pictures of actual bodies, barracks, and bomb sites. And now, during the Modoc War, just as he had been one of the first photographers of Native Americans in Alaska, Muybridge became the first to photograph America’s fight with its indigenous people. It was known at the time by the euphemism “Indian removal.” The Modoc War was a monthlong campaign, one of dozens over decades, distinguished now mainly because Muybridge photographed it.
The Modocs had liv
ed for centuries in northern California at Tule Lake, near the border with Oregon, until the 1860s, when they were pushed by white settlement (and by the U.S. Army) one hundred miles north, onto the Klamath Reservation. A native leader named Kientpoos—called “Captain Jack” by whites for the blue military jacket he sometimes wore—defied the deportation and brought several hundred Modocs back to Tule Lake. When an army party attacked them in November 1872, Kientpoos and his band killed a dozen whites, fled to a rocky plain they knew well (whites called it the Lava Beds), and waited. Perhaps the army hired Muybridge to document its campaign against the Modocs because officers had seen his pictures of the Tlingit. Or maybe he was California’s “adventure photographer,” and everyone knew he would go anywhere. For whatever reason, at the beginning of May 1873, Muybridge left Flora at home in San Francisco and went four hundred miles north, to the fringe of Tule Lake, where he made his first war pictures.8
The Lava Beds, a craggy plain serrated with caves and crevasses, helped fifty Modoc fighters to hold off five hundred army infantry. Throughout May the Modocs killed dozens of soldiers in ambush, to the astonishment of Americans following the fight in Harper’s Weekly, which covered events. Muybridge photographed the army camps, making them look like fifty tents erected on the moon. He photographed the sites of firefights, like “Captain Jack’s Cave,” which looked more otherworldly than even Muybridge’s lighthouses. He photographed a tent where Modocs ambushed a party of officers. He photographed Indian scouts, taken from the ranks of the Modocs’ enemies, who worked for the army. His images of Modocs themselves, hiding in the lava redoubts, are limited to just one: a picture of four women.