The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  As an early war photographer, Muybridge took this picture of the cave used by Kientpoos, or “Captain Jack,” leader of a native revolt against “Indian removal” during the Modoc War of 1873. (Illustration Credit 8.6)

  Harper’s Weekly published engravings of five of Muybridge’s pictures.9 When they weren’t being asked to play the role of savages, Indians had become a curiosity to white readers. A ditty writer sent a few lines to the Yreka Journal, the newspaper nearest the war zone, summarizing the fight as it appeared to many Californians:

  In truth it was a gallant sight,

  To see a thousand men of might.

  With gun and cannons, day and night

  Fight fifty dirty Indians.10

  Modoc women, photographed by Muybridge during the war, 1873 (Illustration Credit 8.7)

  When the Modocs capitulated in early June, Kientpoos/Captain Jack and three others were hanged, and the remaining 150 native survivors were sent into exile on the Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma. They rode on a Central Pacific train owned by Leland Stanford.

  Muybridge veered between subjects and clients. He photographed skittish thoroughbreds and aboriginal outsiders, he worked for prince-capitalists and cursing army colonels. An intoxicating workload, and it had to be enough to keep him in a state of distraction. Occasionally, he arrived home to his young wife, fitted out and frustrated in their nice townhouse.

  He was surprised to discover that Flora had been going to the theater with Harry Larkyns, and Muybridge told his wife to stop doing it. Then he went to his wife’s boyfriend. “The next morning I went to see Larkyns,” he remembered later, “and he greeted me gaily with a ‘Good morning.’ I said, ‘You know very well that as a married woman it is not proper for her to be running about at night with you, and I want you to let her alone. I do not request it of you, but I command you to keep away from her. You know my rights as a married man. So do I, and I shall defend them. If you transgress after this morning I shall hold you to the consequences, and I suppose you know what that means in California.’ ”

  Muybridge meant that in California the rules of marriage could be enforced more harshly than elsewhere, with beatings or duels, and the authorities would look the other way. Larkyns groveled to Muybridge. “If there is any objection on your part I will take her out no more,” he said to his rival.11

  In summer 1873 Flora, age twenty-two, was pregnant. She had had two pregnancies before, both ending with stillborn infants. The couple hired a nurse and midwife, Susan Smith, to deliver the new baby when it came. Smith was a simple woman, excitable, prone to raise her voice, but she was loyal to her clients, the new mothers and mothers-to-be. Smith later told her version of what happened between Flora and her two men.

  Harry Larkyns and Flora Muybridge started writing each other letters, Smith said, “two and three times a day.” They hired a courier to take the letters back and forth between them (“a Negro,” Smith remembered). Smith said she witnessed several things while working for Flora Muybridge. Once, Larkyns stopped at the South Park house in the morning, while Flora was still in bed. “He went into her room,” Smith said. “I also went into the room, and she lay on the bed with the clothes down to her waist, and Larkyns sat on the bedside.” Smith said she saw Flora and Larkyns go into Flora’s bedroom and lock the door “as many as three times a week.”

  In the midst of the affair, Larkyns never stopped wanting to look good. Some of his shirts needed repair, according to Smith, but he did not have much money, and so he gave them to Flora, who sent the shirts out with her husband’s laundry to be cleaned and mended. The same black man who delivered the couple’s letters brought Larkyns’s shirts back to him when they were sewn and starched, Smith said.

  When Flora’s third baby was born, Muybridge was traveling. The midwife told the story. At 2:00 a.m. on the morning of April 16, 1874, a carriage rattled up to her door, at 2116 Powell Street, and someone rang the bell. It was Larkyns, who was wearing a high white hat. Larkyns said that Flora had gone into labor and was lying down in the carriage.

  “I said that she must be brought into the house,” Smith remembered, “but he said no, and half lifted me across the sidewalk. We drove rapidly, I half clothed.” They went to the Muybridge house in South Park. There, Smith said, “Larkyns held Flora in his arms and kissed and caressed her. He stooped over the bed, kissed Mrs. Muybridge, and said, ‘Never mind baby, it will soon be over.’ ”

  Larkyns went for a doctor and brought him back about 3:00 a.m. Smith said that before the baby was born, Flora “was afraid it would have sandy hair, like Larkyns’s.” The midwife and obstetrician delivered a son to Flora at 4:00 a.m. Smith said that Flora “asked me if it had sandy hair, and I replied, ‘Its hair is light.’ ”

  Flora told Susan Smith that Larkyns was going to take her to England as his wife. Flora said, “It is too bad I treat old Muybridge so badly, but I love Harry Larkyns.”

  Smith telegraphed Muybridge, who was out of town, and he came home the day after the delivery. He stayed for a week or ten days, “until all danger was past,” said Smith. Then he went away again, oblivious, to take photographs of a rich man’s house in the town of Belmont, twenty-five miles south of the city.

  The day after he left, Flora wrote a note and told Smith to take it to the San Francisco Evening Post, where Larkyns had an office. Muybridge stayed out of town for several more weeks, and during that time Larkyns visited Flora “frequently,” according to Smith. On one occasion Larkyns was standing at the bedside, and Flora said, looking at the baby, “Harry, we will remember the thirteenth of July. We have something to show for it.” July 13 was nine months before the birth.

  When the baby was four weeks old, Muybridge came home. “He always seemed affectionate and attentive,” Smith remembered, but this time the photographer was disturbed by what he saw.

  THE OCTOPUS

  Usually when Leland Stanford opened the paper or one of the periodicals cropping up in California, he found an item or two extolling him. The more rails that went on the ground, the more writers sketched the portrait of a benign Western monarch who happened to be a businessman. “Stanford’s genius and energy are so conspicuous,” said one profile, he “possesses the sign and signet of the Almighty to command.” To tell the story of the West without Stanford, said another, “would be like staging Hamlet without the prince.” The encomia flowed, and the monarch sometimes turned into a musician. “The vast railroad organization obeys Stanford’s gentlest touch, as the keys of a piano obey every pulsation of the master’s hand.”1 And so forth.

  Edward Muybridge had been clipping news stories about himself and saving them in a big scrapbook. Stanford did the same, only he told his secretaries to make the selection.

  Two years passed, however, and the adoration thinned. When Muybridge photographed Occident and Abe Edgington in 1872 and 1873, Stanford found it hard to keep his collection of flattery current. The golden spike in Utah had flooded the plain with praise of the former grocer, but those waters receded, and the Central Pacific turned from savior of the people into its enemy. Stanford became the brain of a hydra-headed beast, the thinking organ of a creature not seen before, an industrial monopoly.

  Farmers were the first to feel the grip of the railroad and the first to revile it. After the Civil War, as the cash crops of gold and silver dwindled, the economy of California turned away from mining and toward agriculture. Wheat moved from the margins to the center and by the 1870s counted as the state’s biggest staple. Two variables pushed the change: giant tracts amassed by early Gold Rush migrants allowed one crop to spread across millions of acres, and the railroad itself opened the out-of-state food market. Stanford saw it happening and watched the price of grain. California wheat and other staples could not get to the Chicago commodities market and the eastern states without the Central Pacific, so why shouldn’t the company milk farmers? If prices go up in the East, why can’t freight rates go up for California crops heading that direction?

  F
rom the start the Central Pacific made 90 percent of its revenue from freight, only 10 percent from passengers, and from the first, freight meant crops. In 1873, the company moved 122,431 tons of wheat, 14,505 tons of wool, 6,362 tons of tea, 2,050 tons of coffee, 2,488 tons of tobacco, and smaller amounts of flour, butter, and oysters.2 Farmers thought it mysterious that rail prices kept going up until they approached the cost of raising the crop, shaving their margins, leaving them with little profit and a geyser of resentment that they were working for the train.

  In 1872, to push back, growers set up the California Farmers Union and started lobbying for legislation. Train systems back east and all around the farm states came in for similar loathing. The Granger movement, a farmers’ cooperative that started in Kentucky and went national, pushed for laws to limit freight rates as well as fees at grain elevators, often owned by railroads. The Grangers came to the West in the early 1870s, and their influence in Sacramento challenged that of Stanford and the associates.

  “I know the mistrust there is abroad in the community against myself and the management of this great railroad enterprise,” said Stanford in an interview. He missed being treated like a saint. “Nothing but jealousies and misunderstanding,” he said, tossing aside complaints against his power to make or break whole towns with a change in rates.3

  The associates spent a good bit of time defending their monopoly, not only buying smaller carriers, but keeping the competition off balance. During the 1870s, the Southern Pacific blocked an attempt by a rival train prince in the East, the investor Tom Scott, to build a second transcontinental line on a southern route from Louisiana to Los Angeles. Within a few years, the associates built the line themselves, from southern California across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to New Orleans.

  Financial manipulations by the railroad also gave off a bad odor. Stanford made only part of his fortune from the train’s revenue, and better than half the wealth of the associates came from paper—bond sales to investors, enormous and ever-growing bank loans, and beautifully corrupt transactions. An example of the last: about the time Muy-bridge photographed Occident, in 1872, Stanford started to deposit Central Pacific money into a sinking fund, as the law required, to pay off federal construction subsidies, the bond debt of about $50 million that would come due in twenty-five years. But the associates wanted that money, so the Central Pacific began lending the cash from the sinking fund to a subsidiary, the Western Development Corporation, which the associates also owned. As collateral for the loans, Stanford and company transferred from their accounts 17,500 shares of train stock, which they owned, to the Central Pacific, also theirs. The Central Pacific kept the stock collateral and canceled the debt. The associates wound up with cash for their securities and still had the securities themselves.4

  A railroad bubble of sorts burst in 1873, when many train companies, heavy with debt from these kinds of deals, went under during a financial panic that rolled from the eastern states to the Pacific. It began on September 18, when Jay Cooke & Company, a financial house in Philadelphia, closed its doors, groaning from giant, overvalued railroad investments. Tens of thousands of businesses failed in the cascade, and unemployment went to 14 percent. Of the railroads, one quarter of the country’s 350 train companies went bankrupt, but Stanford’s operation stayed alive. Monopolists, east and west, looked to be the villains in charge, and in the eyes of millions Stanford traded the role of benevolent Caesar for that of criminal-in-chief.5

  “The Octopus” came to life when California saw the new kind of power that four men held (or five, including the stroke-impaired Judge Crocker). For years, Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and the Crocker brothers, Charles and Edwin, controlled all track west of the Rockies and held almost all of the stock in the company. The San Francisco Wasp, a paper edited by the novelist and muckraking journalist Ambrose Bierce, ran a cartoon about what that reality meant. The illustration, by an artist named Edward Keller, depicted Stanford and partners as a pink octopus, its tentacles reaching out to strangle farmers, factories, and politicians.

  The name “Octopus” stuck (and it would follow the associates to their graves). An investor fleeced by the associates, John Robinson, complained about the company in a modestly titled book, The Octopus: A History of the Construction, Conspiracies, Extortions, Robberies, and Villainous Acts of the Central Pacific. A big-selling novel with the same disdainful tone, The Octopus: A Story of California, made writer Frank Norris, in 1901, a prophet of the West. Norris wrote: “The galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, Cyclopian, red, shooting from horizon to horizon … symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the Leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.” And further: “The whole map was gridironed by a vast, complicated network of red lines … to every quarter of the state … ran the plexus of red, a veritable system of blood circulation, complicated, dividing, and reuniting, branching, splitting, extending, throwing out feelers, offshoots, tap roots, feeders—diminutive little blood suckers that shot out from the main jugular … in … a hundred tentacles.”

  “The Curse of California,” San Francisco Wasp, August 19, 1882. Here the Octopus sees with the faces of Stanford (in its right eye) and his partner Charles Crocker (in its left). With bags of money blocking City Hall, and over the graves of families killed resisting the railroad at the town of Mussel Slough, the Octopus strangles (among others) farmers, miners, vintners, timber companies, telegraph operators, shipping, and the superannuated stagecoach. (Illustration Credit 9.1)

  The smell of corruption circled the train company like a discharge from the watery beast. The Central Pacific had its hands on the legislatures of all the western states from an early date. “Send copy of California railroad law with such amendments as you think ought to be made,” Stanford telegraphed Charles Crocker from Utah, where he met and manipulated the political class. “I want it to be introduced here.”6 In December 1872, Huntington, from Washington, D.C., telegraphed Hopkins in California to say he had just sent along some land bills coming up in the House of Representatives. “Which do you desire passed and which defeated?” Huntington asked, leaving unspoken the assumption that the company checkbook could make the difference.7

  People had seen nothing like this kind of business before the trains, no capitalist with this kind of grip. The scale and intrusions of the operation exceeded those of the state government. In one of its muscular policies, the railroad gave different rates to different shippers, making would-be customers show their books to Stanford’s accountants before the train accepted their freight, so the company could calculate the maximum to charge. In meetings banked with fake smiles, the railroad men told customers that if they shipped anything by another carrier, a steamboat or a stagecoach, their rates on the train would run 100 percent higher than if the railroad took all the freight.8

  Californians’ loathing for the train grew like a weed. Ambrose Bierce, the Wasp editor, followed his “Octopus” label by pinning a new name on the railroad president, whose company had picked up free acreage with the dimensions of a small state—“Stealing Landford.”

  The news media of the day, along with newspapers, included political pamphlets. Writers dashed off these ten-page items, little speech bombs, and tossed them into circulation in print runs of a thousand or two, for sale at newsstands and stationers and shops. In one such harangue, “The California King: His Conquests, Crimes, Confederates, Counselors, Courtiers and Vassals”—a short story with Stanford as its antihero, published anonymously and scattered around San Francisco in 1876—a fictitious Stanford says cheerfully to an audience of sycophants, “I have California pretty well at my mercy” and “I and my associates go for grand cash and political power.”9

  The Sacramento Union had been a pro-railroad newspaper for years, until 186
9, when the trains started to run, after which its editors felt an attack of bad conscience and flipped. Stanford’s hometown paper then generated a stream of invective against the train company. In answer, the associates bought a competing newspaper, the Record, and made it into a mouthpiece for train-friendly stories. Circulation for the Record disappointed, however, so the Central Pacific bought the Sacramento Union itself and closed it down.

  The most pungent jeers against the train, and the most personal, came from an insider, a lawyer called Alfred A. Cohen, whom the associates had tried to manipulate. During the 1860s, Cohen, a former banker, had gotten up two short train lines running into the cities of Oakland and Alameda; Stanford acquired them by threatening to put Cohen out of business. The associates thought they had purchased Cohen’s loyalty by paying him a $10,000-a-year retainer and giving him the job of in-house counsel (Huntington called Cohen “our Israelite friend”), but they neglected to pay their new partner a promised several million dollars in railroad stock. In retaliation, Cohen went to the state legislature, where he pushed for ceilings on freight rates, lobbying for a railroad regulation package known as the Archer Bill. The Central Pacific sued Cohen, its own insider, accusing him of embezzlement, which had the unintended effect of giving this artful speaker a megaphone in the Twelfth District Court, where all the papers reported on his fulminations.

  In one courtroom speech, Cohen painted verbal portraits of the train partners. Collis Huntington he called “the diner and winer of the Washington department of this devilfish, the railroad.” (The devilfish, or manta ray, a giant, winged sea creature, fit nicely alongside the Octopus.) Charles Crocker amounted to what Cohen called “a living, breathing, waddling monument of the triumph of vulgarity, viciousness and dishonesty.”

  The former insider kept back his most delicate embroidery for Stanford, who sat listening in the courtroom. “In common with the whole people of the state of California, it was an unfortunate hour in which I first saw Stanford,” he began. “With him, the play has been elaborately cast, and Stanford is the heavy character of the plot. Sullen and saturnine, he is remorseless, grand, gloomy, and peculiar. Stanford stalks across this courtroom to ascend to the witness box, where he speaks his part in a basso-profundo growl and departs, while the attendant actors hold their breath in awe. He has the ambition of an emperor and the spite of a peanut vendor.”10