The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  In the fall of 1873, their power having outgrown little Sacramento—and maybe to escape the poison that gripped them in their hometown—Stanford and his partners decided to move their business, and themselves, to San Francisco.11 The move began when Stanford bought sixty acres around the intersection of Fourth and Townsend Streets, near the Bay, building rail yards and a four-story brick headquarters. Stanford’s office had the biggest footprint, with a vast Persian rug and sprawling oak desk (curiously empty, people noticed), the walls decorated with engravings of Washington and Lincoln.

  The associates simultaneously built new houses for themselves at the top of California Hill, the highest point in the city. Stanford and Mark Hopkins bought a city block and divided it in half, with Stanford’s portion to the east, with the grand view of the Bay. Charles Crocker bought a half block for himself, next to his partners’ stake. (Collis Huntington might have joined them, but he still lived in New York.) Stanford added a small lot on the corner of California and Powell Streets to build a separate, two-story stable for some of his horses.

  Leland and Jenny Stanford moved into the Grand Hotel, on Market Street, while they planned what to build. In late 1874, as construction started, they rented a house a block away from the site of their new mansion, which inched upward at the corner of California and Powell Streets. In April 1876, one paper remarked that the extraordinary house was nearly done, and that it had the ordinary address of 901 California Street.12 The couple moved in that summer with their six-year-old son, Leland Jr.

  The associates built the grandest houses in town, fine and garish, using the contracting arm of the railroad, the Western Development Company, which ran the train’s hundreds of buildings. Charles Crocker ran into a problem with his mansion, a somber, brown balloon of a house, and the trouble followed him for years. Crocker had picked up nearly an acre, and to make it square he had bought out several homeowners and torn down their houses—excepting the house of a German American family called Yung. The title holder, the undertaker Nicholas Yung, refused to sell his two-story cottage at the northwest corner of Crocker’s tract at the price Crocker wanted to pay. In a show of pique, Crocker had his builders put up a forty-foot fence, as tall as the Yung family’s house, that wrapped around three sides of it, entirely cutting off its light and air. Yung replied by staking a flagpole on his house, flying a skull-and-bones banner, and laying out an empty coffin on his roof. Crocker’s “spite fence,” his intent to strangle a neighbor, became a symbol of the railroad’s greed. Tourists by the thousands visited it in order to marvel at the avarice and venality of the train princes. Nicholas Yung and his family moved out, but they left their house standing, surrounded by its wooden cocoon. Eventually the undertaker died, but his widow kept up their defiance, and the fence and empty, rotting house stood for thirty years—until 1904, when, Crocker and the Yung couple now dead, the property went to new owners, who leveled it.13

  The Charles Crocker “spite fence” (behind the white house), forty feet tall, encasing the home of a neighbor who refused to sell his land to Crocker, one of the associates of the Central Pacific (Illustration Credit 9.2)

  One year Jane Stanford “surprised” her husband with a birthday gift, a private railroad car ordered up from the Central Pacific yards. (Illustration Credit 9.3)

  No one had seen this kind of money before; Leland and Jenny found it a full-time occupation just trying to spend it. Jenny decided to give her husband a private railroad car for his birthday, and the Central Pacific shops spent months on the design. Fueled with gaslight and steam heat, it had two bedrooms, a living room, dining room, and kitchen, plus servant quarters. The couple used it as a virtual second home for many years. Leland encouraged his wife to help herself to diamonds, and over the years she acquired a pound or two. The jewels turned into her fetishes after a time, so much so that one year she commissioned a painter to collect them all on one canvas, so she could look at them in a picture.

  Jane Stanford, in a photograph retouched with paint, ca. 1870 (Illustration Credit 9.4)

  Astley David Middleton Cooper, Mrs. Stanford’s Jewel Collection, 1898. Oil on canvas, 50 × 75 inches. The artist was hired by Jane Stanford to inventory her stock of diamonds in a six-foot-wide painting. (Illustration Credit 9.5)

  Stanford liked to impress people with his house; he took pleasure in his excess. One day, a British shipping company executive visited the rail builder at his office; after the meeting, his wife being away with Leland Jr., Stanford invited the man to dinner. The Englishman wrote about the night in his diary. “The house I heard spoken of as the finest in the western part of America,” he remembered, “and in San Francisco I saw no others that rivaled it in size.”14 Stanford showed his guest around the fifty rooms, but silently; then he took his company to the stables, where in further silence they looked over horses and carriages. The two men had dinner, alone, in the sixty-foot dining room. Following a multicourse and largely wordless meal, Stanford brought his guest into the library, where life-size portraits of himself and his wife hung on the walls.

  “For the next half hour,” the visitor remembered, “we talked. That is, I talked and Mr. Stanford sat silent. I do not say that he listened, for that I had no means of knowing. He merely sat, regarding me not impolitely but with a face from which all expression had been erased. He may have heard every word I uttered, or he may have heard nothing. I began by feeling that I must be boring him, then by wondering if I had perhaps given him cause for great offense. Next, it occurred to me that he might be sleepy; finally I became certain that he was ill.” The host led his dinner company out and thanked him for the visit.

  Many remarked on Stanford’s impassive manner, and he grew more cryptic as he aged. He surrendered to his possessions the task of communicating with people.

  LITTLE HARRY

  Flora and Edward Muybridge gave their son an invented name—Florado Helios Muybridge. It came from his mother, Flora (with a masculine suffix attached—do). It borrowed the whole-cloth name of his father, Helios, and also his father’s made-up surname, Muybridge.

  In late 1873, when Flora was pregnant, Muybridge suspected Flora and Harry Larkyns might be lovers. Susan Smith, the midwife, who would soon deliver the baby, had witnessed a scene at the house. Flora had given Smith a letter to take to Larkyns, and Smith had done it. While Smith stood with Larkyns in the doorway of the Post newspaper, having just handed him the note, Muybridge walked past. That night at 9:00 p.m. Muybridge came into Flora’s room, where Flora sat talking to Smith; he asked Smith if she had seen Larkyns that afternoon.

  “I was just going to say yes,” Smith remembered, “when I caught sight of Mrs. Muybridge. Her face was white as death. And she held her finger up warningly. As her love affairs were none of my business, I passed it off by saying that I had gone to the newspaper office about an advertisement, and thought I had seen him.” Muybridge turned to Flora and pulled an envelope from his pocket, which he had apparently found, and which contained a different, unsigned letter. Muybridge asked if Larkyns had written it to her. Flora said he had not. Muybridge tossed the letter at Flora. She laughed and said the note was a joke, and that she knew who had written it.

  Flora Muybridge, pregnant, photographed by her husband, Edward, in 1874 (Illustration Credit c10.1)

  Susan Smith remembered, “He was pale and said he hoped to God that what she said was true. He asked her to swear to it.”

  Muybridge wondered what happened to the money that he gave his wife. “I was always a man of very simple tastes and few wants,” he told a reporter, “and I did not spend much money. What I had left after paying my expenses, I gave to my wife, and yet she was always wanting more. I could never see what she did with it.”

  Harry Larkyns lived generously, often buying meals for people, and dressing like a rake. He found ample use for cash from the man he was cuckolding.

  In early 1874, Muybridge talked to managers at the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, a possible client. He hoped they m
ight hire him and send him to Central America to photograph the carrier’s ports of call. If so, Muybridge would be able to get away again for another five or six months—and he felt happiest alone, on the road. Flora Muybridge had an uncle and aunt in Oregon, Thomas and Flora Stump, the steamboat captain and his wife, whom she had lived with as a young girl. Muybridge asked Flora whether she would stay for a while with her relatives in Oregon after the baby was born. “I told her I would send her up to Oregon to her uncle and give her money to pay her expenses there while I was away, if she would go,” Muybridge remembered. Flora said she would.

  Florado was born April 16. Maybe Muybridge hoped to end his wife’s love affair by putting Harry Larkyns out of reach. Or maybe his first act as a father was to put Flora and the baby aside so he could travel. In June 1874 Flora took a steamship from San Francisco north to Oregon with two-month-old Florado.

  The Stump family lived at a place called The Dalles, near Portland, and from here Flora resumed writing letters to Larkyns. On July 11, she wrote Susan Smith, the nurse, “I wish I had a nice little home with you-know-who … I’m not ashamed to say I love him better than anyone else upon this earth, and no one can change my mind.”1

  Harry Larkyns made a meager living from his newspaper items about the shows and starlets of San Francisco’s theaters. At one point he tried to save himself some work by subcontracting his writing job. The scheme involved another journalist, a man called Edward Ellis, who used a made-up name in print, “Coppinger.”

  The story goes that one night Larkyns met a man in the street, “shivering and hungry,” an Englishman who gave his name as Edward Ellis. Ellis leaned on Larkyns for help, and the Scotland native took pity. Larkyns brought Ellis home, cleaned him up, and nursed his hangover. Ellis made good company, Larkyns discovered, and as a writer he knew a surprising amount about theater. When Ellis had recovered, he and Larkyns struck a deal. Edward Ellis/Coppinger would write items for Larkyns’s paper, the Evening Post; Larkyns would submit them as his own, and they would split the money. The scheme worked for some months, Ellis/Coppinger reviewing shows and Larkyns getting credit, but Ellis grew tired of writing in the dark. He sent an anonymous letter to the editor of the Post claiming Larkyns did not write his own copy. Larkyns’s editor confronted him, the writer admitted the fraud, and he was fired. Edward Ellis/Coppinger took over Larkyns’s job, going to work for a rival paper, the Chronicle, writing about theater and art.

  Larkyns failed to take pleasure from this turn of events. After losing his job, whenever Larkyns saw Ellis/Coppinger on the street, he extracted from his former protégé a strange, ritual punishment. Larkyns would grab Coppinger by the nose and jaw, pull open his mouth, and spit into it. Word about this treatment got around, and Ellis acquired a nickname—“Cuspidor Coppinger.”2

  With Flora five hundred miles away in Oregon, unable to provide handouts, Harry Larkyns looked for better work. He found a job as an agent of John Wilson’s Circus, a San Francisco company trying to drum up appearances out of town. John Wilson was a forty-five-year-old impresario and a native of Scotland. He might have empathized with Larkyns, who called himself “an Inverness man.” Wilson had run a circus in San Francisco for fifteen years—minstrels, tumblers, acrobats, contortionists, the performing elephant Albert, and two trick mules known as Pete and Barney. In January 1874, Wilson had opened a new venue in San Francisco on a lot that fronted New Montgomery Street, and he wanted to take his act on the road. He hired Larkyns, with his lovely speech, to get the bookings.3

  Larkyns probably had a hand in a contract that sent a group of Wilson’s performers to Portland, Oregon, where Flora had retreated with her baby. He regretted it. In San Francisco, Larkyns heard rumors that Flora was sleeping with someone from Wilson’s show. He got jealous and wrote a letter to Susan Smith, the nurse.

  Wednesday

  Dear Mrs. Smith:

  You will be surprised to hear from me … but I have been so uneasy and worried about that poor girl that I cannot rest, and it is a relief to talk or write about her.… I want you to be perfectly frank, open and honest with me. If you hear anything of that little lady, no matter what, tell me right out. She may return to the city and beg you not to let me know; but do not, pray do not, listen to her. Do not be afraid that I shall get angry with her. I will never say a harsh word to her, and even if things turn out as badly as possible, and I find she has been deceiving me all along, I can only be grieved and sorry, but I can never be angry with her. I ascertained today that all the minstrels will return from Portland on the next steamer, which will arrive on Tuesday. I cannot and will not believe anything so bad as that rumor.… I have written to the morning and evening papers in Portland today, and advertised in the “personals,” as so—“Flora and Georgie: If you have a heart you will write to H. Have you forgotten that April night when we were both so pale?” She will understand this. Mrs. Smith, I assure you, I am sick with anxiety and doubt, the whole thing is so incomprehensible and I am so helpless. If an angel had come and told me she was false to me, I would not have believed it. I cannot attend to my work, nor sleep. I cannot help thinking of that speech of hers to you the day before she left, when she begged you not to think ill of her, whatever you might hear. And yet Mrs. Smith, after all that has come and gone, would she be so utterly untrue to me, so utterly false? If she had nothing to conceal from me, why does she not write?

  Harry Larkyns

  Larkyns wrote Flora in Oregon and accused her vaguely of sleeping with another man. She wrote to a friend, Sarah Smith, daughter of the nurse Susan Smith, to complain.

  The Dalles [Oregon]

  July 11, 1874

  Dear Sarah,

  I received such a letter from H.L. I was so provoked. He ought to know me better than to accuse me of such a thing, but I may forgive him. I am not ashamed to say I love him … unless with his own lips he tells me that he does not care for me any more. I don’t want Harry to come up here, as much as I would like to see him, for this is a small place, and people cannot hold their tongues.

  Mrs. Muybridge

  P.S. Destroy my letters after reading them, for you might lose one, and it might get picked up.4

  Harry Larkyns quit his job promoting Wilson’s Circus, perhaps over his jealousy about “the minstrels,” the company musicians who had seen Flora. He needed money. Larkyns next tried his hand in the small corner of the mining trade that depended on writers. He wrote items for a newsletter about mining called the Weekly Stock Report and at the same time struck a deal with some speculators to work on a map of the mercury mines in Napa County, north of San Francisco.

  In July 1874, Larkyns started traveling back and forth from San Francisco to the town of Calistoga, seventy-five miles upcountry.

  From scrub hills near Calistoga, at a place called Pine Flat, Larkyns wrote a friend to complain about the dirty work he was doing surveying the mines.

  Pine Flat

  August 29, 1874

  Dear Old L——,

  Up in the mountains, riding twenty and thirty miles a day, groping along tunnels, clambering up and down shafts; nothing but mines, mines, mines; everybody making money, apparently, except the poor devils who work hardest, myself and the pick-and-hammer men to wit. The country up here is very pretty. The weather is hot and if I only had a companion I might have a very pleasant trip; but I’m as blue as the sky and lakes. This situation sticks to me tighter than poverty. Sleep and I are strangers, and if I could get along without eating I’d prefer it, for feeding is hard labor. The thing is that the last two years have broken me down terribly; the undeserved disgrace where I was unknown, and the uphill fight ever since have been too much to carry. I laugh off everything, and have the reputation of being the most devil-may-care, jovial case; but I feel my position every hour in every day, as I do not think there lives a bitterer man than myself. All my life had been a holiday; I was admired, courted and respected everywhere, and from holding up my head as an equal among the proudest people in the
world, I dropped in a day to the level—at least in the eyes of others—of riff-raff terms. I tell you, it’s hard to bear. This map business is making me gray-haired.5

  H. Larkyns

  Susan Smith felt abused by Flora and Muybridge—they owed her for two months of work, and they had not paid. Smith brought up the money to Muybridge, and he said that he had given cash for her wages to Flora. Smith then went to Larkyns, asking him to help her write an invoice and an appeal for the money. He did, and in early fall 1874 she took these papers to municipal court to see about filing a suit in order to collect. When the hearing came, in October, the judge told Smith that in order to prove her claim she had to produce a letter from Flora Muybridge documenting Smith’s employment and services. Smith complied, turning in such a letter, and on October 13, represented by one Samuel Harding, of Harding & Co., collectors, Smith won a judgment against the Muybridge couple for back pay plus court costs.

  The next day, Muybridge spoke to Smith about the court decision—he would pay, but he asked her for a little time to get the money together. As they talked, Smith mentioned the letter she had shown to the judge at the hearing. Muybridge asked to see it, and Smith handed him a letter from Flora. Muybridge read it and became agitated—evidently Harry Larkyns’s name came up several times in the letter. “He said it was strange that his wife should mention Larkyns so familiarly,” Smith remembered.