by Edward Ball
Smith must have been angry, or maybe she was tired of acting as the go-between, because she began to talk to Muybridge about Flora and Larkyns.
“I told him that his wife slept out of the house for ten nights when he was at Belmont,” she remembered, mentioning the weeks after the birth of Florado. “I also told him that his wife once sent me to Larkyns’s room, and that Larkyns said to me, ‘Why doesn’t the old man go away to take pictures, so that Flora and I can do as we wish?’ ”
Muybridge, who thought Smith only wanted money, now saw her as a cruel messenger. He asked her whether she possessed any other letters from Flora, and Smith said yes. He asked whether Smith would give them to him. Smith said yes. Smith wanted her back pay, but she also wanted to see who would be injured by her stories.
On the morning of October 15, a Thursday, Smith went to the office of Muybridge’s attorney, a man called Sawyer, carrying two letters written by Larkyns and two written by Flora. When she arrived, Muybridge was pacing up and down in front of Sawyer’s office “looking wild and excited,” as she put it. Smith had come to be paid, Muybridge had come for the letters.
Smith said, “I have come to see about getting my money.” Muybridge asked whether she had any proof of Flora’s infidelity. “I don’t know,” Smith answered. The two went upstairs to Sawyer’s office, where Smith handed the four letters to the lawyer and then left. “As I closed the door I heard a scream and fall,” Smith later said, the sound of Muybridge dropping to the floor.
A few hours later, in the afternoon, Muybridge went to Smith’s rooms on Powell Street to question her again. What was she doing with Larkyns the day he saw her talking to him if she had not carried a note to Larkyns from Flora? Smith admitted she had taken a message to Larkyns’s office. Why had she not told him the truth about it when he brought it up? Smith said that she had seen Flora standing behind him, pale, and that Flora had silenced her with a shake of the finger.
“Mrs. Smith, you know more than you tell me. How could the woman I loved so dearly treat me so cruelly?” Smith remembered him saying. Muybridge stamped on the floor, went white in the face, and trembled. She recalled that Muybridge “talked incoherently for a while,” and then he left.
Two days later, October 17, 1874, a Saturday morning, Muybridge again went to Smith’s apartment on Powell Street, at 11:00 a.m., and knocked.
“He looked more terrible than I had ever seen him,” said Smith. “He appeared as though he had had no sleep the night before.” In the sitting room, Muybridge picked up a photograph that he saw on a table. A photograph of an infant. Florado was six months old that week. Either the picture had not been on the table two days before, on his last visit, or Smith had recently put it there.
“Who is this?” Muybridge said.
“It is your baby,” said Smith.
“I have never seen this picture before. Where did you get it and where was it taken?”
“Your wife sent it to me from Oregon. It was taken at Rulofson’s”—Bradley & Rulofson, Muybridge’s art dealer, Flora’s employer. Muybridge turned the photograph over.
“My God! What is this—‘Little Harry!’—on the back of this picture in my wife’s handwriting!”
Smith described Muybridge’s behavior.
“He exhibited the wildest excitement. His appearance was that of a madman. He was haggard and pale, his eyes glassy—his lower jaw hung down, showing his teeth—he trembled from head to foot, and gasped for breath.”
“Great God! Tell me all!” Muybridge came toward Smith with his arm raised, as though to hit her.
“I thought he was insane,” Smith said later, “and would kill me or himself if I did not answer him. And so I told him all I knew.”
Muybridge stayed for more than an hour, talking to Smith. She told him how, on the night Florado was born, after Flora had gone into labor, Larkyns and Flora had come to her at 2:00 a.m. to wake her up. She told him how Larkyns had gone out for a doctor to help deliver the boy, and how after the birth he had held Flora in his arms and kissed her, calling her “my baby.” She told Muybridge that Larkyns often went into Flora’s bedroom and locked the door. She told him that Flora had asked her to take care of Florado for several weeks so that she and Larkyns could travel together, but Smith had said she would not. Smith told Muybridge that Flora had said Larkyns was going to take her to England as his wife—that she had said it was “too bad to treat old Muybridge this way,” but she was in love.
Muybridge asked whether Smith thought Flora was, as he put it, “guilty.”
“I have seen it,” she said.
“This is more than I can bear,” Muybridge answered.
Muybridge walked to the door. He muttered, Smith said, and turned as though he had awakened from a trance.
“Flora, Flora, my heart is broken,” he said. “I would have given my heart’s best blood for you.”
Muybridge left Susan Smith’s apartment and found the way to his own house. He spent an hour weeping. He took out his Smith & Wesson #2 six-shooter, loaded a little bag with it and a short statement of last wishes, and walked to 429 Montgomery, the Bradley & Rulofson gallery. In the past he had never taken the elevator, but this time he stepped inside the cage. It was 2:30 p.m.
The photographer wore his customary tattered gray jacket and wide-brimmed felt hat. His beard stretched this way and that, and when he raised his chin, it stuck out horizontally. He carried his corncob pipe. Breathing hard, he could not smoke.6
By chance William Rulofson appeared and boarded the elevator. Rulofson told a reporter, “I was at once struck with the singularity of his appearance, and not a little alarmed. Muybridge’s lower jaw was chattering against his upper, as if he was seized with an ague, while his upper lip was drawn up to expose his teeth and as rigidly fixed as if he were paralyzed. His face was as pale as marble, and his eyes glazed like those of a madman. He was laboring under the most intense excitement, and when the elevator reached the landing he did not know which door to take, but seemed to be entirely bewildered.”
Rulofson asked Muybridge the reason for his anxiety, and the photographer answered that he wanted to speak in private. The art dealer walked Muybridge to a dressing room, a place where customers waited before having their portraits taken. The room had a chair and a sofa.
“He threw himself on the lounge and wept bitterly, moaning like a man in great distress of mind,” Rulofson remembered. “He finally became sufficiently calm to speak, and he said, ‘Rulofson, you have been a good friend to me. I want you to promise me that in case of my death you will uphold the good name of my wife, and that you will settle our business affairs with her as you would with me.’ ” Muybridge pulled out the piece of paper containing this and other instructions and asked his dealer whether he would carry them out.
“Yes, I will,” said Rulofson. “Now, what is wrong?”
“It is too horrible to tell,” Muybridge said.
Some in his position might have had trouble handling Muybridge, but William Rulofson stayed cool, possibly because he had family experience with this sort of thing. Four years earlier, Rulofson’s brother, Edward Ruloff, a linguist who lived in New York, had gone into a rage and, under mysterious circumstances, killed a shopkeeper. Ruloff was convicted and hanged. Muybridge’s dealer, with a killer in his own family, knew the value of calm.
Rulofson thought Muybridge might be capable of killing himself. He told Muybridge it would be a mistake, that suicide would rob the world of an important artist and leave more questions than answers.
“That isn’t my intention,” Muybridge said.
Rulofson later remembered that during this time, “Muybridge would frequently throw himself on the lounge and burst into paroxysms of grief.” At one point Muybridge got up off the sofa to leave, and Rulofson put his back against the door to prevent him exiting the room.
“You shouldn’t go out in this frame of mind,” Rulofson said. Muybridge grabbed him, and, as the art dealer remembered it, “with almost
superhuman strength he literally hurled me across the room, and then started down the stairs.” Rulofson ran after him and caught Muybridge in the well of the stairs, on the ground floor.
“If you leave the building in this condition you will be arrested,” Rulofson said, or shouted. Rulofson persuaded Muybridge to talk some more, and they went into another empty room.
“I again attempted to calm him and to ascertain what it was that had so affected him,” Rulofson told a newspaper. Muybridge said he had been “dishonored” by Harry Larkyns. “I tried to convince him that there might be some mistake—that the whole story was perhaps only the effect of idle gossip, and that such things were difficult to prove. Muybridge said he had the proof. He showed me with great reluctance, and many tears, a letter from his wife to Larkyns”—a letter Susan Smith had given him. He then produced one of Larkyns’s letters to Flora. One letter begged Flora to come back to San Francisco. Larkyns said that he had heard she had been unfaithful to him, but he did not and could not believe the mother of his child would betray him.
Rulofson went silent at this turn in Muybridge’s story. He asked Muybridge what he proposed to do. The photographer looked at his pocket watch. He answered that Larkyns was at Calistoga, and that he planned to go.
“And one of us will be shot.”
“For God’s sake, don’t kill him,” Rulofson said.
Muybridge put his letters in an envelope and gave them to Rulofson, telling him not to show them to anyone, telling him to destroy them if he was killed. Rulofson told Muybridge that he looked in no shape to do anything. “You are in no condition of mind,” he said. “The task requires the greatest coolness and judgment.”
It was four minutes before four o’clock. To get to Calistoga, Muybridge would have to take a ferry to Vallejo, and Rulofson knew the last ferry left at four. If Muybridge missed it, the shooting would be off. The art dealer kept arguing, prevaricating. “I talked against time,” Rulofson remembered.
Muybridge “had been looking at his watch at intervals, and he sprang out of the room and ran down the street like a deer.” Eight blocks away, at the waterfront, the Vallejo ferry took on its passengers. Rulofson said the distance took ten minutes to walk, and that only a person touched by madness could have sprinted to the boat in time.
Muybridge had been to Calistoga before. He had come to upper Napa Valley to photograph the geysers (including one that shot up every fifteen minutes). He had come to photograph some of the vineyards, which had started to spread through the valley, turning it into wine country. He had photographed the petrified forest of trees at least twice, with Flora, before and after they married. On this Saturday, Muybridge came for the last time. He took the ferry to Vallejo and there boarded a train that brought him to the northern end of Napa. He got off at Calistoga and took a buggy across the spurs of Mount St. Helena. It was an hour before midnight when he reached the Yellow Jacket Mine.
Muybridge told the story to a reporter.7
“I had no idea that I would come back alive. I thought that I would find him armed. I expected that a fight would ensue, and that I would probably be shot by him, even if I killed him too. I went to the door of the house, knocked and asked to see him. As soon as he came to the door I said to him, ‘My name is Muybridge. I have received a message about my wife—.’ Before I could say more he started to retreat into the house, so I fired on him. I did not intend to shoot him so quickly, but thought to talk with him and hear what he had to say, to hear his excuses, but he turned to run like a guilty craven when I pronounced my name, and I had to shoot him. The only thing I am sorry for is that he died so quickly.”8
Muybridge had no regrets, no shame, no remorse.
Larkyns’s body was sent back to San Francisco, where it arrived Sunday night.9 The undertakers Lockhart & Porter took charge of it, and someone made the decision not to change the bloodied shirt. They dressed Larkyns in a suit that he had among his belongings and placed him in a rosewood casket with silver-plated screws and handles. Altogether a quick turnaround, especially considering it was Sunday. The undertakers set up the casket, open, in the visiting room at 11:00 p.m.
The dead man had one enemy other than Muybridge, Cuspidor Coppinger. Edward Ellis/Coppinger was drinking in a saloon when someone came in with news of Larkyns’s body. Standing at the bar, Ellis ordered a glass of whiskey in celebration. “There is a special providence in the killing of that man,” he said. “I drink to the special providence.” According to one paper, Ellis, “who had trembled before the deceased while he lived,” left the bar and walked to Lockhart & Porter, at 39 Third Street, where Larkyns lay in his coffin. He stood over the body and stared at the face, “long and maliciously,” then walked out, rubbing his hands together, “grinning like a human jackal.” Outside, Ellis turned to his friends. “I’d walk twenty miles the stormiest night that was ever seen to gaze on that sight,” he said.
On Monday, a stream of people from the worlds of journalism and theater visited Larkyns. His face looked natural, but his forehead and nose showed bruises, made when he fell after being shot.
One of Larkyns’s friends referred to Ellis’s gloating as “a refined and brilliant exhibition of depravity”;10 another, a man called Gerald Darcy, took it upon himself to defend the memory of the dead man. On Monday, Darcy went to Ellis’s office at the Chronicle, told him loudly that he had insulted the corpse of Larkyns, and threatened to kill him. Darcy challenged Ellis to a duel, the two arranged to meet the next day, and Darcy left.11 After a few minutes Darcy returned to the drama critic’s desk and said he wanted to kill him on the spot. At this, the paper’s editors surrounded Larkyns’s friend and physically ejected him from the building. On Tuesday, Ellis skipped the 1:00 p.m. showdown appointment and instead went to the city sheriff, who arrested Darcy for slander and for attempting a duel. Despite being condoned in much of California, dueling violated section 229 in the penal code, a little-heeded provision outlawing guns at private disputes.12
Larkyns’s funeral took place Tuesday, October 20, at the Church of the Advent on Howard Street, with grand flourishes. A choir sang “Rock of Ages,” after which a baritone from McGuire’s Opera House, one of Larkyns’s haunts, sang solo another hymn, “Flee as a Bird to Your Mountain.” From the pews crowded with theater people, Larkyns’s eulogist, Henry Edwards, stepped to the pulpit. An English-born actor and theater director, Henry Edwards, thick and jowly, with wavy hair and a walrus mustache, cut a wide swath in the cultural life of the city. He was president of the Bohemian Club, a circle of artists and journalists; he had founded the acting company of the California Theatre, where Larkyns had spent nights out with Flora; and he was an expert entomologist—he sat on the board of the California Academy of Sciences and possessed the most exquisite butterfly collection west of Chicago.
In his eulogy, Edwards dressed a tale of Harry Larkyns that went beyond his fame as a confidence man and seducer.
“It is good for us to linger for a moment about his remains,” Edwards began, “and from the plain which soon will cover them to pluck a blade of memory, greener than the grass, to weave it into a chaplet of sorrow lighter than the air. He sleeps in peace, for gentle and loving hands have laid him in his grave.” Larkyns should be remembered as “an admirable linguist, familiar with the literature of most continental nations—a brilliant writer, to whom no theme appeared to come amiss—a musician of culture—an artist of refined and polished taste—and, as a conversationalist rarely excelled.” And yet, “poverty always hung like a gaunt specter about his footsteps, and the generous fountains of his nature were dried up by her touch.” Edwards had no time for Muybridge. “The grandest and most heroic struggles of Larkyns’s life,” he said, “were the hand-to-hand conflict which he waged against those who reviled him here and who were far beneath him in every point of manliness and truth and honor.”13
A hearse carried Harry Larkyns’s coffin to the Masonic Cemetery, where his friends placed it in the vault pending instructions fro
m Larkyns’s relatives in England. These apparently never came. No record of his burial can be found.
The day before the funeral, two bailiffs put Edward Muybridge on the train in Calistoga and brought him twenty-five miles to the town of Napa, the county seat, where a Sheriff Corwin took charge of the perpetrator. A crowd watched the prisoner transfer. One said, “Muybridge is a man of fine appearance, with sprightly, elastic tread, and he tripped lightly down the steps and onto the sidewalk.” The sheriff gave Muybridge a standard cell, and the photographer, known to be ascetic, made no complaint. Corwin gave the prisoner books and stationery, plus a menu from the Napa Hotel across the street. Prisoners had to pay for their own meals. Muybridge didn’t mind ordering from the kitchen of the four-story brick inn that had just opened adjacent to the courthouse—the plates were still warm when Corwin carried them in.14
For days before and after the murder, as usual, Leland Stanford had been preoccupied with horses. His star gelding, Occident, had a big race scheduled at the end of October, and several hours a day Stanford watched his trainers put the horse through exercise. Occident was to meet a stallion called Fullerton, whose owners had sent him from the East Coast to challenge Stanford’s dominance in harness racing. The horses would run three heats at the Bay District Track for a purse of $3,500. Stanford liked these single matches—he had put Occident through several. They generated good press, something the unpopular man needed.15
One day during training, although there’s no direct evidence, Stanford seems to have interrupted his regime to send a message to a friend, a lawyer. Wirt Pendegast, age thirty-two, practiced law in the town of Napa, but Stanford knew him from his previous life in Sacramento.16 During six years as a California senator, Pendegast had defended the Central Pacific and pushed laws in its favor. Stanford knew Pendegast because the rail president kept track of which lawmakers stood with him and which had to be brought over with an envelope containing an inducement. Stanford apparently told Pendegast that someone he knew had gotten into trouble in Napa, and that man needed an attorney. It wouldn’t have been the first time Stanford had come to the aid of one of “his people” who had collided with the law. He once wrote the governor to ask for a pardon for a railroad lineman sent up to San Quentin.17 There is no proof in Muybridge’s case that Stanford intervened, no paper trail (why would he want his handprints on a murder case?), but the rich man probably sent word to Pendegast that “my photographer” needed help, and to get over to the courthouse.