by Edward Ball
Large Assortment of Baxter’s Exquisite Oil Prints [and] a stock of Illustrated, Fine Art and Standard Books … such as Halliwell’s Shakespeare; Hogarth’s Works … Flowers of Loveliness; Switzerland Illustrated; &c, &c, &c, all illustrated with highly finished steel engravings.13
This kind of effete inventory did not fly out the door. A year went by, until, looking for better business, Muggridge improvised, putting to work a printmaking scheme that might take advantage of the city’s violence and scandals.
In October 1855, a man who called himself “James King of William,” a former banker put out of work by the financial failures, began editing a newspaper, the San Francisco Bulletin. Charismatic and angry, James King of William explained his strange name as follows: too many men named James, too many named King, and his hometown was called “William.” Muggridge was drawn to the showy editor and placed ads in his paper. The San Francisco Bulletin baited corrupt politicians, and in six months it became the city’s biggest daily, with a circulation of ten thousand. Among his targets, King of William criticized one James Casey, a member of the city’s governing council, the Board of Supervisors. The paper accused Casey of stuffing ballot boxes to get elected in San Francisco and, for good measure, of being a former inmate at New York’s Sing Sing prison. On May 14, 1856, the exposé being too much truth to tolerate, Casey encountered King of William in the street, and shot him. A crowd gathered at the site, turned into a posse, and within a day several hundred men had come together at a meeting. The men, half of them “respectable,” half of them less so, called themselves defenders of civilization and declared that they were tired of crime and corruption and random violence. They formed a gang, the Vigilance Committee.
James King of William lingered for a week and then died, becoming a martyr to law and order.
With news of his death, the vigilantes grew to 2,500 men, who occupied a warehouse and turned it into an armory—called “Fort Gunnybags” for the stacks of sandbags piled outside—built an arsenal of guns, and planned reprisals in behalf of middle-class virtue. They stormed the city jail and extracted two prisoners—Charles Cora, who had killed a U.S. marshal, and James Casey, killer of the newspaperman—and lynched both in front of an enormous crowd.
In the chaos, Muggridge saw an opportunity. James King of William in his death was transformed into a symbol of middle-class normalcy in lawless and backward California. In August, Muggridge advertised that he had hired “Mr. Chas. Fenderich, the well-known artist of this city, formerly of Washington, D.C.,” to make an engraving of King of William, “a faithful likeness of the people’s champion, who ‘fell at his post doing duty.’ ” He promised that this piece of art, “published by E. J. Muggridge” and available for purchase, “shall be an ornament fit for the walls of the drawing-room.”
The engraving sold, sold, sold. Muggridge placed ads for it eight times in four months, raking in money, until the fire went out of the uprising.14
For many weeks the Vigilance Committee put the legitimate government out of business and policed San Francisco with a private militia. The vigilantes hanged four men and drove thirty-two out of the city with death threats. Having faced down some criminals, the uprising looked elsewhere for enemies and found them among immigrants, especially Chinese. Hundreds of Chinese endured random attacks on the street—beatings, the cutting of the long braid, or queue, worn by men, and night raids that smashed storefronts in the Asian ghetto. Even though Muggridge had made money from the vigilante wave, as a recent immigrant the bookseller felt vulnerable to the nationalistic rage. Muggridge had been in San Francisco for just a year when, in November 1856, he filed an application for U.S. citizenship. Perhaps it was insurance—better to be naturalized than a crummy non-American, like the others—or maybe he liked what he had seen.15
The redoubt in San Francisco known as Fort Gunnybags, from which vigilantes ruled the city using mob actions and lynching in 1856, the summer after E. J. Muggridge arrived. (Illustration Credit c14.3)
He was E. J. Muggridge to his customers, but in May 1856 came another name change: “Muygridge.”16 He put the new name in his advertisements (and probably pronounced it “My-gridge”). The bookseller had thrown off the grunting sound of his birth name and replaced it with a little melody.
E. J. Muygridge had a brother six years younger, named Thomas, who was fourteen when Muygridge left for America. At sixteen Thomas had moved from the brothers’ hometown in England to a port city in Wales, where he apprenticed as a seaman. At the end of his contract, in 1856, when he was twenty, Thomas joined the merchant marine, and six months after he took his first bunk on a cargo ship, he decided to follow his older brother to America. Muygridge had possibly written home to Thomas, but letters or not, the magnet of get-rich stories pulled people out of Europe, and seamen notoriously deserted ships that made it to California. When the new sailor’s clipper turned up in San Francisco, Thomas walked off the ship and didn’t turn back.
The last of Muygridge’s brothers back home was named George. Records are slim, but around this time George also fetched up in California. He was twenty-three, and he probably came the well-traveled route—Liverpool to New York, New York to the isthmus, a ship to San Francisco. George and Thomas must have looked up to their older brother, because when each of them reached town, each started using their brother’s invented last name, Muygridge.17
The Golden State played on the fantasies of young men. Its stories had caused three brothers to come eight thousand miles from England to a place none of them had ever seen. George, Thomas, and Edward had this much in common with Leland Stanford and his family, although none of them knew it. Just as all the Muygridge brothers had gone to California, Stanford and all of his brothers, five of them, had done the same.
Thomas and George Muygridge went up from San Francisco into the Sierras, where they dug for gold or shoveled for copper, another mineral that had turned up. (On the way to the mountains, the Muygridge brothers probably provisioned in Sacramento, at one of the Stanford brothers’ stores.) The mines never aroused Edward Muygridge, the oldest brother, who stayed in San Francisco with his books. Thomas and George left few traces, and in these years their brother Edward also appears only in scattered records. In October 1857, Muygridge published another moneymaker, a pamphlet about an enormous steamship that had showed up in the harbor, the Great Eastern. A new British vessel, the goliath Great Eastern could carry four thousand passengers—although half of them had to be crammed into steerage—and was designed to sail ten thousand miles without having to take on fresh coal for its boilers. Muygridge had a personal link to this giant machine. The Great Eastern was the improbable creation of an engineer named Isambard Brunel, a celebrity of industry in England and France. In England, Brunel had become famous for having built one of the earliest railroads, the Great Western line, which ran southwest from London through Kingston—the same train Muygridge had seen as a child, the one that blasted through his hometown. Muygridge made a pocketful of money publicizing Brunel’s latest feat, a huge steamship riding out in San Francisco Bay.18
He must have sold inventory enough to stay afloat, enough pictures and engravings and prints, because he kept placing ads and more ads. In December 1856 Muygridge listed “Christmas & New Year’s presents” for sale, pushing his “magnificent illustrated books” and pointing out that anyone could come around and look without having to buy. He said his little showroom (“upstairs” at 113 Montgomery) kept its door open until 10:00 p.m. (He probably lived and sold at the same address.) Like many in the city, he was transient, shifting around between rented rooms. In summer 1858 Muygridge moved two blocks north to 163 Clay Street, a few doors west of Montgomery.19
Despite the book dealer’s efforts to prop up the standard of discourse, San Francisco’s mental climate remained low and grainy. Next to Muygridge’s ads in the paper were pitches in the vein of “Madam Sweit,” a psychic entrepreneur. (“The renowned Clairvoyant, Madam Sweit, has returned for a short time to San
Francisco, and can be consulted in the TRANCE STATE, on matters of business. She guarantees to her clients a more accurate delineation of character, capabilities, etc. than can be obtained from any phrenologist living.”) Where Muygridge advertised books at five dollars or more, Madam Sweit had easier terms: “Ladies $2, and Gentlemen $3.”
Good citizens in the Western frontier like Muygridge who felt they represented a wave of middle-class stability pushed for moral uplift. In 1856 a group of wage workers founded the Mechanics Institute, an effort to resist debt slavery and indentured labor. The flood of Chinese migrants, whose bosses pushed down wages for all workers, put at risk skilled labor—carpenters and metal workers, bricklayers and contractors, smiths and machinists. The Mechanics Institute opened in a pair of rooms, where its members held meetings and talks, and then put on a trade fair where its members could get out their message. Workers with a trade wanted California to know, in effect, that they were better than “slaves and coolies”—blacks and Chinese. The Mechanics fair was held in September 1857 in a makeshift building on Montgomery Street, and Muygridge pitched in by renting space for his books and prints. He also sold photographs, probably those of his friend Silas Selleck, as well as others he had bought to flip for a profit. In this quick-turnover group he advertised pictures by Carleton Watkins, who would later be his rival in the photography of Yosemite Valley.20
To judge from the newspapers, Muygridge was now running one of the few high-culture businesses in the city. Next to his one-inch-square announcements about art books appear several columns of ads for gin, cutlery, ale, cigars, furniture, Scotch whiskey, clocks, cognac, paper, and wine. One “teacher of the guitar, M.V. Ferrer,” offers services, as do two daguerreotype artists, whose notices peek through the liquor-heavy consumer glut. One of these photographers is Muygridge’s New York comrade, Silas Selleck.
A commercial photograph by E. J. Muybridge, taken in 1872, depicts a stationer and bookstore in San Francisco, LeCount Bros. and Mansur’s, the kind of good-citizen outlet where the bookseller marketed his encyclopedias and art prints. (Illustration Credit c14.4)
In May 1858, Muygridge started publishing another moneymaker, a patriotic serial. The Alta California ran an item on “a new work now being issued in numbers by the San Francisco publisher, E. J. Muygridge,” called The History of the United States. This time, Muygridge took delivery of a manuscript from a writer in New York called Jesse Ames Spencer and published the result in pamphlet installments (“copies from one to four have been laid on our table,” said the paper). As he had done back east, Muygridge sold this history serial by subscription, one piece at a time, until a full book could be put into a binding.
The English immigrant thought he would stay in San Francisco, so he pushed and tried to climb the social ladder. He got involved with the city’s only book collection, the Mercantile Library, which had opened in 1853 with a collection of 2,500 books, shelved in two rooms, with fees required for access. Members of the Mercantile were merchants, men more polished than the carpenters of the Mechanics Institute, men who said they liked to read and to talk. Muygridge sold books to this kind of person. (The insecurity of such men, however, appeared in a disclaimer that the library included in its own printed catalogue: “If this publication is inferior in style to those issued from Eastern presses, its place of publication [San Francisco] is pleaded as an apology.”) Muygridge advised on what materials the library should acquire and followed through by selling them just that, until the collection grew to eleven thousand books. The Mercantile Library soon named Muygridge to its board of directors, his first social promotion. In 1859, the library moved into a new space, with one room of books, a reading room hung with history paintings (Arrival of the Immigrant Family and Landing of Columbus), and a “chess room” furnished with sixteen inlaid game tables. In San Francisco, this was the most refined you could get, orderly and sedate, cigars and newspapers, with dues paid quarterly by a select 1,400 people. The affiliation helped Muygridge wear a little crown of respectability.21
The bookseller had pulled his brothers Thomas and George into the California gamble, but they decided to ignore books and went instead to the mines. Muygridge probably heard the news by word of mouth: in December 1858, George Muygridge died in the Sierras, age twenty-five. As often, the cause of death did not make it into the announcement, which itself appeared in the Sacramento paper four months late, suggesting that George Muygridge had been in a remote mining camp. George had followed his older brother to the edge of America and ended with nothing.22
Edward was twenty-eight. A few months after his brother’s death, Muygridge decided to get out of California and go home to England. The timing looks surprising: he was making money and fitting himself into the small bourgeois elite. But his mother, widowed and alone, was back in Britain, and she had seen all of her children go off to California. And Muygridge had been in America for nine years. Perhaps he felt something of his mother’s loss, or maybe he just missed home.
He began by placing an ad in the paper, saying he was “selling off, to close business.” The ad had no results, and in the fall he placed another, this time looking for assistants—“two salesmen,” maybe in hopes that one might take the business off his hands. For the rest of 1859 Muygridge issued a string of must-sell notices. “Illustrated books, engravings, oil prints … the entire stock must be closed out by the Fifteenth Day of August,” one said. These also drew a thin response. Finally he advertised that he was auctioning his inventory to get rid of everything. “Come and see!—Intends quitting business immediately after New Year’s.” Muygridge ran seven announcements about closing down shop in a period of six months. No one wanted to buy his business, and readers in the city failed to clean out his storage rooms. And so Muygridge decided to give what was left of the operation to his one living brother—Thomas Muygridge, age twenty-four—who was back in town from the mines and at loose ends.
In his notices, Muygridge left it unsaid whether he was leaving America for good. He mentioned he would take orders for European finery—the art books, architecture folios, and engravings—and ship them to clients in California from London. He gave rates (10 percent on small orders, scaling down to 2.5 percent for orders over $1,000). He would be happy to take deposits, he said, before June 5, when he planned to sail on the steamship Golden Age.23
The people on the stagecoach knew the crash was coming, because it took some time. E. J. Muygridge seems to have known he might die in the wreck. A report said he tried to save himself, but since he could not remember anything, someone told him what had happened—nine days later, when he woke up.
The steamship Golden Age had gone from San Francisco without him. Maybe the paltry income of recent months put the ticket out of reach—but fortunately a cheaper ride could be had. On July 2, Muygridge got on the Butterfield stage. The Butterfield Overland Mail Company had a contract with the Post Office to carry letters going east of the Mississippi. Twice a week at 1:00 p.m. a stagecoach went out from San Francisco on a meandering, 2,800-mile, twenty-five-day trip. Sacks of mail made the money, while passengers, up to eight, meant cream on top. The stage turned into the poor man’s American crossing. It replaced the covered wagon routes across the unbuilt midlands, adding new comforts, like dingy hotels and beer stops. To take the Butterfield meant six hundred hours inside a shaking cab, seventy-five food breaks, fifty stops to change horses, occasional overnights with no hotel, and uncountable roadside piss breaks—a dirty, boring, migraine-making trip, racketing down the straights, dribbling across streams, rivers of dust through open windows, three days descending the Sierras, saloons, lunches bought from kitchens at daybreak, up the rises, down the hollows, a different bed (and sometimes no bed) every night—from San Francisco to Los Angeles, across New Mexico, through the desert into Arizona, across Texas, through Arkansas, and into Missouri. Anyone who could stand it deserved to pay as little as possible. At the last stop, in St. Louis, the men who had endured a month on the road washed their c
lothes and got on a train, ending in New York or Washington, or Charleston or Atlanta. And it was usually men—when a woman took the Butterfield, it made the newspapers.
Muygridge might have thought the Butterfield would not be too bad. Wagons had flattened the route from California to St. Louis, the path was worn, a lot of hotels had gone in. But it does not appear that Muygridge had browsed the reports. If he had, he might have taken the boat, because news of killings on the Butterfield came every few days. Two weeks before his trip, at one of the line’s horse depots, on the Concho River in northwest Texas, “Camanches” raided the stage, killing a station keeper and taking ten horses. The week Muygridge left, a Butterfield passenger called Schellenberger, in the middle of a cross-country slog, shot his wife in the stomach. “She is alive but not expected to survive,” the stringer said. Was it an accident, or did the trip cause the man to lose it?24
Muygridge took the stage on a Monday. The eight seats were sold out, with four men taking the whole trip, four planning to stop along the way.
He had spent four years in California soaking up the strange pageant of the West, from the miners and speculators to Chinese bosses, gangsters, vigilantes, all sorts taking the main chance. He might go home for good, or he might come back. He wasn’t sure, but either way there was something about the Americans, their craziness and fantasies, that must have been hard to forget.
The style of stagecoach that Muygridge took across the country in the summer of 1860. The Butterfield Overland Mail Company used a so-called Concord carriage, made in Concord, New Hampshire, with six or four horses, a duffle in the rear for the mail, and eight long-haul travelers in the cab. (Illustration Credit c14.5)