by Edward Ball
One more piece of public madness had lately exploded. In 1858, at a place called Virginia City, in a section of Utah Territory that was later wrapped into Nevada, miners found some “blue stuff,” lead ore with lines of silver in it. Word went to the miners in California, many of them working the sputtering gold fields. A stampede ensued almost as fierce as the Gold Rush ten years before. In six months, four thousand men went to Nevada from California as the ore strike known as the Comstock Lode turned into a river of silver. Between January and July 1860, another twenty thousand men went over the Sierra mountains and into the new mining hills. In the months before he left California, Muygridge would have watched San Francisco emptying out. He would have seen the silver lust in the eyes of plenty of men, a new tide washing his old turf.
When his stagecoach crashed in eastern Texas and threw him from the cab, Muygridge was near the end of a four-week, 2,800-mile trip from California to Missouri. (Illustration Credit c14.6)
His response to it was slow, but a reaction did eventually materialize. As Muygridge bumped and rattled east on the Butterfield, he seems to have thought about it. He had come to the United States to sell Europe to the Americans, hustling heavy books to a mainly indifferent public. Maybe he could do the reverse and sell America to the Europeans. He was now half American and half British. Maybe the craziness of California could be packaged and sold to his people back home. In England, as it turned out, Muygridge would eventually try to sell some of the fantasy of America, the silver rush, to his own countrymen, to English investors. He seems not to have told anyone about this plan, and it would be several years before it came into focus. But when the time came in London, he would try his hand raising money on the dream of the Nevada mines. Maybe with this, he could become one of the rich, half-mad Americans himself.
The Butterfield crept across the Southwest. Three weeks on the road passed without incident, until the stagecoach reached Texas. The stage rattled through the pinelands of eastern Texas, where the dry plains rolled like a fluttering sheet. It was the middle of a heat wave, with a week of hundred-degree temperatures reported in the papers. The passengers sweated and pulled up the canvas windows to admit only hot blasts. On July 22, 1860, sometime during the night—just beyond a place called Mountain Station, near what is now Fort Worth (according to the report telegraphed back to California)—the driver cracked his whip. The six horses, fresh from the last depot, started on a run, and the driver couldn’t stop them. At a gallop, with the coach banging along behind, the stage came to an escarpment where the road began a long downhill stretch. Years later, Muygridge described what happened.25
“I recollect taking supper at a stagehouse on the road. We then got on board the stage, which was drawn by six wild mustang horses. After leaving that station we had traveled probably for half an hour—we were then just entering the Texas Cross Timbers. The mustangs ran and the driver was unable to control them.” The Cross Timbers were a length of woods between Texas and southern Kansas. The coach started down the hill, swerving, the horses running for perhaps half a mile. “The brakes were applied, but were found to be useless,” Muygridge remembered.
“Just as we were getting to the Timbers,” Muygridge said, “I remarked that the best plan would be for us to get out of the back of the stage, because I saw that an accident would take place. I took out my knife to cut the canvas back, and was preparing to leave when the stage ran against a rock or a stump and threw me out. I landed against my head.” He did not remember the next part. When the coach flew off the road, it threw him from the cab and headfirst into a tree, or a rock. (Another passenger, less badly hurt, had told him these things, and Muygridge repeated that man’s story as his own.)
He was taken from the scene unconscious, perhaps in a coma. The next day another stagecoach arrived, and he was put on a stretcher and taken 150 miles to the first semblance of a city.
“I awakened nine days after the accident, in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I had a wound in my head, and double vision. I had no taste, and my sense of smell was impaired.” He was also very deaf, he said.
Medical care on the frontier, less than ideal, delivered him to the care of a particularly meager doctor. Muygridge said that a Dr. Bowie, the physician at Fort Smith, “cupped me several times.” Cupping involved a blade to cut the skin and a heated cup placed over the wound. The heat lowered the air pressure under the cup, and as it cooled, the skin was sucked upwards, creating blisters and forcing a spray of blood. A medieval method used by modern people.
Muygridge convalesced in Arkansas. Weeks passed. When he could get out of bed, he took a train to St. Louis, another to New York. His eyes and ears felt unreliable. He found a new doctor in New York, Willard Parker, a surgeon at Columbia College and associate at Bellevue Hospital. Despite his credentials, Parker seems not to have known what to do. He gave Muygridge one piece of advice, both sophisticated and useless: do not eat meat, and you will get better.26
Still seeing double, Muygridge listened to his American side, the litigious voice. He sued Butterfield Overland Mail, filing in district court and asking $10,000 in damages. Then he sailed to London.
THE TRIAL
The Muybridge murder trial exhibited familiar parts—sex, betrayal, revenge—but a new element put them on everyone’s lips, the speed of the information. Daily reports from the courtroom went down the wires by telegraph, the story ricocheting around America not unlike the trains. Writers for the California papers, scribbling in the courtroom gallery, took their notes to the telegraph depot at the Napa railroad station and dictated long features to the “brass pounders,” the men who tapped out the sentences and sent them over the wire. The network resembled nothing so much as clotheslines strung alongside all the train tracks. Stories appeared the next morning in San Francisco and Sacramento in three-column spreads, and they flickered back across the country to surface in papers from Illinois to Georgia to Massachusetts, where editors had bought the material from news aggregators like the Associated Press and United Press, which packaged copy and sent it around by telegraph. Stories were blazoned of the wild seducer, Harry Larkyns, the beautiful and credulous wife, Flora Downs Muybridge, and the too-serious artist, Edward Muybridge. The admitted killer was sketched to be the saddest figure in the cast, a husband who paid the price for neglect.
The news network had gotten faster—it had added bandwidth, if you like—since the Western Union Company, which dominated national communication, put online a new invention, the “telegraph printer.” Rather than tap out a message, dash by dot, a telegraph operator sat at a machine like a little piano with lettered keys and typed in the text. At the other end of the line a separate machine printed the message, letter by letter, on a thin strip of paper at the rate of fifty words a minute. The new machines came in handy during the Muybridge trial because every day reporters on the murder in Napa, one hundred miles from their editors in San Francisco, filed 2,500-word features about the case. (A twenty-seven-year-old tinkerer in New Jersey, Thomas Edison, had lately made some changes to telegraph printers, patenting several improvements that started him in business as an inventor. Edward Muybridge, in the dock, had no reason to know about Edison or his role in speeding up the news of the trial, but eventually the two would meet and get to know each other, when Edison, years later, put himself in touch with Muybridge because he had heard about the photographer’s moving pictures and thought he could make improvements to them.)
Napa, California, population three thousand, as seen from the roof of the courthouse…(Illustration Credit c15.1)
…became the unlikely focus, during the Muybridge murder trial, of an early media sensation with a national audience. (Illustration Credit c15.2)
In early 1875, at the same time as the Muybridge case, another adultery trial filled newspapers everywhere in America, although this one didn’t involve murder. On the East Coast, the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, the famous and righteous pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, tried to defend himself
in a lawsuit brought by one of his male parishioners who said Beecher had been sleeping with his wife. Beecher the preacher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel about slavery that outsold the Bible for many years and helped to start the Civil War. The Beecher trial ran from January to July 1875, and its salacious testimony about the pulpit seducing the pew shot across the telegraph into newspaper stories everywhere. It was bigger still than the Muybridge case, but the two sex scandals, one in California, the other in New York, had the effect of pulling together, for a short time, the whole country.
It was in this climate of coast-to-coast chatter about two broken marriages that Edward Muybridge sat to defend himself. On the second day of the trial, February 4, the little courthouse in Napa filled up to the back, and would-be spectators spilled into the hall and out onto the lawn. The first of a procession of witnesses stood to be sworn. George Wolf, the young driver who had taken Muybridge to the Yellow Jacket Mine (and who had apparently recovered from the measles), described the hourlong buggy ride up the dark road to the mine. Wolf also said that Muybridge had made a strange remark on the way up the mountain. Wolf remembered that Muybridge had leaned forward and said, “I want to give Harry Larkyns a surprise.”1
Another witness, Benjamin Pricket, who lived at the Yellow Jacket, testified that he had answered the door when Muybridge had knocked. Pricket said he went into the sitting room to get Larkyns, and when Larkyns went to the door, he looked outside. “And I heard him say, ‘What is it? It is so dark I cannot see you.’ ”
The witness who came next, M. C. Murray, said he too was in the room during the shooting. Murray’s memory was the most specific. After Larkyns went to the door, Murray heard these words: “It’s Edward Muybridge. I have brought you a message about my wife.” He said the photographer fired at the word wife. After the shooting, with Larkyns lying on the ground outside the back door, Murray remembered that someone wanted to send for a doctor, and that Muybridge himself spoke up. His buggy and driver were still outside, and he wouldn’t mind lending them.
There was disagreement about what Muybridge said when he pulled the trigger. The photographer remembered that he had said, “My name is Muybridge, and I have received a message about my wife—.” Others quoted more ironic words. James McArthur, the prosecution’s lead witness, who had been sick when the trial began, now testified that he was playing cards with the others in the cabin when he heard at the door, “I have brought you a message from my wife,” and the gunshot.
The pistol Muybridge had used, his Smith & Wesson #2, was produced and shown to McArthur, who said it was the one he had taken from Muybridge. McArthur added that he had noticed two of the six chambers were empty—one of them from the shot Muybridge had fired to test the gun on the buggy ride up. As McArthur handled the pistol in the witness box, Wirt Pendegast, the photographer’s lawyer, realized that this little scene was not the best thing for his case. “We would rather admit that this is the pistol than to have it slung around here,” said Pendegast. The gun was put away.
McArthur said that an hour passed after the shooting, during which “a desultory conversation was carried on.” McArthur said, “He told us that this man Larkyns had ‘destroyed his happiness,’ or something like that, and that men of family would appreciate his position.” In cross-examination, Wirt Pendegast asked McArthur, “Did he say, as one of his excuses, ‘This man has seduced my wife?’ ” The prosecutor, the confusingly nicknamed Judge Stoney, objected—“That is not relevant, we cannot ask him anything about that”—but the question was upheld. “He did not use the words ‘seduce my wife,’ ” said McArthur, “but I understood that’s what he meant from what he said about ‘destroying my happiness.’ ”
McArthur added that after he put Muybridge in the cab for the ride to Calistoga, the two sat together in the backseat. He asked Muybridge why he had come at night, frightening everybody, instead of during the day, and Muybridge answered that he did not want to give Larkyns an easy chance to shoot him.
“I didn’t question him further,” said McArthur. “He volunteered all of this information. He said he went to Yellow Jacket to kill the man.”
The Muybridge trial became an early media sensation. Stories reached a dozen newspapers—from Indiana’s Indianapolis Sentinel to the Arizona Miner in Prescott, Arizona, from the New York Herald to the Chicago Times. The trial crowded pages in the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia North American, the Washington, D.C., Daily Critic, the Daily Nebraska Press of Nebraska City, Nebraska, and the Owyhee Avalanche of Silver City, Idaho.2
Muybridge was an artist already known around the country. His art had first caught the attention of editors—now his crime jittered across the telegraph.
When he started as a photographer, in 1868, Muybridge had bought a blank scrapbook, twelve by fifteen inches, maybe two hundred pages. He began collecting news items about himself and pasting them in the book, beginning with stories about his photographs of Yosemite, the ones he took in 1867.3 Many more clippings appear that cover his doings for the next seven years, until 1874. After this they stop. In October 1874, Muybridge killed Harry Larkyns, and for the next seven months, his name appeared in the press only in connection with the crime. Muybridge’s scrapbook, now in the archives of his hometown, contains nothing for the period October 1874–May 1875. The gap is an omission of both pride and shame. When he started to paste in news items again, they were the ones that called him an artist, a photographer making pictures, and not a killer hoping to be redeemed.
A glimpse of the national fascination with the Muybridge case (and one of the clippings he declined to save) can be seen in one story that came out of the Midwest. In the town of Arlington, in northeast Iowa, a spiritual medium leading a séance claimed to have contacted the ghost of Harry Larkyns. An Iowa paper called the Weekly Hawk-Eye told the story.
Mrs C. M. Sawyer, a spiritualistic medium, living at 1144 Mission St., on Thursday evening last, gave a special séance [in Arlington]. At eight o’clock a party, consisting of Sen. S. P. Jones, of Nevada, Capt. Lees, of the police, J. P. Goodman, formerly editor of the Virginia Enterprise, Judge Southard, D. F. Verdena, and several others … met at the house designated. The medium was introduced and requested that the committee of two gentlemen be appointed to examine the cabinet from which the materialized spirit of Harry Larkyns was to issue forth.… perfect precautions against trickery were taken. The room underwent a thorough search.… the committee tied the medium, and after ten minutes of silence she was compelled to ask that the cords might be taken off. Then followed a series of raps, voices, “materialized” hands, etc., but the whole affair was so shallow as only to excite ridicule. After waiting until after 11 o’clock to see something extraordinary, the visitors departed in disgust.4
The skeptics at the Iowa séance may not have seen Harry Larkyns, but they knew his name, and to look for him.
Muybridge sat at the table with his lawyers, watching in silence. “A reserved looking man,” one paper said.
Wirt Pendegast, the defense attorney, set out to establish that Harry Larkyns’s seduction of Flora Muybridge—or rather, Muybridge’s discovery of it—had driven the photographer to madness, and that he had tracked down his sexual competitor and shot his victim in an “uncontrollable” or “insane” impulse.5 The insanity defense depended on two witnesses—Susan Smith, the midwife who told Muybridge about Flora and Larkyns, and William Rulofson, the art dealer who saw Muybridge the day of the shooting. Pendegast hoped both would depict his client as unhinged.
Susan Smith went first. “More than medium height, plainly dressed, she wore a flower-trimmed straw hat,” said one paper. “A woman advanced in years” and “quite theatrical in manner, rising from her seat and gesticulating,” said another. Judge Stoney, the prosecutor, worried the story of Flora’s affair would come from Smith and that this would hurt his case. “There should be no testimony designed to show provocation,” said Stoney, “or attempt to justify the
killing.” Pendegast answered that he wished to hear Smith’s account in order to show insanity. Judge Wallace, from the bench, let Smith answer questions, and she went on to describe, minute by minute, her encounter with Muybridge in his state of shock and fear.
“I told him I could convince him of the guilt of his wife,” Smith said. She went over the story of the afternoon Larkyns had visited Muybridge’s house while Flora was in bed and had gone into her room and sat on the bed, where Flora was lying naked from the waist up.a On hearing this, “Muybridge was very much excited,” said Smith.
Smith described how Muybridge had picked up a picture of Florado and seen the words “Little Harry” on the back, in his wife’s handwriting. Smith remembered that Muybridge entered a howling fugue. “His appearance was that of a madman, his eyes glassy, his lower jaw hanging down, showing his teeth. He trembled from head to foot, and gasped for breath—he was terrible to look at. He fell on the floor as in a fit.” If she could help him prove he was insane, Muybridge might avoid the gallows. Although the papers commented on Smith’s change of loyalty from Flora and Larkyns to Muybridge, neither she nor Pendegast made an attempt to explain it. Smith said of Muybridge, “I was afraid he would die. When he walked to the door to leave, I spoke to him, and he muttered to himself, as if he did not hear me, and then I spoke to him again. He turned as though he had awakened from a trance. I thought as he left that he was insane.”
At this point, Pendegast called as a witness William Rulofson, proprietor of Bradley & Rulofson, the gallery where Muybridge sold his photographs. More than Susan Smith, who gestured and jumped in the chair, Rulofson made a good witness. If Muybridge was rumpled, Rulofson was polished. The art dealer wore suits, and, except for muttonchop whiskers, he was clean-shaven, unusual during this era of bearded men. Where Muybridge was quixotic and uncomfortable, Rulofson was smooth.