by Edward Ball
Leland liked to go into his paddocks, pet the young colts, stroke their necks, and gaze at their feet and legs. On one visit, his silk hat fell to the ground, and a colt stamped it and kicked it up over the fence. The hat was destroyed and couldn’t be fixed, but Stanford laughed loud and long, because he loved his animals.
Charles Marvin and Stanford worked up a training protocol that became famous as the “Palo Alto system,” one principle of which was to exercise horses at a slower gait and to use speed only in sprints.13 Stanford acquired a reputation for supreme gentleness with his horses. For young colts, he had his men build a “kindergarten track,” an oval the size of a tennis court, with banked turns. Word went out that he fed his animals warm meals cooked from recipes (it was true). Trainers and handlers used soft, whispering voices because their boss banned harsh talk to a horse. Stanford was unembarrassed about caring what the animals felt. “It seems to me that if you would write a treatise on horses’ feet,” he said in a letter to one trainer, “it would be an act of kindness and charity to the horses themselves.”14 The animals never went back to the stable tired, and no beating would be tolerated (although use of the whip in a race still suited). One day at the stable, Stanford saw a filly rush into its stall—one of the grooms had apparently hit the horse. “Fire the man,” the rail president told Marvin.
Thomas Hill, Palo Alto Spring, 1878. Oil on canvas, 87 × 138 inches. Stanford hired artist Thomas Hill to depict his family and friends on the lawn of the house at Palo Alto, and the result gives the impression of a lord and his court at leisure. Jane Stanford sits far left. Leland eyes the viewer, holding a picture on his lap, and Leland Jr. sits in striped stockings, holding a hat. When he painted this picture, Hill was trying to finish an even larger canvas, The Last Spike, that glorified Stanford for completing the transcontinental railroad. (Illustration Credit c18.4)
Palo Alto became a playground for Stanford and also for his son, Leland Stanford Jr., eight years old. The boy got a pony named Cheetem and his own miniature train. Little Leland’s train wasn’t a tabletop toy but a real locomotive and cars, built by company engineers to quarter scale. Young Stanford’s train ran a half-mile circuit from the house out to the stable and back, so the boy could be like his dad, and ride Cheetem when he felt like it.
Mark Hopkins, one of Stanford’s rail partners, built a house next door to him in San Francisco. Hopkins’s place looked like an experiment in towers and bulges, a turreted behemoth in the jigsaw Victorian style, elbowed with wavy extensions and random bay windows, unexplained curves and parapets. Edward Muybridge, on his visits to Stanford, saw the turrets going up—they had suddenly become the highest outlooks in the city—and thought they might flatter his camera. Muybridge got Hopkins’s permission to climb up into an unfinished piece of the house, the framed shell of a tower, and use that turret to make a picture series, a 360-degree view of San Francisco.
Muybridge had already made, in 1868, a half-circuit panorama, a 180-degree view of San Francisco. In June or July 1877, he climbed onto the narrow tower of the Hopkins house with his cumbersome gear to make a full circle. Over five hours, cranking the camera across the city, he made eleven pictures.15 These he printed and attached side by side to a single long sheet of linen. The Muybridge panorama was bound like an accordion into a folio that resembled a book. Unfolded, with its simultaneous views in all directions, it showed San Francisco from a perspective impossible to the human eye.
Muybridge’s San Francisco panorama made a commercial splash and became, after the murder, his reentry into the art market. He printed several versions, some with clouds, some a blank sky. He made a list of landmarks and attached it like a wordy caption, naming fifty-three of the city’s buildings and sites. There was a foldout version, and there was a piecemeal stack of pictures sold in a box. All varieties made money, and all inflated his name.
Sometime in 1876 Stanford, the horse connoisseur, stumbled on the writings of a French scientist, Étienne-Jules Marey, a professor of natural history at the Collège de France. Marey was trying to map the movements of horses using quirky new equipment he had built. He especially wanted to know how the animals’ legs rose and fell. Marey’s investigations had made their way six thousand miles around the world to the desk of Stanford, whom they quickly obsessed. Years later, looking back, Muybridge tried to explain Stanford’s intensity on this subject, writing blandly that Marey “inspired in Stanford the desire to solve the problem of locomotion.”16 There is no evidence that Stanford browsed the original scientific literature in French, and he probably did not read Marey’s book La Machine Animale, published in France in 1873 and in translation in London in 1874. What Stanford likely saw was a feature in the monthly magazine Popular Science. On December 4, 1874, the New York–based serial ran an article about Marey under the headline “The Paces of the Horse,” describing Marey’s design for studying the gait of animals.17
Muybridge, Panoramic San Francisco from California Street Hill, 1877. Muybridge occupied an unfinished tower in the Nob Hill mansion of railroad associate Mark Hopkins to produce a panorama of San Francisco, generating the impossible perspective of a 360-degree inspection of the city. (Illustration Credit c18.5)
Étienne-Jules Marey, a portly, urbane man with a liking for wool suits and mustache wax, thought to measure the steps of horses by attaching rubber tubes to their legs and hooves. With each tread, air pressure pushed through the tubes, registering the footfall by moving a stylus that scratched a squiggle on a piece of paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder. Mapping these marks, Marey showed in what order the animal’s feet hit the ground, answering a thousand-year-old mystery. What especially excited Stanford was Marey’s hypothesis that all four hooves of the animal did, in fact, leave the ground during a gallop. It was a question the horse collector regarded as second only, perhaps, to the enigma of conception.
Stanford wanted to know the position of the legs (bent? straight?) and the sequence of the animal’s steps. (Was it left front, right rear, right front, left rear, or some other order?) He wanted to incorporate this knowledge into his training. When do horses’ hooves leave the ground during a trot, and when at a gallop? With a copy of Popular Science in hand, the rail president summoned Muybridge and put the question to him. Would he try, again, to stop motion?
Photographers using wet-plate negatives, Muybridge’s technique, had been trying to freeze movement for decades. The idea of making a split-second image mesmerized so many people that a professional subset of “instantaneous photographers” appeared. During the 1850s, Gustave Le Gray, in France, had photographed the sea in a way that seemed to freeze waves in mid-swirl, clouds in the sky, and boats in full sail. In Britain, photographer John Herschel coined a word when he called these fast pictures “snapshots.” Charles Darwin became fond of quick photographs, collecting examples of speedy images and hiring a cameraman to photograph facial expressions. In 1872, just as Muybridge was starting his first round of horse pictures, Darwin, in London, published a book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, illustrated with pictures of crying children caught in sobs, their faces contorted.
In the late 1870s, photography journals were still talking about what might be instantaneous and what was not, and spreading advice about taking faster exposures. Speed as ever added value. Studios advertised that they could make portraits with an “instantaneous process.” With less available light indoors, this meant more than five seconds but fewer than sixty. A businessman presenting himself to be photographed for a carte de visite did not have to sit rigidly, but with a shorter exposure time could appear more at ease.
This was the context in which Muybridge went back to Stanford’s horses, knowing plenty about instantaneous photography but also knowing that few cameras actually had stopped motion.
A receipt shows that on November 23, 1876, Muybridge bought “a lot of lenses and other photographic material” from a man called J. Mansur; it might have been the big order for the new horse picture
s. There’s also a letter from Muybridge to Stanford’s assistant, Alfred Poett: “I saw Gov. Stanford a few days ago,” Muybridge wrote on May 21, 1877, “and he told me you could arrange all about photographing the horses.”18
In July 1877, four years after he had last photographed Occident and come up with a blurry image, Muybridge took his gear out to Sacramento’s Union Race Track to make another attempt. As before, he tried to photograph Occident trotting with a sulky in a two-and-a-half-minute mile. And as before, he caught the horse but again thought the picture wasn’t good enough to print and circulate. Stanford, however, wanted some version of it to hang on the wall. With Stanford paying, Muybridge had the image copied by a painter named John Koch, who, like the photographer, worked out of Morse’s Gallery.19 Koch made a replica on canvas of the best photograph, calling his two-by-three-foot picture in watercolor and gouache Occident Trotting. The painting kept the position of the horse but cleaned up the photograph’s blur. Muybridge asked Stanford if he could take that image and sell copies of it, and Stanford nodded. The photographer wanted to add at least one original element from the photograph to Koch’s painting, the head of the driver, James Tenant, which he cut out of a photographic print and glued to the painting like a patch; he then photographed the painting with the patched-on head.
It sounds dubious. Nevertheless, this was a time when photographs were retouched, when people were not yet attached to the idea of the camera as the single “realistic” medium. Muybridge sold his photo of the Koch painting as evidence that he had stopped motion, and it was taken that way. The picture printed well in color engravings; it looked like a soft-focus photo with a clear head. Muybridge then printed it on five-by-seven-inch cardstock; the cards sold and sold, turning into a money faucet.
At the beginning of August, Muybridge took the photo of the painting and the original negative around to the newspapers. The San Francisco Bulletin ran an item on August 3, calling the two “a triumph of photographic art.” A reporter asked how Muybridge had done his magic, the act of stopping time, and the photographer told a story. He had been returning from Central America on a steamship, he said, when he decided to try some instantaneous photography, aiming his camera at the waves from the moving ship deck. The experiment led him to “test chemical formulas” that would stop motion.20 After the Bulletin story, papers around the country ran items about the picture, and it started appearing in magazines and journals as an engraving. (A technique for publishing photographs had not yet been developed, and all pictures in the press were engravings.) The published engravings and the Koch painting were pieces of art, but they looked like neutral data, and people accepted that behind the pictures was a photo, clean and true.
Muybridge, “Occident,” Owned by Leland Stanford; Trotting at a 2:30 Gait over the Sacramento Track, in July, 1877. The first stop-motion photograph sold by Muybridge, a photograph of a painting, itself copied from a photograph (Illustration Credit c18.6)
Muybridge copyrighted his photograph of the John Koch painting with the Library of Congress. “The details have been retouched by Koch,” he wrote, but “in every other respect, even to the whips of the driver, and the dust flying from the foot of the horse, the photograph is precisely as it was made in the camera.”
During the same weeks that Muybridge was pushing his stop-motion picture of Stanford’s horse out into the world, Stanford himself became distracted. His interest in the horse farm flagged for a time because a popular revolt threatened to put him out of business. On July 23, 1877, eight thousand people, 5 percent of the population of San Francisco, went into the streets to support a railroad strike that had launched in the East. The action against rail companies had begun in mid-month in eastern states, and the Workingmen’s Party, a leftist group with ties to Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association in Britain, had organized a rally in California to try to move the strike to the West Coast.21
What would later be called the Great Strike of 1877 started when one thousand track workers in Maryland walked out from the rail yards of the Baltimore and Ohio Company. Their complaints were about their pay and the dangers of the equipment, which killed dozens of workers every year. One by one, rail operators east of the Mississippi watched similar walkouts from their yards, until eighty thousand track workers in ten states were on strike, according to the New York World. The rail action mushroomed into a general uprising, and to everyone’s astonishment, hundreds of thousands of other workers in unrelated jobs walked out on their jobs in solidarity with the rail men.22 The railroads, and for that matter most industries, were almost entirely without unions. During the summer of 1877, for one of the rare times in American history, masses of working people spoke in a single voice, spontaneously and without leadership. More than one hundred people would die in riots during the strikes, most of them at rail yards in the East, most of them shot by law enforcement.
Stanford made no mention of these events in his personal papers, at least not in the ones he left behind, but letters written by other rail owners, his comrades, show that during this time Stanford trembled for his future.
In San Francisco, the year 1877 turned dangerous for the train magnates when a gravelly-voiced man named Denis Kearney started leading anti-railroad marchers through the streets. One part socialist, one part racist (he hated Chinese immigrants), Kearney, an Irish immigrant, proved very good at mobilizing rallies and goading a crowd. For a while, at least, Stanford had much to fear from him. Kearney led demonstrations in support of the rail strikes until fall 1877, when he brought the uprising to Stanford’s doorstep. On the night of October 29, Kearney led a mob up California Hill to Stanford’s house, where Leland sat bunkered in his mansion. (By that time, people were calling it Nob Hill.) In front of a crowd of three thousand, torches aloft, Kearney yelled, “The Central Pacific Railroad men are thieves, and will soon feel the power of the working man! We will march through the city and compel the thieves to give up their plunder!”23
As Stanford looked out the window, horses and Muybridge were nowhere on his mind. He wrote a message to the city’s chief of police, Henry Ellis, and sent one of his servants to deliver it. “I know the mob have considered the question of burning my house and also the house [next door] of Mr. Hopkins,” the note said, with artificial calm. “Their threats may be serious. I would be glad to have you detail a proper guard. Yours truly, Leland Stanford.”24
A posse was dispatched, Kearney was arrested, and he was, for a time, taken out of action.
Muybridge took no photographs of the workers’ eruption: aside from the notable exception of killing Harry Larkyns, he didn’t take many chances with authority. Stanford was his patron and protector, and Muybridge submitted in silence to his interests. If the photographer felt at all ambivalent about the railroad’s domination of California, he kept it to himself.
In Washington, D.C., about this time, President Rutherford Hayes wrote in his diary, “The strikers have been put down, by force.” The national strike of 1877 came to a bloody end in a hundred places, but street agitation continued over the winter and into the spring. A police guard continued to patrol the Stanford mansion, but Denis Kearney, the white man’s populist whom Stanford had put into jail, had been brought to heel.
On the night of October 29, 1877, labor leader Denis Kearney marched a mass rally up the hill to the door of Stanford’s house and threatened to burn the one-year-old mansion. (Illustration Credit c18.7)
With threats from the street fading, Stanford and Muybridge resumed their conversations. Sometimes the horse collector seemed to believe in photography more than the photographer: Stanford now wanted a series of pictures that would show the full cycle of the animal’s gait, every muscle, twitch, and footfall.
Muybridge thought he could get better results without the bother of the curious crowd that seemed always to appear when he set up his camera at the very public Sacramento track. He told Stanford’s assistant Alfred Poett that pestering onlookers bothered him there, making i
t hard to work. “I wish I was assured that I would not be interfered with by people exercising horses, and others of the public,” he wrote Poett. Muybridge wanted to move the horse pictures to the stock farm, where the vast private property ensured he would be left alone. He told Poett, “I have asked the Governor, suggesting that we make the series of photos … at Palo Alto.” Stanford acquiesced.25
The photographer ramped up his ambition. Why one camera, producing a single image? Why not a dozen, making twelve pictures at almost the same time? With many lenses, he would have a better chance of freezing a horse’s gait. From the Scovill Company in New York, Muybridge ordered twelve cameras. From J. H. Dallmeyer, an English optics company, he ordered twelve lenses. The bills ran into the thousands, but Muybridge and Stanford were just beginning to spend.
To make a dozen cameras work, Muybridge knew he had to do two things: increase the light and cut the exposure time. He could boost the light and arrange the apparatus, but he needed an engineer to build a fast shutter that would shrink exposures to a split second. Some photographers, not all, used shutters, cards or pieces of tin slid by hand in front of the lens, but for precision, Muybridge wanted something automatic.
Stanford told engineers in the Oakland office of the Central Pacific to help the photographer however they could. Muybridge took what he called a “crude model” of the multi-camera scheme to the chief engineer of the railroad, Steven Montague. Montague brought in a superintendent called Arthur Brown, and Brown handed Muybridge over to a young engineer named John Isaacs. Isaacs designed a shutter that resembled a miniature guillotine, consisting of two slats of wood, each four by six inches, which would slide in front of the camera at high speed, allowing light to hit the lens for the tiniest moment. Each camera had its own external shutter, and each of the twelve shutters was strung with heavy rubber bands and cocked shut. Isaacs and Muybridge came up with various ways that the running horse might snap the shutters open and closed, “by levers or some means,” as Isaacs remembered in a deposition.