by Edward Ball
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my editor at Doubleday, Gerry Howard, and agent at International Creative Management, Kris Dahl. I thank Stephen Herbert, of Hastings, England, for his scholarship on pre-cinema and Edward Muybridge, which lighted my road. Gratitude to an exceptional researcher, Christine Delucia, who visited archives of Muybridge and Stanford material and excavated some of the best bits from them. People who look after the old papers and photographs do not receive enough credit, and I’m grateful to all staff with keys to the vaults of primary materials. Some who helped include the folks at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution; Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; California Historical Society; California State Library; California State Railroad Museum; Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford; George Eastman House International Museum of Film and Photography, in Rochester; Kingston Local History Room and Archives, in Kingston, UK; Stanford University Library and Archives, in Palo Alto; and the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, in Philadelphia. Many film scholars have written about Muybridge and early cinema, and I am a guest in their house. An incomplete list: Richard Abel, Brian Coe, Jean-Louis Comolli, Mary Anne Doane, Anne Friedberg, Tom Gunning, Hermann Hecht, Stephen Herbert, Laurent Mannoni, Jean Mitry, Charles Musser, Steve Neale, and Deac Rossell. Other writers who brought this story into focus include Marta Braun, Philip Brookman, Robert B. Haas, Gordon Hendricks, Oscar Lewis, Anita Ventura Mozley, Phillip Prodger, Rebecca Solnit, and Richard White. As I spun out the manuscript, three friends read it—historians Beverly Gage, Claire Potter, and Paul Sabin—and I’m grateful to them for commentary. Thanks to a Yale graduate student, Christopher Kramaric, for collecting photography permissions. When I felt history fatigue, the person who helped was Candace Skorupa, who cannot have escaped collateral numbness from this tale, four years in making, plus a year off for illness; loving thanks to her. If there are factual or chronological errors in the story, they are mine, because book writing, let’s face it, is something you do alone.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
LSP: Leland Stanford Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University
MC: Muybridge Collection, Kingston Museum and Heritage Service, Kingston, England
PREFACE
1. Many writers on media have excavated the visual equipment of the nineteenth century. For the prehistory of moving images, see, among others, Hermann Hecht, Pre-Cinema History: An Encyclopaedia and Annotated Bibliography of the Moving Image before 1896 (London: Bowker, Saur, 1993); Stephen Herbert, A History of Pre-Cinema, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 2000); Franz Paul Liesegang and Hermann Hecht, Dates and Sources: A Contribution to the History of the Art of Projection and to Cinematography (London: Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain, 1986); Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner, 1990); and Deac Rossell, Living Picture: The Origins of the Movies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
CHAPTER 1: THE STANFORD ENTERTAINMENT
1. There are other versions of the appearance or “birth” of moving pictures in France, Germany, and America. I have put together this one from newspapers, Eadweard Muybridge’s writings, and these sources: “The Stanford Entertainment,” San Francisco Daily Call, Jan. 20, 1880; “The Zoogyroscope,” San Francisco Daily Call, May 5, 1880 (reprinted in the New York Times, May 19, 1880); Diana Strazdes, “The Millionaire’s Palace: Leland Stanford’s Commission for Pottier & Stymus in San Francisco,” Winterthur Portfolio 36, no. 4 (2001): 213–43; “Stanford and the Earthquake,” Stanford Alumnus 7 (May 1906): 5; George Thomas Clark, Leland Stanford, War Governor of California, Railroad Builder and Founder of Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1931), 367–68; Eadweard Muybridge, preface to Animals in Motion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Muscular Action (London: Chapman & Hall, 1925); Eadweard Muybridge, “The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, Illustrated with the Zoopraxiscope,” March 13, 1882, lecture at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, pamphlet (London: Clowes & Sons, 1882).
CHAPTER 2: THE YELLOW JACKET MURDER
1. “Financial Genius,” San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 14, 1873.
2. This account draws on and condenses several newspaper reports, including “Harry Larkyns—the Life and Death of an Adventurer,” San Francisco Daily Examiner, Oct. 19, 1874; “A Startling Tragedy,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 19, 1874; “Major Larkyns’ Fate,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 20, 1874; “The Calistoga Tragedy,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 21, 1874; “The Fatal Amour,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 21, 1874; “A Startling Tragedy: Chevalier Harry Larkyns Shot Dead by Edward J. Maybridge, the Photographer,” San Francisco Bulletin, Oct. 19, 1874; and “Muybridge in Jail,” San Francisco Bulletin, Oct. 21, 1874.
CHAPTER 3: GOD OF THE SUN
1. Muybridge and Maison Hélios: Alta California, Dec. 3, 1862. A letter from Edward Muybridge, in London, to his uncle, Henry Selfe, in Australia, dated August 17, 1861, says that Muybridge will “shortly leave for the continent … on business that may detain me for some months,” in Robert Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 10. He says that he can be reached at 9 rue Cadet, Paris, in the 9th arrondissement. A researcher in French photography, Yves Lebrec, outlined the history of Maison Hélios and the Berthaud brothers at http://www.blogg.org/blog-93964.html, accessed July 9, 2012; additional information is available at http://laphotoduxix.canalblog.com/archives/berthaud/index.html, accessed Aug. 18, 2011.
2. Art dealer William Rulofson, quoted in the San Francisco Bulletin, Feb. 5, 1875; Daily Morning Call, Feb. 4, 1875, p. 3.
3. The word photography appears in London talks by John F. W. Herschel: “On the Chemical Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Preparations of Silver and Other Substances, Both Metallic and Non-Metallic” and “On Some Photographic Processes,” published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 130 (1840): 1–59.
4. The legacy of Nicéphore Niépce is guarded by a state-run museum in France, Maison Nicéphore Niépce, in the village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, Burgundy (http://www.niepce.com/).
5. John Hittell, Yosemite—Its Wonders and Its Beauties (San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft, 1868), 36.
6. “A.M. Maybridge” at Yosemite in November 1867, Mariposa Gazette, cited in Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), 262.
7. Helmut Gernsheim, The Rise of Photography, 1850–1880: The Age of Collodion (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 66.
8. Theodore H. Hittell, History of California, vol. 4 (San Francisco: N. J. Stone, 1898), 465.
CHAPTER 4: HARNESSING THE ELEPHANT
1. George Thomas Clark, Leland Stanford, War Governor of California, Railroad Builder and Founder of Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1931), 189–206; Stuart Daggett, Chapters on the History of the Southern Pacific (New York: Ronald Press, 1922), 1–26; Theodore H. Hittell, History of California, vol. 4 (San Francisco: N. J. Stone, 1898); Richard Rayner, The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California (New York: Norton, 2008), 35–55; Norman E. Tutorow, Leland Stanford: Man of Many Careers (Menlo Park, CA: Pacific Coast Publishers, 1971), 70–80; Norman E. Tutorow, The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, a California Colossus, vol. 1 (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 2004), 190–226.
2. Clark, Leland Stanford, 185.
3. Leland Stanford to Abraham Lincoln, Sept. 29, 1862, Special Collections, Stanford University.
4. Leland Stanford to Mrs. [Elizabeth] Stanford, Dec. 13, 1862, and Dec. 24, 1863, Special Collections, Stanford University.
5. Hittell, History of California, vol. 4, 465.
6. Tutorow, The Governor, 208–89; Clark, Leland Stanford, 207–73;
California State Railroad Museum, Sacramento, Records of the Central Pacific Railroad, Newton Cope Collection, 1868–1922.
7. Tutorow, The Governor, 128–35.
8. Estimate by a Chinese American historian who canvassed payroll sheets, in William F. Chew, Nameless Builders of the Transcontinental Railroad (Bloomington, IN: Trafford Publishing, 2004), 36–49.
9. Quoted in Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 119.
10. Payroll sheets, Central Pacific Railroad collection, 1864–69, MS 79, box 22, California State Railroad Museum, Sacramento.
11. Quoted in Tutorow, The Governor, 248.
12. Sacramento Reporter, June 30, 1870.
13. “C.P. Railroad Co., Abstract of Earnings, March 1864 to Dec. 1869,” Gilbert Harold Kneiss Collection, 1864–92, California State Railroad Museum, Sacramento.
14. John Robinson, The Octopus: A History of the Construction, Conspiracies, Extortions, Robberies, and Villainous Acts of the Central Pacific, South Pacific of Kentucky, Union Pacific, and Other Subsidized Railroads (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 1–44 (original published 1894); for the burned ledgers, see Rayner, The Associates, 109–10.
15. Tutorow, The Governor, 311ff.
16. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011), 50.
CHAPTER 5: THE PHOTOGRAPHER
1. Philip Brookman et al., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl / Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2010), 46–47.
2. “Destruction of Property in Various Parts of the City,” San Francisco Morning Call, Oct. 22, 1868; stereographs: Alta California, Oct. 28, 1868.
3. Muybridge uses native names in his Catalogue of Photographic Views Illustrating the Yosemite, Mammoth Trees, Geyser Springs, and Other Remarkable and Interesting Scenery of the Far West (San Francisco: Bradley & Rulofson, 1873), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
4. The Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 5 (November 1868), cited in Robert Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 19.
5. Daily Morning Call, Feb. 17, 1868.
6. Helen Hunt Jackson, Bits of Travel at Home (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878), 87.
7. Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 50–53.
8. Jackson, Bits of Travel at Home, 86.
9. Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975), 27.
10. Mead B. Kibbey and Peter E. Palmquist, The Railroad Photographs of Alfred A. Hart, Artist (Sacramento: California State Library Foundation, 1996).
11. Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840–1865 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 415–17.
CHAPTER 6: FLORA DOWNS
1. Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975), 30; San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 19, 1874, Oct. 20, 1874; 1870 United States Federal Census, San Francisco, Ward 10.
2. San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 20, 1874.
3. Bertha Berner, Mrs. Leland Stanford: An Intimate Account (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1935), 15.
4. Listing for Thomas and Flora Stump, 1870 Federal Census, West Dalles Precinct, Wasco, Oregon; “Awful Calamity,” Alta California, Feb. 20, 1856 (Thomas Stump in a steamboat accident); 1860 Federal Census, Sacramento, CA, Ward 2; U.S. IRS Tax Assessment Lists, District 4, Sacramento, CA, Annual and Special Lists (1863); Norman E. Tutorow, The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, a California Colossus, vol. 1 (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 2004), 468–69; detail on Lucius Stone saddlery from “Among the Convicts,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 22, 1873.
5. Schulz & Fischer, invoice, for “Finishing 2 Gold Spikes,” May 4, 1869, LSP.
6. George Thomas Clark, Leland Stanford, War Governor of California, Railroad Builder and Founder of Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1931); Theodore H. Hittell, History of California, vol. 4 (San Francisco: N. J. Stone, 1898); Richard Rayner, The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California (New York: Norton, 2008); Tutorow, The Governor; Central Pacific Railroad Company and Gerrit L. Lansing, Relations Between the Central Pacific Railroad Company and the United States Government: Summary of Facts, pamphlet (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker, 1889); Robert S. Graham, Central Pacific Railroad Company: Facts Regarding Its Past and Present Management, by a Stockholder and Former Employee, pamphlet (San Francisco, 1889).
7. “Mystery of the ‘Last Spike’ Finally Solved,” New York Times, Nov. 27, 1910.
8. Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge, 28.
9. Philip Brookman et al., Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl / Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2010), 52–53; Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 58–60.
10. San Francisco Morning Call, July 18, 1871. Rev. H. A. Sawtelle: San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Nov. 10, 1866, May 25, 1867.
11. Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge, 29–30.
CHAPTER 7: OCCIDENT
1. “Stanford the Railroad King’s Party, Event of the Season,” San Francisco Call, Feb. 7, 1872.
2. Leland Stanford to A. P. Stanford, Oct. 11, 1844, Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
3. “Notable equine purchase”: George Thomas Clark, Leland Stanford, War Governor of California, Railroad Builder and Founder of Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1931), 342–43; and Norman E. Tutorow, The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, a California Colossus, vol. 1 (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 2004), 438 ff.; “I bought a little horse”: Stanford in an interview, cited in Anita Mozley, introduction to Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872-1882 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973), 8.
4. “Occident’s Pedigree,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 18, 1872; and Joseph Cairn Simpson, “Horses of California,” Sunset magazine, Nov. 1900, 86–97.
5. Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840–1865 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 415–17.
6. “Muybridge vs. Stanford,” New York Sun, Jan. 29, 1883.
7. Accounts of these first photographs of Stanford’s horses by Edward Muybridge include “Photograph Studies: Quick Work,” Alta California, April 7, 1873. Muybridge wrote a four-thousand-word account of his horse pictures—headlined, “Leland Stanford’s Gift to Art and to Science, Mr. Muybridge’s Inventions of Instant Photography,” it was unsigned—and published it in the San Francisco Examiner on Feb. 6, 1881. (In 1972, art historian Anita Mozley identified the essay as Muybridge’s own and reprinted it in Mozley, Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872–1882, 199–223. Muybridge wrote another account twenty-five years after the events, published in the introduction to his 1899 book Animals in Motion (repr., London: Chapman & Hall, 1925).
8. Newspapers ran stories about the scene ten months later, probably after Muybridge brought his pictures to editors to show them off. The first item appeared in the Alta California, April 7, 1873.
9. Cited in Phillip Prodger and Tom Gunning, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 140–42.
10. New York Times, May 2, 1873; Atlanta Constitution, May 8, 1873; Philip Brookman et al., Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change, 106 (fn 134).
11. John Cameron, “Occident, the California Wonder,” lithograph (Currier & Ives, 1873); Thomas Kirby van Zandt, Abe Edgington with Sulky and Driver Budd Doble, painting (1876), Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University.
CHAPTER 8: HARRY LARKYNS
1. “Financial Genius,” San Francisco Chronic
le, Mar. 14, 1873.
2. Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–97, Records of the U.S. Customs Service, Record Group 36; National Archives, Washington, DC.
3. Robert Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 43; Muybridge, Catalogue of Photographic Views Illustrating the Yosemite, Mammoth Trees, Geyser Springs, and Other Remarkable and Interesting Scenery of the Far West (San Francisco: Bradley & Rulofson, 1873).
4. Helen Hunt Jackson, “Bits of Travel,” The Independent (New York), Aug. 29, 1872.
5. “Photograph Studies: Eight Hundred Views of Yosemite Valley and the Big Trees,” Alta California, April 7, 1873.
6. “The Fatal Amour,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 21, 1874.
7. “Brief Mention,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, May 11, 1874, June 4, 1874.
8. Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), 103–20; Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975), 47–49; Peter Palmquist, “Imagemakers of the Modoc War: Louis Heller and Eadweard Muybridge,” Journal of California Anthropology 4, no 2 (1977): 206–41.
9. Harper’s Weekly, June 21, 1873.
10. Yreka Journal, June 11, 1873, quoted by Palmquist, 208.
11. “The Fatal Amour,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 21, 1874.
CHAPTER 9: THE OCTOPUS
1. Crofutt’s Western World (November 1871), clipping, Stanford Scrapbooks, vol. 1, Special Collections, Stanford University.
2. Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Central Pacific Railroad Co. [1873] (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker, 1874), 21.