California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  There had been no money to be made in sheep raising. Wool was in great demand, because the cotton industry in the South had been devastated by the Civil War. At the same time, the annual cost of herding, pasturing, shearing, and caring for a herd of sheep was only thirty-five cents a head. Each animal yielded an average of six and a half pounds of wool a year, which could be sold for anywhere from eighteen to thirty-five cents a pound.

  By 1864 two facts had become apparent to Irvine, the Flints and Bixby. It was the worst—and would turn out to be the last—year of the Great Drought in southern California. The huge herds of cattle that had once roamed the grand ranchos in the south were all but decimated, and the Spanish-descended rancheros were desperate for cash. Vast tracts were being taken over by mortgagors, and other lands were for sale at a fraction of their former worth. Also, the four men noted that for some reason the sheep had fared somewhat better than the cattle in the drought. Three adjoining parcels of land particularly interested James Irvine and his friends—the Rancho Lomas de Santiago, which belonged to Teodocio Yorba, the Rancho San Joaquin, which belonged to José Sepulveda, and part of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, which belonged to José Antonio Yorba and Juan Pablo Peralta. Pooling their resources, Irvine, Bixby, and the Flints bought it all for about thirty-five cents an acre, or roughly fifty thousand dollars—120,000 acres, stretching from the Santa Ana mountains to thirteen miles of virgin Pacific coastline.

  Because Irvine had been able to invest an amount equal to that of the other partners combined, he became the dominant partner and the group’s financial mainstay. Soon the Irvine-Flint-Bixby group was grazing 30,000 head of sheep on the new ranch. Within a few years there would be more than 50,000 head. In 1866, James Irvine married Nettie Rice, who came from Cleveland and brought with her a small dowry. The following year their first and only child, James, Jr., was born, and, by 1876, James Irvine, Sr., was able to buy out his partners for $150,000. Now all the land was his.

  The first Irvine’s acquaintance with Collis Huntington on the boat had not immediately blossomed into friendship. Nor did it later. In the 1870s one of the popular methods the Southern Pacific employed to obtain land for its roads was simply to march in and take it—with or without the owner’s permission and often against his express wishes. Often this would be done on weekends, when the courts were closed and owners could not obtain injunctions against the land-grabbers. By Mondaly morning, when the tracks were laid, protests were futile, since in most communities the railroads’ resources for buying judicial opinions were superior to those of the ranchers. The Southern Pacific had been trying for some time to obtain a right-of-way through the Irvine ranch in order to lay track between Santa Ana and San Diego. Irvine had refused to countenance locomotives charging through his herds of easily frightened sheep. One Saturday afternoon, after the courts had closed for the weekend and when a Southern Pacific crew had arrived at the ranch to begin putting down track anyway, James Irvine formed a posse of ranch hands, and with shotguns and rifles blasting, drove off the railroad crew. It was the last time Huntington’s men tangled with James Irvine.

  When Irvine died in 1886 his nineteen-year-old son James, Jr.—or J.I., as he was called—inherited the big ranch. J.I. did not get his land without a fight, however. According to his father’s will, he could not claim his inheritance until age twenty-five, and the will gave the trustees of the estate the option of putting the property up for sale at public auction. This they attempted to do, and J.I. very nearly lost his land—for $1,385,000—and would have except for some confusion in the bidding process. The case languished in the courts until 1892, when, at last, J.I. was of legal age to claim the inheritance.

  J.I. was, if anything, physically even tougher than his father—tall, muscular, lean as a whip. He was also stubborn, autocratic, and something of an eccentric. He once rode a high-wheeled bicycle—its front wheel nearly as tall as he was—from San Francisco to San Diego and back again, just to prove that he could do it. J.I.’s nature was a collection of contradictions. As a disciplinarian on his ranch he was despotic. In 1912, when a farmer named Joe Matlock attacked the daughter of an Irvine ranch hand and then fled to the hills above the ranch, J.I. pursued him for six hours with a two-hundred-man posse, expending a deputy sheriff and incurring a number of wounded before finally killing the man with a shot in the head. J.I. was a self-proclaimed misanthrope who liked to say that most animals were better company than most people, and he was a crude practical joker as well. He enjoyed particularly setting off fireworks under the chairs of female guests, which, however, didn’t prevent him from being an enthusiastic womanizer. And yet, for all his somewhat unpleasant traits, there was another side to J.I. He was a gifted artist and drew dreamily romantic pencil and charcoal sketches of landscapes and women’s faces. He played the piano and he wrote poetry. Though a college dropout, he read extensively, particularly on scientific subjects. He became interested in the pioneering airplane developments of Glenn L. Martin, who used an Irvine pasture for his first takeoff in 1909. In 1925 he invited the Nobel physicist Albert A. Michelson to use a mile-long strip of the ranch for the celebrated experiment in which Michelson first measured the speed of light with high accuracy. And yet uninvited guests to J.I.’s ranch were sent away with broken guns or broken heads.

  J.I.’s greatest passion was for his land and what he saw as its limitless possibilities. One reason why he had invested heavily in Associated Oil was the chance that oil might be discovered on it. It never was, but in time the ranch would support much else—not only enormous herds of sheep but also thousands of head of cattle, as well as vineyards, citrus orchards, walnut groves, persimmon and avocado fields, fields of beans, sugar beets, tomatoes, alfalfa, and a good deal more. For more than a hundred years the great Irvine ranch would remain in J.I.’s family, one of the largest unsubdivided pieces of property since the days of Henry Miller—an area four times larger than the entire city of San Francisco. The ranch would also, as we shall see, be the scene of more bitterness, dispute, hard feeling, bloodshed, and death by violence than has afflicted any other California family.

  * Nineteenth-century revivalist tent shows were known as Chautauquas.

  * Black Bonanza by Frank J. Taylor and Earl M. Welty.

  PART TWO

  THE EASY SPENDERS

  CHAPTER NINE

  Throwing It Around

  One of the pleasant advantages of owning one’s own silver mine was that one never had to worry about where one’s flatware was coming from. When, in the 1880s, John and Louise Mackay decided to order a silver table service, Mackay had 14,719 ounces of silver sent from his mine to Tiffany’s with instructions to make his service as heavy and ornate as possible. Tiffany’s took him at his word and created a design so elaborate that not a single visible area of the surface was without ornamentation. Worked into the design were shamrocks, for Mackay’s native Ireland, and thistles, for his wife’s Scottish forebears. Each piece bore the Mackay monogram, as well as the Mackay “family crest,” which Tiffany and the Mackays devised together. At the time, the Mackay silver was the most spectacular the store had ever produced, and much attention to it was given by the press. There were a few sly gibes about the family crest, since, before John Mackay, there had never been a Mackay family crest, but none of this fazed the Mackays.

  A single Mackay celery vase, though only sixteen inches high, contained 150 ounces of silver. A pair of candelabra, thirty-six inches tall, held fifty-eight candles and weighed more than 40 pounds. The complete service, 1350 pieces in all,* was shipped to the Mackays’ London house, where it “became a tradition to use it at stately receptions for members of the Victorian court and the families of the great houses of Europe.” In Europe the press, as well as society, was much kinder to the Mackays than New York or San Francisco had been, and Louise Mackay was described as “a great lady in the tight circle of international society … mastering several languages and all the social graces of the newly acquired fortune.”
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  Back in San Francisco, the reports of the Mackays’ European successes were read with dismay, envy, and no small amount of confusion. What, after all, did the upstart Mackays possess that entitled them to dinner invitations from the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra? Try as it might to forget it, San Francisco kept being reminded that San Francisco was not London or Paris or Rome or Madrid, nor was San Francisco New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. San Francisco had been an almost overnight creation; its rush to big-city status had been too headlong, its rich families had emerged too rapidly, and there were still embarrassing rough edges. Compared with eastern cities, everything about San Francisco seemed painfully imitative and second-rate.

  San Francisco avidly followed the doings of East Coast society, of New York’s Mrs. William Astor and her arbiter, Ward McAllister, who had codified and delineated society by the simple expedient of limiting it to the number of people who would fit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. He had created New York’s Four Hundred, the unquestioned list of people who counted. San Francisco had no such list. Suddenly the mere spending of money—on houses and jewels and yachts—was not enough. Spending money was simply too easy. Money alone could not purchase either respect or respectability, nor did it define social class. The elusive ingredient that San Francisco lacked, of course, was tradition. But where could one find tradition in a city that had risen from mud streets in a little over thirty years? Could one buy tradition the way the Mackays had bought a family crest? There seemed to be no one in San Francisco who could answer these questions. Then, all at once, there was.

  His name was Ned Greenway, and he was, of all things, a wine salesman. He had come to San Francisco in the 1870s as the West Coast representative of Mumm’s champagne, and because Mumm’s was a French company, serving Mumm’s champagne quickly became a San Francisco status symbol. Ned Greenway not only sold his champagne to San Francisco society but also put away a good deal of his product himself. He liked to boast that nobody in America drank more wine than he and that he often tossed back as many as twenty-five bottles a day. The secret, he explained, was to intersperse the bottles of champagne with quaffs of beer. Because his large wine consumption tended to make him gain weight, he restricted his diet of solids to cookies and pickled limes. Insufficient though these traits might seem for turning Ned Greenway into the darling of San Francisco society, that is exactly what they did. Before long no gathering was considered important without Ned Greenway and his Mumm’s.

  To San Franciscans, at least, Ned Greenway seemed to possess an almost daunting sophistication. In the first place, he was from the East—from Baltimore, where he claimed an ancient and aristocratic lineage. And he knew how to do things, things San Franciscans had always wondered about. He knew how to use a finger bowl, and how to remove it, along with the doily, before the dessert was passed, and how to separate the fork and spoon that arrived with the plate. He pronounced it acceptable to eat asparagus with the fingers. He knew that if the wine was spilled at the table, it was not proper to try to wipe it up. He could read a French menu, and even spoke French, larding his conversations with it. He loved to dance and drink champagne all night. He never rose until four in the afternoon, and when he did he immediately put on evening clothes.

  Ned Greenway dazzled. He dazzled even the beautiful Jennie Flood, and for a while it was rumored that he was engaged to her. In San Francisco, Ned Greenway spoke of the famous Baltimore tradition, its Cotillon—spelled always with but a single i—and lamented that San Francisco did not have a similar one. He, after all, knew how to perform all the traditional cotillion figures. By the mid-1880s, Ned Greenway’s position in San Francisco society was so secure that he decided he himself would become San Francisco’s answer to Ward McAllister. When he elected himself to this post, there was no one in San Francisco to dispute him. In fact, the idea was greeted with great enthusiasm.

  What Greenway needed, first, was a West Coast equivalent to Mrs. Astor. The woman he chose was Mrs. Eleanor Martin. Eleanor Martin gave frequent though dreadful parties—but that was one of her qualifications. So did Mrs. Astor. Conversations at her dinner table were so stiff and difficult that they were agonizing, but her guests felt so fortunate to be invited that they dared not risk the slightest lapse of taste or manners for fear of being banished from her circle forever. Her rules of conduct were strict. Any woman who drank more than one glass of champagne was never invited again. Divorced persons were never permitted past her front doorstep. Socially, she claimed impeccable credentials, tracing her ancestry far back beyond that of the Huntingtons, Crockers, Stanfords, and Hopkinses. Her brother had been a governor of California, and her brother-in-law, Peter Donahue, had founded the San Francisco Gas Works. To Mrs. Astor that might not have sounded like much at all, but, after all, this was San Francisco. Mrs. Martin was not as rich as Caroline Astor either—her husband’s money had been made in street railways and the gas company—but Eleanor Martin possessed that one rare ingredient so essential to any social leader: the power to intimidate, to make everyone in her presence feel immediately inferior. Her rudeness was legendary and her snubs were legion. One never knew when one might displease her or where one stood with her. Physically too Eleanor Martin was overpowering, an immense woman with a spacious poitrine capable of displaying an inordinate amount of jewelry. According to Frances Moffat in Dancing on the Brink of the World, “She sailed through San Francisco society with the serene authority of a battleship.”

  When Ned Greenway approached her and suggested that the two of them might “organize” San Francisco society, Eleanor Martin agreed that this was a splendid idea. What they needed next was a list, a tabulation of who amounted to how much, and who would be in and who out. This did not take them long to complete. Mrs. Martin’s immediate circle of friends had to be included, along with certain obligatory Crockers and Huntingtons and good customers for Mumm’s champagne. Thereafter the invitations went out to San Francisco’s first annual Bachelors’ Cotillion.

  By 1887 a number of San Francisco houses had ballrooms, but none was deemed sufficiently spacious for the event. Once again, San Francisco was not New York, and the Odd Fellows Hall was selected. On the night of the Cotillion, Greenway and Mrs. Martin led the quadrille—Greenway blowing a whistle and announcing loudly how to execute the elaborate figures—and were followed by a confused but enthusiastic assemblage of guests. Although San Francisco had never seen anything remotely like it before, the evening, when it was over, was considered an unqualified success. At last San Francisco had a tradition.

  Overnight San Francisco society became newsworthy. No longer did local editors need to rely on the East for stories of the gentry. Cannily, Mike de Young hired Ned Greenway to write a society column for the Chronicle, whereupon W. R. Hearst immediately hired an ex-Mississippi riverboat captain, William Chambliss, to perform the same function for the Examiner. Each journalist expended most of his energies deploring the activities and denigrating the subjects of his competitor’s column. Mr. Chambliss had a particularly vitriolic pen, which Hearst adored. Attacking the Greenway-Martin list of worthies invited to the Bachelors’ Cotillion, Chambliss averred that they should all be “relegated without unnecessary delay to the ranks of colored society,” which by his definition included not only blacks but Orientals, Latin Americans, and most Europeans. The Crockers, Chambliss wrote, had “Indian blood” and were therefore “foreigners.” And a great deal was made of Mike de Young’s being a Jew.

  Very few of California’s new millionaires had at that point considered trying to establish themselves socially through philanthropy, and none seemed less likely to try than Leland Stanford. Since the birth of his only son in 1868, Stanford and his wife had seemed interested in little else than the child. Leland, Jr., was unmercifully spoiled, pampered by nurses and parents alike, supplied with all manner of toys, entertainments, and pets. Nevertheless, with the passage of time he showed promise of becoming a bright and attractive young man, with far more intelligence than
his mother or father. But at age fourteen, while traveling with his parents in Italy, he was stricken with typhoid fever. Two years later, just short of his sixteenth birthday, he died.

  His parents were inconsolable, and according to a persistent tradition, Leland Stanford cried out to his wife, “The children of California shall be our children!” Whereupon he resolved to donate a great university “To the Memory of Leland Stanford, Jr., and the Glory of God.” According to another tradition, God himself—through a New York spiritual medium, Maud Lord Drake—ordered the Stanfords to create the university. Whatever the case, all the care and devotion that the Stanfords had lavished on their son they soon lavished on their university.

  The Stanfords’ grand plan was not greeted enthusiastically. The chosen location struck most Californians as peculiar and impractical. Stanford wanted to build near his country house in Palo Alto, overlooking the gardens where his son had once played. The San Francisco Chronicle retorted that the University of California at Berkeley, just across the bay from San Francisco, had never attracted more than three hundred students. Northern California, it was felt, had no need for another university, and anyway, the best education for a red-blooded Californian was the school of hard knocks. Eastern newspapers were even less kind, one commenting that “there is about as much need for a new university in California as for an asylum of decayed sea captains in Switzerland.” Even educators offered Stanford little encouragement, pointing out to him that the name itself, the Leland Stanford Junior University, would cause people to think it was a junior college.