In the middle of their investigations they were visited by a stranger, a corpulent man in city dress. He had been watching them through a spyglass. An associate of George Hearst, the man had been trying for months to locate the secret diamond mine, and after observing King and his colleagues at work for hour after hour on the windswept mesa, he concluded that he had come to the right place. Without thinking, the geologists told him he was mistaken. The Golconda was a hoax. The stranger thought for a moment then remarked that the situation presented a superb opportunity to short the stock of the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company.
When the man left, King decided to go straight to San Francisco to stop further stock transactions. By riding all night, he and his party reached the Black Butte railway station just in time to board the dawn train for Oakland. They arrived in San Francisco late on November 10, roused Janin, and spent most of the night explaining their findings. In the morning, King informed the directors of the mining company that they were “victims of an unparalleled fraud.” As evidence he offered a diamond partly burnished by a lapidary tool. Equally suspect was the wide array of minerals found in the same field. The prospectors had turned up four types of diamonds, plus rubies, garnets, spinels, sapphires, emeralds, and amethysts, which in King’s professional opinion was an “impossible occurrence in nature.” In short, someone had salted the field—one of the oldest tricks in the mining business.
Stunned, the directors insisted on a return to Colorado to confirm the findings. King agreed but warned that if they did not make a public announcement of the fraud as soon as they returned to California, he would. He had no intention of allowing them to dump their stock on the innocent.
When the announcement came, King softened Janin’s humiliation by pointing out that the fraud was “the work of no common swindler, but of one who has known enough to select a spot where detection must be slow, and where every geological parallelism added a fresh probability of honesty.” Furthermore, Janin had been given only an hour for prospecting.
Abashed, Janin explained his mistake by noting that two experts before him had inspected the diamond fields and attested to their worth. He had gone to the mine a believer, thinking his job was simply to estimate the yield. He had also trusted in the opinion of Charles Tiffany, who confessed with considerable embarrassment that his jewelers had overvalued the gems because of their unfamiliarity with raw diamonds. They had always worked with polished stones, imported from Amsterdam.
A grand jury was appointed to investigate the hoax. The perpetrators, a sly pair who had passed themselves off as grizzled prospectors of marginal intelligence, vanished before the grand jury returned its indictments.
For days after the announcement, the exploits of Clarence King competed for headlines with the death of the country’s most famous newspaper editor, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. King’s superiors in Washington were annoyed to learn of the hoax from the newspapers rather than from their geologist, but their vexation was swept away by a wave of public adulation. King’s exposure of the hoax proved the value of the Fortieth Parallel survey, the Nation wrote. “This single exposure, the work of a few days in appearance, the result of several years in reality, has more than paid for the cost of the survey.” Overnight, Clarence King was famous.
4
Death of a Hero
“My diamond shares of course turn out worthless, but I lose nothing,” a relieved John Hay wrote home to Warsaw, Illinois, at the end of 1872. Together with almost everyone else who invested in the shimmering bubble popped by Clarence King, Hay was to be reimbursed. His other affairs, he added, “look a little better than they did, though I do not quite yet see daylight through them. I am about embarking, with powerful friends, in another enterprise, where the loss, if any, will be small, and the profit, if it comes, will be large.”
At thirty-four, Hay still felt obliged to explain his finances to his father, as if to assure both of them that he would in fact succeed. As an editor and writer at the New York Tribune, he was well paid and deemed sufficiently respectable for membership in such clubs as the Century and the Knickerbocker—the bastions of his “powerful friends”—but the sting of early failure had not subsided.
In the first decade of his career, Hay had known both the pinnacle and the abyss. At twenty-two, the ink still fresh on his certificate of admission to the Illinois bar, Hay had gone to Washington to work as assistant to John George Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary.* After Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, Hay and Nicolay became members of the household at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and their admiration for the president grew with their intimacy. Hay, possessor of a Phi Beta Kappa key and a diploma from a fine Eastern university, could not restrain his laughter as he listened to the unworldly Lincoln attempt to converse with a delegation of Potawatomis by asking, “Where live now?” and “When go back Iowa?” But the Rail Splitter’s power to cut to the core of any issue, however complicated, left the young secretary in permanent awe. Hay caught his first glimpse of Lincoln’s wisdom in the early weeks of the Civil War, when the president explained to him that the debate over slavery was peripheral. The great question to be settled was “whether, in a free government, the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.” By preserving the Union, Lincoln intended to prove that popular government was not “an absurdity.”
Haunted by the war, President Lincoln slept badly and often padded down the drafty second-floor corridor, clad only in nightshirt and slippers, to his secretaries’ rooms at the east end of the White House. After a midnight visit in April 1864, Hay reported in his diary that Lincoln had come in laughing, “seemingly utterly unconscious that he, with his short shirt hanging about his long legs, and setting out behind like the tail feathers of an enormous ostrich, was infinitely funnier than anything in the book he was laughing at. What a man it is! Occupied all day with matters of vast moment, deeply anxious about the fate of the greatest army of the world, with his own fame and future hanging on the events of the passing hour, he yet has such a wealth of simple bonhommie and goodfellowship, that he gets out of bed and perambulates the house in his shirt to find us that we may share with him the fun.”
In March 1865, at the beginning of Lincoln’s second term, Secretary of State William Seward invited Hay to take a post as secretary of the American legation in Paris. Eager for relief from the demands imposed by the war, Hay accepted, but at Lincoln’s request he delayed his departure in order to assist with the transition to the new administration. A few weeks later, on the night of April 14, while Hay and the president’s son Robert sat talking in the White House, shouting crowds burst through the doors with the news that the president had been shot. The two young men dashed downstairs, commandeered a carriage, and drove to the house on Tenth Street where Lincoln lay dying. Hay stood by the bed until twenty-two minutes past seven in the morning, when Lincoln stopped breathing. Pitched into despair by Lincoln’s death, Hay could not express his feelings even in the privacy of his diary. He fled Washington at the first opportunity.
President Abraham Lincoln flanked by his chief assistants, John George Nicolay, left, and John Hay. Hay was twenty-two when he went to work in Lincoln’s White House.JOHN HAY COLLECTION, JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Arriving in Paris at the end of July, the grieving Hay found fault with everything, from the sterility of the broad new boulevards to the stench of the older arrondissements. Emperor Napoleon III, with his lifeless eyes and “rotten threadbare uniform,” struck him as grotesque. When an American traveler asked the legation to intercede in her dispute with a hotelkeeper, Hay advised her to drop the matter. The French, he explained with a signal want of diplomacy, “make their living by plundering foreigners.”
Hay was no happier with himself than with the French. He felt less than honorable in the service of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, who seemed to be “doing his best to discredit his high office,” Hay thought. I
t was Johnson’s misfortune to preside over the bitter beginnings of Reconstruction, touching off clashes with Congress that nearly cost him the presidency. Apart from his low regard for Johnson, Hay felt underpaid for the style he was expected to maintain as a member of the diplomatic corps, and he recoiled from the picture of himself as a “whiteheaded old shyster of sixty loafing about the Capitol boring my Senator to get me an office to keep me from starving.”
In confident moments, he dreamed of writing a novel and collaborating on a life of Lincoln with John George Nicolay, but an inability to act on his dreams kept him in constant anxiety. “I am confronted continually by the suggestion of middle age coming on me and finding me with no money, no home, no trade, nothing but the habits of the loafer,” he fretted to his brother. “Up to a certain point it is a good and a pleasant thing to knock around the world, but one must know when to hang up the fiddle and the bow and take up the serious shovel and the lucrative hoe.” The matter was particularly pressing in view of his previous disasters with shovels and hoes. A foray into the turpentine business had wiped out his savings—more than $4,000—and a small vineyard in Illinois, supervised by his father, had yet to turn a profit.
Determined to acquit himself in the world of business, Hay resigned in July 1860, barely a year after his arrival in Paris. With no employment prospects, he wrote to his Uncle Milton in Springfield, Illinois, asking to rejoin the law firm where his career had begun: “I have forgotten most of the law I read with you and would have to learn it all over again. I am not even a good clerk as I know very little about money or business. It is nearly an even chance whether I would ever get to be worth my salt at the bar.” All he could offer was a willingness to try.
Milton Hay had no room for his nephew, publishers had no room for another book on Lincoln, employment failed to materialize, and after a few dispiriting months at home, John Hay was grateful to be asked to take another diplomatic assignment, in Vienna. His official title would be secretary of legation, the same as in Paris, but as acting chargé d’affaires he would earn $6,000 a year—more than double his pay in France. He sailed from New York on June 29, 1867.
Vienna pleased Hay no more than Paris. The emperor was “a stupidish fellow,” the Austrians hopelessly smug in their “satisfaction with a very bad present.” In 1869, moving on to the legation in Madrid, he quickly transferred his abuse to the Spanish. Lazy and devoid of “moral principle,” they were led by politicians to whom decency meant nothing and an empress who succeeded with American envoys by keeping them “in a chronic priapism.” Equally disgusted with the United States, Hay charged that President Ulysses S. Grant, who succeeded Johnson in 1869, was filling the diplomatic corps with “swine” and “nonentities.” It was, he confided in a letter intended for his correspondent’s fire, “very dreary to be an American and hate your home.”
Treated to this barrage of bitterness, friends and family must have mourned the loss of their sweet Johnny Hay, the warm, sensitive youth who had sailed through innumerable tempests on his impeccable manners and his droll sense of humor. Surely the “idiots” he complained of in Europe did not put his grace to more strenuous tests than he had met at the hands of greedy office-seekers and the mercurial Mary Todd Lincoln. In the White House he had been more inclined to laugh than censure when megalomaniacs recommended themselves as major generals or when Mrs. Lincoln, in a show of temper, scratched his name from a list of dinner guests. Hay’s angry outbursts from Europe were expressions of grief and rage, walls thrown up around a broken heart. Lincoln had saved the Union, but he had abandoned John Hay and bequeathed the nation to incompetents.
Hay did not recover until the spring of 1870, five years after the assassination. Finally able to look at his future with more optimism than fear, he resigned his post in Madrid and told his parents he was coming home to “do a little writing.”
The “little writing” soon followed, though not in Warsaw, Illinois. Passing through New York in September, Hay dined with Whitelaw Reid, Horace Greeley’s first lieutenant at the Tribune. Known, only half jokingly, as the Great Moral Organ, the Tribune still hewed to the high principles Greeley had set forth in 1841, when he founded the paper with a pledge to “advance the interests of the People, and to promote their Moral, Social and Political well-being.” By eschewing lurid scandals and unsavory advertising, the Tribune meant to win “the hearty approval of the virtuous and refined.” A vegetarian with a weedy-looking fringe of white whiskers along his jaw-line, Horace Greeley was easy to lampoon but impossible to ignore: the Tribune was read from coast to coast. As Ralph Waldo Emerson explained to Thomas Carlyle, “Greeley does the thinking for the whole West at $2 per year for his paper.”
Whitelaw Reid, impressed by Hay’s command of foreign affairs, offered him a job, and after a few weeks of mulling it over, Hay accepted. He had come home superbly accoutred for a newspaper career. Diplomacy had given him an understanding of the subtleties of ministerial pronouncements, and the hours he had spent writing letters and essays had polished his literary style and honed his powers of observation. In December, only a few weeks after Hay’s arrival, Reid raised his pay from fifty to sixty-five dollars a week and sent him a note of praise: “I have seen now enough of your capacity in sudden emergencies and in a wide scope to be ready to repeat the assurance which I gave you at the beginning, that journalism is sure to prove your true field.”
Since the Tribune seldom credited its writers, Hay’s contributions are hard to trace, but one episode, his coverage of the great Chicago fire, suffices to confirm Reid’s high opinion. The blaze began on Hay’s thirty-third birthday, October 8, 1871. Reaching Chicago after a grueling thirty-eight-hour train trip from New York, Hay made the dismaying discovery that the fire had crippled most of the city’s telegraph lines. The keepers of the lines, plowing their way through sheaves of unsent messages, refused to give one newspaper preference over another. Hay managed to persuade them to send one of his dispatches to the Associated Press, arguing that it would then be available to scores of newspapers. It was not the exclusive coverage the Tribune wanted, but it was more than most of his rivals achieved. Though he saw little chance for further transmissions, he worked sixteen hours a day, freshening his stories with new developments in anticipation of the moment when the wires were restored.
On October 15, one week after the fire began, Hay wrote his last dispatch. “I have here before me six miles, more or less, of the finest conflagration ever seen,” he told Tribune readers. “I have smoking ruins … mountains of brick and mortar and forests of springing chimneys; but I turned from them all this morning to hunt for the spot where the fire started.” Finding his way to Mrs. O’Leary’s “mean little street,” he observed that on one side, not a single house had burned, while on the other only one “squalid little hovel” remained: a “warped and weather-beaten shanty … made sacred by the curse that rested on it…. For out of that house, last Saturday night, came a woman with a lamp to the barn behind the house, to milk the cow with the crumpled temper, that kicked the lamp, that spilled the kerosene, that fired the straw that burned Chicago.” Behind the house, Hay found Mr. O’Leary with two of his friends.
His wife, Our Lady of the Lamp—freighted with heavier disaster than that which Psyche carried to the bedside of Eros—sat at the window, knitting. I approached the Man of the House and gave him good-day. He glanced up with sleepy, furtive eyes. I asked him what he knew about the origin of the fire. He glanced at his friends and said, civilly, he knew very little; he was waked up about 9 o’clock by the alarm, and fought from that time to save his house; at every sentence he turned to his friends and said, “I can prove it by them,” to which his friends nodded assent. He seemed fearful that all Chicago was coming down upon him for prompt and integral payment of that $200,000,000 his cow had kicked over.
But it was poetry, not prose, that brought John Hay his first fame. At about the same time he joined the Tribune, Bret Harte wrote a comic ballad about two Western cardsh
arps outsmarted by an Oriental named Ah Sin. Called “Plain Language from Truthful James” but quickly retitled “The Heathen Chinee,” the poem was printed by hundreds of newspapers across the country. Vendors hawked pamphlet versions on streetcorners, and scores of imitators took to their foolscap. Hay, drawing on his dormant poetic talents and the Pike County dialect he knew from his childhood on the Mississippi, dashed off a few ditties of his own. In “Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle,” the hero is a riverboat engineer “who weren’t no saint,” having “one wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill / And another one here, in Pike.” But when the Prairie Belle caught fire, Jim steered for the riverbank and vowed to hold the wheel “Till the last galoot’s ashore.”
And, sure’s you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,—
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a-going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.
“Little Breeches” was the sentimental saga of little Gabe, a four-year-old whose father had “larnt him to chaw terbacker / Jest to keep his milk-teeth white.” Carried off into a stormy winter night by a team of startled horses, little Gabe was given up for lost when his desperate father flung himself “Crotch-deep in the snow, and prayed.” Inspired to look in a nearby sheepfold, he found his boy, unharmed among the sleeping lambs. The child had only one complaint: “I want a chaw of terbacker / And that’s what’s the matter of me.”
The Five of Hearts Page 5