So, things had clearly changed. Mrs Gill was now cutting her own dash and boldly asserting her expertise as the head of this business while her husband was relegated to an inferior position and her father not even mentioned. Far from earning the disapproval of the Victorian public for her status as an independent businesswoman, Margaret Gill appeared to be attracting greater favour. In June the Saracen’s Head was chosen by the Attorney General to provide the refreshments for ‘The Railway Ball and Supper’ and to dress a ‘real Green Land Turtle . . . the largest that has ever been in Sydney at six hundred weight’ for that occasion. At this time the hotel was also immortalised in a satirical poem in Bell’s which celebrated the opportunity to ‘head off to the Saracen’s Head for our gin, and our pipes and our porter’. But then, in mid-August of the same year, Margaret Gill’s ascent came to an abrupt halt. Or perhaps it simply shifted gears. For, quite suddenly, The Herald announced that the Saracen’s Head—with ‘beer engine and spirit fountain, kegs and gas fittings’ was ‘To Let’ and the only explanation given in regards to this change was that the present proprietor was ‘going to another business’. Was this another insolvency for the Gills or had Margaret decided to dedicate her culinary talents to elite private parties rather than the unreliable rabble of the city hotel trade?
When precisely Mary Ann Gill left Sydney for San Francisco again remains unknown. It is certain however that Martin Gill was in Nevada by July 1852, where he was listed as a baker. Did father and daughter travel together on this second voyage with Will once more in their company? It seems likely that Mary Ann left Sydney in early February 1851. Before then she may have been on hand to assist her mother with what must have been one of Margaret Gill’s proudest professional accomplishments, perhaps even the beginning of a new, independent business venture. The day was ‘the celebration of the anniversary . . . to commemorate the foundation of New South Wales. Of all the various amusements’ available on 26 January each year, it was ‘the Regatta upon Sydney Harbour’ that ‘deservedly’ took ‘precedence’, or so Henry Parkes, now the editor of The Empire, proclaimed in an article he devoted to the occasion. However, the weather on this particular Foundation Day was ‘extremely inauspicious’, Parkes observed. There were strong southerly winds as well as a cloudy sky from which heavy showers frequently descended upon the hundreds of ‘holiday folks’ who ‘tramped’ to Fort Macquarie in their ‘gay attire’. Rather than surrender to the ‘sunless sullenness’, however, Sydney-siders dangled from ‘housetops and windowsills’ delighting in ‘the bellows that blasted about them’ and watching the crowd ‘pour’ into Circular Quay and its surrounds.
The harbour was ‘literally studded’ with vessels of all shapes and sizes, Parkes noted. There were giant, 1000-ton burthens as well as small skiffs and sloops and even the Thistle steamer upon which James Butler Kinchela had sailed back and forth between Sydney and Moreton Bay on numerous occasions. Some were carrying lively freights of party-goers while other vessels had a jovial band performing gay tunes upon their polished decks. For all of this, Parkes could not help but remind his readers that they should be extremely proud that there were no longer any vessels ‘tainted with the stigma of having brought convicts to our shores’. More than a year had passed since Parkes had made his defiant stand against the Hashemy, but the success of that campaign was clearly still on his mind, particularly on that day of self-conscious colonial celebration.
Sprawled upon the outer lawns of Fort Macquarie were summer booths supplying refreshments for the huge crowds. From these there issued the noisy ‘clamour’ of fruit vendors and those selling ‘hot saveloys’. At noon, the governor, ‘Sir Charles’, arrived on foot and without any of the formal regalia customarily expected of the governor upon the anniversary of the colony’s foundation. The crowd cheered as he took to his Flag Ship and pulled up beside an amateur club of ‘Jolly Young Watermen’ who afforded him more than a little ‘aquatic’ amusement. Finally at one o’clock, the Governor of New South Wales signalled for a salute of seventeen guns to herald the formal celebrations of the day. A few moments later, those who had been ‘privileged with a special entrée into the interior of Fort Macquarie’ were ushered into that imposing stone edifice where they received, The Empire was pleased to note, a most ‘excellent luncheon’ that had been prepared for them by none other than Mrs Margaret Gill.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Natural Justice
Mary Ann probably left Sydney with her father and brother in February 1851 and arrived in San Francisco in early June of the same year. By then there had been a dramatic decline in the number of ships heading to America as numerous colonists had returned to Australia with tales of horrendous hardship as well as the vilification they had experienced in San Francisco. Between the time James Butler Kinchela arrived in February 1850 and the Gills set foot upon Clarkes Point in June the following year, there had been several more great conflagrations in San Francisco. The local Night Watch was now also particularly vigilant for they had been warned that the town was about to be attacked by ‘500 Sydney men’ who were coming to San Francisco for the sole purpose of burning and plundering the town. The public were thirsty for vengeance and there was a sense that something had to be done. In early 1851 as the Gills were probably boarding their second vessel for California, a group of men came together of their own accord to answer these complaints and form what became known as the Committee of Vigilance. This Committee comprised San Francisco’s most prominent businessmen, merchants, bankers and mechanics and within a few months over a thousand men had signed up, intent upon bringing a group of villainous colonists to justice and then running the rest of the reviled Sydney Ducks out of the town.
It seems fair to say that the Gills found themselves in the wrong place at the worst possible time. At the very moment that Mary Ann and her emancipist father were making their way through the streets of San Francisco, the spirit of ‘Judge Lynch’ was not only presiding over the town but also specifically intent upon spilling colonial blood. William Gill would have had more luck finding gold a few hundred miles from home as Edward Hargreaves had recently returned from California and having observed that certain portions of rural New South Wales resembled the American goldfields he went looking for and soon found gold. No sooner had Hargreaves begun boasting of nuggets than hundreds of men and women abandoned Sydney for the new Australian goldfields. Unfortunately, however, William Gill had sailed to San Francisco at the very time that the mining of gold was becoming more demanding and less rewarding in America and when his accent identified him as public enemy number one. Martin Gill may also have borne a few of the well-known signs that marked him as an emancipist. For all his dash and pluck, he may have had a certain shuffle to his gait that would have aroused suspicion during that feverish period in San Francisco in 1851.
Even if the Gills somehow managed to avoid overt discrimination themselves, they were still likely to have had some sort of encounter with the vicious expression of American justice that took place between June and August of that year when the Committee of Vigilance undertook four public lynchings, all of which involved the brutal execution of Australian colonists. The first of these occurred in June to a Sydney man who had stolen a safe in broad daylight. His public hanging was attended by a crowd of approximately 2000 people even though it occurred at two o’clock in the morning. The second involved James Stuart, another Sydney immigrant, who confessed to assault, robbery and murder when he was rounded up by a group of 500 armed Committee members. In early July he was hung from the mast of a ship docked at Clarkes Point.
During the last of these 1851 vigilante executions the Committee broke into the city’s police gaol, where two ‘Sydneyites’ were being held before their trial for a spate of crimes that included robbery and arson. The two men—Sam Whittaker and Robert Menzies—were dragged from their cells, quickly tried and then hanged at the threshold of the building where the Committee held its meetings. There the colonists’ corpses attracted ‘a g
reat, dense, agitated crowd’ of over ten thousand men, while a further five thousand local inhabitants filed past the two dead bodies over the following days.
Would Mary Ann and her family have seen the ghoulish corpses of these Sydney migrants bloating in the San Francisco sun? As more than half of the town’s population either witnessed the execution or viewed the dead bodies it would have been impossible for the Gills to remain untouched by this horrific incident. What might Kinchela have thought of such an event? His elder brother had shown a taste for taking the law into his own hands—was this something he also deemed necessary in this unpredictable frontier environment? Surely Kinchela did something to earn the title ‘Judge’ he apparently acquired in California, although exactly what this was and when, remains unknown.
We do however know that Mary Ann Gill and James Butler Kinchela were married on Saturday, 16 October 1852 and that this took place ‘by special licence’ before the Reverend Father Scanlan, who solemnised their union at St Mary’s church in San Francisco. On that fine autumn day, the weather was one of the ‘pleasantest days’ of the season. It was a ‘bright, clear day’, the Daily Alta claimed, ‘without a particle of wind or dust and just warm enough to be comfortable’. The atmosphere was so surprisingly clear that the hills of the Contra Costa seemed within a ‘stone’s throw of the city’ and ‘the trees in the ravines and the buildings in the valley’ could be seen ‘with the naked eye’. Already there was much general excitement about the forthcoming federal election and the shop windows and theatre doors were posted with cartoons of the various candidates standing for the election of the fourteenth president of the United States. Out on the harbour the number of steamers anchored about the bay had quadrupled and the hotels were brimming with more bodies than they had beds.
Early in the morning, the town fire alarm had rung out and six or so water wagons rushed through town determined to tame a blaze that had started in one of the residential areas. Within hours the fire was settled and calm restored, but for a party of Chinese men, who caused a stir by hiring a carriage and riding up and down the main street. So much for California’s busy gold town. It was, the news-sheet claimed, a rather uneventful day.
Perhaps on that morning Mary Ann walked to the church in the company of her father and brother, negotiating her way along the wide streets as carts and pedestrians went about their business and one or two men stumbled out of one of the more notorious gambling dens. Or perhaps it was decided that the bridal party should maintain a semblance of respectability by taking a carriage to the church? Did William accompany James Butler—just in case he had another episode of cold feet? If so, Mary Ann would have made her way through the city streets with only her father as her chaperone.
If she was unable to have a dress made for the occasion, Mary Ann would have found some way to furnish her costume with a little lace or a shawl or perhaps even some fabric flowers that would have helped to create a sense of occasion. In keeping with the fashion, whatever dress she wore would have had a tight waist and full skirts, perhaps even a generous bustle. If, however, she had organised to have something tailored for the occasion it is most likely that it would have been bone and ivory with floral embroidering about the bottom of the skirt. With arms and décolletage covered and buttons to her throat, Mary Ann would have been a modest bride. Kinchela would have probably carried his best top hat, such a universal fashion item at the time, and also worn one of his better waistcoats and jackets. Perhaps he also carried his father’s cane with him.
What would Martin Gill have thought as he stood before the altar preparing to give his twenty-year-old Roman Catholic daughter to the forty-year-old Protestant gentleman who he had once tried to murder before successfully convicting and incarcerating him for the abduction of his daughter? More than four years had passed since Mary Ann had first defied her father by slipping out of the third-storey window of their Pitt Street hotel. Since then there had been so many interludes and intrigues that perhaps Martin Gill was finally relieved to see the matter done.
And James Butler Kinchela? Mary Ann’s arrival in San Francisco had been delayed by as much as a year, perhaps even two. When she did not arrive on the Sabine in early 1850 he must have wondered if a shipwreck had taken his future wife, or if perhaps she had changed her mind. More than two years had passed since he had left Sydney and during that time we might assume that he had not only learnt the lie of the land but also found a way to secure a foothold in this new society. James Butler was to do well in California and perhaps as he stood before the altar at St Mary’s he felt a new sense of confidence about himself and his future.
Those few moments at the altar must have been profoundly satisfying for Mary Ann, who had persisted with her affections for James Butler in the face of the most devastating discouragement. She had suffered social humiliation and ostracism as well as the wrath of her parents and the highly erratic conduct of her father. Her suitor had been imprisoned, her family bankrupted and she had set sail to San Francisco only to be forced to return to Sydney on a pirate ship after her own vessel had been wrecked. Despite all these delays, she had set sail again, no doubt with the promise of her future husband and her new life firmly in her thoughts—only to find herself in a city that was every bit as capricious as her hometown and perhaps even more so.
Her journey to the aisle had taken more than four years, and during this time all had seemed lost so many times. But here she was—no longer a furtive fifteen-year-old runaway romancer intent upon defying her father, but rather a twenty-year-old woman standing in the church of her faith, about to marry her gentleman settler with her parents’ blessing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
What Mary Ann Did Next
Mary Ann and James Butler Kinchela were married for twelve years and lived most of this time on Kinchela’s ranch, which was, an advertisement in the Sacramento Daily Union stated, located a mile east of Sutter’s Fort, ‘out on the old Johnson Road’. Mary Ann had what she’d always wanted, even if she had to move to another hemisphere to get it. She was now the wife of a gentleman settler and had already seen more of life than many of her female contemporaries in New South Wales. She also enjoyed a degree of wealth, freedom and respectability. We might imagine this period of her life—between the ages of twenty and thirty-two—as halcyon, a time when she was rewarded for the persistence she had shown in the face of so many romantic frustrations.
Mary Ann’s and James Butler’s ranch would have been near the Sacramento River and close enough to town to enjoy a certain amount of society. They would have survived the devastating floods in the early 1860s, and seen many of their neighbours perish from the cholera epidemics that followed. The Kinchelas would have also witnessed the expansion and consolidation of Sacramento as the town grew to accommodate a population of over 10,000, including thousands of Chinese immigrants who survived various attempts to run them out of town.
James Butler Kinchela would have brought his experience of colonial frontiers in Australia to his life as a pastoralist in America, engaging not only in daring acts of enterprise but probably other sorts of ‘encounters’ with the Maidu and Nisenan people of the Sacramento region. In a state where the governor had proclaimed the need to ‘exterminate and remove’ Native Americans as early as 1850, a man like Kinchela was likely to have played a role in the tragic genocide that took place during this period. Indeed, James Butler was probably the sort of man who perceived such activities as not only necessary for the protection of his family but also part of his civic duty.
The Kinchelas would have used the steamships and then the First Transcontinental Railroad to transport their goods to and from San Francisco. When the new Transcontinental Telegraph was introduced in 1861, Mary, as he preferred to call her, and James would have found themselves much more connected to the rest of the world which would have allowed them to follow the news regarding various antagonisms between the northern and southern states of America and then the declaration of the Civil War in 1861.
Mary Ann probably gave birth to both of her children in their homestead—James John, who was born in 1857 and Edith Ann who was born a year later in 1858. The land around their homestead must have been much like the rest in this region—bountiful with canopies of oaks and cottonwoods as well as grapevines, and an air that had been described as smelling ‘like champagne’. Although, probably not in the areas of Sacramento that had been devastated by gold-mining. Mary Ann and James Butler may have had access to the ten-acre orchard belonging to John Sutter, the German-Swiss miller who built his fort here in 1839. They may even have taken cuttings from these orchards to start their own grove of citrus and stone-fruit trees. James and Mary Ann made their money in cattle, and it is likely that Kinchela continued to drive his herds to local auction yards throughout the 1850s and early 1860s and that as he did so this Irish gentleman and sometime Australian overlander resembled an American cowboy.
Did other family members, such as Mary Ann’s mother, ever visit the Kinchelas during this twelve-year period? Did Martin Gill ever impose upon their hospitality or did he prefer to take his chances baking for the miners of the Sierra Nevada? Or was the wife of Judge Kinchela content with the company of the other ranch owners and whatever town society was available in Sacramento? Perhaps Mary Ann added a Californian drawl to the flat, nasal tones of her native-born accent. What did she think of the abolition debates that raged throughout America during those years? Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold over 300,000 copies in the year that she and Kinchela married. It soon became the most popular novel of that era in England as well as America. Surely she and Kinchela had a copy in their home, although we are unlikely to know their attitudes to it and the important question of slavery.
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