Mackay’s son John William, Jr., “Willie” to everyone with whom he was on informal terms, graduated from Oxford and joined his father in the family businesses around the time his father ceded control of the Nevada Bank. Willie began serving as a director of the American Forcite Powder Company, an explosives manufacturer in which Mackay held a substantial investment, and took a seat on the Commercial Cable Company board. Willie grew into a man who much resembled his father, and the two Mackays made a formidable team. John Junior possessed his father’s acumen, if not all of his touchy pugnacity, but also the easy social graces and casual affability his father found so difficult to master. Willie spoke French like a native, and he’d received the formal education his father had regretted not having his entire life. Willie also possessed a wide streak of fun. He knew how to enjoy himself in ways that John Mackay did not. Rather than try to quash the adventurous frolic from Willie’s character, Mackay always encouraged it. John Mackay had his hopes for the future founded on his two sons.
Since the advent of John’s involvement with the transatlantic cables, the Meissonier incident, and her London triumphs of 1886, Louise had been spending much of her time in England. In December 1890, Mackay bought Number 6 Carlton House Terrace and gave it to Louise on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday. Located in the heart of fashionable London, the home overlooked St. James’s Park, just a short distance down the Mall in one direction from Buckingham Palace and a casual stroll in the other from Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. Louise became every bit as much a fixture in London society as she had been in Parisian.
Three years later, Mackay was again in San Francisco. Around noon on February 24, 1893, Wesley C. Rippey, “a half-insane . . . seedy, played-out old stock gambler” who had lost “all his means” gambling on the Comstock mines, followed Mackay into Lick Alley, a narrow alley that connected Sutter and Post streets behind the Lick House. People nearby paid no attention. Lick Alley served as a popular shortcut between the two major thoroughfares. Suddenly, three shots cracked in the alley. The first eyewitnesses noticed Rippey lying on the ground with a pistol in his hand and Mackay standing a few steps beyond quizzically eying the fallen man. Someone called Mackay’s attention to the smoke rising from his coat and said, “Mr. Mackay, you have been shot.”
Mackay told the man he must be mistaken.
“There’s a hole in your coat,” the man said.
Mackay put his hand inside his coat. His fingers emerged bloody. Rippey had shot him once in the back, missed with a second shot, and turned the third into his own chest. A note in Rippey’s pocket read: “FOOD FOR REFLECTION.—He paid $150,000 for one sapphire to place on the jaded person of his wife—a sum sufficient to have saved at least 500 of his paupers from a suicidal grave. Just think of it. Inscribe it on his tomb.”
Mackay had a bullet wedged between his shoulder blades. The shot had missed Mackay’s spine by the width of a pencil point. A bystander gave Mackay a ride to the Palace Hotel in a buggy. At the Palace, a doctor prepped Mackay for surgery. Although warned of an “exceedingly painful” operation, “the bluff old mining man” refused anesthetic. Perspiration stood out on Mackay’s face while the doctor made deep incisions and pinched out the bullet, but Mackay didn’t so much as utter a groan.
Newspapers all over the country reported the shooting and printed daily articles about the convalescence of a man the New York Times described as “one of the richest men in the world.” The same Times article congratulated Mackay for conducting himself with “a rare degree of modesty and good sense” and excused Mackay’s two points of “pardonable pride”—that he’d come so far from such humble beginnings and that his money “had never been used to the detriment of his fellow man.” Mining circles all lauded Mackay as a man whose astronomical wealth “had not elevated him above his old-time associates.”
A message from London reported John’s cablegram to Louise: “The crank that shot me is 73 years old. I don’t know him; never saw him. Doctor cut out the bullet. No reason for the least uneasiness.” Louise cabled her husband every two hours for the next several days. Aside from inability to lie on his back, Mackay convalesced rapidly—until he came down with a dangerous appendix inflammation. That brought Louise and Clarence rushing over from Europe. The danger had passed without requiring surgery before they arrived in New York. Willie joined them for a more leisurely journey west.
Longtime San Francisco journalists who hadn’t seen Louise in eighteen years remarked on her still-youthful features and said her hair was just as black as it had been when she’d left the city. At the Palace Hotel, Louise went into John’s rooms ahead of the boys. The couple spent a few moments alone, after which their sons entered. “It was plain to be seen that a happier family had never gathered beneath the Palace roof,” said Mackay’s old nemesis, the San Francisco Chronicle. (Louise’s lavish entertainments of the proprietor, Michael Henry de Young and his wife, Katherine, during their European vacations may have contributed to the improved tenor of the paper’s Mackay coverage.) In the morning, Willie and Clarrie enjoyed an outing in the city. Louise shut herself up with her husband, citing her desire for “a few days’ rest after her long journey.” The next day, John “enjoyed a drive of several hours duration” with Louise, the first time he’d left the hotel in forty-five days.
As John gathered strength, the Mackay family reunited with many old friends, toured Chinatown, and took the train to Southern California for a carriage drive through the endless orange groves of Riverside. On their way back East in May, they spent days exploring the Chicago World’s Fair. After two months of uninterrupted family time, Louise and Clarence returned to London in early June. John and Willie stayed in New York attending to business. The appendix inflammation that had bothered John in March nearly killed him in August. Emergency surgery performed in his rooms at the Belgrovia Apartments at Fifth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street saved his life.
At the end of his second 1893 convalescence, Mackay signed contracts for a third transatlantic cable, an improved design with a higher message-carrying capacity. He likely took much joy watching the fourteen-story building he’d commissioned for the Postal Telegraph’s headquarters take shape on the northwest corner of Broadway and Murray Street, directly across Broadway from City Hall Park and newspaper row. Mackay owned substantially in the Sprague Elevator and Electrical Works, which would occupy suites in the building. The Sprague Company installed dynamos, electric lighting throughout the building, and the most advanced electric elevator system in the world. Four local elevators serviced floors one through ten. The two express elevators were exclusively devoted to the needs of the eleventh through the fourteenth floors, which would house the head offices of the Postal Telegraph and the Commercial Cable Company. The mahogany-furnished clubrooms and restaurant of the 360-member Hardware Club occupied the top floor.I Mackay, his sons, and many officers of his companies were members.
John Mackay and John William, Jr., hosted a grand dinner in the Hardware Club to dedicate the building on May 24, 1894, a well-chosen date—the fiftieth anniversary of Samuel F. B. Morse’s first telegraph message. The building’s newfangled electrical elevator system evoked much comment—they were the first in the world to use push-buttons marked “up” and “down” to automatically summon the cars, replacing the old, much despised, easily corruptible system of simply yelling the words into the shaft and hoping for the quick response of the attendant. For himself, Mackay chose a corner office directly over the junction of Broadway and Murray Street. He had his desk placed so that it afforded a view over City Hall Square and down into Frankfort Street. “From this window,” he said, “I can see the site of the house in which I lived as a child, before I dreamed of going to the Coast or ever amounting to anything.”
Only John Mackay knew the incredible distance between those two locations.
• • •
He’d orchestrated a much less pleasant family affair earlier that spring. His daughter Eva’s marriage
to the Italian prince had fallen apart. Their marriage had been at least fruitful, for they had three children, but in the Prince Don Fernando Julian Colonna, Eva had married a man remarkably like her own father, Doctor Edmund G. Bryant. Don Fernando was handsome, but also a scoundrel and a poor gambler with an unpleasant air of entitlement. Mackay had given Eva a substantial income after her wedding—reported by the New York World as $175,000 per annum—in addition to many extravagant presents of jewelry, coaches, and furniture. None of it sated the prince’s notorious passion for gambling—and his correspondingly enormous losses. On several occasions, Eva pawned her jewels to settle his gambling debts. On other occasions, Eva received bills signed by her husband for jewelry and other “feminine adornments” that she’d never seen. Prince Colonna’s treatment of Eva slipped from “neglect to brutality.”
Reproached for neglecting Eva, Colonna replied that he “couldn’t be expected to show [his wife] any consideration” on account of her being just “a common American.”
Colonna also threatened to take all of Eva’s “American independence” out of her.
“You may if you kill me,” she reportedly replied.
Louise Mackay developed a particular hatred and revulsion for her son-in-law. In their final confrontation, Louise told the prince what she thought of him and his conduct. The prince supposedly “contented himself with comparing his princely origin” with the humble beginnings of Mrs. Mackay.
Eva endured all of it until October 1893, when she filed a suit for separation in Paris.
“I am glad you have taken this step,” Mackay wrote to her. “People will talk, of course; but you do not live to please other people, and need not care what any one says as long as you are happy and free.”
After the New Year, when Eva thought she detected her husband plotting to steal the children away to Italy, she fled with them to New York, then to California, where she sought an annulment of her marriage. Eighteen months later, Prince Colonna accepted a legal separation granting Eva custody of the children in exchange for a $12,000-per-year stipend from her stepfather. Eva’s marriage to the Italian prince had done nothing to improve John Mackay’s opinion of European “nobility.”
• • •
James G. Fair died at the end of 1894, of Bright’s disease, the same as that which had felled James Flood. When Fair died, he was one of the largest owners of real estate in San Francisco. The last major project of his life involved reclaiming marshland and developing part of what is now San Francisco’s Marina District. The San Francisco Chronicle made the damning observation that at the time of his death, “Fair did not have an intimate friend in the world.”
Fair’s passing left John Mackay as the last surviving member of the Bonanza Firm. The Santa Cruz Sentinel commented that although all four were of an age, a race, and began their association in equal health, Mackay was the only one of four “who refused to indulge in the luxuries of the table.” Or, it might be added, of the bottle. In personal habits, his life always remained as simple as when he’d been a common Comstock miner.
Mackay’s other old partner, Jonas M. Walker, died a week after Fair, also in San Francisco, in a humble residence at 1715 Polk Street. He’d lost his share of the money he and Mackay had raised from the Kentuck speculating in railroads, returned to California during the bonanza times, and opened a stock brokerage. That business failed in 1879, and Walker’s partner committed suicide. Walker never managed to rebuild his fortunes.
Bishop Patrick Manogue passed on to his long home in February. He’d been the founding bishop of the Sacramento diocese and built the city’s cathedral, largely on contributions from Theresa Fair and John Mackay, who, although never a Catholic himself, honored the many good deeds Bishop Manogue had done for his wife during the hard years of her failed marriage to Doctor Bryant. (Ten years before, Louise had paid to have Dr. Bryant’s body moved from the Sierra foothills to San Francisco’s Laurel Hill Cemetery and interred alongside the remains of Marie Bryant, their baby who died on the Comstock in the early 1860s, whom Louise had also moved to more comfortable soil in San Francisco.)
The Comstock’s glory had vanished. Nine years before, in 1886, Mackay and Flood had stilled the engines of the Combination Shaft, the last of the Comstock’s great third-line shafts. Explorations from the Combination Shaft had found a mass of mineralized quartz on the thirty-two-hundred-foot level, but no ore. As Mackay told a reporter in 1895, they’d spent $7 million on the shaft and “it did not yield us 7 cents.” The mines flooded to the level of the Sutro Tunnel, but reduced milling costs had made it feasible for the mines to survive mining low-grade quartz from the edges of the old bonanzas above the tunnel level. They’d produced $16 million in dividends mining low-grade ores in the last eleven years—solid profits, but a far cry from the bonanza times of the late 1870s, when the Con. Virginia and the California were gushing out $16 million in dividends every eight months. By 1895, miners had exhausted most of the low-grade ores, too.
John Mackay returned to the Comstock on October 10, 1895. He went straight to the Con. Virginia office and descended to the 1,650-foot and 1,750-foot levels of the mine in company with his superintendent and foreman. The trio spent many hours underground, which miners and speculators regarded as “a most encouraging sign.” Superstitious to a fault, they all recalled that “mines have never failed to improve under Mr. Mackay’s personal direction.”
Mackay spent the next several days going over “the whole Comstock situation.” As usual, his old friends said that he’d “changed but little in appearance. The hand of time and the wielding of millions leaving but little trace upon him.”
Tragically, that was about to change.
•••
Mackay was in San Francisco six days later, staying as usual at the Palace Hotel and attending to his business interests, also as usual. The first intimation of trouble came at 7:00 p.m., when Mackay’s private secretary received a cable dispatch from Clarence Mackay saying his brother Willie was sick. A second arrived moments later: “Notify father to prepare for the worst.”
Both telegrams reached Mackay simultaneously in his room at the Palace Hotel. Mackay rushed across the street to the office of the Postal Telegraph. The office superintendent put forth every effort to obtain more information. Silence prevailed for five agonizing hours. The receiving instrument finally ticked out a message from Clarence around midnight: “Willie was thrown from a horse to-day and never recovered consciousness. He died this evening.”
Mackay sat in a chair in his superintendent’s office and held his head in his hands. “His silent grief repelled any attempts at condolence, and none were attempted,” said the devastating dispatch from San Francisco published in the New York Times. Mackay secluded himself in his room the next day, having left strict instructions that nothing was to be forwarded to his room except information pertaining to Willie’s death.
The details were gruesome. Willie and several friends had been riding horses southwest of Paris on a rural estate in Mayet, in the Department of Sarthe outside Le Mans. An excellent horseman, Willie chose “a particularly restive animal”—against the advice of a friend who had ridden the horse the day before. Something spooked the horse, which bolted through a forest with Willie on its back. Willie dodged several trees before losing control completely and sprawling in the saddle. His head struck a tree trunk with such force that it stove in his forehead and crushed both of his eyes. Carried to the estate house on a mattress, Willie remained conscious for three hours. He recognized the voices of his friends and squeezed their hands while they spoke to him. Willie’s favorite dog lay next to him in bed and let out an agonized whine as he died.
Louise rushed to Paris and collapsed in bed, “completely prostrated with grief.” Massive curtains of black velvet drapes fringed in silver draped the facade of the Rue de Tilsitt mansion. In a coffin sealed to save his mother the sight of his mangled face, Willie’s body reposed in the summer dining room, facing the Place de l’Ét
oile and the Arc de Triomphe.
On October 22, the members of the Mackay clan in Europe—Ada, Eva, Clarence, Mrs. Hungerford—gave Willie a funeral fit for a king. Policemen suspended street traffic in the vicinity of the Arc de Triomphe while a hearse drawn by six white horses conveyed Willie’s coffin from the Rue de Tilsitt a short distance up the Avenue Carnot and the Rue d’Armaillé to the church of St. Ferdinand des Ternes. A cross bearing the inscription “Sa mere désolée” rode with the coffin. Newspapers described “the somber gorgousness [sic] of the obsequies,” the black and silver draperies hung in the nave, the monumental candelabras in the church, the forest of candles burning around the catafalque, the profusion of floral devotions, and two wreaths of mauve orchids and white lilacs—one that said, “From a broken-hearted mother,” and the other, “From a broken-hearted father.” Louise hadn’t been able to summon the strength to personally attend the service. After, the hearse took Willie’s coffin to the Chapel of St. Augustin, where Louise came and prayed over the body of her dead son.
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