by Oakley Hall
Senator Sharon died before Sharon v. Sharon came to its conclusion. Knowing he was dying, he vowed that his estate would expend every penny he owned fighting Miss Hill’s outrageous fabrications. “Why, she would be the highest paid whore in history,” he was reported to have said. “The grandes horizon tales of Paris are cheapskates compared to her. I hear they charge a thousand francs a night. If Allie wins out, she’ll be netting about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per.”
On hearing of Sharon’s death, Bierce wrote in his column in the Examiner: “Death is not the end; there remains the litigation over the Estate.”
The State Superior Court ruled in Sarah Althea Hill’s favor. Mrs. Sharon was awarded $2,500 per month as alimony, and $55,000 for counsel’s fees. Mrs. Sharon promptly went on a shopping spree. Unfortunately the Federal Circuit Court was still to be heard from. There would be no more shopping sprees for Miss Hill.
I knew that Bierce had been moving from place to place. He spent some time at Larkmead with Lillie Coit. He lived briefly at the Putnam House in Auburn, and in a boardinghouse in Sunol. My wife and I called on him in Oakland, where he had taken an apartment. She was intimidated about meeting the man about whom she had heard so much, but Bierce was in a fine mood. He had a new job.
We sat on a sofa in the small, hot room, while he brought us tea and ranged before us, gesturing as he told the story of his employment, the same Ambrose Bierce, with his fair mustache like a pair of sparrow’s wings, and his curly, silvering hair, and his cold eyes beneath shaggy brows. He wore a checked suit and a high collar and tie.
“This young man came to my door,” he told us. “The youngest man, it seemed to me, that I have ever confronted. His appearance and manner were of the most extreme diffidence. I did not ask him to apply himself to my better chair but kept him on my doorstep.
“He said he had come from the San Francisco Examiner. Of course I knew that George Hearst had recently presented the Examiner to his son, Willie, as a plaything.
“ ‘Oh, you have come from Mr. Hearst,’ I said.
“And he lifted his blue eyes to me and cooed, ‘I am Mr. Hearst!’ ”
Bierce laughed and clapped his hands together. Young Hearst was assembling the finest stable of journalists in the West. Peter Bigelow and Arthur McEwen had already been employed. Hearst wanted Bierce to write a column for the Sunday Examiner.
“And I will do it!” Bierce said. “I am anxious for some City clamor and movement. I am tired of the scent of pine trees!”
And he said to me, “Perhaps you will come to the Examiner too, Tom.”
I said I was very happy at the Chronicle, but I would look forward to seeing him in the City.
“Yes, we had a pleasant association,” Bierce said. “What detectives we were!” He said to my wife, “You must persuade your husband, my dear.”
She said in a small voice that she would try.
Our association was never again to be what it was. I tried to be of some comfort to Bierce when his sixteen-year-old son, Day, with whom I had participated in double-play practice in St. Helena, shot himself in a fracas over a girl that you did not have to be Ambrose Bierce to know was a piece of utter human stupidity. His second son, Leigh, died of acute alcoholism in 1901.
That same year the first “society” novel of Amelia Brittain Sloat was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine. The title was Shadows in the Glass. The heroine of her novel, Clara Benbough, was forced by her husband’s syphilitic sterility to beg an old friend to father her child. The novel was considered quite daring.
Amelia Brittain Sloat’s novels were often compared to those of Gertrude Atherton, the most famous and daring of the California lady novelists.
A year later Sarah Althea Hill Terry was remanded to the State Insane Asylum in Stockton. Sharon v. Hill had gone against her, in appeal after appeal. She had married Judge Terry, who was thirty-four years her senior. In Sharon v. Sharon and Sharon v. Hill Terry was her most steadfast supporter, even including Mammy Pleasant. The last appeal of Sharon v. Hill was pleaded before Judge Stephan J. Field, who should have recused himself. He had been a friend of Senator Sharon’s, had sat on the State Supreme Court with Judge Terry and was his implacable enemy.
When the ultimate crushing decision was read, both Sarah Althea and Judge Terry became violent. Terry was confined in jail for six months for his outbursts, Sarah Althea for three.
A year after the decision Mr. and Mrs. Terry encountered Judge Field in a railroad station. Terry assaulted the judge, striking him twice, and was shot dead by the judge’s bodyguard, one Dave Neagle, who had served as a deputy sheriff with Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, Arizona.
Mrs. Terry’s conduct in the following years became more and more erratic. She was destitute. She had lost her famous auburn-haired looks, and she was losing her wits as well. Mammy Pleasant took her in, at the Octavia Street mansion, but Sarah Althea became more and more pathetic, and a public nuisance.
Ambrose Bierce, never notable for his compassion, wrote of her:
“The male Californian—idolater of sex and proud of abasement at the feet of his own female—has now a fine example of the results entailed by his unnatural worship. Mrs. Terry, traipsing the streets, uncommonly civic, problematically harmless but indubitably daft, is all his own work, and he ought to be proud of her.”
Mammy Pleasant signed the commitment documents.
Gertrude Atherton had an encounter with Bierce in Sunol, where, after having submitted to some savage criticism of her novels, she gained the advantage over him by laughing at his attempt to embrace her. They became fellow columnists on the San Francisco Examiner, but her contempt for her readership was without the wit that Bierce exercised, and she soon returned to New York and her career as a novelist. She and Bierce, however, embarked upon a long correspondence. He became a faithful admirer and critic of her work, and she regarded him as her muse.
Her one-time companion, Sibyl Sanderson, was established as an opera diva of international repute and continued to shock San Franciscans by becoming the mistress of the composer Massenet.
I encountered young Arthur Brittain Sloat at a meeting in New York of the Newspaper Guild, of which I was at that time an officer. He was a reporter working for James Gordon Bennett at the World. Looking at him was like seeing in a mirror not my reflection but the reflection of myself twenty-two years before. He must have thought I was drunk from the confusion of my greeting.
His mother was at that time on her third marriage and her seventh novel, which was a fictionalization of the Rose of Sharon.
Huntington remained Bierce’s chief enemy. Crocker had died in 1888, Stanford in 1893, and Collis B. Huntington became the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1884 he had been able to cross the country entirely on lines he controlled. His dislike of Leland Stanford, which had always smoldered, caught fire in the senatorial election of 1885, when Stanford doublecrossed Huntington’s friend and faithful Railroad ally Aaron A. Sargent to capture the Republican nomination. In 1887 Stanford “trifled” again with Huntington, making a deal with George Hearst and San Francisco boss Chris Buckley to assist Hearst’s future candidacy in return for Democratic support for a second term in the U.S. Senate.
“I don’t forget those who have played me false,” Huntington said.
His chance to strike back at Stanford came when Stanford had overextended financing his son’s memorial, the Leland Stanford Jr. University. Huntington prevented the former governor’s withdrawal of Railroad funds to balance his personal accounts. The Railroad was then under heavy investigation by the government, and Stanford would have been indicted except for the timely decisions of Justice Stephan Field of the State Supreme Court, who had never been known to let down a millionaire friend.
Huntington was to take one more swipe at his old partner. When Stanford died the estate was immediately tied up in lawsuits, the most important of which was that filed by the federal government attaching assets until the Railroad’s $57,000,000
debt was settled. It seemed that the university must close its doors. “Close the circus!” Huntington growled, and let the Stanford estate fight the battle of the Big Four’s liability, which he also, in his time, would have to face.
By Mrs. Stanford’s heroic efforts the university was kept in operation. A friendly judge allowed her to claim professors and staff as personal servants. Race horses were sold, Mrs. Stanford’s household servants and gardeners were dismissed, her carriage let go. The university was kept open despite Huntington’s malignity.
As the cold-hearted old magnate grew older, he became an easy mark for cartoonists, with his bald, double-domed skull, which he kept covered with a rabbinical skullcap. Caricaturists customarily portrayed him and his railroad lines as an octopus.
The electorate had begun to take a different view of laissez-faire capitalism, and the Railroad’s rate structure, which was universally viewed as arbitrary and discriminatory, was widely blamed for the depression of the 1890s. Moreover the Railroad’s second-mortgage governmental bonds were soon to fall due, and Huntington girded his forces for the fight against their payment. He employed representatives in Washington and in state capitals, whose duty it was to “explain” to legislators what was “right.” He insisted on the American privilege of supporting the election of officials whose views coincided with his own. Payments were made when necessary, but he did not view this as bribery. A bribe was a voluntary purchase for personal advancement, the wrongdoing of which he had accused Stanford.
When I wrote a memorial piece on Bierce for the Chronicle, I was pleased to describe his final triumph over Huntington and the Railroad, which had been a long time coming:
William Randolph Hearst sent Bierce to Washington to help the Hearst newspapers fight the Railroad Funding Bill. This Bill would have been the biggest giveaway yet to the Southern Pacific Railroad. The $75,000,000 debt to the U.S. government was to be fobbed off in the form of 2 percent bonds due in 80 years. In effect it was a total gift to the Southern Pacific. Huntington had bought up enough senators, especially those of the Western states, to insure the Bill’s passage.
Bierce immediately went into action in the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Morning Journal, in the style of invective he had perfected, abusing the Railroad and Collis B. Huntington, and praising Senator John T. Morgan, chairman of the senate committee that had summoned Huntington to testify before it, and who embarrassed the president of the Railroad with probing questions.
Bierce wrote, “Huntington has been able to remove his hand from the public’s pocket long enough to raise it over a Bible. In Sacramento the Railroad’s bagmen are as common a sight as the senate pages, but instead of sending lobbyists to Washington to accomplish his crowning achievement of the purchase of the U.S. Senate, Huntington has packed his own baggage full of greenbacks and come to tend to matters himself.”
In trouble in committee, Huntington produced testimonial letters from prominent Californians attesting to the Railroad’s benefits to the state and the extraordinary ethics of its proprietors. Bierce pursued the authors of these testimonials as he had pursued Aaron Jennings. He publicized them in “Bierce’s Black Book,” where their names were broadcast until they recanted. Recant they did. The senate revelations, Huntington’s arrogance and ignorance as shown in the committee hearings, and Bierce’s harpoonings were so shocking that all but two of the testimonials were withdrawn. The senatorial tide turned against the Southern Pacific Railroad.
Huntington encountered Bierce on the steps of the capitol. “How much?” he growled in defeat, and he uttered his familiar judgment, more cynical than Ambrose Bierce had ever been: “Every man has his price!”
“Seventy-five million dollars,” Bierce said in his triumph. “Payable to the U.S. Government!”