For instance, our Mr. Huntington has remarked that if the Railroad’s profits continue to decline, he will have to resort to reducing wages. He is the largest employer in the state, and if Mr. Huntington is not permitted to earn two millions a year on an original investment of a suspender button and a postage stamp, no mechanic shall earn more than a dollar a day if he can help it.
Mr. Huntington has announced himself opposed to politics. In the purity of his motives, as compared to Mr. £eland $tanford’s, he will turn the offices at Fourth and Townsend into a Sunday School and appoint the faithful Aaron Jennings chaplain of both branches of the State Legislature. If we rightly understand him, Mr. Huntington, whose claim it is that “every man has his price,” promises to renounce the sinful practice of paying money to the legislators, and substitute the saintly habit of taking up a collection, in which operation we recommend that he consult the most successful operator in that field, the Reverend Stottlemyer of the Washington Street Church.
We will have more to say of the senator from Southern Pacific presently. There is the matter of an arson in Santa Cruz that destroyed the papers of former Circuit Court Judge Hiram Hamon, which were concerned with corruption in the judiciary in general and the purchase of then Judge Jennings in particular, and with the murder in Morton Street of Judge Hamon’s widow, which, as we have written, was ineptly arranged to seem to be the third of the “placing card” murders.
The column included some of his usual targets, dogs as “leakers, reekers, smilers and defilers,” the Spring Valley Water Company as “the hydrants of Infamy, the springs of felony,” and reflections on the politics of the Hawaiian Islands: “This bald-faced land-grab by mizzle-spouting missionaries and sugar landlords.”
I was proud that Bierce had run my piece on Mussel Slough on the page opposite Tattle:
During the ‘70s the Railroad advertised in the East and Midwest for farmers to buy and settle Railroad-grant lands in the San Joaquin Valley. Thousands of farmers came on the Railroad’s promise to sell them their land at $2.50 to $5.00 per acre.
The Railroad laid out the towns of Goshen, Tulare, Tipton and Hanford in the Tulare Basin, which came to be known as Starvation Valley from the farmers’ struggle to make a living there.
In 1877, when the lands were prospering, the Railroad broke its promise. Instead of being reconveyed to the settlers at the low figures, lands that had already been settled would be sold to the highest bidders at prices ranging from $25 to $40 per acre.
The farmers sued but lost in several cases in San Francisco Circuit Court, presided over by Judge (now Senator) Aaron Jennings.
The Railroad began foreclosures on farmers who would not pay the higher price, and sent to Hanford two armed men, who had been offered free farms if they could wrest them from the settlers. These men, named Hartt and Crow, in their capacity as gunmen arrived in a buggy laden with firearms. They were met by a dozen armed farmers led by James Harris, who sought to disarm the strangers. Crow discharged his shotgun into Harris’s face, and shot six other farmers. Hartt was killed in the first exchange, and Crow escaped briefly, to be shot down as he was taking aim at another farmer.
The Railroad telegraph was the only means for the news of the gun battle to be disseminated, and the Railroad shut down the line after an announcement of an “armed insurrection.” The public thus knew nothing of the farmers’ side of the dispute. The embattled farmers were taken into custody by Sheriffs deputies commanded by a Railroad employee named Elza Klosters, and were brought to trial in Circuit Court in San Francisco under Judge Jennings. Evidence favorable to their cause was thrown out of court. They were found guilty of resisting officers of the law in performance of their duties and sentenced to prison terms.
Information supporting the cause of the settlers has over the years become available to the public, and facts of the Mussel Slough Tragedy and the trial of the farmers may have furnished the motive for the murder last week of Judge Hamon’s widow, and the arson that burned her Santa Cruz bungalow, including her husband’s papers.
This time Bierce made only one comment, warning me on the selection of words, in particular Hartt and Crow’s “capacity” as gunmen. “Capacity is receptive,” he said. “Ability is potential. A sponge has a capacity for water; a hand, the ability to squeeze it out.”
My next assignment was to gather material for a piece on Senator Jennings.
Seated in the parlor of Mrs. Johnson’s house, Annie Dunker clasped her hands with the tips of her fingers beneath her chin and rocked.
“He’s a very nice young man, Tommy,” she said. “He takes her to the opera and sends her things. He sends her flowers! The other girls are jealous because Rachel is treated so special.”
“I wondered if he beat her or hurt her, or anything like that—when he’s with her.”
“There’s nothing like that my cousin knows about. Tommy.”
I had the blunt feeling that this whole line of investigation had been ill-conceived.
“It just seems funny he don’t—set her up in her own place!” Annie said. “The way rich men will do sometimes. Why, they will even marry some of the girls. Isn’t he awful rich? It just seems like he wants her in the house there. That’s the only thing seems funny about it. He is very nice-spoken, my cousin says.”
“Nothing wrong with him—” I gestured.
“Oh, him! No!”
“Did anybody know of someone that had that trouble I asked you about?”
“I mentioned it to a couple of girls, but they hadn’t heard anything like that.”
And that was all I was to learn about Beau McNair or the mister without a dingle from Annie Dunker.
I had discovered that she was proud of being a parlorhouse girl. She had said of whoring that it was better than going blind in a sweatshop sewing, or twenty hours a day as a kitchen drudge or housemaid, with the old man and his sons laying for you in the hallways.
Except for Slashers laying for you.
Mammy Pleasant lived in the Octavia Street mansion belonging to the financier Thomas Bell, whom she had furnished with a wife from her stable of beautiful young females. Mammy Pleasant referred to herself as the “housekeeper” but her status did not seem to correspond to that title. It was rumored that she had collected so much information about Bell’s youthful malefactions in Scotland, and later ones in San Francisco, that he could never rid himself of her.
A colored butler opened the door for Bierce and me and took Bierce’s card back inside. He returned to usher us into a parlor so curtained and lightless that we had to feel for chairs in which to seat ourselves. Mammy Pleasant was manifested as a faceless darkness between a white lace cap and a neckpiece that glowed phosphorescently in the murk.
As my eyes became accustomed to the dark I could make out that she was seated in a straight chair with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for Bierce or me to speak.
“Madam, we are interested in some ancient history that may affect current events, and I understand that you can assist us,” Bierce said with that degree of coolness that could make a person feel that he was exposed in his iniquities.
“How may I assist you?” Mammy Pleasant said. She had a rather rasping voice that made me want to clear my throat.
“When Caroline LaPlante married Nathaniel McNair, was she already pregnant with the child she named Beaumont McNair?”
“How would I know that?” Mammy Pleasant said.
“I have reason to believe you were the midwife at the birth.”