“Thank you,” Bierce said. “I believe you would also find it helpful to the proceedings in Superior Court if Senator Sharon was revealed as having taken part in even more adulterous affairs, with issue, than he is now renowned for.”
“You leap to conclusions, Mr. Bierce.”
“A rather short leap, madam.”
She smiled again from Bierce to me, gathered up her large handbag and departed.
“Time cannot wither, nor custom stale, that essential malevolence,” Bierce sighed, when the sound of her steps had disappeared down the hall.
“Jimmy Fairleigh mentioned Sharon,” I said.
“We know that Sharon fathered Gertie Dietz’s child,” Bierce said. “Although fatherhood is not uncommon, as I understand it.”
“No.”
“What that woman carries in her very large handbag is a supply of red herrings,” Bierce said.
I had attended one of the early court sessions. The courtroom was crowded because the case was a sensation, a high-ceilinged room with great windows pouring in western sunlight, and Judge Finn on the bench. Sarah Althea Hill’s lawyer, Mr. Tyler, was notable for his chestful of beard, and Sharon’s, a General Barnes, for mustaches which would cause him to have to pass through narrow doorways sideways. Sharon, a grizzled little man with a big head, sat grimly at one table. Miss Hill, in blue velvet faced with dark fur, and a blue hat with a veil that concealed her face, was a slim figure seated in a kind of galvanic stillness beside Mammy Pleasant.
The proceedings that day had to do with a document in the case, which Miss Hill stood before the court to draw from her bosom.
“Judge,” she said in a tremulous voice. “This paper is my honor. I cannot leave it out of my hands.”
“Just show it to Mr. Barnes,” the Judge said.
“If your honor will take the responsibility upon yourself and compel me to, I will deliver the document.”
“I cannot take any responsibility,” the judge said. “Is the paper inside this envelope?”
“I desire that neither Mr. Sharon nor Mr. Barnes should handle it. I consider it my honor and have regarded it as my honor for three long years. Mr. Sharon knows all about it.”
General Barnes said pompously, “I object to this lady standing there and making these statements. Mr. Sharon knows nothing about it. It is a fraud and a forgery from end to end.”
“He knows every word in this paper, so help me God. He dictated it to me.”
Mammy Pleasant was half-rising and subsiding in her chair, in anxiety or support.
Senator Sharon climbed to his feet. “I tell the Court this is the damndest lie that was ever uttered on this earth!”
“I do not like to offend Your Honor,” Miss Hill said with dignity. “But he has got his millions against me. I have been driven from my home. He has taken my money, and I have got no money to defend myself with.”
There was a good deal more wrangling before Miss Hill surrendered the paper to the clerk who was ordered to have a copy made.
I dug through files to look over Senator Sharon’s history. He had indeed been a presence in Virginia City during the ‘60s. William Ralston of the Bank of California was his benefactor, appointing him the bank’s agent on the Washoe. Sharon made his fortune there. Mineowners had exhausted capital and credit, and the quartz mills had been so hastily constructed that many of them were unworkable. So many claims were in litigation that the courts were paralyzed. Virginia City, at the time of Sharon’s arrival, was a bankrupt camp sitting on a billion-dollar orebody. With unlimited credit from the Bank of California, Sharon began purchasing shares in the most promising mines and mills by taking over their paper from the overburdened local banks, and issuing credit at reduced rates of interest. He foreclosed like a thunderclap on nonpayment. His instincts and intuition were almost perfect. With Ralston and Darius Mills he organized the Union Mill & Mining Company to take over properties foreclosed by the Bank. He built the railroad to Carson City and Reno, controlling the traffic to Mount Davidson, and thus became one of the West’s transportation magnates. He had spies to sniff out strikes that were made in competing mines, he engaged in titanic struggles for control through stock acquisitions, he boomed stocks so that their prices swooped up and down like swallows, he made secret deals between mills and mines to hide real value by spreading rumors of bonanza and borrasca. He was the most cynical manipulator of all the Comstock manipulators. At the zenith of his power and wealth he controlled the Union Mill & Mining Company and the railroad and owned seven producing silver mines, including the Ophir, which he had snatched away from Lucky Baldwin.
He was known as the “King of the Comstock,” the “California Croesus,” and the “Bonanza Senator.” The Nevada legislature sent him to the senate in 1875.
He profited hugely on the fall of his mentor, William Ralston, who drowned in a swimming accident or committed suicide when the Bank of California closed its doors in the panic of 1875. Sharon succeeded not only to the control of the reopened Bank, but to Ralston’s last great project, the Palace Hotel, and even to Ralston’s country estate at Belmont. Many blamed him for Ralston’s ruin. Ralston’s empire had collapsed, it was said, because his closest friends, Sharon and Darius Mills, had plotted his ruin.
Sharon kept an apartment at the Palace, entertained lavishly at Belmont and indulged his taste for quoting Shakespeare and Lord Byron. He was a pale, chilly little man with a big head, overly neat, always tight-fisted, generally disliked. His daughter Flora married a genuine British aristocrat, Sir Thomas George Fermor-Hesketh, in a splendid affair at Belmont.
His wife had died in 1874 after a marriage of trying to ignore her husband’s infidelities. While he was making his millions he found time for many adulterous affairs, and he was famous for his penchant for high-class prostitutes. He was often to be seen in the company of glittering young females. He kept a number of mistresses.
The first salvo of the senator’s problems with his most troublesome mistress, Sarah Althea Hill, came at his daughter Flora’s wedding, when Miss Hill was physically barred from the grand event. Sarah Althea claimed she had a right to attend as a member of the family.
In September of 1883 Sharon was arrested for adultery, out of which came two current court cases, Sharon v. Sharon in State Superior Court, in which Sarah Althea Hill sued for divorce, a division of property and alimony, and Sharon v. Hill in Federal Circuit Court, which had jurisdiction because Sharon was a citizen of Nevada, in which the senator sued to have the marriage contract declared false and fraudulent and to enjoin Miss Hill from claiming to be his wife. There were to be peripheral suits for perjury, forgery, slander, libel, conspiracy and embezzlement. Sharon v. Sharon and Sharon v. Hill would be fought in California courts for almost ten years.
Bierce wrote in Tattle, “The testimony this week in the Sharon trial must be of intense interest to the readers of dime-novels. The colossal nastiness of the events divulged is the most impressive feature. The thought of a delectable young person such as Miss Hill falling into the arms of a noxious old debauchee like Senator Sharon is as revolting as is the Christian religion in the hands of Washington Street evangelists.”
Pusey approached along the hallway at his stately gait and turned into Bierce’s office to greet Bierce and me. He seated himself, his cap under his arm, and announced that that was a pretty scene in Superior Court. I was not summoned to join this conversation but observed it from my end of the office. I tried to set my face so as not to glower at Pusey across the office, though I didn’t mind touching my head where I had been whacked certainly on his order.