California Gold

by John Jakes

  Everyone was enthusiastic and confident; that was the tenor of the decade in the City that carelessly bestrode one of nature’s most unpredictable and implacable forces: the cataclysmic power latent in the 650-mile San Andreas fault line.

  53

  EVENTS LARGE AND SMALL filled the hours and days of 1904, as they did every year. Mack took up a meerschaum he bought when he traveled to New York on business. While there, he discussed politics with Pierpont Morgan in Morgan’s great marble library on Fifth Avenue, and he sat for studies by John Singer Sargent, who had sailed over from London for a month to accept Mack’s commission.

  Mack wore a black suit for the portrait. On the fingertips of his right hand, at waist height, he balanced an orange, as if he possessed and dwarfed the products of the earth. A dusky glint in the background suggested the dome of a stock ticker. Sargent would be many months completing the picture; when it was finished, Mack intended to hang it in the library at Sacramento Street.

  He continued to tend all his enterprises dutifully, and none fulfilled him so much as The Palms at Indio. He remodeled the first dormitory and expanded the sanitarium on a cottage plan: fifty small private houses surrounding a large central building containing dining hall, sun room, offices, and a medical wing. He appointed Alex Muller executive director, with complete responsibility for the sanitarium, which now had a waiting list. This added a huge new work load to Alex’s already considerable duties. But he didn’t complain; if he worked the rest of his life without sleep or a day off, he still would not be working as hard as his employer.

  For relaxation that year, Mack read Richard Harding Davis, and The Call of the Wild, a sensational literary hit written by Johnson’s Alaska friend Jack London. He gave a banquet for the writer, and the “Kipling of the Klondike” attended without his new wife. Whenever he was introduced to someone, he said, “Call me Wolf.” He frightened the guests with talk of the coming socialist revolution. After the first course he passed out, drunk.

  In 1904 Mack’s hair turned white. It was a thick, distinguished mane, but strangers guessed James Macklin Chance to be fifty years old, not thirty-six.

  During the year, Señora Olivar learned mechanical sewing on an electric Singer machine Mack bought for her. She loved it, calling it a miracle of the new century. Alex had a new machine as well, a Blickensdorfer typewriter, on which he learned to write at great speed with very few mistakes. He hired a young female assistant to operate the machine part-time. She, too, was called a typewriter.

  Nellie continued her writing, started smoking Turkish cigarettes, and actively worked for the suffragist movement. One day she went to the Roundhouse restaurant on Market Street and sat down and asked for a menu. They threw her out, reminding her that, like many establishments, they served men only. She returned the next night, this time refusing to leave. The police arrested her, and she stayed in jail till morning. Then she wrote an article, the Examiner providing the headline: PENNED UP WITH FELONS: HER NIGHT OF HORROR.

  Hellburner Johnson spent the first five months of 1904 in Riverside, running the Calgold operation. Then he came back to San Francisco, joined a volunteer fire company, and spent hours at the Olympic Club with a guest card. “Till I took up polo I had no idea I was born to be a gent. I love that club. No women, dogs, or Democrats. Gives a man breathin’ room.”

  Once back, he adopted Mack’s son almost every way but legally. “I got an affliction similar to yours,” he liked to remind Jim, tapping his cork foot. “It ain’t so bad. You’ll get along if you don’t dwell on it.”

  Jim didn’t seem to dwell on it. In fact an odd reversal took place, with him and with his father. Jim now wanted to be outdoors as much as possible, and Mack now wanted him indoors, sheltered.

  Johnson ignored Mack’s wishes, taking the boy hiking, sailing in the Bay, even climbing partway up Mount Diablo, though it was slow going because Jim’s left foot dragged at every step.

  Little Jim’s new passion for the outdoors didn’t lessen his passion for learning. The weakness of his foot made him keener to strengthen his mind. After he learned to read at age five, he read endlessly, and he ciphered like some kind of swift and amazing machine.

  Mack hired one tutor after another but none satisfied him. Then, early in 1904, in answer to an advertisement there came Professor Lorenzo Love of Piedmont, Ohio. A small, ordinary, forgettable man when he kept his mouth shut, the moment Love spoke he controlled every listener, his voice pealing like a church organ.

  He said he was a graduate of Oberlin College. He had no papers to prove it, but you didn’t argue with that organ voice. He was full of enthusiasm for education, and full of maxims.

  “The foundation of every state is the education of its youth, Mr. Chance. Enlighten the people, and tyranny of the mind and body will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I did, sir. Quoting Diogenes in the first place, and Thomas Jefferson in the second place.”

  Professor Love had fled “the boredom of Columbus, Ohio, and a certain female there bent on pressing me into marital servitude.” He said a lifelong nasal condition had been cured the moment he set foot in California. He was a man obsessed with details.

  “Mr. Oscar Wilde considers details vulgar, my boy. Not so. What separates those who fail in life from those who succeed? Attention to details. What is the bridge from the slough of commonality to the acme of accomplishment? Ask a rich man. Ask your father. Details, details, details. Tie your cravat again, please. It’s a mess.”

  Lorenzo Love was a scold, and fussy. And Little Jim loved him.

  In the summer of ’04, there could be found in Mack’s address ledger the names of 1,012 acquaintances in California. He added at least one name each week, the business address noted down in his careful hand, and the telephone if there was one. Sometimes he leafed through the book and gazed at all the names and realized he had but two male friends, Johnson and his father-in-law. Marquez, who might have been a friend in different circumstances, had disappeared in the Central Valley again.

  Once a month Mack visited his ranches out there, giving him an excuse to look in on Hellman, who grew more feeble every day. The old man had moved into three rooms in a Sacramento boardinghouse.

  Mack urged him to come to San Francisco. “You deserve better than this. You certainly can afford it. Let me hunt up a flat for you.”

  “Maybe sometime,” Hellman said with a weary wave. “For now, I’m too tired.”

  Mack took his father-in-law for a drive in his open Cadillac. On the journey from San Francisco to Sacramento, the auto had broken down twice, about average.

  They chugged along back roads of the delta. Mexicans knee-deep in bright water worked the rice fields. At a crossroads, they came upon two people different from any Mack had seen before, scrawny brown men in loose shirts and turbans who bowed respectfully to the auto, then hurried on as if afraid of being stopped and questioned.

  “What kind of men are those, Swampy?”

  “Those little brown buggers? Hindoos.”

  “In California?”

  “Yah, I seen quite a few this year. They’re coming down from Canada. Looking for field work, I guess.”

  “In Fresno, I ate dinner in a restaurant run by Armenians. The whole state’s filling up with foreigners.”

  “You’re starting to sound old, Johnny. You’re starting to sound like Fairbanks or some other pure-bred snot-nosed native son.”

  “God forbid,” Mack exclaimed. But he realized Hellman was right. It was something to guard against.

  Late in the summer of ’04 Mack finally saw The Great Train Robbery. Edwin Porter’s little 740-foot moving picture had been released the preceding winter by Edison Films to instant acclaim. Mack paid his 5 cents and ducked inside Neville’s Nickelodeon one afternoon between meetings.

  The picture exploded in his mind. He’d never experienced anything like it. The last scene showed Barnes, the outlaw leader, in giant cl
ose-up. He aimed his revolver and fired point blank at the audience. Mack jumped in his seat. Two ladies swooned.

  He ignored his schedule and sat through it four more times. “It has a story, a genuine story,” he told Johnson that night. “If that idea catches on, the pictures could amount to something.”

  He took Johnson to see it. “Not bad for a bunch of dressed-up easterners playactin’,” Johnson said afterward. “Jim might like it.”

  “No—too scary.”

  The trolley war started in 1904.

  Mr. Patrick Calhoun, grandson of the famed South Carolina secessionist John C, owned United Railroads of San Francisco, and he decided it would be to his advantage to put all of his cars on overhead electric lines, doing away with the tangle of horse and cable systems on many streets. Calhoun promised improved service, while screaming opponents promised a new, incredibly ugly city choked with wires.

  Calhoun wanted to electrify the Sutter Street system first. His men campaigned at City Hall, and it was no secret that he retained Abraham Ruef, Esq., for “municipal assistance and counsel.”

  Adolph Spreckels invited Mack to the Pacific Union Club for luncheon. Adolph was upright, bull-necked, about fifty, the second son of the ruthless old Prussian Claus Spreckels, who had created a sugar kingdom in the West. Claus had gone out to Hawaii, they said, and won vast cane fields from the king in a poker game.

  Adolph ran the family business in the City. He had three brothers. John, older, lived down in San Diego, managing his holdings from there. Rudolph and Claus Augustus, called Gus, had chosen to strike out on their own after a bitter fight with the old man over disposition of some plantation land in Hawaii.

  At lunch, Adolph politely muffled a cough with his starchy napkin. “This trolley business—”

  “Your brother Rudolph’s in the thick of it,” Mack said.

  “You know Rudolph, I take it.”

  “Yes. I’ve had dinner at his home a number of times. I was there when he first discussed a Sutter Street Improvement Club, to fight the overhead wires.”

  “Ruef, that little sheeny”—Mack winced—“is telling everyone Rudolph is against Calhoun because the Sutter Street line passes his front door.”

  “Every man has an ox to be gored, Adolph. It’s still a worthy fight. I gave the club a thousand dollars to help with it.”

  Eyes darting, Adolph Spreckels leaned near, as if they were hatching a bomb plot. He drew a plain envelope from his coat. “I want to make a donation. Please take this cash and then write the draft in your name. My brother and I differ on so many things—he is an ardent, outspoken reformer, for example, while I prefer anonymity—I’m sure you understand.”

  Mack nodded, though he didn’t. Feuds such as the legendary one that wracked the Spreckels family mystified him. Never mind; the money was good, and would be put to a good purpose. On a couple of occasions Mack had talked with Adolph’s brother Rudy about the need for a serious reform movement in the City. That need seemed to grow more critical with every week that passed.

  Every month or so Mack went down to call on Nellie at Carmel-by-the-Sea. She lived in a perfect little artist’s bungalow, isolated among the pines but with a view of the windy blue bay. Mack never stayed overnight, and usually they argued—about graft, about the trolleys, about the City’s water situation. To break the monopoly held by the Spring Valley Water Company, former Mayor Phelan had cast his eye on distant sources: Lake Tahoe, Shasta, the Sacramento River. Late in Phelan’s administration, his water consultants recommended establishing a claim on behalf of the City to the Hetch Hetchy Valley.

  Phelan had done so. Under the federal Right of Way Act, the City proposed to build a dam in the valley. The interior secretary blocked the proposal, and it had been tied up in litigation ever since.

  “And a good thing too,” Nellie said.

  “Is that your opinion, or your friend Muir’s?”

  “What’s the matter with you, Mack? If you dam that valley, you destroy it forever.”

  “What about the City’s water supply? It’s completely inadequate. Meanwhile the population keeps on growing.”

  “Not my fault. Put up barricades.”

  “Oh, the great democrat is suddenly the great exclusionist.”

  “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “Nellie, San Francisco has a major problem. But you and all the folks in the nature societies want to ignore it.”

  “Nature societies? Oh my God, that’s so snide.” She threw a book.

  As a consequence of this kind of conversation, he had lately spent a lot of time with Margaret Emerson.

  Mack forgave Nellie her short temper. Her San Francisco colleague Frank Norris had died suddenly and tragically two years before, of peritonitis, and with the permission of his widow she was attempting to write The Wolf, the last novel of his trilogy about wheat. She wasn’t having any luck, and that roughened her disposition.

  “I reread parts of The Octopus again last night,” she told Mack. “Annixter seeing the wheat at dawn, the wonderful gangplow passage. In every sentence I hear the voice of a friend, but I can’t imitate it. I try and I fail. I’ve never failed so miserably at anything before.”

  So Mack made an effort to excuse the quarrels, even to laugh about them. Underneath he was angry and bitterly frustrated because he couldn’t move the relationship one way or the other.

  Much the same kind of frustration bred of love spoiled his relationship with his son.

  He found contentment in small things. California names. He loved them and, in a corner of his memory, he amassed a collection.

  Pigeon Point, Calexico, El Dorado.

  Fallen Leaf, Drakes Bay, Hurdygurdy.

  Chinese Camp, Malibu, Likely. Pismo, Chowchilla, Havilah, Dinkey Creek. Rough and Ready, Sevastopol, Berryessa, Hobo Hot Springs.

  Avalon, Ahwahnee, Fandango, San Juan Capistrano. Angeis Camp, Coarsegold, You Bet. La Mirada, Yucaipa, Eureka, Glendora. Fiddletown, Modesto, Petaluma, Susanville.

  Point Reyes, Death Valley, Malpaso Canyon, Mokelumne River, Mare Island, Signal Hill, Thousand Palms, Visitation, Hoopa, Tiburon, Portola, Calistoga, Ramona …

  O California!

  A year before, on the fifth floor of the Mills Building on Bush Street, Chance-Johnson Oil had opened an office. Mack’s competitors at Union Oil occupied space two flights up. One day in the fall of 1904, Mack met there for three hours with Haven Ogg and two other geologists. After showing them out, he welcomed Fremont Older.

  They lit cigars and relaxed by a window looking up Nob Hill. It was a cool and golden afternoon, one of those rare City days without a sea breeze. When there was no wind, the soft-coal haze from thousands of chimneys wrapped the rooftops and settled all the way to the streets. The haze was like a gray sea, with huge signs advertising oculists and beer swimming in it like painted fish.

  “I have some word about the water situation,” Older said. “The enlightened Mr. Ruef shares the view of the federal government. We must not dam Hetch Hetchy. At the same time, we must break the vile stranglehold of the Spring Valley Company.”

  “How will we do that?”

  With a cynical smirk, Older said, “We’ll bring in a competitor—Bay Cities.”

  “Bill Tevis’s company.”

  “The same.” Tevis, a San Franciscan, had inherited something like $20 million from his father, Lloyd, another of the state’s nineteenth-century land and cattle barons. “The company has water rights up on the south fork of the American and the north fork of the Cosumnes. My moles who burrow around City Hall tell me the Boss is definitely leaning toward a franchise for Bay Cities.”

  “Is he a friend of Tevis?”

  “No, but I understand someone in the Tevis organization has offered a little something to generate a friendship.”

  “What’s a little something?”

  “One million dollars.”

  “My God,” Mack said. “It gets worse and worse.”

  “Indeed it does. There’s hardl
y an honest man to be found at City Hall. They’re all so hungry for boodle, they’ll eat the paint off a house. We’ve got to unmask Ruef. Get him out, and his hirelings too.”

  “How, Fremont? Ruef’s more popular than ever. So tell me how we do it.”

  Smoking their cigars, they stared at one another in the waning light of a coal-haze afternoon.

  Mack, Johnson, and Little Jim went down to Fisherman’s Wharf. It was a Saturday at twilight. Jim held tightly to his father’s hand as they walked out on the long plain pier.

  The trim little Monterey boats had come in for the night, their red sails furled, but the fishermen, dark weathered men who chattered and yelled in Italian and Portuguese, still had much work left to do. They hoisted baskets of wriggling halibut and sea crabs to the wharf, spread and hung their weighted nets on its rail. One of the young fishermen with a gold ring in his left ear tousled Jim’s hair.

  The three walked on out to the end. In the dusky bay, red and green running lights showed on small launches and an outbound Pacific steamer. Her great whistle bellowed and the boy watched her churning toward the sunset.

  “Where’s she going, Pa—China?”

  “Good possibility of that.”

  “I’m going there one of these days.”

  “Sure. But right now we’re going home. It’s cold. Look at that fog rolling in.” The bank lay just outside Golden Gate, the sun all at once swallowed by it.

  “I want to stay a while.”

  “No, it’s too chilly. I don’t want you catching cold.” Jim started to say something, but Mack patted his head. “Don’t argue.”

  “Look,” Johnson said to the boy, “they’re bringin’ in more live crabs.”

  That was enough to cue Jim to move away to see. Both men watched his tilting gait, heard the terrible slow scrape of his left foot. Johnson’s bright-orange bandanna snapped in the wind.

  “Listen here. You’re treatin’ that boy like the very kind of hothouse lily you said you wouldn’t have.”

  “You’re meddling again, Hugh.”